“Make that two injured,” Maddie said.
“Which one?”
“Second boat. Looks like his right leg.”
Blaine focused on the second boat as the men climbed onto the dock. And yes, one of them was limping badly. One of the limping man’s comrades reached over and helped him up the wooden deck. They left the boathouse, arguing and gesturing wildly. He followed them to the two-story house as far as he could, glimpsing trucks parked in front of the house, and was sure one of them was the Silverado from earlier. Another vehicle might have been the blue Tundra.
“That’s a lot of firepower,” Maddie said. “You think they were attacking the island?”
“If they were, it didn’t go well.” Blaine lowered his binoculars. “I only heard six shots in all, not counting the loud free-for-all in the middle. What about you?”
“Six.”
“What about you, Bobby?”
Bobby held up one hand and one finger on his second hand.
“So six shots in all,” Blaine said. “That’s not a lot. But it might be enough for a pair of Army Rangers to put the hurt on a couple of boats trying to land on their beach. The question is, why are they even attacking the island? What’s going on over there?”
“So you think your friends took the island?” Maddie asked.
“I think they’re on it, yeah. I’ve seen them shoot. They wouldn’t need more than six shots to repel an attack by boat. Even a couple of boats with four guys apiece.”
“Are they that good?”
“They’re really well-prepared, and they know what they’re doing.”
They settled back down into the ditch.
Maddie wiped at a bead of sweat along her forehead. “So what now? We can’t just stay here forever. Sooner or later it’s going to get dark, and we’re going to need shelter.”
He didn’t have any good answers for her. They could attack the house from the front, but he flashed back to the gunfight at the mall. What happened that day was forever etched into his brain. He reminded himself that he, Maddie, Bobby, and Sandra could barely take on two men they had the drop on. Which made it unlikely they were going to take on at least eight heavily armed people in a two-story house, even if two of them were already hurting. That still left six.
Six too many…
Blaine glanced down at his watch: 4:16 p.m.
“Well?” Maddie said, watching his face carefully. “Should we attack the house?”
“That wouldn’t be a very good idea,” a voice said behind them.
Blaine shot up and spun around — and found himself staring into the barrel of an assault rifle.
CHAPTER 31
WILL
Morning brought salvation and sent the ghouls back to their point of origin. It wasn’t hard to figure out where that was. All they had to do was follow the jagged lines of white bones scattered across the island, the flesh seared off completely by the sun’s rays. The unnatural mist of evaporated, tainted flesh and ghoul blood lingered in the air long afterward. Thank God for the wind that appeared out of the north to help drive the smell away.
The sight of so many dead ghouls in one place took Will back to the bank outside of Cleveland, Texas, all those many months ago. That was the day he had lost Kate. He didn’t know it until much later, but that was when she had started to slip away. His failure to notice cost them Harold Campbell’s facility and forced them on this journey to Song Island. Maybe, in the long run, it would all work out.
If they could hold the island…
Less than thirty minutes after sunup, Will and Danny emerged from the Tower. Instead of a cobblestone pathway, they followed the bones from the eastern cliff back to the power station in the west. They bypassed the hotel. There wasn’t anything in there they hadn’t already seen last night. The dead would be gone, including Al, Jake, Debra and her son, and Berg. Will didn’t know if Berg had ever made it out of the zip ties before the ghouls had invaded the hotel, and he didn’t particularly care.
He did care just a little bit about the others, especially Al, whose screams were one of the last things Will had heard before the cook had vanished under a sea of swarming creatures. He hadn’t seen what happened to Debra or her son Kyle, though he had seen Jake swinging a golf club when the ghouls had entered through the windows around them. He remembered grabbing Sienna and dragging her away. She had fought him, trying to get back to Jake, and Will had been half a second from letting her go when she had decided to finally stop fighting and run.
That was last night. This morning, they were alive. Most of them, anyway.
Gaby and Josh, armed with shotguns and radios, stayed behind in the Tower. As soon as the sun rose, they could see everything for miles from the windows. The south and east directions gave them a clear line of sight of the lake’s shorelines, including the marina and the two-story house. The Tower, as Will had predicted, made for a brilliant sniper’s perch.
Now all he needed to do was turn Gaby into a shooter…
The others had begun clearing bones out of the hotel and the grounds around it. The light bones were easy to pick up, stack in wheelbarrows, and roll away. They gathered the remains of the dead in a pile along the north side of the island, next to the cliff.
Will and Danny reached the power station and stepped over the trampled hurricane fencing, still half-buried in the dirt. The big gray building hadn’t been touched, but there was a clear path from where the front gate used to be to the small shack. As he got closer, Will noticed it wasn’t really a shack. It was a stand-alone brick building with a steel door that opened inward, revealing very little on the other side. He thought he could hear rustling wind through the opening, though most of it was lost in the loud, rumbling hum of the generator next door.
Will turned on the flashlight duct-taped to the side of the Benelli shotgun and aimed it at the door. Four pairs of charcoal eyes stared back at him before quickly shrinking back into the darkness, trying to escape the probing light.
“Hellooooo, nurse,” Danny said.
They were squeezed inside the building, just beyond the reach of sunlight, simultaneously salivating at the sight of them and morbidly afraid of the brightness splayed across the open metal door. It was hard to tell how many of them were actually in there. Will guessed the building had a flight of stairs that angled downward and under the island. Where the stairs went after that, and where the ghouls came from, were questions that played themselves over and over in his head. The only way to find out was to go into the shack — or find where the tunnel ended, which had to be somewhere on land, along the western cove. Neither option was particularly viable at the moment.
Will walked around the shack to get a better look at what he was dealing with. It wasn’t any bigger than anything he would have found in someone’s backyard. The front was about two meters wide, the length around three and a half. It was concrete from top to bottom, with a flat, unremarkable roof and a metal door.
When he circled all the way back to the front, he took a quick step toward the door and fired with the Benelli. Regular buckshot ripped through a ghoul standing defiantly in front of him. The creature was thrown back by the impact, half of its side shorn off, revealing bone and flesh underneath. It picked itself up and glared at him, gaunt cheeks flickering in the flashlight beam.
“I don’t think it likes you,” Danny said.
Will fired again, taking off the top half of the creature’s head, where its brain would have been if it still had one. The creature stumbled back into the wall of ghouls crowding behind it before picking itself up and looking back at him through its remaining right eye.