Danny put his hand on the door of the exam room and leaned against the wood to listen. After a while, he pulled his head back. “Did I tell you I used to have a dog?”
“No,” Will said.
Danny threw the door open and Will slipped inside, disappearing for a brief moment before there was a loud boom that made Josh flinch. Then he heard what sounded like something landing on a table. He peered into the room and saw a ghoul lying half-on and half-off the end of an exam table, half of its body sheared by buckshot. It looked dead, thick black blood dripping onto the polished tile floor under it.
Silver buckshot. It actually works.
Suck on that, mofos!
Danny went into the exam room and unclipped the LED lamp from his belt. He turned it on to full power and the room instantly swelled with light. Danny set the lamp on a counter as they began rummaging through drawers and shelves.
“What are we looking for?” Josh asked.
“Syringes, gauze, gloves, small vials of medicine,” Will said. “Anything that looks useful goes into the bag. Lara will pick through it later.”
Josh carefully stepped around the dripping ghoul blood and opened the closest drawer. He looked in at boxes of gloves and gauze tape stacked in neat rolls. He tossed them into the bag. Will and Danny put everything they found on the counters, and Josh scooped them up, careful with unopened boxes containing small vials. They quickly filled the bag, and Josh had to open the second gym bag. He began filling that one up, too.
“His name was Rocky,” Danny was saying. “Cutest dog you’ll ever see. He had this long tail he loved to wag. And he wagged and wagged and wagged. I thought about calling him Waggler, but you know, that would have been weird.”
“Cause Rocky isn’t weird for a dog,” Will said.
“It’s not weirder than Waggler. I mean, can you imagine? ‘Come here, Waggler! Come here, Waggler!’ That’s just weird, man.”
“So what happened to Waggler?”
“You mean Rocky.”
“Right, Rocky.”
“Well, everything was just fine and dandy, until one day my uncle accidentally ran him over. Or at least, he said it was an accident. Personally I thought the old-timer had it in for Rocky.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what it said.”
Josh chuckled.
“I like this kid,” Danny said.
“Don’t encourage him,” Will said.
The third and last door in the hallway was a janitor’s closet that doubled as a garbage room of sorts, with old, used items in cinched garbage bags along a metal shelf. They opened one of the bags and found used rags. Another yielded used sponges.
With two gym bags full of syringes, pill bottles, and other medical supplies, they headed back to the front lobby. Josh carried one bag while Will carried the other. They were in the parking lot and under the bright, hot sun again, and Josh was feeling good. He had done his part and had even learned that silver actually worked on the ghouls, just as promised. The idea that he could finally kill these things made him strangely giddy.
Suddenly both Will and Danny froze in front of him, and as Josh tried to figure out why, he heard the distant echoes of gunfire in the air. It didn’t take long to realize where it was coming from.
The church.
“It’s Lara,” Will said. He was holding one hand over his right ear — over the earbud. “Someone’s attacking the church.”
They ran to the truck. Josh hadn’t even gotten all the way inside when Danny turned on the engine and put the car in reverse and stepped on the gas. Josh careened across his seat, the gym bag falling to the floor. He picked himself back up as the truck sped out of the parking lot and onto the road, swerving around the same overturned Volkswagen.
“We’re coming,” Will said calmly into his throat mic.
Jesus, he’s calm.
“ETA ten minutes,” Will said.
“Five minutes,” Danny said, gunning the gas. Josh heard the truck roar loudly under them.
“Five minutes,” Will repeated into the radio. “Hold on, we’re coming.”
The truck shot forward and Josh toppled in his seat a second time.
Danny maneuvered around cars in the road, swiping other vehicles that he couldn’t get around fast enough. Soon he was driving almost entirely on the shoulder, the buildings around them flashing by in a blur.
Will had put down his shotgun and was unslinging his rifle. His voice, still unfathomably calm: “Josh, when we get to the church, you need to stay in the truck.”
“Gaby’s in there,” Josh said.
“Have you ever shot someone before?”
I shot my friend Matt, he thought, but said instead, “No.”
“Stay in the truck,” Will said, and the hard, unmistakable, “Don’t argue with me” tone in his voice reminded Josh so much of his father.
Josh nodded. He wondered if he was secretly relieved and just didn’t have the courage to admit it. After all, they were running toward gunfire. It wasn’t something he had ever pictured himself doing. Ever.
More gunshots. Louder somehow, more persistent.
“Danny, faster,” Will said.
Danny didn’t answer, but he somehow coerced the truck into going even faster. Josh didn’t think that was possible, but he was wrong. The truck started to shake violently as they tore down the street.
CHAPTER 16
LARA
Her boyfriend, who could very well end up being the love of her life, had told her about his dream last night. More importantly, he had told her about who was in that dream with him.
“It felt real,” Will said. “But unreal at the same time. It’s difficult to explain. Like being caught between sleeping and waking. It’s hard to tell what it is while you’re in it. It’s still hard to tell now.”
“But Kate was there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“And she specifically mentioned Blaine.”
“Yes.”
“What else did she say?”
“That was it.”
“Is he alive?”
“I don’t know.”
Dreams.
It wasn’t bad enough the ghouls were hunting them — now they were invading their dreams, too. Lara might have even felt indifferent about it if it had been someone else who had showed up in Will’s dream.
But no, it had to be Kate.
Kate, who Lara had seen that night when the ghouls laid siege to Harold Campbell’s facility. Not the Kate she knew, however briefly, but the ghoul version of Kate. The new Kate.
Of course it had to be the ex-girlfriend.
She believed Will when he said he didn’t think it was a dream. Not entirely a dream, anyway. Even the third-year medical student in her had come to believe a lot of things lately. Things she would have scoffed at just eight months earlier. Lara was always a practical person, a direct result of her upbringing. She went where the evidence took her, not where her imagination led. But she had seen too many things to start ignoring the possibility of something as metaphysical as psychic dreams now.
Of course, just thinking those words (psychic dreams) made it sound absurd.
After Will and Danny came back from their early scouting run, they left again with Josh in tow. That left Lara with Carly, Gaby, and the girls. The time away from the men always gave her other things to do, like keep up with hygiene. She and Carly had amassed an impressive crate with nothing but feminine products over the months, something Gaby gleefully attacked, having gone without most of them for so long.