Lara raised herself higher and began crab-running up the air duct. Her head scraped against the metal ceiling once, twice, almost five times. She ignored the sudden jolts of pain and kept moving, willing herself to go faster, until she finally (finally!) saw the neon lights of glow sticks appear in front of her again.
There was Carly, on her back, with a ghoul on top of her. Carly had managed to grab the creature’s neck with both hands and was holding it back, but even so, the ghoul’s mouth was open, and it bared its brown and yellow and crooked teeth at her, trying to get at her neck. Saliva dripped rabidly from its mouth.
She pulled the Glock out of her waistband and hurried forward. She passed Elise and Vera, holding onto each other, speechless as they watched Carly battle the ghoul. Passing the girls, Lara stuck out the Glock and fired twice.
Her first shot missed the ghoul entirely, but her second creased the back of its head.
It turned and looked at her, its eyes registered annoyance.
She shot it again, this time hitting it in the right eye. The soft tissue of the eye popped like a grapefruit and sprayed the ducts. It was enough to make the creature stumble away from Carly, and for a moment Lara wondered if she had hurt it, wounded it enough to force it back. She realized what a stupid notion that was when the ghoul turned its attention completely away from Carly and dove at her.
The creature was small, its shrunken form making it almost a perfect fit inside the four-by-four confines of the ducts. It was already hunched over, so when it ran at Lara, it didn’t have to stop. It came at her full speed, and all she could do was empty her gun into it, her last two shots hitting the ghoul point-blank in the chest.
That slowed it down, but it didn’t stop. Black blood dripping in its wake, turning the floor slippery, the creature started running toward her again when Danny appeared, lunging past her and driving his cross-knife into its head.
The creature fell and lay still.
Danny pulled his cross-knife out of the ghoul and hurried over to Carly. “You okay?”
Carly nodded, her face frozen in horror. “It came out of nowhere,” she said between gasps.
“They must have opened another grate in one of the rooms between here and the Control Room,” Danny said. He unslung his M4A1 and crab-walked to the front. “I’m taking lead from now on. Stay behind me.”
Danny started off, Carly behind him, and the girls followed, walking hunched over.
Will came up behind her, reloading his shotgun. He grinned, his expression oddly innocent in their merging halos. “I think we’re slowing them down. Couldn’t be more than, oh, a few thousand at this point.”
She smiled back at him, and before she realized it, she blurted out, “I love you.”
It caught him by surprise, but he quickly gathered himself and flashed her a huge smile. He took out an extra X-marked magazine. “One shot per ghoul. Go. I’ll be right behind you.”
She turned and followed the others up the air duct, reloading her Glock as she went. She hadn’t gone more than a few feet when she heard Will’s shotgun bellowing behind her again.
Once, twice, then silence before the loud, solid sound of the shotgun racking.
As long as she continued to hear that sound, she would know he was doing okay.
Up ahead, Danny’s was firing his M4A1, the staccato effect of the weapon discharging creating a weird universe that made her think they were stuck in a disco of some kind, instead of squeezing their way through an air duct that was quickly becoming infested with ghouls at both ends.
Danny’s right, they’ve found another way in.
Suddenly there was a bright shaft of light in front of her, and it took her a moment to realize they were now moving directly over a lit-up room, and the lights were coming through another grate. She risked a look down through the grate and saw the Green Room below her, troughs filled with fresh dirt and growing plants. Pools of blood, but no bodies, indicated that whoever had sought salvation down there hadn’t found it.
At the sound of Danny firing she looked up the air duct, the same staccato flashes in front of her, surreal and hypnotizing.
Behind her, Will’s shotgun thundered, getting closer. She was surprised to realize that even this close to Will she had somehow managed to tune out the massive crashing, earsplitting carnage of the shotgun. Or maybe she had just lost most of her hearing, but that couldn’t be right, because she heard Will just fine a few minutes ago, when she had told him that she loved him.
God, had she actually said that?
That question was still echoing inside her head as she moved over the grate to get to the other side. She put a foot down and felt something strange — wide-open space — and suddenly she was falling through the air, pinwheeling and crashing into the side of one of the troughs in the Green Room. The impact knocked the breath out of her, and the Glock clutched in her hand went flying and clattered across the room.
Pain lanced through her entire body as she came to rest in a pile on the cold hard floor, between rows of troughs holding dirt and plants and fruits. A shadow immediately fell over her, and she looked up to see a ghoul standing on a trough nearby, holding a blood-encrusted grate with long, almost elegant, bone-white fingers no longer sheathed in flesh. How long had the ghoul been fighting with the screws that held the grate in place, literally shredding its fingers to the very bone, before it finally got it free? There was a small trowel at the ghoul’s feet — had it used that to twist the screws?
Dead, not stupid.
She pushed all of that out of her mind, because it didn’t matter. There was something familiar about the ghoul — in the way it moved, the way it looked at her. What was it doing here in the Green Room, all alone? Lara stared into dark black eyes and remembered.
Rose. The Green Room’s Rose.
Even in death, she refuses to leave this place…
Lara gathered her wits and looked around the room. There, her Glock, ten feet away.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for the weapon. The ghoul that used to be Rose leaped across the room and landed on her back. Lara stumbled and fell, the extra weight driving her down, and she slid across the floor, splashing into a pool of something wet and sticky. She tasted blood — it wasn’t hers — and felt its wetness covering her face.
She fought to regain her footing and was grateful her fall had dislodged the ghoul at least. Her eyes darted around the room again, searching, searching… The Glock was just three feet away.
She ran for it, and the ghoul gave chase once again. She felt it coming, the sudden rush of air against her skin as the creature took flight and the Glock was still two feet away.
She lunged headfirst to the floor at the very last second, and the ghoul sailed over her head. Her chin scraped against concrete, and blood — this time definitely hers — gushed freely in her mouth.
Did she just lose a tooth?
While the pain was loud and clear and demanding, it didn’t trump her survival instincts, which thrust her forward in the direction of the Glock. She got her hand on the weapon and, still on her stomach, shot the ghoul in front of her as it scrambled back to its feet. She only had to shoot it once. The creature toppled sideways and lay still, its eyes staring back at her.