“Take your time,” Keo said. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere tonight—” He stopped in mid-sentence.
Zachary glanced over. “What?”
Keo looked across the empty floor at the stairwell door. He was still chewing, but there was no taste anymore. “Are you sure the lobby’s sealed?”
“Like I told Shorty, yeah. Why?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“Like what?” Shorty asked.
“Moving.”
“What kind of moving?” Zachary said.
“Moving.”
“That narrows it down,” Shorty said just before he picked up his rifle and laid it across his lap.
Zachary pulled away from the window and faced the stairwell door. He stopped moving — even stopped breathing entirely — and listened. After a moment, he shook his head, eyes searching out Keo’s again. “I don’t hear anything. You sure you heard something?”
“Pretty sure,” Keo nodded.
“Shorty?”
Shorty shook his head. “Maybe all those months being chased through the woods by that Pollard guy’s got him spooked.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“Nope.”
Zachary looked back at Keo. “What do you think it was?”
“I told you. Movement.”
“From the floor below us? You mentioned the lobby…”
“Somewhere below us.” Keo dropped the unfinished granola bar and tightened his hands around the MP5SD. “Definitely below us.”
“Maybe you’re just imagining things,” Shorty said. “Maybe killing that bloodsucker’s got you overly excited.”
“I don’t get overly excited.”
“First time for everything, San Diego,” Shorty said.
Keo flashed him a slightly annoyed look. He didn’t really like Shorty all that much, and he was sure the feeling was mutual. Keo preferred the older Zachary’s company. Shorty was a couple of years younger, and his insistence on calling Keo San Diego was getting old real fast. The only reason the kid had come along with them in the first place was because he was tied to the hip with Zachary, who had his own reasons for wanting to reach Song Island.
“Are you guys loaded with silver?” Keo whispered.
“We just made the nine mil rounds for your peashooter, remember?” Shorty said.
Zachary’s eyes remained focused on the door across from them. If he heard or saw anything, he didn’t say it. After a while, he looked down at Keo, sitting to his right — Shorty was to his left — and said, “Are you sure—”
He never finished because Zachary’s words became slurred, then stopped becoming words entirely, and instead took on the form of a scream as his body jerked backward toward the window, as if he were being sucked out by a vacuum.
Keo lunged away from the wall and unslung the MP5SD as he watched, with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as two of the creatures clung to the windowsill outside the building and pulled Zachary through the opening.
One of them had a fistful of Zachary’s scruffy long hair while the other had a viselike grip over the lower half of his jaw, quickly clamping down on Zachary’s screams and turning them into muffled cries for help instead.
And all Keo could think was, How did they get up here? Did they…crawl up the side of the building?
He didn’t know they could do that. He didn’t know the ghouls could do a lot of things.
“Zachary, fuck!” Shorty screamed as he too stumbled away from the wall, spinning around and lifting his rifle.
Shorty fired, his first shot splattering the left eyeball of one of the ghouls outside, the round punching through the back of its head and disappearing into the cold October air, continuing on. The creature, too, kept on going — pulling Zachary’s struggling body through the window along with its partner.
Then Zachary disappeared from view.
Keo stood, frozen, even as he heard Zachary screaming like a banshee from outside. The screaming went on for what must have been two or three seconds, though it sounded more like two to three minutes.
Jesus Christ, how long does it take a man to fall down five floors?
Both he and Shorty flinched involuntarily when they heard the thump! of flesh and bones striking the sidewalk outside.
“Shorty,” Keo said. “We gotta go.”
“Zachary,” Shorty said.
If he had more to say, he never finished it. Instead, he might have gasped audibly when two of the creatures — different ones, this time (or were they?) — reached up from below the windowsill, grabbed the frames, and pulled themselves upward until their faces were visible in the opening. Grotesquely deformed features, like nothing that could possibly be mistaken for human, peered through the window at them.
“We gotta go!” Keo shouted.
Keo backpedaled from the glaring eyes, lifted the submachine, and fired. He hit one of them in the face and the creature let go of its grip, dropping back into the night. Keo was momentarily shocked by what had just happened. He had shot these things more times than he could count and they never reacted that way. He had even seen Shorty put a.308 round through one of them a few seconds ago, and it didn’t even flinch.
But this one…this one went down.
Silver bullets. Silver bullets!
The second one had managed to hook its spindly legs into the window frame, like some kind of insect, and was in the process of pulling itself through the opening when Keo shot it in the chest. It let go and dropped backward, swallowed up by the darkness.
“Shorty!” Keo shouted. “Let’s go!”
But Shorty didn’t move, not even when deformed shapes began climbing through the windows to their left and right along the floor. It was too dark for him to see anything beyond moving shadows. Not that Keo had to guess what was happening around him, because as soon as he killed the first two bloodsuckers, two — three—five more were trying to crawl in through the exact same space that had just been vacated.
Gather some supplies. Make some silver bullets. Go find Gillian.
What could possibly go wrong?
He flicked the fire selector on the submachine gun to full-auto and opened fire.
“Shorty!” he shouted over the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings falling against the tiled floor around him.
Silver 9mm bullets ripped through flesh and kept going, and the creatures fell like dominos in front of him, others swan diving back out of the window.
Then Boom! Boom! as Shorty began shooting. It was a bolt-action rifle, and each shot required him to manually reload. Keo remembered all those days on the road trying to convince the kid to switch to something more practical. But Shorty wouldn’t go for it. He was married to his Winchester.
Stupid kid, Keo thought, shouting again, “Shorty, come on!”
Because Shorty’s.308, as devastating as it was to a human body, was like throwing pebbles at the ghouls. His bullets tore through them, and some even hit the ones behind them — and it still kept going even then — but it didn’t stop them. Not for a moment. Not even for a millisecond. Keo wasn’t sure if the creatures even felt the bullet impacts.
“Shorty!”
He was backpedaling and firing, spraying from left to right, watching the bounding forms stumbling and falling. They were converging from every side now, literally pouring in through the windows across the floor, the tap-tap-tap! of bare feet against the carpet like a dozen stampeding herds at once.