The creature flopped sideways and lay still.
It wasn’t as dramatic as she thought it would be. One second it was on its knees, as if in worship, and the next it was lying in a pool of its own oozing black blood, blue eyes still incandescent in the semidarkness. It might have even been looking back at her. Or maybe through her. What mattered was that it didn’t move again.
She struggled up to her feet. It was difficult. Her left arm wouldn’t respond no matter how hard she tried. She stumbled over the twisted carcass — it looked more emaciated in death for some reason, and less powerful — and up the hallway.
She stopped for a moment at the sight of Lance, buried in debris, bright red blood pooling under him with the halo of moonlight falling through the opening in the roof. Gaby looked toward the stairs. She couldn’t hear anything from down there. Not a single sound. And she couldn’t see anything, either. The other end of the staircase was completely swallowed in darkness.
Crying, coming from the master bedroom. Annie. Or was it Milly?
She climbed over the debris and Lance — she felt like throwing up while doing it — and fumbled her way to the open bedroom door. She lifted the Glock as she neared it. There was just enough moonlight shining through the still-barricaded window that she could make out a figure on the floor, near the center of the room.
Danny. God, don’t let it be Danny.
As she stepped closer, the shape on the floor became clearer.
Don’t let it be Danny…
It wasn’t Danny. It was one of the ghouls, lying on its back. Where she expected to see blue eyes, there were instead two black holes. Except they were much bigger than eye holes were supposed to be. The head lay in a thick puddle of congealed blood, blackened against the moonlight. Danny’s cross-knife was buried in the creature’s forehead up to the guard.
“Danny!” Gaby called out.
“Over here,” a voice said.
There was a click! and Danny’s face was lit up by a flashlight beam. He grinned back at her through a layer of blood. A mixture of black and red, like some kind of Kabuki mask. It was impossible to tell where he was bleeding, or where he wasn’t.
“Can you move?” she asked.
“My right leg’s broken,” he said. “Too bad, cause that’s my dancing leg.”
“Annie?”
Danny moved the light away from him and across the room at Annie. She was still huddled in the corner with Milly, the two of them having folded up into a ball, arms encircling each other in mutual defense. Both were crying softly, unwilling to look up even when Danny’s flashlight illuminated them.
“The other girl…” Danny said.
Gaby looked back toward the stairs.
“Go,” Danny said.
“What about you?”
“I got this situation well in hand. The busted leg’s just to make it fairer.”
She managed a slight smile at him before stumbling her way back down the hallway toward the stairs, fighting the urge to throw up again as she stepped over Lance and the debris a second time. The fact that Lance’s face, turned to the side, was clearly visible in the pouring moonlight made her gag slightly.
She finally reached the stairs and hurried down.
“Will!” she called out. “Claire!”
Her voice echoed, but there was no reply. The only sound was the loud echo of her footsteps. She was halfway down when a silhouetted figure moved in the darkness below her. She stopped and lifted the Glock.
“Don’t shoot!” a small voice shouted.
Claire.
Gaby sighed and ran down the rest of the way as Claire stepped back. The thirteen-year-old was still clutching the FNH in both hands, and she didn’t look hurt or bleeding. Then again, it was so dark on the first floor that Gaby could barely see where she was stepping. She could tell where Claire was looking, though, and she turned in that direction.
Will.
He stood with his back to her, standing near a large hole in the wall of the house. The loud boom that she had heard earlier, she guessed. Some kind of explosion. Will was holding his M4A1 at his side, not in any threatening manner, and was looking out at the front yard.
“Will,” she said, a lot quieter than she had meant to.
Will glanced over his shoulder. “You okay?”
“Alive.”
“Danny?”
“Alive, too.”
He nodded and looked forward again.
Gaby turned to Claire. “You okay?”
Claire nodded. “Annie and Milly…?”
“They’re fine.”
“I saw Lance…”
“Yeah.” She looked back at Will, but said to the girl, “Stay here.”
She walked to Will and almost stepped on a body lying on the floor, hidden in the shadows. She looked down at a twisted black and pruned carcass. Or what was left of it. The head was missing. The monster wasn’t the only evidence of a fight down here. There were also two men in uniforms lying unmoving on the floor, both wearing gas masks. She didn’t have to ask Will what had happened to them.
“Will,” Gaby said. “What happened to the others? The black-eyed ones?”
“They’re still out there,” Will said. “There’s a lot of them.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Maybe thousands.”
“Why haven’t they…?”
She didn’t finish her question, because by then she was standing beside Will and looking out the hole in the wall. There was something else there in the middle of the jagged opening. It was a decapitated head impaled on a long, thin piece of broken wood. The head was hairless and the smooth skin gleamed in the moonlight. When she looked back at the dead creature behind her, she was able to put two and two together.
“Where…?” she whispered.
“Outside,” Will said. He wasn’t whispering, she realized.
She looked out the house and into the yard again. Will was right. The ghouls hadn’t gone anywhere. They were still outside.
All of them.
She could only see the first few hundred through the opening. The rest were hidden in the darkness beyond the power of even the moon to reveal. Not just in the yard, but around the house. The sides, the back, and well into the fields, too.
Her heart pounded at the sight of the creatures amassed outside. Their eyes, always creepy even when there was just one of them, were unfathomably terrifying with so many gathered at one spot. They looked like uncertain children, tentative and afraid. At first she thought they were looking at Will, but she was mistaken. They were staring at the head he had placed in the middle of the hole in the wall, which looked like the crooked mouth of a cave opening.
There was, she knew with great certainty, absolutely nothing to stop the thousands of undead things out there from coming into the house at any moment. Even silver bullets would only kill so many before the rest overwhelmed them in an unstoppable tidal wave of black death. And then what? They could head up the stairs, but against that many, they would never survive the night. She didn’t have to look down at her watch to know that they had hours—hours—to go before sunrise.
But the creatures weren’t attacking. They stayed where they were, swaying slightly against each other, a mass of squirming black flesh, almost indistinguishable against the night. There was something odd about the way they looked at the head, with a mixture of fear and awe and something she hadn’t really seen from them before.