“You think he knows?” Gaby asked.
“About the uniforms?” Danny said.
She nodded.
He shrugged. “He hasn’t mentioned it yet if he noticed, and that guy runs his mouth more than a fat guy on a treadmill in January.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t made a run for it yet,” Mason was saying through the radio. “If I were a betting man — and I’ve been known to lay a few shekels here and there on the roulette table — I’d put good money on the Ranger taking his chances before the sun sets. Of course he wouldn’t have made it, but he’d have gotten an A for effort.”
“Oh, for the love of God, shut him up,” Danny said from across the blasted opening in the wall. He was almost completely sitting in shadows, and if not for the white clouds of mist forming as he spoke, she wouldn’t know where he was.
Gaby reached down and switched off the radio, then picked it up and clipped it behind her belt. A radio was too valuable to just throw away these days, even if the only other person on the other side was Mason.
She glanced down at her watch again: 5:15 p.m.
Christ, where did the last two minutes go?
She searched out Danny in the darkness. “I don’t think they’re coming.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
Despite every indication that Mason would stay back until nightfall, they couldn’t risk retreating into the backroom until they were absolutely certain. The man was a liar, after all, and couldn’t be trusted. But now that the sun had all but vanished and she thought she could feel the floor under her vibrating as…things began moving across Gallant…
“Time to boogie,” Danny said. He got up and began moving backward across the lobby.
She did the same, anxious to get the hell as far away from the opening as possible. But they didn’t rush it and backpedaled one step at a time while keeping their eyes on the wall and the doors and windows in front of them. She turned around only when she saw the island counter passing by to her left and rushed after Danny, past the first office (with the bodies, and Fritz), and toward the manager’s room in the back.
“Nate,” she called.
He poked his head out of the office, his M4 clutched in his hands. “Okay?”
She nodded. “You got guard duty.”
“Gotcha.”
Nate stepped out into the hallway and stood guard while she and Danny went all the way to the back and removed the large metal filing cabinet they had helped Fritz put over the alley entrance earlier. They took it into the office, with Nate retreating into the room after them. They closed the door, then leaned the heavy cabinet against it before pinning it in place with the desk.
It was a decent barricade, and if it was just the black eyes trying to get in, she thought their chances were pretty good the door would hold. But that was the problem. She knew very well it wouldn’t just be the black eyes. The blue-eyed ones would also be around tonight, just like they had last night, and that time at the farmhouse in Louisiana…
With the door closed, Gaby could barely make out Danny and Nate standing in the room with her. Danny had unslung Benford’s pack and was rummaging through it. A few seconds later there was a double cracking sound, and two glow sticks gradually filled the room.
Danny’s face, suddenly awash in fluorescent green, grinned at her. “And then God said, ‘Let there be awesome green disco lights, and so there was.’”
“Not quite sure that’s the line,” she smiled back at him.
“Eh, I never was much of a church goin’ boy.”
“Looks good,” Nate said, nodding his approval at their handiwork over the door. “Definitely looks like it could last through the night.”
“Winter springs eternal, kids,” Danny said.
“You don’t think so?”
“If it were just those black-eyed bastards? Yeah. But that’s not the case, is it?”
I guess I’m not the only one who remembers.
She looked at her watch, the white neon hand more green than white: 5:20 p.m.
If they thought Gallant was quiet before, listening to the excruciating silence from inside a small office in the back of a bank surrounded by four walls and a barricaded door was an entirely new experience.
She sat with Nate at the back, with the door in front and to her right. Danny sat to their left in the corner. No one had said a word since they settled down to wait, and as they listened to what Mason called “the real world” coming awake around them, they continued to maintain the quiet, the anticipation of what all three of them knew was coming (Anytime now, you bastards) almost suffocating.
The ghouls were out there by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, so why hadn’t they begun assaulting the door yet? Despite straining to hear, she couldn’t detect them outside in the hallway or the bank lobby. Which didn’t make any damn sense at all. They had to know the three of them were in here. Even the black-eyed creatures, with their limited intelligence (Dead, not stupid, right, Will?) could trace the new blood from the streets to the gaping hole in the wall and sniff their trail to the back of the building. And if even by some miracle they couldn’t, the presence of the blue eyes would make up for it.
“He’ll come for them soon.”
“Yes.”
“And when he does…”
“We’ll end him.”
“Finally…”
All of this was for one man. Who the hell were they waiting for?
The question turned over and over in her head and had been since last night. Except now it was so much louder and so much more persistent, with nothing for her to do but listen to the silence as she waited and waited for the creatures to show themselves.
What are you waiting for?
She looked over in Danny’s direction, his face covered in the green light from the glow sticks. He had his rifle between his legs, the muzzle pointed up at the roof, and was staring at the door across from him. She couldn’t tell if he was lost in his own thoughts or if he was just as mystified by the lack of an attack as she was.
She felt welcome warmth as Nate reached over and found her hand and squeezed. “Can’t wait to get our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.
“It’s going to be loud down there with the engine next door,” she said, matching his soft pitch.
“Who cares. That’s what earplugs are for. Plus, no one will know what we’re doing down there. Know what I mean?”
“Not a clue.” She kissed him on the cheek, then pulling back slightly, whispered, “I love you.”
“Finally,” he whispered back. “I didn’t think you would ever say it.”
She smiled and kissed him again, then rested her head against his shoulder.
“Tired?” he asked.
She nodded. “You?”
“Like every part of me is about to go all Scanners.”
“Scanners?”
“You know, that movie where the guy’s head blows up?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll add it to the Netflix queue when we get back to the Trident,” Nate said.
“Deal.”
The office looked different swimming in green, almost surreal somehow. Nate slipped an arm around her, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget about what was going to happen in the next few minutes, or hours. But it was going to happen tonight. The blue eyes hadn’t gone through all this trouble to forget about them now.