‘Jack left the door open, goddamn it!’ Jerry snapped. Then: ‘Why shouldn’t he have left the door open? How did he know we’d be going back?’
He spoke as if it were an exercise in logics. He was looking around, standing with his back to the fence. Further down the fence, towards the jail, the dead ghoul was still hanging by his spiked hand… as if, like the swordfish, he had been suspended there to be weighed and measured and mounted. Blood still dripped from his erupted body, not spraying out — his heart no longer pumped — but falling in heavy globs obedient to gravity. The living ghouls still milled aimlessly about.
Jerry said, ‘If we drive around they won’t be able to catch us… as long as the gas holds out. But after that… those vans aren’t as strong as the jail. They could break into a van and we’d be confined, unable to manoeuvre… Damn! If only we knew how long we have to hold out here… how long we’ll be isolated before they… before they do whatever they’re going to do about the island. We have to get to some place we can defend.’
‘What about the compound?’ Mary said. ‘Take the van to the compound? The telephone is probably working from there, at least we could be in touch with… the world.’
Jerry considered that.
He was bareheaded now. He had lost his hat somewhere along the line. The sea breeze ruffled his fair hair.
‘What’s it like in the compound, Jack? Defensible?’
But I couldn’t remember what the compound was like. I could remember only that small whitewashed room… and the stinking pit. Black smoke rose from that pit, a tower of smoke like…
‘The lighthouse!’ I cried.
‘Why… yes. That’s right!’
Mary was nodding enthusiastically. ‘There’ll even be supplies there. Sam Jasper’s things. We won’t have to go back to the jail. ’
‘The tide?’ I asked.
‘We’ll take a boat,’ Jerry said, then paused, glancing out at the harbour, where John Tate had been rammed. The destroyer stood at the approaches, attended by gunboats. It would not be wise to take a boat.
Mary thought for a moment; said, ‘We can cross by the reef in half an hour.’
‘And so can they,’ said Jerry.
‘But only one at a time… we can shoot them down one by one, if we have to… if they come…’
‘If they come in daylight.’
‘Oh, Christ… I don’t know.’
‘But wait!’ Jerry said. ‘They won’t cross water, right? They won’t go into water. That reef is none too solid. There must be a tyre iron or something in one of the vans… if we could lever a couple of rocks out of place, make a break in the line… it should work.’
‘I think it’s our best bet,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be there than here. And someone might be more inclined to rescue us from there… in a day or two they must realise we aren’t infected… a boat or helicopter…’
‘Mary?’ the sheriff said.
‘I… yes. Anything rather than staying here or going back to the jail… waiting for them to break in. Yes. The lighthouse.’
I think we all felt greatly cheered at having reached a decision. At least we were still in control of our own options. We moved to the nearest van.
The keys were in it.
We all got in the front, Jerry at the wheel and Mary between us. Jerry waited a few moments before he switched on the ignition but, once he did so, he started the van moving immediately.
We drove towards the ghouls.
The ghouls watched us come.
Jerry drove at them in first gear, steadily, and they made no attempt to get out of the way. They seemed fascinated by the van, by a large moving object… something of a magnitude to register on their dimmed perceptions. As we closed on the crowd, I saw Jerry’s hand lift from the wheel and hover for a moment over the horn. It was a reaction from habit and he grinned grimly as he realised he had been about to sound the hooter.
‘No way through them,’ he muttered.
‘We’ll have to force our way through…’
Mary, tight-lipped and rigid between us, said, ‘Can’t you drive faster?’
She yearned for the sanctuary of the lighthouse.
Jerry said, ‘Afraid to ram them too hard… don’t want a fender jammed into a tyre or to bend the radiator back into the fan… just try to brush them aside…’
More ghouls were moving towards us. One was hanging on the fence, swinging by one hand, as if he’d discovered a new pleasure. I saw one come out of the open door of the jail and gaze up at the sun. He didn’t blink. I wondered if they would soon be blind? I wondered if that would matter?
Jerry was saying, ‘Why, there’s Joe Wallace… used to play cards with him… Tim Carver… Ike Stanton… Hell, I know these people! Used to know them when they were people… There’s Mrs Jones. Aw, hell.. there’s the Carpenter kid.. he’s only seven years old…’
I looked where he was looking and saw the child, its face preternaturally aged by drooling madness. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Larsen had been right about that… the kids were the worst. I guessed there were about forty of them on the waterfront, men, women and children. I had no idea how many were in the town or how many had been killed… nor how long they would survive.
They were still individuals.
They shared the same mindless countenance, but they moved in different ways, not following a pattern, each affected differently. Some hopped and leaped like frogs, some crept along, some stood upright while others were hunched over, faces downcast as if ashamed of their condition. Most of them seemed to be injured in some way. I saw one youth whose arm had been torn off at the shoulder; perhaps he had torn it off himself, for he held the severed limb in his other hand. A woman had torn her hair out; her glabrous skull was dotted with hundreds of pinpoints of blood. One had no lower jaw. Two were naked. I stared at them in terrible fascination.
‘Why, there’s my hat!’ Jerry said, and he brought his hand to his bare head.
The white Stetson was lying in the street just outside the jail. I thought, for a second, that Jerry was going to halt the van and retrieve it. But he drove steadily on, into them. The ghouls didn’t move out of the way, but they allowed themselves to be brushed aside. They seemed quite passive and docile. I began to hope that the initial frenzy had worn off, that it had been a temporary rage that had burned itself out. That hope burned like acid in my heart.
Then they attacked the van.
A ghoulish face loomed up at my window.
Mary screamed. There was a loud banging on the side of the van, shaking it. Another bang came from the roof. Someone was hammering and pounding at the panels and the windscreen suddenly shattered in a jagged star.
Jerry cursed. He stepped on the accelerator and the tyres skidded and squealed. For a moment the van did not move; someone was holding the rear bumper. Then there was a screech of metal and the bumper peeled free from the van. We surged forward with a jolt… and the engine stalled.
Jerry snapped the ignition and it rasped. The engine didn’t catch. I feared it was flooded. I think I was shouting at Jerry, and Mary was screaming over and over. But then the engine caught and we were moving again. As the van lurched forward the door on the driver’s side was jerked completely off. A ghoul held it by the handle and he fell back as the door came free. The door sailed up like a steel kite, floating. Then we were through them and going fast. I looked back. The ghouls were coming, following after us. Jerry was hunched over the wheel and Mary and I were shouting for him to drive faster. He grunted and touched his forehead again. I figured he regretted losing his hat.
The lighthouse rose up like surging hope.
It was an ugly grey tower upon which gargoyles might have perched, but it looked beautiful to me. Jerry brought the van to a skidding halt, slewing sideways in the sand, just where the reef began. The tide was going out and the black rocks broke through the surface all the way to the lighthouse. For a moment we just sat there. Time was precious, but we had to sit for an instant as the void of our drained emotions filled.