She gave him a wry look. “Gee, okay. Good strategy.”
He place the cross-knife between his teeth and leaped, grabbed the edge of the air duct entrance, and pulled himself up partway.
He was halfway up when he scanned both directions, saw nothing in the green halo, then pulled himself the rest of the way up. He took the cross-knife out of his mouth and picked up the glow stick. He waved it in front of him like a magic wand, looking forward, then back, then forward again.
Lara called from the Green Room: “Will?”
“Yeah?” he called back down.
“Be careful.”
“I’ll be right back.”
With the cross-knife in his right hand, he moved along the air duct.
He got four meters before he felt the rush of movement and braced himself as it leaped out of the darkness in front of him, slamming him in the shoulder and knocking him down. He instinctively dropped the glow stick, reached up, and got the ghoul around the throat with his free hand before it could clamp down on him with brown-stained and cracked teeth. Hissing air escaped through those awful monstrous teeth, and it thrashed about before he drove the cross-knife through its chest, meeting almost no resistance.
The creature sagged against him, then went still.
He pushed the ghoul off and sat up in the green halo, catching his breath for a few seconds. The cross-knife in one hand and the glow stick in the other, he began moving forward once more.
He knew he was near the Control Room when he came across three ghouls crouched around a shaft of light. His glow stick got their attention, and they turned, almost in unison.
The first one lunged at him without making a sound, reaching for his throat. He slashed it across the chest and watched it careen sideways out of his path. Even before the first one landed, the other two were already rushing. He got the second one in the face — just barely, but enough to draw blood with the silver-tipped edge, enough to send it shrieking for a few seconds before it settled down and stopped moving. The third one was tougher, stronger, and it crashed into him with great force, surprising him with its speed and strength, and succeeding in driving him back.
He managed to get his feet underneath the ghoul and kicked out, literally pinning the creature against the ceiling. He stabbed upward and got the creature in the chest. It let out a soft gurgling sound that he had never heard before. It died, black blood dripping down on him in thick clumps like wet rice.
He pushed the ghouls out of the way and continued up the air duct, crab-walking as fast as he could. Thinking about Lara back there alone in the Green Room got him moving even faster.
He finally reached the grate and peered down through the holes, relieved to see Danny pointing his Glock up at him.
“Holy shit,” Danny grinned. “You’re still alive.” Danny glanced over at someone in the room with him and said, “I told you he was too stubborn to die.”
Carly appeared below him under the grate. A look of relief flooded her face. “Will! You’re alive! We thought you might have…” When she saw he was alone, her happiness quickly dissipated. “Where’s Lara?”
“She’s fine,” he said. “We got stuck in the Green Room.”
“She’s not up there with you?” Danny asked.
“No. But I need to get back to her as soon as possible.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“You still got Ben’s pendant?”
Danny produced it from his pocket. “Do bears shit in the woods?”
“I have another idea.”
“Is it better than your last idea?”
“I dunno. It’s a long shot.”
“And the other idea wasn’t?”
“What do we have to lose, right?”
“Oh, nothing. Just our lives.”
“That all?” Will grinned back.
Will crab-walked back to the Green Room and counted himself lucky that only two ghouls were there to block his path. He killed them both easily enough — they seemed to lack conviction and looked almost hesitant to attack when they saw him in the green light of the glow stick.
Eventually, he saw bright lights up ahead.
He dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch, unprepared for Lara’s leap into his arms. “You stupid man. Don’t ever, ever do that to me again, do you understand?”
He kissed her. She smelled great and tasted better, and he forgot for a moment that there was a room full of undead creatures staring at them, and that the stench of rotting cabbage was all around them.
“Stupid?” he said, raising a furrowed brow.
“Promise me,” she said, on the verge of tears.
Guilt washed over him. “I promise,” he whispered softly. “I’ll never leave you again.”
They sat and watched the ghouls inside the Green Room as their nervousness became restlessness, then restlessness gave way to primal fear. Will could feel their terror, rising from the mass of inhumanity before him, like some physical thing that drifted then condensed in the air and just kept growing.
Lara could sense it, too — she began squeezing his hand. It wasn’t something they saw every day, and it was utterly fascinating and at the same time chilling. After fighting them, killing them, and fearing them for so long, to see them now revert back to something so humanlike made him rethink everything he thought he knew about them.
Lara said, “Can you feel it?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think…” She didn’t finish.
“Yeah,” Will said.
Then he heard it: the sound of the Door opening, the loud rumble coursing through the entire facility as the gears worked, powered by the emergency generators. Could they generate enough power to fully open the Door? They had to.
He glanced at his watch: 5:45 a.m.
They waited. He silently counted down the seconds in his head, watching the ghouls for signs.
There, there it was. The message must have been relayed through the hive mind, because soon the ghouls began moving in waves toward the door, then through it, flooding back out into the hallway in streams.
“Oh my God, it’s working,” Lara said.
“I told you.”
“Remind me never to doubt you again.”
“And you’ll listen?”
She smiled. “Of course not. It’s my job. As your girlfriend.”
“I like the sound of that,” he smiled.
Soon the room was empty, and stampeding footsteps echoed down the hallway, moving farther and farther away from them.
The Door had been opening for twenty seconds.
He stood up and, cross-knife in hand, raced forward, making a beeline for the door. The entire time his eyes were fixed on the open door, waiting, expecting ghouls to come back at any second.
Dead, not stupid.
Dead, not stupid…
He reached the door, grabbed it with one hand, and swung it, still not daring to even breath, until the door slammed shut with a loud, satisfying sound, and he quickly cranked the lever up ninety degrees to lock it.
He finally took a deep breath and stepped back, as Lara came up behind him. “What if they come back?”
“They won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We just gave them the opportunity to survive, and they took it. Dead, not stupid, remember?”
The hallways were eerily quiet, but the ghouls left plenty in their wake. Blood, the bright red and thick black kind, covered the floors and walls and even the ceiling. There was clothing and shoes, but no signs of the victims themselves. The twisted carcasses of dead ghouls, hidden from sunlight but ripped apart by bullets and buckshot, formed makeshift obstacles every few feet, around every corner.