“Is it me or are there more of them tonight?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know,” Rick said. “How can you tell?”
“It just feels like there’re more of them out there. Maybe I’m just seeing things. Gut feeling, I guess.”
Rick seemed to consider it, before shrugging it off. “I can’t tell.”
She glanced at the big LED clock on the wall above the monitors. 11:45 p.m.
Ben finally looked over his shoulder. He looked surprised to see her. “Kate. Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said and smiled. “I couldn’t sleep, thought I’d go for a walk.”
“Eleven at night?” Ben asked.
“I like the quiet,” she said and smiled again, hoping this time it was more believable.
It might have been, because he seemed to relax a bit. Or maybe he just lost interest. It was hard to tell with Ben. He was so much like Will in that respect.
“I don’t usually come to this part of the facility,” she said, feeling the need to keep going, to explain her presence. “What are you guys still doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, either,” Rick said.
“Did Will tell you about what he found in Dansby?” Ben asked, his attention already back on the monitors, on the ghouls darting in and out of shadows. They looked like children, playing a game of hide-and-seek with adults.
Did the ghouls know?
“No,” she said.
She hadn’t, in fact, heard about anything in Dansby, though from the sound of Ben’s voice, it was something alarming, maybe even important. Maybe that explained all the excited chatter in the Cafeteria. Many of the facility’s residents usually chattered on pointlessly about something or another, but she noticed they were distinctly more animated tonight.
“What did he find?” she asked.
“Lots of people. Alive. The ghouls are using them in some kind of blood farm. We’re going back there tomorrow to try and bring back as many as we can. If we can. There’s something about them being in a coma that might cause some problems.”
“There are a lot of them, you said?”
“A few hundred.”
“Will said over 500,” Rick added.
“That’s a lot,” Kate said.
This world is theirs. We don’t belong here anymore. Why can’t anyone else but me see that? We’re the intruders now, not them.
“Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot,” Ben said. “Is there something else I can help you with, Kate?”
She could hear it in his voice. Not dislike exactly, but maybe indifference. She heard it in some of the other survivors, too. They didn’t like that she spent all her time in her room and rarely, if ever, interacted with them. They had become suspicious of her. Of course, most of them didn’t know that she did come out, just not when they were awake. She didn’t bother to correct them. What was the point? They could keep on thinking whatever they wanted. It didn’t really matter to her at all.
What’s the point?
She had actually considered seducing Ben and Rick separately to reach her two goals. She was reasonably certain it wouldn’t have taken much to get Rick to do what she wanted, even in her current condition. She was far from the old Kate, the one who could pick up men in bars with a smile and a little leg. She wasn’t that woman anymore, but she was still a woman and they were still men, and that still mattered. Probably even more so now.
But seducing Ben would have been tricky, and she was glad she had ultimately decided against it. One wrong move would alert him — alert the others — and she couldn’t afford that right now. She was too close.
She said, “I’m sorry, Ben,” and was surprised that she actually meant it, even as the words came tumbling out of her mouth.
“What?” he said, turning around again. She guessed he was going to say something else, but he never got the chance.
She took out the Glock and shot him in the right temple. He was so close to her that it wasn’t a very difficult shot at all. His blood splattered the control dashboard in front of Rick, who screamed and jumped out of his seat.
That was easy.
It was a lot easier than she expected. Shooting ghouls was one thing, but shooting a human being who was still alive was another matter entirely, and she was genuinely shocked that it had been so easy to take Ben’s life. One moment he was there, standing behind Rick, and the next he was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was just a little bit of blood dripping from the bullet hole in his right temple. Most of the blood was now splattered against the dashboard, along with a generous amount of brain matter.
She looked over at Rick.
He was barely sixteen, still just a kid, and just a little older than Luke had been when he died. She considered not shooting Rick in the brief two seconds that it took her to turn the gun slightly and shoot him in the chest.
She wondered idly if his parents called him Richard. Or Ricky. Or just Rick. Regardless of what they called him when they were alive, Rick stumbled back against the control board, looking very stunned, before collapsing to the floor. He grabbed at the chair for support, and overturned it as he went down.
The gunshots echoed up and down the facility, like cascading thunder, and she knew they would be coming soon. No one could have heard the gunshots and not know what they were, especially Will and Danny. She didn’t have a lot of time.
Kate quickly crouched next to Ben’s body and found the string around his neck, the one with the pendant that controlled the Door. She pulled it out of his shirt and slipped the loop over his head, careful to work around the wet blood matted against his forehead and chunks of brain clinging to his hair. She slipped the string necklace around her own neck and straightened up.
She walked over and opened the “In Case of Emergency” box next to the door. She took out the ax, spending a moment to familiarize herself with the long curved handle. It weighed a lot more than she had anticipated, but she wasn’t exactly a wallflower. Those weeks of fighting alongside Will and Danny as they left Houston had toughened her up enough so that the ax didn’t feel as unwieldy in her hands as it would have before The Purge.
She took the ax back to the dashboard and located the center console marked MAIN DOOR SWITCH, and below it, a simple red button underneath a glass display. There were no other buttons on the dashboard that looked even remotely like it. It controlled the Door. This and Ben’s pendant, now around her neck.
She glanced up briefly at the bright LED clock on the walclass="underline" 11:51 p.m.
Her eyes moved to the monitors, to the ghouls outside. There seemed to be some urgency to their movements, and there were definitely more of them now than when she had looked a few minutes ago. They seemed to be converging on the Door. At first it was hard to pick them out, because they were so dark and almost invisible against the pitch-black woods, but slowly her eyes adjusted, and their numbers stunned her.
How many were out there? Hundreds? Thousands?
Did they know?
But how? How could they know what was happening down here?
Of course they didn’t know, she decided. She was being silly. How could they?
She turned her attention back to the console, back to the matter at hand. She changed up her grip on the ax a bit, lifted it high over her head, took a big breath, then brought the ax down and heard the solid, satisfying crunch of its metal blade digging into the dashboard a few inches from the button.
She was rewarded with sparks.
She had to pry the ax free. It came out grudgingly, but came back out it did. She lifted it over her head again, took another big breath and lowered it once more with a loud grunt.