One of the creatures had stopped in front of the window. Its skeletal, silhouetted figure looked like a puppet moving behind the curtains of a puppet show, lit up by a flashlight. In this case, the flashlight was the moon. There were two windows at the front of the shop, on either side of the door, and the creature had stopped in front of the window Luke had broken to get inside. It was standing there much longer than it should, as if it was looking at something, seeing something amiss.
Luke tensed up next to her. Both of them had stopped breathing.
The creature continued to look at the window. Maybe it had noticed the bent burglar bars. Maybe it saw or heard or smelled them.
Could they do that? Could they smell them?
Luke gripped his sword, the sharp blade pointing at the ceiling. He had taken it out of the scabbard. When had he done that?
He nodded at her, as if to say, “I’m ready if you are,” and again she was taken aback by just how young he was.
She looked back toward the window.
The creature turned its head quickly, as if its attention was snapped elsewhere. It disappeared from the window, even as new creatures rushed by, silhouettes appearing one second and gone the next in an endless blur.
Luke let out a loud breath. She did the same, feeling a little light-headed for a moment. How long had she held her breath? It had seemed to take forever for the creature to finally move on.
“That was a close one,” he whispered.
“Yeah…”
He slouched, the sword still clutched tightly in his hands.
She didn’t have to say anything, and he didn’t have to tell her, but she knew neither of them were going to get any sleep tonight.
Then they heard it, in the distance. There was no mistaking the noise. It was loud, like thunderclaps.
Gunshots.
As soon as she said it, four more shots rang out, one after another.
They exchanged a look, scrambled to their feet, and hurried to the window to the right of the door, keeping low in case one of the creatures stopped to look in again. More gunshots broke the night air, and the intensity of movements outside seemed to become frenzied in response.
Luke used the point of his sword to brush aside a piece of curtain, enough to give them a glimpse of the parking lot. It was teeming with them as they moved toward the streets all at once. They looked like a horde of stampeding cattle, moving swiftly with an unnatural but graceful gait that struck her as odd and impossible.
There’s so many of them…
The creatures moved with purpose. Not running toward the street, but surging toward the sound of gunshots. Soon it was hard to tell where one creature ended and another began — there was a mass of blackness moving like an ocean wave underneath the moonlight.
She thought about the machete in her hand and the sword in Luke’s, and realized with sudden terror just how ridiculous they had been to think they could ever defend the pawnshop if the creatures discovered them. How long would they have lasted? A minute? Two?
They sat still in the dark underneath the window for the longest time, not saying a word, listening to the dwindling footsteps.
The gunshots continued for a while, then began to fade.
Then there was just the eerie, suffocating silence again, the noise of a city waking when it should be sleeping.
“You think they got them?” Luke whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“I hope it wasn’t those guys in the police car…”
They moved quietly back to their bedrolls. Luke lay down and closed his eyes, the sword on the floor next to him, his right hand gripping the handle in a tight clutch. An absurd, almost comical image of him waking up from a nightmare and accidentally stabbing himself flashed across her mind.
It wasn’t until ten o’clock that she felt the first hint of drowsiness nagging at her. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but nothing happened. She opened them and stared at the ceiling instead, listening to the darkness.
The wind lightly tapped against the wall, and she listened for the distinctive crack of gunshots. She longed to hear it. It was proof someone else was out there besides her and a fourteen-year-old kid.
Midnight came and went.
She couldn’t keep her eyes closed, or stop herself from hearing every single noise outside, no matter how trivial. Her hands, palms flat against the cold tiles beneath her, felt every little insignificant vibration.
And there were no gunshots…
“Luke,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he whispered back.
“Are you asleep?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither. Tell me about your family.”
“Are you going to tell me about yours?”
“If you want.”
“I do,” he said.
“Okay.”
She heard him take a deep breath. “My mother’s name is Patricia, my father’s is Thomas. I’m an only child…”
CHAPTER 14
WILL
Will heard gunshots, somewhere down Richmond. On a normal night, with traffic and the sounds of a city shifting from day to night, he wouldn’t have heard them at all, but this wasn’t a normal night. Without the distraction of daily life, the faint pop-pop-pop echoes might as well be thunder.
He and Danny were on the roof of the Archers Sports and Outdoors store, lying prone near the edge. They watched a small group of ghouls emerge from the 24-hour Walmart Superstore to their left. The group soon ballooned, and Will stopped counting after 300. They darted into the darkness, toward the sound of gunfire.
“That’s the last time I go shopping at Walmart,” Danny said in a low voice.
“When was the last time you went shopping at Walmart?”
“I’m just saying. I’m not going there now.”
“You heard that, right?”
“Gunshots? Yeah. How many rounds did you count?”
“Fifteen. Maybe sixteen. More than one?”
“I’m guessing two. Maybe three?”
“Either or,” Will said.
“So there’s someone else out there,” Danny said. “Bad decision makers, obviously. Probably dead now. I wonder if they know about the silver?”
“How did we find out?”
“Dumb accident?”
“There you go.”
“Or it could have been the work of God. What’s that they say? God works in mysterious ways? Maybe this is one of those mysterious ways.”
“When did you suddenly believe in God?”
“I’m not saying I do,” Danny said. “I’m just saying me not believing in God doesn’t preclude it from being God’s work.”
“How could it be God’s work if you don’t believe in God?”
“God is God. He doesn’t need me to believe in him for him to do what he does. If that were the case, he wouldn’t be God.”
“That makes no sense.”
Danny shrugged. “Makes perfect sense to me.”
“Of course it does,” Will said.
They lay still and watched more ghouls emerge from the Walmart. There had to be 500 now, maybe a thousand since the last time he had looked. Even through the night-vision binoculars, the creatures had become indistinguishable, like pebbles on a black beach covered in tar.
“They look excited,” Danny said, peering through his own night-vision binoculars. “The gunshots have them all afluttered.”
“Afluttered?”
“Yeah, I’m sticking with that. Afluttered.”
“I guess they do look afluttered,” Will said.
“How do they communicate, you think?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of hive mind, maybe.”