The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

CHAPTER 29 WILL

The Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle was a German weapon capable of unleashing its thirty-round magazine in less than five seconds flat. It had a modern, even futuristic, look.

Will was staring down the barrel of a G36 now, except instead of the usual thirty-round magazine, this one was loaded with a C-mag drum that held 100 bullets. So in theory, if things went to shit, he — and Danny, to his right — would have to only avoid getting perforated by 100 bullets for the fifteen seconds it would take the shooter to empty his weapon on full-auto.

Bad odds. Really bad odds.

They were at the foot of the concrete steps facing three men holding G36s, but thankfully only one had the drum attached. Two of the men looked nervous, one of whom couldn’t have been older than seventeen. The other one looked to be in his early forties, with a scraggly beard and almost no hair on top. The beard had an orange tint to it. The kid had on a plaid shirt and khaki shorts; he looked absurd behind the big G36 assault rifle.

The third man, the one with the drum, was tall and wore combat boots, and of the three his hands were the only ones not shaking. The man was in his late thirties, and had calm, dark blue eyes. Will instantly recognized the look of a soldier.

He and Danny had reached the bottom of the steps when the men arrived, turning the corner with weapons raised. This part of the facility was one big concrete block, bright halogen lamps along the walls breaking the monotony of gray scenery. The turn in the hallway was twenty meters ahead, ten behind where the three men now stood.

“Here’s how it’s going to go down,” the third man said. “You drop your weapons and we don’t kill you. Do anything other than drop your weapons, and we kill you. Any part of that you don’t get?”

“Sounds pretty clear to me,” Danny said. “What about you? You get it?”

“Yup.” Will nodded. “I got it.”

“So it’s settled then. We both get it. So what now?”

“Drop your weapons,” the third man said.

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

“No one has to get hurt,” Will said.

He could hear Kate and the others above them, back up on the surface, through the square opening. The Door. As soon as the men appeared around the corner, he shouted at them to retreat back up, which they did, thankfully, without arguing.

That left just the two of them down here. Two against three. And that C-mag.

100 bullets. Shit. Bad odds…

“You’re outmanned and outgunned,” the third man said. “The only way you make it out of this in one piece is with your weapons down on the floor. You get that part, too?”

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

The other two men hadn’t said a word. Had either one ever fired the G36s they were holding? It had a hell of a kick, and by the way the kid was holding it the answer was pretty obvious. The older man had probably shot rifles before, but he, too, looked new to the G36.

So that left the third man. The soldier.

Will figured he would shoot him first and take their chances on the other two not being able to hit anything from this distance. Thirty rounds per second or not, it still took some skill to hit a moving target, and he planned to be moving a lot when the shooting started.

“Let’s talk about this,” Will said.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” the soldier said. “This is our facility. No one’s taking it away from us.”

“No one’s taking anything away. But this place is big enough for six more people.”

“We have limited resources.”

“We have our own supplies. And like I said, we’ll work for our keep. We’ll go out and scavenge in the day, eat only what we bring back if that’s how you want it.”

“We don’t know you. We can’t trust people we don’t know.”

“It’s not like you have a choice here, bub,” Danny said.

“I beg to differ,” the soldier said. “Three against two.”

“One against two,” Will said. “In our favor.”

“How you figure?”

“This guy to my right has four tours of duty in Afghanistan. I have four myself. That gives us eight. We’ve also spent the last three years in SWAT breaking down doors and shooting people for a living.”

The teenager’s face paled. The one with the beard might have groaned, but Will couldn’t be sure.

“On the other hand,” Will continued, “I’m guessing you’re the only one who has ever fired a G36 before. These other two? I don’t think they’re ready for the kickback. I think if bullets start flying, Danny and I are going to take you out with a chest round and then take our chances with those two being unable to hit the broad side of a barn. What do you think? Sound plan?”

Will caught the soldier shooting a quick glance at the other two. It was a subtle move, barely noticeable unless you were waiting for it.

Will had been waiting for it.

“Hell, I don’t think the kid will even be standing when he pulls that trigger,” Will continued. “I think the G36 is going to knock him on his ass and he’s going to be sending half of his magazine into the ceiling. After that happens, we’ll be forced to put a bullet in his head. Which we will. We don’t want to, mind you, but there won’t be any choice, and we’re going to sleep perfectly fine afterwards.”

“Like a big fat baby with his tummy full of Jell-O,” Danny added.

The kid looked nervously at the big assault weapon in his hands, as if he weren’t sure how it had gotten there. The older man with the beard looked equally unsure of himself.

Will almost felt sorry for them.

The soldier remained hardened. “They know where the trigger is and how to pull it. That’s all that matters.”

“Bullshit,” Will said. “You know as well as I do shooting someone from ten meters away is more than just pulling a trigger. I’m guessing they have those rifles on semi-automatic. I’m pretty sure we can take you down then take them down afterwards before either one of them can manage a second shot. What do you think, Danny?”

“It’s almost unfair,” Danny said.

“Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. Where did you serve?”

“None of your fucking business,” the soldier grunted back.

“Fair enough.”

I’m going to have to kill this man, but I don’t want to.

There’s only one way around that…

“Here,” Will said, “I’ll make it easy for you.”

He relaxed and came out of his shooting stance. He was careful not to move too fast, and he could almost feel the soldier’s finger tightening around the G36’s trigger. Will held the M4A1 in front of him by the barrel, the stock of the weapon pointed down at the floor.

The three men tensed up, and the soldier looked confused for a split second before regaining his composure. The teen looked almost relieved, though the older man didn’t know whether to shoot or throw down his own weapon.

“My name’s Will. Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning. The man next to me is Danny. Also Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning. We’re at your mercy, soldier. What say you?”

He sensed the soldier softening — just a bit — but not enough to take his eye out from behind the G36’s rear iron sights. “What’s to stop me from putting one between your eyes now?”

“Nothing,” Will said. “But you do that, and Danny here is going to shoot you. That’s not a threat, that’s just how this guy operates.”

“God knows this guy next to me’s annoying,” Danny said. “I’ll concede that point to ya. And he’s a terrible tipper to boot. But you shoot him, and I’m obligated to shoot you back still.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Will said. “Like I said before — this isn’t a zero sum game. One of us doesn’t have to lose for the other to win. Give us a chance to prove ourselves. That’s all we ask.”

The soldier didn’t reply.

Long seconds went by.

Five seconds. Then ten.

Then twenty…

The soldier suddenly came out of his shooting stance and let the G36 fall to his side. “Ben,” he said. “Of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Second Battalion out of Fort Lewis. You boys are a long way from Georgia.”

Danny grinned and lowered his weapon. The kid and the bearded man did the same, both breathing huge sighs of relief.

“You’re a long way from Washington,” Will said.

“I guess we’re all a long way from where we started,” Ben said. “Tell your friends to come down.” He glanced at his watch. “Three more hours until sundown. The night isn’t our friend anymore, but you probably already know that.”

Everyone had bits and pieces of what happened on the night of The Purge, and once Will added in Ben’s, he learned that Starch wasn’t taken until the night after Houston fell. The ghouls had overwhelmed the big cities first, the major population clusters, before spreading out into the smaller, surrounding areas. Starch, like most small cities, felt rather than knew what was happening in places like Houston and Dallas. All communications were severed by the morning after The Purge, leaving the rural areas to wonder what was happening.

They got their answer on the second night.

As for the rest of the country, things were murky. Like Will, Ben hadn’t been able to make contact with anyone beyond his immediate group of survivors, and by the third night, it was clear they were on their own.

The part of Will that was able to appreciate the insurgents’ tactics in Afghanistan, the guerrilla attacks and roadside bombs that took countless lives, admired the ghouls for what they had accomplished.

The enemy had won the war in a single night.

It was hard to fathom, but it was the reality, and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made.

Once the cities fell, it was essentially over. States were run in big cities, not in small rural communities. Besides increasing the size of their army using the cities’ population, the ghouls also stripped the smaller areas of resources and, probably most crucial of all, help.

It was elegant and brilliant, and the logistics and size of the operation were mind-boggling.

We never stood a chance…

Without guns pointing at him, Will was able to get a better look at the Door, the only entrance in and out of Harold Campbell’s facility. He quickly realized how wrong he had been about blowing it up. Besides the thick slab of concrete, there was a five-inch titanium steel plate at the bottom. It was those heavy plates that needed the powerful gears to open and close them. Even if they had blown up the concrete block on top, the C4 wouldn’t have made a dent in the titanium underneath.

Ben, like Will and Danny, was an enlisted man who joined the Rangers out of Fort Lewis in Washington state. He served in Iraq, then did a couple of tours in Afghanistan when the war moved over there following Saddam Hussein’s fall from grace. He left the Army as a sergeant, forced out by a bad knee, the gift of roadside bomb shrapnel that made him walk with a noticeable limp. He wore a knee brace hidden underneath cargo khakis, but there was nothing wrong with his hands or his aim. If bullets had been fired in that hallway, Will was sure either he or Danny would be dead.

“So the C4 wouldn’t have taken the Door out?” he asked.

“Probably not,” Ben said.

“So why’d you open the Door?” Danny asked.

“I couldn’t take the chance,” Ben said. “Who the hell knows what you two morons would have tried blowing up next if I didn’t open it. Besides, I figured what the hell, you had three women and a kid with you, and they didn’t look like they were being dragged around against their will.”

“So why did you come around the corner full-bore?” Will asked.

“We didn’t. At least, that wasn’t the plan. I told those two morons to follow my lead, but by the time we were around the corner and they got a look at you two, they decided to take aim, and it was all over. Rest assured, I’m never giving guns to them again.”

“We almost killed you.”

Ben sighed. “Trust me, I know.”

They were inside the Control Room, a four-by-seven-meter room accessible by a stainless steel door, like all the important rooms in the Operations area of the facility. It had a row of small monitors along one entire wall that looked out at the circle clearing on the surface above them. There were four cameras on each side of the four-sided structure, capturing every inch of clearing from top to bottom, including the trees beyond. They could also zoom in and out by manipulating a toggle stick on the control board. There was sound, but the volume was down.

A big LED clock kept time on the wall above the monitors.

Rick, perched on a swivel chair in front of the control board, was responsible for monitoring the cameras. He was sixteen, not seventeen as Will had guessed in the hallway earlier. When it had looked as if there wasn’t going to be any shooting, Rick had started laughing, then leaned against the wall and put his hands in his face and started hyperventilating.

Will was glad he didn’t have to shoot the kid. He would have felt bad about it.

“We saw tracks,” Will said. “All around the clearing when we arrived.”

“Yeah, they come here at night,” Ben said. “Don’t stay long, though. Once they see that the Door is still in place, they disappear. But every night they show up, like clockwork.”

“From where?”

“We’re pretty sure they’re hiding in the woods. God knows where. We’ve never found the stones to go in there looking for them.”

“Probably a smart idea.”

“There’s smart and there’s good luck trying to find volunteers to go with you. Even in the daytime, it’s dark as hell in those woods.”

“No kidding,” Rick said. “You’d never get me in there.”

Will told Ben about their encounter at the Cleveland Savings and Loan Bank just down the 59 Highway.

Ben listened intently, then nodded. “Makes sense. It would explain how they could do all of this in one night. If they had a command and control structure in place from the very beginning…”

“Makes you feel optimistic about your chances, doesn’t it?” Danny chuckled.

“Out there? Not so much. Down here? I’d give you even odds.”

“Thank God for Harold Campbell,” Rick said. “I remember when he first came here, with work crews coming and going at all hours of the night, for years. Most people in town loved it, though. He brought a lot of business with him.”

“He probably greased plenty of city officials, too,” Ben said.

“Goes without saying,” Will said. “How long did it take him to finish this facility?”

“Four years,” Rick said. “People weren’t so happy after that. Business dried up real fast after his workers left.”

Ben glanced over at Will and Danny. “You guys look like shit. We got hot showers in the Quarters and plenty of rooms to pick from, feel free to grab whatever meets your fancy. There’re only twenty-four of us down here and this place was built for 100, but you probably already know that.”

“I skimmed a floor plan or two when I was here,” Will said.

“You actually helped build this place?” Rick asked.

“I poured some concrete and put in some electrical wiring, that’s all. Most of the real hard work happened after I left.”

“Is it everything you hoped for?”

“It’s actually a lot bigger than I had envisioned. A hell of a lot bigger, actually.”

The facility was thick slabs of concrete from top to bottom, with a distinctive half-circle layout. It was designed to complement the circular nature of the surface above, or at least, half of it. The Control Room was located on the right side of the complex, designated Operations, with the living quarters on the left, designated Quarters. Using the Entrance Hallway in the center as a marker, Will sectioned off the two distinctive sides — east and west, with the Entrance Hallway exactly in the center, leading to the stairs that led up to the Door.

There were maps of the facility, with a helpful You Are Here indicator, along the walls every twenty-five meters. Not that he needed them. Once he created a layout of the facility’s half-circle in his head, it was easy to navigate the place. Everything was slotted where it should be — sleeping areas, Cafeteria, and Gym in Quarters, with the Control Room and other work areas in Operations.

The place was designed with military efficiency, something he knew Harold Campbell prided himself on, even though, according to Tom Lerner, the man never actually served. But that was all right. Will knew from experience that some of the most ardent supporters of the military style had never sniffed the barracks of boot camp.

The soft rumbling of the facility’s power source was audible everywhere he went. It vibrated through every inch of the facility, and he heard it when he first stepped down through the Door, though he didn’t know what it was at the time. It wasn’t a particularly loud sound, and after a while he stopped noticing it.

Unlike Operations, laid out to accommodate the big rooms like the Cafeteria, Turbine Room, and Green Room, the Quarters section looked like a maze, with hallways that turned left and right and back again. The rooms were evenly spaced out along three major hallways, with communal bathrooms at the end of each one.

Danny had chosen living quarters with Carly and Vera in a room designed for a family, with a queen-size bed and a smaller single bed that could be unfolded from a crate. It was big enough for all three of them, and Carly had hung a sheet between the two beds for privacy. The room was in the back, near the bathroom. Without really thinking about it, Will and Lara had also chosen their rooms near Danny’s, essentially sticking together.

Kate was the exception.

“I’m going to have to start making up excuses to send Vera off on errands,” Danny said.

“Try not to give the poor girl nightmares.”

“No promises.”

“That’s not creepy at all, man.”

After a few minutes of wandering around the hallway by himself, committing the layout to memory, Will found Kate in her room, somewhere in the middle of the old residents of the facility and the newcomers.

There were other single rooms around them, and in the two hours since they entered the facility, Will met ten of the twenty-four people calling the facility home. The rest were scattered about the place, already in the midst of daily routines. They seemed like decent enough people, and he was glad they hadn’t turned the Entrance Hallway into a bloodbath. It would have surely soured everyone’s disposition.

He knocked on Kate’s door and waited for an answer. Unlike the concrete walls, floors, and ceiling, the doors were molded panel interior, made of composite wood. It was probably one of the few civilian touches in the entire place.

When he didn’t hear anything, he leaned against the door and said, “Kate, it’s Will.”

He waited again, but didn’t hear anything.

He was about to turn away when he heard, “Come in” from the other side.

Her living quarters were identical to his, with bright halogen lamps along the walls. There was a small bed at the far end of the room, a lamp on a nightstand next to it, a chair that didn’t look at all comfortable, and a small writing desk with another lamp perched on top. The halogen lights could be turned on and off with a couple of switches — one at the door, another near the bed. Otherwise it was a Spartan design.

Kate was pulling clothes out a box Ben’s people had supplied them, one of the many spoils of their occasional trips to the surface for supplies. She had changed into new pants and a shirt and was wearing sandals. They made her look comfortable and at home and not the wired, often tensed woman from the road.

“Looks like you’re settling in.”

“I took a shower,” she said.

“How was it?”

“Hot. And great. You should take one, too. You kind of stink.”

He smiled, and was rewarded with one in return.

He wasn’t entirely fooled, though. Kate wasn’t the same. Luke and Ted’s deaths had had a profound effect on her, and he could see the thousand-yard stare lingering in her eyes. She was putting on a brave face for his benefit.

“How are you doing, Kate?”

She looked at him for a moment, as if weighing her answer carefully. After a while, she turned back to her clothes. “You don’t have to worry about me, Will. You brought us here, like you promised. You can stop worrying about us now. About me.”

That caught him by surprise, and he didn’t know how to respond.

“I think I’m going to get some sleep,” she said. “They have sleeping pills in the Infirmary. I think I’m finally going to take some of those.” She paused, as if waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, she said, “Thanks for coming.”

“Sure,” he said.

He took the hint and left.

He walked down the hallway toward his room in silence, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened with Kate.

Will needed something to take his mind off Kate, and found Ben on his way back to Operations. He fell in alongside the older man.

“You settled in already?” Ben asked.

“Not exactly. Where you headed?”

“I’m just doing my rounds, looking in on everyone before I close up shop for the night.”

“Mind if I tag along?”

“You didn’t take that shower like I suggested, huh?” He sniffed Will. “Maybe I was being too subtle.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

Ben nodded at Will’s bandaged hands. “You should get those looked at. That’s what the Infirmary’s for.”

“Later. Tell me about the people here. About this place.”

“There were ten of us in the beginning, but that ballooned to twenty-four. I guess a lot of people in town already knew about what Harold Campbell was building out here. It only took four years of year-round construction crews coming and going, after all.”

“How did you know about it?”

Ben chuckled and slapped his right leg, where he wore the brace. “Campbell wanted someone with military experience to do security over his facility until he needed it. You probably already know this, seeing as how you spent time here building this place, but Campbell was a little paranoid.”

“A little?” Will grinned.

“Okay, a lot,” Ben chuckled. “He refused to hire anyone that even smelled like a potential government agent. So he hired me. He figured a gimpy ex-Ranger would never be an active government spy. It helped, of course, that besides the gimp, I could still do everything he needed.”

“You were the one who brought these people here.”

“I brought nine, just the people I knew in town. The kid in the Control Room is one of them. Rick’s mother rented me the house where I stayed. She was a nice lady.”

“Was?”

“She didn’t make it. Not many people did. There are enough horror stories to last you a lifetime if you ask around.”

“I have a few myself.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Campbell gave you the key to the place?”

Ben pulled out a plain rope necklace from underneath his shirt. It was nothing special except for the circular pendant at the end, the size of a small quarter with a pronounced bump in the center. It looked like an elegant button.

“In case the facility needed work,” Ben said, “or Campbell needed to make a quick entrance, he wanted someone here to be ready to open the Door for him. This thing is like a key, except it works by remote. There isn’t actually a key, key. Besides this pendant, the only other way to open the Door is the big switch in the Control Room.”

“Did he make it? Campbell?”

“Never heard from him. That day, or the days after. It’s ironic. Or tragic. Depending on how you look at it.”

“He would probably say tragic.”

“He would probably say that, yeah. You know, for a crazy, paranoid bastard, he really wasn’t all that bad of a boss. He paid me a pretty decent wage — way more than I could have earned doing anything else, especially with this gimpy leg — for doing almost nothing for two years. I heard he paid the construction people pretty well, too.”

“He did,” Will nodded. “The guy who gave me the job said the work was going to be enough to sustain his company for years.”

“You’re talking about Tom Lerner, the ex-Ranger.”

“That’s him.”

“You think he’s still around?”

“If he was, wouldn’t he be here? He knows about this place.”

“I never thought about it that way,” Ben said.

They entered Operations and walked for a few more minutes until they reached a steel door marked Turbine Room.

Will’s teeth began chattering.

Ben twisted the handle. “This is where the magic happens. Try not to splooge in your pants.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Ben led him inside a cavernous room lined with catwalks on top, circling a large steel turbine that took up nearly half of the space. The catwalks wrapped around the circular, almost barrel-shaped machine, the source of the massive hum that vibrated through the facility. He had to crane his neck to see the very top of the machine, which towered over them.

He could hear the turbine blades spinning inside the machine and could almost imagine the rush of water flowing from Lake Livingston, racing underneath their feet, churning out electricity through the generator shaft. Years ago, he had managed to talk one of the construction crews working on the turbine into showing him the blueprints, but to see the behemoth at work and in person took his breath away, even if every inch of his body was shaking from the vibrations.

Ben called to someone. A tall, gangly man in overalls leaned down from one of the catwalks above them. He looked to be in his fifties, with short, cropped hair and eyeglasses that had a crack across one of the lenses. “Peter, this is Will! New arrival!”

Peter waved down to them and shouted back something that got lost in the roar of the turbine. Ben shook his head and tapped Will on the shoulder and pointed to the door. They waved to Peter, who returned it, shouting something else Will couldn’t hear.

Back in the relatively quiet confines of the hallway, Ben said, “I don’t know how he does it. A minute in there and I can barely feel my teeth.”

“It worked the very first day you guys got here?”

“Campbell ordered the turbine be tested out as soon as the facility was finished, but there hasn’t really been a lot of need to use up the juice over the previous two years. In fact, when I opened the Door the day after the shit hit the fan, it was only the third time in the entire two years I’d been working for Campbell.”

“What happens if the turbine goes?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ben shrugged. “Peter’s a science teacher at the local high school. He’s also an ex-Army guy, and we usually met up for drinks on Tuesdays. So when this whole thing went down, he was the first one I called. Without him, I wouldn’t have a clue how to even start the thing up. Peter keeps trying to tell me how it all works, but it’s all Greek to me. He says Campbell had this entire facility designed to be operated by laymen, so a lot of the work is push-button stuff. I’m not sure if that’s comforting or insulting, to tell you the truth.”

“Probably a little of both,” Will said.

“Follow me, I’ll show you what happens if the turbine craps out on us.”

Ben led him farther up the hallway, about twenty meters from the Turbine Room. There was another steel door at the end, but this one didn’t have anything that looked like a lever, only a long rectangle of glass on the right side that was big enough for a person’s hand.

“Palm reader?” Will asked.

“Yeah, but it works with this, too.” Ben fished his pendant out and waved it in front of the glass display.

The door slid open to reveal metal stairs leading down into a dark room below.

“After you,” Will said.

Ben led him down the stairs. Halogen lights along the walls flickered on automatically as they moved down into a subbasement level. Behind them, the door slid closed.

“This place was designed for 100 survivors,” Ben said, “but obviously we’re not anywhere close to capacity. So we can’t use up all the electricity the turbine generates even if we tried. That’s where these come in.”

They were at the bottom of the stairs now, surrounded by large, rectangular-shaped silver metallic boxes that reached from the floor of the basement almost to the ceiling. They looked like big shelves, each one containing an LED display in the center that was hooked up into the wall behind them. Will counted twelve in all.

“Power cells,” Ben explained. “Everything we can’t use up goes down here and gets stored in these containers.”

“Emergency generators?”

“Yup. And I’ve timed it. The generators take exactly eleven seconds to kick in if the turbine shuts down for whatever reason.”

“Eleven seconds exactly?”

“To the second.”

“What’s the capacity?”

“It can only hold so much, but Peter says one month of uninterrupted usage, at full power. Longer, if you conserve.” Ben walked over to a computer screen hanging by a steel bracket from the wall. He touched it and the screen turned on, showing graphical images and scrolling readings of all twelve fuel storage containers. “Not quite at full storage, but it shouldn’t take long to build up.”

“What then?”

“Then they stop storing and go into hibernation mode.” Ben touched a red button on the screen and the images faded to black. He turned back to Will. “So what do you think?”

“I think we’re lucky we got here in one piece.”

“Good. I’m going to need you and Danny to help me out here.”

“On what?”

“Everything.” Ben gave him a hard look, and for a moment he couldn’t help but feel as if they were conspirators inside a dark room, discussing traitorous plans. “I’ve been holding these people together by myself, but I could use a hand. Who we kidding? I could use two hands. It’s dangerous out there, and I’m not just talking about the creatures. What do you call them again? Ghouls?”

“It sounded appropriate at the time.”

“It’s not just the ghouls we have to worry about now,” Ben continued. “We ran into a couple of survivalists a few weeks ago. They started shooting as soon as they saw us. Lost one good man.”

“What happened to the shooters?”

“They weren’t very good at being survivalists. It wasn’t that hard to track them down.”

Will told him about the Sundays.

“The doctor?” Ben asked.

“Yeah.”

“She’s handling it well.”

“She’s tough.”

“Pretty, too.”

“I guess.”

Ben laughed. “Right. You guess.”

Will wasn’t sure how to take that. Before he could respond, the radio on Ben’s hip squawked, and they heard Rick’s voice: “Ben, it’s ten minutes till sundown.”

Ben unclipped his radio and spoke into it: “On our way.” He looked at Will. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’re dealing with when the sun goes down.”

There was something oddly terrifying about what he was seeing on the monitors inside the Control Room a few minutes later. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, because they darted on and off the screens with almost serpentine speed, and it was difficult to predict their movements.

There had to be more than a dozen. Maybe two dozen. They emerged out of the woods, moving silently, and even the camera’s microphones had a hard time picking up the sounds of their bare feet against the soft dirt ground. They scampered around the open clearing, begrimed features camouflaged almost perfectly against the thick woods behind them and the nearly moonless night.

“That’s all they do,” Rick said. “Every night. They come out and move around the Door. Then — poof. They’re gone.”

“How long do they stay?” Will asked.

“Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours,” Ben said. “We can’t figure out what they’re doing.”

“They’re doing what they’ve always been doing,” Will said. “They’re probing.”

“Probing what?” Rick asked.

“The Door. Looking for signs of weaknesses since the last time they probed. It’s what they do. You’re looking at their forward soldiers.”

“Recon?” Ben asked.

Will nodded.

“Command and control,” Ben said. “What you were saying earlier. There’s a hierarchy in place. Leaders and foot soldiers. And we’re looking at the foot soldiers.”

“From every encounter we’ve had with them, they’ve always shown a remarkable ability to strategize. And there’s something else.”

“What?”

“You probably won’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

“What?” Rick said, tilting his head back, anxious to hear it now.

“I might have already seen one of their commanders when they attacked us at the bank. It had blue eyes…”

CHAPTER 30 LARA

She spent most of her first day underground in the Infirmary. Not as a patient, but as its new caretaker. Ben said as much when he showed her the place.

“Will lied,” she told him. “I’m just a third-year medical student.”

Ben grinned at her. “Still three more years than any of us’s got.”

That made her feel better. Not that she was angry at Will for embellishing her credentials. In a way, she was flattered. It also made her determined to justify his confidence. Besides, she was at home here, back in her environment surrounded by things that she understood.

It felt right.

The Infirmary was fully stocked with enough supplies to take care of all the facility’s current occupants and still have plenty left over. Most of the equipment and inventory were still in boxes or shrink-wrapped in drawers and on shelves, with the exception of some aspirin and ibuprofen pills that had been opened and left on counters. She spent most of the day unwrapping and putting everything where it should be. She catalogued everything in one of the bulky laptops that looked twice as big as anything she had ever owned. It had a handle that made it look more like a suitcase when closed.

She was putting away syringes when she heard a knock behind her. She looked back to see Will in the doorway. “I was hoping you might have something for this,” he said, holding up his right hand, though he could easily have held up his left since they both were covered in fresh bandages.

She waved him over to a swivel chair near a counter. “I need to see,” she said.

He held out his hands for her to unwind the bandages. It must have looked worse this morning, when the burns were at their reddest. They were second-degree burns, with the first and second layer of skin damaged, but that looked to be the full extent of it.

Will looked around the room. “How does a third-year medical student know where everything goes in an infirmary?”

“I spent most of my weekends for the last two years working at free clinics around town. I learned a lot, but it might also explain why I had trouble holding on to a boyfriend.”

“Their loss.”

She blushed and instantly looked over to see if he noticed. He was looking somewhere else, thank God.

“You got lucky,” she said.

“Did I?”

“First and second layer skin burns, but there won’t be any permanent tissue damage. You’ll get blisters later, and the skin will keep getting redder. Not to mention the severe pain and swelling.”

“But the question is — will I ever play the piano again?”

“It’s going to hurt a lot, Will.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Tough guy, huh?”

“I once walked across the street without glancing both ways.”

“Jaywalking. Nice.” She nodded at the sink. “You’ll have to soak it for a while.”

She let cool water run into the sink. While he soaked his hands, she searched for sterilized gauze bandages, avoiding the fluffy cotton ones.

“Where’s your hand?” he asked.

“In the fridge,” she said, nodding to a big freezer in the corner.

“Are you trying to freeze it to death?”

“After I went through all the trouble of digging it out of the rubble and bringing it here? No way. When I have time, I’ll bring it out again.” She nodded. “Okay.”

He pulled his hands out of the water, and she wrapped the bandages around them. She kept a close watch for any signs of discomfort or pain, but he looked calmly back at her with his light brown eyes. His hair was a mess and he was growing a thick stubble. He looked tired, but then he always looked tired in the couple of days she knew him.

“When was the last time you shaved?” she asked.

“A week ago?” He rubbed one of his bandaged hands underneath his chin. “I should ask Ben if he has a razor.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty lying around. Carly told me there’s even a gym here somewhere.”

“It’s in Quarters.”

“That’s the living area, right?”

“Right.”

“What do you call this area we’re in?”

“Operations.”

“That all sounds very military-ish.”

“Harold Campbell fancied himself as being very military-ish.”

“Can you flex your hands for me?”

He held up his hands and made fists with them. “They’re good, but I guess I won’t be using that gym for a while.”

“Let them heal a bit first. At least a week. But for now, how’s the pain?”

“It was worse earlier, but it’s manageable now.”

“Is that you being a gung-ho soldier who thinks he has to constantly keep up appearances, or are you being honest with me, Will?”

“The latter.”

“Are you sure?”

“Probably.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Tough guy. But just in case, I’ll give you something for the pain. There are whole buckets of pills for almost every conceivable ailment in the world on these shelves. You said this Harold Campbell guy was paranoid?”

“And then some.”

“He apparently also believed in being absolutely prepared for everything.”

“When you’re rich and paranoid, you can afford to indulge in your hypochondria.”

“Lucky us. I’ll give you some acetaminophen to start with, but if the pain is still too much, we can go stronger. If it starts to swell and ooze pus, we might be looking at an infection. Otherwise, besides some discoloring around the area, you should heal up fine in a few weeks.”

“So, about that piano…”

“I thought jokes were Danny’s area.”

“He’s rubbing off on me.”

“Not very well, I see.”

“He’s a lousy teacher.”

She finished wrapping and brought out the pills, dropping them into two small, empty bottles. Will pocketed them.

“You’re not going to take one now?” she asked.

“Maybe later.”

“Where’s Danny? I should replace his bandages, too.”

“He’ll come around later tonight. You’ll still be here, right?”

“And leave this absolutely wondrous place of hardened concrete, surrounded by undead ghouls on the outside? Perish the thought.”

They exchanged a brief smile, then she watched him walk to the door.

“Will?”

He stopped and looked back. “Yeah?”

“You need to get some rest, okay? Go to sleep. Third-year medical student’s orders.”

“Aye aye, doctor!” He saluted and left.

Danny appeared two hours later. “I was told you wanted to see if I could still play the piano?”

“Will already used that one,” she said.

“Sonofabitch, he’s stealing my jokes now?”

“Get in here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She cleaned his wounds and wrapped them back up, giving him the same pills she had given Will and delivering the same diagnosis, then finishing with, “Just keep an eye on them. If they start to itch too much or you see pus, come back immediately.”

“Will do, Doc.”

“You don’t have to call me Doc.”

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be able to use my ‘What’s up, Doc?’ in my best Bugs Bunny voice every time I come over.”

“Of course, what was I thinking.”

“There you go. Hey, wanna hear a joke about a second-year medical student and the medical examiner?”

“No.”

“You’ll love it. There’s originally a dead body in there somewhere but I’ll take it out just for you.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Danny.”

“Come on, I promise you’ll totally dig it.”

She picked up a scalpel and playfully waved it in front of his face. “No!”

He laughed and hopped off the seat. “You’re no fun.” He headed for the door. “Thanks for the pills, Doc. You said only one bottle a day, right?”

“Only if you don’t want to ever wake up again.”

“Now you’re talking.”

After he left, she went back to cataloging all the medicine she had found hidden away in bags and boxes and bottles. It was a miracle no one had raided the place for drugs before, although she could see signs that people had looked around. It helped that most of the medicine wasn’t labeled for the layman. Harold Campbell had probably expected to have a medical professional down here with him.

She was putting away the IV bags when she heard a noise. She stopped and listened, and it didn’t take very long to trace the sound to its source.

She walked across the room toward the huge, silver chrome freezer, the size of a small closet. It had three sections, each with its own pullout drawer. She went straight to the bottom one and pulled it out, looked in at the backpack with the hand inside.

Then the fingers strained against the backpack’s fabrics and tried to climb over the side of the drawer, carrying the backpack with it.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

She picked up the backpack by the strap and flung it viciously into the side of the fridge. The backpack was half-frozen and she almost expected it to break into little chunks upon impact, the hand inside right along with it.

But it didn’t. Instead, it went slack, and she held it in front of her and waited. She felt a slight movement, but nothing aggressive.

“Good. You’re learning. I don’t want to have this talk again.”

She fell asleep with her forehead resting on the laptop’s keyboard and woke up panicked. It took her a moment to calm down, to remind herself that she was underground, in the facility, and safe.

Safe…

It was such an odd concept, and seemed…wrong somehow. She hadn’t felt safe in a long time. Not in Houston when it all began, not even during those days leaving the city with Tony. Then the Sundays entered her life and threatened to choke it out of her. Finding Will and the others was a godsend. Then this underground facility of Harold Campbell’s.

Safe…

She was safe down here. Or as safe as she was ever going to get these days. The concrete walls were cold and gray and monotonous, but they kept out the undead things outside. No, not outside. Topside.

Up there.

What were they doing up there right now? Searching for her and Will and the others, probably. Maybe even the same ghouls that attacked them at the bank, led by the blue-eyed ghoul.

She believed Will when he told her he had seen a ghoul with blue eyes outside the bank. He wouldn’t lie about something like that. There was no point. Nothing to gain. And in the short time she knew him, he had proven to be trustworthy.

She yawned, stretching on the stool. When was the last time she had actually gone to sleep in a bed without worrying about surviving the night?

She turned the laptop off and made sure the hand was still in the freezer before she left the Infirmary. Not that she thought the hand could possibly open the drawer from the inside while still trapped inside the backpack. That was an absurd notion, wasn’t it? Still, spending the extra few seconds to make sure cost her nothing.

What was that Will said about the ghouls? “Dead, not stupid. Just keep that in mind and act accordingly.”

Good advice.

It was quiet in the hallway, but she heard voices from the Cafeteria as she walked by. She considered stopping in to say hi, introduce herself, but she was tired. Too tired. The last month was finally overcoming her, threatening to crush her under its weight.

She fell on her small, uncomfortable cot inside her room and went straight to sleep.

She woke up sometime in the middle of the night, in the darkness, and for a moment struggled to breathe. Then she remembered she was still safe, still underground in the facility, and she was able to catch her breath again.

She lay back down on the small cot and willed her heartbeat to slow.

Slowly, slowly…

She tried to go back to sleep, but that proved fruitless after an hour of lying in the darkness staring up at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the turbine engine through the walls, the floor, in the tips of her fingers. She wondered how long it would take before she got used to the sound.

She finally surrendered, climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to wander the hallways.

Lara found the Gym near the back of the Quarters area. It was a large room, big enough for a decent track that looped all the way around and a boxing ring in the center. There were treadmills, bicycle machines, and mats stacked high in one corner, though none of the machines looked as if they had gotten much use in recent weeks. The place smelled of disinterest, and didn’t have that strong odor of sweat and exhaustion that usually accompanied every gym she had ever been to.

She warmed up, then tried walking on one of the treadmills for a few minutes, more into the idea of doing something than actually working up a sweat. After a while, the quiet in the Gym began to get to her, and she cleaned up and found herself back in the hallways.

Voices came from the Cafeteria as she neared it. She listened for a bit but didn’t hear anyone she recognized, so she kept going. Eventually she would have to get to know everyone in the facility, but that was for later.

She walked the hallways listlessly, with no real destination. She pressed her hand against the wall and felt the slight vibrations. The sound of the turbine, vibrating through every inch of the facility, was slightly hypnotic. Could she go to sleep touching the wall? She’d have to try it out.

Somehow, she ended up back in the Operations area. She thought she would eventually end back up in the Infirmary — she was comfortable there, and there were a couple of beds in the corner…

But on the way she got sidetracked by a steel door — all the doors in Operations were reinforced steel — marked Green Room. The door was open, and bright lights flooded out into the hallway. The facility’s halogen lights were already bright, but the light coming out of the room was on another level entirely.

Curiosity got the better of her, and she entered, immediately overwhelmed by the size.

It was almost half as big as a football field and just as wide, and she found herself standing in front of rows and rows of plants growing in large troughs, each at least two yards wide and over thirty long. Vegetables, fruits, and plants whose names she didn’t know were growing in their own little parts of the room.

Industrial-sized lamps hung from the rafters directly above the troughs, and their light was so bright she had to blink every few seconds. There had to be over two dozen, enough to illuminate every one of the troughs. Interspersed among them were smaller halogen lights, the kind that dotted the rest of the facility’s ceiling.

A woman in her fifties, crouching next to one of the troughs near the center of the room, looked over and smiled knowingly. “Couldn’t sleep?”

She looked grandmotherly, with luxurious white hair and soft, patient gray eyes. Dirt and soot spotted her clothes, and she was running a silver trowel through the trough.

“You, too?” Lara asked.

“I don’t usually clock out until midnight,” the woman said. “Then it’s back up around six. I guess I don’t need as much sleep as I used to. So I come here, do a little tinkering. The name’s Rose.”

“Lara.”

“Looking for a little late night snack, Lara?”

“I was just walking around…”

“Ah. That old thing.” Rose gave her a compassionate smile. “It’s this place. It’s hard to get used to it at first. You’re thinking about them, up there scampering about right now.”

She nodded and smiled.

“It takes time,” Rose said. “You have to first accept that this place is safe before you can allow yourself to close your eyes and stay asleep. It was the same with me. It’s the same with everyone, I suspect.”

