She stood up to get another bottle of water. There were five left. She drank it while Will and Danny sat on the floor, backs against the wall with the door between them. They had drank a half dozen cans of Red Bull and didn’t seemed any closer to sleep.
Danny was telling jokes again.
“Two secretaries are in the employee lounge, bitching about their respective bosses, when one of them says, ‘You won’t believe it, but he tried to grab my ass again.’ The other secretary sighs and says, ‘Oh, why don’t you just give in, it’ll make life so much easier. Trust me.’ The first secretary guffaws and says, ‘I can’t! People are still laughing at his last secretary behind her back.’ To which the second secretary says, ‘Wait, I was his last secretary.’”
“You already told that one,” Will said. “And it wasn’t funny the first time.”
“Bullshit. When?”
“Stan. When that sniper had us bogged down outside Kabul for seven hours.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. He got Daniels in the ass that time, right?”
“That was outside of Bagram. And it was another sniper.”
“Really? I could have sworn it was the Kabul thing…”
They continued all night. Sometimes the jokes were funny, and she smiled with them. Other times they were horrendous, and she groaned along with Will. They didn’t seem to notice her, and kept going back and forth, arguing about something from Afghanistan, then reminiscing about one of the guys on their SWAT team.
Listening to them jawing back and forth had a strangely calming effect on her. If they weren’t scared, if they could carry on like this for hours and hours, then things might not be that bad. They wouldn’t be joking if it really was dangerous, would they? She hadn’t known them long enough to know for sure, but listening to them chatter on about nothing made her feel better anyway.
By two in the morning she was drifting in and out of sleep, each time opening her eyes to the sound of Danny telling another filthy joke, and Will either laughing or critiquing. The ghouls had stopped banging on the door hours ago, perhaps realizing it was fruitless, or they were just tired. Did they get tired? She didn’t care either way.
Just die already…
Sometime around three in the morning, she opened her eyes to Danny, sounding very far away, telling another joke.
“These two high school sweethearts have been dating for two years, but they’ve never had sex. The guy keeps waiting for the right time to make his move, but it never seems to happen. One day, he decides enough is enough, and sneaks into his girlfriend’s bedroom window ready to take her cherry. Instead, he finds her already in bed with some guy. He’s shocked, but not as shock as the sight of his girlfriend riding the guy like a cowboy, whoopin’ and hollerin’. He lunges into the room and yells, ‘Baby, baby, what are you doing? Please tell me, what are you doing?’ The girlfriend stops riding the guy, rolls her eyes and says, ‘See? I told you he was stupid.’”
“I don’t get it,” Will said.
“Because she’s been telling this guy how stupid her boyfriend is, and he goes, ‘Please tell me, what are you doing’ when he sees them doing the horizontal mambo. Get it?”
“Not really.”
“You get it.”
“So he’s not really stupid, is that it?”
“Fuck off.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to understand. It’s not my fault your jokes suck so much you have to explain them.”
“I got yer explanation right here,” Danny said.
Kate smiled, just before sleep completely overcame her and she closed her eyes and drifted off.
She woke up to the cold, cheap fabric of the couch underneath her and pieces of the ceiling in her hair and clinging to her clothes.
Will, Danny, and Ted were talking briskly in front of her, with Will banging his fist against a wall. There was a buzzing in her head that prevented her from understanding what they were saying.
She glanced at her watch. 7:12 a.m.
Morning. They had made it through the night.
We’re alive!
She pushed herself up from the couch and yawned.
Will glanced over. “Look who’s up.”
“Did you guys sleep at all?” she asked.
“A couple of hours, on and off.”
She heard snoring and looked at Luke, asleep on the other couch, the handle of his sword sticking out from behind him. Next to her, Carly and Vera were also still asleep, entangled in each other’s arms. The two of them combined didn’t make as much noise as Luke.
She looked back at Will. “So how are we getting out of here? Through the door?”
“There are ghouls on the other side of that door.”
“They’re still alive?”
“Definitely,” Ted said. “You can still hear them moving around.”
“We’re not going through the door,” Will said. “That’s why explosions master here is going to blow a hole in this wall.”
“Making doors where none previously existed is a hobby of mine,” Danny grinned.
“Will that work?” she asked doubtfully.
Danny shrugged. “It’s entirely possible I might blow us all up in the process. Or cave in the already fragile roof above our heads. Or collapse whatever’s left of the Archers down on top of us. Basically, kill us all while we wait to suck in the sweet taste of fresh morning air behind this wall.”
“You’re joking, right?” Ted asked with concern.
“Maybe.”
“He’s joking,” Will said.
She couldn’t tell if he was or not. It was hard to tell with Danny and Will.
“I guess we don’t have any choice,” she said.
“Oh, there are lots of choices,” Danny said, “but none of them are nearly as fun as this one.”
They woke up the girls and Luke, then moved to the back of the room. They stacked the couches on top of one another, then took the door off the refrigerator and put Carly and Vera behind it, while Kate, Luke, and Ted squeezed in behind the main bulk of the fridge.
Danny was taping strips of C4 against the far wall, but he was using smaller pieces than when he had rigged up the store. After a while she realized he was making a jagged door-shaped sketch with the explosives. He had a backpack full of the stuff, and the pieces he was using to blow the wall barely made a dent in the backpack’s bulge. When he was done, he got behind the couch with Will. They had angled the furniture so it would cover their heads from any blow back.
“Everyone keep their heads down,” Danny said. “I’m not responsible for shrapnel through eyeballs, decapitations, or other assorted bodily injuries. We clear? I don’t wanna hear from anyone’s lawyers after this!”
No one answered, probably because no one could really hear him through the earplugs Will distributed to everyone earlier. She had wondered what the earplugs were for when they were packing the boxes.
Squeezed in behind the fridge, Luke was on her right and Ted on her left.
Luke was grinning at her. “I told you we should have stayed at the pawnshop. Last time I checked, there wasn’t a crazy dude with explosives trying to blow us all to hell.”
She grinned back.
Danny screamed, “Fire in the hole!”
Even with the earplugs, the massive blast left Kate’s ears ringing. The ground under her feet seem to come unglued, and she held on to the fridge as Luke and Ted pressed in even tighter around her.
After a while, the world settled again.
The blast had done its job — destroying the far wall completely and caving in half the ceiling. Sheetrock and jagged, hard pieces of brick showered down on the floor around them. She felt the ground tremble with every large chunk of brick that peppered the asphalt parking lot outside, because Danny had directed the blast to blow out, not in.