There were too many; they were simply everywhere, coming out of every inch of darkness around him. And they weren’t going to give up. Not as long as he was out here in the wide open with them.
He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and willed the truck to go faster. In the back, Zoe was screaming her head off.
Plan Z, Danny.
You would have loved this one, buddy…
CHAPTER 33
LARA
Will was dead. Gaby, too.
There were no other explanations as to why neither one of them had contacted Song Island since she’d last heard from Gaby. If he was still alive and capable, Will would have attempted to contact her by now.
Unless he’s dead…
Whatever optimism she had managed to cling to vanished when Gaby missed her check-in yesterday. Even Benny, who had been hobbling around the island beaming with anticipation of Gaby’s return, had begun to realize something had gone very, very wrong.
Danny, too, took the silence badly. “That fucking rain. I should have told her to push on through.”
She wanted to tell him not to blame himself, but it was a moot point. Like Will, Danny took responsibility for Gaby. The two of them had molded her into a soldier in their image, and in so many ways, became brother figures to her.
It’s not your fault, Danny, it’s my fault. I should never have let them go.
If I hadn’t insisted on the medical supplies, if I didn’t have so much faith in Will, if I had argued harder against taking Gaby…
…if…if…
It took Stan, one of the people who had arrived with Benny, to get her mind back to the work of the island. For a while, anyway.
She stood outside the main generator building at the Power Station, listening to Stan, wishing she were somewhere else, but grateful to be there at the same time.
This is Will’s job, she thought, listening to Stan as he explained how Song Island’s generator worked. Stan was an electrician and had spent the last few days looking at the island’s energy set-up, jotting down notes, diagrams, and spending more time at the Power Station than he did at the hotel.
“It’s an amazing piece of machinery,” Stan was saying. “The energy grid for the entire island is designed for maximum efficiency. Even with half of the system unaccounted for, I don’t see why we couldn’t crank up the AC in the summers and heating in the winters.”
Stan went on, but Lara had already stopped listening.
This is your job, Will. You should be here right now. You should be in charge. Not me. I’m not ready for this. I was never ready for this.
After a while, Stan seemed to realize that she wasn’t listening. He stopped talking and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“They’ll show up,” Stan said. “They looked pretty capable. Give them more time, and they’ll show up.”
She nodded and tried to smile back at him, but she knew it came out badly. “Can you handle this place by yourself?”
“I don’t see why not. As long as the power grid doesn’t suffer some kind of catastrophic damage, this thing could conceivably keep running for years with just some basic maintenance.”
“Do you need anything? Supplies?”
“Plenty,” Stan said.
“Make a list, and we’ll try to fill it when we do supply runs later in the week.”
“I’ll get on it.”
She left him, and was glad when she made it back to the pathway and her teeth stopped chattering.
For a place that was so vital to the health of Song Island, the Power Station was her least favorite building. Not only because of the intense vibrations emanating from the generator, but because having to walk anywhere close to the small, walled off shack next door made her squeamish, even now, months after Danny and Will had collapsed the tunnel entrance along the shore. She always imagined she could feel them in there, back again after Will had cleared them out a few days ago…
Will, goddamn you.
She was on her way back to the hotel when her radio squawked.
It was Danny: “Lara, got a minute?”
She unclipped the radio. “What is it, Danny?”
“Roy has something to show you.”
She took a breath. She didn’t want to talk to Danny right now, much less Roy. She had barely managed to summon enough energy to talk to Stan, and the only reason she had even done that was to get away from the hotel, from the others. She needed the time alone that the long walk supplied, and she wasn’t quite ready to give it up yet.
She keyed the radio. “Danny, can it wait?”
“Lara,” Danny said, and there was something in his voice — an insistence — that she hadn’t heard before. “You’ll want to see this.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“What is it?” Lara asked.
“It’s a laptop,” Roy said.
“I can see that, Roy. But why am I looking at it?”
They were on the third floor of the Tower, with nightfall spreading across the lake outside the windows. She spent the entire time trying to ignore the darkness, and the image of Will and Gaby out there, trying to survive another night.
If they’re even still alive…
Roy was sitting at the table in front of a laptop. There were two ham radios on the tabletop now, one on each side of the computer. The radio she was familiar with, that was still dialed into their designated emergency frequency and waiting to hear from Will and Gaby, was in one piece, while the one Benny had brought back with him looked gutted. Its cover was open, and there were multicolored wires connecting it to the laptop, which was also open at the back. Clearly, Roy had been doing more than just tinkering with the devices.
Danny leaned next to one of the windows, eating fried fish on a ceramic plate. “I told Roy Rogers here to go crazy with the spare radio, and he goes and does that.”
“What is ‘that’?” she asked.
“He wants to spread the word about the ghouls. Their weaknesses, their bad skin condition, and that ghastly smell that’s like getting tossed into a year-old dumpster.”
“Danny filled me in about the computer program that brought us here,” Roy said. He indicated what looked like a series of random numbers running inside an open window on the laptop’s screen. “I couldn’t duplicate exactly what the people who sent the FEMA broadcast had, but I think I got the gist of it. I’ve connected the two devices so we can now control the ham radio’s operations through the laptop. And, I’ve added some improvements.”
“What kind of improvements?” she asked.
“Instead of broadcasting on one frequency, it’ll broadcast across all of them, across all the bands, one after another. This way, we’ll be able to send the same recorded message over and over, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but not be limited to just one frequency.”
“And it’s all automated?”
“As long as the laptop’s running and the Tower’s still standing, yeah.”
“Jinx,” Danny said.
“Oops, sorry,” Roy said. “You know what I mean.”
“What do you think?” she asked Danny.
Danny shrugged. “It’s not a bad idea and we don’t really have anything to lose. The broadcast doesn’t take that much power, and we still have the other radio for everything else. We know a lot about these buggers, maybe more than most people out there. Seems like the nice thing to do, don’t you think?”