“It’s too late,” Keo said. He kept his voice calm, measured, and unyielding. “He’s on his own.”
“We can’t do this. We have to help—” She gasped again when she saw them. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”
There was a tide of them, so many that at first he thought the night was actually moving, that it had somehow come alive. But no, it wasn’t the darkness that had changed into a living thing, it was the living things inside it.
Ghouls. Hundreds, maybe more. Thousands?
He didn’t know where they had come from, only that they weren’t there one moment and then there was nothing but them. They swarmed toward the man, swallowing him up as if he were a fish trying to outswim the ocean itself. But he couldn’t, and Keo heard the scream, the sound of gunshots that wasn’t quite as loud as before because this time they were muffled by suffocating flesh.
Something grabbed onto Keo’s arm. He looked down at Carrie’s hand, her fingers digging into his skin. She stared out the window, face frozen in horror, the sight too frightening to comprehend yet too fascinating to look away from.
“Carrie,” he whispered when he felt a trickle of blood along his arm.
She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were transfixed by the amorphous blob moving outside the window, just beyond the flimsy hurricane fencing that would fall in a split-second if the creatures ever knew they were in there—
“Carrie,” he said again, a little louder this time.
That did it. She looked over at him, then down at his arm, and quickly unfurled her fingers and pulled her hand back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s okay.”
He slid down to the floor and took a handkerchief out from one of his pouches and wrapped it around his arm.
Carrie sat next to him, clutching her knees to her chest. She stared forward and rocked absently back and forth. “What were they doing out there, Keo? What in God’s name were they doing out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everyone knows not to be outside at night. Everyone knows. Even Lorelei knows. Everyone…” Her voice trailed off.
Keo put his arm around her and pulled her against him. She came willingly, anxiously, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and it wasn’t because of the slightly chilly night air inside the RV.
“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “It’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Will it?”
“Yes. I promise.”
Carrie’s body slackened against him and Keo tightened his grip on her with one hand, the other holding the MP5SD in his lap. He kept his eyes and ears open and knew he wasn’t going to be getting sleep anytime soon. Which was okay. He was used to not getting a decent amount of sleep these days. Hell, these last few weeks and months…
He thought about Gillian, walking on a white sandy beach, barefooted. He wondered if she had given up on him by now or if she still looked off at the Gulf of Mexico every day, waiting for him to arrive, for him to finally make good on his promise.
“You promise me,” she had said. “You’ll follow us to Santa Marie Island.”
“Yes,” he had answered. “I promise.”
“I’ll wait for you. Just hurry.”
That had been months ago. Did she still remember the exchange between them as vividly as he did? Was she even still waiting for him? There was only one way to find out.
First, though, he had to make good on a dead man’s promise, and that meant going to Song Island…
12
Gaby
What are you doing, you idiot?
Turn around. Right now. Run back to the door.
Do it.
And then what? There was no way out. No way to open the door. (She would need a doorknob for that.) No windows to climb out of, either. Not even a vent to crawl into.
They were inside the building, just like whoever had led them in here had planned it.
You’re screwed. You’re so screwed.
She must have sighed out loud because she heard clothes rustling as Peter, somewhere in the darkness with her, turned in her direction. Or she thought he did, anyway.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She shook her head before realizing he probably couldn’t see, not with the flashlight beam in front of them instead of on her face. “I’m fine,” she whispered back. “Keep the flashlight in front of us.”
“Okay…”
They had been walking down a long, empty hallway toward another intersection for the last ten minutes, though it didn’t seem as if they had gone very far from the alleyway door. That probably had something to do with the inability to see beyond the end of Peter’s flashlight. She must have gripped and re-gripped the M4 at least a dozen times.
At least there was a window in front of them this time, even though it was covered up so thoroughly with thick slabs of wood that not a single sliver of sunlight managed to slip through. Peter’s circle of light illuminated the occasional paintings of birds and ducks and flowers on the wall, along with end tables that held delicate-looking vases with nothing inside them.
It continued to be deathly quiet inside the building, not helped by the normal silence beyond the walls. It seemed as if she and Peter were the only two people still alive in the world at that moment, moving in the dark.
Moving in the dark…
She had trouble figuring out what kind of building they were in, much less its size. Maybe some kind of boarding house, judging by the hallways? Or an apartment building, maybe. Was there more than one floor? She hadn’t come across any stairs yet, and there were no sounds above her. She had been so busy chasing Peter through the streets and then the alley that she hadn’t taken even a second to take a look at the buildings around them. Her situational awareness, Will would say, had been utter shit.
How long had they been moving through the darkness? Twenty minutes? More? Less? Hard to tell. Hard to breathe.
But it wasn’t hard to sweat. She was doing a lot of that. The thickness in the air was made worse by the boarded-up window. She assumed the rest of the windows in the place were similarly covered, which would explain the complete lack of ventilation. Peter was sweating almost as much next to her; she could tell because whenever they accidentally brushed up against each other — which was about once every other step — his sweat rubbed off on her exposed arm and vice versa.
They waited to hear from Milly or her captor the entire time. Noises, movements, as long as it was something (anything) that told them that she was still alive in here, somewhere. There was nothing except their dual labored breathing.
Crash!
Gaby spun around. Peter mirrored her action, his flashlight spinning a full 180 degrees until it exposed a small figure standing behind them.
A boy. Barely a teenager. His eyes bulged against the light, though he didn’t look scared — just guilty, as if he had been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He wore dirty slacks and a sweat-stained T-shirt, bright blue eyes looking back at Gaby through stringy brown hair that fell over his face. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and he stood next to one of the end tables, the vase on top of it having fallen down and broken on the floor.
The boy turned and ran.
“Wait, kid, stop!” Gaby shouted before chasing after him.
Peter was slow to react, but eventually his flashlight moved and the beam bounced up and down the dirty floor, erratically picking up the fleeing form. Gaby was close enough that she could see the kid — or at least, the outline of his shape — as he scrambled down the hallway.