Nice and slow.
The creature was forty meters farther down the street. It wasn’t a terribly difficult shot. Your average Boot Camp graduate could have made it standing on his head with an M4 rifle. But he didn’t have a carbine. The MP5SD was a close-quarter combat weapon and was not designed for long-distance shooting.
Still, it was only forty meters. Even an up-close-and-personal shooter like him could probably make this shot.
Probably.
Breathe. Nice and slow.
Just breathe…
He squeezed the trigger and the 9mm round was away, the soft pfft! sound of the gunshot echoing slightly in the darkness, most of it muffled by the highly effective stainless steel suppressor connected to the end of the gun barrel. The noise made by the bullet casing as it ejected, then flicked through the air, before clinking on the rooftop was almost louder than the shot itself.
He watched through the scope as the creature jerked its head back and slumped to the sidewalk in a pile.
Holy shit.
“Holy shit,” Zachary repeated in his right ear.
“Sonofabitch,” Shorty said, sounding slightly breathless.
Keo pulled the submachine gun back just in case the moonlight decided to give away his position on the rooftop. Below him, the creatures were converging on the dead one, their black-skinned and gaunt forms more silhouetted shadows than actual figures. What were they thinking now? Shock? Fear? Confusion? Did they even still think at all?
“So, was it worth it coming out here tonight?” Keo whispered into the throat mic.
“Yeah, yeah,” Zachary said. “Stop gloating and get back down here before they spot you.”
Keo grinned, got up, and moved across the rooftop, keeping his profile as low as possible by bending at the waist. He snatched up his pack along the way, very aware of the crunch-crunch of his boots against the loose gravel floor. He slung the MP5SD as he reached the stairwell door and pulled it open, careful not to make a sound — or more than necessary, anyway, since it was impossible to be completely silent these days — and slipped inside.
He flicked on a small LED flashlight to navigate his way down the enclosed room, the only noise the soft tap-tap of his boots against concrete. He fought against the instinct to turn and flee when faced with darkened corners. Not too much, though; that instinct was what had kept him alive all these months, and it didn’t pay to water it down.
He flicked off the flashlight and entered the fifth floor through another door.
Zachary and Shorty were exactly where Keo had last seen them — still crouched at the window on the far side, peering through night-vision binoculars at the streets below. Zachary’s beaten and well-used Browning BAR rifle rested against the windowsill, while Shorty’s Winchester rifle was on the floor within easy reach. Both men wore jeans and black shirts, far removed from their ghillie suits and Robertson Park.
Chilly air filtered in through some of the broken windows up and down the floor, including the one in front of Zachary and Shorty. The office building was nestled in the heart of downtown Lake Dulcet, and in the daylight, it looked hauntingly abandoned like all the rest around it. The place didn’t look any better at night, but it was one of the few large structures that hadn’t revealed any signs of ghoul occupancy. It also had everything he needed, including a tall enough perch with an easy view of the area and a place to shoot from that couldn’t be traced back. Or at least, he hoped not.
“Silver bullets. Now I’ve seen everything,” Zachary said, looking over his shoulder at Keo. He was in his forties, with a thick patch of beard and a face, like Keo’s and Shorty’s, that hadn’t seen a decent soap or shower in weeks. “Maybe we should call you Tonto from now on.”
“Because I’m half-Korean that means I can’t be the Lone Ranger?” Keo said.
“I was thinking more because you’re a smartass troublemaker.”
Keo grinned. “I hate horses, anyway.”
The young man sitting next to Zachary, Shorty, remained fixed outside the window with his binoculars. “Man, you really stirred them up. They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. You better hope they didn’t hear that gunshot.”
“Did you hear it?” Keo asked.
“No.”
“Then I’m guessing they couldn’t hear it, either.”
“You hope,” Shorty said. “You know what I say about hoping these days?”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Because there is no hope. Get it?”
Keo smirked. “You suck at this.”
“Whatever,” Shorty said. He lowered his binoculars and glanced at Zachary. “We locked the lobby doors, right?”
“Yup,” Zachary nodded. “Why?”
“Nothing, just wanted to make sure,” he said, and Keo thought the young man might have shivered slightly in the semidarkness, but that could have just been his imagination.
Keo crouched next to them at the window. He looked out at the shadows gliding up the street in their direction. After all these months, he still couldn’t quite get used to watching them moving around at night. This was their world now. There was no mistaking that. They — he, Zachary, and Shorty, and all the other humans still running around out there — were the outliers. The exception to the rule.
Santa Marie Island. That’s where you should be. With Gillian. On the beach.
Soon. Soon…
He could see the dead ghoul he had shot, farther down the sidewalk and left to lay where it had fallen. He had done that. Killed it. With a silver bullet. The reality of it was still a little hard to grasp.
But there it was. The evidence.
Daebak.
It had taken them days to collect enough of the valuable metal and find an Archers store in the city with the right bullet-making supplies. Despite Zachary’s and Shorty’s doubts (which he shared, if he was being honest), they all wanted to believe. The creatures had been unkillable except by sunlight for so long that just knowing you could take them out even at night was a game changer.
“You can kill them with silver,” the recording had said. “Stab them, shoot them, or cut them with any silver weapon, and they will die.”
Damn straight.
“Silver bullets,” Keo said. “If she’s right about that, what else do you think she knows?”
“The bodies of water and sunlight we already know,” Zachary said. “I don’t know where we’d get industrial strength ultraviolet lights, though.”
“I knew a couple of guys that grew some plants using those,” Shorty said. “I don’t know if they were industrial strength, but they looked pretty big to me.”
“I know one thing. We’re making a lot of silver bullets tomorrow.”
Shorty glanced at Keo. “Nice shot, by the way. I didn’t think you could hit a trash dumpster with that German peashooter.”
“You’d be surprised what a peashooter can do in the right hands,” Keo said.
“I bet. You ever gonna tell us what you used to do before all of this?”
“This and that, and some of those.” Keo leaned back against the wall and pulled a half-eaten granola bar from his pack and took a bite. “Next stop, Song Island?”
“After we make a shitload of silver bullets,” Zachary said. “As much as we can carry.”
“What about knives?”
“Silver knives?”
“Yeah.”
Zachary nodded. “Good idea. Give me a day, and I can come up with a lot more silver-based weapons.”