But the doors held, just as he knew they would.
Two others clacked their way along the length of the glass wall and peered inside. He didn’t move or react, because he knew they couldn’t see him. Not through the darkness, with just the barest of moonlight to illuminate their search. One smashed a right arm that was little more than a stump into its section of the window, producing a dull thud and little else.
He watched the creatures give up and move on, one by one, until there were just two left behind, still fighting with the doors. They were gaunt things, almost like deformed children with pruned flesh. They abandoned the doors and moved along the walls, angling their bodies in an effort to spy on the darkened corners inside the lobby.
A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, and he wondered if he looked like these twisted and blackened remnants of what once was. Besides the blue eyes, what really made him stand out? There wasn’t very much. The trench coat was just a façade, a vain attempt to hold onto a lie.
“You’re not who you once were, you know,” the man had said earlier on the rooftop. “What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”
The words stung because they were honest and true. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t a man at all.
He watched the creatures pressing themselves into the glass, smearing sections of it with thick, coagulated fluid that could be anything from blood to drool or pus. This was him now, and no amount of clothing would change that. How did he ever think he could convince her of anything? When they saw him, this was what they would see — a dark, blackened thing that had once been human, but was no longer.
“You’re not who you once were, you know…”
Of course he knew. He’d always known, but he had managed to delude himself anyway, told one lie after another until he believed it, because he wanted so badly to save her, to make up for all the failures of the past. Because Mabry had to be stopped, and he knew how—
It fell from the sky and splattered against the concrete walkway, the loud crunch audible even from inside the lobby. A wave of thick black blood sprayed a nearby section of the glass wall in the aftermath.
Before he could recognize what it was — a black-eyed ghoul falling from above and obliterating itself against the pavement — another, then another, then still another fell like raindrops. They smashed into the sidewalk and road one by one, covering more sections of the outside wall in blood and flesh and pulverized bone—
Ghouls. Falling. From above.
The loud, unmistakable crash of breaking glass, followed by gleaming shards plummeting outside the building.
No, no. They were inside the building. How did they get inside the building?
He raced along the length of the shadowed back wall and slipped into the stairwell, and went up. He was almost floating in the air, his bare feet barely touching the cold concrete steps. He once considered wearing shoes because that would have added to the façade, but shoes were cumbersome and he had come to rely on his speed. More than once, it had been the difference between life and (re)death.
He was rounding the third floor when—
Bang! A gunshot from above, coming from the twentieth floor.
The taste of silver drenched his tongue all the way down here. Silver bullets. Either the man or the woman had fired. It didn’t matter who, because they had just alerted the entire city to their location, and they wouldn’t have done that unless they absolutely had to.
Sixth floor…
A short, startled scream. The woman.
Eighth floor…
The pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire began blasting through the building, and his skin rippled from head to toe as more silver was exposed to air.
Tenth floor…
He pushed harder as the shots came faster and louder. Every inch of him wanted to flee in the other direction, the growing proximity to silver nauseating. The metal wouldn’t kill him unless it struck his brain, but it still hurt everywhere else. A lot.
He pushed on.
Fifteenth floor…
The man was shouting, telling the woman to run, run, run.
Sixteenth…
A constant stream of pop-pop-pop now. So much silver that he wanted to retch just to get it out of his system, but he couldn’t remember how.
Twentieth!
A loud bang! as the stairwell door flew open and the woman stumbled into it back-first, fire spitting back into the floor from the barrel of her rifle. She heard him, spun around, the brown of her eyes widening—
Recognition flashed across her face, and she spun back to the open doorway and continued firing into it. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “It’s here!”
“Fuck!” the man said as he stumbled into the stairwell, firing his entire magazine into the floor at full-auto. The man spun around, saw him, and shouted, “We’re fucked, pal!”
“Go,” he hissed.
“Go where?”
“Down.”
“Down?”
“Down!” he shouted, grabbing the man by the jacket collar and jerking him down the steps. It took all of his self-control not to throw the man like a sack of useless flesh, because it would have been so, so easy.
The woman didn’t need any encouragement; she raced down the steps, and they locked eyes for half a heartbeat as she passed him.
“Go,” he hissed.
She went, reloading from a pouch around her waist as she did so.
“Come on!” the man shouted from below.
“Go!” he hissed.
The man gave him a confused look.
“We’ll meet again!” he shouted.
The man might have nodded, but by then he had turned around to face the open door and the twentieth floor beyond.
They had broken through the windows — or, at least, the ones who had survived the climb up the side of the buildings. How many others hadn’t made it up and were still falling, splattering one by one against the sidewalks below? The survivors were now crawling over their dead and toward him.
“There you are,” the familiar voice said inside his head.
He grabbed the first black-eyed ghoul that reached him around the neck and smashed it into the wall, its frail bones crumbling under its skin like twigs. He felt no satisfaction in hearing the crack of its limbs, the snap of its neck. There might have even been some strange surge of sadness, but he passed that off to Mabry invading his mind, trying to slow him down with his words.
“I told you I’d find you again.”
He used the flopping creature as a weapon, hitting one, two, three more of the monsters as he pushed into the floor, leaving the stairwell behind. The taste of silver lingering in the air — still embedded in the twisted bodies of dead ghouls on the floor — threatened to overwhelm him, but he thought of the alternative and kept going.
“There is no safety. No sanctuary.”
He waded through the throng of flesh and bone and squealing things, striking and pushing and punching and kicking what he could. They were like children, grabbing at his legs and trying to cling to his arms. Bony fingers clutched at his elbows and knees and snaked around his throat in an attempt to impede his progress.