He lowered his shotgun. “Lara.”
She came down the steps and looked around. There were two sleeping bags near the back, used wrappers, scattered clothes, empty soda cans and water bottles. “What’s that smell?”
“Confined living,” he said.
He crouched next to one of the bedrolls. His flashlight picked out some used bandages, and there were blood splatters on the bedroll and the immediate floor around it.
“Blood?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Dry blood. From a few days ago would be my guess.”
“She said her brother was hurt. I didn’t want to push her on it, but it must have been pretty bad if he couldn’t even talk to me on the radio. I got the feeling he was unconscious, but she probably thought he was just sleeping.”
She walked across the room and crouched next to something in the darkness. When she stood back up, she was holding an old, portable ham radio. Compared to the one Harold Campbell staffed the facility with, this one looked ancient and bulky.
His radio squawked with Danny’s voice: “What’s the word?”
“They were here recently,” Will said, “but it looks like they’re gone now.”
“How? The door was locked from the inside.”
“That’s a good question.”
He surveyed the room again, then moved closer to the walls, shining the flashlight along the cracks that he could see with the naked eye.
Lara came over. “You think there’s another way out of here?”
“Must be, right? How else would they have gotten out?”
She took out her flashlight and looked at the walls closely, searching the other side of the room to cover more ground.
There was a stack of boxes next to the dumpster. He grabbed one, finding rolls of toilet paper still in their packaging inside. A second box contained paper napkins and plastic utensils, and the third was stuffed with paper plates still in bags.
Something else caught his eye — a thin sliver along the wall, between the boxes and the dumpster, which wasn’t as flat against the wall as he had originally thought. There was a tiny crevice.
Just big enough for an eight-year-old girl to slide through.
Leaning forward and using the flashlight, he discovered a small opening in the wall behind the dumpster.
Bingo.
He grabbed the dumpster and pushed. It moved grudgingly, making a loud, squealing noise in protest, but eventually slid away to reveal the hole in the wall. He illuminated the opening, and rats scrambled out of the way on the other end. The passageway was narrow, only two-by-two feet, and went in a straight line for about thirty meters before ending in a wall on the other end. Sunlight shone through metal grates at the top of where the passageway ended.
“Lara,” he called.
He stepped aside to let her see. “Where does it go?” she asked.
“That’s about thirty meters, which would put it somewhere underneath the auditorium next door.”
“They must have known this was here all along.”
“It was probably their backup plan. In case the ghouls made it through the door. They must have attacked, and the kids panicked and took the exit.” Her expression turned anxious, and he put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find them.”
She nodded.
He clicked his radio. “Danny, we think they went into the auditorium next door through an underground passageway.”
“We’ll scout ahead,” Danny said through the radio.
“Roger that. We’ll be right behind you.”
He and Lara hurried out, back into the hallway.
As they turned toward the auditorium, their radios squawked and they heard Danny’s voice: “Hey, we only brought two trucks, right?”
“Yeah, why?” he asked.
“We might need more trucks, because I think I just found every citizen of Dansby, Texas. All ‘300 or so’ of them.”
Will reflexively checked his watch: 9:42 a.m.
CHAPTER 34
LARA
The human body produces two million new red cells every second. When the body senses that it has lost too many red cells, it creates new ones by secreting a hormone called erythropoietin, which in turn is used by the bone marrow to produce stem cells, the building blocks of red and white cells. In this way, the body replenishes blood on an almost instantaneous basis, constantly restoring the red cells lost during heavy bleeding. In a matter of days, the human body can restore all that it’s lost, essentially supplying a constant stream of never-ending blood. That is, as long as the human body continues to function and remain alive.
Lara was thinking about all those first-year medical school facts as she looked into the Dansby High School auditorium. The spacious, warehouse-like room was lit up by daylight flooding in from windows high along the walls.
Danny was wrong — there weren’t “300 or so” people in the auditorium. There were at least 500, but it was hard to judge because they all looked so alike in their current state.
They lay beside each other on the hardwood floor, leaving very little space between them. Not that the people themselves needed space, because they weren’t moving. At all. From the looks of them, they hadn’t moved for a while now.
Days. Weeks. Maybe even months.
They lay on the floor with their shirtsleeves and pant legs rolled up to expose knees and shoulders. Their necks were similarly exposed, collars pulled aside and buttons undone. They looked, for all intents and purposes, like unconscious vessels.
She crouched next to the closest person — a woman whose age was hard to tell. She was pale and her skin was wrinkled, yet she didn’t look old. Her bones were visible underneath skin that covered her like ill-fitting clothes. She looked malnourished but was somehow still alive. Barely. Her eyes were closed and her lips were pale and cracked, and there were thin layers of mucus around her eyes, nostrils, and at the corners of her mouth.
Lara felt for the woman’s pulse and found it moving lazily underneath shriveled skin. It was weak, but constant. It reminded her of coma patients — alive, but not really.
“Are they dead?” Danny asked.
“They look asleep,” Lara said.
“Like some kind of coma?” Will said.
“Maybe. Some kind of induced coma? I’ve never seen anything like it. They could have been here for a while.”
“How are they still alive? Don’t coma patients need to be intravenously fed?”
“Yes,” Lara said. She didn’t understand it either.
She saw them. Teeth marks along the woman’s arms.
She leaned forward to get a closer look. There were more teeth marks along the woman’s calves, all the way up to her knees. They weren’t from the same set of teeth. One had a chipped molar. More bites along the woman’s neck. It wasn’t just one set of teeth that had bitten into her, it was many.
Dozens.
Will said, “What is this place?”
“It’s a farm,” she said, standing up. “They’re farming these people for blood, Will. It doesn’t matter how many times you take blood from the human body, it will always replenish the lost supply. As long as we’re alive, we’re making new blood every day.” She looked around her, the very idea of what she was saying staggering even to her. “These people are still alive, Will. I don’t know how, but they’re still alive, and they’re producing blood that’s being taken from them on a daily basis.”
“Fuck me,” Danny whispered.
Will walked past her and examined another sleeping figure, a man in denim overalls with a thick beard. He felt the man’s pulse, then shook his head. “This can’t be possible. How do they keep them like this?”
“Blue-eyed ghoul,” she said softly.