He drifted off. Was he thinking about family and friends like she was? Where was Tracy now? Somewhere still out there, maybe hiding in someone’s apartment the way Tony was hiding in hers. Maybe dead in an alleyway. She thought about her parents, her childhood friends, all the people she knew. All the people she once knew…
“Did you call your parents?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Never got the chance.”
“Maybe he’s fine. Your father.”
He nodded. “He’s pretty tough. If anyone can make it through this, I’d put money on him. You know that he taught himself how to fix cars? He couldn’t even speak English when he started working at a neighbor’s garage.”
“He sounds like an amazing man.”
“When the power comes back, I’ll call him and we’ll arrange a meet.”
“You have that kind of pull?” she asked with a smile.
“Absolutely,” he said, smiling back.
He went quiet, his expression frozen, and she instantly knew why. She looked over at the window and saw another one of the creatures trying to peer into the apartment.
Go away. There’s nothing to see here.
They didn’t move for a long time, not until the creature finally turned its head and crept off.
“How many does that make now?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
“Seven,” Tony whispered back.
“How many did you see out there?”
“A lot.”
They sat quietly again.
“How many Twitter followers do you have?” Tony asked.
“Twitter?” She didn’t know how quite to respond. “I deleted my account two years ago. Why?”
“I have 229,” he said. “I’m just wondering how many of them are still alive…”
CHAPTER 8
WILL
They started dozing off and had to take turns waking each other up, so at least one of them could stay awake at all times. The ghouls hadn’t attacked again, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t change their minds. They had done it before.
Around four in the morning, Will opened his eyes to Danny’s voice coming from the other side of the world. “You got any ideas?”
“What?” He struggled to sit up, chasing away the incessant drowsiness. “What did you say?”
“About these things. You got a theory or something?”
“Not really, no.”
“Oh come on. I know you have a theory. You always have theories. That’s why you’re you and I’m me. I provide the jokes and good looks, and you bring the theories. It’s what you do.”
“It’s what I do?” Will grinned back at him.
“Yeah, exactly. So what’s your theory? What the fuck are these things? Where did they come from? And more importantly, how am I going to survive this fucking night? All those fine ladies at the bars aren’t going to pick up themselves, you know.”
It was a good question. Will had been thinking about it for the last few hours, and the same question kept coming up.
Why board the windows? Every window? What was the point?
Why?
It all came back to that: Why?
“I’ll tell you when the sun comes up,” Will said.
“Fuck you, we’ll probably die before then.”
“They haven’t attacked in over four hours. Why would they start now?”
Danny thought about it. “Good point. Maybe we’ll survive this, after all.”
“That’s it. Keep thinking good thoughts.”
“Hey, you know me — Captain Optimism.”
The sun reappeared at exactly 6:50 a.m., its presence announced by a bright ocean of orange and white smearing across the Houston skyline like the hands of God. Will didn’t think he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his life when the sunlight reached through the open window and spidered across the filthy carpeting, even filthier now that he could actually see all the dirt and refuse of humanity that clung to it.
He thought the night had prepared him for everything, but he was wrong.
When the sunlight touched one of the dead ghouls on the floor, the black skin, which was shriveled like tanned leather, turned instantly white. Then it seemed to come unglued at a molecular level and evaporated, leaving behind just bones in a swirl of cigarette ash-like white substance on the floor. A gust of wind brushed the window, snatched up the ashes, and scattered them into nothingness.
“Are you seeing this?” Will asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said, sitting with his mouth open across the room. “But I don’t believe it.”
“Even after last night?”
“Yeah, well…” He stopped talking. Danny at a loss for words was something to behold.
By the time the sun had completely engulfed the room, the ghouls that lay between Will and Danny had been reduced to nothing but clouds of white powder and piles of bones. Peeks was also gone, leaving behind his uniform, boots, ammo pouches, and wisps of his hair in the breeze. There was a stinging, acrid smell in the air that hadn’t been there before.
Will stood up and rushed across to the window. The police vehicles were still there. Under the luster of sunlight, thick patches of dry blood dotted the streets and sidewalks and were smeared across windows inside apartment buildings across the street. To his left, in the distance, the skyscrapers over Downtown that used to look elephantine in the daylight now looked worn down by time and brittle.
But it wasn’t what Will saw that made his mind spin, grabbing for answers that weren’t there. It was what he couldn’t see.
Where are the ghouls?
He couldn’t find a single one of them anywhere on the street or in the buildings around him. Instead, he saw something else that hadn’t been there last night — blankets, sheets, and objects covering the windows of the apartment buildings and storefronts wherever he looked.
Like the Wilshire Apartments when we arrived. They’ve spread out. They’ve taken over other buildings. Covering up the windows because…of the sun.
Will looked back at the ashes that still swirled around in the room.
Because the sun is not their friend.
“So now we know why they covered up all the windows,” Danny said. “The sun.”
“Yeah. The sun.” He remembered something else. “Can you get reception?”
Danny took out his phone and held it outside the window. The phone didn’t show any bars, and Internet service was down. “Jack shit, and Jack doesn’t even have the courtesy to answer the phone.”
“Power’s down, cellphone towers are down, but the satellites are probably still working.” Will looked up at the sky as if he could see them orbiting up there. “Of course, if the towers don’t have power, satellites are useless.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I read.”
“Forget I asked.” He leaned out the window and looked down at the streets, then at the buildings across from them. “You see it?”
“Yeah, the sheets.”
“Maybe they all migrated, and they’re not waiting for us to walk outside this door. Possible?”
“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.
“Yeah,” Danny said with a frown. “Probably not.” He looked back outside. “I’m going to have nightmares about this. For days. Maybe weeks. Months, even. I might even need therapy. You think the department will pay for my therapy sessions?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“It’ll be cool. I can talk about how my parents screwed me over and finally figure out why Betty Johnson didn’t say yes when I asked her to the Junior Prom. That still haunts me, you know.”