He answers the call, his heart in his throat, barely able to gulp out: “’ello?”
“Dennis?”
Dan’s voice.
Dennis nods. “Yes. It’s me.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re still up. I’m almost at Holger’s place now.”
I know, Dennis thinks. I can see you.
But for some reason he doesn’t want Dan to know. “All right,” he says in a neutral tone.
“We still have an agreement?” Dan asks. “I’ll come unarmed, and you’ll let me in through the underground entrance?”
“Sure,” Dennis says.
“And what about your mom?”
“What about her?”
“Have you told her I’m coming?”
Dennis is about to answer, when the door on the passenger side of the car suddenly opens, and a person steps out. It’s a girl, blonde hair and blue shirt. Dennis just stares at her for several seconds.
“Dennis? You still there?”
Dennis blinks. Then nods. Then he says: “Yes.”
“Have you told your mom about me?”
“No.”
“Good. So everything is ready for me to come?”
“I guess so.”
“Right. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Okay. Oh, one last thing.”
“Uh-huh?”
“You’re coming alone, right?” Dennis stares intently at the girl as he asks the questions. “It’ll just be you? No one else?”
Dan hesitates for half a second. Dennis can see him looking over at the girl. Then he says: “Sure. It’s just me.”
Dennis feels his stomach drop. He manages to squeeze out an “Okay.”
“I’ll see you in a bit, Dennis.”
Dan disconnects.
Dennis doesn’t lower the phone. He just stares at the girl and the guy, talking briefly before getting back inside the car.
Who else is in that car? How many people is Dan bringing? Why was he lying? What is his plan?
That last question seems like the easiest to answer.
Dan wants the safe house back. That’s been his plan all along. All of that stuff with curing the deads—that must have been just talk.
As the car gets moving, Dennis finally puts down the phone.
Instead, he picks up the gun. He turns it over slowly in his hands, looking at it, admiring the small details.
Dennis breathes deeply, feeling surprisingly calm.
He has fired the gun before, but never at anyone living.
He has a strong feeling that that is about to change.
THIRTY-TWO
It’s close to midnight. The clock on his phone tells him so. His palms are sore from drumming the steering wheel.
When he was a kid, he wanted badly to be a drummer in a heavy metal band, like Lars Ulrich from Metallica. If one Dane could make it big in the States, why not two?
He spent many hours practicing and he even put together a band that lasted for a few months. They had a couple of gigs in small places before they began arguing constantly over their creative differences, and finally broke up.
That was when William decided he needed to fly solo instead. And being a rock drummer wasn’t the way he would achieve success; instead, he’d become famous as a tattoo artist in LA.
He watched every episode of Ink Masters again and again, studied the craft and practiced drawing whenever he had a spare moment.
But he never got to America.
He needed more money before he could make it happen. And post Nine-Eleven, green cards weren’t exactly easy to come by.
William blinks and comes to. He stops drumming the wheel and looks at his hands. They’re red and swollen.
None of it matters anymore.
He isn’t going to be a drummer or a tattoo artist.
His fate has been sealed.
From the backseat, Ozzy is breathing and whimpering now and then. The dead guy with the neck tattoo is still hanging from the broken passenger door window, effectively serving as a stopper for the rest of the undeads, still trying tirelessly to squish themselves past but so far, no luck.
It’s just a matter of time, though.
Sooner or later, the dead guy in the window will tilt backwards or be pushed all the way through, and it’ll be open season for the rest of them.
“Who’d have thought we’d end like this?” William asks, hardly aware he’s talking aloud.
In the rearview mirror, he sees the German shepherd raise his ears and look at him.
Ever since watching his first zombie movie, William has played with the thought of the dead arising and taking over the world. He’s even come up with specific plans for how he would deal with it if it happened.
And it did.
His first move was to contact Holger and get to his safe house.
Holger is dead now, and William will soon follow him.
So much for that plan.
Yet William had always imagined he would be one of the guys making it to the end. He would survive the apocalypse. He was clever, he was young and healthy. He would take the situation seriously and not fall prey to any of the cliches: trusting someone who can’t be trusted, trying to save someone who is already infected, going into situations that are obviously death traps.
And now, as he thinks back on the last week, he realizes he’s made all of those mistakes and then some.
He left the safe house. He let himself be talked into trusting Eli. And the most recent one: he rushed to get the car without making proper precautions.
This last one turned out to be the one sealing his fate.
And now he can only wait to die.
He reaches a hand back to pet Ozzy, and the dog licks his palm in return. “Sorry I got us into this mess, buddy. I’m a total screw-up.”
The area under the steering wheel is a chaos of wires hanging out. William spent almost twenty minutes breaking it open and even longer meddling with the wires until he finally gave up.
Hot-wiring a car engine sure isn’t as easy as eighties action moves make it look.
William had no idea what he was doing, and his phone didn’t have any internet connection, so he couldn’t Google it. Also, he wanted to save that last nine percentage of the battery.
Running his tongue across his teeth, he can feel all too well how long it’s been since they last met a toothbrush. The sweet taste of the Oreos he
