Will and Danny were halfway across the fifty yards that separated the trees and the power station. They were making a beeline toward the open front gate. Karen was nowhere in sight. Lara could just make out a smaller, shack-like building next to the big gray structure where all the humming noise was coming from. The air around her crackled like every particle was heavily charged and ready to burst.
Will and Danny were at the gate when she saw them come to a sudden stop. For a split second, anyway. Then she heard the almost simultaneous loud booms of shotguns firing, their flames stabbing the night air, searing the area around the gate in hot flashes of orange light.
She slid to a stop forty yards away from them and saw Will turning and running back as Danny stayed behind and fired again — and again — into the power station. Danny finally stopped shooting, turned and ran about the same time Will stopped and turned back and began firing back into the darkness — once, twice, three times — as Danny jogged past him, feeding shells into the shotgun as he ran.
“Go go go!” Danny shouted at her.
Lara backpedaled, but she couldn’t turn and run. Not yet. She had to see what was happening. What they were shooting at? She couldn’t help herself, curiosity gnawing at every fiber of her being.
As Danny got closer to her, Lara heard Josh’s voice through Danny’s radio, alarmed, “What’s going on, guys? I can’t see a damn thing down there. What’s going on? What are you shooting at? Is everyone all right?”
Danny didn’t answer. He didn’t have time to answer. He was too busy feeding shells into his shotgun and running at the same time. Lara looked past Danny’s running form and saw Will turning and running, feeding shells into his own shotgun as he did.
Behind him, the darkness seemed to shift and move, as if alive.
Because it was alive.
It wasn’t the darkness, or the night. It was something else. Something familiar.
Ghouls.
A wave of them, pouring out of the power station gate, moving so fast and crashing so indiscriminately against each other, against everything, that the fence shook and threatened to collapse under their charge. But the fencing didn’t fall fast enough, so they began vaulting it, leaping over each other to get to the other side, until finally there were too many of them clinging to the fence at one time and the whole thing careened forward and buried itself into the ground with a loud, grinding squeal, like nails on a chalkboard.
She had forgotten how fast they were, how thin and skeletal, and how inhumanly dark their eyes were. It was like staring into the abyss and seeing the blackness staring back.
Danny was almost on top of her. He grabbed her arm and dragged her with him, shouting, “Go go go!”
She turned and ran alongside him. “What about Will?”
“Keep going!”
Danny stopped and turned around just as Will flashed past him.
Will reached for her arm, found her wrist, and pulled her along with him, even as she heard Danny’s shotgun firing behind them.
Guys, I’m not a baton, she thought to herself, but her thoughts were interrupted by Danny’s shotgun blasts.
Once, twice, three shots.
Then four, five, six, and seven shots.
Seven shots. The Remingtons have a limit of seven shots.
Will released her hand and stopped and turned.
She looked back and saw Danny coming, passing Will, who had begun firing back at the moving, surging wall of ghouls, each one of his blasts sending a wave of flaming death that shredded the creatures. They were still far off, the closest one thirty yards away, but they were close enough she could see the silver buckshot ripping into them, searing flesh — or what little they had left — from bone. They fell in a row, but it didn’t matter, because one, two — a dozen—were soon leaping over the fallen ones, coming in a relentless deluge across the open ground.
She felt her heart sink at the sight of them.
Where the hell did they all come from?
“Go go go!” Danny was shouting, grabbing her wrist and pulling her with him. She thought her arm might snap out of its socket, but it didn’t.
Lara ran as fast as she could, and suddenly the pain in her left arm came screaming back like a roaring train, engulfing her in a firestorm. The Remington seemed to have tripled in weight, and it was all she could do to hold desperately to it, too afraid to let go. She gritted through the pain and kept running, her legs pumping hard under her.
Behind her, she heard Will’s shotgun roaring, firing again, and again…and again.
And each shot got closer, and closer…and closer still.
We’ll never make it. We’ll never make it…
CHAPTER 29
JOSH
Pros and cons: What were they?
Pros: They had taken the island from Tom, Karen, and Marcus. Tom was dead, which was a major plus. Josh didn’t ever want to deal with that asshole again, and stumbling across his body on the second floor of the Tower hadn’t disturbed him nearly as much as he had thought it would. Marcus was also dead, which to a lesser extent Josh supposed was a good thing. The others, like Sarah, had just gone along in order to survive. Josh could understand that. Hell, he might have done the same thing if Gaby’s life were at stake.
Cons: Karen was unaccounted for. Which was disturbing, because Karen was, to hear Sarah tell it, the real brains of the operation. Josh didn’t doubt that at all. Karen looked like the kind of woman who would barter and trade for what she needed, and survival was a hell of a need. So he didn’t like having her out there, running around in the dark. Who knew what she was up to?
Conclusion: It could be worse.
He was up on the third floor of the Tower, along with Gaby. Carly and the girls were below them on the second floor, with the girls still sound asleep on the cot Tom used as his bed. The second floor had been a mess when they had arrived, with a small pool of blood where Tom lay, a neat hole in his forehead. The real mess was on the wall, where his brain had splattered when Will had shot him.
Will had ordered them to toss Tom’s body out the window to save them the trouble of carrying it down the narrow spiral staircase. Josh thought he would feel a little queasy about just tossing Tom out the window, but he felt strangely okay with it as he watched the corpse tumble down the side of the Tower to land in a bush. Well, after it bounced off the bulging base of the Tower.
Instead of cleaning up the blood, they threw a towel over it and picked up the bookcase and tossed the books and Playboy magazines and board games back on the shelves. You could tell there had been a fight, but it wasn’t like Elise or Vera noticed as they snored. Carly, for her part, sat and watched them sleep with a shotgun leaning against the wall next to her. She looked too tired to care that someone had been shot in the room not all that long ago.
The radio broadcast that had lured them to Song Island came from a simple setup that looked like something he could have put together back in his bedroom in Ridley with parts from the local Radio Shack. A thirty-inch LED monitor sat in front of a tower hard drive and keyboard, with a broadcasting microphone hanging from a thin metal arm bracket. There was a pile of black cords under the table, hooked into multiple jacks along the wall. The monitor showed a program running over a Windows 7 desktop.