Will said, “They’re here.”
He and Danny stood up and went to the windows, most of which had been covered up, but they had left space for peepholes. They looked through these now.
“What do you see?” Kate asked anxiously.
“Nothing,” Will said.
“Butkus,” Danny chimed in.
Will stood still and let his eyes adjust to the darkness.
He saw them. Their thin frames were positioned from one end of the parking lot to the other. It was a moonless night, and the ghouls stood almost invisible in the pitch blackness. Even if he hadn’t been able to pick them out, he would have still felt them. He knew with absolute certainty that there were more of them out there, not just in the parking lot, but beyond, spilling out into the streets.
“Fuck me,” Danny whispered from across the door.
“Are there a lot of them?” Ted asked. He sounded out of breath.
“If by ‘a lot’ you mean a fucking army of them, then yeah, there are kinda a lot of them out there,” Danny said.
One of the creatures suddenly appeared in front of Will’s peephole, slate eyes staring back at him for the split second it took Will to pull his head back. A moment later the ghoul was gone, and Will could see the parking lot again.
“What happened?” Kate said behind him.
“One of them came in for a close-up,” Will said.
He heard them moving on the rooftop, their footsteps light but noticeable. It grew louder as more climbed up. He didn’t worry about the ones up there. There was a ladder up to the roof, but no ways to gain entry into the bank itself. Both he and Danny had gone up to make sure.
“Ted,” Will said, “time to go watch the back.”
Ted hurried off, his big frame making a ruckus as he moved. Will didn’t think the kid could help it. It was part of who he was. Big.
Kate had walked up behind him. “How many are out there?”
“A lot.”
He stood aside to let her see, and as she peered through the peephole, her body tensed in front of him. “There’s so many of them…”
“Four hundred easy,” Danny said. “And growing. They’re filling up the damn parking lot. I can’t even see the cars anymore. You don’t think they’re going to steal our ATVs, do you?”
“There’s a thought,” Will said.
“I just fixed the engine and everything.”
“I know. It’s purring now.”
“Damn straight.”
Kate took an involuntary step back. She looked at Will, fear in her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something, but stopped, and instead walked back to the far end of the lobby and sat down on the floor.
She clutched the M4A1 tightly to her chest and stared off at nothing.
“Kate,” Will said, “Ted needs some backup in the hallway.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “You’ll need me out here when they start coming through.”
“When they start coming through, we’re fucked. Right now, I need you back there to watch Ted’s back.”
Kate looked uncertainly at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to argue. To his surprise, she nodded and stood up, one hand on the wall for support as if she didn’t trust her own legs, and hurried into the hallway.
He looked after her. He could see just far enough into the curving hallway to pick up Carly leaning out of the office, looking worriedly back at him. He gave her a brief smile, though it probably wasn’t nearly as convincing as he had hoped.
He looked back out the peephole and saw that Danny was right. The ghouls had taken up almost every inch of space in the parking lot and, as impossible as it seemed, more of them had appeared out of thin air, squeezing forward until there were no spaces left.
They stood quietly, still, like soldiers waiting for orders. He couldn’t tell where they ended and the night began.
“If I had a grenade,” Danny muttered.
“We have something better. We have Plan Z.”
“I hate your Plan Z. Have I told you that? Hate it. Hate it with every fiber of my being. If you gave me a survey now and asked me to rate your Plan Z from one to ten, with ten being ‘Hate it with a passion,’ I’d write in twenty. That’s how much I hate your Plan Z.”
“You whine like a housewife.”
“Fuck your Plan Z,” Danny insisted.
Then Will saw something that made him perk up.
One of the ghouls, somewhere in the middle of the densely packed parking lot, stood out from the others, because it actually stood.
He stared for a few seconds, just to be sure.
But yes, he wasn’t seeing things. The ghoul stood without hunching over like the others, and that alone made it looked taller, regal, like a king among prostrated servants.
Is it possible?
Will quickly lifted the M4A1 and slipped the barrel through the peephole, using the boards as a perch, and flicked on the sight’s night-vision.
There.
Will could see it clearly now, bathed in fluorescent green that turned night into day. It was staring back at him with fearless, defiant eyes. It stood perfectly straight and it was very clear that the ghoul had dark, crystal pale blue eyes.
Will took his eyes away from the sight. He wondered if Danny had seen it. Had he really seen it?
He looked back through the sight again, just to be sure.
And yes, he could still see it. The ghoul hadn’t moved, hadn’t tried to hide, and remained standing in the parking lot thirty meters from the bank, towering over the other ghouls hunched around it.
Fuck you.
He squeezed the trigger.
The bullet punched a hole through the glass window and traveled out…and one of the black-eyed ghouls threw itself into Will’s line of fire, the silver bullet punching through its chest and landing a full two meters short of the blue-eyed creature.
As the dead ghoul fell sideways, Will switched the M4A1’s fire selector to full-auto and pressed the trigger, and this time the window shattered under the assault. He watched, fascinated, impressed, and pissed off, as one ghoul, then two, then three—then a dozen—threw themselves into his line of fire, silver bullets slamming into them one after another.
Will jerked his finger off the trigger and watched as the crowd of ghouls stirred, then settled back down, as if nothing had happened.
And the blue-eyed ghoul, still standing, still defiantly tall, continued to stare back at him. Then it did something he didn’t expect—it grinned at him.
Will took a step back and quickly reloaded the M4A1.
Danny was looking across the door at him. “What’s going on? You trying to pick a fight or something?”
“You didn’t see it?” Will asked.
“See what?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“No,” Danny said, shaking his head. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“There was a ghoul in the parking lot.”
“There are lots of ghouls in the parking lot. What’s your point?”
“This one had blue eyes and it stood tall, not like the others. It was different, Danny. It had blue eyes.”
“The fuck you say?”
“And it grinned at me.”
“It grinned at you?”
Will slapped the new magazine in and slipped the M4A1’s barrel back through the peephole again and peered out through the sight. He scanned the parking lot, but the blue-eyed ghoul was gone.
He continued sweeping the parking lot, back and forth, but saw only dead black eyes staring back at him.
“Is it still out there?” Danny asked.