Will nodded. He felt bad for the guy, because he’d always liked Peeks.
Danny saw the crosses. “Don’t tell me. You’ve found Jesus.”
“I found something.” Will handed Danny one of the crosses.
Danny stared at it. “I appreciate the matching set vibe, don’t get me wrong. It’s very bromance, which makes me a bit uncomfortable, but never mind that for the moment. What exactly am I supposed to do with this? Sing gospel tunes?”
“The bottom’s pretty sharp. I cut my finger on it.”
“You want me to blow on it for you?”
“Maybe later.” Will opened one of the empty ammo pouches on his belt and slipped the cross inside, pushed a bit until the sharp point stabbed through the leather at the bottom. “Last resort.”
“What exactly do you think the knife on my left hip is for, cooking?”
“These are heavier. You can use it to bash their heads in.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Really? We’ve been running from things that won’t die even when we shoot them in the head, and you think this is nuts?”
“Good point,” Danny said and pushed the cross into one of his own empty ammo pouches. “Looks expensive.”
“Two hundred, tops. They probably got a discount for the matching pair.”
“When did you become a jewelry expert?”
“That time when you were asleep and I snuck away to do some reading.”
“Ugh. Reading. No thanks.”
Danny had gotten three boards free from the window, but the others remained stubbornly in place. Will ran the flashlight over the nails of the remaining boards. They were surprisingly well-spaced.
Organized and disciplined. Keeping the windows covered was important to them.
But why?
He reached through the slit and pushed aside the blanket, doing his best to avoid the various dull-colored stains that pockmarked the fabric. Revealing dirty glass windowpanes — then beyond that, the city.
He was immediately struck by the quiet. The Wilshire Apartments was located in an unimportant, non-descript section of the city, but even so the emptiness of the world outside the window threw him for a loop. It was a heavy silence, the kind of calm filled with dread and promises of sudden violence. Like standing in the eye of a hurricane. It was uncomfortable and strangely, unnervingly soothing.
Will glanced down at his watch: 9:43 p.m.
He realized how isolated they had been, fighting for the last four hours from the twentieth floor down. What was happening in the city? Maybe that explained why SWAT Command wasn’t trying to send help.
He stood up on tiptoes and looked down toward the street. Police vehicles scattered along West Dallas Street, but there were no cops in sight. The SWAT van was still parked directly across the street. It looked unattended, which was never a good sign. A SWAT van had a lot of expensive and dangerous equipment inside. You didn’t leave something that valuable idling at a corner without supervision.
Will pressed the Push-To-Talk switch dangling from his radio. “SWAT Command, come in. SWAT Command, come in if you can hear me. Is anyone out there? If anyone can hear me, please respond.”
He waited for a response through the earbud in his right ear, but there was none. Just like the last five times he had tried to reach them.
Where is everyone?
Not just the cops. The civilians were gone, too. There had been a dozen lookyloos when they showed up this morning. That number usually ballooned by the time word got around that SWAT was in the neighborhood. He spotted the sawhorses from earlier, blocking both sides of the street. News vans were parked just up the curb, color logos visible underneath the halo of street lamps. Channel 2, Channel 11, and even Channel 26 had shown up, but there were no clues as to the whereabouts of their owners.
There were a couple of tenement buildings across the street, with lights on in a dozen or so apartments. He thought he caught a glimpse of something small and thin flashing by one of the windows, but when he looked again, it was gone. A pair of stores, including a Valero gas station, looked deserted, bright lights lit up along the pumping stations. Empty cars waiting in line for gas.
He glanced to his left and had to strain to make out the I-45 stretched in the far distance. Too far to really see anything except a long, black slab of raised concrete. Even so, he should still have been able to spot luminescent streams of white and red lights flashing along the north and southbound lanes. Instead, he saw unmoving white and red dots scattered all along the highway.
Will had the very odd impression of peering through a window and seeing the world at a very specific point in its existence, frozen forever in time.
The ghouls finally remembered they were still alive around ten. For a while, Will thought the creatures might have simply forgotten that they existed, but he quickly dashed that idea for another one: There had been something else occupying their time.
They’re organized and disciplined.
Will and Danny heard footsteps moving outside in the hallway. The creatures were quiet, but in the absence of any other noises inside the building, the ghouls might as well be wearing clogs. Will crept closer to the door, while Danny leaned back against the wall on the other side, his ear against the dirty wallpaper.
They had finally removed the boards from the window behind them, and moonlight streaked through the dirty glass windowpanes. It provided enough light for Will to see Danny and Peeks without the need of a flashlight. Peeks didn’t look any better in the moonlight, though. If anything, it gave him an odd, preternatural glow that made Will slightly uncomfortable.
He turned his attention back to the door and the footsteps on the other side.
Danny lifted three fingers in the semidarkness. Will nodded.
Three ghouls outside.
Will flexed his grip around the hilt of the combat knife in his right hand, warming to the familiar sensation of the plastic handle. With his ear against the wall, he listened to them moving outside.
The tap-tap of bare feet against soiled carpeted hallway floor.
Three.
Will glanced at Danny, adjusting his grip on his own knife. He looked anxious, which had to be a first.
Suddenly the ghouls outside the door began moving quickly, loudly…and away from Apartment 1009.
He looked at Danny for confirmation. Danny nodded back and pulled slightly away from the wall. Will allowed himself to relax, slowly releasing blood flow back to the fingers gripped around the handle of the knife.
Danny grinned at him. “So, this father took his son fishing one morning while the wife was busy shopping—”
A loud explosion, followed by shards of glass spraying inside the room like long, jagged bullets, cut Danny off in mid-sentence. They looked over in time to see a ghoul crashing through the window and smashing into the floor. The creature seemed to roll, like an out of control ball of flesh and bones, until it finally came to a stop and began unfurling itself, the grating noise of bones and joints snapping back into place. A thick shard of glass jutted out of the creature’s right cheek, though it didn’t seem to notice.
Danny was already rushing across the living room with great big strides. He barreled into the ghoul as it was straightening up and carried it across the room, ramming it into the wall next to the window. The ghoul might have caught its breath, though it was hard to tell. Did they even breathe?
Peeks, on the other side of the window, might have opened his eyes for a moment, before drifting back off again.