“That’s it, think positive,” Will said.
Millard’s clothes actually fit him pretty well, and he shoved the sheathed knife behind his back.
“I’m being realistic,” Natasha said. “These two didn’t even know why the uniforms work. They just accepted it because that’s what they do; they’re followers. Look how fast the tall one was willing to buy your bullshit.”
They were adapting so they wouldn’t perish. It’s human nature.
“What’s in the back room?” he asked.
“Just some empty boxes. The window was unlocked, and it was just big enough for me to crawl through.”
Then Natasha went very quiet.
“What’s—” he started to ask.
She was staring past him and out the windows again, at the creatures gathered outside. Nothing had changed that he could see. There were still too many of them, overflowing out of the parking lot and onto the feeder road. No matter how hard or long he stared, it was impossible to make out the gray concrete of the I-10 in the background. Was it even still there?
“What’s happening?” Natasha asked. Her voice had dropped noticeably again.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“I don’t see anything.”
“They don’t look different to you?”
He shook his head, then glanced back at her. Natasha had retreated until she was standing (almost leaning) against the far wall, now little more than a silhouette in the shadows. He didn’t know how, but he could actually see her terrified face in the darkness.
“I swear I saw them move,” she said.
“Move?”
“Yeah. They moved.”
“How?”
“I can’t explain—”
Bang!
He spun around, lifting the M4 just as the ghoul picked itself up from the concrete sidewalk. It had smashed itself, skull first, into one of the twin glass doors and left behind a crack about an inch long. The figure slowly straightened up, tar-like black eyes finding Will and focusing in, as if it knew—it knew—who he was.
“That can’t be good,” Natasha said breathlessly behind him.
Yeah, I think that’s the understatement of the century, Natasha.
Will took another step back, then another one, when a second ghoul raced forward and flung itself into the other glass door. It struck headfirst, like the other one, and instantly fell to the sidewalk before picking itself back up. Like the first one, it had left an inch-wide crack across the glass.
What the hell were they doing? They weren’t going to break through the doors. Most convenience stores had tempered glass designed to withstand this kind of brute force attack. It would take forever to shatter unless you had a pickup truck moving at full speed. And right now he didn’t see a vehicle—
Oh, fuck.
He stumbled back as they began flinging themselves into the glass walls—bang! bang! bang!—all across the length of the store.
One after another—
Bang!
—after another—
Bang!
Each impact rang out like a gunshot—
Bang!
Worse than gunshots, because this weapon could be reloaded again and again, because they never died, they didn’t feel pain, and shattered limbs and broken bones meant nothing to them. The windows, along with the doors, were starting to chip little by little with every strike. They would break. Sooner or later, they would break.
“What now?” Natasha shouted behind him.
He didn’t answer her, because there was nowhere to run. If there were this many ghouls outside that he could see, there were probably even more surrounding the building that they couldn’t. Because it was night outside, and the night was theirs.
It was hers.
“I’m coming, Will,” she had said. “I’ll be there soon…”
“What the fuck is happening?” Natasha shouted, her voice drowning in the maddening fury of ghouls spearing the glasses with their bodies.
The constant hammer pounding, growing…
Bang!
“Hey!”
BANG!
“What now? What do we do now?”
BANG!!!
CHAPTER 22
GABY
“This is Lara! Everyone who isn’t already there, head to your designated exit points now! I repeat! Head to your exit points now! The island is lost! I repeat! The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
She might have stopped breathing for a moment as Lara’s words echoed through the earbud. Her body was still trembling from the sight of men dying on the beach—and the fact she had contributed to that body count—when the explosion ripped through the island, followed by Lara’s voice over the radio.
“The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
It couldn’t be possible, could it? She and Danny and Nate had risked everything to get down here just to save the island. They had left Will behind in order to do it. All that sacrifice had resulted in these bodies lying on the beach, the lapping waves of Beaufont Lake flooding the white sand with crimson blood that looked shockingly bright even with just the moonlight. At first she thought shooting men behind the night vision of her optic was surreal, like playing a videogame. The men stumbling and jumping out of their beached vessels didn’t look like actual human beings; they were more pixilated CGI.
But they were real, just like the round after round she had sent into them from the safety of the tree line. She had lost count of how many times she moved from spot to spot, never giving the black-clad assaulters a single location to shoot at. Eventually, they started believing there was more than just her in the eastern half of the beach and began spraying indiscriminately into the trees.
All of that, and for what?
“The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
This can’t be how it ends. All this blood. All those lives…
“Gaby!” someone shouted in her ear. Danny. “Get your ass moving!”
How did he know she wasn’t already moving?
Because he was Danny, and he knew her. Just like Will knew her. They had trained her themselves on this very island, where she had dreamt about coming back to night after night. Only to have it end now…like this?
“Gaby!” Danny again. “Move your ass! That’s an order! Vamos!”
