Black (Road To Babylon, Book 5)

by Sam Sisavath

  She expected an argument, but instead he walked over and handed the AR to her. Gaby took it and thought, I should have asked him for it a long time ago, dammit.

  The AR had only two firing options—semi-auto and burst-fire. She made sure it was on the first. The rifle felt light in her hands, but fortunately Jones had saved a magazine that he also passed over.

  “You have anything else?” she asked.

  He nodded and drew his sidearm before moving over to the other side of the closet. He could probably hear the Mercerians coming just as she could without having to lean against the door between them.

  For a split second she had entertained the idea that it could have been Peters and Jolly returning from the scavenging jaunt, but the two men wouldn’t be slowly approaching the supply closet the way the men outside were doing right this second. No. She was listening to the enemy.

  The voices were gradually growing as the speakers neared, but they were taking their time. Which meant they weren’t complete idiots. The Mercerians had no reason to hurry. They had taken Darby Bay, after all. Everything now was just mop-up duty.

  At least it’s not ghouls.

  That was the only positive she could think of. At least it was human beings and not an endless wave of pruned black flesh and meth teeth. Those were still underneath her in the tunnels.

  She comforted herself with the knowledge that at least there was a finite number of men coming toward her. She could deal with that. She’d dealt with it before. You could count on men to do certain things. Predictable things. Now all she had to do was make sure—

  Pop-pop-pop! as someone opened fire from the hallway and the door shook against the impacts. The lever snapped loose under the assault as holes began appearing along the slab of wood, stitching it from top to bottom, then side to side.

  The shooting didn’t stop even after the door had swung open on its own, round after round punching through what was left of it and slamming into the concrete wall in the back. Gray clouds began filling up the closet, and still they kept shooting.

  Pop-pop-pop!

  Pop-pop-pop!

  There were so many rifles firing at once, so many shooters pitching in that the gunfire started becoming the brap-brap-brap of machine guns.

  Gaby braced herself, thankful that the door (What door? There’s no more door!) was the only thing the Mercerians could shoot because the wall behind her was solid concrete. Even a sustained volley wouldn’t punch through them. Or at least, she hoped not.

  The room continued to fill up with pulverized gray dust, and eventually Gaby lost sight of Jones on the other side of the now wide-open door. She couldn’t fathom how the door remained attached; there wasn’t enough of it left to even resemble a door anymore, and what was left clung to two hinges instead of three, and—

  The shooting suddenly stopped, and she heard the clack-clack of magazines changing.

  Now!

  Gaby pushed away from the wall, spinning to face the doorframe. At the same time, she flicked the fire selector on the AR to burst fire just half a second before she squeezed the trigger. The first two rounds in her initial three-round burst were early, and they slammed into the wall, but the third found its way out the opening.

  All three rounds from her second burst—then her third—were true.

  She glimpsed bodies standing in the hallway, but she was moving too fast to get a clear look at any one of them. She did see assault vests, circled M’s, and gas masks. Mercerians. Every single one of them.

  Bodies fell while others scrambled out of the way. She was moving too fast and couldn’t tell how many there were. There might have been two or three dozen jammed inside the narrow corridor. That limited space made searching for targets easy; she just shot into the thick of bodies moving against the moonlight.

  She squeezed the trigger a fourth time as she slid toward Jones’s side of the room, and while the first of the fourth three-round burst disappeared through the opening, the next two slammed harmlessly into the wall.

  “Fuck, fuck!” someone was shouting outside as Gaby flattened her back against the wall and instinctively ejected the magazine, searched for, found, and jammed in the second (And last!) spare.

  She sucked in a deep breath and almost choked on clouds of pulverized concrete filling up the room. She grimaced through it, ignoring the stabbing pain coming from her left arm. Most of the throbbing was limited to the elbow and upward to the shoulder joint, but at least she could grip the barrel of the rifle tightly enough not to drop it as she pulled her stunt.

  And she was alive!

  She didn’t know how. It had been a dumb move, but the only one she had in her arsenal. Any one of the men outside could have gotten in a lucky shot and put her out of her misery when she exposed herself for those brief few seconds.

  Except they hadn’t.

  Now all she had to do was perform the same miracle a second time. Except this time the Mercerians would be ready. Not only that, but they would know which side of the open door she was going to appear from.

  I’m going to die.

  God, I’m going to die in a stinking supply closet.

  She was preparing herself to do it all over again when someone shouted something coherent, followed by what sounded like sporadic gunfire. And there was something else. A new sound that was both familiar and—

  Suppressed weapons. Someone is using suppressed weapons!

  Stray bullets sailed through the open doorframe and struck the far wall, further adding to the already thick gray clouds still lingering in the room. But there weren’t nearly enough bullets hitting the wall to convince her that someone was purposefully targeting the interior of the closet.

  She glanced over at Jones, hyperventilating in the corner. He stood there like a statue with his pistol gripped in both hands in front of him. At that moment, he really did look like someone’s dad who was also a CPA.

  The shooting had stopped in the hallway. Gaby leaned closer to the door and listened to the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings rolling around on the hard floor. She thought she could hear voices. Not words, but men moaning in pain.

