“Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop…”
He didn’t recall when he had started to lift the gun, but it was suddenly up to his chest when he heard footsteps and looked over as Maddie walked into the lounge.
She had her M4 rifle over one shoulder and a backpack over the other. She saw him and gave him a brief, awkward smile. “You’re up.”
Blaine consciously lowered the gun and glanced at his watch. Already 10:16 a.m.? He had slept through most of the morning. “You should have woken me.”
She shrugged. “You looked like you needed the rest. Besides, there wasn’t a lot to do.”
“The others…?”
“Gerry’s gone. Lenny, too.”
“What about Sandra?”
“I’m sorry. She’s gone, too.”
Of course they would take Sandra, too. Why would the world allow him to grieve properly?
She walked over to the couch and sat down. Her eyes went to the gun in his hand. “No signs of Mason, but I have Bobby on the roof just in case he comes back.”
“Is that safe?”
“Safer than all of us sitting in here where he can sneak up on us.”
Blaine looked down at the Glock in his hand. It looked foreign, and the feel of it against his palm was unnatural.
“Blaine,” Maddie said, “put the gun away.”
He looked up at her, momentarily taken aback by the hardness in her voice. What did she think he was going to do with the gun? Kill himself? He wasn’t going to kill himself.
Right?
Blaine slipped the Glock into its holster and sat back down on the floor. Maddie unzipped her backpack and took out a bottle of water and tossed it over to him. He took a big gulp and was halfway through when he started spilling some on his shirt and slowed down.
“So what now?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” He set the bottle between his legs.
“I mean, what now? They’re gone, you know.”
“Lenny, Gerry, and Sandra, I know.”
“No, not just them. The others, too. All the sleepers on the second floor.”
Blaine gave her a surprised look.
“Yeah, all of them,” she nodded. “That was all the commotion last night. They were carrying away the sleepers en masse. There isn’t a single soul left up there. You’d think there might be one or two or a dozen that they would leave behind, who might have died; but no, they took them all.”
“All of them?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing about last night makes sense.”
“Where would they take the sleepers?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many were up there? Thousands?”
“At least.”
“That’s a lot of people to move in one night.”
“There were a hell of a lot of them last night, Blaine.”
He nodded. He had to remind himself this was their world now. They — he and her and Bobby — were the anomalies, running around trying to survive, to avoid being stamped out of existence. One nightfall at a time.
So this is what being a cockroach feels like.
“So what now?” Maddie asked again. “Do we follow your friends to Beaufont Lake?”
“Go to Song Island,” Sandra had said. “Take Maddie and Bobby. Go to Song Island and try to be happy. If you love me — if you care about me — you’ll keep going.”
“Blaine?”
He looked up at her. She was watching him closely. “What?”
“Do we follow your friends to Beaufont Lake?”
He thought about it. It was hard to concentrate on any one thing. He still felt numbed — not just physically, but mentally as well. “Will and the others would have reached the island by now.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“So we should go, too. Take what we can from here — the food, water, weapons, and clothing — and start off now.” She glanced at her watch. “We could be on the road by noon. If we push it, we can be in Louisiana and on our way to Song Island well before nightfall.”
“It’s a plan,” he nodded quietly.
“But is it a good plan? Is it doable?”
“What does Bobby say?”
She grinned at him.
“You know what I mean,” he added.
“He’s good to go. We have vehicles. Gas. And it wouldn’t be hard to shoot out the lock in the security room and gather up the weapons.”
“We need silver.”
“What for?”
“Silver kills the ghouls.”
“Since when?”
He told her about Will and Danny discovering silver. About his own use of silver at the house with Sandra.
Sandra…
“Jesus,” Maddie said. “When were you going to tell us this?”
“After we killed Mason.”
“Fair enough. We have more silver than we know what to do with in the department stores. The question is: you know how to turn them into bullets?”
“I don’t have a clue. You?”
“None.”
“Didn’t you say you used to hunt as a kid with your dad?”
She gave him a wry smirk. “Yeah, but we bought bullets from the store like normal people.”
He had to see it for himself, so he went up to the second floor. He expected to see the rows and rows of sleeping bodies. Instead, there was just emptiness.
It didn’t seem possible the ghouls could remove thousands of people in one night, but they had. Even so, he walked along the second-floor walkways just to be sure, spaces once filled up with frail, sleeping bodies hanging between life and death. He could see outlines of where they had lain, created by dust and dirt and spilt blood, like obscene police chalk outlines. There wasn’t nearly as much blood on the floor as he had expected.
They don’t waste a single drop.
After a while, Maddie joined him. “Not even one night. They did all this in half a night. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They took over the damn planet in one night.”
“How many buildings in Beaumont are as big as the Willowstone Mall?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly explored the city since I got here. That was Mason’s job, and he gave me mostly guard duty. Why?”
“They had to have taken the bodies somewhere.”
“You’re assuming they’re going to keep them in the city.”
“You’re right,” he nodded. “They wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble just to swap one building for another in the same city. Not because of us. I don’t think they’re afraid of us at all.”
“Hardly. There are what, millions of them out there? Billions? How many of us are left? A few hundred in the state? A few thousand across the country? The planet?”
One less without Sandra…
“We should start getting ready,” Maddie said. “I think we need to be gone from here by noon. Just to give ourselves enough time to get to Song Island in case we run into trouble along the way. Besides, I’m not fond of the idea of Mason waiting out there for us.”
They walked back to the escalator.
He knew she was watching him closely, trying to gauge his state of mind. “I’m fine.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, well…”
He walked past her and down the escalator, trying to pretend like he really was fine, and failing miserably.
“If you love me — if you care about me — you’ll keep going…”
Blaine and Maddie went down to the security room for their weapons. Maddie shot the lock with her M4, and Blaine collected his Remington shotgun and handgun while Maddie grabbed as much as she could carry.
They took the weapons to a Jeep parked outside Sortys, with Bobby standing sentry on the roof. It took them three trips, using two shopping baskets, to carry all the ammo outside. They stuck to the M4 rifles and shotguns and left behind a stack of weapons for whoever came after.