The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 14


BLAINE




“HERE?” SANDRA SAID, stopping the Toyota in the middle of the road.

Blaine leaned forward a bit to look past her at the two-story house, like some ancient relic from the past towering behind a sea of tall grass that hadn’t been mowed in eight months. It looked the same as the first time he had passed it a few hours ago.

“That’s it,” Blaine said. He glanced at his watch: 6:57 P.M.

They could have easily reached Lancing before nightfall, but the more Blaine had thought about it, the more he wasn’t sure he could find Will and the others if they had moved away from the courthouse, which they had already been planning to do when he left them. If they went all the way to Lancing and couldn’t find the others, then what? They would have to find someplace to stay the night. That would take time and effort, neither of which he had very much of at the moment.

“You guys stayed here for the whole night?” Sandra asked.

“The windows and back doors are already reinforced. We can do the same to the front door.”

“No basement?”

“None that I saw.”

“Risky,” she said, clearly not sold on the idea.

“It’s probably the least risky choice.”

She turned the truck into the driveway. With the grass grown on both sides of them, it felt like driving through a forest, albeit one with a smoothly paved road. The Labrador statue with its missing head still sat in the front lawn, while its companion guarded the front door.

Sandra put the truck in park and reached for the lever when he stopped her. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Just in case.” He reached into the ammo bag on the floor and grabbed a handful of shotgun shells with a white “X” marked across them.

“What’s the ‘X’ for?” Sandra asked.

“They’re filled with silver buckshot. You know how when we shoot the ghouls, they just keep coming?”

“They’re impossible to kill.”

“Not with silver.”

“Silver?” She gave him another doubtful look. “Where did you learn that?”

“Will and the others have been using it since day one.”

“And it works?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t used it before. They say it works, and I believe them. Why bullshit about this?”

She nodded. “They wouldn’t.”

Blaine ejected shells from the Remington shotgun and shoved in new ones with silver loads. “What are you carrying?”

She took a Glock out from behind her back. “I grabbed it last night.”

“I have some ammo for that.” He dug into the bag and came out with a magazine with an “X” across the side. “This should fit the Glock.”

She reloaded the Glock, then gave him an amused look. “First duct tape and now silver bullets. Who are these people, the Lone Ranger and Tonto?”

*

THE INSIDE OF the house looked the same as it had this morning, with a repurposed door leaning against the wall next to the front door. The door still had long nails driven through it, ready to be re-used. Blaine wondered if Will and Danny did that on purpose, leaving a convenient way for someone else to seal the place later.

“We’ll need a hammer or something to nail them back in place,” Blaine said.

“I’ll check the kitchen.” Sandra walked off with her Glock at her side.

Blaine took the opportunity to struggle over to the foyer, where he sat down on a comfortable wooden chair. He made sure he could hear Sandra in the kitchen behind him, sifting through the drawers, before he took out the bottle of Tramadol and shook out two more.

As Blaine swallowed down the pills, he remembered Lara telling him jokingly, “At this point I’m supposed to tell you not to take more than three a day or you’ll run the risk of addiction, but I doubt you’ll listen anyway.”

Smart girl, he thought, squirreling the bottle away.

Sandra came back with a rubber mallet. “Will this do?”

“Probably.”

“You all right?” she asked, looking at him with one hand on her hip.

He smiled. That pose never failed to get his blood pumping. “I’m fine. Why?”

“You look pale.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“I’ll open a window.” She smiled. “Just kidding.”

He waited a few more seconds until he was sure the pills were kicking in. When he stood up and didn’t feel any pain—or at least, not as much pain—he knew they were (mostly) working.

He and Sandra didn’t have any trouble putting the door back in place. The nails were straight enough, and he banged the ones that were slightly crooked back into the correct angles. While Sandra held the door at a slight angle—so the length covered as much of the doorway as possible—he hammered the nails into the walls on both sides.

That done, they stepped back and gave it an appraising look.

“It looks decent,” Sandra said. “We’ll have to thank your friends for making it so easy.”

“At this rate, I’ll spend the rest of my life thanking them,” Blaine said.

*

WITH AN HOUR until nightfall, they ended up in one of the rooms upstairs. It was clearly a girl’s room, decorated with pink dressers, pink bedsheets and of course, pink blankets. The idea of staying in the same room from this morning, when he lay half-dead, didn’t appeal to him at all. They considered the master bedroom, but it was too far away from the stairs.

