Claire gasped.
Will looked up at a new pair of blue eyes piercing the darkened living room from the jagged hole in the wall. Its tall, elongated frame looked theatrical against the light of the moon splashing in behind it. Will couldn’t figure out if it really was that tall or if the angular shape of its body added to the preternatural deceit.
He reached down and pulled Claire’s arm away from him, pushing her back into the hallway. She went willingly.
The creature’s eyes shifted from Will to the dead carcass of the other ghoul lying on the floor behind him and Claire. What was it the creature was seeing? Was it the twisted body of its friend? Comrade? Maybe even a lover? Did they even love anymore?
“Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you.”
What the hell does that mean?
Will reached for the holstered Glock at the same time the creature moved, but he only groped empty air. The Glock was gone. He hadn’t realized it until now, but he should have sooner. The gun belt felt lighter, but in all the moments of trying to survive, trying to just learn to breathe again, he had missed it.
He switched the knife to his right hand and prepared himself for the inevitable when Claire fired next to him. She was standing so close that he swore this time he really did go deaf from the noise of the shotgun blast. She didn’t stop with one shot, either.
The girl fired again and again, the self-loading gun allowing her to shoot without having to manually rack the weapon each time. She was so small she would never have managed it anyway, though Will was awestruck that she somehow held onto the shotgun after every shot. What was she, eighty pounds soaking wet?
The blue-eyed ghoul didn’t come straight at them. Oh no, it wasn’t going to make it that easy. Instead, it was running sideways — left, then right, then back again — like some kind of goddamn leaping animal. Buckshot from Claire’s blasts caught it in the sides, the thighs, and even took a big piece off its temple. The creature was almost on top of them when another blast hit it full in the chest, making a hole so absurdly wide that Will could actually see through it.
And yet it kept coming.
Will waited for Claire to fire again, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. The FNH had seven shots. Had she fired all seven?
Fuck it.
He launched himself forward at the oncoming creature. He saw its radiant blue eyes widen, registering shock a split-second before he hit it straight in the chest with his entire body, catching it while it was still in the air. He thought he might have heard a grunt from the undead thing, or maybe that was just air wheezing out of the gaping hole in its chest.
Something wet and thick slathered across Will’s face, joining the remains of the first dead ghoul, as he tackled the creature. They both fell to the floor in a heap, but Will had the momentum and he was up first. He shoved his left arm against its neck to pin it to the wooden floorboards, putting every ounce of strength he had into it. Even so, it was already getting back up, its strength unimaginable for something so sickly looking.
It was hissing at him. He couldn’t be sure if they were words or just guttural sounds. He didn’t give a damn. Its eyes bored into him. It didn’t quite look so amused or smug anymore, and for a second — just a split-second — Will allowed himself a momentary surge of triumph.
But it wouldn’t stop moving against him. Of course not; what was he thinking?
It had managed to pull its head up from the floor and its hands were reaching for his throat when Will slammed the cross-knife into its temple. He didn’t stop pushing down down down until the guard smacked into the bone and the end of the knife pierced the floorboard on the other side of the thing’s head.
The creature went slack almost instantly under him.
“Will!” Claire shouted.
He looked back at Claire, shoving shells from the pouch into her shotgun, her hands fumbling with the ammo because her eyes were elsewhere. He followed her gaze to the hole in the wall, knowing full well what he was going to find out there.
He wasn’t disappointed.
There were hundreds of them crowding around the ragged opening, and those were just the ones he could see. But there was something wrong with the way they moved. Or didn’t move. They weren’t pouring inside the house even though there was nothing to hold them back. Instead, they were peering tentatively at him.
No, he was wrong; they weren’t looking at him.
They were looking at the creature under him. The dead blue-eyed thing he was crouched over was the center of their universe. It, and only it, as if he didn’t exist at all. They weren’t running, or charging, and there was none of the rabid intensity he was so used to.
“Will, what should we do?” Claire shouted behind him.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“But—”
“Don’t move.”
Will looked down at the creature lying still, dead (again), on the floor. Blue eyes, not quite as bright as before, stared accusingly back up at him. He pulled out the knife, then grabbed as firm a grip as he could on the smooth, oozing black skull and lifted it up.
The mass of quivering figures outside the house seemed to go absolutely still as one. He saw something in them, in their responses, that he hadn’t seen in a while. Since that night back in Harold Campbell’s facility. And he could smell it, too. It wasn’t the two dead creatures’ flesh and muscle and blood that drenched him from head to toe.
No, this was coming from the hundreds (thousands?) of undead things that gathered outside the house.
Fear.
They were afraid.
Will looked down at the blue-eyed ghoul, then, getting a better grip on the smooth head, began sawing the neck with the cross-knife.
“Oh God,” Claire said behind him just before he heard retching, followed by the smell of vomit.
He kept sawing…
34
Gaby
Someone was screaming inside the bedroom, but it was impossible to tell if it was Danny, Milly, Claire, or Annie. She guessed it had to be either Milly or Annie, though it was a stretch that Milly could produce that kind of ear-splitting sound. It couldn’t be Claire, who was as strong as a rock. And she knew for a fact that it couldn’t possibly be Danny, because she had never heard Danny scream in his life. At least, not in fear like this.
Not that she could have done anything to help them anyway, because the blue-eyed ghoul was right in front of her, grinning like a madman. There was something amazingly human about its expression — a twisted, nightmarish version of what a man would look like if he simply gave in to all his base animal urges.
She pulled the trigger on the M4 again and got off another three-round burst. Just a lone silver bullet found its target this time, snapping a piece of flesh off the creature’s shoulder blade as its body slid to the right to dodge the other two rounds. Then, without missing a beat, it was moving forward with that same unnatural fluidity that shouldn’t be possible.
Impossible. All of this is impossible.
It grabbed the rifle by the barrel and yanked it out of her hands. The move was so effortless that for a moment it took her breath away. She staggered back, unsure if she even had control of her legs anymore. She reached down to her hip for her sidearm and drew the Glock as the creature watched her, head cocked to one side, eyes glowing magnificently in the semidarkness of the narrow hallway.