“But it happens? Eventually?”

“Yes, eventually.”

Lara walked around the room. Carrots, peas, and stalks of corn grew along one trough. There were other vegetables and maybe some fruits that were mysteries to her. Some grew as high as the ceiling, wrapped around sticks that had been stuck into the soft dirt for that purpose. Where did they get all the dirt?

Lara said, “It’s bright in here.”

“Only at first, but you get used to that, too.”

She glanced up at the lamps above them. She couldn’t imagine ever getting used to that level of brightness. “What kind of lights are those?”

“Special ultraviolet lights. Or so they tell me. I don’t really know, to be honest with you. They’re supposed to mimic the sun, I guess. I didn’t even know they existed until I came down here. I used to rely on the sun itself, but hard to do that nowadays.”

“Do they work?”

“Proof is in the pudding, as they say. We turn them on for just half the day. They’re quite the resource hog, I’m told.” Rose bent and twisted something free. “Here, catch.”

She stuck out her hand, and the object miraculously landed in her palm. It was beets. Brown and slightly reddish, about the size of a walnut.

“Not nearly as big as I had hoped,” Rose said. “But I guess they’ll do for now. Maybe the next batch will come out better.”

“Do you take care of this room by yourself? It’s massive.”

“Yes, it certainly is. Much, much bigger than my garden back home. But I have a couple of helpers — asleep at the moment, I’m sure. I suspect it was either this or wander around the place bored out of their minds. Or they could always go up top, and we all know what’s going on up there. You came with the others earlier today.”

Lara nodded.

“We’re glad to have you. Always nice to have some new blood.” Then, with a crooked smile, she added, “So to speak.”

Lara smiled. “What did you do before all of this?”

“I was a librarian. Before that, I was a schoolteacher. And before that, housewife. All in that order. Though most of my time was spent in my garden doing exactly this. I wouldn’t be here if not for Ben. God bless him.”

“Is everyone down here from Starch?”

“Yes, most of us have lived in Starch all our lives and have known each other since we were young children. It’s the end of the world, and we find ourselves down here. Still with the same people we’ve known for most of our lives.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

“It could be worse, as they say. You’ve lost people, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

She thought about her parents. About her disapproving mother. Her gentle, overly approving father, who showered her with affection mostly to compensate for her mother’s lack of it. She thought about Tony, who kept her alive in those early days. About Tracy, her roommate… God knows what had happened to her.

“We all have,” Rose said.

“Your husband?” Lara asked.

“He passed away a few years ago. Thank God. I don’t know what I would do if he suddenly came back and… Well, you know.”

She nodded. She knew pretty well. They all did.

“You planted all of this? In less a month?” she asked.

“Oh gosh, no,” Rose said, amused by the idea. “They were already growing. This Harold Campbell had them planted long before we got here. This room was a big mess then, but we’ve straightened it out.”

“It must have been a lot of work.”

“It was, but idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say.”

Lara spent the next few hours with Rose in the Green Room, listening to her stories, watching her work diligently on one trough, then another. She seemed to have twice as much energy as Lara did despite their age difference and wasn’t the least bit bothered by the bright UV lamps above them. Or maybe, like Rose had said, she was just used to them.

Lara found the UV lamps too bright, and they stung her eyes unless she shielded them with her hands. After a while, Rose took pity on her and found a straw hat in a closet. Lara put it on and instantly felt relief.

After that, the lamps became an afterthought, though they never really left Lara’s mind completely…

CHAPTER 31 WILL

They had to get more silver. That was the most important thing. That meant runs on the surface for Will and Danny to look for the precious metal, while at the same time looking for supplies to stuff the facility’s coffers.

But the silver was always priority, and Ben agreed.

Will found locating a ghoul was now much harder. It was more difficult to know if there were creatures inside a place regardless of whether there were coverings over the windows or not. They were constantly adapting, constantly changing their modus operandi.

Dead, not stupid.

There wasn’t a whole lot of silver to be found in Starch, Texas, though they built up enough of a reserve of silverware, jewelry, and everyday home items to start making more ammo. After their encounter at the bank, he decided the shotgun shells were more valuable, and they concentrated the bulk of their silver production on that. Ben deferred to his experience.

Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Before they knew it, winter had come and gone, and spring had arrived. Christmas, once on every adult’s mind and every kid’s lips, passed without any recognition. The leaves changed colors, as did the grass in the clearing. The only people who noticed were the ones who went topside with Danny and him. Life in the facility moved on, one day identical to the previous.

Will saw Kate intermittently, though not for lack of trying. She had stopped responding to his visits, and she seemed to be purposefully timing her comings and goings to avoid him. Eventually, Carly became his only contact with Kate. She still opened the door for Carly, though even that was becoming rare. Kate didn’t just avoid him; she avoided all of them, and had begun to take her food back to her room.

Those were just some of the many troubling signs that he was losing her. Not that he felt he owned her, but they had something once, and he was hesitant to let it go without a fight. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to believe it was a one-sided affair.

All of it crystallized one day, almost three months after they arrived at the facility, when Carly sat down across from him in the Cafeteria, where he was catching a quick bite. The rest of the big room was empty. Not a surprise, given that no one had set timetables and people regularly came and went as needed. The facility had no clocks to punch, no work schedule written in stone, and though everyone had their own contributions to make, only the Turbine Room really required 24-7 supervision.

Harold Campbell had the Cafeteria fully stocked with crates of bagged prepackaged meals called Meals Ready to Eat, as well as Number 10 metal cans, each one the size of a gallon of paint and filled with food designed for a long shelf life. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner involved a process of mixing and matching salads and vegetables from the Green Room with canned food, though he, Danny, and Ben usually settled for MREs when they could, having grown used to them from their Army days.

Carly looked across the table at him now, watching him pick at mashed potatoes and slabs of slightly hardened and overly salty turkey from a recently procured bag of MRE.

“How is she?” he asked.

“I’m worried,” Carly said.

“That bad?”

“I don’t think she’s eating anymore. I tried bringing her food, but she just stares at it and then goes back to writing in her journal.”

“She’s keeping a journal?”

“She started about a week ago. Have you tried talking to her again?”

“She won’t answer the door.”

“Oh.” Carly frowned. “I didn’t know it had gotten that bad between you two.”

“I think she’s avoiding me.”

“She barely talks to me, Will. Most of the time I sit there talking and she just listens. Honestly, sometimes I don’t think she’s even listening. Whenever I get up to leave, I think she’s relieved. It’s not exactly fun times in there for me, you know. It hasn’t been for a while.”

“Don’t give up on her, Carly. You’re the only person she’s even talking to anymore.”

“I have Vera and Danny… I can’t keep devoting twenty-four hours of the day to making sure she doesn’t slit her wrists.”

He gave her an alarmed look. “Are you saying she might do that?”

“I don’t know, Will.” She let out a heavy sigh. “It’s hard to know what’s going on with her when she won’t talk to me. I mean, really talk to me.”

Carly looked tired, the teenage girl from Houston almost completely gone now, replaced by a woman. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Carly had always been a woman. He just never noticed.

“It’s not the same Kate we left Houston with,” Carly said. “You know that, right? Losing Ted and Luke, but especially Luke… I don’t know, Will, I think we might have lost her back at the bank.”

He nodded. He saw Kate change that night, when the ghouls poured into the bank. The way she stood in the middle of the room, disoriented and confused. Ted’s death had paralyzed her, and Luke’s death crushed her spirit.

“Have you eaten yet?” he asked Carly.

She gave him a wry smile. “How’s the food?”

“It’s great.”

“Really?”

“It kind of tastes like day-old bread and newspaper. Cheap newspaper that’s been used to wrap week-old fish.”

“Yum,” Carly said.

The conversation with Carly about Kate bothered Will and lingered with him for the next few days. It took Lara and that undead hand of hers to break the spell.

“You got a minute?” she asked him through his radio.

Ben had assigned them all radios to keep in contact, though not everyone made use of them. Kate had one, too, but he didn’t think she ever actually turned it on.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I have something I want to show you.”

“Where?”

“Infirmary.”

“I’m on my way.”

When he got to the Infirmary, he found her at an examining table looking at the ghoul hand. Or at least, what was left of it. He knocked on the door to announce himself.

She smiled at him over her shoulder. “Thanks for coming.”

“Sure.”

He hadn’t realized how blue her eyes were — crystal blue — and how well they complemented the shape of her face. Was she always this attractive? For some reason he hadn’t noticed she was no longer the girl from the Sundays’ cabin, in the filthy dress, with the wild, terrified eyes.

He forced himself not to stare. “What’s up?”

Lara had dissected the hand into little chunks, with all five fingers sliced off at the second joint. The hand itself was tied onto a wooden block with a rope around what was left of the wrist and fingers. As he approached it, the remainder of the hand moved slightly underneath the rope.

“Aw geez,” Will said, looking down at the thing.

Lara had sliced the hand open then sewed it back up numerous times, so that sewing thread crisscrossed the hand from end to end. It still looked lively, straining against the restraints as if sensing his presence.

“Jesus, Lara, should I be worried?”

“I told you, I wanted to do some tests. So I’ve been doing some tests. Don’t worry, it doesn’t seem to mind regardless of how many times I cut it up and sew it back together. It just keeps on ticking like the Energizer Bunny.”

“You’ve been doing this by yourself?” he asked, alarmed.

“Of course not,” she said, looking slightly annoyed. “We agreed, remember? I always had someone here with me whenever I worked on it. Danny, Carly, Ben, some of the other guys.”

“What did Ben have to say about this?”

“He was…squeamish about it at first. But he got over it. Mostly.”

She looked at home here, surrounded by patient beds and medicine, wearing the white doctor’s coat. The handful of times he had seen her over the last three months involved follow-up visits to treat the burns on his hands and evening meals in the Cafeteria. She was always busy, Ben’s people eagerly embracing her as their doctor, third-year medical student qualifications or not. As Ben said at one point, her three years were still three years more than all of them had combined.

“So, I’m here,” he said. “What did you want to show me?”

“Watch this.”

She picked up a scalpel and stabbed it into one of the fingers lying motionless on the wooden board, then held it up to him like some kind of trophy.

“Well, that’s never happened before,” he said.

“What?”

“We haven’t done anything yet, and you’re already giving me the finger.”

She rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

He grinned, pleased with himself. “I thought so.”

She ignored him and pushed on. “What’s the difference between this finger and this hand?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“At least think about it, Will.”

He did. “The hand is still alive?”

“Exactly. But this finger was still alive, too, until it wasn’t anymore. You know why it died? I mean, died again? Blood.”

“Blood?”

“After I cut it off at the hand, it still had blood, but eventually, with the open wound, it bled out. Once it bled out…once the blood left the finger, it died. Again. Do you see?”

“Not really. People can’t survive without blood either, Lara. What’s your point?”

“That’s true. But your hand wouldn’t still be moving if I cut it off. In fact, it would instantly become just a lump of meat sans the rest of your body. But this thing”—she looked back at the hand roped against the board—“continued to survive. Thrived, even.”

“Then why didn’t the fingers live? I mean, not live, but not die. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

She smiled. “I know what you mean. It’s the blood. With enough blood, pieces of the ghoul can keep surviving. Deny it blood, and it shrinks and ceases to be.”

She put the scalpel down, then picked up another one. She held it to her palm and made a small incision.

Will almost tackled her, but she quickly held up her other hand, “Wait, watch.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Just watch for a sec.”

She held her left palm over the ghoul finger she had stabbed with the first scalpel. She squeezed her palm, putting pressure near the small incision, and a drop of blood fell and landed on the side of the finger. The blood seemed to move along the length of the finger before it was absorbed into the skin.

“Oh, man,” Will groaned.

“Watch what happens next,” she said, shushing him.

The finger on the board started to move. A small twitch at first, but then it became more active and was moving against the scalpel holding it down. She quickly grabbed the scalpel and lifted it into the air. The finger continued wiggling against the sharp point, trying to escape.

He could only stare, unable to find any words.

“Do you see?” she said. “It’s only alive as long as it has fresh blood to sustain it. Blood reanimates it, Will. But you take it out again…”

She held the finger so that the severed end faced the board, and thin trickles of blood began dripping out. The blood wasn’t red anymore — it was a thick, clumpy black ooze, the kind that poured out of ghouls when they bled.

After a dozen of the black drops had left it, the finger stopped moving, then went still.

“That’s disgusting,” he said. “But what does it mean?”

“They change us at cellular level, Will. We’re talking DNA. They’re literally rewriting our DNA. They take what we are, infect us with their own blood, make us into something else. Them. This…is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. It’s like some kind of super virus. But whatever changes they make, it destroys the body’s ability to replenish blood, so they need a constant supply once they’ve used up what they have — or acquired, for lack of a better word. Once they’re out of blood, they’re dead. Or, you know, dead again, again.”

“What about the hand?”

“It has some blood left. It’s conserving, that’s why it’s moving so slowly. Once all the blood leaves it, it’ll die, too. You can see how weak it’s already become. When I put it in the freezer, the blood congealed, and it prolonged the hand’s lifespan. It’s losing strength. Pretty soon, it’ll dry up and die. I mean, again.”

“What about the silver?”

“What about silver?”

“Why does silver do what it does to them?”

“Oh. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I guess I could study up on that. But it’s funny. They can sense it, you know. The silver.”

“Sense it?”

“Yeah. Watch.” She walked to the counter and came back with a silver bullet in her palm. “Watch closely,” she said and brought the bullet toward the hand. As she neared it, the hand started to move, struggling against the rope holding it. When she stopped, the hand stopped. “How does it know the silver is getting closer?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You’re the doctor, doctor.”

“It senses it,” she said.

“Senses it,” he repeated. “Like a sixth sense?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Does it see ghosts, too?”

“What?”

“You know, like that movie.”

“What movie?”

“The one about the kid who can see ghosts. Bruce Willis is really dead. That movie.”

She shook her head. “I don’t watch a lot of movies. Between school, the free clinic on weekends, and a part-time job, I’m lucky if I get to even see my TV when I’m at home, much less actually watch it.”

“Never mind.” He nodded at the hand. “So, what does all this mean? About the blood?”

“They’re feeding on us,” Lara said. She returned the bullet to the counter. “They need us to survive. Once we’re gone, who knows what they’ll do for sustenance? They can’t attack and feed on each other. They’ve already altered the composition of the blood they ingested. I guess they can always feed on the animals, but those aren’t going to last, either.”

“But they could survive on the animals.”

“I don’t see why not. It’s probably just a matter of, well, tastes. But I could be wrong. I’m just guessing here. I’d love to get my hands on some medical textbooks. Rose, from the Green Room, used to work at a library in town. One of these days I’d love to raid it for books. You think we could do that?”

He nodded. “We have a surface run coming up in two days. We could probably swing by the library.”

“Great. I’ll start making a list of books I’ll want to grab.”

“Maybe you should add some nail files and clippers, too.”

“What? Why?”

“Your nails, Lara.”

She held up her hands and stared at the dirt underneath her nails. She had meant to clean them earlier but was too excited to show Will the finger. Thank God she hadn’t had any patients yet today.

“Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to play with dirt?”

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rose in the Green Room.” She walked to the sink and washed her hands with soap, working up a thick lather. “It’s serene in there. It’s funny, because I was never much of a nature person. But in there, even with those bright UV lights…” She smiled. “It’s soothing.”

She grabbed some paper towels and dried her hands.

“So,” Will said. “Everything you’ve shown me is fascinating, but how does it help us?”

The question seemed to stump her. “I have no idea.”

“No idea?”

“No idea,” she repeated.

“So you’ve spent the last three months on this, and you have no idea how any of it will be useful?”

“I wouldn’t say three months. I’ve only been working on it on and off. This facility may be a Godsend, but it didn’t stop people from getting sick or hurt. I’ve poked and prodded it when I could, but there were always other things.”

He smiled. “Like Rose and the Green Room?”

“I told you, it’s serene in there. And Rose reminds me of my grandmother.”

“I can see that.”

“So this doesn’t impress you at all?”

He shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s all pretty fascinating. I guess I was just hoping you were going to tell me an easier way to kill them.”

“Sorry.” She wrinkled her nose and actually looked a little embarrassed. A strand of blonde hair fell over her eyes and she blew at it.

He smiled.

She saw him and said, “What?”

Crap.

“Hmm?” he said, trying to play it off.

“You smiled.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“I was just thinking about a joke Danny told me this morning…”

“Yeah? Let’s hear it.”

“Maybe later…”

She didn’t look convinced. “I think you’re lying.”

“No, really—”

He was saved by a loud squawk from the radio clipped to his hip.

“Saved by the radio,” she said.

Ben’s voice came through: “Will, if you got a minute, head over to the Control Room.”

He unsnapped his radio and pressed the lever. “What’s going on?”

“Come see for yourself. And oh, swing by the Infirmary and grab Lara, too.”

“Will do.”

“Give me a second,” Lara said.

He helped her put the hand back into its home — a plastic container with a snap lock — and stuff it into the freezer. It attacked the inside of the box, spraying black blood everywhere as they got closer to the freezer, because it knew where it was going. Would it later suck all that blood back into itself, the way the finger had done with Lara’s blood? The thought slightly unnerved him.

“Where’s your radio?” he asked.

“In one of the drawers. I turned it off. It’s too loud — people are always talking on it.”

“That’s the point, Lara.”

She looked slightly embarrassed. “I like peace and quiet. And people don’t need it blurting every few seconds when they’re in here.”

“It’s more like squawking.”

“Whatever.”

They left the Infirmary together, hurrying down the hallway to the Control Room.

“So, what was the joke?” Lara asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said.

“Tell me now,” she insisted. “Unless there wasn’t a joke.”

“There’s a joke.”

“So tell me.”

He sighed. “There wasn’t a joke.”

“So why did you smile at me?”

“Because you’re pretty.”

She laughed. “Okay.”

“Okay?” he said, glancing at her briefly.

“Yeah, okay,” she said, and she might have smiled to herself, but he couldn’t be sure because she turned her head away.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.

“Down here?” she said, looking a bit stumped by the question.

“You spend time somewhere else but down here?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” She didn’t answer him right away. After a few more steps in silence, she said, “No.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yeah?” She glanced over at him, and this time he was sure she smiled.

“Yeah,” he nodded.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“You never know.”

They reached the Control Room, and as soon as they entered, they heard a small, female voice. For a moment, he thought the guys had let a little girl into the room. Except the voice was coming from a ham radio on a shelf on the back wall, broadcasting from somewhere nearby.

It was a young female voice, and he recognized it as belonging to a child.

“Hello? Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Please, if you can hear me, we need help. We’re running out of supplies and my brother is hurt. I’m all alone now. Is anyone there…?”

CHAPTER 32 LARA

Lara’s father was an amateur radio operator when she was a kid, though he gave it up when his only daughter didn’t find it quite as interesting as she once did, when she sat on his knee to see the blinking lights. This ham radio looked much more sophisticated than her father’s, with a ridiculous amount of buttons, LED readings, and dials. She recognized the microphone, though, which hadn’t changed very much over the years.

“Hello? Is anyone there? Please, we need help. My brother is hurt. I think he’s hurt real bad. Is anyone out there?”

The girl’s voice was young and frail. It came through clear on the radio but didn’t really tell her anything. The voice could be from as nearby as Starch or from halfway across the globe. That was the charm of a ham radio — the ability to reach the world without ever leaving your basement.

Ben was there with Davies, the man who usually worked the Control Room’s afternoon shifts, both of them looking at the radio but neither moving to answer it.

“She started broadcasting a few minutes ago,” Ben said. “We usually leave the radio on all day, with the unit set to automatically scroll across the bands every few minutes in case someone tries to make contact. It’s connected to an antenna in the woods.”

“Has anyone made contact before?” Will asked.

“This is the first time we’ve heard from another living soul out there. We almost missed it, too. Davies was about to leave for the day.”

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Lara asked.

“That’s why I told Will to bring you,” Ben said. “I was hoping you would answer her. I don’t want to spook her. She sounds like a little kid.”

She nodded. It made sense. Kids usually responded better to a female presence.

She picked up the microphone and pushed the push-to-talk lever on its side. She took a breath. “Hello?”

She depressed the lever to let the girl talk, but there was no voice from the other end. She waited, then looked to Will for confirmation. He gave her an encouraging nod, and she pressed the lever and spoke into the microphone again.

“Hello, I can hear you. My name is Lara. What’s your name?”

No response.

Lara waited a few more seconds, and was about to press the lever again when the voice suddenly came back.

“Elise. My name’s Elise.”

Lara breathed a sigh of relief. “Elise. It’s nice to meet you. How old are you?”

“Eight.”

“Are you alone, Elise? You said your brother was with you.”

“Todd…”

“Is Todd hurt?”

“Yes. He’s hurt bad.”

“How old is Todd, Elise?”

“Fifteen. But he’s going to be sixteen in two days. I won’t get a chance to find him a present or anything.”

“I’m sure he knows you tried your best,” Lara said. She was thankful the men hadn’t crowded around her. She took another deep breath, then pressed the microphone again. “Where are you now, Elise? Can you tell me?”

“I’m underneath the school. In the basement. We both are.”

“What school, Elise?”

“The high school.”

She thought about Vera and tried to picture her in Elise’s position. Small, vulnerable, and scared. Not alone, but she might as well be with her brother hurt. Patience was the key here.

“What is the name of the school, Elise? Do you know?”

“Dansby High School.”

Lara looked over at the men. Davies was nodding his head. “Dansby is a town about ten miles up the highway. I know that high school — I’ve been to football games there.”

She turned back to the mic. “We know where the school is, Elise. Are you okay?”

“Todd’s hurt…”

“But are you okay, sweetheart?”

“I think so.” The girl’s voice seemed to drop another level when she said, “Lara?”

“Yes, Elise. I’m here.”

“Can you save us?”

Lara felt her heart break. It took her a moment before she could be sure her voice wouldn’t quiver when she answered. “Yes, Elise. We’ll save you. I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She looked at the men. Will nodded again, encouraging her to keep going. She turned back to the radio. “Is Todd there? Can I speak to Todd, Elise?”

“He’s asleep,” Elise said. “He’s hurt real bad and took some medicine and now he’s sleeping. He’s been sleeping all day.”

“Okay, that’s fine. He’s probably just tired from the medicine. I need you to listen to me carefully, Elise.”

“Okay…”

Lara glanced down at her watch. 4:15 p.m.

“I want you to stay exactly where you are and don’t go anywhere, okay? You’re very close to us, and we can come and get you very soon. Understand, sweetheart? Tell me you understand.”

“I understand.”

“What will you do until I get there?”

“Stay still. Don’t go out.”

“That’s good, sweetheart. I want you to stay exactly where you are. Do you have any food left?”

“A little bit…”

“Enough for the day?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Okay, I want you to make sure it lasts for at least one more day, because that’s all it’s going to take for me to get to you.”

“Please hurry.”

“I will. And Elise?”

“Yes?” the girl replied, the hope in her voice making Lara’s chest heave.

“Just hold on a little while longer, sweetheart. I’ll come get you. I promise.”

“Hurry, Lara.”

She released the lever and looked at Will. “I’m going to go get her,” she said softly, but with absolute certainty.

He nodded back. “We’ll go with you, but not today. It’s two hours until sundown. We need to carve out as much sunlight as possible to get there and back. Until then, see what else you can get from her.”

Lara nodded. He was right, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear, or to turn back to the radio and tell Elise. But she did, doing her very best to reassure the girl that she would be there. Not today, but tomorrow.

Tomorrow…

She spent another two hours talking to Elise, comforting the girl and reassuring her that they would be there tomorrow. She didn’t let the girl go — she didn’t want to let her go — until she heard Elise yawn. Lara told her to go to sleep and turn off the radio so it didn’t make any noise. By the time she left the Control Room, she couldn’t remember ever having felt so hopeful since all of this began.

Will followed her back to the Infirmary, where he watched her pace back and forth in the middle of the room. Trying to wear out the carpet, her mom would have said, except there wasn’t any carpet in the facility, only hard, solid concrete. She hadn’t realized how much she missed carpets until now.

“You did a good job preparing her for tonight,” Will said. “She’ll be fine until we can get there tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, nodding. Knowing and accepting weren’t the same thing. “I’m going with you.”

“Of course you are.”

“I mean it, Will. Don’t even think about leaving without me.”

“I won’t. But you should get some sleep. Take some of those sleeping pills. Tomorrow might be a long day.”

“Davies said it’s only ten miles up the highway. Less than an hour there and back.”

“There’s a lot between here and there. You know my motto. Hope for the best—”

“—prepare for the worst,” Lara finished. “I know. Like at the bank. Plan Z?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Barely.” She gave him a teasing smile. “I was surprised I didn’t wake up buried underneath a ton of rubble.”

“It was close there for a moment.”

“But you got us through it.”

He nodded.

“You always get us through, Will.” She stopped pacing and gazed across the room at him. “I trust you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“But I don’t think I’ve ever said it. I trust you. Carly and Vera and Danny. They trust you, too. Explicitly. Ted and Luke did, too, and even Kate, before…”

She didn’t finish, and Will nodded silently. She wished she hadn’t brought up Kate’s name. She knew things had changed between them. They all knew, because Kate rarely came out of her room anymore. Lara knew most of this through Carly. They had become friends, though Lara was always cognizant that Kate was Carly’s friend first.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bring up Kate.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“The point is,” she said, hoping to get beyond her mistake, “I trust you. Because you’re Will.”

He chuckled. “I don’t know what that means.”

She watched him for a moment. He had such gentle eyes, despite all the violence he was capable of, and she often found herself feeling relieved whenever she saw him for some reason. On the rare days she didn’t see him in the last three months, whether in the Cafeteria for meals, or in her Infirmary for check-ups, her mind wandered to him — what was he doing, was he all right? Whenever the Door opened — it was impossible not to hear it — she knew he was leaving, because he always volunteered to go out. And when she heard it open again later that day, she knew he was back and held her breath, hoping no one called her on the radio because they needed her assistance.

Before she knew what she was doing, Lara walked across the room and kissed him on the mouth.

He didn’t respond at first, and panic rose inside her. She tried to pull away, but then his hands slipped into her hair and he pulled her mouth tighter against his, kissing her back. She was suddenly flushed and breathless as they stood like that for a while, mouths locked, until finally she had to put her hands against his chest and pushed him away slightly in order to catch her breath.

She laughed and blushed at the same time. It had been so long.

“Okay, that isn’t quite the reaction a guy wants after a kiss,” he said.

She stopped laughing. “It was a great kiss.”

“I can tell. Because you laughed.”

“I didn’t mean to laugh.”

He gave her a disbelieving smirk. “Prove it.”

“Okay,” she said and kissed him on the mouth again.

He didn’t hesitate this time. His hands moved down to her waist, slipped underneath her shirt, and touched her skin. She leaned farther against him, their mouths locked. His hands traveled upwards, and she sighed as his fingers touched her breasts.

But then suddenly the warmth and pleasure and anticipation of intimacy fled in a heartbeat and she was seized with fear and terror.

Her body must have tensed up noticeably because he stopped and pulled back slightly and looked at her, concern in his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

She wanted to. She was sure of it when she kissed him, and even more sure of it when he kissed her back. But now…

“I can’t,” she said again, hoping that he would understand. “Not yet.”

She had never told him about what happened with the Sundays. Not the details, anyway. She hadn’t told anyone, not Kate or Carly, but she thought that they knew anyway. It was impossible not to.

Looking into his eyes now, she felt embarrassed and ashamed and tried to pull away from him, but he held onto her and wouldn’t let her go. “Stop. Lara, stop.”

She looked back at him. She expected to see accusing eyes staring back at her, chastising her for leading him on and then trying to flee. But she didn’t. Instead, he folded both hands over hers and squeezed softly.

“Okay,” he said. “Not until you’re ready. Only when you’re ready.”

He pulled her closer to him and kissed her softly on the lips, so gently that she barely felt the contact. She wrapped her arms around him and he held her tightly, protectively. She wanted to stay like that forever.

“Stay with me,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

He stayed with her through the night. They slept in his room, on the small cot that didn’t feel nearly big enough for him, much less the both of them. Somehow they made it fit, and she slid easily against his chest in the semidarkness. Both of them still clothed, with only the lamp glowing quietly in the corner of the concrete room. He must have kicked the blanket to the floor sometime in the night. Not that they needed it. The room, like every inch of the facility, was perfectly balanced between hot and cold.

She listened to him breathe, the steady rise and fall of his chest below her. He stroked her hair, his calm breath against her every few seconds, the predictable rhythm of it soothing.

She hadn’t realized how much she missed the presence of another person against her. It seemed so long since she arrived here, and between working in the Infirmary and all the odd jobs she had found to occupy her time — the Green Room with Rose taking up most of it — she realized how much she had missed this.

Missed the physical human contact.

She was sure he would bring it up sometime in the night, but he never did. Will seemed content to let it go unspoken. She knew she would have to talk about it sooner or later, and he probably knew that, too.

But he didn’t push it, or approach it, and she was grateful for that.

After a few hours of lying against him in the darkness in silence, Lara decided it was time to stop hiding.

“He raped me,” she said softly.

She waited for him to reply, but he didn’t say anything. Had he drifted off to sleep? No. She could still feel the stroke of his fingers against her hair and the steady rhythm of his breathing underneath her.

He was letting her talk.

“John. The one Danny killed in the woods. He raped me twice, then I guess he got tired of me. I think the only reason he did it in the first place was to let me know my place. I don’t think he even enjoyed it. After that, the only reason he kept me around was to clean and cook for them. And because I told him I was a medical student. I saw them bring two other girls to the cabin afterwards, then in the morning they were gone.”

She paused. Should she stop? Or keep going? What did he want to hear? How much did she want him to know?

She needed to keep going.

“When I dream about the night I killed Jack, I switch their faces. It’s John that I’m shooting. I’ve never fired a gun before that day, and in the dream, I’m surprised by how much it kicks. But it doesn’t stop me from pulling the trigger over and over again. Even in my dreams, I’m so afraid of him, that he’ll get back up and hurt me again. So I beat him with the gun until he’s bloody and there’s nothing left of his face.”

She stopped. Did his body just tense up? No, that was just her imagination. He hadn’t moved at all, hadn’t reacted at all. He continued to stroke her hair and breathe in the same steady pace.

“Say something,” she whispered, desperate to hear his voice.

He stirred underneath her, and his arms tightened around her body. She lifted her head, placed her chin on his chest, and looked up at him. It was dark, but she could still see his eyes and the curve of his lips, and she was sure he was looking at her, too.

In the darkness, he said, “You’re with me now.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

That was it. Four words.

It was all he wanted to say. All he needed to say.

She wanted more, but there was no more. She let those four words sink in and realized it was all she needed to hear from him. They were comforting and freeing and protective all at the same time.

She laid her cheek back against his chest and dozed off soon after.

She woke up again sometime around midnight, and for a moment forgot where she was. The slow, calm rhythm of his breathing and the rise and fall of his heartbeat reminded her that she was still in his room, on his bed, sleeping against him. His arms still wrapped around her, tight and protective, warm and secure, and so familiar and natural that she wondered how she ever managed without them.

“You’re with me now,” he had said.

She smiled in the darkness and drifted back to sleep.

CHAPTER 33 WILL

They gathered in full gear in the Entrance Hallway, at the bottom steps of the Door, Will doing the same last-minute checks on his weapons and equipment that he always did before a mission. He carried the Remington 870 with him, the tactical shotgun complementing his M4A1, with the Glock in a hip holster. It was his standard gear, though in the Army he carried a Sig Sauer 229, but he had become a convert to the Glock in civilian life.

The big, burly Davies was there with him, checking his G36. Like most of Ben’s people, Davies had trained on the G36, but he added a Remington 870 shotgun to his arsenal anyway to take full advantage of the silver shells. The facility had an Armory that, besides a fully stocked rack of G36s, also carried Remington 870s and an assortment of Glocks. There was plenty of ammo, so much that Will wondered how Campbell had managed to hide it down here without the ATF knowing. The G36s themselves weren’t illegal, but he was sure so many in one place might have been.

Davies grew up around this area and was familiar with Dansby. He volunteered to take them, because like most of the men in the facility, he wanted to shake off cabin fever. At six-two and carrying at least thirty pounds more than he needed, Davies had a bit of clumsy in him, and reminded Will a bit of an older Ted.

“What’s the population of Dansby?” Will asked.

“Three hundred or so,” Davies said.

“Or so?”

“About there, yeah. Last I checked, anyway.”

“When you say ‘or so’ do you mean ‘or so’ in the fifty-plus range, or ‘or so’ in the less-than-fifty range?”

Davies seemed to give the question some serious thought. “I don’t have any idea. But the last time I was up there, about three years ago, I was told they had about 300 or so people in town.”

“That’s what they told you. ‘Three hundred or so.’”

“They might have said an exact number, but all I got out of it was ‘300 or so.’ Sorry I can’t be more precise than that.”

“Okay. Three hundred or so it is, then.”

Danny turned the corner, checking his shotgun as he walked. They were both wearing stripped-down versions of their usual tactical assault vests.

Danny flashed Will a wry grin. “We should get going before I get shot in the back.”

“We wouldn’t want that to happen,” Will said. “More trouble in paradise?”

Carly and Danny had become like an old married couple the last few months. Will had never seen Danny simultaneously so happy and so miserable in his life.

“FYI: Carly blames you for me going on this run,” Danny said.

“Why would she think that?”

“I might have said it was your fault I’m going on this run. Or something to that effect.”

“Must be nice playing house.”

Danny smirked. “I just do it for the sex.” He looked over at Davies. “This place, Dansby. How big of a town are we talking about?”

“About 300 or so,” Will said. “Right?”

“Or so,” Davies nodded.

“I don’t get it,” Danny said.

Will said, “Davies isn’t sure exactly how many people there are in Dansby, but he believes there are, possibly, ‘300 or so.’”

“So are we talking about ‘or so’ as in fifty-plus range or ‘or so’ in the less-than-fifty range?”

Davies looked annoyed. “Man, I don’t know. Three hundred or so, okay?”

Danny grinned. “Okay, just wanted to make sure. The only thing worse than jumping into a combat zone with your dick in your hand is not knowing how many people will be trying to kill you once you land.”

“You mean in case they’re all ghouls?”

“Either that, or they’ve been turned into horny farmers’ daughters. In either case, I’m in big trouble.”

It took Davies a few seconds to get the joke, but then he grinned and pointed at Danny. “Nice.”

“Thanks, I’m here all week,” he said, then glanced over at Will and rolled his eyes.

The last person to arrive was Lara. She looked odd with the gun belt around her waist, though he had gotten used to seeing her in combat boots and camouflage pants. She wore a T-shirt and jacket, and her hair was in a ponytail.

“Shouldn’t I get a shotgun, too?” she asked.

“Do you want one?” he said.

“Can I think about it?”

“Take your time.”

“Really?”

“No.”

She made a face.

He grinned back, then clicked the radio clipped to the front of his tactical vest. “Ben, we’re good to go.”

Ben said, through the radio, “Opening in five…four…three…”

When he got to one, the slab of concrete above them began moving, and a crisp ray of sunlight slithered through the small, widening gap and splashed across his face. The facility was a godsend, and there was no doubt they were vastly safer down here than on the surface, but he still craved the sun and took every opportunity to go outside.

Lara walked over and stood next to him, stuck her face into the shaft of sun, and closed her eyes. “God, that feels good.”

He took a moment to watch her in the sunlight, the way the brightness glinted off her blonde hair. He liked the pointy curve of her nose, the thinness of her eyebrows, and the small shape of her mouth. She had very small lips, but they were perfect for her frame, and they were very soft and responsive when kissed.

She must have felt him staring, because she opened her eyes and looked at him and smiled. They looked at each other in silence for a while, enjoying the moment. He remembered her in his arms last night and decided he wanted to do that again.

“Seriously, get a fucking room,” Danny said behind them.

They stepped out into the familiar circular clearing. The grass had gotten much taller since he had been up here a few days ago, and the blades were now all the way to his knees. Soon, there wouldn’t be much of a clearing anymore, and the woods might eventually retake this patch of land. To keep the woods at bay, they would need a lawnmower. A big one, too. And maybe a dozen machetes or so, and a week carved out just to do some landscaping…

Behind him, the Door continued to open in its usual, ponderous way. Because it was so massive, and the titanium slab so thick and heavy, just the act of opening and closing was a process that filled the clearing with a loud, grinding noise that seemed to dominate the entire area. He wondered if the ghouls inside the woods knew each time the Door opened and closed just from the sound and vibrations.

The Door had a quirk that bothered him, something he had brought up with Ben, but they couldn’t find a way around it. The gears needed to pry open and close not just the concrete slab, but also the much heavier titanium underneath it required the machinery to completely run its course in one direction before it could be reversed. That meant if the Door opened, it had to fully open. He didn’t know enough about mechanics to understand why that was the case. Maybe if they found an engineer still alive out there, they could work on changing it.

Having exited through the Door, they had to wait until it closed completely behind them before striking out. That took exactly thirty-six seconds. To open, and to close. Exactly thirty-six seconds each way. He had timed it to within the exact second months ago. You never knew when something like that might come in handy.

He counted down the seconds in his head until the loud grinding noise cut off, and the clearing was suddenly serene again.

Lara was looking back at the Door. “You okay?” he asked.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been back up here,” she said. “It feels weird to see it closing and not be on the other side. How long did it take you to get used to it?”

“Who says I’m used to it?” That was a lie, but he thought she needed to hear it.

Their vehicles were where they left them, parked in a row to the right of the Door. The familiar Ram and Tacoma rested alongside three other trucks, a van, and a big semi without a trailer that took most of the space. The ghouls never bothered with the vehicles, which nagged at him.

He and Lara climbed into the Tacoma while Danny and Davies took the Ram. Both engines hummed to life without a problem. He checked his gas gauge, saw that he only had a quarter left.

He clicked the radio. “Ten miles up the highway, Davies?”

“Yup,” Davies answered through the radio.

“My truck’s almost empty. You, Danny?”

“I could use some more gas,” Danny said. “Wouldn’t mind grabbing a Twinkie or two or a dozen, either.”

“Let’s stop for gas.”