  What just happened?

  Gaby didn’t move, and neither did Jones in the corner. She wasn’t even sure if he could if he tried. The poor bastard—

  “Gaby,” a voice said. It came from the hallway outside. “You still alive in there?”

  Then a second—and almost familiar—voice: “Don’t be shy. The bad people are gone.”

  She managed a smile. “Peters? Jolly?”

  “Yeah,” Peters said.

  Gaby leaned around the open door and looked out.

  It was a bloodbath in the hallway, with bodies stacked on top of one another, starting at about five meters from the closet and continuing on for another ten. There had to be a dozen, maybe more, men on the floor. Bloodied circled M’s on a few of their chests glistened in the moonlight.

  Peters and Jolly stood on the other side of the fresh graveyard, reloading their rifles while still wearing their Mercerian outfits, gas masks dangling against their chests. They both looked unhurt.

  “Jesus, I’m glad to see you guys,” Gaby said.

  “You good?” Peters asked.

  “I am now.” Then, with a barely contained smile, “Back in a jiffy, huh?”

  Jolly shrugged. “We got back as fast as we could.”

  She looked down at the bodies and tried to figure out how to get through them without stepping on them in the process. It was a dilemma, but it was a hell of a better dilemma than the one she’d been facing a minute ago.

  “Becker and Walton?” Peters asked.

  Gaby shook her head.

  “Shit,” Peters said.

  “Yeah,” Gaby said.

  Fifteen

  There were bodies everywhere. Not just in the hallway outside the supply closet but stretching all the way back to the side door. Peters and Jolly had killed their way to get to her using their suppressed rifles. Their stolen uniforms�
�the vests with circled M’s and gas masks—helped them to blend in, camouflaging them as they methodically made their way through the warehouse.

  Remind me never to get on the wrong side of these guys. Jesus Christ.

  Gaby stopped counting the dead after she hit fifteen and concentrated instead on adjusting the vest she’d put on, along with the gas mask hanging around her neck by a strap. It was uncomfortable, and the not-quite-dry blood didn’t help. There were two bullet holes near the center between two of the pouches, but unless you got really close they were invisible, especially at night.

  She and Jones followed Peters and Jolly back to the side door, passing two other doors into the center of the warehouse to their right. The Mercerians had indeed blasted their way into the building from the front entrance just as she had guessed, and had been converging on her from two sides. The world had gone mostly quiet around them, but there were still sporadic bursts of gunfire in the distance. Nothing close enough to cause alarm, but they were good signs that the fight wasn’t completely over.

  Who are you kidding? It’s over. It’s been over for a while now.

  “They’re going through the buildings one by one now,” Peters told her as they made their way through the warehouse, careful to listen for more Mercerians nearby. “They’ve just about cleared out everyone on the east and south sides, and they’re starting on the west. We passed a lot of bodies, but a lot of survivors, too.”

  “Survivors?” Gaby said.

  “Local Darby Bay citizens and Black Tiders. They’re taking prisoners, rounding them up like cattle. The ones who aren’t fighting back, anyway.”

  “We still have fighters out there,” Jolly said. “Small groups. Unorganized.”

  “What about ghouls?” Gaby asked. “Did they come back?”

  “Yes, but not in the same numbers as before,” Peters said. “Not even in the same league. I guess the ones in the tunnels either can’t find their way out, or they’re hanging around down there for some reason.”

  “No one ever accused the black eyes of being smart,” Jolly said.

  Gaby glanced down at her watch. 12:57 a.m.

  “What about the planes that Danny sent over?” she asked.

  “Still on their way, though I don’t know what good they’ll do,” Peters said. “They could reduce the city to rubble, but that’d just kill a lot of innocent people, too.”

  “And the marinas? That’s the quickest way out of the city.”

  “Good point. The Gulf of Mexico is looking mighty tempting right about now,” Jolly said.

  “That was one of the places the Buckies took first,” Peters said. “There must be a hundred of them down there, and they have technical support.”

  “How many?” Gaby asked.

  “Enough to kill anyone making a run for it.”

  Of course they took the marinas as soon as they could. Because they had spies in Darby Bay, and they knew where we would go when they attacked. They knew everything.

  Goddammit, they knew everything.

  They finally reached the side door, moonlight flooding in through the doorless frame. The bodies she’d seen before were still there along with a couple of new ones. Peters’s and Jolly’s victims. Gaby looked up the hallway past the opening and hoped to find clues to Becker’s whereabouts. But it was too dark, and nothing was moving down there.

  He’s dead. That explosion took out the door, and he was standing right in front of it. No one could have survived that. No one.

  She followed Peters and Jolly out into the parking lot, Jones trailing behind in the back. There were two Mercerians lying next to two trucks outside, both vehicles rigged as technicals. There were big white M’s spray painted on their doors, making them easy to spot from a distance.

  They didn’t move right away and instead took their time listening for foot traffic and voices, and only jogged toward a nearby alley when they were sure no one else was coming. Gaby had rearmed herself with an M4 from one of the dead Mercerians and refilled her pouches with spares. Her left arm was doing fine, with only annoying minor moments of pain. She could have gritted her teeth through them, but she took two more of Jolly’s painkillers instead.

