Blaine put the AR-15 down on the bed and drew his Glock, held it in his lap. She leaned over and cupped his face in her hands and kissed him gently. She tasted of the road and the Texas heat, and he couldn’t get enough.
He saw the hole in the door behind her crack a little wider, and a ghoul tried to shove itself inside. It succeeded in getting one side of its body almost all the way through before Blaine shot it through the chest and watched it go limp, the top half of its body looking as if it had merged with the door in some kind of strange experiment gone awry. But then something on the other side grabbed the dead ghoul by the legs and pulled it free, and almost immediately a second ghoul was there, trying to squeeze in through the same hole.
Blaine shot it, too.
Soon the small splintered hole in the door grew wider, and now two of the creatures tried to push their way in at the same time. They couldn’t move the dresser, so they were trying to go over it. Blaine shot both of them, and their slack bodies were quickly pulled free and two more took their place.
He lowered the gun to his lap, then wrapped both arms around Sandra and looked away from the door, willing the sounds into the background, and concentrated just on her. Her smell, the feel of her body pressed against his, the contact of her hair in his face.
“What now?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he whispered back.
“There’s always the closet. It looks pretty big. Stretching room and everything.”
He smiled. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t such a bad life. He had gotten what most people never had — a second chance. And he had her. Sure, it took the end of the world for it to happen, but what the hell, eight months wasn’t so bad.
He heard the door break, splitting into pieces, and the dresser tumbled backward under a massive assault.
Blaine emptied his Glock into the door, into the mass of black squirming skin, while Sandra began blasting with the shotgun next to him.
He was reaching for another magazine when the first ghoul made it inside.
Blaine shot it in the face from four feet away and watched it flop to the floor, but then two more — five more — no, a few hundred more were already taking its place…
Book Two
‡
THE HUNTED
CHAPTER 15
JOSH
Pros and cons: What were they?
Pros: They had fallen in with a group of pretty decent people, including two ex-Army Rangers. That was a major pro right there. Matt had been a good friend and a good partner, but Matt wasn’t an ex-Army Ranger. Or an ex-SWAT commando. Will and Danny were both.
Cons: He couldn’t think of any at the moment.
Conclusion: Things were looking up. Hell yeah.
It was the first time in a long time that Josh remembered sleeping all the way through the night. Usually his sleep was filled with nightmares and memories and fear, and he would oftentimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering if this was the day, if this was the moment he was going to die.
That wasn’t the case this morning as he opened his eyes and stared up at the LED lamps hanging from the ceiling, set to low so they didn’t blaze a hole through his eyeballs like they usually did. The basement was closed off from the rest of the universe, the better to keep it beyond the reach of the bloodsuckers. Or ghouls, as the others called them.
Josh sat up on his bedroll and looked over to his right, expecting to see Gaby, but she wasn’t there. Instead, he heard voices and saw the doors at the top of the stairs were open, the thick slabs of wood used to reinforce them leaning nearby. He was the only one still in the basement, a realization that made Josh panic momentarily until he remembered the voices from above him.
He wiped sleep from his eyes and glanced down at his watch: 8:16 a.m.
Jesus, he had slept for more than twelve hours? Was that even possible? He didn’t remember the last time he had slept for more than four or five hours at a time. All that waking up in the middle of the night, the nightmares, the fear, was not conducive to naps.
Josh stumbled up from his bedroll and looked for his tennis shoes. He found them nearby and pulled them on. He heard the voices traveling down from beyond the stairs again. Just the women.
Nice going, chump. Way to make a first impression.
He climbed up the stairs and slipped out through the basement doors and looked sheepishly around. Gaby sat on one of the pews playing some kind of clapping game with Elise and Vera. Carly was nearby watching them, one of those pump-action shotguns hanging off her shoulder from a strap. Lara walked back from the front of the church, also with a shotgun hanging off her shoulder. They looked like road-weary warriors, he thought, feeling a touch unmanly with just the Glock handgun stuffed in his front waistband.
Gaby looked over at him and smiled. “Look who’s finally awake. We thought you were going to sleep forever.”
“Why didn’t anyone wake me?” he asked, slightly indignant.
“You looked like you needed all the sleep you could get,” Carly said. “Besides, there’s nothing pressing to do. Breakfast is over there,” she added, pointing at some food laid out on a long bench nearby.
Josh was about to tell them he wasn’t hungry when his stomach growled involuntarily, just low enough that only he could hear. Which was good, because he didn’t really need the added embarrassment of a rumbling, empty stomach, too.
He walked over to the table and grabbed some Vienna sausages and was surprised to see fresh bread on a plate. Well, half a loaf, anyway. He nibbled on it and was shocked by how good it tasted. Of course, that could just have been the fact that it was the first piece of fresh bread he had eaten in months.
“Enjoy it,” Carly said, “it’s pretty much the last loaf we’ll be making for a while.”
“How did you make this?”
“It’s bread, Josh, not gold from wine,” Carly said, amused. “All you need is dough and fire. We have both. Well, we had both. Kind of short on the dough part at the moment.”
“Eat up,” Lara said. “We already ate most of it — it’s only fair you get the final piece.”
He discovered he was actually starving. Josh grabbed some bottled water, and even warm as always, it tasted almost as good as the bread going down.
“Where’s Will and Danny?” he asked.
“They went out to do some scouting,” Lara said. “They’ll be back soon.”
“Any word on Blaine or Sandra?”
“No, unfortunately.” Lara looked at him for a moment, then asked, “Is that comfortable?”
She was looking at the gun in his waistband.
“Not really,” he said, slightly embarrassed again.
“Come with me.”
He grabbed the remaining piece of Vienna sausage and followed her back down to the basement. “These sausages are really good,” he said, taking the final bite and wiping his fingers on his cargo pants.
“Those are the last ones, too. We’re reaching lots of ‘last ones’ these days.”
“Maybe Song Island has more.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“And fish. They’d have fish, don’t you think? Being on an island? I could go for some fish.”
“What about lobsters while we’re at it?”
“Yeah, those too. Why not?”
Lara led him to their stack of plastic moving crates. She opened one and pulled out a gun belt with a holster, which she handed to him. “It beats walking around with a gun stuffed down your front waistband.”
Josh put it on. It was one size fits all. He cinched it, then tried holstering the Glock. The belt fit just fine, and it even had a flap to flick over the gun so it didn’t fall out of the holster. There were also small pouches in the back and sides.