He put the Tacoma in gear and backed up. Lara pulled at her seatbelt and he grinned.

She caught him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Safety first,” she said and blushed a little. He found it oddly endearing.

He led the Ram through the clearing, crushing tall grass underneath the big tires, and aimed it for the now-familiar bumpy road.

He said, “How about some tunes on the radio?”

Lara instinctively reached for the radio dial, but stopped short and gave him a wry look. “Oh, nice.”

He looked innocently back at her. “What? Nothing on the radio?”

“Funny. You’re a real funny guy, Will.”

“Works every time with the noobs.”

“Pleased with yourself, huh?”

“Just a little bit,” he said, pinching his fingers.

She gave him a playful punch on the shoulder before settling into the seat as the Tacoma bounced its way up the road. She grabbed onto the handle above the door to keep from being thrashed around.

“This road sucks,” she said, her voice stuttering with every skip and hop.

“That’s the point.”

“Still, it sucks.”

Because the road was so treacherous, he had to keep the speedometer low so he didn’t damage the vehicle. Danny, who was also used to the road by now, followed at his own slow pace. Will kept one eye on the road in front of him and the other on the wall of trees beside him. He could almost feel them inside, watching from the safety of the dark woods. Or maybe it was just his imagination.

Lara, who had been quiet for the last few minutes, finally decided to break the silence. “Thank you for staying with me last night.”

“Anytime.”

“I mean it, Will,” she said, looking at him now.

He met her eyes. “And I meant what I said. Anytime.”

She leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. He put his free arm around her. Like last night, this was a major development in their relationship. He didn’t want to ruin it or rush her. He still remembered the taste of her mouth…

“Close your eyes and try to imagine we’re driving through the park,” he said. “A really, really bumpy park.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes. “I’m imagining now…”

“Now ignore those undead ghouls trying to eat you…”

She laughed, but didn’t open her eyes or pull away. Instead, she leaned in closer, and he tightened his arm around her shoulders.

They stopped for gas at McVickers, one of two gas stations in Starch. Davies told them a story about how McVickers had opened as direct competition to a Valero gas station across town. The proprietor was the hometown bred Jim McVickers, who plotted and schemed to put Valero out of business by offering everything the chain gas station did, but at just a penny lower. Exactly a penny lower. To accomplish this, McVickers sent spies into Valero on a daily basis to take inventory of their shelves, then duplicated the items in his own store. It worked with the townspeople, and by the time The Purge struck, McVickers had claimed nearly sixty percent of Starch’s gas-guzzling customers.

While Danny and Lara looted what remained of McVickers’s shelves, finding mostly nonperishable junk food and warm bottled drinks in the freezers, Will and Davies used a hand-crank pump to siphon gas directly out of the underground storage container. They filled up both trucks, then added four cans of gasoline for emergencies. It didn’t pay to get caught out here without a gas station nearby.

By the time Danny and Lara came outside with bags of junk food and warm drinks, Will and Davies were done.

Danny tossed Will a bag of peanuts. “Damn rats been dining out on most of the junk food, but I was able to salvage that.”

“Way to go.”

“I do my best.”

Lara pulled out a yellow bag of Funyuns and tossed them over to Will. “This was the only unopened-slash-un-rat-infected bag left in the entire store. I managed to get to it before Danny could. You owe me.”

Danny smirked. “I let her have it.”

“You wish.”

“I’m gentlemanly that way. Ask Carly.”

“I’d rather not.”

“It’s true,” he insisted.

They climbed back into the trucks and took off. It was 8:24 a.m., and according to Davies, it wouldn’t take them more than fifteen minutes to drive up the highway to Dansby. Will had calculated in an hour’s drive anyway, in case of unforeseen problems. If all went well, they would be back in Starch and safely tucked away inside the facility by noon. If things really went to shit, they would have a five-hour window to get back or find a defensible position for the night.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…

They reached Highway 59 and were on their way up to Dansby about twenty minutes later. Will glanced at his watch as he drove: 8:45 a.m.

“See if you can get in touch with her again,” Will said.

Lara unlatched her seatbelt and reached into the back of the truck. She pulled forward the ham radio from the Control Room and put it in her lap.

They had tried to contact Elise earlier this morning but didn’t have any luck. It was a bad sign, but there were a myriad of explanations for why they couldn’t get in touch with her, and the girl did promise Lara she would remain where she was. Will knew radios were undependable, oftentimes at the mercy of whatever was scattered in the sky at any given time.

Lara turned on the radio and fidgeted with the dial, then pressed the microphone: “Elise, can you hear me? This is Lara. Elise? Can anyone hear me, sweetheart?”

She kept trying for a few minutes, stopping every twenty seconds or so to adjust the dials back and forth in case Elise had accidentally changed hers. After five minutes of no response, she put down the mic but didn’t turn off the radio. Worry clouded her face.

“She’s fine,” he said. “There are a lot of explanations why she’s not answering. We’ll go there and get her and her brother and bring them back with us and it’ll be fine.”

“She should have answered, Will.”

“Maybe she’s busy. She said her brother was hurt. Maybe she had to take care of him and wasn’t around to answer the radio. Or maybe she heard something and had to turn it off. Maybe the battery she was using died. Who knows how long she’s been using it. There could be a thousand reasons why she’s not answering, Lara. Have faith.”

She nodded, but he didn’t think she really believed it.

“She must be a tough kid,” he added. “She’s survived for months with her brother. I think she’ll be fine for another day.”

“You’re probably right. There could be a thousand reasons why she’s not answering.”

He wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince him or herself. He didn’t really believe his own explanations. Lara was right — the girl should have answered.

They drove in silence the rest of the way to Dansby, Texas.

Dansby was a small town of “300 or so people.” There was a sign introducing the town as they arrived. A gas station sat alongside what looked like City Hall, next to the highway. Other than that, Dansby was an unremarkable patch of land, alongside a state highway that saw thousands of cars pass by every day, none of which probably gave the small community a second look — if they even gave it a look at all.

They took the off-ramp and turned left under the highway, with Danny moving ahead in the Ram, Davies providing driving directions. A two-lane road led them into the housing area of Dansby, essentially twenty to thirty houses spread out within a two-mile stretch. Dansby High School loomed in front of them, next to a wide football field that was easily the most prominent structure within the entire city limit.

Texas and football. Almost as big as God and Country. Sometimes it was bigger, depending on the town and that year’s team.

Davies’s voice came through the radio: “Came here to watch a football game a time or two. For the size of the place, they’ve actually fielded some pretty good teams over the years. They had a kid a few years back who was highly recruited. Went to the University of Texas at Austin to play ball, but busted his knee in his sophomore year and didn’t really do much after that. I heard he got a free education, though, so you can’t beat that.”

“And ladies and gentleman, that awesome bit of Dansby, Texas football lore comes to you courtesy of Davies,” Danny chimed in.

“Bite me,” Davies replied.

Will and Lara exchanged a brief smile. Danny had that effect on people.

“Did you go to school?” she asked him.

“I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Greek History from UT, actually.”

“No kidding. Greek History?”

“Yup.”

“What do you do with a degree in Greek History?”

“Teach Greek History. Or go into the Army.”

“How does a guy who spent four years studying Greek History end up in the Army?”

“Boredom.”

“Perfectly good reason to me.”

“How does someone get interested in medicine?”

“Curiosity. That, and my mom didn’t think it was the right career path for me and tried to discourage me every step of the way. You put those two things together, and it was a no-brainer.”

“Would your mom have approved of me?”

“Not in a million years. Which is why I like you.”

He laughed. “I can live with that.”

“What did you do in the Army when you weren’t out saving America?”

“Sleep.”

“Sleep?”

“You don’t get a lot of sleep in the Army when you’re in-country. There have been times when I’ve gone days without sleeping. So you learn to grab shut eye whenever you can, which usually means when someone’s not shooting at you.”

“How do you ever get used to something like that?”

“You don’t have a choice. Adapt or perish.”

“Maybe that’s what we have to do now. Adapt or perish.”

“We’ve adapted, Lara. That’s how we’ve survived this long.”

“We’ve survived, Will, but survival isn’t living.”

“That can change.”

He reached over and put his hand over hers. She slipped her fingers through his until they were entwined.

“That was very slick,” she smiled.

“I have my moments,” he smiled back.

They drove past the overgrown football field, spread out underneath the sky. The bleachers, along just one side of the field, were empty.

Dansby High School was slightly under a kilometer from the highway, though the trip along the small, bumpy road felt longer. They pulled into the parking lot. The sprawling one-story school was much bigger than he had expected. The uncut grass swayed in the breeze, but it was easy to tell that the school grounds used to be well maintained, with a series of winding concrete walkways leading from the parking lot to two front doors. The American flag was still flying when they arrived, the metal latch that held it in place banging against the steel pole, the only sound in the whole town other than their engines.

“How many people did Davies say lived here?” Lara asked, leaning forward to take in the sight of the school.

“Apparently just three hundred or so,” Will said.

“That’s a pretty big school for 300 or so people.”

“Maybe they’re really serious about their education. Or they had more money than they knew what to do with. A lot of small towns along the state highways don’t even have land taxes. All of their money comes from speeding tickets.”

“Really?”

“There are speed traps everywhere. It’s great if you live in those towns, not so much if you’re just driving through and happen to be going five miles over the speeding limit.”

“Are we speaking from personal experience?”

“My heart says no, but my wallet says yes.”

Will climbed out, snatching the Remington 870 and M4A1 from the back. Lara followed, leaving the ham radio behind. They met Danny and Davies in front of the trucks and looked over the neighborhood around the school. There were a dozen houses on the other side of the street.

Danny looked over at Davies. “Three hundred or so, huh? How many of those 300 or so are kids? Two hundred and ninety-nine?”

Davies shrugged. “Look, that’s just what someone told me, okay? There might be more, I don’t know. Shit.”

Danny rolled his eyes. He looked back at Will. “Okay, boys and girls, so we’re here. What’s the plan?”

“Go in, get the girl and her brother, go home,” Will said.

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that.”

“Uh huh.”

“What?” Davies said, seeing Danny’s doubtful expression. “Is there something going on I should worry about?”

Danny jerked a thumb at Will. “It’s just that whenever he says something is going to be a walk in the park, it usually ends up being anything but.”

“I take offense to that,” Will said.

“Shut up. You know I’m right.” Danny looked back at the school. “Okay then, might as well get this adventure over with. It’s just a walk in the park, right?”

“Absolutely,” Will said and glanced down at his watch. 9:13 a.m.

Dansby High School looked big on the outside, but inside it was essentially one long hallway that extended left and right, with the main entrance in the very center. The classrooms were along the hallways, lockers sprinkled between them. As soon as they stepped into the school, they were greeted by a big glass display filled with pictures of past winning sports teams, trophies, and signed sports memorabilia. A big banner on top of the trophy case declared: “Welcome to Dansby High School. Home of the Fighting Panthers” in big, bold capital letters and three different primary colors.

Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust, and there were cobwebs dangling from the ceiling and corners. But it was the tiled floor that got Will’s attention. It was well-traveled, but not by people wearing shoes.

Bare feet…

He caught Danny’s eyes and nodded at the floor. “They’ve been here. Often. Maybe they’re still here. Eyes forward and ears open. Stay frosty.”

Davies quickly slung his G36 and freed the Remington. He racked a shell into the chamber and thumbed off the safety. Lara reflexively put her palm on her holstered gun as if to make sure it was still there, and her body stiffened noticeably next to him.

“Lara, stay close and try not to get in front of me,” Will said. “Where did Elise say she was staying?”

“In the school basement.”

“Maintenance room would be my guess,” Davies said. “My friends and I used to sneak off for smokes back in the day. That’s usually where you access the basements in small schools like this.”

Will found a map of the school encased in glass on the wall nearby and scanned it. “Maintenance room’s to our right, before the gym. You’re right, basement’s in there, too. Danny, cover our six.”

“I’ll cover Lara’s, but I’d rather not do yours,” Danny said.

“Fair enough,” he said.

Lara rolled her eyes next to them.

Will led them down the hallway toward the gym. Lara followed closely behind while Davies kept pace on his left. Danny trailed in back, watching the long hallway at the other side of the front doors. There were enough skylights along the hallway for there to be no issue with light.

Patches of sunlight and darkness were visible in the classrooms to their left, which they could see through small security windows in the doors. There was something very wrong about the sight of an empty classroom. They moved on, reaching the maintenance room a few minutes later.

Will noted the turn twenty meters farther up the hallway, and a plaque reading Auditorium, with an arrow pointing left. “Danny,” Will said.

Danny swung around until he was standing on the other side of the maintenance door. They switched on the tactical flashlights underneath their shotguns and exchanged a nod.

He looked back. “Davies and Lara, stay out here.”

They nodded.

He took hold of the doorknob and mouthed a count from three. On one, he threw open the door and stepped inside, Danny moving swiftly behind, then quickly shuffled forward until he was beside him. Will swept the left side while Danny swept the right, the bright halo from their flashlights lighting up the darkened room, exposing two circular patches per second. Behind them, sunlight flooded in through the opened door, but there were corners where it couldn’t reach and he quickly scanned them with the flashlight.

The maintenance room was surprisingly big. Even stuffed with the janitor’s supplies, including two large trash bins, there was more than enough space for two men with long, heavy shotguns to move around freely.

Will’s flashlight ran across a door at the back and a plaque marked Basement. He walked over to it. The door was in one piece but showed signs of damage, and there were dark black splotches and pieces of skin, dry to the touch, clinging to the wood exterior. He tried the doorknob, but it didn’t budge.

“Good news, right?” Danny said. “Door’s still locked — that means the bad guys didn’t get in.”

Will nodded. “Good way to look at it.” He glanced back at Lara, looking at him anxiously from the opened doorway. “Lara.”

She hurried inside, passing by Danny, who went out to join Davies.

Will and Lara stood in front of the basement door, Lara looking expectantly at it, then at him. “See if you can get it open,” Will said.

She leaned toward the door, putting one hand on it for support, careful to avoid the fleshy clumps clinging to it. “Hello? Is anyone in there? Elise? Todd? This is Lara. Remember, we talked on the radio yesterday? If you can hear me, we’re here to rescue you, like I promised. But first I need you to open the door.”

She waited for a response.

Will tuned out the rest of the room. He listened intently, trying to pick up any sound coming from the other side of the door.

Nothing.

Lara continued, a little louder now: “Elise? Are you in there? We’re here to help, sweetheart. It’s Lara. Please open the door. I can’t help you if you don’t open the door.”

They waited again, but still no response.

“She said the basement?” Will asked.

Lara nodded. “Yes. I made sure of it. I asked her at least three times last night.”

“And she said she never left?”

“No. Todd wouldn’t let her leave. He seems to be very protective.”

“He must have gotten hurt during one of his supply runs.”

“That’s my guess. Or maybe he’s sick and couldn’t find the right medicine. They’ve been down there for a really long time, in an enclosed space…”

He nodded. “Okay, we’re going to have to do this the hard way, then.”

Will put a hand on her shoulder and led her back. She moved reluctantly as he squared up against the door. It was solid wood, but not metal clad. That wasn’t too bad. He would have preferred one of those cheap, hollow-core doors, but this was the next best thing.

He stood with his legs slightly unbalanced, took a breath, then delivered a swift, quick kick at the door just underneath the doorknob, almost as if he were falling into the brown slab of wood. He heard the loud, satisfying crack! as the wood gave way and broke around the knob, and the door swung inward, revealing pitch blackness on the other side.

Will instantly snapped backward a full foot and lifted the shotgun, the flashlight underneath the barrel razing the darkness in a wide sweep.

There was a concrete floor below metal stairs and what looked like more janitorial supplies in the back of the room. There was a dumpster on one side, next to a pile of boxes. Sleeping beds, clothes, candy wrappers, books, and empty soda cans covered the floor.

Just like every teenager’s bedroom.

There wasn’t any space to really hide, but he illuminated the area underneath the staircase anyway to be sure, then along the dumpster area.

“Can you see her?” Lara asked behind him.

“No.”

Will took a step back, lowered the shotgun, and produced a handful of glow sticks from a pouch. He cracked them, then tossed them into the basement, spreading them in all four directions. Slowly, the darkness gave way to a sea of green.

“I need to go down first, Lara.”

“Okay.”

He tested the first step to make sure it was solid, then scrambled down to the basement floor a second later, sweeping the back of the room with the shotgun. He made a beeline for the dumpster, looking around it, then pried open the lid with the barrel and quickly shot a look inside.

Garbage. Smelly garbage.

But no kids.

He lowered his shotgun. “Lara.”

She came down the steps and looked around. There were two sleeping bags near the back, used wrappers, scattered clothes, empty soda cans and water bottles. “What’s that smell?”

“Confined living,” he said.

He crouched next to one of the bedrolls. His flashlight picked out some used bandages, and there were blood splatters on the bedroll and the immediate floor around it.

“Blood?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.

“Dry blood. From a few days ago would be my guess.”

“She said her brother was hurt. I didn’t want to push her on it, but it must have been pretty bad if he couldn’t even talk to me on the radio. I got the feeling he was unconscious, but she probably thought he was just sleeping.”

She walked across the room and crouched next to something in the darkness. When she stood back up, she was holding an old, portable ham radio. Compared to the one Harold Campbell staffed the facility with, this one looked ancient and bulky.

His radio squawked with Danny’s voice: “What’s the word?”

“They were here recently,” Will said, “but it looks like they’re gone now.”

“How? The door was locked from the inside.”

“That’s a good question.”

He surveyed the room again, then moved closer to the walls, shining the flashlight along the cracks that he could see with the naked eye.

Lara came over. “You think there’s another way out of here?”

“Must be, right? How else would they have gotten out?”

She took out her flashlight and looked at the walls closely, searching the other side of the room to cover more ground.

There was a stack of boxes next to the dumpster. He grabbed one, finding rolls of toilet paper still in their packaging inside. A second box contained paper napkins and plastic utensils, and the third was stuffed with paper plates still in bags.

Something else caught his eye — a thin sliver along the wall, between the boxes and the dumpster, which wasn’t as flat against the wall as he had originally thought. There was a tiny crevice.

Just big enough for an eight-year-old girl to slide through.

Leaning forward and using the flashlight, he discovered a small opening in the wall behind the dumpster.

Bingo.

He grabbed the dumpster and pushed. It moved grudgingly, making a loud, squealing noise in protest, but eventually slid away to reveal the hole in the wall. He illuminated the opening, and rats scrambled out of the way on the other end. The passageway was narrow, only two-by-two feet, and went in a straight line for about thirty meters before ending in a wall on the other end. Sunlight shone through metal grates at the top of where the passageway ended.

“Lara,” he called.

He stepped aside to let her see. “Where does it go?” she asked.

“That’s about thirty meters, which would put it somewhere underneath the auditorium next door.”

“They must have known this was here all along.”

“It was probably their backup plan. In case the ghouls made it through the door. They must have attacked, and the kids panicked and took the exit.” Her expression turned anxious, and he put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find them.”

She nodded.

He clicked his radio. “Danny, we think they went into the auditorium next door through an underground passageway.”

“We’ll scout ahead,” Danny said through the radio.

“Roger that. We’ll be right behind you.”

He and Lara hurried out, back into the hallway.

As they turned toward the auditorium, their radios squawked and they heard Danny’s voice: “Hey, we only brought two trucks, right?”

“Yeah, why?” he asked.

“We might need more trucks, because I think I just found every citizen of Dansby, Texas. All ‘300 or so’ of them.”

Will reflexively checked his watch: 9:42 a.m.

CHAPTER 34 LARA

The human body produces two million new red cells every second. When the body senses that it has lost too many red cells, it creates new ones by secreting a hormone called erythropoietin, which in turn is used by the bone marrow to produce stem cells, the building blocks of red and white cells. In this way, the body replenishes blood on an almost instantaneous basis, constantly restoring the red cells lost during heavy bleeding. In a matter of days, the human body can restore all that it’s lost, essentially supplying a constant stream of never-ending blood. That is, as long as the human body continues to function and remain alive.

Lara was thinking about all those first-year medical school facts as she looked into the Dansby High School auditorium. The spacious, warehouse-like room was lit up by daylight flooding in from windows high along the walls.

Danny was wrong — there weren’t “300 or so” people in the auditorium. There were at least 500, but it was hard to judge because they all looked so alike in their current state.

They lay beside each other on the hardwood floor, leaving very little space between them. Not that the people themselves needed space, because they weren’t moving. At all. From the looks of them, they hadn’t moved for a while now.

Days. Weeks. Maybe even months.

They lay on the floor with their shirtsleeves and pant legs rolled up to expose knees and shoulders. Their necks were similarly exposed, collars pulled aside and buttons undone. They looked, for all intents and purposes, like unconscious vessels.

She crouched next to the closest person — a woman whose age was hard to tell. She was pale and her skin was wrinkled, yet she didn’t look old. Her bones were visible underneath skin that covered her like ill-fitting clothes. She looked malnourished but was somehow still alive. Barely. Her eyes were closed and her lips were pale and cracked, and there were thin layers of mucus around her eyes, nostrils, and at the corners of her mouth.

Lara felt for the woman’s pulse and found it moving lazily underneath shriveled skin. It was weak, but constant. It reminded her of coma patients — alive, but not really.

“Are they dead?” Danny asked.

“They look asleep,” Lara said.

“Like some kind of coma?” Will said.

“Maybe. Some kind of induced coma? I’ve never seen anything like it. They could have been here for a while.”

“How are they still alive? Don’t coma patients need to be intravenously fed?”

“Yes,” Lara said. She didn’t understand it either.

She saw them. Teeth marks along the woman’s arms.

She leaned forward to get a closer look. There were more teeth marks along the woman’s calves, all the way up to her knees. They weren’t from the same set of teeth. One had a chipped molar. More bites along the woman’s neck. It wasn’t just one set of teeth that had bitten into her, it was many.

Dozens.

Will said, “What is this place?”

“It’s a farm,” she said, standing up. “They’re farming these people for blood, Will. It doesn’t matter how many times you take blood from the human body, it will always replenish the lost supply. As long as we’re alive, we’re making new blood every day.” She looked around her, the very idea of what she was saying staggering even to her. “These people are still alive, Will. I don’t know how, but they’re still alive, and they’re producing blood that’s being taken from them on a daily basis.”

“Fuck me,” Danny whispered.

Will walked past her and examined another sleeping figure, a man in denim overalls with a thick beard. He felt the man’s pulse, then shook his head. “This can’t be possible. How do they keep them like this?”

“Blue-eyed ghoul,” she said softly.

Will looked back at her. “What?”

“This is intelligence, Will. This is strategy and organization and leadership and God knows what else.”

Davies was shaking his head. “Holy Christ. The others are going to freak about this.”

“Then don’t tell them,” Danny said.

“How can I not tell them?”

“Okay, then tell them.”

“Ideas, guesses, wild theories?” Will asked, looking specifically over at her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. They turn us by infecting us — the hosts — at a cellular level, changing our DNA to meet their needs. If they can do that, then this…might be child’s play. If I can get one of them back to the facility, I can run tests and find out more.”

Will glanced at his watch.

“How are we on time?” she asked.

“Nine fifty-three a.m. We’re still good.”

Danny said, “What now? Do we wake them?”

“How do we do that?” Davies asked.

Danny looked to Lara. “You’re the doc, Doc.”

“Third-year medical student,” she said, managing a slight smile back.

“Close enough. So how do we wake them up?”

“You’re asking me like this is normal,” she said. She looked around her again, at the pale, ossified bodies on the floor. There were so many, and each one looked more malnourished than the next. “I don’t even know what they did to these people, much less how to wake them up. Or if we even should.”

“What do you mean if we even should?” Davies asked. “We can’t just leave them like this. Right?”

“I don’t know what would happen if they woke up from whatever this…is. Look at them. This isn’t natural. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen if you force one of them awake.”

Will nodded. “Lara’s right. We’re wading through uncharted territory here.” He looked around the auditorium. “Maybe not all of them are asleep. Maybe we can find one that’s awake.”

“You want us to go through this graveyard?” Danny asked.

“You got a hot date?”

“Actually, yeah. Don’t tell Carly, though.”

“Let’s get started,” Will said.

She walked among the bodies. They were packed so tightly into every available space that there was barely any room between them. Even being as careful as she was, she still managed to step on an arm, then a leg, then an open palm. She felt horrible each time, expecting to hear bone snapping, and was relieved when she didn’t.

Could these people know what was happening to them? She had heard horror stories about coma patients who could hear and feel everything going on around them, but couldn’t speak or move to let someone know. It was a terribly debilitating existence, and she hoped and prayed it wasn’t the case here. She shivered at the mere possibility.

“Anyone having any luck?” Danny called from thirty yards away. “The only thing I’m finding here is Jack and shit, and Jack just took off for the hills and forgot to leave a letter behind.”

“None,” Will said.

“They’re all asleep here,” Davies added.

“Nothing here,” she said.

They spread out across the auditorium, with Will and Danny farther ahead. As she moved through the room, she realized she was wrong about there not being any space to walk. There were clear pathways through the auditorium, big enough to allow someone to go from end to end without stepping on the bodies. There was also a much bigger empty space along the right side wall, where the bathroom and offices were.

She was almost in the middle of the auditorium when she nearly stepped on an open palm. She carefully lifted her boot to step over the outstretched hand when it suddenly came alive and the fingers grabbed her around her calf, above her boot. She gasped sharply at the feel of cold fingers. She looked down at milky white eyes, like cream in a coffee mug, looking back up at her. The mind behind those eyes was very much alive, and she focused on the pale, cracked lips which quivered, trying to talk.

“I found someone!” she shouted.

She crouched next to the figure. It was a young woman, maybe in her twenties, with short pink hair and piercings in her nose and ears. She wore dark black clothes and a T-shirt and looked completely out of place among people in overalls and jeans. She also looked reasonably healthy, and her bones weren’t protruding dangerously out from underneath loose skin, her cheeks not quite as sunken as the others’. In a room full of skeletal forms, she stood out.

The woman let her hand drop back to the floor and let out a soft, relieved sigh.

Will and the others converged on her as she leaned over the woman. “Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me. Anything.”

The woman struggled to speak, her lips trembling, but no words came out.

“It’s okay,” Lara smiled down at her. “We’re going to get you out of here, okay? Save your energy.”

Will crouched on the other side of the woman, careful not to step on an old man who was almost completely skin and bones and unconscious next to her. “How is she?” he asked.

“She doesn’t look like she’s been here as long as the others.”

He glanced up at Danny. “Give me a hand.”

Lara stood up and backed away as Danny took her place. They picked the woman up and carried her carefully across the auditorium. She lay weakly between them, like a mannequin with rubber arms and legs, head turned to one side, eyes wide with fear and uncertainty.

She and Davies followed them to the door, then back out into the hallway.

Will propped the woman against the wall, below a poster advertising a sale on yearbooks. He arranged her legs and arms and head for her as if she were a child. Danny held out a small canteen and dripped water between her lips. The woman struggled to swallow, desperate to take in as much as she could.

“How long have you been here?” Lara asked.

The woman stared at her while greedily swallowing more water. Finally, she leaned her head back and coughed. She whispered, her voice so low that Lara had to lean in closer to hear, “I don’t remember.” Her eyes darted left and right, then back to Lara. They looked alarmed, terrified. “Where am I?”

“You don’t know?”

The woman shook her head with difficulty.

“What’s your name?”

“Megan,” she whispered.

“They’ve been feeding off you,” Lara said. She gently picked up Megan’s left hand and held it up for her to see the teeth marks that ran up and down every inch of her arm like runaway train tracks. “Do you remember?”

Megan’s eyes widened at the sight of the teeth marks. She looked down at her right hand and tried to lift it, but couldn’t. “I remember…seeing them around me. I thought it was a dream. A bad nightmare.” Something occurred to her, and her eyes shifted back to Lara, anxious. “I have a friend, Tom. Did you…?”

Lara shook her head. “You were the first person we found awake. You might be the only one.”

“What about the others?” she croaked.

“We don’t know how to wake them, and we’re not sure if we should. It could be dangerous. We don’t know what’s happened to them, to you. I don’t want to do anything until I know more.”

Megan looked disappointed, but nodded.

Will tapped Lara on the shoulder. “I think I know where Elise and Todd went. Stay here with Megan. Davies and I will go make sure.”

She nodded.

Will and Davies went back into the auditorium. Danny stayed behind and took out a power bar. “Can she eat this?”

“Not yet,” Lara said. “Let her system get used to water first. Her body isn’t going to be able to accept solid food all of a sudden. We’ll have to reintroduce it to her one step at a time, no matter how much she wants it.”

“I can’t move my arms and legs,” Megan said. She looked down at her legs, as if to make sure they were still attached. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Muscle atrophy,” Lara said, “from lying down for too long without moving. It’s going to take time, and you’ll need to do physical therapy to get strength back into them. For now, just sit back and let your body do what it needs to, which is get used to being up again.”

Megan nodded slightly, her control over her head the only real power she possessed at the moment. Her eyes roamed the hallway. “Is this a school?”

“You’re in a high school. In a town called Dansby.”

“Dansby? How did I get to Dansby?”

“Where was the last place you remember?” Danny asked.

Megan seemed to think about it, trying to clear the fog that Lara guessed was currently swelling inside her head. After a while, Megan shook her head slightly. “I was in Cleveland. There were four of us, hiding in town, going from place to place. Then they finally caught us and… I don’t remember the rest. They brought me to Dansby?”

“It could be a hub for them,” Danny said to Lara. “A central location where they’re bringing people from the surrounding areas. So there’s probably one in Houston. Or two, or three. Bigger population centers mean bigger, well, farms, right?”

“Farms?” Megan said.

“You need to rest,” Lara said. “Save your strength.”

She nodded to Danny, who leaned over and gave Megan more water. The woman drank it like someone who had never tasted water in her life.

Their radio squawked with Will’s voice: “Lara, I’m sending Davies back out there. I need you to come over to me. First room to the right after you enter the doors. Boys’ locker room.”

“On my way.”

She stood up and waited for Davies, who showed up about ten seconds later. She hurried past him, back through the auditorium doors and along the right side of the room, where there was a lot of space and she didn’t have to worry about stepping on one of the sleepers. She turned right and headed down a smaller hallway that split up into two locker rooms.

Lara turned toward the boys’, pushing through the swinging door. Will was inside, standing with his back to her.

“Did you find her?” she asked.

Will took a sideways step to reveal an eight-year-old girl cowering in the corner. Covered in a thick layer of dirt and grime, there was maybe a month’s worth of cobwebs in her hair. She wore a plain white dress that was probably the apple of her eye months ago, but was now dirty and torn in places, strands from the hem drifting lazily off the bottom.

Immediately, Lara flashed back to those two nightmarish weeks in the Sundays’ cabin and the filthy dress they had made her wear. Was this what she had looked like when Will found her? She marveled that he could ever find her attractive after that first impression.

The girl in front of her looked like a feral animal with dirty blonde hair, but there was no mistaking those big blue eyes and trembling, small lips as belonging to a scared little girl.

“There’s a grate in the back corner,” Will said. “Probably some kind of unused vent. She must have crawled all the way over here then pushed her way up. Chances are the brother knew about it and taught her how to get to it, in case of emergencies.”

“Did you find Todd?” Lara asked.

“No signs of him. My guess is he went somewhere between yesterday and today, maybe to get that medicine he needed, and didn’t come back, and she was scared and ran off through the passageway.”

Elise looked catatonic, and it was only her darting eyes that convinced Lara she was even alert and conscious at all. Each time Will talked, Elise’s eyes went to him, and each time Lara said anything, those blue eyes sought her out.

“Elise?” Lara took a slow step toward the girl, who stiffened, her eyes darting from Will to her and back again. “It’s okay. It’s me. It’s Lara. Do you remember? We talked on the radio?”

Recognition slowly spread across her face. “Lara?” she whispered.

Lara smiled. It was the same voice that had spoken to her on the ham radio last night. Small and soft and afraid. “Yes. It’s me. I’ve been looking for you. You didn’t stay in the basement like we agreed.”

“I had to leave…” Her voice cracked.

“What happened?”

“Todd left and didn’t come back. He said I had to go if he didn’t come back, so I did.”

She nodded. “I understand. You did what you had to do.”

The girl began to cry. Lara moved toward her and was surprised when Elise leaped forward and into her arms. She hugged the girl to her body and Elise’s arms tightened around her, as if she were never going to let go.

“It’s okay now,” Lara whispered. “You’re safe, and you’re going to stay that way. We’ll find Todd, and then we’ll all leave together. I’ll take you some place where there are no monsters.”

“Promise?” Elise said between sobs.

“Promise,” she said. She glanced up at Will, who was checking his watch again. “How are we doing for time?”

“We’re still good,” he said.

“What about Todd?”

“Where would we start looking?”

“I don’t know. Maybe—”

Gunfire, loud and sudden, cut her off.

She grabbed onto Elise tightly, lowering both of them to the tiled floors, expecting the bathroom walls to shatter around her at any second. But they didn’t. Instead, she heard the rolling sounds of gunfire continuing unabated, coming from outside the school.

“What’s happening?” she asked, looking over, expecting to see Will crouched next to her, but he was gone.

His footsteps echoed through the locker room as he ran, his voice calm on the radio: “Danny, talk to me.”

Danny’s voice, replying through gunfire crackling in the background: “We only brought two trucks, right?”

“Yeah, why?” Will asked.

“I think we’re gonna need new trucks…”

There were ten of them, standing in the school parking lot, surrounding the Tacoma and Ram trucks and firing on the vehicles until there was nothing left but smoking wreckages, steam flooding out from underneath the hoods and broken windows. She noticed they had been careful not to shoot the gas tanks.

When they were done, they moved behind the trucks and took up fighting positions.

At first she thought they were just big men, but as she moved closer toward the window, it became clear they were wearing suits. Black and green full-body hazmat suits with black gas masks over their faces. The suits weren’t the bulky kind, but slimmer versions, the type she had seen soldiers wear, that allowed them to still fight like soldiers while being protected. Tactical suits, she remembered someone telling her. They wore some kind of web belts around their waists, with gun holsters slung low and bulky pouches on their hips. Like Will and Danny, but…not.

“They showed up and began firing on the trucks,” Danny said, sounding almost amused by what he was seeing.

She stood on one side of the window, Will on the other. Danny and Davies were peering out through the opened front doors a few yards to their right, keeping their profiles as small as possible. The sun reflected off the lenses of the gas masks peering out from behind the trucks.

“Why didn’t you shoot them?” Will asked.

“Seriously?” Danny said.

“Yeah, why not?”

“I dunno. Seems kind of weird to just start shooting people without a reason.”

“They just shot up our transportation.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t doing that when they first showed up. They did that after they showed up. It never occurred to me to shoot them before they started in on the vandalizing. Seemed kind of knee-jerk.”

“Well, it’s too late for that now.”

“Ah, man, this is why I hate civilians,” Danny said.

“So now that you didn’t stop them, got any ideas for wheels?”

“I see two other cars in the parking lot.”

“Probably don’t work,” Davies said, “or they would have shot them up, too.”

There were two other vehicles inside the parking lot, both sitting on extreme sides, as if their owners had purposefully parked them as far away from each other as possible. One was a beat-up black pick-up parked to their left, the other a small red sedan parked to their right.

Danny was saying, “See, that’s you being pessimistic, Davies. This is me being optimistic.”

“You really think this is the time to be optimistic?” Davies asked incredulously.

“Of course,” Danny said, with absolute certainty. “Will and I were stuck on a mountain in Afghanistan once for three weeks, eating goat cheese and drinking goat milk. If we had been pessimistic pandas like you back then, we would never have made it back to base.”

“That right?” Davies asked, looking over at Will.

“He’s exaggerating,” Will said. “He wishes we had goat milk.”

“In my mind, it will always be goat milk,” Danny said.

“Who are these guys?” Lara asked. “What do they want?”

“Besides the desire to keep us from driving away from here?” Danny said.

“Besides that, yeah.”

“Those are hazmat suits,” Will said. “Level B designs, from the looks of them. Protection against hazardous materials and chemicals.”

“What, you going to throw acid on them?” Danny grinned.

“I’m just saying, they’re no good against lead.”

Will stepped out in front of the window, raised the M4A1, and fired a single shot that shattered the school window and hit one of the men in hazmat suits, leaning out from behind the Tacoma, in the face. The gas mask lens shattered and the figure went down in a pile, his rifle clattering away harmlessly.

The remaining nine men immediately fired back.

She dropped to the floor and slid against the wall as glass shards rained down all around her. Bullets peppered the wall across from her, destroying the bulletin board and the map of the school, while more cascading glass covered the floor like rain.

She glanced up the hallway toward the auditorium and saw Elise and Megan holding onto each other against the relentless, earsplitting sound of gunfire. Thankfully, they were too far away to be hurt by falling glass.

Will was sitting behind the wall, between what was left of the window and the opened front doors, casually tapping his hand against the floor next to him. Danny sat nearby, equally calm, while Davies hugged the floor on his stomach as bullets zipped inside, piercing the doors that were now swinging wildly back and forth. The volley of gunfire had obliterated every inch of the trophy case that greeted visitors upon entering the school, and hard-earned trophies and pictures and even souvenir baseball bats had been shredded into tiny fragments under the torrid assault of lead.

Finally, mercifully, the shooting stopped.

Will slid back up along the wall, then poked his head out the window for a split second, scanned the parking lot, and quickly pulled his head back.

“Nice,” Danny said. “You couldn’t have given us a heads up there, chief?”

“Element of surprise,” Will said.

“Element of almost got my ass shot off.”

“What the hell?” Davies said, fuming.

Will shrugged back at him. “They destroyed our vehicles. That means they don’t want us leaving this place. They already made it clear they’re not friendlies.”

“Still, man, a little warning next time?” Danny said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“By the way,” Danny said, “I think they’re trying to outflank us. I saw one — possibly two — moving toward the back of the school.”

“You’re full of good news today, aren’t you?”

Danny grinned. “I aims to please. Just ask Carly.”

