Road to Babylon (Book 9): The Ranch

by Sisavath, Sam

“No, I don’t.”

  “Keo…”

  “No, I don’t, Lara.”

  Lara walked over to a stool and dragged it to where he stood. She sat down in front of him. Then she took his hands and squeezed. “You’ve never had one of these things inside your head, have you?”

  “No, but I hear it’s not pleasant.”

  “It’s not. It’s far from pleasant.” She paused, seeming to struggle for the right words. Then, “It’s not like anything you’ve ever experienced, Keo.”

  “So what is it like? And do you think it justifies what she did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “I can, because I know what she’s going through. You know the kind of experiences I have with these things...”

  He nodded. “You never went into details.”

  Lara started to reply but stopped short and shook her head softly. He could see her still struggling to find the right words.

  “What’s it like?” he asked. “If you want to tell me. You don’t have to. I don’t need to know the nitty gritty to know that these fuckers are bad news.”

  “They’re that, and more.”

  “How much more?”

  “It’s almost indescribable. I’ve had both kinds inside my head. The good and the bad.”

  “The good?”

  “Will…” She paused again. Then, “After he was infected and turned, he could do what they did. He could project himself into my head, and we could be having a conversation like you and me are doing right now. It felt very real.”

  “Will could do that?”

  She nodded. “And a lot of other things. Even now, after all these years, there are still some fragments of him in my head. Sometimes I have dreams about him, and it’s not like any other dream. It feels so…real.”

  Keo was surprised to hear that. Not that there was some part of the ghoul Will—or as Keo always thought of him as, Frank—still lingering inside her, but that she continued to have dreams of him. Then again, maybe Keo shouldn’t have been so surprised. Her relationship with Will was, in many ways, much stronger than his and hers. Theirs was built during the early days of The Purge. In that kind of environment, everything was stronger, more vivid…and more memorable.

  Even though his head accepted this and understood it, he still didn’t like it. But that was his problem, not Lara’s.

  “What about the bad kind?” he asked. “How’s that different?”

  “Disgusting,” Lara said. “Dark. Depressing. Degrading.”

  “Are you purposefully just using words that begin with a D here?”

  Lara smiled. It was the first time he’d seen that all day. “No. But they fit what the feeling was like. But if Will’s presence lingers, and he was one of the good guys, the other kind does, too. If not more so.” She glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping Thuy. “You don’t know what it’s like having one of those things inside your head, Keo. It’s not something I’d wish on even my worst enemies.”

  Keo looked over at Thuy. He remembered the thousand-yard stare he’d seen on her when they first met outside of Longmire. She’d seemed so far away then, like she wasn’t present even when she was talking to him. That look had continued throughout the day, and Keo should have been more wary of her presence among them.

  Dammit. How did I miss all the signs?

  “Can it get to her in her current condition?” Keo asked.

  “Yes,” Lara said. “They can get to you whether you’re sleeping, unconscious, or even wide awake.”

  “Was that what happened earlier? When you guys came down here?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe. Even now, we still don’t know everything the Blue Eyes are capable of. A part of me hopes we never do.” She might have shivered slightly when she said that. “Maybe I just don’t want to know.”

  He didn’t blame her. Keo had come face to ugly face with these things before, but they had never entered his head and stayed there. Just the thought of being invaded by one of the creatures left him cold and the hairs on his arms and the back of the neck standing up.

  He stared at Thuy again, this time with new understanding. What was it like for her to have that thing inside her head? The beast from Paxton was different from all the others. There was something more sadistic about this one.

  Sadistic is really earning his name more and more, the fucker.

  “What are we going to do with her?” Lara asked after a while.

  Keo shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess we can talk about it. You, me, and Bunker. For now, let’s just keep her like that. If she’s not up and walking around, she can’t be a danger to us. Can you do that?”

  “Easy enough. I’ll keep her under until this is over.” Then, “I think he likes her.”

  “Who?”

  “Bunker. You didn’t see how the two of them were together earlier?”

  “I was a little busy.”

  “He was flirting with her.”

  Keo chuckled. “Bunker knows how to flirt?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How did she respond?”

  “I think she was a little confused, like she wasn’t sure what he was doing, or why.”

  “Or maybe, now knowing what we know, she didn’t want him to get too close because she already knew what she had to do.”

  “That’s probably true, too,” Lara said.

  She got up and stood with her back to the wall next to him, before leaning her head against his shoulder. Keo slipped an arm around her body and pulled her closer.

  “Are they still out there?” she asked.

  “I think that’s a pretty safe bet.”

  “They haven’t tried to come in yet.”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think that is? Why did they just stop?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because it knows it can’t get through the door. I think there’s a chance it could break down the one outside, but it hasn’t tried yet. I don’t know why.”

  “It’s playing with us. With you.”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “It likes to play games.”

  “They all do, but this one…”

  “Bunker said you gave it a name. What was it?”

  “Sadistic.”

  Lara nodded. “Sounds about right.”

