Not stupid. Dead, but definitely not stupid.
They would eventually have to dig Ted’s body out of the rubble. There couldn’t be very much left of the hallway after the explosion. Will wasn’t looking forward to that. Best case scenario was that the explosion killed Ted before the ghouls got to him, before they could turn him.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Kate lay on the floor next to him, breathing in long, regular breaths. He reached over and ran his fingers along her temple. One of the fragments from the falling air conditioner had hit her on the side of the head, and he could feel a big bump there. She was going to feel the effects of it for days. But maybe that wasn’t really the problem.
He remembered the look on Kate’s face as they retreated into the office. She was dazed and confused, fixing him with the thousand-yard stare he was so familiar with. He had seen it from soldiers after a hectic firefight. Mostly the rookies, the new kids that hadn’t been in-country for longer than a few weeks, but veterans got it, too. He would have to watch her closely.
Lara was alive, which had to be some kind of miracle. Her prone body lay behind the big desk to their right, hidden in a corner and somehow spared from much of the falling wall and ceiling, shielded by the expansive tabletop. She had bled profusely from the nasty gash on her head, thanks to a projectile dislodged from the wall by the impact of the ramming car. The bleeding had mercifully stopped.
She’s a lot tougher than she looks.
Will turned his head too fast and flinched involuntarily. Broken ribs for sure, from the same fusillade of bricks and mortar that had knocked out Lara. His thigh was bruised — he knew that much without having to see it. Half his body was probably purple and black underneath his thermal clothing, but there would be time to take inventory later. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere anytime soon.
His eyes went back to the hole in the wall across the room. The door was still intact, which was another surprise. The steel bar had done its job. Barely, but it held. Most of the ceiling was still where it was supposed to be, though large globs of it had collapsed before the ghouls abandoned that part of their assault to focus completely on coming through the caved-in wall.
It was impossible to tell where the skeletal corpses of the ghouls stopped and the room began. They were everywhere. Hundreds, possibly thousands, piled on top of one another, in places reaching as high as the ceiling. There were probably more spread outside the building, and he imagined a bridge of the dead leading directly to the hole in the wall. Ironically, it was the dead ghouls that saved their lives. After a while, it became impossible for the creatures to reach them without first having to climb over their own dead. That slowed their progress tremendously and made defending the wall easier.
The nearest dead ghoul was barely a meter from Will’s boots, lying on its stomach, head twisted awkwardly. He stared down at the creature’s lifeless eyes. There wasn’t much of a chest left after he shot it point-blank with the Remington. What remained of the ghoul’s insides were spilled out on the floor. Or at least, he thought those were insides. It was hard to tell…
Almost every inch of the once-white tiled floor was covered in a shimmering black pool that looked like the surface of a calm pond made of dripping thick tar. The inky color gave off an almost radiant glow underneath the LED lanterns still hung from the remaining ceiling and walls. What must it look like from the outside, looking at the bank from a distance, with the LED lights pouring out through the hole…
Probably like some kind of glowing radioactive chamber. Warning, warning: don’t get too close!
Their clothes were stained black, as were most of the walls and big swaths of the ceiling. The same black goop clung to parts of his face, hair, and over one eye. Danny, sitting nearby, was in the same boat; he was almost completely covered from the cheeks down, and there were thick chunks of clumpy flesh in his hair.
Will glanced down at his watch but saw only ghoul blood. He wiped it against a clean part of his pant legs and stared at the time: 3:14 a.m.
Three more hours…
The good news was it didn’t look like any more ghouls were coming. There had been less and less of them as the hours dragged, as he and Danny ran lower and lower on ammo. Until finally, the ghouls had just stopped coming. He hadn’t heard or seen any signs of movement at all for at least thirty minutes now.
Still, he took that assumption with a grain of salt. They could be playing possum right now. He wouldn’t put it past them.
Dead, not stupid.
He looked over at Danny again. Like Will, he had wrapped pieces of a shirt — one of many scattered about the room, loosened from the crates during the fight — over both his hands. Their weapons had overheated from repeated use. The heat generated by the non-stop firing had turned every inch of the M4A1s and shotguns into burning metal, and their palms were bright red and covered in welts as a result. It would have been worse if they hadn’t switched between six shotguns, giving each weapon time to cool down. Not enough time, as it turned out.
He was sure they both had second-degree burns, which was the best-case scenario. If they were unlucky, they were third-degree, which meant damaged nerve endings — probably why they couldn’t feel the pain at the moment — and hair follicles and epidermis, which was not going to be pretty. Assuming they survived the night, of course.
Again, more assumptions he had to take with grains of salt.
For now, he could still grip the shotgun, which was a good sign, even if doing so made him grimace with pain. The M4A1 had run dry an hour ago, forcing him to revert back to the Remington and their precious and dwindling shell count. He kept the rifles nearby, though. In a pinch, they made for decent blunting instruments.
He barely felt the cold rushing in through the opened wall despite the fact each breath he exhaled produced a small cloud of white mist. Maybe it was the thermals he had on, or the thick layer of ghoul blood that caked him, or possibly the nerve damage from the weapon burns.
Thank God for small miracles.
Or it could be the adrenaline. It was still coursing through his body, keeping him from feeling most of the pain, blunting the aches and throbbing in his joints, the stinging in his palms, and even the cold against his face. But it wasn’t going to last forever. And when it went, it was going to hurt like a sonofabitch.
Next to him, Danny kept one eye on the gaping wall across the room and the other on Carly and Vera, folded up into a bundle next to him, both snoring lightly. Every now and then, Carly woke up and looked at Danny, who smiled at her and nodded, and she then drifted back to sleep.
“I think they’ve retreated,” Will said softly after about an hour of sitting in silence staring at the wall.
“How long has it been?” Danny asked.
“Hour?”
“You’re not sure?”
“Probably an hour.”
“How many you think we killed? A few hundred? Thousand?”
“I lost count.”
“I know one thing: I killed more than you. But then again, I’ve always been the better soldier.”
“Yes, you are. The master of disaster.”
“Was that a joke?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s my territory, asshole.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t let it happen again.”
They sat quietly for a few more minutes, looking out at the pitch-black darkness visible beyond the pile of the dead.
“You saw Ted?” Danny asked quietly.
“Yeah.”