CHAPTER 35 WILL

Danny’s goat milk story reminded him of those two weeks in Afghanistan — not three, as Danny claimed. They were well into their second redeployment by then, and a mission to check if expelled Taliban forces had returned to a village in the Kunar Province went bad almost the second they climbed onboard the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. The reliable bird, first introduced in the ′70s and in service ever since, had trouble lifting off and came within a foot of shearing the roof off one of the base’s watchtowers.

He remembered exchanging a look with Danny. They were seated at the edge of the bird, strapped in by harnesses, and saw the whites of the tower guard’s eyes as the UH-60 came up on him and swooped away at the very last second.

So when the Black Hawk crashed into the side of a mountain more than sixteen kilometers short of their assigned landing zone, neither he nor Danny was surprised. They managed to survive with only minor bruises, as did the rest of the unit. Unfortunately, they lost both pilots, the cockpit having taken the brunt of the impact against the rocky terrain.

That was when they saw the goats standing nearby, watching them as they climbed out of the helicopter wreckage. The unit spent two weeks in the mountains, waiting for rescue that was delayed by an intense and prolonged sand storm, with nothing to eat but goat.

As he leaned back against the wall between what was left of the window over his right shoulder and the shattered twin front doors of the school to his left, he remembered the taste of goat and how much it sucked.

Somehow, some way, the two front doors were still hanging from their hinges, just barely, with maybe a hundred or so holes between the two of them. Whoever had hung those doors should be proud. They did their jobs, and then some.

Danny was crouched across from him, eyeing the long hallway to their left through the red dot sight of his M4A1. Will had sent Davies back to the auditorium doors to cover their backside with his G36.

He checked his watch: 10:16 a.m.

“What’s the plan?” Danny asked.

“We can’t retreat back into the auditorium. That’ll just get those people in there killed if there’s any kind of fight, which there will be.”

“Back to the ol’ maintenance room, then?”

“There’s no way out of there once we’re inside. Unless you feel like crawling through that passageway to the boys’ locker room. See Reason Number One for why that’s a no-go.”

“Kinda running out of options then, Kemosabe.”

Will glanced back at Lara. She sat next to Elise and Megan down the hallway, looking down at her Glock. She looked up and caught his eyes. They exchanged a tight smile.

He turned back to the doors. He didn’t have to poke his head out — there was probably a sniper out there waiting to take it off — to know the men in hazmat suits weren’t advancing yet, though the sound of a breaking window from the other side of the school indicated they weren’t going to stand still forever.

He was pretty sure they weren’t soldiers or even ex-law enforcement. He could tell by the way that they unloaded on the doors and window. They shot without purpose, firing back because he killed one of them. And they kept on firing their entire magazine, stopping only when empty. He caught sight of a couple of AR-15s, three AK-47s, and a few others he couldn’t quite make out from the distance, though he was sure one had a pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip.

“There’s Waldo,” Danny said calmly next to him.

Will looked up the hallway at a dark shape peering around the corner. Danny fired a single shot and the shape fell to the floor, where it lay and didn’t move.

He pulled out his binoculars and peered down the other end of the school. The figure, wearing a gas mask, was slumped on the smooth tiles, a neat little hole in the mask’s right lens. A small patch of blood pooled underneath the hazmat suit. Dark red.

“Dead or undead?” Danny asked.

“Dead. Right through the eye.”

“Which side?”

“Right.”

“I was aiming for the left one.”

“Maybe next time.”

Feet shuffled behind him, but he didn’t have to look back to know it was Lara. Davies had heavier footsteps. And besides, he could already smell her, and she smelled nice.

“Is he dead?” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Yes,” Will said.

“Was it one of them?”

“He’s one of us. Dead, not undead. Re-dead. Whatever.”

“I don’t understand why they’re doing this, then?”

“Collaborators,” Danny said.

“What I figured,” Will nodded.

“Collaborators?” Lara said.

“It happens in every single war that’s ever been fought throughout human history,” Danny said. His eyes never left the long hallway in front of him. “There will always be people looking out for Number One, who think they’re on the losing side, so they go all-in with the invaders.”

“Danny, are you telling me you’ve actually read a book or two?” Will grinned.

“Mom forced me to, and I still hate her for it.”

Lara wasn’t convinced. “Maybe this is a big misunderstanding.”

Danny chuckled. “They probably meant to just shoot out our truck windows because they heard the key to a long life is lots of air. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Lara sighed. “I just don’t understand why they’re attacking us. Are they protecting the auditorium for the ghouls?”

“Maybe that is what they’re doing,” Will said. “Makes sense, if you think about it. The ghouls can’t protect places like this in the day, so they need humans to do it for them.”

Lara was quiet for a moment. He could practically hear her analytical mind turning the new information over. “Then that changes everything, doesn’t it?”

“I think things have been changing for a while now. We just didn’t realize it because we’ve been living underground for months, cut off from what’s happening up here. Meanwhile, the ghouls have been adjusting, progressing.”

“Adapt or perish,” she smiled.

“Adapt or perish,” he smiled back.

She looked up at what was left of the window. “Why aren’t they attacking?”

“Maybe they don’t need to. If their job is to protect the auditorium, then that means they have time on their side.” He glanced down at his watch. “Nine hours until sunset. Then it’ll be us against them and more ghouls than we can handle, judging by all the people in the auditorium behind us.”

“Good news, though,” Danny said, “there’s only eight of them left.”

“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.

Danny chuckled.

“Why the hazmat suits?” Lara said. “If they’re human, why do they need those?”

Will shrugged. “We’ll ask them when this is all over. Which means trying to take one of them alive.”

“No promises,” Danny said.

“Shoot for the leg.”

“I’ll shoot for the balls. You can survive with just one ball, right?”

“Last time I heard.”

“Awesome. It’s been a while since I’ve been ball shooting.”

Will looked back at Lara. “You should go stay with the kids in case they start freaking out.”

Lara looked reluctant, but she nodded and got up anyway. Keeping low, she crossed the window without exposing her head, then stood up straighter and jogged back to where Elise and Megan sat, anxiously watching her come back over.

“Look at this,” Danny said.

Will looked up the other side of the hallway. The body in the hazmat suit was gone. “Where did Waldo go?”

“Someone pulled him back around the corner by the legs a few seconds ago.”

“Hunh.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your inventory?”

“Four long magazines, two silvered up. Two for the Glock. Twenty shells. And of course, cross-slash-knife. You?”

“About the same. Davies too, I think.”

“And there’re eight of them and probably an unlimited amount of ammo stashed around the town. And of course, darkness is not our friend. It just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?” He grunted. “Carly was right, I should have stayed in bed this morning.”

“What happened to Captain Optimism?”

“He’s in the john right now. Try back in a few.”

Their radios squawked and Davies’s voice, panicked, came through: “Guys, I think I heard something from inside the auditorium.”

“What did you hear?” Will asked.

“I don’t know. A sound. Like a clanging sound. I don’t know.”

Will exchanged a brief look with Danny, who rolled his eyes and said, “Go. Try to keep him from shooting himself. Or you. Or me. But mostly me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He got up and jogged back toward the auditorium. He passed Lara, Elise, and Megan. “We’re good,” he said to Lara.

She nodded back.

He reached the end of the hallway, turned left, and saw Davies near the opened auditorium doors. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and Davies almost jumped out of his boots.

“Relax,” Will said. “Go up front and back up Danny. If you hear them coming toward the doors, open fire.”

Davies nodded and got up and ran off, moving faster than Will had ever seen the big man move. He didn’t even know Davies could move that fast.

Will looked into the auditorium to get a sense of space and distance. He tuned out the bodies on the floor, an easy enough trick since they didn’t move at all and were very low to the floor. He adjusted his eyes to ignore everything thirty centimeters from the floor and searched out the doors and hallways.

He already knew where the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms were — immediately to his right, upon entering the auditorium. There were two windows in the boys’ locker room, and both were too small and high up to allow a grown man to climb through, much less one wearing a hazmat suit. He assumed the girls’ locker room had a similar design.

That left an office, farther up the auditorium and three doors at the very end — twin doors in the middle, and two smaller, single doors at each end. All three probably opened up into the track and football field nearby. There were no other entrances or exits, so that made things easier. The office could be a problem. He had only glanced into it during his walk through the auditorium and hadn’t looked long enough to see any windows, though he guessed there had to be some. Most offices had windows, didn’t they? Not that he knew. He’d never had an office job in his life.

He jogged back up the hallway and turned right. Lara looked up at the sound of his approach. He hurried over and crouched next to her. “Keep an eye on this for me, okay?” He unslung the Remington 870 and laid it down on the floor next to her. “I’ll be right back.”

“Be careful,” she said and reached forward and put her hand over his and squeezed.

“When we get back…”

“Yes,” she said and smiled.

He smiled back, then got up and darted back around the corner and back to the auditorium doors.

He paused for a moment, took a breath, then darted inside.

Will moved at a steady pace along the row of bodies, his eyes shifting between the three doors in front of him and the office just a few meters away from the locker rooms to his right. Without the seven pounds of the Remington tapping against his back, he felt lighter and quicker on his feet.

He came up quickly to the office, moving closer to the wall, almost hugging it. The office had a door and an interior glass window that as he passed, he snapped a look into the office. There was a second set of sliding glass windows in the back, looking out into the parking lot.

Alarms rang in his head at the sight of the parking lot and, as if on cue, a gas-masked head appeared behind the glass. The man inside the hazmat suit saw Will a split second after Will spotted him.

Will spun to his left, his forward momentum carrying him across the window, the M4A1 rising to his shoulder. The man’s eyes went wide inside the gas mask just a heartbeat before Will fired a burst. His bullets shattered the window in front of him, continued on, shattered the second window, and finally caught the man in the head. The man snapped back and fell, vanishing from the window frame.

A second man scrambled out from behind the window, and as he ran away, threw back his right hand and the AK-47 in it and squeezed off a blind volley through what was left of the glass. Will was already lunging to the floor, and he scooted underneath the inner windows as the man’s bullets pelted the brick wall outside and strafed the interior of the office walls. Window frames broke, wood splintered, and bullets screamed as they whipped over his head, traveled through the length of the auditorium, and smacked against the wall on the other side. A white mist filled the office, floating out through the destroyed window above his head.

And the man kept blindly firing until he had wasted his entire magazine.

Amateurs.

Will snapped up to his feet the second the man stopped shooting and saw the figure fleeing across the parking lot. Twenty meters. Maybe twenty-five. Getting farther and farther way. Not far enough, though.

He fired a shot. The man seemed to stumble, as if he had tripped over something, fell, and lay still.

Will sat back down underneath the window when his radio squawked and he heard Danny’s voice: “You still alive back there?”

“Two down, six to go,” he said.

“And here I thought we were in trouble.”

“Perish the thought.”

Lara’s voice cut in, and he could tell she was more than slightly annoyed: “Would you please stop with the manly bullshit and concentrate on trying not to get killed, please.”

Danny laughed. “I think she likes you.”

“Shut up, Danny,” Lara said. Then, in a softer voice, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Danny said. “You were talking to me, right?”

“I’m fine,” Will said. “Everyone stay where you are.”

“Are you sure?” Danny said. “I was about to head over there. After all, I don’t want Lara to lose her new boyfriend so soon.”

“Danny, shut up,” Lara snapped.

“Keep an eye on the hallway,” Will said. “I’ll call if I need any help.”

He scooted closer toward the office door and had reached for the doorknob when he heard gunfire from the parking lot.

That was followed by additional gunfire, this time coming from the school hallway outside the auditorium.

An AK-47, answered by an M4A1.

Then moments later, the unmistakable sound of a G36 firing on full-auto.

Will started to get up, to retreat back to the hallway, when a bullet smashed through the door in front of him and zipped past his head by half an inch, so close that he thought he could smell pieces of hair burning. His.

Will lunged back to the floor as more bullets punched through the door, splintered cheap wood raining down on him. He heard the familiar scream of an AK-74, the more modern version of the Russian AK-47, clattering from the other side of the door, outside the window.

He crawled back down behind the wall, sticking low to the floor, listening to the very distinctive rattle of the AK-74. The door offered no resistance against the fusillade. The wall around him exploded, bullets ripping effortlessly through the Sheetrock. The man was strafing from left to right, but hadn’t bothered to move the barrel up or down, which meant he expected Will to be crouched and not flat on the floor the way he currently was.

Will listened, waiting for the man to stop shooting, when a single shot from a handgun rang out inside the auditorium. He spun to his left, toward the sound of the gunshot.

Lara was at the doors, the Glock in her hand, shooting across the auditorium. He looked at where she was aiming and saw that the farthest door at the other side of the gym was open. He caught a glimpse of a masked head hidden behind the door. For a moment his instinct was to tell Lara to stop shooting, that she couldn’t possibly hit anything from that distance with a Glock, but he realized that hitting the man wasn’t the point — pinning him down and keeping him from shooting him in the back was.

Meanwhile, behind him, the AK-74 had stopped firing.

The realization hit him like lightning. They were using a specific tactic on him. One man fired from the window to pin him down while the other one entered from the door across the auditorium.

Not so amateurish after all.

Will sprung up, moving left at the same time, and squeezed off a short burst on full-auto into the window even before he saw anything. He caught a glimpse of a black and green blur lunging out of his line of vision, disappearing behind the cover of the wall.

He kept moving until he was now on the other side of the interior window, where he quickly turned his attention to the opened door across the auditorium. He switched the fire selector on the M4A1 to semi-automatic and lowered himself into a crouching position.

The man in the hazmat suit hiding behind the door leaned back in and took aim with an AR-15 across the auditorium at Lara. Before he could get off a shot, Will fired two shots in the man’s direction. His first shot hit the door, but his second shot was true and hit the man in the left calf. The man stumbled backward through the doorframe, the door slamming shut behind him.

Keeping as low as possible, Will ran back toward Lara.

She watched him coming, one eye focused on the doors across the auditorium. He slid the last meter along the smooth floor and came to a stop next to her. She flashed him a brief satisfied smile.

He laughed. “My hero.”

“You make it look so easy, I thought I’d give it a shot.”

“Give it a shot?”

“Oh right,” she said and laughed.

“I’ll be right back.”

He pushed himself up and jogged to the corner, looked up the hallway. Danny had moved back three meters from his last position, but still had his attention focused down the other side of the school, where another body in a hazmat suit was slumped on the floor. From his angle, Danny could see both the front doors and the hallway, allowing him to defend both points of entry without any extra movements.

Five down, five to go.

Davies had also backed away from the door and was now crouched on the floor against the wall about two meters behind Danny. He was reloading his G36 and fumbling with the magazine.

Will clicked his radio. “We good?”

“Hunky dory,” Danny said. “You?”

“I might have grazed a third one.”

“You mean after your girlfriend saved your butt?”

Will looked back and saw Lara smiling at him.

“Yeah,” he said into the radio. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

“So what’s the plan, boss man?”

He walked back to Lara, crouched next to her. He glanced down at his watch. 10:41 a.m.

“They took their shot,” he said. “Now they’re down to half their original number. Unless they’re getting reinforcements, I’m guessing they’ll probably decide to wait us out. It’s the smart thing to do.”

“You’re assuming they’re smart,” Danny said.

“They’d have to be dumb as rocks to keep attacking with only five men left, possibly only four able-bodied.”

“So what’s the play?”

“Give me a sec.”

“Sure, not like I got some place to be. Like with Carly, on top of Carly, possibly even inside Carly…”

Will held his M4A1 out to Lara. She shook her head. “Will, I don’t know how to use that.”

“It’s easy. See the trigger? Squeeze it. One shot at a time. Just like the Glock, except this one’s got a longer barrel. But the same rules apply.”

She hesitantly took the rifle from him.

Will pulled out his spare magazines and stacked them on the floor next to her. “Make sure you see them first before you fire. The sound alone should make them scramble. And keep the barrel high so you don’t hit the people on the floor.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“We can’t let them wait us out. That’s their game plan, but it’s not ours.”

“I don’t like the sound of that…”

“Trust me.”

“I do trust you. I thought I made that obvious.”

He acted on impulse, leaned forward and kissed her. She moaned against his mouth, and it made him kiss her harder, until he remembered where they were, what was happening, and he forced himself to pull away.

“I need my shotgun back,” he said.

“Wow, that wasn’t quite what I was expecting to hear after that kiss.”

He grinned and kissed her again, just as intense, but pulled away faster this time. He picked up the Remington 870 from the floor. “I’ll be right back.”

He passed Elise and Megan, still sitting on the floor with their knees pulled up against their chests. They both looked stunned and confused by what was happening around them.

He passed Davies, who glanced up and gave him a relieved look. “Man, I’m glad to see you still among the living.”

“Stay frosty.”

He stopped behind Danny and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What’s up, Kemosabe?” Danny didn’t take his eyes off the hallway or the front.

“I think it’s time to see if we can even the odds a little bit.”

“Looks pretty even to me.”

“Even-er.”

“That’s not a word.”

“Of course it is.”

“Whatever.”

“Do me a favor and keep an eye on Lara for me.”

“Sure, I got nothing better to do than keep an eye on your new girlfriend.”

“I really like her.”

“Yeah, I figured. Try not to get dead. Better yet, try not to get me dead.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Ready?”

“Go for it,” Danny said.

Will stood up and leaned against the wall next to the tattered, bullet-ridden doors that somehow remained partially closed, even though they were barely hanging from two battered hinges. Behind him, Danny got up and moved toward the window, then a second later Danny’s M4A1 fired into the parking lot.

As soon as Danny started shooting, Will darted across the doors, making it to the other side without taking fire. He slid down to the floor as soon as he was clear of the wide opening and sprung back up, shotgun aiming down the hallway. It was empty, except for the still hazmat suit lying on the floor at the end.

He didn’t know if anyone had seen him make the move across the opened doors. Not that it mattered, as long as they didn’t anticipate what he was going to do next.

Yeah, that’s the ticket…

Will moved down the hallway just as Danny stopped shooting behind him. He heard return fire from the parking lot smashing into the brick wall outside and punching at jagged pieces of glass still clinging to the destroyed window frame next to the doors. With five fewer shooters, the barrage sounded more subdued, almost lackluster.

He slipped the shotgun up to chest level in case someone turned the corner suddenly in front of him. The man in the hazmat suit lay perfectly still on the floor, having fallen forward on his stomach, head turned sideways. There was a little hole in his gas mask’s right lens, and a thin trickle of red blood had gathered on the tiles underneath his head. Unlike his friend, no one had pulled this man back behind cover.

Will found out why when he turned the corner.

He only had to follow the trail of blood to the first man Danny had shot. The man lay crumpled up nearby, where he had been dragged by the other dead man, then left behind.

Will scanned the short hallway. There was a door at the end, leading into the cafeteria, the other big room in the school. Just before that, a half-opened window. It looked big enough to crawl through.

He moved toward the window, looking out through the glass. He couldn’t see or hear anyone on the other side, but picked up a slight breeze in the air. He moved as silently as possible, glad he didn’t have any spare magazines to weigh him down. He flattened his back against the wall, almost a foot from the window. He stood very still, then held his breath and tried to cut out every other noise, even the distant ringing of the flag pole’s latch. He heard the wind, chirping birds, and what might have been a dog barking far away.

But nothing that sounded human.

He ducked underneath the windowsill to the other side, took another deep breath before appearing directly in the window frame, shotgun aiming out, finger on the trigger.

No one on the other side.

He slid the rest of the window open and climbed out. He slipped down into the tall grass outside the building and scanned the immediate area. There was nothing back here, just the football field and track to his right, behind the cafeteria. To his left, the street and the parking lot.

He moved left, keeping low, eyes forward, shotgun in firing position. Tall blades of grass tickled his waist. He listened for sounds of gunfire and wasn’t terribly surprised when none came. The double attack in the auditorium seemed to have been the full extent of their tactical abilities.

Or at least he hoped so.

He peeked out briefly, taking in as much of the parking lot as he could in the brief second or two of exposure.

The parking lot was forty meters away, and there was a man in a hazmat suit behind the red sedan. He sat with his back against the rear bumper of the car, his gas mask resting on the concrete floor next to his AR-15 rifle. He was eating what looked like a can of Pringles, shaking out the pieces and flicking them into his mouth, and he seemed to be enjoying the sun.

Will looked farther up the parking lot and saw three more men gathered behind the Tacoma and the Ram, facing the school’s all-but-obliterated front doors. One of the men sat on the ground, one leg resting in front of him. He had white bandages around his calf. And there, all the way on the other side of the lot, was the fifth man, standing inside the bed of the beat-up black pick-up truck, a hunting rifle resting on the roof of the vehicle. Sunlight glinted off the smooth lines of a scope on top of the rifle that was scanning back and forth between the auditorium’s back doors, the office window in the gym, and the front doors.

Will slipped back behind the wall and clicked his radio. “Miss me?”

“Like a dog misses ticks,” Danny said. “What’d you see?”

“Five left. Three behind the trucks, one behind the sedan, and the fifth in the pick-up with a hunting rifle and scope. I wouldn’t poke my head out if I were you.”

“Well, there goes my evening plans.”

“Are you okay?” Lara asked.

“Better now that I hear your voice.”

“Barf. Get a fucking room,” Danny said.

Will grinned. “It looks like they’re content to wait us out until nightfall.”

“So that confirms it,” she said. “They’re working with the ghouls.”

“It looks that way.”

Danny said, “Personally, I have a policy. Never collaborate with anyone or anything uglier than shit in the sun.”

“Oh, that’s lovely, Danny,” Lara said.

“I know, right? I use that line on the girls, and they just about melt.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“But enough about me,” Danny said. “What’s the plan? We just gonna sit here with our thumbs up our asses and wait for nightfall, or what?”

“I need you to take the one behind the pick-up truck,” Will said.

“I’m listening…”

“He’s focused on the back doors of the auditorium, the office window, and the two front doors. I’ll make sure he doesn’t bother with the auditorium doors. You get ready when you hear it.”

“I was born ready,” Danny said. “Then my mom changed my name to Danny.”

“Davies,” Will continued, ignoring Danny.

“Yeah,” Davies said.

“When I give the word, I want you to empty your magazine toward the trucks. Fire in bursts, and don’t poke your head out. Keep to the right of the doors, stick your rifle out, and make sure to get their attention. You don’t have to hit anything, understand? Don’t stop shooting until you’re empty. Then reload and do it again.”

“I only have one magazine left.”

“Don’t worry, that’ll be enough.”

“Okay,” Davies said, though Will thought he sounded unconvinced.

“Lara…”

“Yes,” she answered.

“When the shooting starts, run to the interior office window in the auditorium. Your job is to get the attention of the sniper in the truck.”

“How do I do that?”

“I’ll draw his attention first. When you see that happen, I want you to squeeze off a couple of shots in his direction. Use the Glock. It’s lighter, and you’ll be able to move more easily back and forth behind cover. You don’t have to hit him or the truck. You just have to get his attention long enough so he doesn’t catch Danny coming out of the back doors. Lara,” he added, “whatever you do, do not expose yourself. Understand?”

“Yes. I understand.”

Will went down into an almost crouching position, his left leg in front of him, his back ready to propel him up and forward. “Davies. You ready?”

“Yeah,” Davies said, his voice trembling slightly.

“On the count of three. One, two…three.”

Will counted down a full two seconds before he heard the first volley from the G36. He peeked out around the corner and saw the men in hazmat suits suddenly come out of their positions in response. Across the parking lot, the man in the truck swiveled his rifle toward the school doors, but from his angle, he would only be able to see the very end of the G36’s barrel, firing straight out at the trucks. The man behind the red sedan grabbed his gas mask and slipped it back on while scrambling for his AR-15, turning his body in the direction of the school’s front doors.

Exactly five seconds after Davies began firing, Will slipped out from behind the school and, keeping as low as possible, began moving toward the sedan. The man’s attention was fixed on the action across the parking lot.

Will counted the distance in front of him. He took the first ten meters in five seconds…

Fifteen meters…

The man behind the sedan didn’t hear him over the roar of the G36, and the three men behind the trucks were too busy staying hidden behind the vehicles to shoot back. They looked confused by what Davies was doing, and looked content to wait it out.

Twenty meters…

Will risked a quick look in the direction of the truck at the other end of the parking lot. He spotted the shooter behind the rifle, peering through the scope, entirely focused on the school doors. The only way he could see Will now was if he pulled his eye away from the scope. That was the problem with staying behind a scope for too long. Your vision became limited and the field became a small circular bottle instead of a massive football field. That was why snipers stayed far from the main action, in a position where they could pick out targets without worrying about incoming fire. And why they had spotters.

Twenty-five meters…

As soon as Will hit the thirty-meter mark, the man behind the sedan started to turn around in his direction. But Will was well within shotgun range, and as the man swiveled his AR-15, Will lifted the Remington and saw his own moving form reflected in the clear lens of the man’s gas mask. Will fired from five meters away and the man’s chest exploded in a red splash and the lower half of his gas mask evaporated under the onslaught of buckshot.

He was still running toward the sedan when he shifted his perspective to the men behind the trucks, more than fifty meters away across the parking lot, and fired three quick shots in their direction. His buckshot fell well short, as he had expected. Hitting them wasn’t the point anyway. He just needed to make sure Danny could hear the shotgun blasts over the roar of the G36. Three shots would just about do it.

Immediately, all three men turned around and began firing at him. He reached the sedan just in time and lunged for cover, making sure to slide up to one of the back tires for additional protection. Bullets slammed into the sedan and kicked up thick chunks of concrete around him. Will slung the shotgun and reached for the dead man’s fallen AR-15, a slightly heavier weapon than the more mobile M4A1.

Will felt the heft of the weapon in his hands while bullets peppered the car behind him. He ignored them. The distance was too great, and unless all three decided to swarm him at once, he was fine where he was. He didn’t think they would do a full-frontal attack, not with Davies firing away with his G36. Coming out from behind the trucks meant exposing themselves, and even amateurs knew better than to do that.

Then there was a loud clang! as a heavy round pierced the other side of the sedan and traveled all the way through the body of the vehicle and exited out the door to his right, three inches from his head.

Holy…

It had to be the guy behind the hunting rifle, in the back of the pick-up truck all the way across the parking lot. The guy was using armor-piercing rounds.

Will scrambled to the ground on his stomach and fired the AR-15 in the direction of the three men. They scrambled to get cover when Davies suddenly opened fire with the G36 again, sending the men running back to where they had just fled from. It was funny, and Will almost chuckled when another large-caliber rifle round punched through the tire he had been hiding behind seconds ago and embedded itself into the parking lot twenty meters away. Things stopped being funny after that.

He reached for his radio. “Whenever you’re ready, Danny! Now would be nice!”

On cue, two shots rang out from a Glock, then a split second later, a loud burst from an M4A1, the gunfire coming from the other side of the school.

As soon as the last of the M4A1 shots faded, he leaned out and fired across the parking lot at the trucks again. He took a moment to watch the three men scrambling around. They were clearly uncertain about where to go, with gunfire coming from all around them now. Davies was still firing blindly from the doors and a black figure was standing behind the pick-up truck where the sniper had been. The sniper was hanging off the side, his arms dangling lifelessly. The black figure took his place.

Danny.

Will was about to click his radio and tell Davies to cease fire when the G36 went silent. He had finally run out of bullets.

Will heard Danny’s M4A1 pinging off the dented sides of the Tacoma and Ram. He leaned out from behind the flat tire, and using the dead hazmat body as a prop, he sighted in on the three men in the middle of the parking lot.

The one he had shot earlier in the auditorium was crouched behind the Tacoma, and even from this distance Will could see him shaking, which was something to behold, because the man was still wearing a hazmat suit. Will pulled the red dot away from him, moving slightly to his left, to the one standing, firing calmly back at Danny.

Will shot him once in the back of the head and quickly rolled away as a third man turned in his direction and began firing back. The dead man in the hazmat suit next to Will twitched as two bullets found him, surprising Will.

Nice shot, buddy.

Will clicked his radio. “Danny, leave the one with the bandages.”

“I would never hurt a wounded dog,” Danny said.

Will sat calmly behind the flat tire and waited out the shooting. The man would have to reload sooner or later.

Instead, he heard a single shot from an M4A1 and then silence.

Or not.

Danny’s voice came through the radio: “Nine down, one to go. Looks like we have a volunteer. You think he’ll join up? Lie to him about the pension plan. They always fall for that.”

He leaned out and saw the man with the bandaged leg standing, or trying his best to stand, groping the truck for support, and turning around in a wild circle. His rifle lay on the floor at his feet next to his gas mask. He was shouting something. It took Will a moment to hear what he was saying: “I surrender! Don’t shoot!”

Will wasn’t sure, but the man might have also been crying.

He clicked his radio: “Lara, talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“Davies?”

“Good, good,” Davies said, though his voice was still quivering a bit, and he sounded a little out of breath.

“I’m fine, too, in case anyone cares,” Danny said.

Will glanced down his watch: 10:43 a.m.

CHAPTER 36 LARA

His name was Kevin. He was twenty years old, and a blue-eyed ghoul came to him one night and asked him if he wanted to keep living. Kevin, who somehow survived The Purge, and kept surviving almost purely by accident — or as he put it, “Dumb-ass luck and more dumb-ass luck”—said yes. And that was how he became one of the ten men in hazmat suits who by day made sure the blood farm wasn’t disturbed, and by night…well, at night, they tried to stay out of the way.

Lara spent the hour after the gunfight listening to Kevin explain things as best he could. He wasn’t the leader. Far from it. The leader was a man named Troy, who was also the first man Will shot, thus sending the group into something of a free fall. After that, a man named Peter sort of took over the group, directing the attacks, but proved wanting.

For his part, Kevin managed to survive so long because he kept his head down and did what he was told. He was thankful to still be alive, knowing that so many were already dead or dying.

“It wasn’t like I had a choice,” he explained. “It was either that or get used like those other guys. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I’m no hero.”

He looked at the field of emaciated bodies around him as he spoke. They were in one corner of the auditorium, close enough to the bodies for Kevin to squirm uncomfortably on the floor. Without his gas mask, he didn’t look very menacing. He looked exactly like what he was — a scared kid.

She was in the auditorium with Will, who was casually picking his nails with the sharp point of his cross-knife. She knew it was an act. Letting Kevin see it was a psychological tactic — a covert threat. Kevin’s eyes kept darting from Lara to Will to the cross-knife to the bodies and back again.

“And there are only ten of you?” Will asked. He barely looked at Kevin, but the threat was implicit: I’m so disinterested in you, I can kill you at any moment and not give a shit.

“As far as I know,” Kevin said.

She hadn’t been able to detect a lie from him since they began the questioning. She didn’t think he was smart enough to know when to fib and when to tell the whole truth. That, and he had just seen Will and Danny kill nine of his comrades. That probably made an impression, too.

“What about the other towns?” Will said. “Are there other blood farms like this one? How many do you know about?”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “We were told to just watch over this one. We’ve never even left the town since it all started. That’s part of the deal.”

“Where did you get the people?” Lara asked.

“They brought them to us.”

“They’re not all from here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you from here?”

“Yeah.”

“You said ‘they’ brought the people here. Who is ‘they’?”

“You know. Them. The creatures. The ones you call ghouls.”

“They were still alive when they were brought here?” Will asked.

“Yeah. Like that. They were just sort of asleep.”

“What is it that you do?” she asked. “With the bodies? You just watch over them?”

Kevin nodded. “That’s it. I swear. We just watch them, make sure they’re still here when they, you know, need them at night.”

“How often do they need them?” Will asked.

“Every night.”

“Every night?” Lara said.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Kevin nodded.

“You said he came to you,” Will said. “The blue-eyed ghoul. He talked? The way you and I are talking right now?”

“Yeah. He’s not like the others. He walks straight and he talks. He kind of looks human, too. From, you know, certain angles.”

She looked up at Will. Was he thinking the same thing: Was it the same blue-eyed ghoul, or were there more of them out there?

“Did he have a name?” Will asked. “This blue-eyed ghoul?”

“What?” Kevin shook his head, as if that was the most ludicrous thing he had been asked yet. “No. At least, none that he told us. We never asked. Why would you ask, you know? It wasn’t like it was hard to pick him out from the others. He had blue eyes.”

“How do you contact him?”

“We don’t. He comes to us, tells us what to do. It’s been a while since we heard from him, though.”

“How long has it been?”

“About two weeks.”

“When did you start all this?” Lara asked.

“About three months ago,” Kevin said. He suddenly looked from her to Will, then back to her. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

She wasn’t surprised he looked at her when he asked that. It was a shrewd move, something she hadn’t thought he was capable of. Asking her and not Will was a sign he knew any chance he had of survival lay with her, the woman. She almost respected him for such a blatant, tactical move. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all.

“That’s not my call,” she said.

The words came out easily, emotionless. Kevin heard it, too, and the disappointment was obvious on his face. She expected to feel sorry for him, but it never happened.

Their radios squawked with Danny’s voice: “I got good news, and I got bad news. Which one you want first?”

“What’s the good news?” Will said.

“The good news is Davies turned out to be a pretty decent mechanic. At least, he knows his way underneath a hood, which is more than I can say for, well, me.”

“So what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is there’s not a whole lot for him to work on. Every single vehicle we’ve come across is no good. There are bullets in everything. Engine blocks, tires, doors. One guess who was responsible, and no cheating.”

Will looked at Kevin. “The cars in town. Why did you destroy them?”

“Me?” he said, as if they had just accused him of something unthinkable.

“You and the others. Why?”

“Because he told us to.”

“Who?”

“You know. Him.”

The blue-eyed ghoul…

Part of her wanted to see the creature for herself, to finally lay eyes on the ghoul that the others had seen. It was like listening to everyone talk about coming face to face with Bigfoot and having drinks with it, and all she had were footprints in the mud and flimsy videos to go by. It was maddening.

“Plus,” Kevin was saying, almost apologetically, “we were bored. There’s not a lot to do here, you know? We had to watch the school in the day, and we couldn’t leave town. And we had all these guns…”

“You were bored,” Will said. He sounded almost amused, like a parent accepting his young child’s bad behavior. He turned back to his radio and clicked it: “Keep looking, Danny, but settle if you have to. It just has to drive.”

“Will do,” Danny said.

Will looked back at Kevin. “Tell me one last thing. The hazmat suits. What’s the deal with those?”

“The blue-eyed ghoul brought them over,” Kevin said. “He said we should wear them, so the other ghouls wouldn’t attack us at night.”

“Do they work?”

“Yeah. They just ignore us.”

“So why were you wearing them in the daytime?”

Kevin looked confused by the question. “What?”

“I get it,” Will said. “You wear them at night, so the ghouls won’t attack you. But why were you still wearing them in the daytime? There are no ghouls around in the daytime.”

Kevin shrugged. “We decided to keep wearing them, because you never know when you might get caught outside at night. Better safe than sorry, you know? Plus, they’re pretty comfortable. Heat, cold — doesn’t matter.”

“I see. Besides, they kind of look cool, right?”

Kevin grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”

Will looked over at Lara. She found it impossible to read his thoughts. “I think we’re done with him, don’t you?”

“One more question.” She turned back to Kevin. “There was a boy. A teenager named Todd. Did you see him? He’s been hiding under the school since it all began.”

“A kid?” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t think so. But we always thought there was someone stealing our supplies.”

“Your supplies?” Will said, with a slight smirk.

“I mean, the supplies we gathered up,” Kevin said, looking sheepish. “Things would go missing. Food. Water. Even a ham radio.”

So that’s where she got it.

“And you never saw him?” Will asked. “The kid?”

“No. I guess he was really good at sneaking around.”

“I promised Elise we’d find him,” Lara said to Will.

“Give me a few minutes, then bring the girl back in here. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Todd is one of these people. I think we’re due for some good luck, don’t you?”

She nodded.

Kevin, who had been listening and watching, suddenly became alarmed and blurted out, “Wait, where are you going?” He focused his eyes on her and pleaded, “Please don’t go. Please.”

She avoided his eyes, because she knew what she would find if she looked. She had seen those eyes before, when she looked in the mirror during her days with the Sundays.

She got up and walked away, leaving Kevin in the auditorium with Will.

Lara understood from the very first minute why they brought Kevin in here to question him, away from Elise and Megan. He was a liability now, and he couldn’t be trusted. She expected to be a little troubled when the time came, but as she walked away, she realized, with a bit of shock, that she wasn’t.

Mother would be so proud.

Elise and Megan were eating energy bars and drinking warm Gatorade in the hallway near the destroyed front doors. They looked over as Lara came back.

“Danny’s not back yet,” Megan said, worried.

“I know,” Lara nodded. “He’ll be back when he finds a car that can carry all of us.”

They had already decided it was impossible to take everyone in the auditorium, so when Danny found the vehicles, they would only take as many as they could carry. That wouldn’t be very much, even if all four of them drove a different vehicle. Still, it was better than nothing, and there was absolutely no positive side to being caught in Dansby when the sun went down.

Megan was looking past Lara, down the hallway. “What are you guys going to do with him? That guy in the hazmat suit?”

“Will’s handling it.”

“He doesn’t deserve to live,” Megan said, her voice dripping with ice. “Not for what he’s done. To me, to all those people. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

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

Lara sat down next to Elise and put a hand on her shoulder. The eight-year-old looked up and smiled at her, showing stained yellow teeth. How long had it been since she last had a toothbrush? It wasn’t as if clean teeth were a priority while she and her brother were hiding in the school’s basement all these months.

“Are we leaving now?” Elise asked, worry creasing her young face.

Lara had cleaned Elise up as much as she could, using undamaged bottles of water from the trucks, and the little girl looked like a little girl again. Almost. She would look even better after a shower and new clothes back at the facility. Then again, so would Lara.

“Not yet, sweetheart. But soon.”

“We haven’t found Todd yet,” Elise frowned.

“I know. Soon, I want you to come into the auditorium with me and see if you can find Todd in there, okay?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

Was she doing the right thing, bringing Elise into the auditorium? She had no choice. She didn’t know what Todd looked like, and if Todd had been captured, the ghouls wouldn’t waste him, not with their dwindling supply of humans. They would plug him into their “farm.”

As she watched Elise chewing on a granola bar, Lara was at least comforted by how Vera, Carly’s sister, had accepted the new situation and even thrived. Kids were highly adaptable and tougher than adults tended to give them credit for.

