The attic door!
A ghoul, its skin blackened and wrinkled, gaunt features mostly skin and bones, fell out of the freshly opened rectangular hole and landed on the second floor in a crouch that reminded him of a praying mantis. The figure was so emaciated Blaine thought he could almost hear bones clacking against joints as it moved.
The creature, resting on its haunches, searched the darkness and found them. Then it was running across the bridge in their direction. Blaine lifted the AR-15 and fired a shot and hit the ghoul in the chest. It was so close that he couldn’t have missed even if he had tried. The ghoul seemed to stumble on something and flopped to the floor a couple of feet from Blaine, where it lay still.
“Holy shit,” Blaine whispered.
Silver bullets. I can’t fucking believe it.
He was rejoicing over that fact when something else — three — no, four — no, ten—bony shapes fell out of the attic opening. They were already rushing across the bridge at Blaine, moving silently, atrophied faces contorted in rabid poses.
Blaine switched the AR-15’s fire selector to full-auto and squeezed the trigger. The room lit up with a strangely hypnotic staccato effect and one ghoul, then two, then three fell, but each time one ghoul splashed to the floor, another leaped over it and continued coming straight at him. All the way in the back, under the attic door, Blaine saw even more ghouls falling through the opening.
Blaine kept firing, backpedaling, and watching with horror and fascination as the ghouls fell like bowling pins. Even as he squeezed the trigger and kept it pressed, his mind was telling him he was using up the magazine, that he was going to be empty soon and there were still going to be too many ghouls.
By the time he fired his last shot, there were still five ghouls climbing over their dead. Others were leaping over the pile of bodies and using the four-foot-tall walls flanking the bridge as a catapult, launching themselves into the air. One of them came straight at Blaine and he managed to get the AR-15 up in time, smashing the stock of the rifle into its face and knocking it sideways, the blow carrying the creature across the room.
Then Sandra was there, firing her Glock into the remaining four creatures. She caught one as it was trying to leap up the bridge wall. The creature tumbled down through the opening. She kept firing, missing some but hitting others, until all three ghouls went down and didn’t move.
Blaine didn’t bother reloading the AR-15. Instead, he snatched up the Remington shotgun and turned to face the ghoul he had knocked out of the air. It was back on its feet and glowering at him when he shot it from ten feet away, obliterating the upper half of its body with silver buckshot. What remained of the creature keeled over to the floor, thick black blood oozing out onto the carpet.
“Blaine!” Sandra screamed.
Blaine turned back in time to see ten ghouls — no, fifteen — no, too many to count—falling down through the attic opening across the floor, like drops of rain, a never-ending flow of click-clacking bones and pruned skin and hollowed faces.
“Room!” he shouted. “Get back into the room!”
Sandra backed up, struggling to reload her Glock. She gave up and turned and fled toward the room with the pink dresser and pink bedsheets.
Blaine began firing. Racking and firing, racking and firing, buckshot vaporizing the creatures, tearing flesh from bone — or what little flesh they had left over their bones — with brilliant efficiency. Their bodies were so thin, the flesh so weak, that each shotgun spray took out two, sometimes three ghouls at the same time.
But more of them were falling through the attic door every second.
Too many. Too many!
“Blaine!” Sandra shouted behind him. “Come on!”
He fired his final shot and snatched up the ammo bag and the AR-15 and ran to her. She was holding the door open and waiting, face contorted in mortal terror, when he rushed inside, ignoring the pain rippling through seemingly every inch of his body.
Merciful God it hurt!
She slammed the door behind him and locked it.
“Help me!” Blaine shouted.
He dropped his weapons and grabbed the pink dresser and pushed it toward the door. Sandra ran over to help as the ghouls began crashing into the door on the other side, the wall shaking from the impact. The wall hadn’t even stopped trembling from the first assault when they crashed into it again, and again, and again. What looked like green neon stickers on the ceiling fell down and peppered the carpet in little glowing stars.
They pushed the big wooden furniture across the room. The only sounds were the ungodly loud crashing noise from the other side of door and the dresser’s legs grinding away against the carpeted floor, tearing off chunks of fabric as it moved grudgingly.
Finally, they got the heavy dresser into position, just as a big chunk of the door tore free and Blaine saw dark black eyes peering in through a jagged hole. He drew his Glock, shoved it into the hole, and fired. He heard what he thought was a shriek and the eye was gone.
They stepped back from the door and listened to the pounding continue, the door and the wall and the dresser shuddering and threatening to fall apart with every loud crash.
The door won’t hold. God help us, it won’t hold.
Blaine snatched up the shotgun and handed it to Sandra. She took it without a word. He gave her the bag of ammo, then reloaded the AR-15 with the remaining magazine.
“Do we have enough?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
She began feeding shells into the shotgun, careful to choose only the ones with the white “X” written on the side.
Blaine hurried to the window. He peered out through a small sliver along the top that the door nailed across the window didn’t quite cover. He saw darkness and a thin trickle of moonlight over the front lawn. There was so much grass between the house and US 287 he had difficulty making out the long stretch of highway in the distance.
Then, slowly, he began to make out shapes and forms moving along the tall blades of grass.
Ghouls.
There were a lot of them, so many he felt something in the pit of his stomach give, and suddenly the pain in his side and thigh and shoulder didn’t seem to matter anymore. There were so goddamn many of them. Hundreds.
Thousands.
And among the unending tide, Blaine swore he saw something he had never seen before. A pair of eyes. Glassy blue eyes in the middle of an obsidian ocean, staring back up at him, as if they could actually see him.
But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
A blue-eyed ghoul. Now I’ve seen everything.
He looked over at Sandra and found her staring back.
The door trembled violently in front of her, the room around them shaking every few seconds from the onslaught. How many were outside that door right now? A dozen? Maybe a hundred? How many could they possibly squeeze into the second floor before there was no more room? A few hundred?
“A lot?” she asked.
“A lot,” he said.
He considered telling her about the blue-eyed ghoul, but realized it didn’t matter. Blaine walked over and sat down on the bed with the pink covers and pink fluffy blankets. Sandra sat down next to him.
Another big chunk of the door, high above the reinforced dresser, splintered and flew across the room, but they didn’t pay any attention to it.
Instead, Blaine reached over and took her hand and squeezed. “I’m glad I found you.”
“You didn’t find me, I found you,” she said, smiling back at him.