How the hell did he know she wasn’t already moving?
She pushed up from the slightly damp ground and onto her feet, then spun around and began running through the woods. She was glad to go, happy to be leaving the beach behind. If not figuratively, at least literally. She was going to have nightmares about tonight for years to come, she knew that much, and the less she could remember the images—the blood, the dead…but especially the dead—the better.
She tried to do that now—push the sight of those men falling as she shot them—as Danny and Keo shot them—out of her mind. But they were still too fresh and the best she could do was tell herself it was either her or them, because they hadn’t come here to talk. They had come here armed and ready to kill.
The wind against her face, the branches slapping her legs and arms, brought her back to the present. Back to the here and now. And right now, they were evacuating the island—
Wait, how was she moving so fast? Oh, right; because she wasn’t as weighed down by ammo as she was when the night started, because she had used up all her spare magazines. The one in the M4 at the moment was only half full, and once she used it up she would be down to just the Glock in her hip holster. At least she had two spare magazines for that.
The bodies on the beach. I did that. I killed those men.
God help me, I killed those men.
For a second or two, she entertained the idea of stopping and turning around and running back to the beach and collecting spare magazines from those very same men who she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Did they want to come here? Were they forced? Did they have
friends or family waiting for them back in the towns? She remembered the woman with the boy in L15 and the countless other people walking along the sidewalks. Couples. Families. Was there a husband among the dead on the beach right now? Maybe she had killed him. Or maybe it was the man next to him—
Stop it. They’re gone. You did what you had to do.
Focus!
The clicking in her right ear helped her to concentrate on the moment, on the branches still slapping against her arms and legs, and the chill that pervaded the island and soaked her to the very bones despite her clothing.
“Lara,” a voice said.
“Keo!” Lara shouted back. “Where are you?”
“Southwest corner, just beyond the power station.”
“What do you see?”
“More assaulters. They’re coming through the shack next to the power station and heading right at you.”
“How many?”
“Too many. But if we coordinate a defense—”
“No,” Lara said, cutting him off. “It’s not the humans we have to worry about. Without the shack, there’s nothing to hold them back. Do you understand? Get to your exit point. We’re getting off the island!”
“Roger that,” Keo said, and the radio went quiet again.
Gaby burst out of the woods a moment later and into the almost pitch-black state of the hotel grounds. Even the Tower in the distance was barely visible, a hulking and darkened spire sticking out of the cliff, the familiar floodlights that usually adorned its exterior missing. Not gone, just turned off like the rest of the island, along with the LED lamps that had been inside the third floor a few hours ago.
For the first time in a long time, Gaby felt alone. The others were gone, moving toward their exit points. Soon, they’d all be converging on the Trident, anchored somewhere on the other side of the island. Lara’s Plan D, just in case everything went to hell.
I guess this means everything’s gone to hell.
She jogged across the tall grass, trying to get her bearings as she went. She had exited the woods at a random point and was much further away from the hotel than she had expected. She could see its squat one-story shape in the distance, the walls visible against the deep black of a lightless world. She was so used to seeing the grounds around the hotel lit up by bright LEDs that not having those markers now was startling.
She turned away from the hotel and ran in the direction of the Tower, where her designated exit point was. Even without lights, it was hard to miss, its structure looming against the moonlit sky. Carly or Benny would have already put the escape ladder in place over the cliff and climbed down, where two cheap aluminum boats, each with a pair of paddles inside, awaited them among the rocks. If both of them had left at the same time (which made sense), they would have left one boat down there for her. Or, at least, she hoped.
She was halfway to the Tower when the pop-pop-pop of assault rifles made her slide to a stop in the tall grass. The shooting was coming from her left, where the hotel was. The vicious back-and-forth paralyzed her, and Gaby didn’t know whether to keep running to her exit point or turn toward the hotel.
“The island is lost! I repeat! The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
Orders were orders, but the sound of gunfire seized her and refused to let go. Maybe it was the ferocious nature of it, or its proximity—so close, and yet so far away. Who was shooting? Lara and Danny and how many assaulters? It was definitely concentrated inside the hotel, she was sure of it. There was a hollow almost echo-y quality to the gunshots, hints that they were coming from enclosed spaces.
“We’re pinned!” someone screamed in her right ear. Lara. She was shouting to be heard over the continuous roar of rifles firing at close proximity. “Blaine, take off now!”
“What?” Blaine shouted back through the radio. “We’re not leaving without you! Get over here!”
“We’re not going to make it!”
“Then we’ll come back to you!”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“Lara!”
“That’s an order, Blaine! Move your ass now or I’m sending Danny over there to kick it!”
“Yeah, what she said!” Danny chimed in.
“Danny!” Carly. “What are you doing? Get over here, you dumbass!”
“Get going!” Danny shouted back. “We’ll catch up! I promise, babe!”
“You goddamn better!”
“Scout’s honor!”