About five minutes later, Will’s voice came through her radio: “Lara, you can bring her in now.”

She stood up and held out one hand to Elise. “Come on, let’s go see if we can find Todd.”

Elise took her hand and stood up hesitantly.

“It’s all right,” Lara said. “I’ll be with you the entire time. And we can stop whenever you want, okay?”

The girl nodded mutely.

Lara led her back to the auditorium. The girl walked stiffly beside her, and Lara felt her little fingers tightening as they neared the doors.

“It’s okay,” she said, trying to inject as much confidence as she could into her voice.

When they entered the auditorium, Will was walking toward them through the rows of frail bodies. There were no signs of Kevin. “Try to find Todd first. Depending on what Danny and Davies can find, we won’t know how many we can take with us.”

Lara nodded. “Okay.”

Will left them inside the auditorium.

She knelt in front of Elise and took both her small hands into hers. “Ready? Let’s find Todd. I don’t know what he looks like, so it’s up to you to look very carefully at all of these faces. Just pretend they’re sleeping, having good dreams. Okay?”

Elise nodded, but there was obvious fear on her face. She didn’t blame the girl. Being in here with these sleeping, skeletal figures still made her uncomfortable, as if she were barging through a funeral home while people were mourning. She couldn’t fathom what it must be like for an eight-year-old who had lost the one thing she had been holding onto all these months — her brother.

Elise was trembling as they walked through the first two rows, looking from left to right, moving as slowly as possible. Her shaking lessened noticeably by the third and fourth rows, and disappeared almost completely by the tenth.

“Take your time,” Lara said.

Elise nodded and slowed down. “Is he here? I don’t see Todd, Lara. Where is Todd?”

“We have to keep looking, sweetheart. That’s all we can do. Keep looking…”

It was well after one in the afternoon when Danny and Davies finally came back with a vehicle, pulling into the school parking lot and stopping behind the destroyed Tacoma and Ram.

Davies was behind the wheel of an old, brown minivan that had been riddled with bullets, its windows blown out. Even without the bullet holes, the van looked old and decrepit, yet it was somehow still running.

Will, standing next to her, shouted at Danny, “How is that thing even still running?”

“We had to swap out the tires, which were a bitch to find,” Danny said, climbing out of the van’s front passenger’s side. The door creaked loudly as he pried it open then slammed it shut again. “Luckily, the jackasses never got around to shooting up the engine block, and we found the keys inside.”

“Thank God for shitty miracles,” Davies grunted, hopping out of the driver’s side door.

“Gas?” Will asked.

“Half a tank,” Danny said.

“You think it’ll actually make it back to Starch?”

Danny shrugged. “If it doesn’t, we’ll be walking the rest of the way unless we find a decent replacement along the highway. There isn’t anything else out there, bub. It was either settle for this beautiful bastard or start looking even farther out, and that would have taken another hour, easy.”

Will nodded. He walked over and peered into the minivan through the side hatch door. “Good enough. Davies, go bring Megan.”

Davies jogged back over to the school.

Danny looked over at Lara, standing with Elise next to her. “You guys find Todd?”

“He wasn’t in the auditorium,” Lara said.

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

Danny looked over at Elise. “Sorry, kid. We really wanted to find your brother for you.”

Elise nodded but didn’t say anything. Instead, she slipped behind Lara while still holding onto Lara’s hand.

“Kids love me,” Danny said.

“I can see that,” Lara smiled at him.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Will said, walking back to them.

“How much room do we have?” Lara asked.

He shook his head. “It’s going to have to be just us for now.”

“That’s it?”

“We’ll be back for them later. Right now, we have to make sure we’ll be around to come back.”

“Will, there must be some room…”

Will put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed gently. “We have to worry about us first. I know it’s hard. But Megan and Elise, the others, it has to be us first.” He paused to let it sink in. “We’ll come back. I promise. We’ll come back as soon as we can.”

He gently brushed back some hair that had fallen across her face and smiled at her.

“You promise,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “We’ll come back.”

“Tomorrow morning. As soon as the sun is up, we’re on the road with as many vehicles as we can muster to take them back with us. I promise.”

She nodded. “All right. Tomorrow. I’m holding you to that promise.”

She looked back at the school, imagining she could see through the walls into the auditorium, at the field of poor souls trapped inside.

Were they conscious? Did they know she was about to abandon them? Were they crying out right now but unable to make any sounds? Or were they completely oblivious, more dead than alive?

She wished she knew, and not knowing made it somehow much, much worse.

They drove back through Dansby along the same route they had used to enter the small town. Lara was squeezed into the long back seat with Elise and Megan, fastened to her seat by a seatbelt, while Davies sat in the middle chair in front of them. Danny drove while Will navigated from the front passenger’s seat. Their equipment, guns, and what supplies they were able to salvage from the destroyed trucks were spread out in the empty spaces between the seats. She could barely move her legs without kicking something.

As they drove through Dansby for the second time, she looked carefully at the cars parked along the curbs, in the streets, or in driveways. They all had flat tires and bullet holes along their sides.

My God, how did we miss the signs? It’s all there in front of us, but we drove past them without really seeing…

She listened to the sound of wind whistling through the holes in the van, mingling with the soft noise of Elise snoring lightly against her shoulder and Davies snoring much more loudly in front of them, his body slumped against the seat so awkwardly she was afraid he might tumble to the floor at any moment since he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

She looked down at the little girl who had fallen asleep almost as soon as the car started moving. How long had it been since Elise could fall asleep without thinking about monsters, without being afraid? She marveled at how the girl had survived all this time with just her brother, hidden in that dark basement. It had worked out until Todd got sick. What would have happened to them, she wondered, if Davies hadn’t been listening to the ham radio in the Control Room when Elise called yesterday?

She brushed some blonde hair from Elise’s face, revealing the cherubic shape behind it. She had managed to clean most of the dirt and grime, but despite her best efforts, there were still small patches here and there that clung on stubbornly.

Lara felt eyes watching her and glanced up to see Will looking over his shoulder. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said back.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something…”

“Yeah?”

“I…” she started, but didn’t finish. Instead, she smiled at him, and perhaps he knew what she was going to say, because he smiled back.

“Oh, get it out,” Danny said.

Lara pictured him rolling his eyes, though she couldn’t see anything but the back of his head behind the driver’s seat headrest.

“Just pretend I’m not here,” Danny continued. “Just a guy driving a minivan. Riddled with bullet holes. Down a deserted highway. In the apocalypse. With undead creatures probably watching us from the woods. You know, nothing special.”

She exchanged another private look with Will. “I’ll tell you when we get back home.”

“Okay,” he nodded back.

Danny said, “Wow, be still my heart. That was possibly the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You guys should write greeting cards. Love Notes from the Apocalypse. You’d sell a shitload. I’d buy a dozen…”

HAPTER 37 KATE

The first time he came to her was in a dream, a month after they arrived at Harold Campbell’s facility.

She was dreaming of Deussen Park, near Lake Houston, which had always been one of her favorite places to go. Her father used to take her there often. She would spend the entire day with him, running up and down the piers, loving the feel of freshly cut grass against her bare feet. She loved darting in and out of the gazebos while he fished. Or tried to fish. The truth was he spent more time keeping her from falling into the lake than he ever caught anything.

Her father would laugh a lot during those visits. It was never about the fish. If you wanted to catch fish, you bought a boat and went out onto the lake. Fishing from the pier was just a way to pass the time. Or spend a day with your eight-year-old daughter.

She wasn’t eight anymore, but going to the park as an adult always brought back memories of her father. This was their place, where she recalled her happiest childhood memories. So it was no wonder that when she closed her eyes and dreamed her first dream in quite some time, she found herself back at Deussen Park.

It was in one of these dreams that she met him.

Tall, handsome, wearing a suit and tie for some reason. No one wore a suit and tie to the park, but he did, and though he stood out from the others, in their overalls and slacks and jeans, no one seemed to notice.

Except her.

When she first saw him, he was leaning over a railing in one of the bigger gazebos, looking down at the water lapping quietly, serenely against the foundation poles. Tiny, busy spiders spun cobwebs along the ceiling above him. White pelicans walked lazily around the gazebo behind him, unperturbed by his presence. The pelicans were used to dining on the shrimps left behind by unsuccessful fishermen.

She was barefoot and wore a simple dress in the dream. It was a brilliantly clear day, with no annoying boaters on the waters to ruin the fishing for the people perched along the piers or to break the tranquility of the lake.

She leaned against the railing and gazed out at the calm lake, missing her father. He would have loved a day like this.

“What’s the point?” the man asked suddenly.

“What?” she said, looking over at him. “Did you say something?”

“What’s the point?” he asked again, smiling at her. He had white, almost translucent skin. He looked at home in the sun, as if he were born to bask in its heat.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m just wondering. What the point of all of this is.”

“The lake?”

“No. The facility.”

“What facility?”

“The one you’re staying in now. Harold Campbell’s facility. What’s the point?”

“I don’t understand.”

And she didn’t. This was a dream. Why was a man in her dream asking about Harold Campbell’s facility?

“Don’t you?” he asked, eyes searching hers.

“Surviving,” she said, finally. “The point is surviving.”

“For what?”

“That’s a strange question.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t even know you.”

“My name’s Mabry,” he said. “Now you know me.”

“I still don’t know you,” she said and moved away from him to the other side of the gazebo.

She hadn’t yet settled against the railing before she realized he had somehow moved across the gazebo without her knowing. He was to her right now, still smiling at her. Had she moved away from him or toward him?

“Luke’s dead,” he said. “Ted’s dead. Donald, Jack… What’s the point?”

“Living,” she said. “The point is living. Surviving.”

“For what purpose?”

“That’s a stupid question.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t the point of surviving to survive for something? So what are you surviving for, Kate?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but couldn’t. Did she even know the answer?

She did… Didn’t she?

“That’s not the point,” she said, her annoyance growing.

“No?” He feigned satisfaction with her answer. “Maybe not.”

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am, Kate.”

“I don’t have a clue.”

He laughed. It was surreal, almost artificial. “I told you. My name is Mabry.”

“Go fuck yourself, Mabry,” she said and walked off.

“What’s the point?” he shouted after her as she exited the gazebo. “What’s the point, Kate? You’ve been asking yourself the same question all month. What’s the point?”

Deussen Park was crowded, and she was wearing a different dress than the last time she was here. There was a celebration of some kind going on in one of the gazebos, and she watched and smiled, enjoying the sounds of laughter and children and happiness.

“Have you figured it out yet?” a voice asked.

She glanced at Mabry, standing next to her, in the same suit and tie. His face looked just as white, as otherworldly.

There’s something wrong with him. He’s not…whole.

His sudden appearance didn’t startle her. It was almost as if she had expected him. But why would she?

“Figured what out?” she asked.

“What the point is,” he said.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

He laughed. “I told you. My name’s Mabry. I’m starting to think you’re purposefully not remembering my name, Kate.”

“Leave me alone.”

She walked away…only to see him waiting in the grass ten yards ahead of her.

“What’s the point?” he asked again.

She ignored him and walked past him, not giving him the satisfaction of meeting his searching blue eyes.

“What’s the point, Kate?” he shouted after her.

As she walked farther away, she knew intimately that she didn’t answer him because she didn’t know the answer. It was the same question that had been nagging at her ever since Luke died. She didn’t have the answers then, and she still didn’t now.

What was the point?

She almost asked Carly that question when the younger woman showed up at her room one day, out of the blue. She thought Carly had given up coming by, so when she heard the knock on her door and went to open it, she was surprised to see Carly standing outside.

“Hey,” Kate said.

“You hungry?” Carly asked. She was holding onto a food tray with one hand. The tray had carrots and beets and what looked like turkey. “It’s not turkey,” Carly said, as if reading her mind. “Tofu. Ready-to-go, MRE tofu. But looks like turkey, right? It doesn’t taste too bad, either.”

“Oh,” she said, not quite sure what to say.

It had been almost three weeks since the last time Carly came by. Kate was sure they had given up on her. Even Will had stopped coming by a month ago.

“I’m not really hungry,” Kate said.

“I thought you’d say that.” She took her other hand out from behind her back, revealing a small cupcake with a single candle on top. “Happy Birthday!”

Kate stared at the cupcake. She had forgotten it was her birthday. She was thirty-two. Where did all the time go?

She was keenly aware of Carly watching her closely. “Come on,” Carly said, “you have to at least let me light it, okay?”

She nodded and did her best to smile. She hadn’t smiled a lot lately, and she wasn’t sure how it came out.

Kate stood aside and let Carly enter, then closed the door. For a moment, just a moment, she was disappointed Will wasn’t also out there. But just as quickly as the thought appeared, it evaporated. She had given that part of her life up a long time ago. She wondered if he had found someone else yet.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Carly asked.

“I did, actually.”

“I knew it.”

“Who else…?” she asked, but couldn’t bring herself to finish.

Carly gave her a pitying look. Kate felt like telling her that she didn’t care, that she was just curious.

Wasn’t she just curious? She didn’t really care if anyone else remembered, did she? Especially Will?

Of course not. That part of my life is over. I was the one who severed it.

“No, it’s just me,” Carly said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said and smiled again. She still wasn’t sure how it came out. It had been such a long time since she had company, had to fake a smile for the benefit of others. Did it at least look mildly convincing? “All right,” she said, “let’s light it up.”

Carly put the tray down on the foldout table where Kate ate most of her meals. Carly dug out a lighter and lit the candle on the cupcake, then held it out for her. “Okay, blow. But make a wish first.”

She nodded, closed her eyes and pretended to make a wish, then blew out the candle.

“What did you wish for?” Carly asked.

“I can’t tell you or it won’t come true,” she said, playing along.

Carly smiled and nodded. She looked happy.

This isn’t for me, it’s for her.

Carly stayed with her for exactly ten minutes. They talked about little things. Pointless things. Carly asked if she was still keeping her journal, but Kate told her she gave it up a month ago.

Carly looked disappointed. “I was hoping to read it.”

“Sorry. I threw it away.”

Eventually the conversation stalled, and Carly waited for her to say something, but Kate didn’t feel like it. This visit had already gone on long enough, and she was ready for it to end.

“I should probably get going,” Carly said and got up.

“Thanks for the cupcake,” Kate said. She stared at it, half-eaten, on the tray in front of her, with the beets and carrots and the disgusting tofu turkey. “I’ll eat the rest later.”

“Promise?”

I’m not your little sister, Carly. I don’t have to do what I promise you.

She said, instead, “I promise.”

Carly nodded, satisfied, and went to the door. She looked as if she was in a hurry to leave.

At the door, Carly stopped and looked back at her. “We miss you, Kate. You should come have dinner with us sometime. We all miss you. Danny, Will, Vera…”

“I will,” Kate lied. “Thanks again for the cupcake.”

“Sure,” Carly said, gave her a pursed smile, and left.

Kate closed the door after her and locked it. She didn’t think she could stand another surprise visit today.

What’s the point, Carly? she had wanted to ask the other woman. What’s the point of celebrating a birthday when the world above us is dead?

“What’s the point?” Mabry asked.

She was in the dream again, though it was sometimes hard to tell where the dream began and ended. It had begun to merge with her life in Harold Campbell’s facility. Or what passed for a life, anyway.

Sometimes she liked the dreams better. She couldn’t go to Deussen Park in real life. Not anymore. She couldn’t go anywhere in real life. She was stuck in Harold Campbell’s concrete facility. The place that was supposed to be her salvation had become her prison. She realized that now, more than ever.

What’s the point?

“Exactly,” Mabry said, leaning against the gazebo railing next to her. He had come out of nowhere again, like always.

She looked over at him. “What?”

“Exactly,” Mabry said. “What’s the point?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Then why continue like this? What’s the point of going on like there’s still a point, Kate, when you know in your heart there isn’t really one?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Do you?”

He shrugged, and gave her an amused look. “That’s for you to find out. I’m just some guy in your dreams.”

“You’re an annoying guy in my dreams,” she smirked at him. “Why can’t I get rid of you?”

“Maybe you don’t want to. Maybe subconsciously I’m here to ask you the very question you can’t bring yourself to ask when you’re awake. But you know, deep down, that it’s a question that demands to be answered.”

“Bullshit.”

“Is it? Tell me. What do you think about when you’re awake, Kate?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Of course you do. You think about Luke. About Ted. About what’s up there, in the real world. The world above the facility. You wonder what the whole point of it all is. The world as you know it is gone. You’ll never get it back. You know that.”

“I know that,” she said quietly. “So you’re just repeating what I’m thinking, is that it?”

“What else could it be?” He smiled at her. “I’m here because you want me to be here. You need me to ask the question you refuse to ask out there.”

“What’s the point. Is that the question?”

“Is it? You tell me, Kate.”

She didn’t answer right away. “Maybe,” she said after a while.

“You’re not sure?”

“How can I be? I’m talking to myself, if what you’re saying is true. That in itself is disturbing.”

He laughed. “I guess it can be viewed that way.”

“What other way to view it is there?”

“Maybe you’re finally just accepting reality.”

“What reality is that?”

“That the world is gone. Your father is gone. Will is gone. That everything you know and trust and understand is gone.” He paused, as if to let his words sink in. “So tell me, Kate. What’s the point?”

She closed her eyes.

“What’s the point?” Mabry asked, his voice echoing inside her head.

Or maybe it wasn’t his voice. Maybe it was actually her voice.

What’s the point?

When she woke up in her room, on her tiny cot, her nose was bleeding. She raced to the small sink in the corner and watched the blood drip down to the metal pan, the ping-ping sound of the nosebleed almost hypnotic.

She looked up at the thirty-two-year-old woman staring back at her in the mirror. The stranger looked haggard, dark, with no color along her cheeks or forehead. Even her lips were dark and blackened, lifeless. Her eyes gave the impression of a woman who hadn’t slept in days. They were hollow and unattractive.

She remembered when her appearance was everything. When she could walk into a meeting with clients and, on pure will alone, get them to sign with her, commit their entire annual advertising budget with her company. She could have sold them anything.

But that was the old world. That was the old Kate.

What was she now? A thirty-two-year-old woman in an underground facility, surrounded by unyielding gray concrete. Living with men and women who didn’t know there was no point to all of this. They were just going through the motions, living out the remainder of their lives until they grew old and died.

It wasn’t much of a life. It was nothing compared to the life she had.

She idly noticed blood on her shirt. She wiped at it with some paper napkin soaked in water, but it only diluted the blood and made it cling to the cheap fabric. The old Kate would never have been caught dead wearing something like this.

She sighed and tossed the bloodied napkin into a nearby trash bin. She missed badly, and the crumpled sheet fell into a corner. She didn’t bother picking it up.

She looked down at the bloodied shirt for a moment, then turned off the water.

What was the point of cleaning it? She would never get the blood out of the shirt now. Blood was hard to get out. Blood was forever.

So what’s the point?

CHAPTER 38 WILL

“How many?” Ben asked, somewhere between incredulous and horror.

They were back inside the Control Room, with Ben leaning against the dashboard and Will standing nearby eating a bag of MRE that tasted like dirt, but it was food and he needed the calories.

“Five hundred,” he said, between spoonfuls of something that was supposed to be mashed potatoes. “At least. We didn’t have time to do an exact head count, but it’s definitely more than just the town. Davies said there were only 300 or so people in Dansby. There were more than that in the auditorium alone.”

“Blood farm?” Ben said for the third time since Will filled him in on what they had found in Dansby, Texas. Will didn’t blame him. It wasn’t an easy thing to grasp — much less accept — unless you saw it for yourself.

He nodded. “They’re smart, Ben. Way smarter than we’ve given them credit for. They definitely have a command structure. How big, how wide does it go? That’s the question.”

“There’s probably a hell of a lot of them out there, ones like this blue-eyed bastard,” Ben said. He seemed to weigh everything Will had told him, before adding, “All right. We’ll load up and go back there tomorrow. You think there are more of these blood farms out there? Around the country?”

“They went through a lot of us during The Purge. If they’re as smart as we think they are, then yeah, they probably had this planned from day one. The big ones have to be in the cities, in the big population centers. I get the feeling the ones in Dansby are just local branches, so to speak.”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t mind telling you, I’m not going to be sleeping a lot tonight. Hell, I’ll be lucky if I get even a second of shut eye.”

“There are pills for that.”

“I don’t want them. I want to stay as awake as possible.” Ben shook his head again. “Blood farms. Fuck.”

Will finished the MRE, running his tongue around the interior of his mouth to dig out the horrid taste, then tossed the empty bag into a nearby trash can. “I’m gonna go get some sleep.”

Ben sniffed him. “When was the last time you took a shower?”

“It’s been a while.”

“You should rectify that.”

“That bad?”

“I almost threw up in my mouth.”

“Say no more.”

Will left Ben in the Control Room and walked through the hallways, turning the blood farm and how to free those poor souls tomorrow morning over in his head. They would need more vehicles than they already had. That was the first step. The next and more important was waking those people up. That was Lara’s department. He’d leave that to her.

Thinking of Lara made him smile. She had such wonderful, kissable lips…

Will went back to his room, determined to think the problem through, but was dozing on the small cot almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. It wasn’t unusual. His body always knew when he was preparing for a long day, starting back in Afghanistan. In the months since The Purge, his body had reverted back to in-country mode, but instead of a mission every week or month, it was now every day.

Survival had become the new mission, and it was ongoing.

In his dream he was back in Afghanistan with Danny, and they were playing soccer, but with a goat’s head instead of a soccer ball. Lara was there, rooting him on from the sidelines, wearing a shiny dress that made her hair sparkle for some reason. She may or may not have been doing a cheer, because he was too busy chasing after the goat’s head to hear what she was shouting.

It was one of his rare, fun dreams.

He woke again at 8:15 p.m. to a soft, hesitant knocking on his door. He almost didn’t hear it over the quiet hum of the turbine.

Will got up and padded over in the semidarkness.

8:16 p.m. That meant he had slept for almost four hours. A dream scenario in his book.

He opened the door and was surprised to find Lara outside in the well-lit hallway.

“Hey,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I woke you, huh?”

“I was dreaming I was back in Afghanistan.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I was playing soccer with Danny, but instead of a ball we were using a goat’s head.”

“Wow.”

“And you were there. You were doing a cheer. I think.”

She smiled. “For you, I hope.”

“I think so. I couldn’t really hear what you were cheering, though.”

“I’d like to know, too. I’ve never cheered in my life.”

“I figured. You wanna come in?”

He stood aside, then closed the door after her and hit the light switch on the wall.

Lara had showered and wore new pants and a T-shirt that was at least one size too large for her. Her hair looked clean and shiny like in his dream, and he decided he really liked the way her blonde strands fell around her face.

“You smell good,” he said.

“It’s soap.”

“It must be great smelling soap.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls who knock on your door in the middle of the night, while you’re having soccer dreams involving goat’s heads.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

He watched her for a moment, fully aware of how painfully beautiful she looked and how great she smelled. That led to him sniffing himself discreetly. Ben was right. He really did need a shower. Or two.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked.

“You got something?”

“Not really, no.”

She laughed, sounding nervous.

“How’s Megan and Elise?” he asked.

“They’re adjusting. Elise has Vera to help her, so she’s doing better than I expected. Kids are good at that, you know? Adapting. Megan’s got her legs back, so she can almost walk again. The rest of it, the mental stuff, that’s going to take a while.”

“What about you, Lara? Are you okay?”

She turned around to face him.

God, she’s beautiful.

She must have seen the expression on his face, because she blushed a little. “Is it over between you and Kate?”

“It’s been over for a while,” he said, hoping that the absolute certainty in his voice came through.

It must have, because she nodded and said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” she said again. “I think we should finish what we started yesterday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ve never been so sure of anything before in my life.”

He moved closer to her, then put his hands on her shoulders and waited for her reaction. When she didn’t stiffen or move away, he pulled her closer and looked her in the eyes. “You’re so beautiful,” he said softly.

She leaned forward and kissed him. Will hesitated at first, but her lips were so insistent and soft and she smelled so good that he couldn’t help himself. He leaned into her and kissed her and really tasted her mouth.

Her hands slipped around his waist, and he pulled her tighter against him. He breathed in her scent and let his hands explore her curves over the T-shirt. It was too big and loose for her, but it didn’t do anything to hide the woman underneath. She moaned against his mouth when he slid his hands inside the fabric and brushed his fingers lightly against her belly. It was soft, like velvet, just as he knew it would be.

For a moment he hesitated, and she must have sensed it because she reached down and pulled the shirt over her head and tossed it to the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

She smiled at the way he was looking at her breasts, pleased by his reaction.

Then she kissed him again, pulling back just long enough to whisper, “They’re not there just for show, you know.”

He didn’t need further prodding.

Will kissed the tip of one nipple. She sighed, which was all the permission he needed to kiss the other. He moved his hands down the length of her body, to her thighs, then lifted her easily into the air. She was surprisingly light. Her legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried her to the small cot, kissing her the entire way, exploring every inch of her mouth. She was intoxicating. Every time he took a breath and she filled his lungs, he wanted more.

He laid her down softly, afraid if he dropped her the flimsy cot might crumble underneath her weight, even as light as she was. She helped him remove her pants, and they scrambled to remove his clothes, their hands everywhere, at times bumping into each other, laughing softly, nervously. She kissed his bare chest, and then wrinkled her nose playfully at him.

“Sorry,” he said, breathless. “I was going to take a shower. Then you showed up.”

“Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s something my mom used to say. Never mind.”

She pulled him down to her. Then he was inside her, and he didn’t know how he had gone so long without her. It pushed him to the edge much faster than he had expected. She wrapped her legs around his waist again and held on as his body went slack against hers.

He lay in her arms, their bodies slick with sweat, even in the temperature-controlled room. She felt warm against him, her hand picking through his dirty hair. He should have taken that shower before the nap…

“I’m sorry,” Will said, “it’s been a while.”

She laughed.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Did I hurt your ego?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“Men.” She raised his head gently until she could look him in the eyes. “See me?”

“Yes,” he said back.

“This is me not caring.”

She pulled him to her and kissed him again. Her hand moved between their bodies, and he groaned as she wrapped slender fingers around him, stroking him. It didn’t take very long.

“You wanna do something about this?” she asked playfully.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just try to make it last longer this time, okay, Quick Draw McGraw?”

“Ouch,” he said, and she laughed again.

They lay slick with sweat in the dark room, gasping for breath. Will was surprised the cot hadn’t given way. He had slept on Army cots that were bigger and sturdier. Even worse, this bed actually felt as if it wanted to come apart underneath him, and he wondered how romantic it would have been had they both fallen to the floor naked and tangled up in a twisted bed frame.

He was tired, but she wasn’t.

She whispered into his ear, “Oh come on, one more time.”

He shook his head against the pillow. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“No fair. That first time was a total bust.”

“You’re going to keep rubbing that in my face, aren’t you?”

“At least until next year.”

“You’re optimistic if you think I’m going to sleep with you again after tonight.”

“Give me a break,” she said, “I’m making up for lost time. You are too, judging by that first, er, shot.”

“I told you that’s never happened to me before.”

“I believe you. Yup, totally believe you.”

“Are you humoring me?”

“Totally,” she said and laughed.

He liked the sound of her laugh. She hadn’t laughed very often since they met, but when he heard it, it sounded like poetry to him.

He rolled over onto his back until she was straddling his naked waist. She looked down at him, watching him carefully.

She looked spectacular naked, her form outlined against the dark ceiling, blonde hair cascading around her face. He enjoyed the soft curves of her hips, the perkiness of her breasts, the way her eyebrows arched when she was thinking.

“What?” she said, looking down at him. “What are you staring at, mister?”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what? What are you talking about?”

“That you’re beautiful.”

He could tell that it caught her off guard, and she looked down at him, her eyes suddenly very serious. “Do you mean that?” she whispered.

“Every word.”

“Show me.”

He reached up and traced her flustered cheeks with his fingers. He thought she was going to cry, but instead she leaned down and kissed him, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her against him and never wanted to let her go.

He was somewhere between asleep and awake when Lara stirred against him. She lay on the cot with her back pressed up against his chest, reminding him that he had never felt more content while surrounded by darkness in his life than he did now, at this moment.

“Can’t sleep?” he whispered softly.

“Did I wake you?”

“I was already awake,” he lied. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She was lying, he could tell. Her body had stiffened a bit against him, and her breathing was slightly irregular. He had been lying there with her long enough to become used to the soothing patterns of her heartbeat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing,” she said again. “Go back to sleep. You need it. When was the last time you slept?”

“I slept for four hours tonight. And don’t change the subject. I’ll go back to sleep after you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Will, it’s nothing.”

He said, more sternly this time, “Lara, tell me what’s wrong, or I’m just going to keep pestering you until you give in. Trust me, I can do this all night. You’ve already seen my prowess at doing things for a long time.”

He wished he could see her smile, but he didn’t want to untangle himself from her at this very moment. It would break the spell, the connection they shared, both physically and emotionally.

He longed to see her face, though, to read what she was feeling right now so he could say the right words to ease her mind, to make her understand how much he cared. Right now, he was afraid the wrong word would send her racing away from him. He never wanted something more in his life than to know how to reassure her at this very moment.

After a while, she said, “I was thinking how happy I am. Right now. At this moment with you. Even before everything happened, I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“But…?”

“I can’t see how this is going to last. And that terrifies me.”

He wrapped his arms tighter around her, hoping to reaffirm his presence. “It might not last. I don’t know. Maybe we should just accept it in the here and now and make the best of it. We know what’s out there and how hard it is. But this, right here, this is good.”

“It’s good,” she echoed, with some confidence in her voice.

“So let’s just embrace it. Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

She didn’t answer for a moment, but then, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” she said again, and he imagined her smiling in the darkness.

He didn’t go right back to sleep. Instead, he lay perfectly still, holding her against him and listening to the soft rhythms of her breathing. After a while she drifted off, and her body relaxed in his arms, her breathing taking on the familiar pattern of REM sleep.

With Lara finally asleep, he stopped fighting and quickly found himself going back in.

He woke up an hour later…to the very distinct sounds of gunshots inside the facility.

CHAPTER 39 KATE

Will was back, but he hadn’t come to see her. She wished that surprised her, but it didn’t. What she had with Will, however brief, was over a long time ago. Maybe there had never really been anything beyond that one night they spent together in that old house. Did she really expect one night to balloon into something…more? What a joke that turned out to be. On her, on him, on all of them.

She walked down the hallway, listening to her own footsteps echo up and down the concrete world around her. Sometimes she felt like a ghost, unable to distinguish her dreams from her waking world. Who’s to say which one was real?

Mandy, one of the little girls in the facility, appeared in front of her, leaning around the corner like an apparition. She was six years old, with a chipmunk face and cheeks that always looked rosy. Kate had seen her around often during the night, because Mandy liked sneaking out of her room to run around by herself. Kate supposed her mom didn’t mind the girl being out here alone. After all, where was she going to go?

“Hi,” Mandy said, her cheeks flushed red as usual.

“Hi,” she said back.

Mandy reminded her of Vera. When Carly came to see her, she never brought Vera along, which Kate didn’t mind. She hardly knew what to say to Carly, much less to Carly’s little sister.

Mandy pulled her head back behind the corner and ran away, soft footsteps fading.

She walked quickly past the Cafeteria, because there were sometimes people in there, even at night. She could hear them now as she walked past the always-opened doors.

Chattering. Endless chattering.

About what, she couldn’t imagine. What was there to talk about? Did they really think they were going to be safe down here for the rest of their lives? Even if that was the case, did they really call it living? It was almost comical how they were fooling themselves.

She had become used to the hallways, all of their nooks and crannies and turns, and no longer had to consult the maps along the walls. She had gotten lost often during the first month, each hallway looking exactly like the previous one and the one just around the corner. Especially in the Quarters area, with its three-finger-like design. That didn’t happen anymore.

The irony of Harold Campbell not having made it to his precious “bomb shelter,” as Luke liked to call it, helped to push her forward, steeling her resolve to do what she had to do. Will wouldn’t agree. Will would try to talk her out of it, but failing that, would he stop her some other way? She didn’t know. Despite all those days and nights and weeks on the road together, did they really know each other all that well?

For God’s sake, she didn’t even know his last name!

She didn’t know when she had crossed over from the Quarters area of the facility to Operations, but suddenly she turned a corner and saw the metallic glint of the steel Armory door at the end of the hallway.

How did I get here so fast?

She stopped for a moment to get her bearings. Her mind was wandering more and more these days, ever since she started dreaming about Mabry and his opaque white skin. Her mental fog used to be confined to her dreams, but Mabry and the confusion he brought in her dreams were starting to bleed into her waking life.

Mabry.

“What’s the point?” he asked her over and over again in her dreams.

There was no one around, but she waited and listened, checking to make sure anyway. She didn’t want to get caught in the Armory.

When she was sure no one was in the hallway with her, she hurried to the Armory, grabbed the door handle, turned it, and slipped inside.

The door was never locked. None of the steel doors in the Operations area were locked. Not that it mattered. Most of the people in the facility were already armed with handguns, and the kids were strictly forbidden from playing in the Operations area, though Kate had seen Mandy and the Steven boys wandering over here every now and then.

She stood in the middle of the room and took inventory.

The Glocks had their own separate rack. She was used to a Glock, though these looked a bit bigger than the one Will had chosen for her all those months ago. Not that much bigger, and it was still a Glock. She would recognize the same look and plastic feel of it even in the dark. She picked one up and held in her hands, and found it a little heavier than she was used to. Not by much. Most of the difference was in the width when she tried to put her fingers around the grip. It was a little wide, but she could still reach the trigger, and that was all that mattered.

She found a box of bullets, took out the magazine and began to load it. She didn’t bother with a second gun or magazine. One should be enough.

She had given up her own Glock a while back, during one of those dark weeks when she almost never came out of her room, even at night when no one was around. It was Will who had asked if she still wanted the gun, and when she said no, he had been eager to take it away.

She was feeling better now, much better. The realization of this new world — this “living”—gave her a clarity she hadn’t known in a while. She had Mabry to thank for that. He pushed her, cajoled her, until she accepted and embraced his question.

What’s the point?

She tucked the Glock in her back waistband and made sure her shirt draped over it. Most people carried guns around the facility, but even so, she wanted surprise on her side. Everything depended on surprise.

She opened the Armory door a crack and peered out, made sure no one was outside before going out and closing the steel door shut behind her. She walked briskly up the hallway, thinking about all the steps ahead of her, turning them over and over in her head.

It was a solid plan. She had been thinking about it for a while now, planning every little detail.

It was a good plan. It was a great plan.

And most of all, it was a logical plan. There was nothing emotional here. It was all logic. Sanity prevailing over insanity.

Order over chaos…

Ben had what she needed, so she walked back to the Quarters area to find him, seeking him out in his personal quarter. He wasn’t there. Opening the unlocked door, she found an empty cot in the corner. Ben was not very tidy, and the place looked heavily lived in.

He wasn’t in the Cafeteria either.

She suspected he was probably back in Operations, where he spent most of his time. She found him in the first place she looked — the Control Room.

Serendipitous.

It was as if all the stars were aligning, presenting the two things she needed to accomplish her plan in one place. Of course, it would have been nice if she had gone straight to the Control Room instead of looking for Ben elsewhere. It would have saved her some pointless walking, if nothing else. But that was nitpicking.

Rick was also there. He sat in a chair, looking at the rows of monitors that showed the clearing above ground. It was dark, but the moon was full and she could see black shapes moving in the clearing, darting in and out of the woods.

What were they doing out there? Did they know?

Of course not, she chastised herself. How could they know? She had thought about it and thought about it, but she hadn’t even known she was actually going to do it until just an hour ago.

She stood quietly in the Control Room doorway and listened to them talking, oblivious to her presence. She smiled. She had become good at this.

“Is it me or are there more of them tonight?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know,” Rick said. “How can you tell?”

“It just feels like there’re more of them out there. Maybe I’m just seeing things. Gut feeling, I guess.”

Rick seemed to consider it, before shrugging it off. “I can’t tell.”

She glanced at the big LED clock on the wall above the monitors. 11:45 p.m.

Ben finally looked over his shoulder. He looked surprised to see her. “Kate. Is something wrong?”

“No,” she said and smiled. “I couldn’t sleep, thought I’d go for a walk.”

“Eleven at night?” Ben asked.

“I like the quiet,” she said and smiled again, hoping this time it was more believable.

It might have been, because he seemed to relax a bit. Or maybe he just lost interest. It was hard to tell with Ben. He was so much like Will in that respect.

“I don’t usually come to this part of the facility,” she said, feeling the need to keep going, to explain her presence. “What are you guys still doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep, either,” Rick said.

“Did Will tell you about what he found in Dansby?” Ben asked, his attention already back on the monitors, on the ghouls darting in and out of shadows. They looked like children, playing a game of hide-and-seek with adults.

Did the ghouls know?

“No,” she said.

She hadn’t, in fact, heard about anything in Dansby, though from the sound of Ben’s voice, it was something alarming, maybe even important. Maybe that explained all the excited chatter in the Cafeteria. Many of the facility’s residents usually chattered on pointlessly about something or another, but she noticed they were distinctly more animated tonight.

“What did he find?” she asked.

“Lots of people. Alive. The ghouls are using them in some kind of blood farm. We’re going back there tomorrow to try and bring back as many as we can. If we can. There’s something about them being in a coma that might cause some problems.”

“There are a lot of them, you said?”

“A few hundred.”

“Will said over 500,” Rick added.

“That’s a lot,” Kate said.

This world is theirs. We don’t belong here anymore. Why can’t anyone else but me see that? We’re the intruders now, not them.

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot,” Ben said. “Is there something else I can help you with, Kate?”

She could hear it in his voice. Not dislike exactly, but maybe indifference. She heard it in some of the other survivors, too. They didn’t like that she spent all her time in her room and rarely, if ever, interacted with them. They had become suspicious of her. Of course, most of them didn’t know that she did come out, just not when they were awake. She didn’t bother to correct them. What was the point? They could keep on thinking whatever they wanted. It didn’t really matter to her at all.

What’s the point?