  “Yeah.”

  They didn’t say anything for a moment, and Keo was fine with the silence. He wrapped his arm around her body tighter and pulled her closer. She could be stuck to him, side to side, and he would still think she wasn’t close enough.

  “What was it like, having to go up against it out there by yourself?” Lara finally asked.

  “Who?”

  “Sadistic.”

  “I wasn’t completely by myself.”

  “You know what I mean. What was it like?”

  He searched for the words. What had it been like fighting for his life against the beast?

  “Desperate,” Keo finally said.

  “Desperate?”

  “Yeah, desperate.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “I was desperate to get back to you. I was desperate to do anything to accomplish that. So…in a word, it was desperate.”

  He paused for a moment, considering the question a second time, while staring across the infirmary at Thuy.

  “Desperate,” he said again, thought quieter this time and maybe with just a little bit more understanding for the other woman’s plight.

  Twelve

  Bunker was sitting on the floor with his back against the door that connected the outer hallway with the basement on the other side. Keo had a brief flash of Sadistic breaking down the door and sending it tumbling over the rancher, crushing him underneath its weight, and wondered how long he’d mourn.

  A day? Two? A week?

  Keo wasn’t sure why he was still so pissed off at Bunker for not telling him and Lara everything there was to know about the underground shelter. It
wasn’t like the not knowing had come back to haunt them. If anything, it’d probably saved Lara’s life. What would Keo have done differently if he’d known about the secret doors between the rooms? Maybe he might have involuntarily given the information away to Thuy.

  But maybe it was the fact that Bunker had taken a big risk while Lara was at her most vulnerable. Yeah, that was probably it, more so than the lack of information about the secret doors.

  The thought of losing Lara gnawed at Keo. He couldn’t afford to lose her. Not here, not now, not anytime.

  Ever.

  So maybe, when he really thought about it, none of it would have changed anything and he was being a big baby about the whole affair. Bunker certainly didn’t feel as if he had anything to apologize for.

  Then again, Bunker was kind of an asshole, so…

  “Anything?” Keo asked.

  Bunker looked up from the bag of beef jerky he’d been nibbling on all night. The smell filled the hallway, but it was better than the alternative: Another kind of smell, one that was like hot garbage in the sun.

  “A big fat zero, hombre,” Bunker said.

  “Nothing at all?”

  The rancher shook his head and talked through a mouthful of jerky. “Nada. They haven’t made a peep since the big bad boy pounded on the door upstairs. If they made it down into the basement, I can’t tell. They’re being awfully quiet, and I can’t smell a thing.”

  Keo leaned toward the door and pushed his ear against the cold surface. He listened, but there was just the rhythmic (and reassuring) beating in his chest and the sound of Bunker tearing into another strip of dry venison behind him.

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to put close-circuit cameras in there, and maybe all around the outer perimeter, too,” Bunker was saying. “In case we need to hightail it in here again, we’d be able to see what’s happening out there without having to poke our heads out and risk getting it chopped off.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I dunno. Never got around to it, I guess.”

  “You were lazy.”

  “Hey, I’m a busy man.”

  “Since when?”

  “Good point.” Then, without missing a beat, “Anyway, shouldn’t be too difficult to find some cameras in one of the closer towns. As long as the generator’s running, we can hook them up over a weekend.”

  Keo gave up listening for sounds from the basement and pulled back. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “I told you,” Bunker said. “It doesn’t make any sense they’d stop the attack now. It’s not just me, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know something I don’t?”

  “Lots.”

  “Clever. But let’s stick to the present, wiseass. What do you know that I don’t about what’s happening? Or in this case, not happening.”

  “Maybe it knows it can’t get through the door,” Keo said. He tapped the thick slab of metal in front of him. Two inches of solid steel produced a solid but dull-sounding thump-thump against his knuckles. “Maybe, with time, it could get through this one, but not the one into the main shelter.”

  “They call them blast doors for a reason.”

  “Exactly. So maybe it knows that. Or suspects it.”

  “It’s that smart?”

  “It’s not dumb.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “That’s why it forced Thuy to try to get us to open the door. Maybe it knows that’s the only way it’s going to get inside.”

  “She failed.”

  “Right. And when it realized that, it didn’t see any reason to waste its time on this door.”

  Keo narrowed his eyes, imagining he could see through it with X-rays and into the basement beyond. Maybe the creature was actually there, staring back at him. The thought sent a brief spurt of coldness up and down his spine.

  “Maybe it’s regrouping,” Keo said. “Coming up with a new plan for tomorrow night.”

  “Is that what we’re hoping for?” Bunker asked.

  “A part of me wants to get it over with tonight, but the other part wouldn’t mind if tonight ends like this. Peacefully.”

  Bunker pulled himself up to his feet and brushed his dirty hands on his pants legs. “Well, you were right about one thing…”

  “What’s that?”

  “This blue-eyed devil’s one intriguing fucker.”

