“Nowhere that I can’t find you again and again and again.”
They had stopped trying to reach the stairwell behind him, their pursuit of the man and woman forgotten because he was their singular purpose, their goal. Mabry’s voice rushed through his head as it did theirs, because his blood flowed through all their veins. What they saw, he saw. What he commanded, they did.
“Embrace what you are. What you’ve become.”
He grabbed another one by the throat and began using it as a battering ram. He smashed skull into skull, leaping over grasping arms, and snapped limbs as he landed. A chest caved under him and covered him in black liquid from head to toe. His vision began to darken as fluids that weren’t his own splashed his eyes.
“You have so much potential. We could do so much together in the years to come…”
Bony fingers continued scraping against the brick and mortar outside the building, signaling that more of them were coming. Too many. Always too many. Hands appeared out of the darkness and grappled onto the windowsills, pulling up rail-thin creatures with accusing black eyes.
“The decades to come…”
Blood gushed around him, splattering every part of his moving form in thick chunks. Theirs. His. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
“…the centuries…”
His vision had all but disappeared, forcing him to glimpse the far wall across the floor through a black fog that was quickly darkening further and further still.
“You can’t save her. You can barely save yourself.”
He wanted to give in, to let Mabry’s voice wash over him. Every ounce of his being longed to embrace the everything, and the nothing. It would be so easy; all he had to do was stop moving, stop snapping the necks of the weak things pushing against him. All he had to do was stop punching his fists through their skulls and caving in their already shrunken chests. They screamed soundless words as he tossed them aside and kicked them across the room.
“Give in,” Mabry said, his voice soothing, comforting.
And still they came, an unrelenting tide of shriveled dark flesh and dead black eyes. They filled the floor, scrambling over cubicles, the stampede of bare feet tap-tap-tapping against the bloodied tiles.
“Come home.”
He dropped the shattered bones he’d been using as weapons and leaped. Outstretched fingers brushed against his legs and arms, every one of them inches from finding purchase, just before he smashed into the top half of one of the windows and burst out into the night air.
The kiss of the wind, cool against his flesh, made him gasp with surprise.
It had been a while since he actually felt the weather; it was always a constant balance of cold and heat, the incongruity fighting for dominance over him. Inside him. Outside him. Everywhere. It was easier not to feel at all.
But it was different this time. Tonight. Because he was flying, and the building across the street appeared, rushing toward him in a blur.
How far?
Close.
How did it get so close?
Then a figure flickered against a long stretch of glass curtain wall, a bright pool of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds above him at last, highlighting a bony creature of black skin and gleaming blue eyes, the dirty and torn fabrics of a faded brown trench coat fluttering behind it like some kind of cape.
For a second — just a split second — he remembered how to smile, before shattering glass filled his eardrums and pain stabbed through him like a thousand spears.
Pain. Overwhelming, glorious pain.
“Pain lets you know you’re still alive,” someone had once said.
He couldn’t remember who had said it, but it would come to him eventually, like it always did.
CHAPTER 2
GABY
It was pitch dark and she could barely make out Nate’s outline on the bench next to her, though she could hear his soft breathing just fine. And there was his scent, which she had become familiar with over the last few weeks. It would have almost been romantic if they weren’t squeezed into the back of a van parked out in the open along a curb in a Texas town that was, at this very moment, infested with ghouls.
Across from them Danny was whispering, small clouds forming around his outline with every word.
“…he stops at a Wallbys pharmacy and runs up to the counter and says, out of breath, ‘Mister, mister, you got any condoms?’ The pharmacist smiles knowingly and grabs a pack and rings it up. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ he asks. ‘Girl?’ the guy says. ‘There’s no girl.’ The pharmacist looks confused, then realizes, ‘Ah! It’s the twenty-first century!’ ‘Lucky guy, I mean,’ the pharmacist corrects himself. To which the guy flashes an embarrassed grin and says, ‘It’s just me, I’m afraid.’ ‘But what do you need the condoms for, then?’ the pharmacist asks. ‘Well, I believe in safe sex,’ the guy answers.”
“I don’t get it,” Nate whispered.
“Because he believes in safe sex,” Danny said.
“I still don’t get it.”
“No?”
Nate shook his head. Or, at least, Gaby saw the shape of his head moving slightly left then right as he did his very best to move as little as possible.
Danny looked over at her, blue eyes barely visible in the suffocating darkness. “You get it?”
Gaby smiled back at him. “I got it.”
“That’s my girl. What say we ditch this buzzkill? He’s really bringing me down.”
“He’ll come around.”
“Yeah, I’ll come around,” Nate said. Then, softly, “As soon as you get funnier.”
“I heard that,” Danny said.
“You were supposed to.”
Nate’s head was turned in her direction, and they exchanged a smile. They were close enough that she was reasonably certain he could see her response. Of course, it was so dark in the back of the van with the grime covering up the front windshield to their right and the two smaller back windows behind them, that it was entirely possible she was wrong. It didn’t help that all three of them had taken up positions in the darkest parts of the vehicle.
A van. They were riding out the night in a van. She would have preferred a stronger hideout. Anything, in fact, but a vehicle in the middle of an open street. Not that they’d had any choice. Fleeing Hellion with daylight running out hadn’t helped; neither had all the movements inside the buildings they’d checked. It seemed as if there was a ghoul inside every single one of them.
So it was a van or nothing. She just hoped it was enough to avoid—
Whump! as something landed on the rooftop above her. That was quickly followed by the tap-tap of bare feet moving from the back of the van toward the front. Slowly, as if it had all the time (night) in the world.
Gaby slowly — oh so slowly — extended one finger and flicked off the safety on the M4 rifle in front of her. The soft click! sounded so much louder inside the close confines of the vehicle, though she passed that off as her imagination playing tricks with her.
Probably.
She slipped her left hand around the pistol grip underneath the carbine’s barrel and tightened it, feeling the leather fingerless gloves constricting against the cold object. Next to her, just a few inches down the bench, Nate’s breathing picked up slightly. Not a lot, but enough that she noticed. She couldn’t tell what Danny was doing across from them, but his head looked slightly tilted up toward the ceiling, so he had heard the creature landing and moving around up there as well.