“These two brothers are at home watching football one Sunday afternoon. As brothers are wont to do, they start arguing about whose wife is hotter. The first brother says, ‘Bullshit, you know my wife’s hotter. Admit it!’ But the second brother insists, ‘Are you kidding me? Have you seen my wife’s vagina? It’s gorgeous!’ The first brother considers that for a moment, then replies, ‘Hmm, on second thought, you’re right.’ They go back to watching football when an hour later, the second brother exclaims, ‘Hey, wait a minute, how do you know my wife’s vagina is prettier than yours?’”
“Fuck you,” Will said.
Danny laughed. “Come on, man, I got that one from Rob. You remember Rob? Big, fat guy from Pittsburgh?”
“One that got shot by a sniper while pissing at night in the yard? Hockey fan?”
“Yeah, him. I guess no one told him the Stan didn’t have hockey.”
“They have polo with goat heads.”
“Yeah, well, not the same thing, is it?”
“You two are fucked up,” Peeks said, looking up at them from the floor, where he was trying not to bleed to death.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Danny smirked.
Will glanced over at Peeks. The big man had seen better days; his right leg was busted, and he couldn’t use his left arm. He had told them around the fifteenth floor that he couldn’t feel anything past the elbow joint. That probably had a little something to do with the big gash along his forearm, where one of the ghouls had bit him.
It was impossible to tell what they used to be, so Will had started thinking of them simply as ghouls.
To keep him from bleeding to death, Will had cut off a piece of Peeks’s pant leg and wrapped it around the wound. Peeks’s left arm now hung from his shoulder like a piece of useless meat, and his right leg wasn’t any better. He could hobble, but not for more than a few minutes at a time. It made moving between floors a bitch. Of course they couldn’t leave him behind. Will had thought about it on the thirteenth floor, and he was sure Danny had too, but they had each come to the same conclusion: No one gets left behind. They couldn’t afford to, anyway.
Everyone else was dead.
After Marker, Jenkins, and Ross got dragged off kicking and screaming into the darkness, and while Will and Danny were busy pulling a bleeding Peeks out of Apartment 2025, Lambert and Hollins went into the apartment and never came back out.
And that’s when the ghouls started flooding out into the hallway. They came out in a tide, like an ocean of black death moving across the filthy carpeting.
Fast. Inhumanely fast.
The M4A1s had become useless at that point, even on full-auto, but habit kept Will and Danny from discarding them. Will wasn’t superstitious, but the rifle had served him well during his tours in Afghanistan, and only dead soldiers threw away good luck omens. Besides, Will reasoned that if push came to shove, the rifles made for effective blunting instruments. The telescopic stocks could absorb a lot of damage.
They were relying mostly on Peeks’s and Marker’s Remington shotguns now, and Peeks had the foresight — or dumb luck, depending on how you looked at it — to cram enough shells into his ammo pouches to take them all the way down to the tenth floor. The buckshot loads were a hell of a lot more effective than the 5.56mm bullets that the M4A1s fired, though they had the unfortunate side effect of creating the surreal sight of ghouls attacking with only half of their heads still intact, missing jaws, or gaping holes in chest cavities — the results of shotgun blasts at close range. Those nightmarish couldn’t-possibly-be-happening moments convinced Will he was dreaming it all.
Dream or not, Danny’s jokes were still terrible.
Once the shotgun shells ran out, it was a matter of finding apartments that could be defended with the M4A1s. The ghouls didn’t die if you shot them in the head, but it did seem to bother them. Like kicking sand in a cougar’s eyes, it really pissed him off and kept him from mauling you…for a while, anyway. If all else failed, they still had their Smith and Wesson combat knives.
He had managed to make contact with SWAT Command somewhere around the eighteenth floor. They had promised backup, but an hour later no one had shown up. His next five attempts to reach SWAT Command only got dead air.
Things went from bad to crap when they encountered ghouls coming from below them while they were in the stairwell between the thirteenth and twelfth floors. It seemed obvious now that the ghouls had been down there since Will and the others entered the building, waiting for the right moment to strike.
As he watched the creatures swarm up the stairs, Will had a hollow feeling in his gut. He knew why no SWAT backup had arrived — they had not gotten past the lobby. Or maybe the first floor. Or the second… How many of those things were down there waiting for them?
Twenty? Thirty? A hundred?
It looked like a forest of moving limbs and black eyes. Innumerable.
“Like an orgy no one bothered to invite me to,” Danny said between the twelfth and eleventh floor, looking down the stairwell at what was coming up at them.
“That happens a lot?” Will shouted back at him.
“Every now and then,” Danny said between shotgun blasts.
Each time one of Danny’s blasts hit a ghoul, it lost its footing and tumbled backward, smashing into the creatures behind it and carrying a tangle of limbs and pruned skin down with it. A second later they were back on their feet and clamoring up the stairs and over each other, gaping holes in sunken chests dripping thick, oozing black fluids that didn’t look like blood. But then what were they?
They eventually located an apartment on the tenth floor with a door that could be locked from the inside. They scrambled around in darkness as soon as they slammed the door shut. Every hallway they had encountered had been dark and dank, with blankets and paint and tape and God knows what else plastered over windows.
Forced darkness and the pervading stench of decay and lifelessness followed them all the way down from the debacle at Apartment 2025 like a rabid serpent.
We’re in a nest. Jesus Christ. We just stepped into a nest and didn’t even know it.
“Where the hell is SWAT?” Peeks shouted.
“SWAT’s gone,” Danny said matter-of-factly. “We’ll have better luck writing letters to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny for help.”
Will could hear the ghouls coming down the hallway outside the apartment door, the sound of ruined, scarred bare feet crunching slowly against filthy carpeting. The realization struck him that they were moving cautiously.
“You know that, right?” Danny said from across the door, his blue eyes intense in the darkness, the ghost of a grin on his lips. “There’s no one out there. We’re on our own, Kemosabe.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I once dated this chick who insisted on doggy style every single time.”
“This is fucking nuts!” Peeks shouted from behind them.
“Nah,” Danny said, “I like doggy style.”
Apartment 1009 had three sets of locks, but only one was where it was supposed to be. The doorknob was gone, leaving behind a hole, and the door chain was missing. But, for whatever reason, the deadbolt was still intact.
Will turned it now and heard the solid click as the lock tumbled into place. Just to be sure, they pushed an old couch the color of vomit green against the door, then stacked a three-legged table on top for extra weight. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but they found through trial and error in the last four hours that it didn’t take a lot to defend a door against the ghouls.