She had actually considered seducing Ben and Rick separately to reach her two goals. She was reasonably certain it wouldn’t have taken much to get Rick to do what she wanted, even in her current condition. She was far from the old Kate, the one who could pick up men in bars with a smile and a little leg. She wasn’t that woman anymore, but she was still a woman and they were still men, and that still mattered. Probably even more so now.

But seducing Ben would have been tricky, and she was glad she had ultimately decided against it. One wrong move would alert him — alert the others — and she couldn’t afford that right now. She was too close.

She said, “I’m sorry, Ben,” and was surprised that she actually meant it, even as the words came tumbling out of her mouth.

“What?” he said, turning around again. She guessed he was going to say something else, but he never got the chance.

She took out the Glock and shot him in the right temple. He was so close to her that it wasn’t a very difficult shot at all. His blood splattered the control dashboard in front of Rick, who screamed and jumped out of his seat.

That was easy.

It was a lot easier than she expected. Shooting ghouls was one thing, but shooting a human being who was still alive was another matter entirely, and she was genuinely shocked that it had been so easy to take Ben’s life. One moment he was there, standing behind Rick, and the next he was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was just a little bit of blood dripping from the bullet hole in his right temple. Most of the blood was now splattered against the dashboard, along with a generous amount of brain matter.

She looked over at Rick.

He was barely sixteen, still just a kid, and just a little older than Luke had been when he died. She considered not shooting Rick in the brief two seconds that it took her to turn the gun slightly and shoot him in the chest.

She wondered idly if his parents called him Richard. Or Ricky. Or just Rick. Regardless of what they called him when they were alive, Rick stumbled back against the control board, looking very stunned, before collapsing to the floor. He grabbed at the chair for support, and overturned it as he went down.

The gunshots echoed up and down the facility, like cascading thunder, and she knew they would be coming soon. No one could have heard the gunshots and not know what they were, especially Will and Danny. She didn’t have a lot of time.

Kate quickly crouched next to Ben’s body and found the string around his neck, the one with the pendant that controlled the Door. She pulled it out of his shirt and slipped the loop over his head, careful to work around the wet blood matted against his forehead and chunks of brain clinging to his hair. She slipped the string necklace around her own neck and straightened up.

She walked over and opened the “In Case of Emergency” box next to the door. She took out the ax, spending a moment to familiarize herself with the long curved handle. It weighed a lot more than she had anticipated, but she wasn’t exactly a wallflower. Those weeks of fighting alongside Will and Danny as they left Houston had toughened her up enough so that the ax didn’t feel as unwieldy in her hands as it would have before The Purge.

She took the ax back to the dashboard and located the center console marked MAIN DOOR SWITCH, and below it, a simple red button underneath a glass display. There were no other buttons on the dashboard that looked even remotely like it. It controlled the Door. This and Ben’s pendant, now around her neck.

She glanced up briefly at the bright LED clock on the wall: 11:51 p.m.

Her eyes moved to the monitors, to the ghouls outside. There seemed to be some urgency to their movements, and there were definitely more of them now than when she had looked a few minutes ago. They seemed to be converging on the Door. At first it was hard to pick them out, because they were so dark and almost invisible against the pitch-black woods, but slowly her eyes adjusted, and their numbers stunned her.

How many were out there? Hundreds? Thousands?

Did they know?

But how? How could they know what was happening down here?

Of course they didn’t know, she decided. She was being silly. How could they?

She turned her attention back to the console, back to the matter at hand. She changed up her grip on the ax a bit, lifted it high over her head, took a big breath, then brought the ax down and heard the solid, satisfying crunch of its metal blade digging into the dashboard a few inches from the button.

She was rewarded with sparks.

She had to pry the ax free. It came out grudgingly, but came back out it did. She lifted it over her head again, took another big breath and lowered it once more with a loud grunt.

More sparks.

Almost there…

CHAPTER 40 LARA

Gunshots.

She knew they were gunshots almost instantly, the sound traveling along the concrete walls and floors of the facility, standing out against the quiet hum of the turbine in the background. For a moment, she remembered how all of this started for her — waking up to the sound of gunshots and discovering that the world had changed while she slept.

She opened her eyes in time to see Will pulling himself free. He was already stepping into his pants somewhere in the semidarkness of the room by the time she sat up on the small cot. “I heard gunshots…”

“Two shots. From Operations.”

“Glock?”

He glanced at her, pleased. “Sounds like a Glock, yeah.”

She smiled proudly back at him. “I’m learning.”

“Yes, you are.”

Will slipped on his shirt as she climbed out of bed and looked for her clothes. Found her pants nearby and quickly pulled it on, but the large T-shirt was nowhere to be found.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“One shot is an accident, two is on purpose.” Will grabbed his gunbelt from the nightstand and slipped it on. The silver shape of his cross-knife gleamed in the semidarkness. Will opened the drawer and pulled out a fistful of spare magazines and two radios, handing one to her. “Don’t lose it.”

“I won’t.”

“Keep it turned on at all times.”

“Okay.”

“I have to go.”

“Be careful.”

He moved with purpose to the door, put his hand on the lever, but didn’t turn it.

“What?” she asked.

“I forgot something.”

“What is it?”

He walked back to her, slid one hand around her waist, pulled her against him, and kissed her hard on the mouth. Her bare breasts crushed up against his chest, but she adjusted quickly and kissed him back.

Finally, he pulled away and looked at her. “That.”

“Good call,” she said.

He let go of her and quickly left the room, but not before looking back one last time. She smiled back, and for a split second she wanted to grab his hand and tell him to ignore what was happening out there, to stay with her instead, that they could be happy here, just the two of them.

But she didn’t, because she knew this was what Will did. He ran toward danger, didn’t shrink from it.

She stood alone in the darkness for a moment, trying to decide what to do and feeling a little flushed. It had been a while since she felt this way about someone. Will was so different from all the other men she had ever been involved with. In another life, they would never have met. When would she have ever come in contact with a guy from Harris County SWAT? Or an Army Ranger?

She pulled herself out of her thoughts. She felt silly, like a teenager in love for the first time. She was too old for that, she reminded herself, and began looking again for her T-shirt on the floor. She finally found it crumpled up near the foot of his cot and pulled it open. She found her shoes farther back toward the door and slipped them on one by one before stepping out into the brightly lit hallway.

She heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Danny rushing toward her. He was still buckling his gunbelt. “Will?” he asked.

“He’s headed there now.”

Danny nodded and ran past her. He hadn’t bothered to ask where “there” was.

Lara looked after him for a moment, then remembered her Glock and hurried down the hallway to her own room. She found it amusing that her first instinct was to go for her gun. The old Lara would have been terrified at such a thought. Then again, the old Lara had survived The Purge by pure dumb luck.

She thought about checking up on Carly and the girls farther down the hallway, but it was late, almost midnight, and they were probably asleep. Unlike Will and Danny and her, most of the facility seemed oblivious to the gunshots, which alarmed her.

Wake up! she wanted to shout. Something’s happening! Can’t you people hear it?

The Glock was in the drawer next to her cot where she left it. She was clipping the holster onto her belt when there was a knock on her door.

“Come in!”

She looked back to see Carly standing in the open doorway in pants and T-shirt, her eyes groggy from sleep. “Is it bad?” Carly asked, looking at Lara’s gun holster.

“I don’t know, just to be safe.”

She glanced at her wall clock: 11:55 p.m.

“Danny woke us up,” Carly said. “He said he heard gunshots.”

“We heard them, too. How’s Elise?”

“She’s fine—”

The sound of a third gunshot stopped Carly mid-sentence. This one was closer — much closer than the two shots from earlier.

“Oh my God,” Carly said.

“Danny’s there with Will,” Lara said. “They’ll be fine.”

I hope.

She unclipped the radio from her belt and pressed the lever. “Will, come in. What’s going on? I heard another gunshot.”

Will’s voice came through the radio: “Where are you?”

“In my room. Carly’s here with me. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Will said.

Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t tell if he sounded anxious or excited. It was hard to read Will’s emotions at any given time when he was standing in front of her. Trying to guess his thoughts through a radio was next to impossible.

“We have a situation here,” Will said. “I need you to go back to Carly’s room and lock yourselves in with the girls.”

“Will, what’s happening?”

“Lara, did you hear me? I need—”

“And you need to tell me what’s going on,” she interrupted, a lot more forcefully than she had really wanted.

But it did the job, and Will said, “It’s Kate. She shot Ben and Rick, and she has Ben’s pendant.”

“Pendant…?” But she knew what that meant as soon as she said it.

“Yes,” Will said.

“Where are you now?”

“Entrance Hallway. Kate’s here. So I need you to go to Carly’s room and lock yourselves in. Don’t come out for anything, no matter what you hear, unless it’s Danny or me knocking on the door. Lara? Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Go. Now.”

“Be careful,” she said quickly.

“I will.”

She looked over at Carly and saw the younger woman’s pained expression. “They’ll be fine,” Lara said. “Danny and Will are together.”

Carly gave her a forced smile and nodded.

Lara hurried over to her. “Come on, you heard what Will said.”

She took the other woman’s hand and led her back outside. They turned right and headed down the hallway toward Carly’s room. It was almost all the way at the back, with the community bathrooms farther down.

She opened Carly’s door and guided her inside. “Stay here with the girls.”

“What? What about you?”

“I’ll be back.”

“But Will said—”

“I know,” Lara said and tried to put as much confidence into her smile as possible. Maybe fifty percent. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Until then, do what Will said. Lock the door and keep it locked, okay?”

Carly was about to argue, but Lara quickly closed the door and ran up the hallway.

It seemed to take forever to get to the first turn up ahead. Then she was running around another corner, heading toward the Entrance Hallway, which was exactly halfway between Quarters and Operations.

It felt as if she had been running for miles when she finally heard voices coming from the turn in front of her. She slowed down, using the opportunity to catch her breath.

She heard Will’s voice first: “… you don’t want to do this, Kate. I know you. Let’s talk about this.”

And a female voice, which Lara had a hard time placing at first because it had been such a long time since she had seen Kate, much less heard her voice: “Do you really think there’s anything to talk about, Will? I killed Ben and Rick. And I just shot Davies. What’s stopping you from shooting me now?”

Oh, no, not Davies, too…

Lara slowly took the corner and came up behind Will and Danny, standing with their Glocks drawn and hanging almost casually at their sides. They were looking across the long, brightly lit Entrance Hallway at Kate, who stood at the foot of the stairs. The smooth titanium steel plating at the base of the Door rested at the top of the steps above her.

But it was the figure slumped on the floor between the three of them that got her attention. It was Davies, lying on his back, a big, wet bloody patch spread across his chest where he had been shot. From her position, she couldn’t tell if he was still alive or not. She couldn’t see his eyes, or tell if he was still breathing even underneath the bright halogen lights.

Will had tilted his head slightly to his right when she initially came out from around the turn. He had already picked up her presence without having seen her.

Kate was holding a long, plain string in her left hand, her thumb rubbing against a slightly circular object that Lara recognized as Ben’s pendant, the same one he kept around his neck at all times.

The same pendant that controlled the Door above Kate’s head.

The same Door that stood between them and the creatures outside…

Oh God, Kate, what are you doing?

And Davies. Poor Davies, on the floor. Dead or dying.

She had to make sure…

Without even realizing she was doing it, she moved around Will and toward Davies when Will, his eyes on Kate the whole time, said in a soft voice meant only for Lara to hear: “Don’t. He’s dead.”

“Are you sure?” she whispered back.

“Yes.”

She relented and took a step back, continuing to look at Davies’s still body for indications that Will might be wrong. She wouldn’t put it past him to tell her a baldfaced lie to get her to stay back, to protect her.

She heard footsteps coming up behind her, fast. Then haggard breathing from people who hadn’t had to run in a while.

She looked back as Rhonda, Tom, and Mike appeared around the corner, sliding into the Entrance Hallway. Mike had a six-shot revolver, the kind she had only seen in movies, and he was still wearing his pajamas. Rhonda was fully dressed in slacks and shirt, and Tom still had bed head. They piled around the corner, freezing at the sight of Will and Danny, then Davies on the floor, and finally, noticing Kate standing at the bottom steps of the Door.

“Stay back,” Danny said, looking back at the newcomers.

“What the fuck is going on?” Tom demanded. He was a short man in wire-rimmed glasses, and hearing the profanity come out of his mouth sounded incredibly wrong to Lara for some reason.

“We heard gunshots,” Rhonda said between breaths.

“Jesus, is Davies dead?” Mike asked, moving forward a bit before another quick glance from Danny stopped him cold in his tracks.

“He’s dead,” Danny snapped. “Now shut the fuck up and stop moving around.”

That deflated all three newcomers, and they hung back in the hallway as ordered.

She knew all three of them pretty well. They had, at one point or another, come to her in the Infirmary for various ailments. Rhonda was a former school teacher, while Tom was retired, and Mike worked as a mechanic on the weekends. They had all barely survived The Purge, mostly thanks to Ben’s quick thinking.

“Where’s Ben?” Rhonda asked behind her.

He’s dead, she wanted to say. And so is Rick and now Davies. And Kate — who looks half-crazed — has her hand on the Door’s switch. Any more questions?

Will was talking to Kate, in that calm voice of his: “Kate, don’t let it go further than this. It can all end now.”

Kate looked almost amused. “Now you’re just being silly, Will.” She looked as if she was about to laugh, but all that came out was a smirk. “There’s no going back from this. I killed Ben. Did you miss that part? I put a bullet in his head. Then I shot Rick in the chest. They’re dead, Will. There’s no going back from that.”

Rhonda gasped behind her, and either Tom or Mike swore under their breath. Maybe both of them.

“It’s done,” Will said. “It’s over with. Forget about that.”

He sounded so convincing that Lara wondered if he actually meant it. Or was he just saying whatever he thought Kate wanted to hear? It was so hard to tell with him.

“Are you going to shoot me, Will?” Kate asked. “You should, you know. It’s the only way you’re going to stop me from doing what I have to do.”

She held up the pendant, and her thumb rubbed back and forth over the button that controlled the Door, that would open the facility to the undead things waiting up there.

“Oh my God,” Rhonda groaned behind them.

“She has Ben’s necklace,” Mike said.

Or was it Tom? She had difficulty distinguishing between the two of them, and she was so focused on Kate and the small object in her hand that everything else was hazy.

The Door. Don’t let her open the Door…

“Kate,” Will was saying, “I can’t let you open that door.”

“You’re going to have to shoot me to stop me,” Kate said.

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Of course it does. And if you can’t, Danny will.” She turned her head slightly to look at Danny. “Right, Danny? I bet you wouldn’t have any problems shooting me down.”

Lara didn’t know if Kate was purposefully trying to antagonize Danny, or if she really thought this was one big joke. There was something about Kate’s eyes, the way she was smiling. Kate looked like someone who thought they had nothing to lose, who thought they knew things that others didn’t and as a result felt confident in their actions, even if no one else understood. Lara called that kind of person crazy.

Then Kate’s eyes shifted, settling down on Lara from across the well-lit hallway. Lara instantly felt vulnerable and naked under that gaze, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was standing in front of a woman she never really got to know, whose lover she had taken, and who, right now, was standing before her with a gun in her hand.

The same gun she had already used to kill three men…

And she’s crazy. Don’t forget that part.

Lara fought every instinct to step back and cower behind Will, to escape the harsh spotlight of Kate’s scrutinizing eyes. She didn’t, because she couldn’t. She found the strength to stand her ground, returning Kate’s glare with as much intensity as she could manage. It wasn’t very much at all.

Kate smiled. “Hey, Lara. We never really got to know each other, did we?”

“No,” Lara said. She was surprised she could actually talk. She hadn’t been sure before the word came slipped through her lips. “We can change that, if you want.”

Kate cocked her head to one side, as if she was considering it. “No, not really. I’d rather just shoot you.”

There was a loud bang! and it took Lara a split second to realize that Will had just shot Kate in the chest. She had been so focused on Kate’s crazed smile that she never noticed the other woman lifting her gun in her direction.

Kate stumbled backward and Lara watched, horrified, as Kate’s thumb moved, pressing down on the pendant—

No no no NO!

They heard it, like the sound of some angry god rising from the pits of hell, the loud grinding noise as the Door began to move.

“No!” Danny screamed, racing toward Kate.

He wrestled the pendant easily from her weak fingers, as she sat down heavily on the steps like an old woman resting for the very last time.

Danny was repeatedly hitting the button on the pendant, not that it did any good.

The Door was already moving, opening, and what was initially just an inch of moonlight — a dark, milky sea of blackness in the sky, something she had rarely seen these last few months — turned into two…then five…then ten inches, all within a couple of heartbeats.

She felt the rush of spring wind from outside, the coldness of the March night flooding in, giving her the kind of chills that raced up and down her body in an endless rush of terror.

Will shouted next to her, “Danny! Get back!”

A pair of dark, black eyes appeared above the stairs, peering through a small sliver of opening. Then one pair of eyes became two, then five, until suddenly there was a dozen of them peering in, waiting, waiting…

As the Door continued to open, grinding away against the still night outside and inside the facility, she reached for her Glock and found the handle cold and strange and uncomfortable. She pulled it out just as Will took a step back, and Danny started backpedaling, the pendant in his hand. Danny was still pressing the button desperately.

She knew it was pointless, and wanted to shout it at Danny, even as he kept backpedaling toward them. She didn’t doubt he already knew it was futile, because, like Will, he had been out there more than most and had had to wait each time for the Door to close behind them before they could set out on a mission. Because the Door couldn’t begin to close until it was fully opened. A “quirk” in the facility’s construction that bothered Will, but there was nothing they could do about it.

Harold Campbell strikes again.

As the first ghoul slipped through the hole, all she could think of was a conversation she had had with Will. She had asked him how many ghouls he thought were out there, standing silently inside the dark woods, waiting for their chance. Just waiting, and waiting, and waiting…

“A lot,” he had said.

“But how many?” she insisted.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “A hell of a lot.”

Her hands trembled as several ghouls dropped out of the widening hole at the top of the stairs and landed on the top steps. Even Kate, sitting on the bottom step, must have felt them behind her, because she looked back at them as they slipped through like rain, one after another after another after another…

Will grabbed Lara’s wrist and dragged her back, his voice so forceful that it immediately seized her attention: “Go back to Carly and the kids and lock yourselves in their room! We’ll come for you! Go!”

She didn’t argue. There was no point.

She turned and ran, almost crashing into Rhonda standing behind her staring dumbly as the ghouls came in. Lara wasn’t sure if she pushed Rhonda out of the way or if the other woman just fell.

She just ran, turned the corner, and kept running.

The girls! Get to Elise and Carly and Vera!

She heard gunshots behind her. Loud, crashing gunshots, and knew they were from Will’s and Danny’s Glocks. They were using regular bullets, not silver, and regular bullets only slowed the ghouls down long enough to make them mad. The silver bullets were in the Armory, where they were always kept until they had to go out on missions.

She kept running, fighting the urge to look back, even as the gunshots rang out one after another. She ran as fast as she could, taking corners almost haphazardly, grabbing at walls to keep from sliding and spilling, willing herself to go even faster.

Familiar faces came out of rooms in front of her, flooding into the hallways one by one, woken up by the loud, undeniable sounds of gunshots. They couldn’t ignore it now. There were too many gunshots, one after another, rumbling through the facility like thunderclaps.

They looked at her with dazed eyes, confused by the sight of her barreling down the hallway toward them, gun in hand, passing them with reckless abandon.

What must her face look like to them?

But all she could think to do was scream at them as she ran: “Get back inside! They’re through the Door! Get back inside and lock your doors!”

Some listened and quickly retreated, but most just stared dumbly at her. She knew them all by name, had treated all of them in the Infirmary at one point or another.

She saw Sandra, whose little daughter, Mandy, Lara sometimes saw sneaking around the hallways by herself. Sandra looked stunned at the sight of Lara racing down the hallway. “My God, what’s happening? I heard gunshots…”

“Get back inside!” Lara yelled.

“What?” Sandra said, confused.

Mandy stood clutching at her mother’s leg. Lara didn’t care about that right now. She screamed at the top of her lungs down the hall, at Sandra and at the others still staring mutely after her.

“Get back inside! For God’s sake, go back inside and lock your doors! They’re coming! They’re through the Door! Get back inside now and lock your doors!”

She saw realization on some of those same faces, but not enough of them. Not nearly enough. Most of them continued to look after her as if she was shouting at them in a language they couldn’t understand.

“Goddammit, get back inside!”

She couldn’t waste any more time now, even as the gunfire started to move away from them, toward the other side of the facility.

Operations.

Will and Danny were heading toward Operations. But why?

Of course. The guns. That was where all the guns were. In the Armory.

Including the silver bullets…

She turned the final corner.

Carly was coming out of her room. She saw Lara and froze. “What’s going on?”

Before she could answer, there was another sound, cutting through the hallway like a scythe, pursuing Lara and finally reaching her. It stopped her in her tracks and she turned, looking back down the way she had come. Her gut constricted, and she had to remind herself to breathe.

“Is that…?” Carly began.

“Yes,” Lara said. “Come on.”

She turned and grabbed Carly’s arm and dragged her back into the room. Carly went along hesitantly, her eyes darting back up the hallway.

Lara slammed the door shut and twisted the lever up ninety degrees to lock it. She had no illusions that the door would hold. At least, not for very long. What she wouldn’t give to have one of those steel doors they had over at Operations.

Behind them, Elise and Vera were sitting on a small cot. They looked back at her, terror visible in their big eyes, even brave and usually stoic Vera.

“Lara?” Elise said, her voice soft, barely audible.

“It’ll be all right, sweetheart,” she said, trying to smile back at the girl. “Everything will be fine.”

“What do we do?” Carly asked, her voice visibly shaking.

“We stay here,” Lara said, remembering Will’s words. “Will and Danny will come for us. But we have to stay here. Whatever happens, we don’t go out that door. Whatever we hear, whatever knocks against it, we stay inside.”

Carly nodded, and they looked back toward the door and took a few steps away from it.

Then they heard it again, the same noise that had stopped Lara in her tracks in the hallway. It sounded louder this time, closer.

“Oh my God,” Carly whispered. “Girls, stay back. Stay back…”

The noise was screaming.

Screaming and gunfire…

…and more screaming…

CHAPTER 41 WILL

Thirty-six seconds.

That was how long it took the Door to open and close. Exactly thirty-six seconds. Will knew because he had timed it to the very second.

Thirty-six seconds.

It wasn’t necessarily a long time. He could do a lot of things in thirty-six seconds, including kill a man. Hell, he could kill a man in less time than that. A lot less time.

Thirty-six seconds was also more than enough time for a few hundred ghouls to get into the facility. His tiny shred of optimism was that there were so many of them out there, jammed into the clearing, that there might be a stampede effect, and they would somehow become a hindrance to one another as they all tried to make for the Door at the same time.

Bullshit.

It took the Door thirty-six seconds to open, then another thirty-six to close. However many made it through in the first thirty-six seconds, nearly the same amount would also get through before the Door could close back up. He had never been particularly good at math, and numbers were never his game, but even he knew that it was a hell of a lot.

The Door had been opening for two seconds when Danny raced forward and snatched the pendant from Kate.

It had been opening for four seconds when Will grabbed Lara’s wrist and screamed at her: “Go back to Carly and the kids and lock yourselves in their room! We’ll come for you! Go!”

Then Lara was gone, but he didn’t watch her go. He was too busy firing at the first ghoul that landed on the top steps, even as Danny backpedaled toward him, still pressing the pendant as if it were going to help. Danny being Danny though, that didn’t seem to deter him one bit.

The bullet didn’t stop the ghoul who glowered at him almost mockingly even as more ghouls fell through the opening above it.

Will backpedaled and shouted, “Danny, Armory!”

Danny slipped Ben’s pendant around his neck, turned, and ran. Will was right behind him, counting down the seconds in his head.

Thirty seconds…

He reached back and fired down the hall as the first two ghouls bounded down the steps after them. As he fired and ran, he saw Kate, staring back, blood pumping out of the hole in her chest.

The hole he was responsible for. He had done that. He had shot her. Had she done it on purpose? Made him shoot her? She pointed her gun at Lara. She must have known he wouldn’t allow that. Even if it hadn’t been Lara, even if it had been someone else, he would never have allowed her to shoot someone, not after she had already shot Ben and Rick and Davies.

But it had been Lara, which made the split-second decision a non-decision.

He watched Kate now, as the ghouls raced around her, like a black ocean parting, leaving her dry in its wake. The sight of it almost made him stop in his tracks.

Almost.

Then he was turning the corner, going left toward Operations, with Danny right beside him.

They hadn’t gone more than a few yards when the first ghoul slid around the corner. Danny shot it in the head, and the ghoul stumbled back and slammed into two others. He emptied the rest of his Glock into them, but they absorbed the bullets and kept coming. He might as well be throwing rocks at them.

No, that wasn’t true — rocks might have been more effective.

Twenty-five seconds…

Danny was running beside him. “The girls!” he screamed.

“Lara’s got them!” he shouted back.

He reloaded as he ran.

“You shot Kate!” Danny shouted.

“I know!”

“I can’t believe you shot your ex-girlfriend, man!”

Will glanced at Danny who was grinning, on the verge of laughing. “It was a rocky break-up!” he shouted back.

Danny burst out laughing, just as the ghouls caught up to them.

They emptied their Glocks back down the hall, watching the nearest ghouls cartwheel backward and fall, only to bounce back up onto their feet seconds later. The bullets weren’t stopping them, but the concussive force was enough to throw them off their balance.

Barely.

Twenty seconds…

He heard gunshots and screaming from other parts of the facility.

From the Quarters.

He prayed Lara made it to Carly and the girls in time. This was all going to be for nothing if they weren’t safe. She was important to him, and he was always better when he had something to protect, someone to protect. That was Lara, and he didn’t want to let go. Not now. Not after all he and Danny and the others had endured.

He had already lost Kate…

The radio bumped against his hip, and he fought the urge to reach for it and waste precious seconds trying to reach Lara. She must have made it to Carly by now. She had a good head start. Lara was smart. He was sure she made it.

Fifteen seconds…

He turned another corner and saw the Control Room up ahead. They ran past it. Were Ben and Rick still in there, where Kate had shot them and left them? He considered risking a glance but at the last second, decided against it. It would cost him precious seconds, and depending on what he saw, it could cost him more.

Not now…

They turned another corner, and each time they did the ghouls were gaining on them. Finally they turned yet another corner, and there, at the very end of the hallway, was the Armory with its steel door. Unlocked, like always.

At least, he hoped. Maybe Kate had locked it, to throw another obstacle in front of them. God, he hoped not.

Ten seconds…

He raced toward the Armory at full speed, loading his third and final magazine into the Glock. Danny was already on his second and last, and fired his final bullet, knocking a ghoul out of the air in mid-leap. Danny tossed the Glock to lighten his load.

Will shouted, “Go go go!”

Danny sped past him. Will slowed down long enough to throw his arm back and empty his final magazine into the mass of ghouls bounding up the hallway after them. He had forgotten how fast they were, how completely single-minded when they attacked.

Five seconds…

Danny reached the Armory and pulled the door open, lunging inside. Thank God it wasn’t locked. Danny was behind the door when it was Will’s turn.

He tossed the Glock, spun, and lunged inside. Danny slammed the door shut a heartbeat after he entered and turned the lever ninety degrees to lock it, and all it took was another heartbeat before the first ghoul crashed into the other side of the door, unable to stop its own forward momentum. Danny stumbled back, out of breath, as ghouls continued to batter at the door.

Zero.

“Now!” Will shouted.

Danny pulled Ben’s pendant out and pressed it. They kept perfectly still and listened to the gears grinding again after a brief pause.

The Door began closing, but it wouldn’t close completely for thirty-six seconds.

“How many you think got in?” Danny asked, doubling over at the waist, breathing heavily.

“A hell of a lot,” Will said, grabbing a rack of guns to catch his breath.

“That’s a lot.”

“That’s a hell of a lot.” He straightened up and looked around at the Armory, still gasping for air. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

He grabbed a pair of assault vests from a shelf and tossed one to Danny. He grabbed the magazines with silver bullets. They were marked with a white “X” along the sides. He grabbed a new Glock and reloaded it.

Their M4A1s were where they always left them, along a separate rack in a corner. They grabbed the rifles, loaded them, then grabbed the Remington 870s from another rack. They filled up on ammo, shoving in as many magazines and shells as the pouches would hold. He also grabbed a handful of glow sticks from a box.

“We going to a rave first?” Danny asked.

“The turbine,” Will said. “In case it goes…”

“Now you’re just being paranoid.”

“I’m being cautious.”

Danny shrugged, then grabbed a handful of glow sticks and stuffed them into one of his pouches, too. “Why the hell not.”

“Sheep,” Will grinned.

“Baaaaaaah,” Danny said.

As he fed shells filled with silver buckshot into the Remington, he heard the solid thoomp! as the Door finally closed shut above them, and suddenly the world was silent again, except for the hum of the turbine down the hallway from them.

The ghouls had stopped pounding on the door, and they could hear the sudden burst of violence — screams and gunshots — erupting around the facility. As one scream faded, another took its place. The gunshots were random in nature, quick shots followed by silence.

He forced himself to keep stuffing magazines into his pouch, trying his best to shut out the noises outside the Armory. There was nothing he could do for them now, for those caught outside when the ghouls flooded in.

“It’s been a while,” Danny said. “Maybe we should make sure they’re okay…?”

He nodded. It was rare when he could hear fear in Danny’s voice. Danny wasn’t afraid for himself, it was for Carly and Vera.

Will unclipped the radio and pressed it. “Lara, can you hear me? Come in.”

He waited, but there was no reply. Danny had stopped what he was doing to listen.

Will tried again: “Lara, come in. Can you hear me?”

Several excruciating seconds later they finally heard Lara’s voice: “Will, thank God you’re okay. Is Danny with you?”

“He’s with me.” He exchanged a relieved look with Danny, who went back to reloading and stuffing. “We’re in the Armory right now. Are you safe?”

“Yes,” Lara said, her voice trembling noticeably. “For now.”

“What about the girls? Did you get to Carly and the girls?”

“Yes, they’re here with me right now. We’re all fine for the time being.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“We’re locked inside Carly’s room,” Lara continued. “I can hear them outside, Will. They’re going from hallway to hallway, room to room, breaking down doors.” She paused, and he could hear her breathing as she tried to find the right words. “Will, I don’t think this door is going to hold them when they get to us.”

“We’re coming to get you, but until then, grab whatever you can find — the bed, the dresser, everything — and pile them in front of the door. Everything, Lara.”

“We’re doing that now. But please hurry.”

“We will.” He hesitated for a moment. “Lara…”

“Yes?”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay,” she said. “Hurry.”

“Soon,” he said again.

Will clipped the radio back on his belt. He looked over at Danny, who had moved back to the door, one ear pressed up against the thick steel.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Squat. Nada.”

“They’re going after easier targets,” Will said. “The Armory door is steel, and it’s not going to break anytime soon. But the living quarters have wooden doors. They’ll break sooner or later. Dead but not stupid, remember?”

“I’ll settle for dead. Again. Whatever.” He looked over at Will. “So what’s the plan?”

“What choice do we have?”

“You think we have enough ammo?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

“Can’t be helped. We have to get to the girls now.”

“Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

Will walked over to face the door. Danny wrapped his fingers around the lever, and they exchanged a brief look. He nodded and Danny mouthed down from five, four, three, two, one…

Danny twisted the lever and swung the door open, and Will immediately stepped through, shotgun swinging up, looking for a target.

He found an empty hallway instead, with dark black flesh sticking to the other side of the steel door. There were hundreds of bright red bloody footprints on the floor, and bloody handprints along the walls and ceiling.

The ceiling. What the hell?

Danny swung the Armory door shut, then stood beside him.

“Ready?” Will asked.

“Not yet, can I have a moment?”

“No. Let’s go.”

They moved forward.

He tried to maneuver around the bloody footprints on the floor, but after a while gave up and stepped into them instead. Danny did the same. There were going to be bloody prints all over the facility by the time tonight was over. There was no point in avoiding it.

As they neared the turn, a gunshot echoed through the hallways, followed by screams. Both had come from the other side of the facility — the Quarters. That was where everyone was now. It was night, and Operations was usually empty except for the Control Room, and maybe Peter in the Turbine Room, but even Peter had the good sense to sleep in his own cot every now and then. Will could hear and feel the hum of the turbine, so it was still running. Maybe Peter was in there now, safe.

They were five meters from the turn when he stopped, and Danny immediately froze next to him. They exchanged a brief look, Will hoping to see in Danny’s face that he heard it, too. Danny nodded.

Footsteps. Soft, padding footsteps. The kind generated by bare feet against concrete floors. There were a lot of them. Maybe a dozen. Maybe more.

He and Danny moved as one, turning the corner together, side by side. The hallway was slick with blood, and four ghouls were bent over a body. He couldn’t tell who it was right away. The face was covered in blood, and the arms and legs were twitching, flopping against the floor like fish on land. There was a gun nearby. A six-shot revolver.

Mike.

The ghouls covered Mike like a blanket, two suckling at his thighs while two more slurped greedily at his throat. Their dark, shrunken forms reminded him of children.

He’s still alive.

Mike’s fingers twitched in the pool of blood that gushed from his wounds. The slurp-slurp-slurp sound filled the hallway.

The nearest ghoul, drinking at Mike’s right thigh, looked up and saw them standing at the corner. Blood drooled from its chin, the lower half of its face covered in a thick layer of red paint, and its dark black eyes glinted in the bright ceiling lights. It looked drunk, lost in ecstasy.

Will shot it in the chest. The ghoul took the brunt of the buckshot and was thrown halfway down the hallway.

Danny shot the second ghoul, while Will shot the final two, though it only took one shell. The silver buckshot did their job with brutal efficiency, spreading between the two crouched figures, splattering thick black blood among the bright crimson red.

He and Danny waited for more ghouls to appear in the hallway, to respond to the loud booms of gunfire, but to their surprise none came. Instead, only silence once their shotgun blasts finished their fading echoes.

“You think they heard that?” Danny asked.

“Nah,” he said.

He walked quickly toward Mike, whose eyes were still open, though he didn’t look as if he had control of his body anymore. Mike was a mechanic, he remembered, who spent most of his free time up on the surface fixing the vehicles they used for their runs. He was a nice enough guy who insisted on hanging onto his revolver. It was a.38 Smith and Wesson and, to hear Mike tell it, a gift from his father, passed down through the generations. Will wasn’t sure about that. The gun looked pretty new to him, but Mike was a good guy, and Will didn’t feel like calling him on his story.

He stood over Mike now, looking down at the blood-splattered face, wondering how he could still be alive with so much of his blood covering the long hallway. Mike’s lips quivered. Will wasn’t sure if he was trying to say something or if it was just muscle spasms. Large, gaping wounds ran along Mike’s neck and legs. His neck had been easier to get to, but in order to get at his thighs the ghouls had chewed through his pajama pants. It was a grisly sight.

Danny said, “Want me to do it?”

“No,” Will said.

He drew his Glock and shot Mike once in the forehead. The body went still on the floor as a thin trickle of blood dribbled out underneath Mike’s head, and gravity pulled it into a larger pool nearby.

They continued up the hallway, stepping through puddles of red and black blood, slick against the soles of their boots. He strained to hear, but couldn’t detect anything around the turn up ahead. There were two more turns, he remembered, recalling the facility’s layout in his mind, then the Entrance Hallway beyond that.

And from there, the Quarters on the other side of the facility.

Lara and the girls, after that…

They took the corner without encountering another ghoul, entering an empty hallway covered in as much blood as the previous one. This one also had a single shoe. A sandal. Turned on its side, the manufacturer’s name — Roxy — visible in bold black letters.

Rhonda’s.

They kept moving and reached the Control Room again. This time he stopped and peered inside with the shotgun. He knew what he was going to see before he saw it.

There were two ghouls inside, crouched over a pair of bodies on the floor. The greedy, thick slurping sound preceded the sight of them. He drew his Glock and shot the first ghoul in the back, and as it fell the other one lifted its head in curiosity. He shot out its right eye. It flopped to the floor, splashing tainted blood everywhere, and lay still.

He paused to look across the room, at Ben and Rick, their bodies laid out on the floor in awkward poses. He could only see the back of Ben’s head, the patch of blood where Kate had shot him. There was a hole in Rick’s chest.

Kate, what did you do?

Silent static played on the monitors along the walls, and he guessed it had something to do with the fire ax sticking out of the computer dashboard. The large button that opened and closed the Door was gone, destroyed into little pieces, wiring sticking out like innards. The biggest piece of the broken red button was underneath a shelf at the back, slightly hidden by a fallen chair.

Danny called from outside in the hallway: “We good?”

“Yeah.”

He went back outside to rejoin Danny.

“Ben inside?” Danny asked.

He nodded. “Rick, too.”

“How the fuck did she get the drop on Ben?”

“I don’t think he saw it coming. I didn’t.”

“I don’t think any of us did.” He shook his head. “Shit, Carly’s going to take it hard.”

“She’ll get through it.”

“You’re not the one who’s going to have to hear about it.”

“You’re all heart, Danny.”

“I know. It’s a curse.”

They continued up the hallway, sticking close together, avoiding as much of the blood on the floor as possible. They had already tracked bloody boot prints in their wake, like some kind of perverse follow-the-bloody-tracks game played by children. Sick and demented children.

He tried not to think too much about it. During battles, it had always been easy for him to shut out the gratuitous details and concentrate entirely on the work at hand. He did that now, though seeing the heavy concentration of blood ahead didn’t make it any easier.

They turned another corner, and as they did, Will froze.

Danny had done the same next to him.

The ghouls were stuffed into this section of the facility leading into the Entrance Hallway like pebbles on a beach. Possibly four dozen of them. Black, shrunken things perched on the floor, as if waiting their turn for some purpose.

As Will and Danny turned the corner, the first pair of dark black eyes shifted to greet them. Then the rest turned, almost in unison.

“Fuck me,” Danny whispered.

The first ghoul spun its thin body and started toward them, and Will blew it in half, pieces of the shotgun shell’s silver buckshot spraying two other ghouls around it. Even as those three fell, there were already ten scrambling over them.

