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Her watch ticked to 5:13 p.m.

“Time to check under the beds and in the closet for monsters.”

She could barely hear Mason’s voice with the two-way handheld radio’s volume set to almost its lowest setting. Turning it off completely to silence the man’s irritating voice was an option, but Mason talking meant Mason potentially giving away something they could use.

“Hear that?” Mason said. “That’s the sound of the real world starting to wake up.”

She thought she saw shadows moving behind one of the drawn curtains that covered a window along the department store across the street. Or was that just her imagination? How big was that building anyway? Big enough for a few hundred ghouls to be hiding inside right this moment? Maybe more if they crammed into both floors. And why wouldn’t they? The creatures couldn’t care less about comfort. That was a human thing, and they were well beyond that now.

“You think he knows?” Gaby asked.

“About the uniforms?” Danny said.

She nodded.

He shrugged. “He hasn’t mentioned it yet if he noticed, and that guy runs his mouth more than a fat guy on a treadmill in January.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t made a run for it yet,” Mason was saying through the radio. “If I were a betting man—and I’ve been known to lay a few shekels here and there on the roulette table—I’d put good money on the Ranger taking his chances before the sun sets. Of course he wouldn’t have made it, but he’d have gotten an A for effort.”

“Oh, for the love of God, shut him up,” Danny said from across the blasted opening in the wall. He was almost completely sitting in shadows, and if not for the white clouds of mist forming as he spoke, she wouldn’t know where he was.

Gaby reached down and switched off the radio, then picked it up and clipped it behind her belt. A radio was too valuable to just throw away these days, even if the only other person on the other side was Mason.

She glanced down at her watch again: 5:15 p.m.

Christ, where did the last two minutes go?

She searched out Danny in the darkness. “I don’t think they’re coming.”

“Doesn’t look that way.”

Despite every indication that Mason would stay back until nightfall, they couldn’t risk retreating into the backroom until they were absolutely certain. The man was a liar, after all, and couldn’t be trusted. But now that the sun had all but vanished and she thought she could feel the floor under her vibrating as…
things
began moving across Gallant…

“Time to boogie,” Danny said. He got up and began moving backward across the lobby.

She did the same, anxious to get the hell as far away from the opening as possible. But they didn’t rush it and backpedaled one step at a time while keeping their eyes on the wall and the doors and windows in front of them. She turned around only when she saw the island counter passing by to her left and rushed after Danny, past the first office (with the bodies, and Fritz), and toward the manager’s room in the back.

“Nate,” she called.

He poked his head out of the office, his M4 clutched in his hands. “Okay?”

She nodded. “You got guard duty.”

“Gotcha.”

Nate stepped out into the hallway and stood guard while she and Danny went all the way to the back and removed the large metal filing cabinet they had helped Fritz put over the alley entrance earlier. They took it into the office, with Nate retreating into the room after them. They closed the door, then leaned the heavy cabinet against it before pinning it in place with the desk.

It was a decent barricade, and if it was just the black eyes trying to get in, she thought their chances were pretty good the door would hold. But that was the problem. She knew very well it wouldn’t just be the black eyes. The blue-eyed ones would also be around tonight, just like they had last night, and that time at the farmhouse in Louisiana…

With the door closed, Gaby could barely make out Danny and Nate standing in the room with her. Danny had unslung Benford’s pack and was rummaging through it. A few seconds later there was a double
cracking
sound, and two glow sticks gradually filled the room.

Danny’s face, suddenly awash in fluorescent green, grinned at her. “And then God said, ‘Let there be awesome green disco lights, and so there was.’”

“Not quite sure that’s the line,” she smiled back at him.

“Eh, I never was much of a church goin’ boy.”

“Looks good,” Nate said, nodding his approval at their handiwork over the door. “Definitely looks like it could last through the night.”

“Winter springs eternal, kids,” Danny said.

“You don’t think so?”

“If it were just those black-eyed bastards? Yeah. But that’s not the case, is it?”

I guess I’m not the only one who remembers.

She looked at her watch, the white neon hand more green than white: 5:20 p.m.

I
F THEY THOUGHT
Gallant was quiet before, listening to the excruciating silence from inside a small office in the back of a bank surrounded by four walls and a barricaded door was an entirely new experience.

She sat with Nate at the back, with the door in front and to her right. Danny sat to their left in the corner. No one had said a word since they settled down to wait, and as they listened to what Mason called “the real world” coming awake around them, they continued to maintain the quiet, the anticipation of what all three of them knew was coming
(Anytime now, you bastards)
almost suffocating.

The ghouls were out there by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, so why hadn’t they begun assaulting the door yet? Despite straining to hear, she couldn’t detect them outside in the hallway or the bank lobby. Which didn’t make any damn sense at all. They had to know the three of them were in here. Even the black-eyed creatures, with their limited intelligence
(Dead, not stupid, right, Will?)
could trace the new blood from the streets to the gaping hole in the wall and sniff their trail to the back of the building. And if even by some miracle they couldn’t, the presence of the blue eyes would make up for it.

“He’ll come for them soon.”

“Yes.”

“And when he does…”

“We’ll end him.”

“Finally…”

All of this was for one man. Who the hell were they waiting for?

The question turned over and over in her head and had been since last night. Except now it was so much louder and so much more persistent, with nothing for her to do but listen to the silence as she waited and waited for the creatures to show themselves.

What are you
waiting
for?

She looked over in Danny’s direction, his face covered in the green light from the glow sticks. He had his rifle between his legs, the muzzle pointed up at the roof, and was staring at the door across from him. She couldn’t tell if he was lost in his own thoughts or if he was just as mystified by the lack of an attack as she was.

