Drip-drip-drip.
Most of the men gathered round him looked anxious, and some were clearly terrified. They tried to hide it by looking away or chatting quietly among themselves, but he could hear the quivering in their voices even behind their gas masks. They had every right to be afraid. Even if their approach to the tunnel entrance had been discovered, Josh would have still stuck to the plan. He had brought plenty of men for just that possibility. Even if every gun on Song Island was concentrated outside the power station at the moment, Josh would have ordered these men out there anyway.
And they would have gone through with it, because she had given the order through him, and these men had sold their souls. Guns were scary, but a legion of mangled teeth coming at you relentlessly, night after night, was more terrifying.
Josh didn’t blame them. He remembered those nights before he saw the light and stopped fighting the inevitable. This wasn’t a war, as Will falsely believed; this was conquest. It was already over, and only the stubborn kept pretending it wasn’t.
Except for Sonia and a few others crouched nearby, Josh didn’t know the names of most of these people he was leading at the moment. If not for the name tags, he wouldn’t be able to tell one man from another, which, Josh had found, was a good idea. What was the point of memorizing the names of dead men?
What’s that old saying? Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Or killing a few guys.
Okay, a lot of guys.
He remembered the looks on their faces when he told them their roles in the attack. Half of them wanted to curse him, and the other half wanted to shoot him right then and there. Travis, he was certain, wanted to do both.
But they did neither of those things. Because they knew who Josh was. He was one of the chosen ones. To disobey him was to disobey the ghouls. To disobey her.
“Take the island,” Kate had said to him last night in his dream (nightmare?).
“I will,” he had replied.
“Whatever it takes,” she had said, “Song Island has to fall. It’s become a symbol. It has to fall at all costs.”
But not at the cost of Gaby’s life, Josh thought to himself now.
Drip-drip-drip.
She was on the island right now. His Gaby. He knew it with absolute certainly, even if he had no visual confirmation. She would have returned with Danny and the new arrivals from earlier, all because Mason had screwed him over and was solely concentrating on capturing Will. Josh guess he couldn’t really blame the guy. Mason was doing Kate’s bidding, just like he was. Just like they all were. At the end of the day, Kate’s needs were the only things that mattered.
He looked back at Sonia. “How much longer?”
She leaned into the stairwell and glanced up. “How much longer?”
“Almost done!” a voice shouted back down.
“Almost there,” she repeated to him.
Josh nodded and turned back to the gathered men. They had heard, too, and the ones who were sitting had stood and the ones leaning were straightening. Electricity filled the room, emanating from the almost three dozen bodies squeezed into the tunnel. They were ready, anxious, and terrified at the same time.
Drip-drip-drip.
“Take the hotel,” Josh said to them. He wanted to be loud and commanding, but his words came out flat and echo-y to his own ears. He gathered himself and continued. “That’s your job. That’s your only job. Once the hotel falls, the island will follow. Got it?”
Some nodded, but others were too scared to do much besides fumble with their rifles or equipment in an attempt to stop their hands from shaking. Josh didn’t quite understand why he was feeling so calm. Like these men, he’d never (willingly or not) gone into a war zone before, which was what he was about to do right now.
And yet, and yet…
I’m one of the chosen ones. Whatever happens, I’ll be fine. Because it’s fate. Just like Gaby and me. We belong together.
Always. Forever.
“What about them?” one of the men said. He was looking behind them at the wide half-circle entrance that connected the large room they were inside now with the rest of the tunnel.
He couldn’t see them, because they were keeping their distance just as she had ordered them to. He wasn’t quite sure how many were back there, invisible in the darkness beyond the ring of LED lamps spread out across the large room, but there had to be hundreds, maybe more. They had entered the tunnel only after Josh’s people had begun moving through the over-half-mile-long concrete structure.
Kate’s ghouls. Or were they his?
Maybe ours…
Josh pulled the gas mask off and breathed in the stench. It reeked in here, made worse with the creatures nearby. One of them was bad, but so many crowded into one room without ventilation was unbearable. He pushed through the smell and sucked in a large lungful of the stale air anyway.
“Forget about them,” he said, hoping the confidence came through in his voice that time. He couldn’t be sure if he had succeeded, though a couple of the men did look comforted, even if he could only see their eyes behind their gas masks. “They’re only here as a last resort — not that we’ll need them. We’ll get this done, men. Everyone just do your jobs, and this will be over in a few hours.”
He must have been pretty convincing, because that seemed to placate most of the men; there might have been one or two (or a dozen) that weren’t moved. It was less about him and more about being so close to the creatures gathered en masse behind them. They might not have been able to see those black eyes, but their stink…
Josh slipped the gas mask back on and was grateful for the filtered air that flowed to his lungs.
“They’re done,” Sonia said.
Footsteps echoed as two men wearing welding masks, rivers of sweat dripping off their faces and clothes, trudged down the stairs carrying heavy portable equipment, the two cylinders inside clinking with every step. They looked exhausted and were leading two more men hauling a thick metal plate between them. The door. Or a part of it that had been cut free. It must have been extremely heavy by the way the men’s eyes were clenched behind their gas masks.
Josh and Sonia stepped aside to let them exit the stairwell. Then he leaned inside and glanced up, not that he could see much of anything even with the portable LED lamps sitting at the very top step.
After Will and Danny closed and then locked the shack, they had sealed it with two layers of brick and mortar. That was why Josh couldn’t see anything now, even with the hole where the door used to be.
“You ready?” Sonia said to someone behind him.
Hank and two others walked over to his position. They were carrying backpacks, and while Hank seemed comfortable with the items, the other two couldn’t hide their nervousness. It almost looked as if they might both bolt at any second.
“Relax,” Hank said. “Nothing’s going to blow up unless I want them to.”
That didn’t make the other two relax at all. Josh stood aside to let the three men go up the steps.
Sonia leaned closer to him. “What’s in those bags?”
“C4,” Josh said.
“Explosives?”
“Uh huh.”
“Should we, uh, move farther away?”