They opened fire, backing up, and ghouls slobbered the floors and ceiling with black blood. Will fired, racked, fired, and racked again. He was moving on pure muscle memory, and the target environment in front of him was so rich he didn’t even have to aim.

Still, the sheer number pushed him back.

This must be what it’s like trying to hold back the ocean.

Each time one fell, five more took its place. There were too many of them, and more were coming every second, drawn to the fight by the loud crash of shotgun blasts.

More ghouls came around the corner, and because it was impossible to pass the thick mass already in front of them, the newcomers leaped onto the walls and ceilings, running on top of each other’s heads, until there was no grayness left. It was just black — a flood of tainted, black death.

Will shouted, “Go go go!”

Danny fired his final shot and turned and ran, Will right behind him. He loaded as he ran, shoving shells into the long shotgun, but it was a difficult task, and he managed only two shells before the Control Room appeared in front of them, its door invitingly open.

“Control Room!” he shouted.

Danny was well ahead of him and already making a beeline for the steel door.

Will was halfway to the Control Room when he could feel them almost on top of him.

He twisted, and immediately the face of a ghoul was inches from his own. He struck out with the Remington and caught the creature across its face while it was still in mid-air, the shotgun’s stock nearly sinking completely into the ghoul’s cheek, cratering the brittle bone underneath and tossing the creature across the hallway and into the wall like a flesh-and-bone piñata.

He backpedaled and fired, wasting the two shells he had just managed to reload into the obscene, surging black wall behind him. He obliterated the closest five ghouls with one shot, then six more from the second wave that scrambled over them.

Danny screamed behind him, “Let’s go! You want an invitation?”

He turned and ran full speed, and because the shotgun was too heavy he tossed it aside. He could feel them almost on top of him again, made the calculations and leaped the last two meters.

He dove through the door like a human rocket and crashed into the fallen chair and slammed his back into the legs of the dashboard even as he skidded across the concrete surface. He heard the solid thoom! of the steel door slamming shut behind him and the ratcheting sound of the lever locking in place. But even as he came to a crushing stop against the dashboard, grimacing with pain, he could hear the simultaneous hissing above and behind him and knew that two of the ghouls had managed to follow him inside.

Almost instantly, the ghouls outside threw themselves against the door, raining repeated blows on it, one after another. But the steel door held as it was supposed to and didn’t budge an inch.

He scrambled up from the floor, eyes flashing around the room, before finally settling on the ghoul hanging from a monitor above him like some sort of monkey. Will slid the cross-knife out of its sheath and caught the ghoul in the throat as it dropped on top of him. He was driven back down to the floor, the ghoul’s sticky black blood dripping onto his chest. He lifted it off — it was shockingly light, almost entirely bag and bones — and flung it away with utter distaste.

He glanced over at the door, where Danny had grabbed the other ghoul by the throat and had jammed his cross-knife through its forehead, killing it on the spot. Danny stepped back, letting the creature slide down the wall, leaving a thick trail of splotchy, dark liquid behind, before collapsing to the floor in a pile.

Danny looked over and managed a grin. “Well, that plan didn’t work.”

“No shit,” he said, catching his breath as he pulled himself up from the floor again.

“You got a Plan B? At this point, I might settle for a Plan Z. The girls aren’t going to last long with that door.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking…”

“Think faster.”

He pulled up Rick’s chair and sat down heavily on it. He wanted to sit for a few hours and gather his strength, but his mind was already racing through options. So many options, and most of them weren’t going to get them more than a few meters beyond the Control Room.

The continued pounding against the door didn’t help.

Danny, frustrated, kicked the steel door and shouted, “Shut the fuck up! The man’s trying to think in here!”

Will grinned.

He looked over to his left, at Ben and Rick’s bodies, the two dead ghouls he had killed earlier lying nearby.

“Well?” Danny said.

“Thinking, thinking…”

Danny sat down on the floor, the cross-knife dangling between his knees. He looked tired, covered in thick clumps of flesh and blood and sweat.

Will pushed himself back up on his feet. He always thought better on his feet. He looked over at the destroyed dashboard, then shook his head. “I’m open to suggestions.”

The ghouls at the door suddenly went quiet, and Will and Danny stared at it for a moment.

Danny got up and walked over and pressed his ear against the door. “They’re playing possum. I can hear them moving around outside. Smart fuckers.”

“How many?”

“All of them?”

“That’s not good.”

“Yeah, what I said.”

Will wiped the cross-knife against his leg and slid it back into its sheath. He walked around the small room, taking in every inch of it from floor to ceiling. There wasn’t exactly a lot of space, and it only took him twenty seconds to cover the entire room. As soon as he was done, the finality of it, the sudden lack of viable options, drew a disappointed sigh from him.

“I don’t want to hear that,” Danny said behind him.

“Thinking, thinking…”

He looked over at the shelf. Maybe he had missed something there. Ham radios, electronic parts, and a stack of manuals. A lot of things that couldn’t help him get to Lara and Carly and the girls right now. He turned away from the shelf and looked up at the ceiling. If there was nothing down here that could help, maybe he could find some possibilities up there.

Then he saw it.

He walked toward the back right corner and stood below it.

Danny said behind him, “What is it?”

“Harold Campbell designed the facility to be his own private bomb shelter. Built most of it to his personal specifications. But even he had to follow standard building codes, because they became standard for a reason.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Will pointed up at a two-by-two foot metal grate on the ceiling, near the corner. “Ventilation ducts. They cool and warm the facility. And it runs all along the structure. Through every hallway, every room, and every living quarters.”

Danny walked over. “So what are you saying? We’re going to Die Hard our way over to the girls? We’re in the middle of a crisis, with thousands of blood-sucking ghouls outside our door, and you’re looking to an action movie from the ’80s as inspiration?”

“It worked for John McClane.”

“True enough,” Danny said. “Okay, assuming it works and we can get to the girls that way. Then what? How do we get out of here? There are still a lot of those fucks stuck in the facility with us.”

“We just have to survive until morning.” He nodded at Ben’s pendant hanging from Danny’s neck. “Then we open the Door. Let sunlight kill as many as possible and we finish off the rest. As long as we can keep accessing the Armory, load up on the silver, we can hold out indefinitely. Or damn near close.”

“Is this Plan Z? I hate your Plan Z.”

“What happened at the bank? They gave up after we killed enough of them. We have a hell of a lot more ammo here, and every day we’ll be able to close the Door and whittle them down. We’re not the ones stuck in here, Danny, they are. We control access to the Door. We have the advantage.”

“Right. We have the advantage.” Danny didn’t look convinced.

Will grinned at him. “It’s just a matter of perspective.”

“What perspective? That you’re insane?”

“Shut up and look for rope. Or strings.”

“What the hell do we need ropes for?”

Will opened one of his pouches and pulled out a handful of glow sticks. “First rule of survival: stay out of the dark.”

CHAPTER 42 KATE

The fact that it didn’t hurt at all surprised her. She had prepared for this moment, expected it to be the most painful moment of her life. She thought it might be like giving birth — not that she knew what that was like — only more permanent.

She knew it would come to this, because she wanted it so. With her very last breath in the split second she heard Will shoot, she would press the button and it would be done. She would be dead, but not before she pushed the final pieces into place. Literally, in this case. Instead, she wasn’t dead — she only felt a mild sensation on the bullet’s impact. Then she pressed Ben’s pendant, and the gears cranked up and the Door behind her started to open.

The people in the facility treated the Door with a reverence that was justified. It was the one thing standing between them and what waited outside. The things that she had just let in…

She stumbled back and somehow ended up sitting on the bottom step. Danny appeared, suddenly standing in front of her and snatched the pendant out of her hand. She didn’t even realize Ben’s string necklace was gone until she saw Danny pressing it over and over again.

Danny, you know better than that, she wanted to say.

Or maybe she did say it. She couldn’t be sure, because everything looked slightly off-kilter and even surreal, and she felt as if she was looking at the world through a fog. Her perception became skewed and a feeling of floating on air, light as a feather enveloped her. She hadn’t planned for that.

One moment Will was there, looking at her quizzically, as if trying to understand what was happening, what she had done, and then he was gone. Danny was gone, too, and Lara, and Rhonda, and those two guys Kate had never made the effort to get to know. There might have been gunshots, but her senses were dulled, and she couldn’t really tell if the gunshots were new or if she was just replaying Will shooting her.

Where were Will and the others going, and why? But then remembered: Oh, right, the Door is opening…

She didn’t really hear them, because they never made a lot of noise, but she could feel them coming down around her, the rippling in the air, in response to their movements. There must have been a lot of them, and there was going to be more as the Door widened farther.

Even now, she could feel them gathering around her, flowing down the steps. Their numbers must have been something to see. She wished she could turn her head and look, but she couldn’t.

Or maybe she did. She didn’t really remember.

She only recalled a sense of finality, of, at last, tranquility. A job well done. A final task performed.

Doing things with her body was very hard. Probably because she was dying. Or maybe it was for another reason.

This is what happens when you die, right? Nothing becomes clear. Everything becomes difficult, muddy, even the simplest things like turning one’s head…or listening.

Or remembering. Or perceiving what was happening around her. Were the ghouls really passing her by without touching her?

Yes. That seemed to be the case, though she didn’t understand why. They didn’t even pay attention to her. She could see thin, clattering bony feet appearing out of thin air in front of her before disappearing again. They didn’t acknowledge her.

Now this is odd. I didn’t expect this, either.

She stopped fighting the ache in her arms and legs and leaned her head back against the steps. She felt the cold concrete, her first real exterior sensation in a while, press up against the back of her neck, and it sent goose bumps through her. She had forgotten what that felt like. She arched her neck some more and lay still, and looked up and saw nothing but cold, calm, soothing night sky above her.

The ghouls were still coming down, but they weren’t using the steps anymore. She could see dozens — hundreds — of them simply plummeting, like bats falling out of the night around her. Coming down from the moon itself, it seemed. Which made for quite a sight. They weren’t so ugly when you stopped being afraid of them.

They looked almost…poetic.

And they continued to ignore her, never once giving her a second look.

Where was Will at that moment? Will and Danny. There were loud, booming sounds throughout the facility. It took her a while to figure it out, but she eventually did.

Gunshots. They’re fighting back.

What’s the point? It’s over. They should just accept it.

It’s over…

She had accepted it. She wanted to tell them to stop wasting their time. This was their world now. They, the humans, were the intruders. All she had done was usher in the end sooner, that’s all. The inevitable ending that she knew was coming. They should thank her. Or at least, realize what she was doing and embrace it.

There isn’t any pain at all. I’ve been shot. There should be pain, shouldn’t there?

Something appeared above her, entering her line of vision and taking away a big chunk of the pitch-black night sky and the beautiful, round moon high above. It was a face. A thin, oval-shaped face. Near the center, under the forehead, were two very bright blue eyes.

The blue-eyed ghoul…

It stared down at her, the first ghoul to accept that she was there at all. It looked so different from the others that for a moment she wondered if someone was playing a trick on her, that it might be Will or Danny, always the trickster, in a Halloween mask trying to prank her. In her clouded, hazy mind, it was a very real possibility that she couldn’t ignore.

Haha, Danny, you got me. Funny.

But it wasn’t Danny. Or Will. It was the blue-eyed ghoul.

She remembered seeing it from a distance at the bank outside of Cleveland all those months ago, back on the night Luke and Ted died. Really, they should all have died that night, but Will and Danny fought like animals to keep them alive, and they were saved once again by Will’s Plan Z.

That’s such an awful name. I could have given you a better name than that, Will, if you’d asked me first.

And for what? This? Living underground in artificial light, never to see the night sky in person again. Never to feel the comforting cool breeze of darkness against your skin. It wasn’t really life, it was a prison of their own making.

What’s the point?

The blue-eyed ghoul was looking down at her. Was it smiling? Had what was left of its thin lips moved in a way that could possibly be interpreted as a smile? Its eyes were so bright. She didn’t think she had ever seen such piercing blue eyes, even before The Purge. They seemed to almost glow, in fact. Or maybe that was just her imagination. The blue-eyed ghoul she had seen outside of the bank looked like it had dead, pale blue eyes. Or maybe she was remembering it all wrong.

It reached down, its fingers rough and scratchy, like sandpaper, touching the sides of her head. She felt as if cardboard were touching her, not flesh, rubbing against her skin, cutting into her, though she didn’t detect blood. The ghoul lifted her head off the steps, and it bent down, and she felt pain—I can still feel pain? — lance through her body as it closed its mouth over her neck.

She closed her eyes as the blue-eyed ghoul dug deeper with its teeth. It had punched through her skin seconds ago, and she could almost hear the sound of blood draining out of her into the ghoul’s mouth.

This must be what Donald had felt in his final seconds…

Then she remembered what Donald had looked like afterwards, and panic filled her. This wasn’t what she wanted. Not to die like this. To become one of them. She had only wanted to free the others, free herself.

Oh, Will, why didn’t you finish the job? Why did you leave me alive?

Goddamn you, Will, you couldn’t even do that much for me? I asked so little of you…

Then she heard something else — the ghoul’s blood flowing into her, and it reminded her of wild streams splashing across an open range. Was this what happened with Donald? With the others that were bitten? She didn’t know. No one knew. The only people who knew were the ones that had been bitten, and they didn’t come back to spread the tale.

The blue-eyed ghoul pulled back, and she looked up and saw her blood staining its teeth and much of its lower jaw. It had nice teeth, not jagged or brown-stained or yellowed like the others. It wiped at the blood clinging to its jawline with the back of a strangely strong-looking right hand, then licked it with a long — unnaturally long — tongue that darted out like a reptile’s, making a flickering noise against the air.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice that wasn’t hers, talked to her, clear as day, as if the person was standing right next to her ear:

“Thank you for opening the door, Kate.”

She stared up at the blue-eyed ghoul hovering above her. Had it said something? No, it hadn’t, she was sure of that because she hadn’t seen its lips move. In fact, they were still shaped as if smiling, though it was hard to tell because its lips were so shriveled and constricted. Could they even move to form words?

And the voice she heard clearly came from inside her head.

“What’s happening to me?” she said, and she found that she had more strength than a few minutes ago. It was coming back. Slowly at first…

“You know who I am, Kate,” the blue-eyed ghoul said inside her head.

You’re in my head.

“Yes,” the voice said.

It could hear her thoughts?

How are you in my head?

“You know how, Kate.”

This is how you communicate. With the others.

“Yes.”

How is this possible?

“How is any of this possible? Why do you ask silly questions, after all you’ve seen?”

Will thought you might have a hive mind.

“He’s right. He’s very smart for a soldier. We should have killed him back in the city. He’s very dangerous, your Will.”

I’m not dead. Why haven’t you killed me?

“Because I still need you, Kate. You’ve been chosen.”

Your voice. Why does your voice sound so familiar?

Kate saw the wide-open pitch-black sky above the ghoul start to get smaller, and she realized the Door was closing. She hadn’t heard the gears stop or restart, which was strange, but then she was so preoccupied with the blue-eyed ghoul inside her head it probably wasn’t so surprising after all. She had a hard time concentrating on anything outside her mind. It all felt out of her reach, hard to grasp, and as each second passed, the blue-eyed ghoul’s voice inside her head became clearer.

I know you. I know your voice.

“Yes,” it said.

Another flood of ghouls was rushing inside the facility, leaping and darting behind the blue-eyed ghoul, hurrying through the closing Door. Kate hadn’t heard the creature talking to them, but she thought it had. She didn’t know how she knew it, she just knew.

You told them to hurry.

“Yes,” it said inside her head.

I didn’t hear you.

“You can only hear what I want you to hear, Kate. I am the master, you are the slave. You will learn first.”

You said I was chosen.

“You were.”

Why is your voice so familiar?

The blue-eyed ghoul’s lips curved into a half smile. It seemed almost human for a second, despite the black, shrunken skin that draped over its prominent skull. Why did it even bother with the skin? There was no fat or any meat underneath anymore.

“It gets cold,” the blue-eyed ghoul said, answering her unasked question. “And it serves other purposes. You’ll learn soon enough.”

Are you going to kill me?

“Why would I do that, Kate? After all you’ve done for us.”

I did it for them. For Will and the others. To free them.

“Of course you did.”

She felt a strange sensation ripple through her, and she found herself sitting up on the steps. Suddenly the aching pain in her chest, where Will had shot her, didn’t hurt so much anymore. She felt unnaturally energetic, more alive than she had ever been, though she couldn’t explain how. She stood up and found that her body was lighter, and there was an energy boiling up inside, prepare to explode if she didn’t expel it.

She looked back at the blue-eyed ghoul, standing a few steps higher behind her. It wore no clothes, not that it mattered. It had ceased to possess any semblance of sex organs. It didn’t need them. The ghouls didn’t procreate like the living.

“What did you do to me?” she asked. Her voice was calm. Everything about her was calm, and she couldn’t quite explain that either.

“I gave you what you wanted.”

“I didn’t want this.”

“Yes you did, Kate. When I looked at you outside the bank, I knew this was what you wanted. To give up. To give in.”

She heard gunshots behind her and turned as a swarm of ghouls rushed from the living quarters, past her and toward the Operations area. As each shotgun blast thundered through the hallways, she felt a stabbing pain originating from somewhere inside the deep recesses of her mind.

She reached up and pressed her palms against her temple, hoping it would help control the pain, but it did nothing. The pounding continued unabated and the shearing sensation only increased in volume.

“What’s happening? My head…” Just speaking was painful.

“Pain, Kate,” the blue-eyed ghoul said inside her head. “It is the pain of your brothers and sisters dying. You’re linked to us now. To me. To them. To every one of them. You feel what they feel, until you learn to control it. Eventually you’ll see what they see, hear what they hear, and bend them to your will, as easily as you breathe.”

Your voice…

“You know who I am, Kate. You know.”

The pain shot through her every time she heard a shotgun blast. Will and Danny with those shotgun shells loaded with silver buckshot. Will’s idea again. Will, who had come up with the perfect way to kill them. He was the bane of their existence, their one road bump since The Purge.

“Yes,” it said inside her head. “You understand now.”

“Why me?”

It smiled at her. Truly, truly smiled.

“Because you’re perfect, Kate. For what’s coming next. Just like I was perfect for the beginning, you will lead us into the ending. You, Kate, you…”

CHAPTER 43 LARA

The screaming got to her. She could stand the gunshots, the loud banging, and even the sounds of doors crashing.

But the screaming. The screaming got to her.

She hadn’t left the door since it began, though she lost track of just how long she had been standing there with the Glock gripped tightly in her hand. Seconds and minutes seemed to merge until she couldn’t judge time anymore. Fear, anticipation, and creeping terror all converged into one bubbling emotion that threatened to engulf her. She did the best she could to stave it off, but it was getting harder with every passing second that Will didn’t show up.

Where are you, Will?

Carly, who was pacing the room behind her, had put her handgun away in the Armory a long time ago. Lara never felt truly safe without hers, which was odd to admit given how she grew up, in a household where guns were seen as cruel and unnecessary things.

Behind them, Elise and Vera sat on the floor, backs against the far wall. Both girls were silent, their hands entwined. She wanted to tell them that everything would be all right, but she didn’t, because she didn’t know everything would be all right, and she was afraid that the truth would come rushing out if and when her voice trembled.

Looking at Elise, holding tightly onto Vera’s hands, Lara felt utterly depressed and guilty. What had she done? She had “saved” the girl only to bring her here.

What was that old saying? Out of the frying pan, into the fire…

She listened to the ghouls crashing against the door, trying to get in. How many of them were out there right now? Hundreds? Possibly thousands. How many had been able to enter the Door when it opened and closed?

Too many. Just too many…

She changed the gun from her right hand to her left to keep her fingers loose. Her right hand had become numb, the fingers gripped around the handle turned white. She flexed them while listening to the ghouls assault the door, every maddening thoom! loosening the door from its hinges.

She could almost feel the door slowly, inch by inch, coming looser with each strike. It had been so long since the bank that she forgot how terrifying it felt to know that the undead were right outside the door, trying to get in. She could almost feel the wall trembling each time, but maybe that was her imagination working overtime.

They had piled every piece of furniture they could find against the door, but she had no illusions that it would hold forever. The beds were mostly metal frames and soft mattresses like in other rooms, but at least in Carly’s, one designed for a family, there were other, heavier furniture. The table and dresser took a lot of effort to move, and they left jagged, shallow gutters in the concrete floor in their wake. They also added an ugly red felt armchair that Danny liberated from the Starch Public Library. Carly hated the thing because it was so wide and heavy and took up so much space.

“Thank God he never got around to removing this ugly thing,” Carly said as they grunted with the effort of pushing the armchair across the door.

They topped the pile with the mattresses and bed frames.

Lara was intimately aware that the door in her room wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes against the ghouls. But here, in Carly’s room, they had a chance. It wasn’t much of one, but there was a chance.

Hurry up, Will. Hurry, for God’s sake.

After the barrage of blood-curling screams in the first few minutes of the siege, things seemed to calm down. The screams were rare now, though they still wafted up and down the hallway, usually preceded by gunshots.

Women’s screams. Men’s, too.

She tried to remember how many people were inside the facility. More than twenty at last count. Ben and Rick were dead, killed by Kate. Not many left now. Soon it would just be them, in this one room, waiting for salvation that might never come.

Hurry, Will, hurry.

She abandoned the door, tucked the Glock in her waistband, and walked across the room and sat down next to the girls. Carly came over and sat down next to her, until all four of them were sitting in a row, eyes zeroing in like lasers on the door and the trembling pile of furniture pressed up against it. Their last line of defense. Their only line of defense.

“Anything from the guys?” Carly asked.

“No,” Lara said.

She unclipped the radio from her belt. It had been a while since she last heard from Will. There was a series of shotgun blasts, and for a moment she was jubilant, expecting Will and Danny to reach them any moment now. But then the blasts stopped, and there was only silence.

“Maybe we should try calling them,” Carly said.

“They might be in the hallways. If the radio starts blurting…” She shook her head. “We need to wait for them.”

“I heard shotguns a couple of minutes ago. That was them, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then it went quiet…”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Lara said. “They’ll come. Will promised. And he’s never broken his promise yet. They’ll come. We just have to wait for them.”

The radio in Lara’s hand mercifully let out a loud squawk that made both women jump.

Will’s voice came through, in his usual calm — maddeningly so, at times — manner: “Lara.”

“Thank God you’re alive,” she said. Carly tensed beside her. Lara said into the radio, “Danny?”

“He’s fine,” Will said. “We’re both fine. How is everyone over there?”

“Scared. Where are you?”

“We’re in the Control Room. We couldn’t get through the hallways, there were too many. We don’t have enough bullets to clear them all out.”

Her heart sank. She was hoping Will would have made some progress through the facility, but she knew the Control Room was well on the other side, in Operations. It was near the Armory, where Will and Danny had gone for their weapons.

“What now?” she asked.

“I need you guys to hang on a little while longer. We’re coming.”

“When, Will?” She had managed to keep her voice calm, afraid it would crack at any moment.

“The air conditioner ducts,” Will said. “They run through the facility. There should be a grate near the back of your room.”

She stood up and walked toward the back. She saw it in the corner, a two-by-two foot metal grate that was pushing out warm air to balance out the cold night. “I see it.”

“Can you find a way to open it?”

“We’ll try.”

“We’re on our way, but if we don’t get there in time, if the door doesn’t look like it’s going to hold, you know what to do.”

“Use the air ducts.”

“You’ll have to try to make your way to us and chances are we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. The Control Room has a steel door, so it’ll last indefinitely.”

“Where are you now, Will?”

“We’re coming as fast as we can. Hold on tight.”

“I’ll see you soon?”

“Yes,” he said. Then he added, “Lara.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not letting you go that easily.”

She smiled. “Hurry.”

The radio went quiet, and she laid it on a nearby shelf.

Carly said, “I should tell you something. I’m afraid of confined spaces.”

“I should tell you something, too,” Lara said. “So am I.”

They exchanged nervous grins.

Lara looked back at the grate. Carly stood next to her, taking it in as well. The ceiling was about eight feet high, at least two heads taller than either one of them.

“How do we open it?” Carly asked. “We don’t have the tools, and we can’t even reach it if we did.”

“Chair,” Lara said.

She hurried back to the door and untangled a metal chair from the barricade. The chair was mostly metal tubes and a mesh seat and was uncomfortable to sit in. Every room had one.

She put the flimsy chair down and put a foot gingerly on it, testing to make sure it would hold her weight. She was glad she hadn’t gained weight since The Purge. Not hard to do given that her appetite rarely extended past survival mode, and she ate mostly for the calories.

When she was certain the chair would hold, she climbed up and took a second to orient herself. The chair wobbled a bit with her full weight on it, but held. It gave her an extra foot and a half, and she was able to touch the metal grate with her hands. It felt warm, and a hot wind brushed against her face. They would have to crawl in that.

Better than down here…

“What do you see?” Carly asked.

Lara took in the entire grate. It was a perfect square shape, exactly two feet on all four sides. The grates were designed to have air flow through them, and she could insert her fingers through the slots. She tried jerking the grate free, but it didn’t budge. Not even a little. There were flathead screws along all four sides, one in each corner, and additional screws between the corners, making a total of eight.

She looked down at Carly. “I don’t suppose you have any screwdrivers lying around?”

Carly gave her a wry look. “It never occurred to me to stock up on screwdrivers, sorry.”

Lara climbed back down. “Well, we’re going to need a screwdriver. Or something that can work like one.”

There was a loud bang! behind her, and turning, she saw that one of the mattress frames had tipped over, pushed back by a particular massive hit on the door. Immediately, the girls gasped, and Carly gave her a pale look that didn’t try to hide the horror rushing through her.

“It’s all right,” Lara said, “the door’s still holding.”

Carly nodded, though there was no relief on her face. The door was holding now, but for how long? That last hit was hard enough for the concussive force to travel through the barricade and knock back the mattress frame. How badly had it damaged the door?

She said, “Everyone, I need your help. Start looking around the room, find anything that we could use to take out the screws. A ruler. A knife. Anything long and flat. Okay? Let’s go.”

Elise and Vera got up and started to look. Carly did the same. Lara picked up the mattress frame and pushed it back against the barricade, over the mattress that usually went on top of the frame. They were beating against the door again, and with each strike, more and more of the vibrations came through.

They’re getting stronger by the second…

“Lara,” Carly said behind her, walking over with a metal spoon. “Will this work?”

“I think it might.”

She took the spoon and climbed back on the chair. She didn’t really know if it would work, but it was worth a try. She had seen movies where people used spoons to turn screws. But those were movies…

She positioned the spoon underneath the nearest screw and was elated to see that it slipped into the groove. She began to turn it. The screw was in there tight, and it took a lot of effort just to turn it counterclockwise even a little bit. But it moved — that was the important thing. It moved.

She closed out the sounds of heavy banging behind her — at one point the bed frame fell again, and Carly rushed over to reposition it — and concentrated on turning the screw until she had it half free. She tried using her fingers to twist it out the rest of the way, but it wouldn’t budge. Not even a little bit. So she went back to the spoon.

Finally, the first screw fell to the floor. It landed and clattered away into a corner. She thought she heard Carly and the girls breathe a sigh of relief.

One down, seven to go…

She started working on the second screw, even as another vicious bang! sent the mattress and the bed frame tumbling to the floor behind her. Lara didn’t look back. She heard Carly hurry to take care of it and the girls rushing over to help.

She concentrated on the second screw. It was only halfway out, but her arms were already starting to ache from being extended upward toward the ceiling. The constant heat blasting against her face didn’t help, but it didn’t have nearly as much impact as the strain building in her arms.

The second screw fell to the floor, and the third one came out much easier than the first two. She had a harder time with the fourth and fifth screws because her arms were getting tired. They felt like jelly, like pieces of spaghetti trying to hold up something heavy. The remaining center screws held the grate in place as she worked around the edges instead of taking them all out in order. This way, she wouldn’t have to worry about holding up the grate until she was almost at the end.

She was out of breath by the time she got the sixth screw out. Now with only two screws left, the grate started to creak and shift against her grip. She tried gripping one of the edges and ripping the whole thing out of the ceiling with brute force, but she couldn’t shift the grate even a little bit, despite pulling on it with all her strength.

So much for that idea.

She went to work on the seventh screw, and by now her feet had become nearly as fatigued as her arms. She gritted through the pain and tried to think of something else. She thought of Elise, and Vera, and Carly. Of Will and Danny, making their way over to them. Of the ghouls outside their door this very moment, salivating at the thought of coming in. It was that last thought that drove her on, made her continue twisting the long-dented spoon in the same counterclockwise motion long after she lost feeling in both her arms.

Behind her, another loud crash sent the dresser tumbling to the floor. Carly expelled a loud gasp.

“Lara,” Carly said behind her. “Hurry.”

Lara heard everything she needed to hear in the younger woman’s voice. “I know,” she grimaced, concentrating on the screw.

It was almost out…

“Girls,” Carly said behind her, “I need your help with this. Whenever one of these things fall, we need to get it back up right away. Understand?”

Lara couldn’t make out the girls’ mumbled replies, but all three worked diligently behind her, constantly moving, pushing the heavier objects back against the door, even as the relentless pounding continued and seemed to get louder. It was as if they knew they were getting closer, that the door wasn’t going to last much longer. Lara didn’t have to ask how the door looked. She knew how it looked. She could hear it, feel the wood starting to buckle against the constant, unrelenting pressure.

Not too long now…

She forced herself through the screaming pain and hurried with the eighth and final screw, her left hand holding up the grate in the middle, fingers splayed out to get as much coverage as possible. When the eighth screw finally came free and clattered to the floor, the grate suddenly felt as if it had gained 100 pounds and it was all she could do to drop the spoon and quickly grab at the grate with both hands before it plummeted down and bashed into her face.

Lara climbed down from the chair and practically dropped the grate on the floor. It fell heavily, chipping the concrete.

Carly looked across the room at her and smiled. It was the first real smile Carly had managed since they ran inside the room. “Nice work.”

“Thanks,” Lara said. “I don’t think I can move my arms, though.”

Carly laughed, but stopped when another massive bang! nearly tore the door from its frame. The mattress, nightstand, and bed all toppled against the assault, and the ugly red felt armchair moved at least half a foot. Carly quickly pushed the chair back against the door as the girls picked up what they could. Lara rushed to help.

Come on, Will, where the hell are you?

She heard a scraping sound above her and looked back as a black, dark figure fell through the air conditioner duct and landed inside the room in a crouch. She nearly had a heart attack when the figure stood up, a shotgun slung over his back and pouches of ammo jiggling around his waist and chest.

Danny grinned at her. “Hey, I was just in the neighborhood and heard there was a bunch of girls who needed a manly hand?”

Carly rushed over and leaped into his arms. He grabbed her and laughed, then kissed her passionately on the mouth. Vera and Elise giggled. Danny was wearing one of those glowing sticks dangling from a string around his neck…the same string with Ben’s pendant attached at the end.

Lara said, “Get a room.”

A voice from above her chipped in, “Preferably not this one.”

She looked up. Will was draped through the duct opening in the ceiling. He had another glow stick dangling from a makeshift necklace — just a cheap piece of string, really. They had been using the illumination of the sticks to maneuver through the dark air ducts, she realized.

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Hey yourself.” Then, putting on his serious face: “We should probably get moving. That door doesn’t sound like it’s going to hold for much longer.”

Another crash tossed most of the barricade to the floor, spilling the nightstand and the mattresses and bed frames in all directions. The felt armchair, amazingly, rocked backward slightly, then bounced right back in place.

“Time to go!” Danny said. He unslung his shotgun and pulled four extra glow stick necklaces out of a pouch. He cracked them one by one, then handed them out. “Will’s going to pull everyone up one by one. We’ll regroup in the Control Room if we can make it that far. If not, there’s always Plan Z.”

“Oh great, another Plan Z,” Carly frowned.

“Carly,” Will said, “you first, then the girls.”

Carly climbed up on the chair and held out her hands. Will grabbed them, and taking a breath, pulled her up slowly. Carly said, “If you say I’ve gained weight, I’m going to kill you, Will.”

He grinned and pulled her halfway up. Carly reached into the corners of the duct for leverage, while Danny grabbed her legs to help push her the rest of the way.

They continued that way with Vera, then Elise. The girls were easier, lighter, and Danny simply passed them up to Will, who pulled them both into the air duct without much effort.

When it was her turn, Lara loosened up her legs and arms and climbed back up on the chair. Will, dangling from the square box in the ceiling, said, “Ready?”

“Thanks for coming,” she smiled up at him.

“I had no choice. It was either this or find a new girlfriend. As you’ve probably noticed, my history with girlfriends in the post-apocalypse has been pretty hit and miss.”

“I bet you say that to all the g—”

She never got the chance to finish. There was a loud crack! behind her and she knew without looking that the door had just given way, that the only thing holding the ghouls back now was the barricade, and it wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds.

Danny, behind her, shouted, “Go go go!”

Will had already gotten a grip on her wrists, and he pulled her up in one fluid motion, grunting loudly in the effort. Unprepared for the pull, she thought her arms might pop out of their sockets.

Will deposited her into the air duct with another big grunt.

The air duct was intensely hot, and Carly and the girls were already sweating profusely as they sat inside, their wet faces lit up by the glow sticks hanging from their necks. The unnatural green glow glinted off the shiny metal interior of the air ducts, reminding Lara of some weird sci-fi movie.

She climbed past Will, who made himself as small as possible to allow her to hurry by. Fortunately it wasn’t as tight a squeeze as she had feared. Although the grate was only two-by-two feet wide, the duct itself was wider at four-by-four feet. It had to be to accommodate the massive industrial-sized air conditioner that Harold Campbell had installed in the facility. The generous size allowed Carly to mostly sit and the girls to stand slightly hunched over.

Even as she moved past Will, a loud crashing sound thundered behind her, back in the room. She knew the door had just come completely free from its hinges, and on cue, a split second after the loud crashing noise, she heard the roar of a shotgun blast.

She stopped and looked back at Will. He was leaning over the hole, shouting, “Danny, now, Goddammit!”

The shotgun bellowed from below.

One, two, three times.

Will reached down and grabbed onto something and jerked back up in a harder and rougher movement than he had used on her. Danny climbed through the hole, his face grimacing with pain. She knew instantly that Danny hadn’t been as lucky as her, that one, possibly both of his arms, had come free from its sockets during the pull. He was heavier than her, and the weapons and ammo he carried only added to his weight.

He crawled up the rest of the way by himself, but she could see he was in tremendous pain. His teeth were tightly clenched and he cradled his left arm as he crawled forward while behind him Will unslung his shotgun and fired into the room. The loud shotgun blasts were ear-shattering in the close confines of the ducts, and Lara thought she might have just lost all hearing, but that proved false when she heard Will fire again, and again, and again.

Danny struggled into a sitting position in front of her and reached into one of his pouches, pulling out two round green globes.

Grenades!

Danny shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

Will quickly scooted back as Danny pulled the pins and tossed the grenades through the opening, just as a ghoul stuck its head up, black eyes searching. A second later the ghoul evaporated in the dual blasts that sent shrapnel screaming through the opening, slicing into the area around the grate like thousands of tiny daggers. Much to Lara’s relief, Will had moved far enough away to be spared from the double explosions.

Lara feared the entire ceiling — and they with it — might collapse. A cloud of smoke shot through the opening, and for a moment she lost sight of Will, who was somewhere behind the wall of white mist.

She looked back at Elise and Vera to make sure they were all right. Both girls were pressing their hands against their ears, eyes squeezed shut, neither one making a sound. Elise looked on the verge of tears, but when Vera took her hand away from her ears and reached for Elise’s, the other girl fought back the tears.

While things were calming down in front of her, they continued to be chaotic and desperate behind her. Lara still couldn’t see Will through the curtain of drifting smoke. She could only see Danny, sitting nearby, cradling his left arm in his lap and trying desperately to get it to work for him.

She crab-walked over. Danny gave her a look indicating he was fine. She knew better and grasped his left arm. He flinched, but didn’t say anything.

“Hold still,” she said, “this is going to hurt.”

He grinned back at her through the swirling white smoke. “No shit, Doc. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I once dated a lesbian in college.”

“Oh ye—”

She pulled. Hard. And heard the pop! as the bone slid back into the socket.

Oh my God, I can’t believe I just did that. Professor Stevens would be so proud…if he wasn’t probably already dead.

Danny sighed and unslung his M4A1 from behind his back. “So, about that lesbian encounter…”

“Later,” she said.

Two more shotgun blasts roared behind them, then Will appeared through the smoke like some apparition. “Less chatter, more moving.”

Ahead of them, Carly began crawling through the air duct, moving as fast as she could. The girls followed, walking hunched over. Lara crawled behind them, her head bumping into the ceiling every few feet until she got used to it and started moved at a lower angle.

She risked a glance back over her shoulder, just in time to see a ghoul appear out of the evaporating mist. Its black eyes looked even more freakish against the green neon of the glow sticks that flooded the ducts. That is, for the split second before Will detached its head from its shoulders with a shotgun blast. The buckshot must have kept going, because Lara heard another ghoul behind the headless one let out a surprised shriek.

The shotgun blasts were like someone hammering away at her ears with explosives. Each shot made her wince and hesitate, and it was only with great focus that she managed to force herself to keep moving, despite what sounded like the never-ending bellow of gunfire behind her.

Carly was well ahead of the pack, with the girls moving steadily behind her. They were so far up front that the two-foot halo of their glow sticks began to fade into the darkness. She was afraid they would get lost. Lara didn’t know if there were turns in the air ducts, though she could feel it curving in places to accommodate the half-circle construction of the facility. She hadn’t passed any overt turns yet, which was good. That meant there weren’t too many spots where they could get lost or lose track of one another.

She knew the ghouls were now in the air ducts with them, because Will and Danny were firing and moving and firing. Through the sound of shotgun and M4A1 fire behind her, a scream pierced the darkness of the air duct in front of her.

Carly.

