“I liked that kid.”
“Me, too.”
“Went out like a champ.”
“Yeah.”
“Would have made a decent soldier.”
“Probably.”
Will glanced at Luke’s still form. Danny’s eyes went there, too.
“Didn’t think the kid had it in him,” Danny said.
“He was tough.”
“That’s the way I’d like to go. Coming back as one of those things is not my definition of fun in the sun.”
“Make sure you save a silver bullet for yourself, then.”
“You and your sweet nothings,” Danny said.
Will chuckled. He was tired. He didn’t feel like moving. Talking was easier, and it kept them both alert and alive. Just in case the ghouls were still out there, playing possum, listening in.
Dead, not stupid.
“Kate?” Danny asked.
“Concussion, I think, but she’ll be fine.”
“She didn’t look so good back there.”
Will nodded. “I know.”
“What about her?” Danny nodded over in Lara’s direction. “I think I can see her chest moving.”
“She’s a tough one.”
“Can you move?”
“Barely,” Will said.
“Good. Cause I can’t move at all.”
“Cover me.”
“You wish.”
“No, seriously.”
“Yeah, seriously, you wish.”
He gritted through the pain and crawled to Lara, shuffling forward on all fours with the shotgun in one hand and one eye on the wall. Halfway there, he slipped and fell in a pool of black blood.
“Nice,” Danny chuckled behind him.
“Eat me.”
He picked himself up and kept going until he reached Lara. He kneeled behind the big desk and reached for her blood-covered hand, searching for a pulse. Weak, but it was there.
“How is she?” Danny called softly.
“Just barely.”
He grabbed a bottle of water lying nearby and found a clean shirt in one of the storage crates. He wetted the shirt and slowly wiped at the dry blood along her forehead and face. She had minor cuts along her cheeks and nose, but they paled in comparison to the gash on her forehead. He slicked back bloodied blonde hair from her face and was struck by how peaceful she looked, as if she had simply gone to sleep.
Her breath quickened a bit and she moved slightly, as if sensing his contact. He sought out her pulse again. It had gotten stronger, more determined.
Tough girl.
He pulled a compact first-aid kit from one of his pouches. He cleaned her wounds again, then applied a thin layer of antibiotic cream before bandaging them up. It wasn’t exactly first-rate corpsman work, but it would keep the wound from festering. He hoped. The only thing that killed soldiers faster on the battlefield than bullets was an infected wound.
Behind him, Danny said, “You through, loverboy?”
“Almost.”
Will finished up and leaned back against the wall. He took a breath and watched Lara sleep soundlessly in front of him. He wished he could sleep that peacefully. It had been a while…
The pain hit him like a locomotive flying out of a tunnel while he was standing on the tracks. He closed his eyes and grimaced. His joints were starting to ache, the throbbing in his arms and legs was asserting itself, and his palms were beginning to sting a little bit more. He felt like screaming out but got through it by clenching his teeth instead.
“You feel that?” Danny asked. “Adrenaline’s going. It’s gonna hurt.”
“Try not to cry out like a little girl.”
“We’ll see who cries for their momma first.”
Will grinned back at him through the pain.
They were both still awake when the sun finally showed up at 6:35 a.m., flooding the hole in the wall with a great big yellow splash that looked as beautiful as anything he had ever seen in his life.
The familiar and stinging acidic smell waffling through the air attacked his nostrils with a vengeance. He watched with morbid fascination as the sun swamped the bodies piled across the mouth of the caved-in wall, the sea of dead looking strangely spectacular in the daylight. Ghoul skin sizzled and evaporated into white powder. Bones clattered as the flesh that once held them sloughed off, literally dissipating into listless clouds of fine, white mists. The hundreds (thousands?) of bones, suddenly finding themselves without something to hold them in place, tumbled from their piles, making the kind of racket that would have woken even the dead.
The sun finally reached Danny and covered him from head to toe. “God bless you, sun, you magnificent bastard!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, spreading his arms out as if he could actually embrace the heat.
Black blood clinging to Danny’s face turned dry and brittle and cracked, falling loose like a facial treatment gone wrong. Will half expected to see a new face appear underneath the second layer of crackling skin, but it was still just Danny.
The same happened to the blood on the floor, on the walls, and splattered against the ceiling and rubble. Sunlight hardened it on contact, and soon it was fracturing like clay, literally coming undone before his eyes. It turned into hazy sheets of vapor that seemed to get sucked out through the hole, into the bright sky outside.
The only blood that remained where they were was the red kind. Luke’s, Lara’s, and theirs.
Danny was crouching in front of Carly and Vera, shaking them awake by the shoulders. Vera opened her eyes first, and seeing the sun spread across Danny’s face, scrambled out of Carly’s arms and into his. Danny grabbed her, grunting with the pain of contact, but trying not to show it.
“Feeling all right there, sport?” Will grinned at him.
“Just fine, thanks,” Danny grunted back, wincing in pain.
Carly opened her eyes and smiled at the sight of Vera clinging to Danny. “You look like shit.”
“Feeling good, babe. It’s morning.”
“Yay for morning,” Carly said, sitting up from the floor.
Will got up and walked across the room. He felt like a dead man in purgatory, strolling through a cemetery, with bones unearthed from coffins to block his path. Having to climb the mountain of bones meant stepping on them. Arms and legs and even skulls crunched underneath his boots. He blocked the terrible sounds out. It couldn’t be helped. They were just everywhere.
He managed to climb to the very top, found some stable slabs of brick to stand on, and looked down at the parking lot.
Or at what was left of it.
Will glanced back at Danny. “Hey, master of destruction. Job well done.”
“How does it look?”
“Like a masterpiece. Come see for yourself.”
Danny gave Vera back to Carly and climbed up the mountain of bones to stand beside Will. He looked out at the parking lot and nodded. “Not bad. If I do say so myself.”
“You do, you do.”
“A-plus?”
“Give or take. You’re a poet, man.”
“I should open a school. Danny’s Academy for Blowing Shit Up and Stuff.”
“Sign me up. Do I get a discount?”
“What makes you so special?”
The entire parking lot had caved in, dropping two — and in some places, three — meters deep, as if a giant sink hole had opened up and swallowed it, taking anything, and every undead thing, that had been standing on top with it. A sea of skeletal remains — legs and arms and fingers — jutted out of the debris like blades of grass, gleaming bones underneath the sparkling sun.
It was impossible to count how many ghouls had perished in the parking lot, trapped by the rubble at night and silenced permanently by sunrise. Will guessed it had to be in the high hundreds, maybe thousands. And there were probably more buried underneath that they couldn’t see. At least the bulk of the ghoul army, he guessed, gathered to kill them last night were dead before they even made it into the bank.