She felt welcome warmth as Nate reached over and found her hand and squeezed. “Can’t wait to get our own room on the
Trident
,” he said quietly.

“It’s going to be loud down there with the engine next door,” she said, matching his soft pitch.

“Who cares. That’s what earplugs are for. Plus, no one will know what we’re doing down there. Know what I mean?”

“Not a clue.” She kissed him on the cheek, then pulling back slightly, whispered, “I love you.”

“Finally,” he whispered back. “I didn’t think you would ever say it.”

She smiled and kissed him again, then rested her head against his shoulder.

“Tired?” he asked.

She nodded. “You?”

“Like every part of me is about to go all
Scanners.
”

“Scanners?”

“You know, that movie where the guy’s head blows up?”

She shook her head.

“We’ll add it to the Netflix queue when we get back to the
Trident,
” Nate said.

“Deal.”

The office looked different swimming in green, almost surreal somehow. Nate slipped an arm around her, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget about what was going to happen in the next few minutes, or hours. But it was going to happen tonight. The blue eyes hadn’t gone through all this trouble to forget about them now.

“He’ll come for them soon,”
one of the creatures had said.

He
. Who the hell was
he?

She allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment even as her ears kept listening for telltale signs that the creatures had finally arrived outside their door, or beyond the walls of the bank, or maybe even above them on the rooftop. Except they weren’t in any of those places because there was just
dead silence
all around them.

What in God’s name are they
waiting
for?

She had her eyes partially closed and was concentrating on the warmth of Nate’s body against hers when there was a massive
boom!
that tore through the room, so close and immediate that her ears were still ringing even as she struggled to open her eyes and
move, move,
move,
dammit!

By the time she managed to fully open her eyes, green tendrils of smoke were already starting to fill the room at a dizzying speed. Then Danny was shooting, his face lit up by a staccato effect of green and white and orange as flames stabbed from his M4. He had somehow made it onto his feet before either she or Nate could react and was actually pushing his way into the smoke instead of running away from it like a sensible human being.

Since when does Danny qualify as “sensible?”
she thought even as she scrambled to get ahold of her rifle, which she had dropped about the same time the explosion knocked Nate’s arm from its place around her body.

She wasn’t sure when she lost sight of Danny, but one second he was in front of her and in the next breath he had vanished into the spreading green smoke, and the only thing she could make out was the
pop-pop-pop
of his rifle assaulting her ears as the ringing from the explosion subsided. The M4s they were armed with were only capable of three-round bursts, but Danny was squeezing the trigger so fast that they sounded almost like one continuous full-auto blast.

She finally
(finally!)
got her numbed feet under her and scrambled up, gripping her rifle in one hand and shouting, “Stay here!” back at Nate.

He was coughing and trying not to gag against the smoke, but he somehow still managed to flash her a defiant look as he shook his head. “The hell I am!”

“Nate, please!”

“No!” he shouted back.

Loud crackles of gunfire reached them, coming from
the hole in the wall
that hadn’t been there before.

They blasted through from the other room. Jesus Christ!

Nate was already on his feet when she began moving forward. She could hear him coughing behind her as he followed, and Gaby lifted her rifle as—

A figure stumbled through the jagged opening in front of her. He was wearing black and she glimpsed the shiny lens of his gas mask—

She fired, and the man, moving between rooms, fell awkwardly, landing in the middle of the hole with one part of his body in their room and his legs in the manager’s office.

How the hell did he get past Danny?

It was impossible not to inhale the smoke—a combination of disintegrated Sheetrock and explosive powder swarming around the opening—and she started to cough along with Nate even as they kept pushing forward.

Questions swirled around in her head as she forced her legs to move:

Why did the collaborators attack? Why risk an explosion when Mason had strict orders to keep them alive? Or had the “him” that the blue-eyed ghouls were waiting for finally arrived, and their usefulness as bait had finally come to an end?

“Danny!” she shouted as she stepped over the dead man and into the connecting room. There had been a lot of smoke in the other office, but there was even more in here, almost as if the collaborators hadn’t properly executed their breach.

The only response to her shouting of Danny’s name was the
pop-pop-pop
of automatic gunfire coming from outside the room, through the open door to her right.

“Danny!” she shouted as she stumbled over bodies on the floor.

New bodies, and not the ones they had stacked in the back of the room. These were all black, with gas masks jutting out from their faces like plastic elephant tusks.

“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, shouting from behind her. “Wait!”

But she didn’t wait. She couldn’t. Danny was out there by himself, the continued banging of ferocious back-and-forth of automatic rifle fire forcing her to move faster and
faster.

“Gaby, wait!”

She ignored Nate’s desperate plea and finally made it out the door and into the hallway, ready to see caverns of yellow and white and brown fangs coming at her. She twisted right toward the alley door, but it was still closed and there was just suffocating darkness back there. She turned left toward the lobby—

Pop-pop-pop!

A figure was shooting in the direction of the street while backing up toward her. She couldn’t tell what kind of clothes he was wearing—it looked dark, either black or blue, so it could have been Danny or a collaborator uniform. After all, weren’t they wearing the same colors right now?

She lifted her rifle and took aim when the man threw a glance over his shoulder. She couldn’t see his shadowed face, but there was nothing that looked like a gas mask, and that was the only reason she didn’t pull the trigger.

“Back, back!” the figure shouted.
Danny!
“We got incoming, kid! A shit ton of incoming!”

She looked past him and saw that something had swallowed up the hole in the front wall of the bank. No, not something, but some
things.

Oh, so there they are.

She never believed they would make it through the night without the ghouls finding them. It was simply beyond the realm of possibility, the kind of optimism that only the old Gaby could have fallen prey to. And yet, and yet, she had wanted to believe. God, she had wanted to believe so badly.