She had lost her bearings. She didn’t know where the door was. Every inch of the room looked the same, and it became impossible to orient herself.
Danny appeared out of nowhere and sat next to her, reloading his shotgun. There were shotguns scattered all around them, and pouches, some with shotgun shells spilling out. So many pouches. So many shells. This was why Will insisted they keep making silver ammo, even though it slowed them down leaving the city. He knew they would need it. He knew, because Will always prepared for the worst-case scenario.
Danny was shouting at her — No, he was shouting at Will, who grinned even as he racked the shotgun and fired again and again, swinging it from left to right, right to left.
Seven shots. Those shotguns only have seven shots.
Danny was shoving shell after shell into his shotgun. When he was done, he grabbed a nearby shotgun and loaded that, too. It wasn’t until Will shouted something back at him that Danny started firing. Now it was Will who was reloading, grabbing handfuls of shells from the pouches spilled about them, loading one shotgun, then another.
The two of them were constantly moving, moving, moving.
Through a kind of impossible slow-motion haze, Kate saw that the ghouls weren’t coming through the door. No, it still held, the latch had done its job, even though the walls around it were badly cracked and torn and chunks of it were falling free.
No, the door was safe. The creatures were coming through one of the walls that had opened up in the explosion. A sea of dead, unmoving black things covered the floor and rubble, like an extension of the darkness outside in what remained of the parking lot, or the dark, swaying trees or the quiet, pitch-black highway in the distance.
Plan Z…
The only thing keeping the darkness at bay were the LED lanterns screwed into what was left of the walls and the ceiling, and a couple resting in corners on the floor behind them. Would it be better if she couldn’t see what was happening? The end was coming, and she’d rather let it all end in the dark. It would be more merciful that way.
Hands grabbed her and she was pulled back toward another section of the wall. Will’s face appeared above her, but she still couldn’t hear what he was saying. She found herself marveling at the way thick black pools of blood clung to his temple and chin and cheeks. Not his blood.
Across the room, Luke bravely shot at the mass of ghouls pouring in through the wall, but it was like firing into an ocean of pudding. They simply absorbed his bullets and kept coming. He had to know that, didn’t he?
As she watched, horrified, Luke stopped shooting and she realized he was out of bullets. She groped for her own gun, screaming at him to take hers, but he didn’t hear her. Had she really screamed at all? Was it only in her head? Her mouth was dry and clenched tight, and she didn’t have the strength to open it.
Luke smiled at her, but before she could respond, one of the ghouls seemed to swallow him up and he disappeared down to the floor. Suddenly they were all over him, and she tried to dig out her gun.
Here, Luke, take it!
Her hand swung limply at her side even as Will dragged her across the room.
No, stop! Luke! We have to save Luke! Can’t you see? He needs us!
The ghouls on top of Luke evaporated before her eyes as buckshot tore into them. But it was too late, she realized. Too late.
Luke…
Will shoved her against the wall where she sat awkwardly, looking across the room as more ghouls raced through the opening, slithering on black blood as they persistently climbed over growing piles of their dead. Kate felt like laughing at the sight of slipping and sliding ghouls, but when she parted her lips to do just that, no sound came out. Or maybe she did laugh. She wasn’t sure, since she couldn’t hear a thing and hadn’t been able to hear for a while now.
The ghouls didn’t get far into the room before their skin was shredded by silver-coated buckshot. The shotgun blasts, as Will fired next to her, barely a foot away, had become mere soft pop-pop-pop noises, felt rather than heard.
Will and Danny took turns shooting and reloading. More machine than men. Whenever Will stopped shooting to reload, Danny was instantly shooting. Three empty pouches lay on the floor, and there seemed to be more spent shotgun shells around them than flooring.
As the pain and numbness started to take her, something made her look out through the hole in the wall. Past the never-ending ghouls trying to crawl in, stumbling on the increasingly large hill of dead.
There was something out there. In the darkness. Standing on top of a large, rising rubble in what was left of the parking lot.
It was a man.
No, not a man. It stood like a man, but she knew, without having to think about it, that it was one of them. A ghoul…and at the same time it wasn’t.
There was something about its eyes, something intense and unnatural in the way they seemed to glint against the inky blackness of the night. They were cold eyes. Cold and blue and they bored their way into her very soul.
It sees me. The undead thing with blue eyes sees me.
And more…
The creature’s lips moved, forming an expression she hadn’t seen before in the creatures.
Not a frown, but anger.
It was simmering with anger.
Then the blue-eyed ghoul turned and slipped away into the night, and she saw only black clouds and a moonless sky high above them.
Overwhelming calm and sleep tugged at her, and she didn’t bother to fight them. Even shotgun blasts and an M4A1 firing on full-auto a foot from her ear faded into the background. But she didn’t turn her head to make sure, because it didn’t seem to matter all that much.
Will and Danny were still fighting. They weren’t going to give up. Not them. Not Will and Danny. They never gave up. They would fight on, and fight on and fight on until they couldn’t fight anymore.
She didn’t know why they bothered.
What does it matter? What does any of it matter?
She closed her eyes, and there was only serene blackness.
CHAPTER 27
WILL
They had maybe ten shells left between them. That was the optimistic guesstimate, anyway. A couple were scattered about the room, hidden among the sea of empty shells, that he made mental notes of over the course of the night. But ten shells sounded about right. It was why he had switched back to the M4A1 sometime during the night while Danny kept firing with the shotguns. While the Remington gave them the coverage at close range that the rifle couldn’t, silver bullets were still silver bullets.
Will took tally of the dead and dying:
Luke was dead. He knew that much. The kid hadn’t moved in two hours. The top part of his head was gone, a dead giveaway that he wasn’t waking up anytime soon. The kid had saved a bullet for himself and actually went through with it. Will wasn’t sure when that had happened because he lost track of Luke during the chaos. His field of vision had been limited to a half-dozen meters around him, and Luke somehow got lost in his blind spot.
Ted was also gone. Somewhere in the hallway beyond the office door, lost behind a pile of debris, probably. Will’s last sight of the big former security guard was watching Ted fight off a dozen ghouls falling through a hole in the ceiling. The creatures had used an air conditioner to break their way through, just like with the car against the lobby wall. Different objects, same principle.