It was indecision. They didn’t know what to do.
“Will,” Gaby whispered. “How did you know it would work?”
“I didn’t,” Will said. “But the blue-eyed ones control them. I just didn’t know to what extent.” He paused, then, “There were two more…”
“They’re upstairs. Dead.”
“Good.” Will pulled out his cross-knife and handed it to her, the silver gleaming brilliantly against a stray stream of moonlight. “Bring them down here. Just the heads.”
It was stickier than she had expected, and the smell made her want to retch every few seconds. She was no stranger to blood these days, but this wasn’t really blood. At least, not anymore. It was like washing her hands in tar, and she wondered if she would ever be able to clean them off — really, really clean them off — after tonight.
Cutting the heads hadn’t been easy with one hand. Her left was still effectively useless (though she didn’t tell Will that), but she found that pressing down on the creatures’ chests with one knee and slicing with her right hand was good enough. It took a lot of work, but thank God it hadn’t been as difficult to saw through bone as she had anticipated.
The black blood dripped from her fingers as she stood next to Claire and watched Will prop up the two heads on two separate objects sticking up from the floor. With the first makeshift spike, Will had broken a hole in the floorboards with the heel of his boot, then rammed the piece of wood into the dirt ground and set the head on top. He did a similar thing now with the two new heads she had brought down, using a lamp for one, shoving the exposed neck into the spot where the lightbulb was supposed to go, then setting it down on the ground. He used a rifle he had picked up from the floor for the other one.
If she thought the sight of the three decapitated heads side by side was disturbing, she felt better at how uncomfortable, how frightened the black-eyed ghouls looked outside where they continued to amass in the hundreds and thousands.
Claire stood next to her, both of them keeping a safe distance behind Will. He hadn’t moved, so they hadn’t, either. She wasn’t sure how long they stood on the first floor, in the darkness, waiting for something to happen.
But the ghouls never came in. They remained outside for the rest of the night and through the early morning hours. As far as she could tell, they barely moved at all and continued to huddle against one another, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, peering in at the three severed heads, as if transfixed.
Around midnight, Will ordered her and Claire upstairs.
Annie was asleep in the corner, on the floor, with Milly snoring in her lap. Danny had (somehow) stood up and was peering out the window through the slots. He was using his rifle as a crutch and had wrapped pieces of lumber around his broken right leg with duct tape. He drank water and kept in constant contact with Will downstairs through their radios. Like Will and her, he had lost his earbuds during the chaos, but both of them had managed to keep their radios in one piece.
Gaby wanted to pick up Milly and put her on the bed, but she didn’t have nearly enough feeling in her left arm to lift her own hand, much less carry the girl. So she sat on the bed with Claire instead and listened to the thirteen-year-old gradually fall asleep, until eventually she was snoring in tune with Milly and Annie. Claire was still clutching the shotgun against her chest as if it were a childhood teddy bear.
She stayed awake throughout the night and morning, watching Danny as he stood, unmoving, by the window. Every now and then, he asked her to take out some food from his pack and they ate. It didn’t occur to her until much later that he could hardly move.
“You okay?” she asked as he chewed on some stale jerky.
“Sure,” he said, giving her a smile.
Danny had rinsed blood off his face with water, leaving behind a gash along his cheek and another one across his temple that he had treated. Those new wounds, along with his broken nose, ruined the California surfer good looks. But scars, she knew, would heal. It was the ones you couldn’t see that lingered.
“You did good, kid,” Danny said after a while.
“Thanks.”
“Not just tonight. The last few weeks, too, to hear Willie boy tell it.”
“I did okay.”
“Don’t be so modest. We did so good with you, I told the guy downstairs we should open a school. Willie and Danny’s School of Asskicking. What do you think? If you refer a friend, you get a free ammo can filled with silver bullets as bounty.”
She smiled. “Sign me up.”
“I’ll do that. Now, go to sleep,” Danny said. “I’ll wake you in an hour for your turn at the window.”
She didn’t argue. She simply didn’t have the strength.
Gaby lay down on the bed next to Claire’s snoring form. She didn’t think it would happen, but as soon as she closed her eyes (Just for a little bit), she was asleep.
Danny was still standing by the window when she opened her eyes and struggled up on the bed.
“Danny,” she said. “You were supposed to wake me.”
“You feel that?” he asked.
She did. The warmth inside the room. The brightness of the walls. The bloody stains on the floorboards looking more ghastly somehow in the morning light. And the small remnants of blood that Danny had failed to clean off his face during the night.
Morning!
“We made it,” she said softly, afraid that if she said it too loud it might jinx it.
Danny nodded. “Told you.”
She looked down at Claire, who had crawled over to sleep in her lap sometime during the night. Annie and Milly were both snoring on the floor in the corner, Milly curled up in a fetal position. The girl looked cold despite the sun that highlighted her dirty round face.
“So what now?” she asked.
“We go home,” Danny said.
“Can we?”
“I don’t see why not.”
She carefully untangled herself from Claire, then climbed off the bed and walked across the room to the window. She looked out at the empty front yard. The grass was trampled and there were signs everywhere that hundreds (thousands) of ghouls had been down there last night. The trucks, she saw with some relief, were still where she had last seen them, and they looked to be in the same condition.
“Will?” she asked.
“Still giving head downstairs.”
She smiled, then peered out across the farm at the highway in the near distance. She expected to see trucks — or technicals, as Will and Danny called them — staring back at her, waiting to finish the job, but they were gone, too.
“The soldiers?” she said.
“They made like bananas and split sometime around sunrise,” Danny said. “My guess is, they realized we had a secret weapon—” he glanced at Claire’s snoring form on the bed “—and decided not to risk it. What is she, twenty?”
“Thirteen.”
“The hell you say.”
“Uh huh.”
“Damn. That girl saved my life last night.”
“How did she manage that?”
“When Frankly Dead Sinatra came through the door, she was the one who distracted it long enough so it didn’t rip my heart out when it had the chance. Hit it with that shotgun of hers, like she was swinging a mallet at a county fair. I guess she didn’t want to risk shooting it for fear of hitting me. Thank God. Have you ever been shotgunned?”
“No.”
“Take my word for it, kid; you’re gonna want to avoid it if you can.”
“I saw her outside in the hallway. She saved my life, too.”