They had some time, so they laid down on the bed and he held her in the semidarkness of the room. They didn’t say a word, neither one of them wanting to ruin the moment. The feel of her body against him was more than he could bear, but doing anything else was out of the question in his current condition.


Eventually, they got up and left the bedroom, and walked the short distance to the top of the stairs, where they sat down next to the supplies crates they had brought in with them. Blaine put down the ammo bag, with the shotgun shells and spare magazines for the AR-15 and Glock.

There were a couple of windows behind them, and tiny remnants of sunlight filtered inside through doors fastened over the frame. The stairwell was exactly in the middle of the house, with a perfect view of the kitchen and its island counter below. The second floor was a bit of an oddity—it was split up into two sections which were joined in the middle by a walkway, like a bridge, with the stairs to one side and additional bedrooms on the other.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Blaine said. “If they find us and start up the stairs, I want you to go back into the bedroom and close the door.”

“Not without you.”

“Sandra…”

“No.” Her voice was calm but firm. “Not without you. Not again.”

He didn’t think there was any point in arguing, so he said, “All right.”

They sat and waited.

At 8:30 P.M., it got pitch-dark outside, and the less light he had to see by, the more tense he became. Slowly, the pain around his stomach came back. He shook out another pill from the bottle and saw Sandra look over. She sat in the darkness with him but was close enough that he could see the concern on her face.

“How many of those have you taken already?” she asked.

“Not nearly enough,” he said glibly, hoping that would prevent what he knew would come next.

It didn’t.

“You should rest,” she said. “You can’t keep going on pills alone.”

“I’m not. I have you.”

Her face remained grave. “I’m serious, Blaine. You need to rest. You were shot three times yesterday. That’s not going to heal any time soon.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for rest later.”

She sighed, but didn’t pursue it, even though he could tell she wanted to. Instead, she laid her head against his left shoulder.

He was sure the ghouls would have found them by nine o’clock, but they hadn’t. Or if they had, they didn’t attack right away. He sat in the silent blackness with Sandra next to the stairs and listened.

For anything. For something.

He heard nothing, just the wind outside, sometimes pushing up against the wall or windows. He tried to imagine what ghouls moving through the lawn, with its forest of grass, would sound like. Barefoot movements were hard to detect, but dozens, maybe hundreds, might be easier to pick up.

Ten o’clock came and went.

Sandra started to relax next to him and wasn’t clutching the Glock quite as tightly anymore. “Maybe we got lucky,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” he whispered back.

They were both wrong.

About ten minutes later, there was a loud crashing noise from the front of the house. Before the sound had even finished its echo, another loud crash erupted from the back. He recognized the sharp noises instantly. God knew he had heard them often enough—they were the very real clamor of shattering glass.

They’re coming through the windows.

Blaine looked back at Sandra, her face awash in growing terror. He couldn’t remember the last time she had looked this afraid, and he wondered if his own face mirrored hers. He hoped not. He wanted at least to give a reassuring look, as impossible as that seemed at the moment.

The sound of crumbling glass was soon followed by a cacophony of tumultuous, battering noises—flesh against wood. The ghouls had broken through the windows, only to find thick wooden boards in their path, and they were now beating on the barricades with their bodies. They hadn’t even bothered with the front door, he realized. Was that because they knew it was pointless, or did experience tell them windows were easier targets?

“Stay here,” Blaine said, and got up and rushed over to the bridge.

He looked down to his right, past the living room and at the four windows at the back of the house. The doors nailed over the windows were holding, though they trembled slightly each time the creatures struck them again and again and again.

He had forgotten how terrifying these moments could be. They had been so lucky the last few months, hiding at night and moving in the day. He remembered distinctly the first few days, the horror and terror of what was happening. The end of the world, playing out before his eyes. All those memories came flooding back now.

He hurried back to Sandra.

“Can they climb?” she asked when he reached her.

“I don’t think so,” he said. Could they? He had never seen them climb before…

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“I hear something on the roof.”

Blaine looked up at the ceiling. Not that he could see anything but a fan and pieces of peeling white paint above him. Earlier in the day, he had seen plenty of cobwebs and insects up there, too. He couldn’t see anything now in the pitch-darkness.

