She nodded, then looked back at Roy. “What do you need to set everything up?”
“Everything’s already set up,” Roy said. “I just need a message to send out there.” He picked up the radio’s microphone and held it out to her. “Fire away.”
She stared at him, then at Danny. “Me?”
“You’re the boss,” Danny said.
“Danny…”
“Carly’s not going to do it. She hates the sound of her own voice. And Sarah’s not going to do it, not after…well, you know.”
“What about Bonnie? She used to be a model.”
“We asked her,” Roy said. “She says models are seen, not heard.”
“We talked, and we all agreed you should do it,” Danny said.
“You ‘talked’?” she said. “When did that happen?”
“It’s a secret. We do that, you know, talk behind your back. Quite often, actually.”
“Why does it have to be a woman, anyway?”
“Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, Hanoi Hannah…”
“Really, Danny?”
“Point is, it’s gotta be a woman. Makes people feel all warm and fuzzy.”
She sighed. “What should I say?”
“It should be short. The facts, but nothing about us or our location. I like Roy Rogers here and all, but we don’t need people showing up every day. It’ll get crowded real fast.”
She nodded. “I guess I’ll sleep on it.”
After Roy left to go eat, Lara stayed behind in the Tower with Danny. They stood next to each other, ignoring — but intimately aware of — the darkness covering the island and the lake outside the windows.
Neither one said anything for a while. She imagined he was thinking the same things she had been turning over in her head for the last few days.
About Will, about Gaby…
“I need to know,” she said after a while.
He nodded. “It’s a good thing I know where to start looking.”
“The pawnshop.”
“She gave us the address. Too bad we don’t have GPS, but we’ll make do. I hear they invented maps and such that work just as well.”
“It’ll be dangerous, Danny.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Will would hate me for asking you to do this. He always says either him or you should be here on the island at all times.”
“Willie boy has been known to make sense every now and then.”
“And you’ll have to leave Carly…”
“I’ll talk to her tonight and leave at sunup.”
“She’ll hate me.”
“Probably.”
Lara sighed. Then, “Who can you take with you? Blaine’s still hurt, even though he pretends he’s not.”
“Maddie, maybe. Or Roy.”
“Roy?”
“He’s a lousy shot, but all I need is a warm body to distract the other guys.”
She smiled. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?”
“No.”
“Maybe not.”
They stood in silence again.
“If they’re out there, I’ll bring them home,” Danny said after a while.
“I know you will,” she said.
“Okay?” she asked.
“Um, not yet,” Benny said. “Give me a sec.”
She waited patiently as Benny moved his finger around the laptop’s touchpad, directing the pointer onscreen. He clicked a couple of times, but the program she had seen running when Roy was working the same laptop last night didn’t show up.
Morning sunlight flooded in through the windows along the Tower’s third floor. She had barely slept last night, her mind filled with thoughts of Will and Gaby, and now Danny’s leaving. Her eyes had looked red in the bathroom mirror, as if she had been crying all night, though she didn’t remember doing it. Maybe she had just blocked it out.
“Benny?” she said.
“I almost got it.”
“Maybe I should come back later…”
“Roy showed me how this thing works. I don’t know why it’s not working now—” Finally, the familiar-looking program appeared on the screen. “There.”
She gave him a half-hearted “good job” smile.
Benny picked up the ham radio mic and handed it to her. “You can start whenever you want, and I’ll clean up the audio later. Do however many takes as you need.”
She nodded. She was always planning on one take. It was a simple message and relatively short. She had already run it by Carly and Danny, and they had given her the thumbs up. Even so, she wished Will were here. He would know if she had gotten it right.
Will, please be alive. I don’t know what I’d do without you.
Lara took a breath, then pressed the transmit lever.
“To any survivors out there, if you’re hearing this, you are not alone. There are things you need to know about our enemy — these creatures of the night, these ghouls. They are not invincible, and they have weaknesses other than sunlight. One: you can kill them with silver. Stab them, shoot them, or cut them with any silver weapon, and they will die. Two: they will not cross bodies of water. An island, a boat — get to anything that can separate you from land. Three: some ultraviolet light has proven effective, but flashlights and lightbulbs with UV don’t seem to have any effect. We don’t know why, so use this information with caution. If you’re hearing this message, you are not alone. Stay strong, stay smart, and adapt. We owe it to those we’ve lost to keep fighting, to never give up. Good luck.”
CHAPTER 34
WILL
The city of Harvest, Louisiana, like most small towns around the United States, maintained a backup water supply in a water tower. The one Will and Zoe were on now was fifty meters high, with the word “Harvest” stenciled down the side in big, blocky black letters to make them stand out against the bright white paint. It was the stark whiteness of the structure against the darkness that Will had spotted from a distance.
Getting up the water tower was simple enough. All it took was climbing. A lot of climbing. Fast climbing. Fifty meters up. He was pretty sure he was going to die about halfway, but somehow, some way, his stitches held, and miraculously he wasn’t bleeding by the time he got to the top.
The ghouls were on their heels by the time Will flung himself onto the tower’s cone-shaped roof. He had his pack over one shoulder, the M4A1 over the other, and he unslung the rifle and fired down, killing the closest ghoul — already halfway up the ladder — and slicing through three more behind it. They fell like dominos, tumbling backward, knocking loose more ghouls. It looked almost amusing, like a Three Stooges gag.
Will counted every bullet he fired, painfully aware of how many he had left in his arsenal. The current magazine was already minus the three rounds he had used back at the collaborator town, leaving him with twenty-seven.
One…
He couldn’t see the white Ford F-150 parked at the base of the tower anymore. It was simply gone, engulfed by the teeming mass of creatures racing toward the structure that rose out of the center of Harvest like a beacon.
Come one, come all! Free human blood! Come get them — if you can!
He must have laughed out loud, because he caught sight of Zoe out of the corner of his eye looking over at him, half terrified and half perplexed.
She was clinging to the tower’s roof, her shoes scraping for better contact against the smooth metal surface. Not an easy feat, given the day’s rain, which had made climbing and keeping a grip on the ladder’s rungs difficult. The leftover wetness also made accidentally slipping down the slanted rooftop a very real possibility. The tower itself didn’t have any protective railing at the top, which meant if you dropped off the side, you dropped.