For a second, just a second, Will stared back at it through the night-vision goggles, wondering what was going through its mind, what it was seeing, and what (who) else was looking back at him through those dead, black eyes.
“Shit,” Blaine said, stepping forward and shooting the ghoul from a meter away. The creature’s head was severed from its narrow shoulder blades, and it flopped to the floor as if it were a sack of meat.
Blaine racked his shotgun. “What the hell was it doing back here all by itself?”
Good question.
Will continued into the room, stepping over the decapitated ghoul.
The room looked about forty meters in diameter, with concrete floors covered in old, cracking, mud-caked footprints. The place had the feel of a staging area, like a supply warehouse without the supplies. That stark emptiness gave it a cavernous vibe, and Will couldn’t help but wonder how many had been down here that first night they spent on the island.
Hundreds. Maybe thousands…
On the far wall was the empty car of a freight elevator, and from its position, he guessed it led straight up to the generator building on the surface. And next to it, the first of many steps leading up.
Will clicked the Push-to-Talk switch on his radio. “We’re underneath the Power Station. Looks like they never got around to finishing the elevators.”
There were bodies in the room, though not as many as he had expected. Old, wrinkled skin draped over bones that looked bleach-white against the neon green glow of his night vision. He counted a dozen skeletons, give or take, in a jagged line toward the stairs. They had been here for a while.
Blaine moved closer to get a better look. The hulking, six-two Blaine had a good three inches on Will, and looked like some kind of alien insect with the protruding lens of the night-vision goggles.
Blaine craned his head to look up the stairs. “I see a door.”
“That’ll be the shack.”
There was a steel door at the top of the stairs, slathered with dry skin and thick clumps of coagulated liquid. Will went up the steps first, skirting around still-gooey layers of flesh in his path. The stairs were wide, designed to accommodate more than one person at a time, but it got noticeably narrower the higher it went. A door gleamed against his night vision, even underneath the cake of dried blood.
When he finally reached the top, he banged on the door as hard as he could. There were barely any echoes, just the dull thuds of flesh against unyielding steel.
“Can you hear that?” he asked.
“Barely,” Danny said in his ear. “Do it again.”
Will banged his fists against the door a second time.
“Okay,” Danny said. “Now do Camptown Races.”
They climbed out of the makeshift hole — a one-by-two meter-long jagged opening near the top — and slipped and slid their way down the loose pile of rubble. The tunnel entrance, or what remained of it, squatted along the eastern shore of Beaufont Lake and was little more than a wall of destroyed concrete. It would have looked like just another unfinished construction site — gray and uninteresting — if you didn’t know what was on the other side.
He had been seeing the world through the night-vision goggles for so long that the sudden afternoon glare gave him an excruciating headache. The scorching late-September heat didn’t help, a reminder that there wasn’t much of a difference between Texas and Louisiana when it came to climate.
Maddie was waiting for them with a baseball cap to keep the brightness out of her eyes. She seemed even smaller than usual against the expansive, barren landscape behind her. “What were they doing down there?”
“Good question,” Will said.
“It looked like they were waiting,” Blaine said.
“Waiting for what?” Maddie asked.
“I don’t know,” Will said, “they weren’t in a conversational mood. Come on, let’s get this thing sealed back up.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Maddie sighed.
It took them two hours laboring in the heat until they could replace all the concrete slabs that the ghouls had removed from the rubble to regain entrance into the tunnel. It was heavy work, and they created an assembly line, passing pieces big and small between them, with Blaine tossing them up into the pile until they couldn’t see the opening anymore.
“Will that hold?” Maddie asked later.
“Not in this lifetime,” Will said. “But it’ll slow them down. When they get it open again, we’ll close it back up. Next time, we’ll just seal the fuckers in.”
“The fun never ends,” Blaine said.
“Sorry I couldn’t lend a hand,” Danny said in their ears, “but you know, island duty…and stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Maddie grunted. “Rub it in, surfer boy.”
“It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Blaine said, looking the tunnel over.
He wasn’t wrong. The entrance, before Danny blew it up, was a large, wide open half-circle surrounded by a concrete bunker. There were no doors and it was big enough for a truck to drive through, and when they had first located it three months ago, they saw old tracks and faded footprints leading in and out. The land around it was flat and sun-bleached, with a few shacks scattered among the dead, brown grass. There were signs that a construction crew had once been here, including an abandoned Port-A-Potty lying on its side and a trailer with deflated tires. But there were no vehicles now, as if everyone had simply packed up and went home one day.
Will glanced at his watch: 2:15 p.m.
He clicked the PTT. “Gaby, we’re on our way back. Anything?”
Will looked west, across the lake and at the easily identifiable long structure jutting out of Song Island. The Tower. A combination lighthouse and radio tower, with windows along the second and third floors that offered a perfect view of the island and the surrounding shorelines to the east, north, and south. There was nothing in the west except water.
“Lots of big, fat nothings,” Gaby said. “Well, except for you guys.”
He couldn’t see Gaby, but knew she was on the third floor of the Tower right now, providing overwatch with her M4, probably peering through the ACOG — the Advanced Optical Combat Gunsight — riflescope at him at this very moment. The ACOG gave them long-distance shooting capability, something at which Gaby had proven surprisingly efficient.
From shoo-in high school prom queen to military-trained sniper. I wonder where you put that on the college admissions form.
“All quiet?” he asked.
“Good to go,” Gaby said.
Will looked back at Blaine and Maddie, both still catching their breath, all three of them standing in shirts and pants drenched in sweat.
“We’ll keep an eye on it from the Tower,” Will said. “Until we can get it permanently sealed, this’ll have to do for now.”
They headed back to the Jeep parked nearby. The land around them was flat but impossibly bumpy, with the nearest paved road, Route 27, a good five kilometers away. The Jeep made the trip bearable, if just barely.
They were halfway to the vehicle when Will stopped suddenly.
Blaine almost crashed into him. “What?”
“Listen,” Will said.
It was like the flutter of feathers in the air — a soft, teasing whup-whup-whup. Will knew what it was, because he had heard it often enough in Afghanistan. And he remembered that night on the island while waiting for the collaborators to attack the beach. It had come and gone, never to be seen again…until now.