Dan bites his lip. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Yeah, me too,” William says. “I don’t like shit I don’t understand.”
“So, what do we do?” Liv asks again.
Silence for a moment, as they all exchange looks.
“We could check the cameras.”
They all turn towards Dennis. Liv almost forgot the tall, chubby guy was even there. He’s standing as though he needs to pee, moving in place and looking from one to the other.
“Maybe … maybe we can see what made them leave.”
“That’s a great idea,” William says. “You know how to do it?”
Dennis nods. “I think so.”
“Great, go check it out then. We’ll stay here.”
Dennis looks to Birgit, and Liv sees her sending him a nod, as though giving him permission to go. Dennis then runs inside the house.
They begin waiting.
Dan picks up a handful of gravel, letting it fall to the ground one piece at a time. The sound of the pebble falling is swallowed up by the night. It’s not that cold, yet Liv finds herself shaking.
Dan drops the last pebble, then turns to look at the others. “I don’t like this,” he says again. “I think we should go back inside.”
“Why?” William says, looking around. “No one’s here.”
“Is that a car?” Birgit says, pointing towards the road.
Liv turns and sees a pair of headlights a few miles up road. The car is holding still, engine apparently idling.
“It is,” William says. “So what? It’s too far away to have anything to do with it.”
“I agree with Dan,” Liv says, shivering. “Something’s wrong. I think even the dog feels it.”
The German shepherd has raised its hair all the way down the back and seems to be staring at something by Holger’s garage.
“What is it, boy?” William asks, squinting to see if anything is hiding over there.
There’s a sound of gravel crunching. Then a figure moves in the shadows. Ozzy barks as the person comes into view. His raspy voice cuts through the dog’s barking: “You can put down that rifle now, son.”
TWENTY-NINE
Dennis runs all the way down to the bunker.
For some reason, his heart is pounding away, and it’s definitely not just from the running. He feels very tense. Anxious. Even more so than he’s been feeling ever since Mom started doing the ritual.
He opens the metal door and goes into the control room, headed straight for the monitors.
The ones showing the courtyard are all on—one of them is still turned slightly to the side, so that the far corner with the well cover isn’t showing. Dennis forgot to adjust it back into place, so he does it now.
On the other ones, he can see Mom and the rest of them standing around, waiting.
Dennis has been messing around with Holger’s security system a fair bit, getting familiar with it. Despite Dennis not being particularly clever, he’s good at computers, and it takes him less than a minute to navigate to the recent recordings. He pulls them up, goes back an hour, then hits play.
The dead people suddenly appear in the courtyard, clambering at the windows. The film shows him nothing else of interest, though.
He puts it on fast-forward. The minutes glide by in seconds. The zombies move around a little, but other than that, nothing happens.
Then, suddenly, a car appears.
Dennis’s heart jumps, and he fumbles to put the video back at regular speed.
It’s a big, black van, and it has its headlights off, so that it’s hard to see in the darkness. It moves into the courtyard slowly, as though sneaking its way. It moves closer to the zombies until they notice it, then it stops. They begin leaving the house one by one and instead gather around the car. They even come from the other side of the house, as they must sense new prey has arrived.
Then, when all the dead people have turned their attention to the car, it begins to move backwards very slowly. It’s barely visible in the middle of the herd; it looks like someone dropped a piece of candy and ants are crawling all over it.
The van heads out of the courtyard, slowly drawing all of the dead people along with it. It keeps going until it and all of the zombies are out of sight.
Dennis just sits there for several seconds, staring at the video, waiting for what comes next.
Nothing does, though.
Dennis’s brain works very hard to figure out what he just saw. Someone came in a van and used themselves as bait to lure away the zombies. But why? It didn’t make sense. And that van—wasn’t there something familiar about it?
Dennis rolls the video back to the point where the van has just showed up. He hits pause. Leans forward. Stares intently at the van.
There is something familiar about the van.
And then it clicks into place.
Dennis gasps out loud.
THIRTY
A man in a motorized wheelchair comes rolling out of the shadows by the garage. He’s holding a shotgun at hip-level, pointing right at William.
William holds up his hands. “Okay, easy now …”
“I said put it down,” the man repeats. “On the ground, please, son.”
“Okay, I’m doing it …” William crouches down slowly to put the rifle on the ground.
Ozzy barks and growls menacingly.
The old guy turns the shotgun at Ozzy, and for a terrible moment, Dan is certain the man will pull the trigger. He even braces himself for the gunshot. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he tells William: “Get your dog under control, son, or I’ll have to shoot him.”
“Ozzy!” William commands. “Heel!”
Ozzy comes to his side, and William grabs him by the collar.
“That’s one well-trained dog,” the old man says, sounding almost jovial. “You know, I had a dog like him once.”
“If you’ve come for the house,” William begins.
The man scoffs. “I couldn’t care less about that house, son. Oh, no. I’ve come for something else entirely.”
Ever since the man revealed himself, Dan has been trying to work out who he is and what he’s doing here. It’s somehow clear
