“Where is the kid?” Dillon asked at last, his face haggard. A dark shadow of beard had grown over his face in the last forty-eight hours.

“He’s hiding,” Marvin said.

“The door to the bunker is locked,” Lacy said. “He’s locked it!” She stood over the open trap door, trying to slide back the iron plate.

They all looked at each other.

“There’s only one way down there,” Dillon said.

Marvin nodded.

“All the extra ammunition is down there,” Quentin said. His shirt had been burnt from the flame thrower they’d used during the battle. Some of the gel had dripped onto him and caught fire as he’d tried to turn off the weapon. Lacy had smothered the fire out with her own body.

   No one had noticed Summers sneaking off during the battle. They had no way even to communicate with him. The trap door was covered with a two-inch thick steel plate, set in place from below.

Lacy, first to see the plate, had immediately realized what Summers had done. During the battle, she’d seen him frozen with fear when it looked as if they would be overrun and the front door breached. But she’d been forced to concentrate on her firing and she’d forgotten about Summers, lost in her own manic killing and reloading.

“Motherfucker!” Dillon said. He took a sip of coffee. “I guess this Phelps guy never figured on a coward fucking everyone like that.”

“There’s only a couple of boxes of ammunition left up here,” Marvin said.

A loud, steady banging started on the cabin’s door. Coffee in hand, Marvin walked slowly to the gunport with a view of the porch. He saw a teenage Howler with a sledgehammer. The thing was using deliberate, careful swings, hitting the cabin’s reinforced door. Marvin watched the hinges jump, intrigued by the Howler’s use of the tool.

“They’re learning fast. He’s got a sledgehammer,” Marvin said, not bothering to turn around. He stuck the barrel of the FAL through the gunport, fired a burst at the kid’s head and returned to the table. Killing Howlers had become routine.

During the worst moments of the battle it had been the doctor who made sure everyone had ammunition: running to the back of the cabin and the gun locker and bringing boxes of ammunition to each of them, sometimes sitting on the ground, his back to the wall, his blood stained sheep-skin coat open, reloading their empty clips himself with a gadget from Phelps’s gun locker. Never once had Marvin looked frightened or even worried, even at the very worst moments when Summers had stopped firing and started screaming like a child, having snapped.

At their worst moment, when a horde of Howlers gained the porch, dozens of the creatures beating on the thick plastic window, their faces big, their spit hitting the window, their dirty palms pressed against the bullet-proof plastic—some of them shoving hands through the open gunports—even then, when it seemed they would all die soon, Marvin had worked with the same dull look on his face, almost as if he’d become one of them.

   It was then, while Summers pissed himself and fell on the floor screaming like a child, that Quentin ran for Phelps’s homemade flamethrower. Quentin manned the awkward thing, attached to a jerrycan by a plastic hose, itself attached to an air compressor. He’d pulled the compressor’s starter and the flamethrower jumped to life, building pressure in the jerrycan, pushing a gel-like substance that Chuck had designed to mimic the Napalm he’d seen used in Vietnam.

The homemade flamethrower began to spit hunks of gel from its nozzle. Quentin screamed for people to get away from the gunports and lit the end of the flamethrower. Dripping flame, he poked the flamethrower’s head out of one of the cabin’s gunports and pulled the trigger. The nozzle shot flaming gel at the attackers, covering them in flames.

The weapon saved the day, turning the wall of pounding Howlers, a hundred of them, into a blue-yellow ball of fire. The burning gel struck the creatures, igniting their clothes and skin. Their whole bodies on fire, the things ran out in different directions, blind.

It had been Dillon who opened the cabin door and rushed out to kill them as they ran. At the same time, he doused the flaming porch with buckets of water that Marvin and Lacy passed out to him.

It was then, while they were all fighting the fire on the porch, that Summers had crawled to the trap door and had locked himself down in the bunker, without anyone noticing.

“What do we do now?” Lacy said. She was looking at her father.

Quentin got up from the table. “We have to eat something. Can you fix us something?” He walked to the trap door that led to the bunker. He opened the cover and saw that the inside was locked with a steel plate that slid over the hatch and could only be locked from the bunker side.

“Yes,” Lacy said.

“Hey, kid. Can you hear me?” Quentin said.

No one answered.

Quentin opened the cabin door and looked at the dead Howler, his hands still around the sledgehammer. He slid the hammer out of the Howler’s hand and closed the cabin door, re-locking it. He walked over to the hatch and with all his might, swung the hammer down on the steel plate.

The hammer’s head snapped off and flew off, nearly hitting Miles. Quentin looked at the hammer’s broken handle.

“Now what?” Miles said. His face was white with exhaustion, his hands blistered from his weapon.

“We eat breakfast,” Quentin said. He took the broken handle, walked toward the cabin’s door and leaned it carefully against the door. Lacy got up and turned to the refrigerator.

“I must face the man that hates me or lie a coward—or lie a coward in my grave—.” Dillon sang the words to High Noon quietly.

“Shut up!” Quentin said.

“What’s wrong, Sheriff? We got a couple boxes of ammo and these things are starting to use tools. What do you think is going to happen to us? We’re heading to the green room.” Dillon walked over to the hatch separating them from safety and looked down again at the steel plate. “I should have listened to Rebecca and shot that fucking kid when I had the chance.”

“Please shut up!” Lacy said. She started to cry. She was holding a box of eggs she’d found in the cold room. “Please.” It was so pitiful, her exhausted tone of voice, that Dillon shut up. He looked at her, then went down to the gun locker and threw it open.

Three boxes of long rifle shells were left. A whole stack of shotgun shells remained, but their range made them almost useless. They had only survived because they’d killed so many of the things further out from the cabin. He closed the locker door and for the first time in a long, long, time felt real fear. He felt a kind of panic.

He turned and looked at the cabin door. He had the sudden irrational urge to run out the door and onto the field. He could see himself running through the snow to the road, to some kind of vehicle that would take him far away from this nightmare.

He heard the sound of bacon frying, then smelled it. That familiar sound, and the smell of the cooking food, helped him get hold of himself. He turned around in time to see Quentin collapse onto the floor. He watched Quentin’s body twist and shake in the grips of some horrible seizure.

Lacy had laid a wooden spoon on the counter. Marvin, realizing Quentin was having a seizure, forced the spoon into Quentin’s open mouth as he shook and jerked on the floor.

Dillon looked out the scratched and bloody window. A new wave of Howlers was gathering at the bottom of the field. He could see them shaping up for a new attack, most of them sitting on their haunches and howling. He expected to die.

*   *   *