The ghoul glared back at Danny and let out a guttural shriek, a sound that came from the very pits of its stomach. It surprised Will. He hadn’t heard them make that kind of noise before.
Danny drove his knife through the ghoul’s forehead with an overhead swing, the force of the blow so vicious that all seven and a half inches of blade pierced flesh, then bone, and kept going until it embedded itself into the wall behind the creature’s skull with a solid thunk! The wall trembled slightly, and Danny staggered back as black clumps of liquid spurted out of the point of penetration in the creature’s forehead.
Will stared with disbelief as the creature tried to dislodge itself from the wall by jerking its body forward. But it was hanging five inches off the floor, and it had no leverage. It quickly gave up that approach and wrapped slender, bony fingers around the handle of the knife and tried to pull it out.
Behind Will, the door shook and trembled as creatures crashed into it. He took an involuntary step back and tightened his grip around the knife handle.
“What now?” Danny shouted.
“Shoot it!” Will shouted back.
Danny drew his Glock and shot the ghoul point-blank in the face three times. The first bullet shattered its right eye, the second destroyed the bridge of its nose, and the third obliterated a dozen teeth and slammed into the wall behind the back of its throat. The ghoul seemed to pause for a second, then it went back to trying to pull itself off the knife.
Danny glanced back at Will. “Any more bright ideas?”
Will put the knife away and reached for the cross. As he began pulling it out, he noticed the ghoul’s eyes darting away from Danny and over to him.
No, not to him. To the cross.
The ghoul became frenzied and thrashed its body against the wall, redoubling its efforts to free itself. Will pulled out the cross completely, and the creature let out a loud, almost involuntary shriek. When Will walked toward it, the ghoul’s agitated state seemed to double — then triple.
“What are you doing?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know,” Will said.
He was almost across the room when, with a last desperate lunge, the ghoul suddenly jerked itself free of the wall, Danny’s knife sticking out of its forehead, the handle like a plastic black horn. Will rushed forward and rammed the sharp end of the cross into the creature’s chest. The silver and bronze sank deep, the chest cavity giving way like papier-mâché, and the creature let out another wild shriek before collapsing to the floor.
Will reached for his knife, expecting the ghoul to get right back up.
But it didn’t. It stayed down. And it didn’t move.
He exchanged a look with Danny, saw his own flushed look of confusion, exhilaration, and apprehension reflected back in Danny’s face.
“What the hell did you do?” Danny asked.
“I stabbed it with the cross.”
“Why?”
“Shooting it didn’t work. Stabbing it didn’t work. I was going to bash its head in with the cross until it didn’t have a head anymore. I guess I decided to stab it instead at the last minute.”
“Oh,” Danny said.
“Yeah.”
“Assist us, O Lord our God…” a voice said from the darkness. They looked over and saw Peeks, suddenly wide-awake. His eyes were fixed on the dead ghoul in front of him, the cross lodged crookedly in its sunken chest. “… and defend us evermore by the might of the Holy Cross, in whose honor thou makest us to rejoice. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.”
Peeks made the sign of the cross with his right hand and almost as quickly, closed his eyes and seemed to drift off again.
“Makest?” Danny said.
“I haven’t been to a church since I was five,” Will said.
“Well shit, praise the Lord and pass the bullets.”
“You hear that?” Will asked.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Yeah…”
He looked back at the door. The ghouls had stopped smashing into it. There was silence again, and the apartment, like the rest of the building, seemed to have settled down abruptly, the quick burst of violence and noise and chaos having dissipated into the ether. The only movement came from a soft gust of wind rushing through the broken window, fluttering the dirty curtains in its wake.
They know. Somehow, they know about one of their own dying…
CHAPTER 4
KATE
It was entirely possible she wasn’t afraid. Or maybe it was just adrenaline. There was a fine line between fear and courage and pure survival instinct, and at this very moment Kate wondered if she was more afraid of dying or of what would happen if she stopped moving for even a second.
After Jack and Donald, she had never made it out of the parking garage. When she finally reached the first floor, after what seemed like hours instead of the minute or so it had actually taken, there were already six cars haphazardly lined up at odd angles in front of the only exit gate that was still open after five o’clock. She imagined when the first car stopped, the other vehicles became stuck behind it, trapping everyone except the very last car from going forward or back.
There were no signs of the drivers, though the stench of blood filled her nostrils through the opened car window. She felt like gagging. Darkness had already fallen outside the garage, though Kate couldn’t see any cars along the usually busy Louisiana Street beyond.
So she sat in her car, the gear in park, behind the last car, a new-looking gray Mercedes with vanity plates (“S8UpFun”). Kate calmed herself, taking in slow, unhurried breaths, and tried to search for order out of the chaos.
There were two cars in front of the entrance side of the garage, and one of them — a slightly old red Chevy sedan — had crashed into the large metal slab that blocked access, the car’s front bumper crumpled up like paper. Smoke rose lazily from the badly damaged hood.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shriveled, dark black head poking out of the open front driver’s side window of the Mercedes. She stopped breathing and sat perfectly still, watching as the creature turned its head slightly…toward her. Kate saw a face caked with blood, and dark black marbles where eyes should be zeroing in on her. Did its nostrils flare? Or maybe it was the garage lights playing tricks on her. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman — or whatever it used to be. It looked like an animal, small and primal, and the sight of it made Kate grip the steering wheel with vise-like desperation.
Then a woman’s head appeared in the same window, long blonde hair smeared with blood. She was young and attractive, a gorgeous oval-shaped, blood-red choker fastened around a long, elegant neck smeared with blood. The woman was trying to climb out through the window, trembling hands grasping for purchase along the door. She looked tired, as if she had been fighting for hours. The creature looked away from Kate, as if remembering there was someone else in the car with it. Kate watched in wordless horror as the thing put both hands over the woman’s head and pulled her back into the vehicle with barely any fight.
Kate willed herself to move, move, move. She numbly backed up the Mazda, spinning the wheel, and nearly ramming into one of the support columns behind her but managing to stop with barely an inch to spare. She headed back in the direction she had fled moments ago, hoping that the creature wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t abandon the woman and come after her instead. She glanced in the rearview mirror, saw only a glimpse of the creature inside the Mercedes, its head bobbing up and down.
Kate turned left, onto the up ramp, and the Mercedes mercifully disappeared from her view.