Smart girl, he thought, squirreling the bottle away.
Sandra came back with a rubber mallet. “Will this do?”
“Probably.”
“You all right?” she asked, looking at him with one hand on her hip.
He smiled. That pose never failed to get his blood pumping. “I’m fine. Why?”
“You look pale.”
“It’s hot in here.”
“I’ll open a window.” She smiled. “Just kidding.”
He waited a few more seconds until he was sure the pills were kicking in. When he stood up and didn’t feel any pain — or at least, not as much pain — he knew they were (mostly) working.
He and Sandra didn’t have any trouble putting the door back in place. The nails were straight enough, and he banged the ones that were slightly crooked back into the correct angles. While Sandra held the door at a slight angle — so the length covered as much of the doorway as possible — he hammered the nails into the walls on both sides.
That done, they stepped back and gave it an appraising look.
“It looks decent,” Sandra said. “We’ll have to thank your friends for making it so easy.”
“At this rate, I’ll spend the rest of my life thanking them,” Blaine said.
With an hour until nightfall, they ended up in one of the rooms upstairs. It was clearly a girl’s room, decorated with pink dressers, pink bedsheets and, of course, pink blankets. The idea of staying in the same room from this morning, where he lay half-dead, didn’t appeal to him at all. They considered the master bedroom, but it was too far away from the stairs.
They had some time, so they lay down on the bed and he held her in the semidarkness of the room. They didn’t say a word, neither one of them wanting to ruin the moment. The feel of her body against him was more than he could bear, but doing anything else was out of the question in his current condition.
Eventually, they got up and left the bedroom and walked the short distance to the top of the stairs, where they sat down next to the supplies crates they had brought in with them. Blaine put down the ammo bag with the shotgun shells and spare magazines for the AR-15 and Glock.
There were a couple of windows behind them, and tiny remnants of sunlight filtered inside through doors fastened over the frame. The stairwell was exactly in the middle of the house, with a perfect view of the kitchen and its island counter below. The second floor was a bit of an oddity — it was split up into two sections, which were joined in the middle by a walkway, like a bridge, with the stairs to one side and additional bedrooms on the other.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Blaine said. “If they find us and start up the stairs, I want you to go back into the bedroom and close the door.”
“Not without you.”
“Sandra…”
“No.” Her voice was calm but firm. “Not without you. Not again.”
He didn’t think there was any point in arguing, so he said, “All right.”
They sat and waited.
At 8:30 p.m., it got pitch-dark outside, and the less light he had to see by, the more tense he became. Slowly, the pain around his stomach came back. He shook out another pill from the bottle and saw Sandra look over. She sat in the darkness with him but was close enough that he could see the concern on her face.
“How many of those have you taken already?” she asked.
“Not nearly enough,” he said glibly, hoping that would prevent what he knew would come next.
It didn’t.
“You should rest,” she said. “You can’t keep going on pills alone.”
“I’m not. I have you.”
Her face remained grave. “I’m serious, Blaine. You need to rest. You were shot three times yesterday. That’s not going to heal any time soon.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for rest later.”
She sighed, but didn’t pursue it, even though he could tell she wanted to. Instead, she laid her head against his left shoulder.
He was sure the ghouls would have found them by nine o’clock, but they hadn’t. Or if they had, they didn’t attack right away. He sat in the silent blackness with Sandra next to the stairs and listened.
For anything. For something.
He heard nothing, just the wind outside, sometimes pushing up against the wall or windows. He tried to imagine what ghouls moving through the lawn, with its forest of grass, would sound like. Barefoot movements were hard to detect, but dozens, maybe hundreds, might be easier to pick up.
Ten o’clock came and went.
Sandra started to relax next to him and wasn’t clutching the Glock quite as tightly anymore. “Maybe we got lucky,” she whispered.
“Maybe,” he whispered back.
They were both wrong.
About ten minutes later, there was a loud crashing noise from the front of the house. Before the sound had even finished its echo, another loud crash erupted from the back. He recognized the sharp noises instantly. God knew he had heard them often enough — they were the very real clamor of shattering glass.
They’re coming through the windows.
Blaine looked back at Sandra, her face awash in growing terror. He couldn’t remember the last time she had looked this afraid, and he wondered if his own face mirrored hers. He hoped not. He wanted at least to give a reassuring look, as impossible as that seemed at the moment.
The sound of crumbling glass was soon followed by a cacophony of tumultuous, battering noises — flesh against wood. The ghouls had broken through the windows, only to find thick wooden boards in their path, and they were now beating on the barricades with their bodies. They hadn’t even bothered with the front door, he realized. Was that because they knew it was pointless, or did experience tell them windows were easier targets?
“Stay here,” Blaine said, and got up and rushed over to the bridge.
He looked down to his right, past the living room and at the four windows at the back of the house. The doors nailed over the windows were holding, though they trembled slightly each time the creatures struck them again and again and again.
He had forgotten how terrifying these moments could be. They had been so lucky the last few months, hiding at night and moving in the day. He remembered distinctly the first few days, the horror and terror of what was happening. The end of the world, playing out before his eyes. All those memories came flooding back now.
He hurried back to Sandra.
“Can they climb?” she asked when he reached her.
“I don’t think so,” he said. Could they? He had never seen them climb before…
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“I hear something on the roof.”
Blaine looked up at the ceiling. Not that he could see anything but a fan and pieces of peeling white paint above him. Earlier in the day, he had seen plenty of cobwebs and insects up there, too. He couldn’t see anything now in the pitch-darkness.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But it sounded like footsteps. You said they can’t climb?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen them climb before, but I guess…”
Why wouldn’t they be able to climb?
It wasn’t like climbing took a lot of skill. All you needed were hands and feet, and the ghouls had both of those. So why couldn’t they climb?
“It wasn’t noise from downstairs?” he asked, hopeful.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Something else, moving on the roof.”
“I don’t hear anything,” he said, just before a large rectangular section of the ceiling on the other side of the bridge opened up with a loud creak.