Instead, she reached down and pressed the PTT, and shouted, “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”
Where the hell was Will? Couldn’t he hear what was happening up here? What was he doing down there? What—
There was a massive BOOM! and the entire house shook from its foundations all the way up to its ceiling, as if a bomb had gone off on the floor under her.
The first floor. Will.
What the hell was happening down there?
She started forward toward the stairs—
— when a second creature fell through the same hole the first one had made with the sledgehammer and landed in an elegant crouch in front of her. It made so little noise, and there was so little effort in its movements, that for a moment the sight of it straightening up, stretching its body like some twisted, deformed ballerina, startled Gaby to the core.
It had its back to her as it rose to its full height — it was at least a foot taller than her, maybe more — and turned around. Gaby became instantly mesmerized by its ethereal blue eyes. Like two impossibly bright orbs washing over the darkened hallway, reaching into her very soul.
It opened its mouth, revealing twisted and cracked brown and yellow teeth stained with oozing black liquid that looked, for some reason, as if they, too, were alive and wiggling.
“Wanna play?” it hissed, eyes glinting with mischief in the moonlight.
33
Will
The darkness did things to you these days. It lulled you into a strange state of numbness with its overwhelming silence, the unnatural sense of calm that seemed to pervade everything, while at the same time it made you dread all the things out there that you couldn’t see.
Inevitable. Night after night.
Are we just living on borrowed time? Is that all it is?
Tonight. Tomorrow night. The week after. The next month?
How long can we keep the island? How long can we keep fighting them before it becomes too much? Before the costs are too great?
How long…
He had to shake himself to rid his mind of those depressing thoughts. Being downstairs by himself didn’t help. The most he could do to keep busy was move from window to window, checking every corner of the front yard. He couldn’t really see the soldiers on the road from here, but he knew they were still out there, somewhere.
When they finally came, he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand. His senses were never more razor sharp as they were during the preamble to combat. He felt it now, the hyper awareness of his surroundings. Every sound, every flickering image, and every glowing blue eye.
As he watched them toying with Harrison, he realized just how different these creatures were. They were the same, but not — an entirely new breed of what he was familiar with. Radically different. More dangerous. This was why they had kept the other ghouls back in Dunbar. Because this was their show. Their sport. Harrison was a warm-up and now they were coming for the main event. He and the others inside the house.
So where were they now? What was taking them so long?
Will glanced back at the staircase behind him. It was too dark to make out much of anything on the first floor even with the slivers of moonlight filtering in through the barricades over the windows, one next to him and the other one on the other side of the door. He could just make out the stair landing—
There was a loud crash from above him, and the entire house shuddered.
He reached for his radio. “Gaby!”
He waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. Instead, he heard the pop-pop-pop of an M4 exploding from the second floor. Three-shot burst. Gaby’s rifle, because Danny still had his M4A1 and he would have either used single shots or gone full-auto.
Will abandoned the window as more gunfire erupted from the top of the stairs. In the packed confines of the house, the sounds were thunderous, but they couldn’t quite drown out the voice. Danny’s, shouting between gunshots. He wasn’t using the radio, either. That was a bad sign.
The first floor. Stay on the first floor! Don’t abandon—
Then Gaby’s voice, blasting through his earbud. “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”
He was at the stairs, grabbing for the wooden globe on top of the newel, when shadowed movements flickered across the wall in front of him. Figures, moving outside one of the windows, their shapes casting across the room by moonlight.
He spun back around and saw the indistinguishable shapes moving on the other side of the window he had abandoned just seconds ago. As soon as he saw them, the silhouetted forms raced away again.
What—?
The explosion (or was that explosions?) shredded the window, the barrier over it, and a large section of the house around them. Will dived to the floor as chunks of the wall and even the porch buzzed over and around his head, sharp pieces embedding into the floor inches from him. Debris rained down across the room and his ears were buzzing. He was sure he had gone temporarily deaf (Please let it be temporary), though that couldn’t possibly be the case because he could still hear continuous gunfire from above him.
Grenades? Did they just use grenades on the wall?
Jesus Christ.
He looked up from the floor, expecting the entire house to come tumbling down on top of him at any second. But it didn’t. Somehow, by some miracle, the second floor remained where it was — above him — despite the jagged, gaping hole across the room looking out into the moonlit yard. Absurdly, the door next to it had remained intact, as had the repurposed lumber they nailed over it. Smoke from the explosion poured out of the house, and he became aware of the chilly night air for the first time in the last few hours.
He managed to scramble to his knees, glad he hadn’t lost the M4A1 during his swan dive. Pieces of wood and glass fell off his shoulders and back and head, and there may or may not have been a trickle (or two or a dozen) of blood flowing down his face. His ears were still ringing, which made the sight of two figures, both in camo uniforms and gas masks, stepping through the hole in the wall and moving against the lingering smoke look like monsters in a bad dream.
He couldn’t hear his carbine firing, but he could feel it bucking against his hands.
The first man slumped forward while the second one tried desperately to track him in the smoke. His vision was likely blocked by the limited view of the gas mask.
Sucks to be you.
Will put a bullet into the second man’s right eye. He stumbled awkwardly before collapsing into a pile.
Will struggled to his feet. His equilibrium was off and he swayed left, then right, then left again. The coughing fits didn’t help him adjust any quicker as he reached out with his free left hand, got a grip on something solid, and finally managed to steady himself.
Or as steady as he could get, anyway. The room had begun to spin and he considered falling back to the floor, where it would be so much easier to regain his senses. The world had looked pretty stable from down there, and he didn’t remember coughing nearly as much, either. Up here, though, the smoke was everywhere, and it was hard to just breathe.
The wall he was touching shook, but he had a hard time tracing where the vibrations were coming from. Behind him? Above? Maybe from outside the house. It could have been more steady gunfire from the second floor. Gaby and Danny were still up there. So were Lance and Annie and the two girls.