Will nodded. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already considered a million times since last night. “I have a plan. A just-in-case plan.”
“A good one, I hope.”
“Good enough. It involves Plan Z.”
“Aw, shit,” Danny said. “Not Plan Z.”
“You love Plan Z.”
“I hate Plan Z. And I hate you for making me take part in your Plan fucking Z.”
“Quit yer bitchin’ and embrace the Z,” Will said.
Will turned off the flat highway and into the parking lot while Danny kept going up the road behind him. Ted was on the roof of the auto body shop, leaning over the edge, waving down. He waved back, then watched Ted disappear behind the rooftop again.
He grabbed the bullets they had taken from the Sundays’ cabin and took them into the garage, where he found Lara looking inside one of the weapons containers. She had changed into pants and a T-shirt and had washed her hair. She was an attractive girl. How had he missed that last night?
She looked over as he entered the garage. “You guys have a lot of guns. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many guns in one place before.”
“Danny and I brought most of them with us, but the rest we found along the way. You’d be surprised how many guns there are out there. We could have filled a dozen crates if we had wanted to, but guns without the right bullets are pointless.”
“Silver bullets.”
“Yeah.”
“You figured that out.”
“Accidentally, but yeah.”
He told her about the Wilshire Apartments, about finding the crosses hidden inside someone’s pantry closet. He skipped the part where seven other SWAT guys had gone into the building with him, but only two of them came out.
“I would say it was a sign from God,” he said, “if I actually believed in God.”
“I didn’t use to believe in God, either.”
“You sound like you’ve changed your mind.”
“Maybe. The things I’ve seen… It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
He was going to answer, but stopped himself. That wasn’t really a question meant for him, he realized. It was probably something she had been asking herself, struggling with the answers to. After what she had been through, he didn’t blame her. There were moments in a person’s life when he or she questions everything they believed in. Will knew what that was like. His first moment had come when bullets started flying over his head in Afghanistan. It was the first of many moments.
He gave Lara her privacy and took stock of their ammo instead. They had enough to last a prolonged engagement, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think they had enough to stop making silver bullets. No, that time was never going to come, not as long as they were up here, and the sun still set every evening.
He glanced at his watch: 11:15 a.m.
They were into the middle of December now, but this was December in Texas, and despite the chill weather outside, sunset was still around 5:25 p.m. Too fast, but it gave them plenty of time to set up for tonight.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re not coming after all…
Yeah, right, and maybe I’m the Prince of Wonderland.
Danny returned about an hour later.
Will heard his ATV approaching from a distance and went outside to meet him in the dirt parking lot. “Did you find a place?”
“I found something that could work.” Danny turned off the engine and pulled out a map. “Saw a couple of good candidates, but only one really viable option. It’s a bank. Country bank, sure, but it had solid concrete walls, two front doors, two front windows, and only one back door. No rooftop access, so that’s a plus.”
“How far back?”
“A couple of klicks, give or take. Closer to Cleveland.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s the best we’re going to find in such a short time. I say we go for it.”
Will glanced at his watch and nodded. “The bank it is.”
The “country bank,” inside a strip mall, was sixteen kilometers back up the highway. The bank was flanked by a Shipley Do-Nuts and a Subway to one side, and a McDonald’s and Ned’s, a mom-and-pop hardware store, on the other. The fact that Ned’s existed at all, in a world of Home Depot and Lowe’s, was an amusing anomaly.
The bank itself, a small operation called Cleveland Savings and Loans, was exactly as Danny described. It had two front doors made of thick glass, and there were no telltale signs of ghoul occupancy. The doors were locked, so Will and Danny forced them open with prying bars.
“You couldn’t have picked a place that wasn’t locked?” Will asked.
“Nag, nag, nag,” Danny said.
The bank’s interior was about 3,000 square feet, the size of a major bank’s local branch in the city. It had a teller counter to one side and a manager’s office, an employee lounge, and a vault room in the back, along a hallway that curved slightly to the right the farther back you went. The manager’s office, with its rows of metal shelves, big desk, and sofas, took up twice as much space as the vault room and employee lounge combined.
Like a boss.
There were rows of chairs lined up against the front wall inside the bank lobby, and closed-circuit cameras watched silently along the ceiling. The bank didn’t have a drive-through, so no backdoor windows to worry about. A small layer of dust had fallen over the furniture and counters, as well as the red velvet rope that snaked into three rows in front of the tellers. Other than that, the bank looked to be perfectly preserved.
Will spent some time in the office taking inventory, then walked out of the hallway to find Danny holding fistfuls of $100 bills from one of the opened teller drawers, shouting at him, “I’m king of the world!”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. It’s about time, too. I was starting to think serving the public good would never pay off. Goes to show you, my guidance counselor didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
“That’ll show ’em.”
Will walked across the lobby to the front doors. They were big and bulky, with two windows on each door that took up about forty percent of the space. He tapped on the glass and liked what he heard.
“Doors are steel and laminated glass,” he said. “We’ll still have to reinforce them, just to be safe.”
“Ned’s should have all the tools we’ll need. Maybe take apart some of the counter?”
“Some? Try all of it.”
“I was hoping for less work.”
“Captain Optimism.”
Danny grunted.
“There’s just one back door,” Will said. “So we’ll have to reinforce that, too. The manager’s office is big enough to put everyone inside.”
“What about the vault? I always dreamed about living in a vault.”
“Power’s out, and it’s electronically controlled. Can’t open it without blowing it up.”
“You and your fucking facts,” Danny said. “By the way, did I mention? I’m rich!”
He watched Danny running along the teller counter, snatching money out of the drawers and tossing it into the air.
He smiled, but it also made him slightly sad. Was it that long ago that they were all putting so much of their blood, sweat, time, and tears into the acquisition of what were essentially just green rectangle pieces of paper?
Money. What the hell were we thinking?
They gathered all the tools they needed from Ned’s, transferring them back to Cleveland Savings and Loans before heading back to the diner, where the others were waiting for them. Having ridden over piggyback on one of the ATVs, Will now rode the ATV back while Danny drove a Ford F-150 truck from the strip mall parking lot, the car keys abandoned on the driver’s side floor.