She recognized Carly’s scream even though she couldn’t see a damn thing up ahead. She looked back at Danny and Will, taking turns firing into the darkness behind them, oblivious to what was happening up front. They probably couldn’t hear anything over the roar of their own weapons. And they were kept busy, too. Ghouls lunged into Danny and Will’s neon halo, only to be shredded by gunfire. Like they had done before, Will and Danny fired and reloaded, screaming out “Changing!” each time.

Lara raised herself higher and began crab-running up the air duct. Her head scraped against the metal ceiling once, twice, almost five times. She ignored the sudden jolts of pain and kept moving, willing herself to go faster, until she finally (finally!) saw the neon lights of glow sticks appear in front of her again.

There was Carly, on her back, with a ghoul on top of her. Carly had managed to grab the creature’s neck with both hands and was holding it back, but even so, the ghoul’s mouth was open, and it bared its brown and yellow and crooked teeth at her, trying to get at her neck. Saliva dripped rabidly from its mouth.

She pulled the Glock out of her waistband and hurried forward. She passed Elise and Vera, holding onto each other, speechless as they watched Carly battle the ghoul. Passing the girls, Lara stuck out the Glock and fired twice.

Her first shot missed the ghoul entirely, but her second creased the back of its head.

It turned and looked at her, its eyes registered annoyance.

She shot it again, this time hitting it in the right eye. The soft tissue of the eye popped like a grapefruit and sprayed the ducts. It was enough to make the creature stumble away from Carly, and for a moment Lara wondered if she had hurt it, wounded it enough to force it back. She realized what a stupid notion that was when the ghoul turned its attention completely away from Carly and dove at her.

The creature was small, its shrunken form making it almost a perfect fit inside the four-by-four confines of the ducts. It was already hunched over, so when it ran at Lara, it didn’t have to stop. It came at her full speed, and all she could do was empty her gun into it, her last two shots hitting the ghoul point-blank in the chest.

That slowed it down, but it didn’t stop. Black blood dripping in its wake, turning the floor slippery, the creature started running toward her again when Danny appeared, lunging past her and driving his cross-knife into its head.

The creature fell and lay still.

Danny pulled his cross-knife out of the ghoul and hurried over to Carly. “You okay?”

Carly nodded, her face frozen in horror. “It came out of nowhere,” she said between gasps.

“They must have opened another grate in one of the rooms between here and the Control Room,” Danny said. He unslung his M4A1 and crab-walked to the front. “I’m taking lead from now on. Stay behind me.”

Danny started off, Carly behind him, and the girls followed, walking hunched over.

Will came up behind her, reloading his shotgun. He grinned, his expression oddly innocent in their merging halos. “I think we’re slowing them down. Couldn’t be more than, oh, a few thousand at this point.”

She smiled back at him, and before she realized it, she blurted out, “I love you.”

It caught him by surprise, but he quickly gathered himself and flashed her a huge smile. He took out an extra X-marked magazine. “One shot per ghoul. Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

She turned and followed the others up the air duct, reloading her Glock as she went. She hadn’t gone more than a few feet when she heard Will’s shotgun bellowing behind her again.

Once, twice, then silence before the loud, solid sound of the shotgun racking.

As long as she continued to hear that sound, she would know he was doing okay.

Up ahead, Danny’s was firing his M4A1, the staccato effect of the weapon discharging creating a weird universe that made her think they were stuck in a disco of some kind, instead of squeezing their way through an air duct that was quickly becoming infested with ghouls at both ends.

Danny’s right, they’ve found another way in.

Suddenly there was a bright shaft of light in front of her, and it took her a moment to realize they were now moving directly over a lit-up room, and the lights were coming through another grate. She risked a look down through the grate and saw the Green Room below her, troughs filled with fresh dirt and growing plants. Pools of blood, but no bodies, indicated that whoever had sought salvation down there hadn’t found it.

At the sound of Danny firing she looked up the air duct, the same staccato flashes in front of her, surreal and hypnotizing.

Behind her, Will’s shotgun thundered, getting closer. She was surprised to realize that even this close to Will she had somehow managed to tune out the massive crashing, earsplitting carnage of the shotgun. Or maybe she had just lost most of her hearing, but that couldn’t be right, because she heard Will just fine a few minutes ago, when she had told him that she loved him.

God, had she actually said that?

That question was still echoing inside her head as she moved over the grate to get to the other side. She put a foot down and felt something strange — wide-open space — and suddenly she was falling through the air, pinwheeling and crashing into the side of one of the troughs in the Green Room. The impact knocked the breath out of her, and the Glock clutched in her hand went flying and clattered across the room.

Pain lanced through her entire body as she came to rest in a pile on the cold hard floor, between rows of troughs holding dirt and plants and fruits. A shadow immediately fell over her, and she looked up to see a ghoul standing on a trough nearby, holding a blood-encrusted grate with long, almost elegant, bone-white fingers no longer sheathed in flesh. How long had the ghoul been fighting with the screws that held the grate in place, literally shredding its fingers to the very bone, before it finally got it free? There was a small trowel at the ghoul’s feet — had it used that to twist the screws?

Dead, not stupid.

She pushed all of that out of her mind, because it didn’t matter. There was something familiar about the ghoul — in the way it moved, the way it looked at her. What was it doing here in the Green Room, all alone? Lara stared into dark black eyes and remembered.

Rose. The Green Room’s Rose.

Even in death, she refuses to leave this place…

Lara gathered her wits and looked around the room. There, her Glock, ten feet away.

She scrambled to her feet and ran for the weapon. The ghoul that used to be Rose leaped across the room and landed on her back. Lara stumbled and fell, the extra weight driving her down, and she slid across the floor, splashing into a pool of something wet and sticky. She tasted blood — it wasn’t hers — and felt its wetness covering her face.

She fought to regain her footing and was grateful her fall had dislodged the ghoul at least. Her eyes darted around the room again, searching, searching… The Glock was just three feet away.

She ran for it, and the ghoul gave chase once again. She felt it coming, the sudden rush of air against her skin as the creature took flight and the Glock was still two feet away.

She lunged headfirst to the floor at the very last second, and the ghoul sailed over her head. Her chin scraped against concrete, and blood — this time definitely hers — gushed freely in her mouth.

Did she just lose a tooth?

While the pain was loud and clear and demanding, it didn’t trump her survival instincts, which thrust her forward in the direction of the Glock. She got her hand on the weapon and, still on her stomach, shot the ghoul in front of her as it scrambled back to its feet. She only had to shoot it once. The creature toppled sideways and lay still, its eyes staring back at her.

Robbed of life for a second time, the ghoul looked more like Rose. The face seemed to soften, and light returned to those dark black eyes, though it could just have been her imagination running wild.

Rose. Poor Rose. I’ll miss gardening with you. Your grandmotherly stories. Goodbye, Rose.

She heard it — footsteps approaching fast. It was so distinct — bare feet moving quickly against hard, jagged floor. Her senses were heightened, enhanced by raging adrenaline, and there were so many of them that the patter became almost like stampeding hooves, impossible to miss unless she were completely deaf. Which, despite being stuck in the air duct with Will and Danny firing away mere feet from her, she wasn’t.

She scrambled back on her feet and made the calculations in her head. She was thirty yards from the Green Room door, and it would take her at least five seconds to reach it, but even as she made the calculations, the first ghoul appeared in the open doorway and made the decision for her.

Lara shot it in the chest and it fell, but even before it hit the floor, two more ghouls were already inside. She fired again, the bullet punching through the first ghoul’s chest and hitting another one behind it. Even as they fell, five more were already leaping over them.

She stumbled backward and kept firing, counting down the bullets, knowing it wouldn’t be long now before—

A shotgun blast ripped two of the ghouls apart.

Lara threw a quick look over her shoulder and saw Will moving toward her. “Hurry!” he shouted.

She turned and ran past him and leaped onto the trough. He fired behind her — racking and firing, racking and firing…

As long as I can hear him shooting, I know he’s fine.

She leaped up and grabbed at the air duct opening, painfully aware that Will’s shotgun had a limited number of shells, that even fully loaded it only had seven shots.

And Will had already fired four…

Three left.

She swung around and looked back. Will had drawn his Glock and was firing it as he backpedaled toward her. Ghouls stumbled and fell as he fired, over and over and over. Left and right, center, left and right again. He was an excellent shot, every bullet finding its mark, some finding two, sometimes three.

But like the shotgun, the Glock had a limited number of bullets. Then what would he use? The knife. The cross-knife he always carried with him, like Danny.

Then what?

Will glanced over his shoulder at her hanging from the opening of the air duct. He looked dumbfounded, then angry. “Lara, Goddammit, go, now!”

The ghouls were almost on top of him, and for every creature he shot down, three or four took its place. He kicked at a ghoul lunging at his legs, then kneed another one in the throat. It went down, but sprang right back up, even though three other ghouls stumbled over it in the rush to get at Will.

Then she saw them — the large, industrial lamps hanging from the ceiling around her, each one of them turned off. They were hard to miss, their size dwarfing the smaller halogen lights between them that were currently lighting up the room.

What had Rose said about those large lamps? “They’re supposed to mimic the sun…”

Lara glanced around the room and located them on the wall to her left — two big button light switches, their fat size making them hard to miss even from this distance. One was switched on, the other still in the off position.

She jumped down, landing on the trough below her.

Will must have heard her landing because he glanced back and looked even madder than before. “Lara, Goddammit, get out of here!”

“Hold on!” she shouted back.

She launched herself into the air and landed on another trough nearby, and continued hopping from trough to trough, aiming for the wall with a determination she hadn’t known she possessed.

Half of the ghouls in the room immediately broke away from Will and surged in her direction. She ignored them. It was hard to do, but she pushed them out of her mind and kept her legs churning.

Will’s Glock fired once, twice — then there was silence.

She couldn’t help herself and looked back, as she ran, at Will with his cross-knife in hand stabbing a ghoul as two more swarmed on him. He fought one off, backing up the entire time, and stabbed another one through its neck. Then three of them were on him and pushing him to the floor with their weight.

She turned and lunged across the final trough and reached out toward the light switches. There were two big switches, but only one had “UV” stenciled underneath it. That was the one she slammed her fist into, right before she crumpled to the floor in a bruised heap.

The big lamps on the ceiling hummed to life almost instantaneously and the areas around the troughs were bathed in ultraviolet light, so much brighter than the regular halogen light bulbs that for a moment it looked as if the sun had risen inside the room. The ghouls caught inside the rings of blindingly bright circles seemed confused by what was happening.

Then suddenly one of them let out a loud shriek as its flesh turned hard and brittle and peeled off at the bones. Then two more ghouls shriveled into nothingness without a sound.

The rest figured it out and tried to flee the lights, but it was too late.

She lay on the floor watching it all. She felt like laughing.

She hadn’t been sure it would work. But she hadn’t forgotten all those conversations with Rose (Poor Rose) over the last three months that she spent in here. She knew nothing about plants, or gardening, but Rose didn’t mind. Rose enjoyed her company, and Lara couldn’t get enough of the Green Room’s serenity.

Bye, Rose, thanks for everything.

Will, buried underneath a thick layer of ghoul paste, scrambled to his feet, spitting the powdery remains of the dead creatures from his mouth and nostrils and shaking it out of his hair. Fleshless bones rattled off him, sticks of femurs and fibulas, ribs and deformed skulls.

The remaining ghouls crowded around the pool of UV light, looking uncertainly at it. A couple of ghouls entered the light tentatively and fell apart, which seemed to be enough to convince the others to stay out.

She ran back to Will, making sure to keep well inside the UV light. The ghouls glared after her, and one risked exposing itself to the light and turned into bones a foot inside the pool of light. The rest stopped moving forward.

Lara grabbed Will’s hand. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Ultraviolet light,” she said, pointing up at the lamps. “It’s supposed to have all the properties of the sun, to help the plants grow. I wasn’t sure if it would actually work, but…”

“Yeah,” Will said, grinning back at her. “Can they get to that light switch?”

She glanced back at the switch on the wall. It was well within the pool of UV light. “I don’t know…”

Several ghouls tried to lunge for the light switch, but each stumbled and fell and became nothing but clattering piles of bones and white mists in the air well short.

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“Good. Then all we have to do is wait them out.”

“What about Danny and the others?”

“They should have made it to the Control Room by now. Once Danny gets the grate back up, they should be fine.”

She glanced at her watch and frowned. “Five hours before sunup.”

He shrugged. “I wanted some free time with you anyway.”

They watched a dozen more ghouls desperately trying to get to the light switch, only to die. The rest finally took the hint and stopped trying. She thought she could hear them growling deep in their throats. An intense, piercing universe of dark black eyes looked accusingly at her, and only her — but maybe that was just her imagination still running at a feverish pitch, fed by the adrenaline pumping through every inch of her.

There had to be hundreds of them squeezed into the Green Room, so many that they stretched all the way out the doorway and beyond. They didn’t move, and seemed content to watch and wait…for something.

Will squeezed her hand tighter. “Hey.”

“What now?”

“I love you, too.”

Lara didn’t take her eyes off the ghouls for even one second, but she smiled and squeezed his hand back. Suddenly the pain coursing through every inch of her body didn’t hurt nearly as much as a second ago.

Then she saw it. A figure standing near the back, just outside the opened door, among the ghouls.

But it wasn’t like the rest. It stood tall, almost human, and it had blue eyes.

The sight of it made her simultaneously joyous and terrified. That raw instinct doubled when the creature turned its head and stared at her across the distance, over the heads of the other ghouls.

She shivered.

It sees me. And it wants me to know that it sees me…

The blue-eyed ghoul broke their contact, turned and walked away, moving through the wave of endless creatures. It struck her just how different the blue-eyed ghoul was, like some kind of royalty among its subjects.

As it walked away, she saw a second blue-eyed ghoul looking across the room at her.

This one also stood taller than the rest, but it looked much more feminine than the first one, though gender was hard to decipher with the creatures. The second blue-eyed ghoul looked across the room, and it smiled at her, before turning and following the first one through the tightly packed space.

Kate…

CHAPTER 44 WILL

Being locked in a room with a few hundred ghouls introduced a smell that was hard to ignore. It was acidic and pungent, like rotten eggs boiled in filth and trash for an obscene amount of time before someone decided to add vinegar. It stung his eyes and made swallowing repellent. It was all he could do not to vomit.

They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, making sure they were well within the heavy flood of UV light. There were a good thirty meters between them and the closest ghoul, though it felt much closer. Twice now the creatures had tried to come down through the air duct opening, only to evaporate almost instantly as they were exposed to the lights, leaving only bones behind.

Lara sat next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. He held the cross-knife in his right fist. Covered in a thick coat of black blood and gooey flesh, its silver still glinted brilliantly against the light pouring down above them. It felt like sitting in the sun without sunscreen. He couldn’t fathom how Rose had survived this onslaught day in and day out.

“What happens to the lights if they find a way to destroy the turbine?” Lara asked. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the ghouls. Neither had he.

“Backup generators,” Will said.

“Can’t they get to those, too?”

“They’re in a basement behind a steel door. Without the codes, Ben’s pendant is the only way in, and Danny has that.”

“If Danny’s still alive,” Lara said.

“He made it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am.”

Lara sighed. “So we wait them out?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“You have that knife…”

“Uh huh.”

“How many of them do you think are stuck in here with us?”

He had stopped counting about an hour ago — at 200—when he could no longer keep track of the blackened and shrunken forms. There were more than that in this room alone, and even more outside in the hallway. He and Danny had killed over a hundred since the siege began, and they hadn’t made so much as a dent. It made him wonder if his original plan was even still viable.

He glanced at his watch. 1:33 a.m.

Five more hours until sunup…

“A lot,” he finally answered.

“That’s not very scientific,” she said.

It had been almost an hour and a half since Kate opened the Door and the ghouls flooded inside the facility. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Kate…

What had happened to her? Had the ghouls gotten her? Lara swore she saw Kate at the door, though she didn’t look like Kate anymore. She looked like a ghoul, except Lara said this new Kate had bright blue eyes, like the blue-eyed ghoul he had seen at the bank.

“I swear it was her,” Lara said. “It was the eyes. Not the color, but the way she looked at me. It was her, Will.”

“I believe you,” he said.

And he did believe her. After everything he had seen and lived through, the idea that Kate had become another blue-eyed ghoul was the least unbelievable thing thrown at him.

There was a movement above them, and a second later another ghoul dropped out of the air duct and landed on a trough nearby. It was turning to face them when the UV light reduced it to ashes.

The sight was still surreal to him, like watching the creature’s entire being simply come unglued at a molecular level, flesh falling away from skeleton and leaving behind nothing but a pile of white ash and pale bones to mark its passing.

“How many does that make?” Lara asked.

“Five,” he said.

“I thought you said they were smart.”

“They can be pretty damn stubborn, too.”

The ghouls in the room didn’t look particularly disturbed by the death of one of their own. In fact, none of them even moved or made any indication that they noticed the dead ghoul. There were piles of bones all around them now, turning the Green Room into a kind of ghoulish cemetery where the bodies weren’t properly buried.

Lara said, “Are you sure Danny and the others made it back to the Control Room?”

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry.” She paused. “It must be the UV lights. It’s too damn bright.” She paused again. “How did you answer the last two times?”

“I’m sure they made it.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Lara lifted her head and blinked at the bright lights above them. “Maybe we can turn down the lights a bit. How am I supposed to get any sleep with those things on all night?”

“Give it a shot.”

She leaned her head back on his shoulder. “Why did you tell me you loved me?”

He was unprepared for that question. Admittedly, it stunned him when she made the declaration in the air ducts, and he hadn’t really known what was happening when he said it back to her later on. Maybe it was the heat of the moment. He remembered saying it to only two previous women in his life, and one of those had been his mother. The other a high school sweetheart whom he never saw again after she went to college, although they had promised to stay in touch. Whatever happened to her?

“Will?” Lara said. “Should I take the silence as a bad sign?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointment in her voice.

“I don’t know why I said it, but I meant it,” he said, hoping to salvage the moment. Lara didn’t answer right away, and he knew she was waiting for him to continue. “I know that now. I meant it, every word of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She kissed him on the cheek.

“Not in front of the undead creatures, dear,” he said.

She chuckled tiredly and closed her eyes, and he held her hand as she drifted off to sleep.

He glanced down at his watch: 1:40 a.m.

The turbine went offline around 2:11 a.m., and the lights — all the lights — went off exactly eleven seconds after that.

As darkness swamped the Green Room, he heard scrambling as what must have been every ghoul in the room swarmed forward as one. But even before that it felt as if electricity had charged the air.

They knew what was going to happen before it happened.

Will stood up and stepped in front of Lara as the ghouls converged. He held the glow stick in one hand, illuminating their faces in garish green as they charged across the short distance like rabid dogs, some even moving on all fours.

Eleven seconds…

The first one reached him two seconds later…

Nine seconds…

He stabbed it through the head, then sliced the chest of another ghoul…

Eight seconds…

He kicked another one out of the way, then backhanded loose with his left fist the jagged teeth of another lunging for him…

Seven seconds…

Slashed the necks of two ghouls…

Six seconds…

One lunged for his leg, wrapped cold, bony fingers around his ankles…

Five seconds…

He stabbed it through the top of the head…

Four seconds…

Two fell out of the air duct to his left…

Three seconds…

A dozen surrounded him…

Two seconds…

More jostling for positions…

One second…

The lights came back on without warning, the large UV lamps on the ceiling snapping back to life. A ghoul only two feet from Will’s face let out a loud, surprised squeal as its skin turned into powder, and it fell to the floor in a twisted stack of falling bones.

There were at least fifty, maybe more, in the pool of bright light, and they didn’t fare any better. A fine white smog materialized in a matter of seconds and swirled around the back half of the room, covering Lara and him in a thick blanket, making them cough from the overwhelming odor. It was otherworldly and unnatural, and it got in their eyes and nostrils and mouth and hair.

The remaining ghouls stayed where they were at the edge of the UV halo. The small spaces in the room left by the dead ghouls had instantly been replaced by new ones from the hallway.

“What happened?” Lara asked, clinging to his shoulders.

“They got to the turbine, but the backup generators kicked in.”

“And they can’t get to those, right?”

“No,” he said. God, I hope not.

It took a while before Lara stopped shaking.

They sat back down on the floor.

He was exhausted, his body sore from the soles of his feet all the way up to his ears. He didn’t show it, because she didn’t need to know that right now. Besides, if he didn’t show it, he didn’t have to really acknowledge it.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

“How much longer?” she asked.

Will glanced at his watch. “Too long. Go to sleep. I’ll wake you up if something interesting happens.”

“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to fall asleep in the middle of this,” she said. Then added, sheepishly, “Again.”

Thirty minutes later, she was snoring lightly against his shoulder.

Will let her sleep while he kept watch on the ghouls around them. He wiped the bloody cross-knife on his pants, and kept at it until he could see the glinting silver underneath again.

The creatures seemed to know that the sun was creeping up on them. He thought he could sense them starting to fidget uncomfortably amongst each other, though it was hard to tell — they were so thickly packed into the room it was difficult to know where one ended and another began, much less if they were actually moving or just swaying against each other accidentally.

They looked like one big, giant black blob.

He was waiting, too. At sunup, he expected to hear the Door start to open again. That would be the sign that Danny had in fact made it to the Control Room.

Despite what he told Lara, he wasn’t sure if Danny really had made it. He was relying almost purely on gut instinct and, more importantly, Danny’s abilities. The Green Room was close enough to the Control Room that Danny hadn’t needed to go much farther to reach safety. The good news was he heard Danny’s M4A1 firing in the air ducts long after he jumped down into the Green Room.

Of course, after that, he didn’t hear anything else.

Four more hours, and he would know for sure, one way or another.

Come on, Danny boy, don’t let me down…

At 4:13 a.m. the ghouls started to actively move around, nervously and visibly jostling against each other.

He had never seen this behavior before, and he didn’t want to be the only one to witness it, so he woke Lara up.

She was as surprised as he was. The ghouls looked clearly agitated, and the mild jostling started to give way to overt panic. There was also a low rumbling rising from the masses that he thought was coming from the creatures’ throats. It wasn’t language, it was more primal, instinctive.

Fear.

Lara stared for a long moment. “They know it’s coming. The sun. And they’re scared. They don’t know what to do.”

The ghouls were trapped inside the facility, the darkness quickly dissolving outside, something that, if they indeed had the hive mind he thought they possessed, would be relayed to them by the other ghouls topside.

And it scared them. It scared the shit out of them.

He smiled. He liked seeing them scared.

At that moment, he wished he still had his radio. It was gone, lost somewhere in the air ducts during the chaos.

“You still have your radio?” he asked.

She looked down at her hip. “I must have lost it in the ducts.”

He grinned. “How many times have I told you, Lara? Keep your radio on you at all times.”

“Funny. Where’s yours?”

“That’s not the point.”

She rolled her eyes. “So what now?”

He glanced up at the air duct entrance.

Lara saw where he was looking. “What are you thinking?”

“I need to get in contact with Danny.”

“How?”

“There’s only one way.”

He stood up and climbed onto the trough directly underneath the air duct.

Lara followed. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s the only way.”

“Will, there are more of them up there.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Will, don’t go…”

“I have to get in contact with Danny.”

“If he’s even there…”

“He’s there.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“He’s there.” Then, with as much confidence as he could muster, he added, “Trust me.”

“I do trust you. I followed you all the way here, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. So trust me again.”

She sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

He took his last glow stick out of his pouch and cracked it, then tossed it up through the hole and heard it land inside. The opening instantly glowed green and revealed the square-shaped metal above him. He waited to see if something would grab the glow stick, but the light never shifted.

He walked back to Lara. She was about to say something, but he kissed her first, catching her off guard.

Then he quickly pulled free. “Stay here.”

She gave him a wry look. “Gee, okay. Good strategy.”

He place the cross-knife between his teeth and leaped, grabbed the edge of the air duct entrance, and pulled himself up partway.

He was halfway up when he scanned both directions, saw nothing in the green halo, then pulled himself the rest of the way up. He took the cross-knife out of his mouth and picked up the glow stick. He waved it in front of him like a magic wand, looking forward, then back, then forward again.

Lara called from the Green Room: “Will?”

“Yeah?” he called back down.

“Be careful.”

“I’ll be right back.”

With the cross-knife in his right hand, he moved along the air duct.

He got four meters before he felt the rush of movement and braced himself as it leaped out of the darkness in front of him, slamming him in the shoulder and knocking him down. He instinctively dropped the glow stick, reached up, and got the ghoul around the throat with his free hand before it could clamp down on him with brown-stained and cracked teeth. Hissing air escaped through those awful monstrous teeth, and it thrashed about before he drove the cross-knife through its chest, meeting almost no resistance.

The creature sagged against him, then went still.

He pushed the ghoul off and sat up in the green halo, catching his breath for a few seconds. The cross-knife in one hand and the glow stick in the other, he began moving forward once more.

He knew he was near the Control Room when he came across three ghouls crouched around a shaft of light. His glow stick got their attention, and they turned, almost in unison.

The first one lunged at him without making a sound, reaching for his throat. He slashed it across the chest and watched it careen sideways out of his path. Even before the first one landed, the other two were already rushing. He got the second one in the face — just barely, but enough to draw blood with the silver-tipped edge, enough to send it shrieking for a few seconds before it settled down and stopped moving. The third one was tougher, stronger, and it crashed into him with great force, surprising him with its speed and strength, and succeeding in driving him back.

He managed to get his feet underneath the ghoul and kicked out, literally pinning the creature against the ceiling. He stabbed upward and got the creature in the chest. It let out a soft gurgling sound that he had never heard before. It died, black blood dripping down on him in thick clumps like wet rice.

He pushed the ghouls out of the way and continued up the air duct, crab-walking as fast as he could. Thinking about Lara back there alone in the Green Room got him moving even faster.

He finally reached the grate and peered down through the holes, relieved to see Danny pointing his Glock up at him.

“Holy shit,” Danny grinned. “You’re still alive.” Danny glanced over at someone in the room with him and said, “I told you he was too stubborn to die.”

Carly appeared below him under the grate. A look of relief flooded her face. “Will! You’re alive! We thought you might have…” When she saw he was alone, her happiness quickly dissipated. “Where’s Lara?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “We got stuck in the Green Room.”

“She’s not up there with you?” Danny asked.

“No. But I need to get back to her as soon as possible.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“You still got Ben’s pendant?”

Danny produced it from his pocket. “Do bears shit in the woods?”

“I have another idea.”

“Is it better than your last idea?”

“I dunno. It’s a long shot.”

“And the other idea wasn’t?”

“What do we have to lose, right?”

“Oh, nothing. Just our lives.”

“That all?” Will grinned back.

Will crab-walked back to the Green Room and counted himself lucky that only two ghouls were there to block his path. He killed them both easily enough — they seemed to lack conviction and looked almost hesitant to attack when they saw him in the green light of the glow stick.

Eventually, he saw bright lights up ahead.

He dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch, unprepared for Lara’s leap into his arms. “You stupid man. Don’t ever, ever do that to me again, do you understand?”

He kissed her. She smelled great and tasted better, and he forgot for a moment that there was a room full of undead creatures staring at them, and that the stench of rotting cabbage was all around them.

“Stupid?” he said, raising a furrowed brow.

“Promise me,” she said, on the verge of tears.

Guilt washed over him. “I promise,” he whispered softly. “I’ll never leave you again.”

They sat and watched the ghouls inside the Green Room as their nervousness became restlessness, then restlessness gave way to primal fear. Will could feel their terror, rising from the mass of inhumanity before him, like some physical thing that drifted then condensed in the air and just kept growing.

Lara could sense it, too — she began squeezing his hand. It wasn’t something they saw every day, and it was utterly fascinating and at the same time chilling. After fighting them, killing them, and fearing them for so long, to see them now revert back to something so humanlike made him rethink everything he thought he knew about them.

Lara said, “Can you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think…” She didn’t finish.

“Yeah,” Will said.

Then he heard it: the sound of the Door opening, the loud rumble coursing through the entire facility as the gears worked, powered by the emergency generators. Could they generate enough power to fully open the Door? They had to.

He glanced at his watch: 5:45 a.m.

They waited. He silently counted down the seconds in his head, watching the ghouls for signs.

There, there it was. The message must have been relayed through the hive mind, because soon the ghouls began moving in waves toward the door, then through it, flooding back out into the hallway in streams.

“Oh my God, it’s working,” Lara said.

“I told you.”

“Remind me never to doubt you again.”

“And you’ll listen?”

She smiled. “Of course not. It’s my job. As your girlfriend.”

“I like the sound of that,” he smiled.

Soon the room was empty, and stampeding footsteps echoed down the hallway, moving farther and farther away from them.

The Door had been opening for twenty seconds.

He stood up and, cross-knife in hand, raced forward, making a beeline for the door. The entire time his eyes were fixed on the open door, waiting, expecting ghouls to come back at any second.

Dead, not stupid.

Dead, not stupid…

He reached the door, grabbed it with one hand, and swung it, still not daring to even breath, until the door slammed shut with a loud, satisfying sound, and he quickly cranked the lever up ninety degrees to lock it.

He finally took a deep breath and stepped back, as Lara came up behind him. “What if they come back?”

“They won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“We just gave them the opportunity to survive, and they took it. Dead, not stupid, remember?”

The hallways were eerily quiet, but the ghouls left plenty in their wake. Blood, the bright red and thick black kind, covered the floors and walls and even the ceiling. There was clothing and shoes, but no signs of the victims themselves. The twisted carcasses of dead ghouls, hidden from sunlight but ripped apart by bullets and buckshot, formed makeshift obstacles every few feet, around every corner.

He glanced at his watch: 7:05 a.m.

They had given it an extra thirty minutes after sunup before emerging from the safety of the Green Room, just to be sure. They had kept the Door open to let sunlight in.

Lara, weaponless, stayed close behind him. His only weapon was the cross-knife, and he ached to get his hands on something that could be used more than a meter in front of him. They were halfway to the Armory when Danny appeared out of the Control Room with his M4A1, Carly and the girls tailed close behind him. He guessed by the way Danny was holding the rifle, almost as a club, that he didn’t have any silver bullets left in it.

Carly and Lara ran into each other’s arms, dodging piles of dead ghouls on the floor. It didn’t take Vera and Elise long to join in on the screams and crying. Will and Danny hung back and let them have their moment.

“So,” Danny said, “you going to tell me how you survived in that room surrounded by those things, and armed with only that pig sticker?”

“UV lights,” Will said.

“UV what?”

“In the Green Room. There are giant industrial-sized UV lamps they’ve been using to grow the plants. Turns out they’re really, really good for killing ghouls, too.”

“You thought of that?”

“Lara did.”

“Ah. So she’s the real brains of this operation, then.”

“Never any doubt.”

“I’ve never been in the Green Room,” Danny said.

“Not once?”

“Not once. I got better things to do than see where they’re growing the trees.”

“I’ll show you later.”

They made it to the Armory without incident.

Without the turbine constantly turning in the background, the only sounds were their heavy breathing, footsteps, and the air conditioner cranking out the heat, powered by the emergency generators.

Inside the Armory, he and Danny rearmed themselves with new Remington shotguns and refilled their ammo pouches with silver ammo. It may have been daylight outside, but the facility had plenty of dark spots where sunlight couldn’t touch. Every single room held a potential nest. Deep in his mind, he considered that the evacuation by the ghouls could have been a feint. Send most of the foot soldiers home, and leave a few behind as a surprise.

Dead, not stupid…

Both Carly and Lara rearmed with Glocks, loading magazines with silver bullets, while the girls looked on in the background. The new kid, Elise, was handling it well. Maybe it was Vera’s presence. The two of them looked joined at the hip.

“What’s the plan?” Danny asked.

“Clear out the rooms, then take tally of the damages.”

“Are we staying here?” Carly asked.

“For now,” Will nodded. “We still have power and weapons and food. Until we find a better place, this is still our best bet. Even if the power goes, we still have the Door. Of course, opening it is another matter without the power, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Hopefully the bridge won’t be on fire,” Danny said.

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Will said.

Lara said, “How much damage did they do to the turbine, do you think?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Will said. “You guys stay here in the Armory while Danny and I clear the rooms.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’ll go with you.”

“Lara, I need you to stay here.”

She looked hurt and fixed him with a stare that told him this wasn’t going to end with him raising his voice. So he took her aside. He held her face in his hands, kissed her softly, and looked her in the eyes.

“I need you to be safe,” he said quietly. “I can’t do what I have to do out there if I’m worrying about you, because I will. Because you mean that much to me.”

She softened against him, and finally nodded. She kissed him quickly and glanced across the room at Danny. “Watch his six.”

Danny grinned back. “Yes, ma’am.”

Danny kissed Carly and followed Will outside.

They closed the Armory door, then waited until they heard the door lever turning and locking into place. Danny banged on the door twice, then they headed off, stepping over eviscerated ghoul corpses.

They moved from room to room with shotguns, finding no survivors. There were no ghoul corpses in the Quarters area. Which made sense. Will and Danny were the only ones who had managed to arm themselves with silver ammo, and they never made it past the Entrance Hallway during the siege.

Sunlight continued pouring through the Door like a great big welcoming bath. The feel of sunlight against his skin as they walked across the Entrance Hallway was one of the best damn feelings in the entire world. Second, he concluded, only to Lara in his arms.

On their way back from Quarters, Danny said, “What about Kate?”

“What about her?”

“We know what happened to her?”

Will told him about what Lara saw in the Green Room last night.

“Blue eyes?” Danny said. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”

“If it was actually her…”

“Lara was pretty sure.”

“Shit. That’s new.”

“Yeah.” He paused for a moment. Then said, “I saw something in the Green Room that I haven’t seen before.”

“Share with the class.”

“They were scared. Freaking out. They knew the sun was coming and they were trapped down here with us. That’s why I thought opening the door early for them to leave would work.”

“Still, a hell of a risk. What if they had just sent in more ghouls?”

“I figured, what the hell. There was already a billion of them inside.”

Danny grunted. “Oh sure, what’s another billion more, right?”

“Exactly.”

They cleared the Cafeteria next. It was easily the biggest room in the whole place, and it took them longer than the rest of the facility combined, but eventually they found nothing except more patches of blood, the red and the black kinds. Scattered around the facility were bullet casings of different calibers and shredded clothing. There were also left-behind guns, and someone had resorted to using a spatula as a weapon, which lay in a corner covered in blood.

“Last stand of the spatula,” Danny said, with surprisingly little humor.

They moved on to the Turbine Room, which looked undisturbed, except for the fire ax sticking out of the computer dashboard. The massive, towering turbine itself looked fine, and sat coldly, silently on one side of the room. He didn’t think he would ever miss the sound or feel of the turbine’s omnipresent hum, but he was wrong.

They stood looking at the machinery for a moment, before he said, “You know how to fix a computer?”

“I don’t even know how a computer actually works,” Danny said. “Do you?”

“Not really, no.”

“You mean you know a little bit?”

“I know how to turn it on and search for porn.”

“You and every other male on the planet. That doesn’t do us any good here.”

“Nope.”

“So we’re screwed.”

“Ben said Harold Campbell designed the turbine to be operated by laymen.”

“Yeah? You’re a layman, right?”

“Last time I checked.”

“So you can probably operate this thing.”

“Sure.” Will looked back at the dashboard, with the ax sticking out of it. Half of the machine was destroyed, the other half scattered about the room. “But how do you put that thing back together?”

“Carefully?” Danny said.

Will knocked on the Armory door and it swung open, Lara standing on the other side with her Glock next to her hip. “Good?”

“Good,” he nodded.

“What about the turbine?”

“It’s still there, but the computer that runs it is smashed to hell. We don’t have any ideas about how to go about fixing it. Hell, we don’t have any ideas where to even start. You know computers?”

“Not really,” she frowned.

“Yeah.”

“What about the generators?” Carly asked.

They had used Ben’s pendant to go down to the sublevel and checked on the generators. The machines were still running fine, and the computer told them they had at least a month of stored electricity left.

“If we conserve,” he said, “we should be able to make it last more than a month. Maybe two or three.”

“Captain Optimism,” Lara smirked.

“Hey, that’s my job,” Danny said.

They went topside, if just to feel the sun against their skin again, to remind themselves that there was another world beyond the blood-covered concrete universe of Harold Campbell’s facility. In a lot of ways, the facility had functioned exactly as Campbell predicted, though he guessed even a paranoid billionaire never quite envisioned strangers using his place to fend off undead creatures at the end of the world.

The girls didn’t seem to notice, though. They ran around chasing each other as soon as they burst out into the sun, seemingly oblivious to the nightmare of the previous night, while Danny and Carly stood watching them, holding hands.

Lara walked up beside him and took his hand and squeezed. They watched Elise and Vera picking flowers from the overgrown grass, sticking yellow daffodils in each other’s hair and giggling.

A couple of bluebonnets were growing farther out. Bluebonnet was the official state flower of Texas, and they tended to grow where you least expected them.

After a while, Will said, “We’ll stay here for as long as we can.”

“Then what?” Lara asked.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

Carly looked over. “Did we ever find out if the rest of the country is like this? What about the rest of the world?”

“We never did,” Will said. “Too busy trying to stay alive to worry about some Frenchman in Paris.”

“Maybe it’s time to go out there and find out,” Carly suggested. “Not Paris, of course. But what about the surrounding states?”

Will nodded. It had been gnawing at him, too.

Was the rest of the country like Texas? What about the rest of the world? There was a big planet out there. The ghouls had managed to conquer Texas in one night, but what about the other forty-nine states? Had they fallen as easily? Were there now bands of humanity fighting back in conclaves? Maybe there were other facilities like Harold Campbell’s out there. Maybe remnants of a United States government hiding in underground bunkers around the country.

He wanted to find out. He needed to find out.

“What about those poor bastards back at Dansby?” Danny asked.

“Look around,” Will said. “We’re no good to them now, not in our current jam.”

“It didn’t work out so well for Megan, either,” Lara said quietly.

“Okay,” Danny said, brightening up. “Sounds like a plan. A lousy plan, but I guess a plan is a plan, right?”

“Plan Z?” Lara smiled.

“Plan Z is for when everything hits the fan,” Will said. “We’re not quite there yet. For now, it’s still Plan A.”

Then he thought about it.

“Okay, maybe it’s more like Plan E…”