“What did you hear?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But it sounded like footsteps. You said they can’t climb?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen them climb before, but I guess…”

Why wouldn’t they be able to climb?

It wasn’t like climbing took a lot of skill. All you needed were hands and feet, and the ghouls had both of those. So why couldn’t they climb?

“It wasn’t noise from downstairs?” he asked, hopeful.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Something else, moving on the roof.”

“I don’t hear anything,” he said, just before a large rectangular section of the ceiling on the other side of the bridge opened up with a loud creak.

The attic door!

A ghoul, its skin blackened and wrinkled, gaunt features mostly skin and bones, fell out of the freshly opened rectangular hole and landed on the second floor in a crouch that reminded him of a praying mantis. The figure was so emaciated Blaine thought he could almost hear bones clacking against joints as it moved.

The creature, resting on its haunches, searched the darkness and found them. Then it was running across the bridge in their direction. Blaine lifted the AR-15 and fired a shot and hit the ghoul in the chest. It was so close that he couldn’t have missed even if he had tried. The ghoul seemed to stumble on something and flopped to the floor a couple of feet from Blaine, where it lay still.

“Holy shit,” Blaine whispered.

Silver bullets. I can’t f*cking believe it.

He was rejoicing over that fact when something else—three—no, four—no, ten—bony shapes fell out of the attic opening. They were already rushing across the bridge at Blaine, moving silently, atrophied faces contorted in rabid poses.

Blaine switched the AR-15’s fire selector to full-auto and squeezed the trigger. The room lit up with a strangely hypnotic staccato effect and one ghoul, then two, then three fell, but each time one ghoul splashed to the floor, another leaped over it and continued coming straight at him. All the way in the back, under the attic door, Blaine saw even more ghouls falling through the opening.

Blaine kept firing, backpedaling, and watching with horror and fascination as the ghouls fell like bowling pins. Even as he squeezed the trigger and kept it pressed, his mind was telling him he was using up the magazine, that he was going to be empty soon and there were still going to be too many ghouls.

By the time he fired his last shot, there were still five ghouls climbing over their dead. Others were leaping over the pile of bodies and using the four-foot-tall walls flanking the bridge as a catapult, launching themselves into the air. One of them came straight at Blaine and he managed to get the AR-15 up in time, smashing the stock of the rifle into its face and knocking it sideways, the blow carrying the creature across the room.


Then Sandra was there, firing her Glock into the remaining four creatures. She caught one as it was trying to leap up the bridge wall. The creature tumbled down through the opening. She kept firing, missing some but hitting others, until all three ghouls went down and didn’t move.

Blaine didn’t bother reloading the AR-15. Instead, he snatched up the Remington shotgun and turned to face the ghoul he had knocked out of the air. It was back on its feet and glowering at him when he shot it from ten feet away, obliterating the upper half of its body with silver buckshot. What remained of the creature keeled over to the floor, thick black blood oozing out onto the carpet.

“Blaine!” Sandra screamed.

Blaine turned back in time to see ten ghouls—no, fifteen—no, too many to count—falling down through the attic opening across the floor, like drops of rain, a never-ending flow of click-clacking bones and pruned skin and hollowed faces.

“Room!” he shouted. “Get back into the room!”

Sandra backed up, struggling to reload her Glock. She gave up and turned and fled toward the room with the pink dresser and pink bedsheets.

Blaine began firing. Racking and firing, racking and firing, buckshot vaporizing the creatures, tearing flesh from bone—or what little flesh they had left over their bones—with brilliant efficiency. Their bodies were so thin, the flesh so weak, that each shotgun spray took out two, sometimes three ghouls at the same time.

But more of them were falling through the attic door every second.

Too many. Too many!

“Blaine!” Sandra shouted behind him. “Come on!”

He fired his final shot and snatched up the ammo bag and the AR-15 and ran to her. She was holding the door open and waiting, face contorted in mortal terror, when he rushed inside, ignoring the pain rippling through seemingly every inch of his body.

Merciful God it hurt!

She slammed the door behind him and locked it.

“Help me!” Blaine shouted.

He dropped his weapons and grabbed the pink dresser and pushed it toward the door. Sandra ran over to help as the ghouls began crashing into the door on the other side, the wall shaking from the impact. The wall hadn’t even stopped trembling from the first assault when they crashed into it again, and again, and again. What looked like green neon stickers on the ceiling fell down and peppered the carpet in little glowing stars.

