“So we’re definitely doing this, then.”
“Hell yeah,” the captain said. “Tell the boys to stay hidden, but get ready. We’ll see what kind of firepower they have first.”
“I still think we should have taken the lifeboats inland instead of just showing up with lights flashing.”
“It’s called a Trojan Horse. And it’s worked before. If it ain’t broke…”
“…don’t fix it,” the other man finished.
There was a slight tremor in their voices. It wasn’t fear. Keo recognized it from all those times he was deployed into a new arena.
It was excitement.
Clang-clang from behind him, coming from the spiral staircase that connected the main and upper decks.
Keo hurried back down the hallway and slipped behind the staircase just as a bearded man wearing a sweat-drenched T-shirt climbed up the steps. The man had a shotgun slung over his back and a gun belt was riding low around his waist. He was turning, the staircase moving him from left to right as he climbed higher and higher.
Keo slung the MP5SD and slowly, silently, slid the Ka-Bar out of its sheath.
He took a breath, and just as the man put his foot onto the wooden floor of the upper deck, Keo lunged forward and slapped one hand over the man’s mouth and stabbed him once, twice, three times in the side before the man could get out his first startled gasp. Keo kept his grip over the man’s mouth as he lowered the still-twitching body to the floor. Blood poured out of the gaping wounds and over Keo’s fingers, but he ignored the warm sensation.
His eyes remained fixed down the hallway, toward the bridge hidden around the bend. He could still hear them talking.
“You think they have women on the island?” one of them was asking. It sounded like the one with the binoculars.
“What are the chances they don’t?” the captain said.
“It’ll be nice to get some new ones onboard.”
The other man chuckled. “Just keep it in your pants until we have the whole place locked down.”
“Remember, we get first dibs.”
The bearded man had gone completely still in Keo’s arms. He lowered the body all the way to the floor and wiped blood off his hand against the man’s dry pants.
“Rod sound a little rebellious to you a while ago?” the “first mate” was asking.
“A little,” the captain said. “Probably cabin fever. We’ve been at sea for way too long.”
“Must be.”
Keo tugged the shotgun from the lifeless body and stood up. He would have used the MP5SD, but the suppressor wasn’t going to make a lot of noise. And right now, he needed to make noise. Enough that Lara could hear all the way from the island.
“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” she had said.
“Trust me, if you hear shooting on the boat, there’s a very damn good reason for it,” he had answered.
He headed back down the hallway and turned the corner, and as soon as he stepped inside the bridge, the captain saw his reflection in the glass.
The man looked over his shoulder. “Who the fuck are you?”
“You the captain?” Keo asked.
The “first mate” turned around and went for his sidearm. Keo fired and the man’s head disintegrated in a hail of buckshot that continued and spiderwebbed the windshield behind him, splattering chunks of brain and skull against the console.
Keo racked the shotgun and swung it back over to the captain. “I asked you a question.”
“I–I guess,” the man said.
Keo stepped forward and pulled the man’s sidearm out of its holster. It was a fancy silver chrome six-shot revolver. “Nice gun.”
“Thanks,” the captain said.
Keo shot the man in the right kneecap with his own gun. The captain howled in pain and fell to the floor. Keo grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar and dragged him across the room, then deposited him into a corner.
“Stay,” Keo said.
Even through the captain’s high-pitched cries, Keo heard footsteps pounding across the boat, originating from outside the bridge. They weren’t being the least bit subtle about it. Then again, they probably didn’t know what the hell was happening.
He slid the revolver into his waistband and leaned out the door just as a bald man poked his head up the spiral staircase. Keo lowered the shotgun’s iron sight over the melon-size target.
Nice and juicy, just the way he liked them.
32
Gaby
She shouldn’t be this afraid. If her chances were decent when she was lugging around three girls, then having Will and Danny beside her was a hell of an improvement. But of course all those times didn’t involve a small army of Josh’s soldiers pinning her inside a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and the knowledge that the coming night was going to bring out something worse.
Will said there had been four of them in Dunbar. He had killed two. Four minus two got you two.
Four!
She wasn’t sure she wanted to see them. Just hearing stories about the creatures — from Will, from Lara, from Blaine and Maddie — was creepy enough. She had never actually felt the need to ever come face-to-face with the abominations.
Gaby shivered slightly and was glad no one was around to see it.
She was on the second floor, crouched at the head of the stairs, looking down at total darkness. Ten feet. That was all that separated her from the first floor, where the ghouls would come in first. Unless, of course, they decided to try climbing the two-story house. That was possible, too.
“They can be creative when the blue-eyed ones are around,” Will had said.
Gaby shifted her bent legs to keep them from falling asleep. Lance was sitting against the wall next to her, an AR-15 loaded with silver ammo in his lap. His eyes were focused on the peeling wallpaper in front of him, just barely visible in the streams of moonlight filtering through the main bedroom further down the hallway to their left. The door was open and Danny’s silhouetted form stood still, peering out the slots they had left in the window after covering it up with slabs of countertop from the second-floor bathroom.
There wasn’t enough light to see much of anything, though her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and her mind filled in the missing pieces. She couldn’t see Will on the first floor, but she could hear him moving from one barricaded window to another every few minutes. Nightfall had come an hour ago, and they were still waiting for signs of an attack.
Because it was coming. She knew that for a fact. There was no way they were getting through tonight untouched.
Gaby was in the center of the second floor, with two bedrooms to her right and a bathroom at the very end. All three doors had been removed to cover the first-floor windows and reinforce the main bedroom. Closet doors, along with whatever else they could take down, had also been used to block the other windows along the floor. It wasn’t impossible to get through the barriers, but it would take a lot of force and there wasn’t a lot of leverage to be had while clinging to the outside. Just the same, they had sealed up the other bedroom windows with dresser, beds, and furniture.
Better safe than sorry. Always better safe than sorry.
She felt reasonably safe up here. It was the first floor that they had to worry about. The fortification would hold for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later, the ghouls would batter their way through. And if they couldn’t, then their human allies could open the door, literally, for the creatures. Then there would just be the stairs to block their path.
A click in her right ear, and Danny’s voice. “Anyone huffing and puffing down there yet?”