She caught her breath, afraid it would disappear like a mirage if she lowered the binoculars or looked away for even a second.
Song Island…
CHAPTER 22
BLAINE
They appeared as soon as the sun abandoned the world for another day. They weren’t just on the rooftop of the Sortys department store, they were all around them. He couldn’t see them, so he didn’t know how many there actually were, but he could hear and feel them along the walls, the floor, and every inch of the building, and that told him everything he needed to know.
Sandra lay on the couch in his arms, as quiet as he had ever seen her. With the painkillers still kicking around in his system, Blaine didn’t feel a whole lot of pain, but the drugs also kept him wide awake for most of the night, listening to the ghouls as they traveled back and forth, through, above, around, and, he swore, underneath him, too.
He tried not to think about what was happening on the second floor of the mall. He tried not to picture those poor souls up there. Did his best to shut out the images of teeth marks along arms and legs and necks of prone victims, hanging somewhere between life and death.
Did they know what was happening to them? Were they crying out right now, tormented by the fact that no one could hear them?
His skin rippled with a sensation Blaine hadn’t felt in a long time. A combination of fear and shame and hopelessness.
“Is it the pain?” Sandra asked.
“No,” he whispered back.
“Oh.”
It stayed with him until he finally fell asleep around three in the morning. He closed his eyes, and when he woke up, the feeling was still with him, in his mouth, like a lingering bad meal regurgitated over and over.
He also felt the renewed, unwanted sensation in his side. He quietly pulled his pill bottle from his pocket and shook two pills out, then popped them into his mouth.
“Go easy on them,” Sandra said, lying against him, her eyes still closed.
“Just two.”
“How many do you have left?”
“Not a lot.”
“Go easy,” she said again.
They heard footsteps approaching, and Sandra untangled herself from him and stood up just as the door opened and Mason came in. He was wearing his hazmat suit, but not the gas mask, looking absurd with his head sticking out of the shiny gray uniform. Maddie was behind him, but Lenny, who sometimes watched the door, wasn’t outside this morning. Blaine had learned last night that the yahoo with the country accent was Gerry. He wasn’t there, either.
“Rise and shine,” Mason said. “Decision time. Are you with us or are you against us?”
He smiled at them, but Blaine didn’t believe there was anything remotely heartfelt about the smile. Just to prove Blaine’s thoughts correct, Mason casually laid his right palm over the butt of his holstered Browning.
Blaine looked past Mason at Maddie. The two of them were almost the same height and looked like teenagers playing at being soldiers. Maddie was clearly uncomfortable with what was happening, but she looked committed nevertheless. If not to Mason, then to survival, and that meant standing behind the man with the gun.
Blaine wondered if he could get to Mason and end this, but the man was too far enough away. Even on his best days — and he was far from that at the moment — there was no way he could take that distance before Mason shot him dead.
“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Blaine said.
“You speak for her, too?” Mason asked, eyes going to Sandra.
“Yes,” Sandra said quietly.
“Are you sure?” Mason smiled. “You don’t sound like you’re very sure.”
He sounds like a fucking game show host. All of this is just fun and games to him.
“Yes,” Sandra said again, louder, though not necessarily with any more conviction than the first time.
“All right, then.” Mason clapped his hands. “First order of business is breakfast. Then we’ll get the two of you fitted for suits. You look like the kind of gal who could make the color gray work. You certainly got the tits and hips for it.”
Sandra glanced over briefly at Blaine and frowned.
He tried to smile reassuringly back at her.
God, I hope this works…
It didn’t take much to convince Blaine that Mason didn’t really trust them. For one, the man wouldn’t give them their guns back. Or let them carry any kind of weapons at all. The only thing he issued them, other than their ugly gray hazmat suits and gas masks, were radios.
“What about our guns?” Blaine asked.
“You won’t need them,” Mason said. “You see anything, you hop on the radio and we come running.”
“You get guns when you prove you deserve them,” Gerry added.
Mason left them with the cowboy, who sat by himself at a table across the food court from them. Gerry ate greedily from a can of SPAM. Blaine wondered how long it would take before the cowboy accidentally stuffed too much of the canned meat into his mouth and choked on it.
With my luck, never sounds about right.
“When would that be?” Blaine asked instead.
“When you deserve them,” Gerry said. “Which part of that don’t you understand? You want I should speak slower so you can habla?”
Blaine grinned back at him. He wasn’t sure which part of Gerry he disliked more — his face or his country twang.
“What exactly will we be doing?” Sandra asked Maddie, who was sitting at another table nearby.
Sandra sat next to Blaine, both of them in their hazmat suits, the gas masks on the round metal table in front of them. The seat was uncomfortable and dug into Blaine’s ass even through the suit. He picked at the can of tuna with a flimsy plastic spork while Sandra ate a can of chicken. There was plenty of canned food to go around, Maddie told them, showing them boxes and boxes of the stuff in a storage room next to the Sortys employee lounge.
“Guard duty, mostly,” Maddie said.
“Without weapons?” Blaine asked.
“Guard watch,” Maddie corrected herself. “You don’t need weapons for that.”
The food court was next to the non-working escalator they had previously taken up to the second floor, and Blaine could see the guy Maddie had been standing guard with yesterday still up there. His name was Bobby, and he had yet to take the gas mask off, so Blaine still didn’t know what he looked like underneath it.
“It’s not that bad,” Maddie said. For a second, Blaine thought she was trying to convince herself more than them. “After a while, you get used to it. It’s boring work. When it’s your turn, you stand on the second floor and watch the sleepers. That’s what we call them.”
“Food” is more like it.
“What happens if one of them wakes up?” Sandra asked.
“They don’t,” Maddie said.
“But what happens if they do?”
“They don’t,” Maddie repeated. “At least, none of them have woken up before in all the time I’ve been here.”
“You don’t know what the ghouls did to them?” Blaine asked.
“Not a clue,” she said. Then, “‘Ghouls’?”
“That’s what they look like to me,” he lied. “Ghouls.”
Maddie smiled a bit. “Yeah, you’re kind of right. They are ghoulish looking, aren’t they?”
Everything about this is ghoulish.
“What now?” Blaine asked.
“I’ll show you the rest of the mall first,” Maddie said.
“Bullshit,” Gerry said, his voice coming out of nowhere. For a moment Blaine had forgotten he was even there. “Why the fuck are you showing them where everything is?”