Robbed of life for a second time, the ghoul looked more like Rose. The face seemed to soften, and light returned to those dark black eyes, though it could just have been her imagination running wild.
Rose. Poor Rose. I’ll miss gardening with you. Your grandmotherly stories. Goodbye, Rose.
She heard it — footsteps approaching fast. It was so distinct — bare feet moving quickly against hard, jagged floor. Her senses were heightened, enhanced by raging adrenaline, and there were so many of them that the patter became almost like stampeding hooves, impossible to miss unless she were completely deaf. Which, despite being stuck in the air duct with Will and Danny firing away mere feet from her, she wasn’t.
She scrambled back on her feet and made the calculations in her head. She was thirty yards from the Green Room door, and it would take her at least five seconds to reach it, but even as she made the calculations, the first ghoul appeared in the open doorway and made the decision for her.
Lara shot it in the chest and it fell, but even before it hit the floor, two more ghouls were already inside. She fired again, the bullet punching through the first ghoul’s chest and hitting another one behind it. Even as they fell, five more were already leaping over them.
She stumbled backward and kept firing, counting down the bullets, knowing it wouldn’t be long now before—
A shotgun blast ripped two of the ghouls apart.
Lara threw a quick look over her shoulder and saw Will moving toward her. “Hurry!” he shouted.
She turned and ran past him and leaped onto the trough. He fired behind her — racking and firing, racking and firing…
As long as I can hear him shooting, I know he’s fine.
She leaped up and grabbed at the air duct opening, painfully aware that Will’s shotgun had a limited number of shells, that even fully loaded it only had seven shots.
And Will had already fired four…
Three left.
She swung around and looked back. Will had drawn his Glock and was firing it as he backpedaled toward her. Ghouls stumbled and fell as he fired, over and over and over. Left and right, center, left and right again. He was an excellent shot, every bullet finding its mark, some finding two, sometimes three.
But like the shotgun, the Glock had a limited number of bullets. Then what would he use? The knife. The cross-knife he always carried with him, like Danny.
Then what?
Will glanced over his shoulder at her hanging from the opening of the air duct. He looked dumbfounded, then angry. “Lara, Goddammit, go, now!”
The ghouls were almost on top of him, and for every creature he shot down, three or four took its place. He kicked at a ghoul lunging at his legs, then kneed another one in the throat. It went down, but sprang right back up, even though three other ghouls stumbled over it in the rush to get at Will.
Then she saw them — the large, industrial lamps hanging from the ceiling around her, each one of them turned off. They were hard to miss, their size dwarfing the smaller halogen lights between them that were currently lighting up the room.
What had Rose said about those large lamps? “They’re supposed to mimic the sun…”
Lara glanced around the room and located them on the wall to her left — two big button light switches, their fat size making them hard to miss even from this distance. One was switched on, the other still in the off position.
She jumped down, landing on the trough below her.
Will must have heard her landing because he glanced back and looked even madder than before. “Lara, Goddammit, get out of here!”
“Hold on!” she shouted back.
She launched herself into the air and landed on another trough nearby, and continued hopping from trough to trough, aiming for the wall with a determination she hadn’t known she possessed.
Half of the ghouls in the room immediately broke away from Will and surged in her direction. She ignored them. It was hard to do, but she pushed them out of her mind and kept her legs churning.
Will’s Glock fired once, twice — then there was silence.
She couldn’t help herself and looked back, as she ran, at Will with his cross-knife in hand stabbing a ghoul as two more swarmed on him. He fought one off, backing up the entire time, and stabbed another one through its neck. Then three of them were on him and pushing him to the floor with their weight.
She turned and lunged across the final trough and reached out toward the light switches. There were two big switches, but only one had “UV” stenciled underneath it. That was the one she slammed her fist into, right before she crumpled to the floor in a bruised heap.
The big lamps on the ceiling hummed to life almost instantaneously and the areas around the troughs were bathed in ultraviolet light, so much brighter than the regular halogen light bulbs that for a moment it looked as if the sun had risen inside the room. The ghouls caught inside the rings of blindingly bright circles seemed confused by what was happening.
Then suddenly one of them let out a loud shriek as its flesh turned hard and brittle and peeled off at the bones. Then two more ghouls shriveled into nothingness without a sound.
The rest figured it out and tried to flee the lights, but it was too late.
She lay on the floor watching it all. She felt like laughing.
She hadn’t been sure it would work. But she hadn’t forgotten all those conversations with Rose (Poor Rose) over the last three months that she spent in here. She knew nothing about plants, or gardening, but Rose didn’t mind. Rose enjoyed her company, and Lara couldn’t get enough of the Green Room’s serenity.
Bye, Rose, thanks for everything.
Will, buried underneath a thick layer of ghoul paste, scrambled to his feet, spitting the powdery remains of the dead creatures from his mouth and nostrils and shaking it out of his hair. Fleshless bones rattled off him, sticks of femurs and fibulas, ribs and deformed skulls.
The remaining ghouls crowded around the pool of UV light, looking uncertainly at it. A couple of ghouls entered the light tentatively and fell apart, which seemed to be enough to convince the others to stay out.
She ran back to Will, making sure to keep well inside the UV light. The ghouls glared after her, and one risked exposing itself to the light and turned into bones a foot inside the pool of light. The rest stopped moving forward.
Lara grabbed Will’s hand. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Ultraviolet light,” she said, pointing up at the lamps. “It’s supposed to have all the properties of the sun, to help the plants grow. I wasn’t sure if it would actually work, but…”
“Yeah,” Will said, grinning back at her. “Can they get to that light switch?”
She glanced back at the switch on the wall. It was well within the pool of UV light. “I don’t know…”
Several ghouls tried to lunge for the light switch, but each stumbled and fell and became nothing but clattering piles of bones and white mists in the air well short.
“No,” she said. “I guess not.”
“Good. Then all we have to do is wait them out.”
“What about Danny and the others?”
“They should have made it to the Control Room by now. Once Danny gets the grate back up, they should be fine.”
She glanced at her watch and frowned. “Five hours before sunup.”
He shrugged. “I wanted some free time with you anyway.”
They watched a dozen more ghouls desperately trying to get to the light switch, only to die. The rest finally took the hint and stopped trying. She thought she could hear them growling deep in their throats. An intense, piercing universe of dark black eyes looked accusingly at her, and only her — but maybe that was just her imagination still running at a feverish pitch, fed by the adrenaline pumping through every inch of her.