They pushed the big wooden furniture across the room. The only sounds were the ungodly loud crashing noise from the other side of door and the dresser’s legs grinding away against the carpeted floor, tearing off chunks of fabric as it moved grudgingly.

Finally, they got the heavy dresser into position, just as a big chunk of the door tore free and Blaine saw dark black eyes peering in through a jagged hole. He drew his Glock, shoved it into the hole, and fired. He heard what he thought was a shriek and the eye was gone.

They stepped back from the door and listened to the pounding continue, the door and the wall and the dresser shuddering and threatening to fall apart with every loud crash.

The door won’t hold. God help us, it won’t hold.

Blaine snatched up the shogun and handed it to Sandra. She took it without a word. He gave her the bag of ammo, then reloaded the AR-15 with the remaining magazine.

“Do we have enough?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

She began feeding shells into the shotgun, careful to choose only the ones with the white “X” written on the side.

Blaine hurried to the window. He peered out through a small sliver along the top that the door nailed across the window didn’t quite cover. He saw darkness and a thin trickle of moonlight over the front lawn. There was so much grass between the house and US 287 he had difficulty making out the long stretch of highway in the distance.

Then, slowly, he began to make out shapes and forms moving along the tall blades of grass.

Ghouls.

There were a lot of them, so many he felt something in the pit of his stomach give, and suddenly the pain in his side and thigh and shoulder didn’t seem to matter anymore. There were so goddamn many of them. Hundreds.

Thousands.

And among the unending tide, Blaine swore he saw something he had never seen before. A pair of eyes. Glassy blue eyes in the middle of an obsidian ocean, staring back up at him, as if they could actually see him.

But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

A blue-eyed ghoul. Now I’ve seen everything.

He looked over at Sandra and found her staring back.

The door trembled violently in front of her, the room around them shaking every few seconds from the onslaught. How many were outside that door right now? A dozen? Maybe a hundred? How many could they possibly squeeze into the second floor before there was no more room? A few hundred?

“A lot?” she asked.

“A lot,” he said.

He considered telling her about the blue-eyed ghoul, but realized it didn’t matter. Blaine walked over and sat down on the bed with the pink covers and pink fluffy blankets. Sandra sat down next to him.

Another big chunk of the door, high above the reinforced dresser, splintered and flew across the room, but they didn’t pay any attention to it.

Instead, Blaine reached over and took her hand and squeezed. “I’m glad I found you.”

“You didn’t find me, I found you,” she said, smiling back at him.

Blaine put the AR-15 down on the bed and drew his Glock, held it in his lap. She leaned over and cupped his face in her hands and kissed him gently. She tasted of the road and the Texas heat, and he couldn’t get enough.

He saw the hole in the door behind her crack a little wider, and a ghoul tried to shove itself inside. It succeeded in getting one side of its body almost all the way through before Blaine shot it through the chest and watched it go limp, the top half of its body looking as if it had merged with the door in some kind of strange experiment gone awry. But then something on the other side grabbed the dead ghoul by the legs and pulled it free, and almost immediately a second ghoul was there, trying to squeeze in through the same hole.

Blaine shot it, too.

Soon the small splintered hole in the door grew wider, and now two of the creatures tried to push their way in at the same time. They couldn’t move the dresser, so they were trying to go over it. Blaine shot both of them, and their slack bodies were quickly pulled free and two more took their place.

He lowered the gun to his lap, then wrapped both arms around Sandra and looked away from the door, willing away the sounds into the background, and concentrated just on her. Her smell, the feel of her body pressed against his, the contact of her hair in his face.

“What now?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back.

“There’s always the closet. It looks pretty big. Stretching room and everything.”

He smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t such a bad life. He had gotten what most people never had—a second chance. And he had her. Sure, it took the end of the world for it to happen, but what the hell, eight months wasn’t so bad.

He heard the door break, splitting into pieces, and the dresser tumbled backward under a massive assault.

Blaine emptied his Glock into the door, into the mass of black squirming skin, while Sandra began blasting with the shotgun next to him.

He was reaching for another magazine when the first ghoul made it inside.

Blaine shot it in the face from four feet away and watched it flop to the floor, but then two more—five more—no, a few hundred more were already taking its place…






Book Two


?


THE HUNTED