  “‘Intriguing’ wouldn’t exactly be the word I’d use to describe it.”

  “Whatever you wanna call your Mr. Sadistic, it sure has its own way of doing things. I don’t know if that’s good or not, though. Mind you, not that I have experience in these matters like you and Lara.”

  “Trust me, Bunker, you don’t want the kind of experience we got.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Anyway, if it wants to prolong this fight, that’s fine with me. We’ll just do it all over again tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah, but maybe I got a date tomorrow night. You ever thought of that?”

  “Do you?”

  Bunker shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Have you been paying attention to the last few days?”

  “Good point.”

  Bunker was staring at him.

  “What?” Keo said.

  “Would it really, I don’t know, give up?” Bunker asked.

  “Give up? No. But would it quit attacking tonight, so we can do this all over again tomorrow night? Yeah. I think it would.” Keo clenched his teeth. “If I’ve learned one thing about this fucker, it’s that it can be really, really patient. Aggravatingly so, at times.”

  They didn’t have close-circuit cameras in the basement or in the house to make sure the ghouls were gone and weren’t lurking in the shadows waiting for them. Just because it was morning didn’t mean the creatures had completely retreated. Sunlight could kill a ghoul just as easily as silver bullets, but it couldn’t do its job if it couldn’t touch them.

  “Definitely need to install those CC cameras,” Bunker said.

  “We’ll do it first chance we get,” Keo said.

  “Look at you, being all Mr. Optimistic. Is that what you guys call it?”

  “Captain Optimism.”

  “Close enough.”

  But there was another way to make sure there wasn’t an ambush waiting to be sprung on them in the basement or somewhere else inside the dark house. The McCanns had built an escape tunnel into the underground shelter that led to an alternative entry/exit. The entrance was in the vault room, the same room Bunker had used to sneak behind Thuy earlier in the night, and the exit was over a half mile away.

  The doorway into the tunnel was just as thick and blast proof as the outer door and opened up into a concrete passageway that was ten feet high and five feet wide. It was essentially a skinnier version of the outer hallway and had remained undetected throughout The Purge and beyond. Keo had only seen the hatch on the other end once and wouldn’t have been able to locate it if Bunker hadn’t shown him its location. The half-mile distance from the main property was necessary; after all, it wouldn’t be much of a “secret” alternative way in and out if it was easy to discover.

  The ceiling was tall enough for an adult male to traverse without hitting his head but not nearly wide enough to bring anything through beyond boxes of supplies. There were small lights along the walls that lit up when Bunker hit a switch, and a small rectangular security slot near the top, with a two-inch thick tempered glass material, slid open to reveal what was on the other side. That gave them visual confirmation nothing was waiting for them in the tunnel, but they still had to open the door a crack and take a quick whiff of the interior to know for sure.

  The air was stale and hot, but there was nothing that even smelled like rotting garbage in the semidarkness.

  “All clear,” Keo said.

  “You first,” Bunker said.

  Keo took the lead with his MP5 while Bunker brought up the rear. The trip across the length of the underground tunnel was uneven
tful, with only their heavy breathing and footsteps against the solid floor to occupy the time. Neither one of them spoke, which was just as well, as Keo’s lungs were having to work overtime to withstand the suffocating heat. Thankfully the corridor was tall enough that they didn’t have to crouch.

  The air got noticeably hotter the farther they trekked through the semidarkness. It didn’t help that some of the light bulbs weren’t working, and Keo made a mental note to replace them the first chance he got. Fortunately, they were appropriately geared up for the trip and had brought along flashlights.

  The tunnel wasn’t a straight shot to the other end—there were constant bends as their path curved left and right, the curves sometimes for long periods before Keo could be sure there wasn’t anything waiting around the bend. It was unnerving, but he kept reminding himself that as long as he couldn’t smell ghouls, that meant they weren’t down here with him and Bunker. Besides, even if they were, he had the appropriate ammo to deal with them.

  God bless silver bullets.

  By the time they reached the other end, they were both drenched in sweat. Keo stopped in front of a metal ladder that led up to a round steel hatch about ten foot off the ground. There was a keypad next to it, the numbers glowing softly. The presence of lights meant there was still power to the keypad, but should the main generator lose power for whatever reason, an emergency one would have turned on.

  “Up you go,” Bunker said behind him.

  Keo climbed up and punched in the six-digit PIN. If, for some reason, the main and emergency generators went offline, there was a slot for a key next to the pad that could be used to open the hatch. Bunker had the key in his pocket right now.

  As soon as Keo punched in the final digit, the keypad glowed a soft green—the confirmation he’d entered the right code. He grabbed the submarine wheel and turned it without any real effort. With the locks disabled, the hatch opened easily for him.

  They didn’t have to worry about the possibility of ghouls waiting for them on the other side of the hatch, since the round door opened up into a secluded and unused wooded area in broad daylight. The door was camouflaged by plenty of trees and natural foliage, with Bunker having kept it that way since he took over from the McCanns.