No, not at the two dead men. More, specifically, at their uniforms.
“What?” Natasha said. “What are you looking at? You already took everything they have. What’s left?”
“Their uniforms,” Will said. He kneeled back down and began unbuttoning Rick’s shirt.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Because they leave the soldiers alone,” she said. Then, with something that almost sounded like hope in her voice for the first time since he’d met her, “You really think it’ll work?”
“Only one way to find out,” he said.
It didn’t take them long to strip the two men down to their underwear. Rick was the smaller of the two, so Natasha took his uniform into the back room. Will pulled on Millard’s, grateful to shed his own bloodied clothes.
He didn’t realize just how bruised and purple and yellow he was until he was standing in his boxers. He quickly put the uniform on and cinched the gun belt in place, covering up the scars and bandages and everything else that reminded him he was probably not going to last very long in this condition. The painkillers he had popped earlier were starting to work, but what he wouldn’t give for a little bit more pep.
He told himself he’d get the help he desperately needed when he finally made it back home. Lara could treat him. Or Zoe, though he’d insist Lara do it.
Have to get home. Get back to Lara.
Have to get home at all costs…
Natasha came back out, still doing up the buttons on Rick’s shirt. “It kind of fits. For all the good it’ll do.”
“That’s it, think positive,” Will said.
Millard’s clothes actually fit him pretty well, and he shoved the sheathed knife behind his back.
“I’m being realistic,” Natasha said. “These two didn’t even know why the uniforms work. They just accepted it because that’s what they do; they’re followers. Look how fast the tall one was willing to buy your bullshit.”
They were adapting so they wouldn’t perish. It’s human nature.
“What’s in the back room?” he asked.
“Just some empty boxes. The window was unlocked, and it was just big enough for me to crawl through.”
Then Natasha went very quiet.
“What’s—” he started to ask.
She was staring past him and out the windows again, at the creatures gathered outside. Nothing had changed that he could see. There were still too many of them, overflowing out of the parking lot and onto the feeder road. No matter how hard or long he stared, it was impossible to make out the gray concrete of the I-10 in the background. Was it even still there?
“What’s happening?” Natasha asked. Her voice had dropped noticeably again.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“I don’t see anything.”
“They don’t look different to you?”
He shook his head, then glanced back at her. Natasha had retreated until she was standing (almost leaning) against the far wall, now little more than a silhouette in the shadows. He didn’t know how, but he could actually see her terrified face in the darkness.
“I swear I saw them move,” she said.
“Move?”
“Yeah. They moved.”
“How?”
“I can’t explain—”
Bang!
He spun around, lifting the M4 just as the ghoul picked itself up from the concrete sidewalk. It had smashed itself, skull first, into one of the twin glass doors and left behind a crack about an inch long. The figure slowly straightened up, tar-like black eyes finding Will and focusing in, as if it knew — it knew—who he was.
“That can’t be good,” Natasha said breathlessly behind him.
Yeah, I think that’s the understatement of the century, Natasha.
Will took another step back, then another one, when a second ghoul raced forward and flung itself into the other glass door. It struck headfirst, like the other one, and instantly fell to the sidewalk before picking itself back up. Like the first one, it had left an inch-wide crack across the glass.
What the hell were they doing? They weren’t going to break through the doors. Most convenience stores had tempered glass designed to withstand this kind of brute force attack. It would take forever to shatter unless you had a pickup truck moving at full speed. And right now he didn’t see a vehicle—
Oh, fuck.
He stumbled back as they began flinging themselves into the glass walls—bang! bang! bang! — all across the length of the store.
One after another—
Bang!
— after another—
Bang!
Each impact rang out like a gunshot—
Bang!
Worse than gunshots, because this weapon could be reloaded again and again, because they never died, they didn’t feel pain, and shattered limbs and broken bones meant nothing to them. The windows, along with the doors, were starting to chip little by little with every strike. They would break. Sooner or later, they would break.
“What now?” Natasha shouted behind him.
He didn’t answer her, because there was nowhere to run. If there were this many ghouls outside that he could see, there were probably even more surrounding the building that they couldn’t. Because it was night outside, and the night was theirs.
It was hers.
“I’m coming, Will,” she had said. “I’ll be there soon…”
“What the fuck is happening?” Natasha shouted, her voice drowning in the maddening fury of ghouls spearing the glasses with their bodies.
The constant hammer pounding, growing…
Bang!
“Hey!”
BANG!
“What now? What do we do now?”
BANG!!!
CHAPTER 22
GABY
“This is Lara! Everyone who isn’t already there, head to your designated exit points now! I repeat! Head to your exit points now! The island is lost! I repeat! The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
She might have stopped breathing for a moment as Lara’s words echoed through the earbud. Her body was still trembling from the sight of men dying on the beach — and the fact she had contributed to that body count — when the explosion ripped through the island, followed by Lara’s voice over the radio.
“The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
It couldn’t be possible, could it? She and Danny and Nate had risked everything to get down here just to save the island. They had left Will behind in order to do it. All that sacrifice had resulted in these bodies lying on the beach, the lapping waves of Beaufont Lake flooding the white sand with crimson blood that looked shockingly bright even with just the moonlight. At first she thought shooting men behind the night vision of her optic was surreal, like playing a videogame. The men stumbling and jumping out of their beached vessels didn’t look like actual human beings; they were more pixilated CGI.
But they were real, just like the round after round she had sent into them from the safety of the tree line. She had lost count of how many times she moved from spot to spot, never giving the black-clad assaulters a single location to shoot at. Eventually, they started believing there was more than just her in the eastern half of the beach and began spraying indiscriminately into the trees.