“He’ll come for them soon,” one of the creatures had said.
He. Who the hell was he?
She allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment even as her ears kept listening for telltale signs that the creatures had finally arrived outside their door, or beyond the walls of the bank, or maybe even above them on the rooftop. Except they weren’t in any of those places because there was just dead silence all around them.
What in God’s name are they waiting for?
She had her eyes partially closed and was concentrating on the warmth of Nate’s body against hers when there was a massive boom! that tore through the room, so close and immediate that her ears were still ringing even as she struggled to open her eyes and move, move, move, dammit!
By the time she managed to fully open her eyes, green tendrils of smoke were already starting to fill the room at a dizzying speed. Then Danny was shooting, his face lit up by a staccato effect of green and white and orange as flames stabbed from his M4. He had somehow made it onto his feet before either she or Nate could react and was actually pushing his way into the smoke instead of running away from it like a sensible human being.
Since when does Danny qualify as “sensible?” she thought even as she scrambled to get ahold of her rifle, which she had dropped about the same time the explosion knocked Nate’s arm from its place around her body.
She wasn’t sure when she lost sight of Danny, but one second he was in front of her and in the next breath he had vanished into the spreading green smoke, and the only thing she could make out was the pop-pop-pop of his rifle assaulting her ears as the ringing from the explosion subsided. The M4s they were armed with were only capable of three-round bursts, but Danny was squeezing the trigger so fast that they sounded almost like one continuous full-auto blast.
She finally (finally!) got her numbed feet under her and scrambled up, gripping her rifle in one hand and shouting, “Stay here!” back at Nate.
He was coughing and trying not to gag against the smoke, but he somehow still managed to flash her a defiant look as he shook his head. “The hell I am!”
“Nate, please!”
“No!” he shouted back.
Loud crackles of gunfire reached them, coming from the hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before.
They blasted through from the other room. Jesus Christ!
Nate was already on his feet when she began moving forward. She could hear him coughing behind her as he followed, and Gaby lifted her rifle as—
A figure stumbled through the jagged opening in front of her. He was wearing black and she glimpsed the shiny lens of his gas mask—
She fired, and the man, moving between rooms, fell awkwardly, landing in the middle of the hole with one part of his body in their room and his legs in the manager’s office.
How the hell did he get past Danny?
It was impossible not to inhale the smoke — a combination of disintegrated Sheetrock and explosive powder swarming around the opening — and she started to cough along with Nate even as they kept pushing forward.
Questions swirled around in her head as she forced her legs to move:
Why did the collaborators attack? Why risk an explosion when Mason had strict orders to keep them alive? Or had the “him” that the blue-eyed ghouls were waiting for finally arrived, and their usefulness as bait had finally come to an end?
“Danny!” she shouted as she stepped over the dead man and into the connecting room. There had been a lot of smoke in the other office, but there was even more in here, almost as if the collaborators hadn’t properly executed their breach.
The only response to her shouting of Danny’s name was the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from outside the room, through the open door to her right.
“Danny!” she shouted as she stumbled over bodies on the floor.
New bodies, and not the ones they had stacked in the back of the room. These were all black, with gas masks jutting out from their faces like plastic elephant tusks.
“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, shouting from behind her. “Wait!”
But she didn’t wait. She couldn’t. Danny was out there by himself, the continued banging of ferocious back-and-forth of automatic rifle fire forcing her to move faster and faster.
“Gaby, wait!”
She ignored Nate’s desperate plea and finally made it out the door and into the hallway, ready to see caverns of yellow and white and brown fangs coming at her. She twisted right toward the alley door, but it was still closed and there was just suffocating darkness back there. She turned left toward the lobby—
Pop-pop-pop!
A figure was shooting in the direction of the street while backing up toward her. She couldn’t tell what kind of clothes he was wearing — it looked dark, either black or blue, so it could have been Danny or a collaborator uniform. After all, weren’t they wearing the same colors right now?
She lifted her rifle and took aim when the man threw a glance over his shoulder. She couldn’t see his shadowed face, but there was nothing that looked like a gas mask, and that was the only reason she didn’t pull the trigger.
“Back, back!” the figure shouted. Danny! “We got incoming, kid! A shit ton of incoming!”
She looked past him and saw that something had swallowed up the hole in the front wall of the bank. No, not something, but some things.
Oh, so there they are.
She never believed they would make it through the night without the ghouls finding them. It was simply beyond the realm of possibility, the kind of optimism that only the old Gaby could have fallen prey to. And yet, and yet, she had wanted to believe. God, she had wanted to believe so badly.
But the truth stared her in the face as she took in the forest of pruned black flesh and heard their bones clacking as they surged through the opening and poured across the lobby floor like an endless ocean wave.
She turned and ran, and heard Danny’s footsteps close on her heels.
“Faster!” he shouted. “Faster!”
Up ahead, Nate had finally found his way out of the door, and his eyes widened at the sight of her and Danny racing back to him.
“Nate, run!” she shouted. “They’re inside! They’re inside the building!”
She saw the whites of Nate’s eyes, and he might have screamed something back at her but she couldn’t hear, because at that very moment the floor and the walls and the ceiling began vibrating uncontrollably. She heard the very distinct clink-clink-clink of empty brass casings (Danny’s, the collaborators, whoever’s) that were littering the floor began jumping around like beans.
At first she thought they were being hit by an earthquake, but then she heard it, and the sound sent a spear into the very center of her soul. The first time she was introduced to it was on the road, then again later, outside of Larkin. It was a sound that she would never forget for as long as she lived, whether that be the next few seconds, or minutes, or years from now.
Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!
18
Frank
He was close. So close. He could almost feel them nearby.
Danny and Gaby.
It was a trap. He knew that without a shred of doubt. Danny, Gaby, and the boy whose name he couldn’t remember were being used to lure him to the town of Gallant. They knew he would come, that he would have no choice because the (small) part of him that was still human demanded he come.