“You were never in the scouts—” Carly started to say, when a loud explosion drowned out the voices all trying to speak at the same time.
The blast had come from the hotel, almost a football field away from her, but it sounded much closer. Thick plumes of smoke were drifting into the air, looking almost poetic against the black canvas of night. But she knew there was nothing lyrical about it, especially when the gunfire temporarily halted in the aftermath.
Gaby was running full-speed toward the hotel before she even realized she had made the decision. About ten seconds into her run, the shooting started up again, the back-and-forth still as frenzied as they had been before the explosion. As horrific as it was to think so, the fact that two sides were exchanging gunfire was a good sign that either Lara or Danny (or both) were still alive.
She hoped, anyway.
To keep her mind off the fact that she was running to the sound of automatic gunfire, Gaby tried to imagine how many assaulters were waiting for her in there. They had sent anywhere from thirty to fifty on the beach alone. So how many more had gotten through the tunnel? Another thirty to fifty? God, she hoped not. The very idea of having to kill that many more made her want to stop and vomit into the grass.
But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Lara and Danny were in the hotel right now. (What happened to Roy and Stan and Sarah?) And they clearly needed her help, or Lara wouldn’t have ordered Blaine to go. She had done that to save them, Gaby knew, because for whatever reason, she and Danny weren’t going to make it to their exit point.
Gaby ran until her lungs were burning, and still the hotel seemed to remain just as far away as when she had counted the distance a few seconds ago. As she drew closer, she realized the shooting wasn’t just coming from the building in front of her. It was coming from the other side, too, as well as from her right. That was where the Trident was, waiting to shove off. There were, as far as she could tell, at least two or three gun battles going on simultaneously across the island.
And here she was, running right into the middle of one of them—
BOOM!
Another explosion tore through the hotel just as she was about to reach it. This time she was close enough to feel the ground trembling as the blast blew a hole in the roof near the middle, almost directly in front of her. It sounded like a grenade had gone off. Christ, who was throwing around grenades on the island? Was the first blast a grenade, too?
Gaby dived to her left as debris—chunks of the ceiling and God knew what else was up there at the moment, left behind when the workers abandoned the place—rained down around her. Something hard pelted her head and shoulders and she threw herself against the hotel wall and clung to it, trying desperately to make herself small against the falling pieces of the building.
She could smell the pluming smoke and hear the still-rattling gunfire from the other side of the wall she was pressed up against. Right on the other side. Even a grenade going off hadn’t stopped them for very long.
The side door was to her right, within easy reach. Even without lights to point her way, she knew there would be one around here and there it was. She moved toward it now, trying in vain to keep track of the back-and-forth clatter of assault rifles inside the hotel.
What was going on in there? Some kind of running gunfight? Although at the moment it sounded like it had stalled in one spot. The first explosion had come from her left—very close to where the lobby would be—and moved right toward the back, through the hallways. So why had it stopped now?
S
top thinking and move!
She grabbed the doorknob and took a breath, then counted to five—
One.
She pulled the door and slipped inside—raising the M4, peering through the night-vision scope—even before the door had swung completely open. It would have been pitch black inside the narrow passageway except for the staccato flash-flash-flash of assault rifles firing in the connecting hallway ten meters in front of her. She easily picked up the distinctive clink-clink-clink of ejected shell casings pelting the hotel’s smooth tile floor.
The endless flashes filled her vision while the continuous slamming of gunshots dominated her eardrums, and the lingering sting of sulfur in the air, combined with the suffocating smell of gun powder in the closed confines, threatened to overwhelm her sense of smell. There was a big hole in the ceiling in front of her where the two hallways joined, though it hadn’t done very much to vent out the place.
Gaby pushed through until she was almost at the corner, when there was a flurry of movement in front of her. A man clad all in black, with a thick beard that might have been red (though it was hard to tell when everything was awash in green), took a step backward and stopped in front of her and began reloading. The man’s night-vision goggles protruded forward from his aging face like a pair of alien eyes. She guessed he had to be in his forties, and he looked a bit like her Uncle Bill.
He must have sensed her, because he turned his head and saw her—
Gaby shot him once in the chest.
Even as the man fell, she was running up the hallway and flicking the fire selector on her rifle to full-auto. She reached the corner and stepped over the crumpled body, turning right to find three men crouched further up the narrow passageway—two on one side, the third on the opposite—with their weapons aimed at a door that had already been perforated by at least two dozen bullet holes. The backs of all three men were to her, their black uniforms glowing green under the phosphorous lens of her night-vision scope.
Once upon a time, Gaby might have hesitated. Certainly, the Gaby from a year ago, who depended on Matt (and, to a lesser extent, Josh) to keep her safe would have been horrified at the thought of shooting men in the back. That Gaby would never have made it off the beach earlier tonight.
Purge of Babylon (Book 5): The Ashes of Pompeii Page 30