“We get ready for nightfall,” Will said.
“How are you for silver bullets?” he asked Gaby as he handed her a box of ammo from one of the two technicals.
“I’m out,” Gaby said. “I used everything up in Lafayette when me and Nate got caught in the pawnshop.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
Gaby nodded. “He was a nice guy.”
“Yeah. He was a good soldier, too. We could have really used him at the island.”
“I don’t even know what happened to him, Will. Not really, anyway.”
Gaby was looking at Claire, standing across the yard from them, watching the road. Will had given her the FNH shotgun and it hung across her back, its thirty-nine inches just a foot shorter than her entire frame. A large pouch bulged against her hip, stuffed with extra shotgun shells. She had learned surprisingly fast when he showed her how to load and fire the weapon less than thirty minutes ago. The girl was a natural, which again reminded him of Gaby.
“Are you sure about that?” Gaby asked.
“Not really,” Will said. “Fact is, if we need her to start shooting, we’re already in trouble.”
“Just don’t give Milly one of those, okay?”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
Gaby followed Will back to the house. He glanced up at Danny, watching the roads from one of the open second-floor windows. He had chosen a spot that gave him a clear view of both sides of Route 13. Lance stood next to him with binoculars, peering left, then right, then back again every few seconds.
“We should have brought Tommy’s rifle,” Danny said down at them.
“Shoulda woulda coulda,” Will said.
Danny made a gun with his fingers and said, “Pew, pew,” up at the road.
“Who’s Tommy?” Gaby asked.
“A kid we met in Dunbar,” Will said. “He had a sniper rifle. He was pretty good with it, too.”
“What happened to him?”
Will shook his head, recalling Tommy’s decapitated body in the hallway outside the bathroom in the Dunbar Museum. The next morning, it was gone.
They take the dead. Why the hell do they take the dead?
They walked up the rickety steps to the front porch and stood underneath the awning. It was old and cracked and there were holes up and down its length, but it still provided a welcome respite from the heat. They stood in the shade and looked back out at the yard, Claire’s tiny figure standing sentry, the sun-drenched road beyond.
“Everyone’s dying around us, Will,” Gaby said quietly.
“Not us.”
“What makes us so special?”
She peered out at him through the broken nose and bruises around her face. Even with all of that — and all the cuts and scratches from the helicopter crash, if he looked closely enough — Gaby was still just the eighteen-year-old girl he and Danny had molded and trained to be a killer on the island. He guessed she would never outgrow that image in his head.
“We’re not,” Will said. “We’re just well-prepared. And we have something to live for. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.”
“The island,” Gaby said.
“No, not the island. The people on it…”
“You radioed Song Island yet?” Danny asked.
“Not yet,” Will said.
“What’s keeping you?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Good news and bad news. Good news, we found Gaby. Bad news, reunion time won’t start until tomorrow. Don’t tell her we’ll probably die tonight, though.”
“Good advice, Danny.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Then, “Sunset at 6:30, give or take.”
“Yup.”
“They got us by the balls.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Kinda, yeah. And itchy, too. Is it supposed to itch?”
“When was the last time you bathed?”
“You’re asking me?” Danny sniffed him. “You smell like week-old cabbage. No, I take that back. That’s giving week-old cabbage a bad name.”
Will smiled. Pouring bottles of water over himself took away some of the stink, but it wasn’t nearly enough. “I’ll shower when I’m dead.”
“So soon, then?”
Will smirked. “Captain fucking Optimism.”
Danny chuckled. He was leaning on one side of the open window across from Will. The main bedroom on the second floor gave them a perfect view of Route 13 and the soldiers at both sides of the road. With only one vehicle parked across the lanes, it was less a barricade and more of an invitation. Will knew a fake opening when he saw one, and he was looking at two right now. Danny had come to the same conclusion.
“Maybe we should give it a shot anyway,” Danny said, alternating between looking out the window and finishing a can of SPAM with a steel spork. “Give them what they want. You know me; I’m a people person.”
“We’d never make it. Even with the M240s on each truck. A machine gunner out there is a sitting duck. We proved that.”
“Maybe we can move it inside the cab.”
“How?”
“I dunno. I’m just throwing out ideas. That’s me. The idea man.”
“We’d never make it,” Will said again. “Not with the girls and the kids.”
“When did you get to be such a Debbie Downer all of a sudden?”
“I’m just being practical. The ones along the ditches are the problem. They’ll pick us off because we’ll be sitting ducks in the middle of the road. Before we know it, the ones on the other side will flank us, cut off our retreat.” He shook his head. “No, there’s no way around that. And they know it.”
“I hate sitting and waiting. Did I tell you that? They used to call me Action Danny back in college.”
“So I hear.” He glanced down at his watch again. 5:31 p.m. “It’ll be dark soon, and they’re still out there.”
“‘They’?” Danny said.
“Yeah. They.”
“Oh. They.”
The other two blue-eyed ghouls. They’re out there somewhere. Waiting for nightfall.
Always waiting…
“Maybe we got lucky and they’re not around here anymore,” Danny said. “Maybe they went home. They have homes, don’t they? Maybe when you put down the other two, they got scared and ran off.”
Will didn’t say anything.
“Of course not,” Danny said. “When has anything ever been easy with you around?”
“You blaming all of this on me?”
“I thought that was pretty obvious.” He shoved another chunk of SPAM into his mouth. “We need a new plan.”
“We already have a plan. Sit and wait and see what they do, and react accordingly.”
“That’s a sucky plan. Come up with a better one.”
“You know what they say about plans.”
“That yours suck?”
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
As soon as he said the words, he thought about Kate. She had said the same thing back in Dunbar. In the dream. The nightmare. One of those.
He looked out the window and scanned the flat empty landscape around them.
Are you out there, Kate? Are you pulling the strings right now?
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Danny said.
“What’s that?”
“Contact with the enemy. The real enemy. The last time that happened—” he touched his broken nose “—I got just a little bit uglier. I mean, sure, I’m still male model material compared to you, but a guy can only take so much abuse before he starts losing gigs, ya know?”
Gaby, Lance, and Annie were downstairs hammering the closet doors they had pulled off the rooms on the first and second floor over the windows as well as the front and back doors. They had found everything they needed from the shack on the property, including buckets of rusted nails. Lance, who didn’t look as if he had ever picked up a tool in his life before The Purge, handled a hammer surprisingly well, while the girls, Milly and Claire, pitched in as best they could.