Carly nodded and led Kate and Luke down the aisle. Kate looked back at Will as he headed off in the opposite direction.
Carly said, “There’s a staircase that leads up to a second floor catwalk. It’s actually pretty scary, really high up, with just this metal walkway keeping you from going splat against the floor below. From there, you can climb up to the roof.”
“How many of you guys are here?” Kate asked.
“Me, Vera, Danny, and Will. Oh, and Ted. So, five. Well, seven now. You guys meet any other survivors out there?”
“You’re our first. But we did hear gunshots last night.”
“Will and Danny heard them, too. They think the guys who were shooting are dead.”
“Why?” Luke asked.
“Because they were shooting,” Carly said, as if that explained everything. When they didn’t respond, she added, “You make that much noise, you’re just drawing them to you. And with so many of them out there…”
Kate nodded. Like moths to a flame.
“You know that Walmart next door?” Carly asked.
“We passed it on the way here,” Kate said.
“There must be thousands of them in there. I mean thousands.” Carly shivered. “I get the creeps every time I think about how many of them are right next door to us. That’s why once Will and Danny finish making their bullets, we’re going to leave.”
“There’re not enough bullets here already? I thought that’s all they sold here. Bullets and guns.”
“Kate doesn’t exactly shop at Archers a lot,” Luke smiled.
She smiled, too, feeling a little embarrassed. Her life had changed so much in just a few short days, it sometimes took her a while to realize that the life she knew was gone, replaced by something foreign and dangerous.
“They’re making silver bullets,” Carly said.
“Why?” Kate asked.
“The creatures are allergic to silver or something. Will and Danny say you can empty a whole clip into the buggers and they’ll just keep coming. But you shoot them with one silver bullet and down they go. So they’re making as many silver bullets as they can.”
Kate remembered Donald, smiling at her after she had driven the three inches of heel into the side of his head…
“Luke and I were staying at a pawnshop before we came here,” she said. “There was plenty of silver back there. There were also a couple of safes in the back that probably contain a lot of valuables, maybe even more silver.”
“I’ll let them know,” Carly said.
“So they’re going to finish making the bullets soon?”
“Danny says they should have most of the silver melted down and recast into bullets by tonight. Once they’re done, we’re outta here,” Carly added, sounding relieved.
“Where are you going?”
“Into the countryside. Will says there’s a place near Lake Livingston that’s like some kind of underground bunker, built by this guy named Harold Campbell. Have you ever heard of him?”
“No,” Kate said.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Luke added.
“Supposed to be this crazy millionaire,” Carly said. “Anyway, after Will left the Army, he went to work for this Campbell guy building his bunker for a while. It’s supposed to be impregnable.”
“Sounds almost too good to be true,” Luke said.
He looked over at her, as if to ask, Are we going, too? She didn’t know how to answer, so she kept her face as neutral as possible. An impregnable underground facility somewhere in the countryside? It really did sound too good to be true.
Carly led them into a hallway at the very back of the Archers, then into an employee lounge. Inside, a big man in cargo pants and a sweater was eating tacos.
Carly said, “That’s Ted. As you can see, he likes him some tacos.”
Ted grinned and came over and shook their hands.
“Ted, this is Luke and Kate,” Carly said. “Ted here was the first guy we met that night. He saved my sister and me all by himself.”
Ted’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment. “It was nothing,” he said.
“Don’t believe him,” Carly said. “It was something, all right.”
“You guys hungry?” Ted asked, clearly trying to take the attention away from himself.
He had made two tacos and put them inside Taco Bell wrappers. The finished product didn’t look anything like the commercials she remembered, but the smell of cooked ground beef and fresh cheese made her mouth water just the same.
“It’s not much,” Carly said, “but we’re trying to eat as much as we can before it all goes to waste.”
“We’ve been eating nothing but jalapeno-flavored beef jerky for the last two days,” Kate said. “Trust me, this is a vast improvement.”
“Then dig in, before Ted eats it all.”
Kate and Luke exchanged a look, then happily dove in.
CHAPTER 16
WILL
“You remember that whole Mayan 2012 thing?” Danny asked.
“End of the world?” Will said.
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
Danny chuckled. “I got Stacy Patterson to sleep with me because of that. Best sex of my life.”
“She hated your guts.”
“Not that night. She believed in the whole Mayan thing.”
“So you tricked her.”
“Shut your mouth. I was just agreeing with her.”
Will laughed. Stacy Patterson was a part-time dispatcher at their SWAT house, an attractive twenty-five-year-old with a strict policy of not dating cops, especially the SWAT guys she worked with. Danny had been after her ever since they arrived, his constant failures to get even a date a running joke among the guys. The fact that Stacy developed a new, even stricter policy of not speaking to Danny after December 22, 2012, the day after the Mayan calendar predicted the world would end, now made perfect sense.
“What brought that up?” Will asked.
“I dunno. I was just thinking about her all of a sudden. She had a really nice rack.”
“Great rack.”
“Tremendous.”
They were back on the Archers roof, scanning the city with binoculars. Below them, the police siren wailed away in the hope of attracting more survivors. It had already worked twice…
Danny said, “So, Harold Campbell?”
“You got a better idea?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“We can’t stay in the city. The numbers don’t work out.”
“Math was never my strong suit.”
“We’ve been lucky so far,” Will said, “but that’s not going to last. Tonight. Tomorrow. The day after. This city belongs to them now, and whatever unlucky bastards are still hiding out there, they’re going to wish they weren’t very soon. We need someplace more defensible.”
“Howard Campbell,” Danny said.
“Howard Campbell, yeah.”
“Good plan, but it still leaves a big city to make it through in one piece.”
“Cars are out of the question. Not with the cluttered highways. We could take the small roads, but that’d take forever. We could always island-hop. Travel by day, shelter up at night. We’d eventually make it out of the city.”
“Eventually sounds like a long time.”
“Safety first. The longer we stay here, the higher the risks. You saw them last night. It’s more than just a hive mind, Danny. They’re being led. You don’t take down the country in one night without a chain of command.”
“You thought this out.”
“Except the part where we don’t all die.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice, too.” Danny took out some of the jerky that Kate and Luke brought with them and took a bite. Jalapeno-flavored beef lingered in the air. “So how do we bypass the highways?”