  She thought of Becker, telling her to “go easy” on the pills because she might “wanna save some for later.”

  Becker…

  I’m sorry, Becker. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.

  I barely saved myself…

  Once they were beyond the warehouse, they picked their way through the dark back alleys, keeping away from the streetlights and sticking to the shadows whenever they could. Vehicles zoomed past them on the roads, men in the back of trucks manning machine guns while big M’s spray painted along the doors flashed by. She expected to see flags in the back of the technicals to further shove home the point that they’d won.

  “Didn’t think it’d end this way,” Becker had said to her.

  “It’s not over yet. Not while we’re still alive,” she had responded.

  Even now, replaying that conversation in her head, she wondered if she’d sounded all that convincing. And yet she still believed that it wasn’t over, not as long as she and Lara and Danny were still alive.

  Lara, most of all.

  A sudden gust of wind, followed by the roar of jet engines as a plane flashed by overhead. It appeared and disappeared in the space of half a heartbeat between the edges of two rooftops above them. Gaby barely glimpsed its gray belly before it was gone.

  Finally.

  “Look who decided to show up,” Jolly said, craning his head to look up at the now-empty sky.

  “Are they going to bomb the place?” Jones asked.

  The man sounded worried, which Gaby thought was appropriate since they were still in Darby Bay, too, and the pilots wouldn’t have a clue where they were. The prospect of dying in a friendly fire incident, after everything she had lived through tonight, left her mildly amused.

  It’d be a hell of a way to go, that’s for sure.

  “Hope not,” Peters said. “Not while we’re still down here in the wrong jammies, anyway.”

  A second plane appeared and disappeared overhead, following in the wake of the first. It had moved too fast for her to see very much, but she did glimpse just enough of its wings to know it was an A-10 Thunderbolt.

  Those are definitely ours.

  The presence of the Warthogs should have brightened her mood, but it didn’t, because Peters was right. The kind of firepower the A-10s could bring to the battle was unparalleled, but they were also incredibly dangerous to everyone if they didn’t have a clear target. Or did they?

  “The technicals,” Gaby said.

  Peters, hiding in the shadows in front of her—Jolly and Jones were behind her, almost submerged in patches of blackness—glanced over. “What about them?”

  “Can’t they can see the technicals? Those are obvious targets.”

  “Those M’s don’t hurt,” Jolly said.

  “I don’t know,” Peters said. “They’d have to get pretty low to be sure—”

  A series of brap-brap-brap rocked the silent Darby Bay night and went on for five—ten—twenty seconds. Gaby knew right away what that was and what was happening: The Mercerian technicals were shooting, and coupled with the Warthogs’ sudden appearance over the city, she didn’t have to think too long and hard about what they were firing at.

  “That should do it,” Jolly said.

  “Do what?” Jones asked.

  “Wait for it.”

  “For what?”

  “Just wait for it.”

  Jones flashed a perplexed look, but Gaby knew exactly what Jolly was talking about.

  The technical with the mounted machine gun firing couldn’t have been very far from their location, because Gaby could hear the brap-brap-brap loud and clear. A block, maybe two, but that was—

  Then she heard it, the sound she and Jolly had been waiting for:

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  She knew i
t was coming and was fully prepared for it, but a shiver still sliced up and down her spine. She couldn’t help herself. No matter how many times the A-10 pilots had saved her life out there in the fields, there was always a small part of her that wondered what kind of fresh hell awaited her if she should, one day, end up at the wrong end of those 30 millimeter GAU-8 Avenger cannons.

  The ferocious roar of cannon fire was followed by something exploding, then a burst of brightness in the dark skies behind them about a block and a half away. The machine guns had stopped firing at the same time, probably because the ones manning it were dead.

  “Look,” Jolly said, pointing at what looked like fireworks streaking upward into the dark Darby Bay air from different parts of the city.

  “What is that?” Jones asked.

  “Rockets,” Peters said. “They’re trying to shoot down the Warthogs.”

  Gaby watched as half a dozen rockets flew in jagged lines across the skyline like Roman candles. But there were no explosions up there because they didn’t hit anything, and the projectiles began falling back down to earth. Some exploded against buildings and rooftops across town, while others landed well beyond the city limits. The latter produced flashes, but barely any sounds.

  Then, as if in response:

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  It came from the other side of the city and was quickly followed by the sound of explosions and plumes of fire lighting up the black night.

  The four of them remained perfectly still, suddenly bystanders to a war instead of participants. Gaby was more than happy to stay away from these firefights.

  Another roar as a Warthog appeared above them and was gone just as quickly.

  Next to her, Peters was holding something in his hand. A radio. He was manipulating the volume and slowly she began to make out voices, shouting:

  “—shoot at it! Jesus Christ, what are you fucking punters doing? You can’t bring those planes down! Stop shooting at them and get out of the streets! If they can’t see you, they can’t shoot you! Fuck me dead!”

  The voice sounded familiar, but Gaby couldn’t quite place it. For a moment she wondered if it was Buck himself, but it was too shrill and foreign-sounding.