She had to stand on tiptoes and look down before she saw it.
The man with the spiked hair hadn’t gone anywhere. He lay crumpled on the walkway below the windowsill, and someone was crouched next to him. Lara saw scraggly whiffs of blond hair clinging to a balding head, the pale flesh underneath wrinkled and pulled painfully tight. She was reminded of the cancer patients she visited every month at the hospital, how their hair would fall off after chemotherapy, how painfully pale and heartbreakingly sad they always looked.
The figure lifted its head, and Lara might have stopped breathing entirely. It looked at her with dark black eyes, cheeks so hollow she could see the sharp, smooth contour of its skull underneath. There was blood plastered over the lower half of its face, around its mouth. The mouth itself was grotesque, a crumbling cavern of black and yellow and crooked teeth.
She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, or maybe a combination — or neither — even though it wasn’t wearing clothes. There were no sex organs that she could see. No penis or breasts.
It didn’t look human.
Lara was used to seeing dead bodies, and this thing in front of her, perched over the man with spiked hair, looked like a corpse. But this “corpse” wasn’t dead. It was licking its lips at the sight of her. No, not at her, it was trying to get at the blood around the corners of its mouth, like a kid who had to have every last drop, taste every last sensation.
Just as quickly as it had seen her, it lost interest and went back to feeding on the man with spiked hair. The stranger who had been going up and down the second floor walkway knocking on apartment doors, hoping someone would help him get out of the night. He lay very still underneath her window, and Lara couldn’t tell if he was still alive.
“Please,” he had said, “for God’s sake, open the door. I’m begging you. God, I think I can hear them coming… Please. Please…”
Lara took a quick step back and ran to her bedroom.
She might have been screaming the entire time, but she couldn’t be certain. After all, how could you scream if you weren’t even breathing?
She paced in her bedroom in the dark for the next hour, caught between fear and anxiety and a desperate need to do something.
Anything.
She had tried calling 9-1-1 five more times since slamming her bedroom door shut, locking it, and shoving a chair underneath the doorknob — she had seen people do that in the movies. Each time she got the same damn recorded message telling her to stay on the line if she had an emergency. How many people were getting the same message tonight, and were they as terrified as she was at the thought that no help was coming?
Yes, I have an emergency. A stranger with spiked hair is being eaten outside my door at this very moment.
It was absurd. Just thinking about it made her want to laugh, but when she opened her mouth to, a wheezing sound came out instead.
At least the phones were still working. Her cellphone had no reception, which had never happened before. The Internet was also down, so she couldn’t get any news about what was going on outside her apartment. When was the last time the Internet was down? She couldn’t even remember.
And what had the man with spiked hair said? “I think everyone’s dead. Something’s happening. It’s all over the city.”
If that was citywide, that meant the police weren’t coming. They would have more to deal with than a medical student locked in her bedroom in the dark.
The silence was broken by screams from outside her window. She hurried across the room and peered out through the corner of the curtains, too scared to throw them open and look out.
Be smart. You have to be smart.
The first thing she noticed was the apartment complex next door — it was pitch-black. The same windows she had seen lights on earlier were now bathed in darkness, and Lara swore she could see silhouetted figures moving behind some of them. It occurred to her that they too might be hiding, peering out of their windows, too afraid to make themselves known. Maybe strangers with weird hair had been banging on their doors, shouting ludicrous stories, too.
She couldn’t locate where the screams had come from, though she was certain she had heard it. Hadn’t she?
Maybe…
Sudden movement from below drew her eyes. A dark figure darted along the sidewalk below her. It was a woman, her hair flowing wildly behind her, eyes darting left and right, holding something small and shiny in her right hand. A knife? She ran across the sidewalk, moving fast, showing off an athlete’s gait.
Where are you going? Why are you in the streets? Don’t you know what’s out there…in the dark?
The woman vanished down the street.
Run. Run as fast as you can…
Lara remained at the window looking out, careful not to be seen, scanning the streets and windows for signs of others hiding. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, unmoving. Maybe only a few minutes. Maybe half an hour. She couldn’t be sure, because she was transfixed.
By the city. By the stillness of it.
Houston was a city of at least two million people, and she had never seen it like this in her life.
There was nothing out there. There was just the silence.
Lara thought of her parents, in their home back in the Woodlands. They would be asleep by now. Did they know what was happening? Were they thinking about her, too? She remembered how they had argued about her going to medical school.
So long ago now. So pointless…
A song by R.E.M. popped into her head. She couldn’t remember the lyrics. Something about the end of the world.
She smiled despite herself. A line from an old song from decades ago. Her friends would make fun of her if they knew she listened to alternative music from the ’90s. It was all pop and Rihanna and rappers with grills for teeth.
Were other people out there having the same pointless, inane thoughts at this very moment? Were they trying desperately to talk themselves into something resembling calmness?
Somewhere in the dark distance, she heard what sounded like gunshots.
She listened, trying to recapture the sound, but it was gone.
There was just the silence again.
How did that R.E.M. song go again…?
CHAPTER 6
WILL
Peeks died sometime around eleven. Maybe. Will had lost track of time around the third wave of ghouls. They kept coming, and there seemed to be more urgency to their attacks in the aftermath of Will’s killing of the ghoul with the cross.
After turning the events over in his head, Will decided it wasn’t the cross that was doing all the damage, it was the silver along the edges. Where bullets only annoyed them and knives pissed them off, stabbing them with the point of the cross sent them into a frenzy. As long as the silver spilled blood, they died almost instantly. It was the kind of wild, from-the-ethers logic — if you could even call it that — he would have scoffed at a day ago.
Danny wanted to test the theory out. So he fashioned a cross out of their knives and used it to stab at the ghouls. The creatures shook off his blows, even when the knife skewered an eye and went out the back of one ghoul’s skull. It kept coming. When Danny finally stabbed it in the forehead with the cross, it shrieked and fell and died.
“Okay, it’s probably the silver,” Danny said, and kicked the jerry-rigged knife until it skidded across the apartment and vanished into darkness.