by Sam Sisavath
That caused his partner to stop and glance down briefly, and by the time he had gathered himself and turned back around, Gaby fired again—pop-pop!—and put two into his chest. The man dropped and lay still, even though the first one was still moving around. Barely.
Her heart was already racing (In and out. In and out!) as Gaby turned around and finally got a good look at the wagon’s occupants.
Shocked and confused faces stared back at her. She was right; they were all women. There were a couple of teenagers among them and a few older women in their forties. Most of them had been crying, and their eyes were red and baggy.
A small girl—possibly the smallest in the bunch—stood up and looked up the road at the two dead men before training light brown eyes back on Gaby. “Is it over?”
Gaby recognized the voice as belonging to the one who had warned her earlier. She didn’t answer, and instead checked down the road just in case the man she had let escape returned.
Will would have killed him. So would have Danny. Because they were smart, and it was the smart thing to do. It was the only thing to do when you were dealing with men who murdered entire towns.
So why didn’t she shoot him?
Because I’m not them, and I never will be.
God help me…
Five
She listened for the inevitable roar of car engines that she knew would be coming from down the road—from Kohl’s Port. There was no way someone hadn’t heard her gunshots. Sound traveled these days, especially gunfire—
Car engines, coming toward them.
I hate it when I’m right.
The women were climbing down from the wagon, a few looking as if they might fall to the pavement if someone wasn’t there to lend a hand. There were seven in all, with the youngest being the girl who had spoken up. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She was small, though not necessarily frail looking.
The oldest was in her late forties, with gray hair along the temples, and she was one of the first to climb down. “Do you hear that?” the woman asked Gaby.
Gaby nodded. She could hear it just fine, but she also knew it wasn’t going to reach them for a while. Five minutes, even if they were hauling ass, which was exactly what it sounded like.
“Is there anywhere you can go?” she asked the woman.
The woman seemed to think about it—or, at least, Gaby hoped she was. The truth was, the woman looked almost in pain, and it was the same with the others. They were still too traumatized—the taking of their town, then being herded like cattle into the wagon—and Gaby couldn’t be sure they had even heard her question.
All except for the girl, who walked up to Gaby. “More of them’re coming. What should we do?”
“We?” Gaby thought.
She didn’t answer the girl, and instead looked back at the older woman. The others seemed to congregate around her. “Is there another town? Another place around here that you can go for safety?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. I…I don’t know.”
“Dresden,” another woman said. She had blonde hair and was tall. “There’s Dresden, Macy.”
The older woman, Macy, nodded. “Yes. Dresden,” she said, turning back to Gaby. “We can go to Dresden.”
“How far is it?” Gaby asked.
“Two miles—” She stopped and glanced around her for a moment to get her bearings. Then, “Maybe three miles northwest.”
Gaby had never heard of Dresden. But then, she’d never heard of Kohl’s Port, either, until Danny gave her the assignment.
“Will it be safe?” she asked Macy. “Dresden?”
“They have soldiers,” the blonde said.
“Not soldiers,” Macy said. “But security people. I think…” She paused again. “I think it’s our best choice.”
“Can you lead the others there?” Gaby asked. “Do you know the way?”
“I do,” Macy nodded. She looked toward the same patch of woods that Gaby had come out of earlier. “I can take them.”
“Go. Take the weapons and go.”
Macy turned to the blonde, and the two women exchanged a brief, determined nod before they hurried to strip the rifles and handguns off the four dead men in the road. For a group of women that Gaby wasn’t sure could even walk a few minutes ago, they were responding incredibly well.
But she guessed they had to be tough to have survived this long. Collaborators or not—and almost everyone she’d met since Houston had been living in the ghoul towns during The Purge years—those still around had developed some survival skills, even if it did take a while to kick in.
When the women were done, Macy looked over at Gaby. “Thank you.”
“Go,” Gaby said.
The older woman nodded, and Gaby thought she was going to say something else, but Macy didn’t. Instead, Macy led the others off the road and into the woods—
“Can I go with you?” a voice asked.
It was the girl, standing in the road next to Gaby, and had been all this time. All five-two of her, in denim overalls that gave off a very strong fish smell. Her arms hung helplessly at her sides, and she stared at Gaby with those round brown eyes of hers. She looked even smaller up close. Not necessarily weaker, because she wasn’t malnourished. If anything, she looked in good health. The girl was just small.
“Go with them,” Gaby said, nodding after Macy and the others. The women had already disappeared into the woods, but Gaby could still see them through the wall of trees.
“I don’t want to,” the girl said.
Gaby narrowed her eyes at her, but the sounds of incoming cars drew her attention instead. They were getting closer.
Less than two minutes now…
Gaby began backpedaling up the road. “You need to go with the others.”
“I don’t want to,” the girl said as she followed Gaby.
“I don’t care what you want. Go,” she said, and pointed after the others.
Gaby jogged off, and thought, I don’t need this right now.
When she glanced back, the girl was briskly walking after her, stuck somewhere between running and walking.
“What’s wrong with you?” Gaby said. “Go with the others.”
“He’s dead,” the girl said.
“What?”
“My dad. He’s dead. They killed him.” She pursed her lips, looking childish all of a sudden.
What am I talking about? She is a child.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not my problem,” Gaby said.
She turned around and angled right toward the other side of the woods, in the direction that would take her back to the coastline, and from there she could try to reach Black Tide with the handheld portable—
Soft footsteps behind her.
She looked back and wasn’t surprised to see the girl ducking under a branch as she trailed behind Gaby. The girl was about ten meters back, and the distance between them was getting longer. The kid was clearly doing her best to catch up, but her short legs weren’t going to be any match for Gaby.
Jesus Christ. Just what I need.
Gaby stopped and turned around again. She had put enough distance from the road that she wasn’t too worried about being spotted. After all, if she couldn’t see the two lanes from here, then anyone out there wouldn’t be able to see in at her, either. Probably.
The girl walked over and stopped in front of Gaby. She was breathing hard and wiping at beads of sweat along her brow, but there was no denying that steely look of determination on her face. She was not going to be chased away.
“You’re out of shape,” Gaby said.
“I haven’t had to run a lot,” the girl said.
Gaby shook her head and sighed. “What’s your name?”
“Reese.”
“I’m sorry about your dad, Reese.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you see it?”
Reese nodded.
“Okay,” Gaby said.
“Okay?” th
e girl repeated.
“Keep up and try not to make too much noise. That means avoiding branches in the air and twigs on the ground. Understand?”
Reese nodded before pursing a victorious smile.
Gaby stopped three times in the next twenty minutes to make sure they weren’t being pursued, always looking back in the direction of the country road they had fled. There was never anyone behind them, and the sounds of car engines had faded about ten minutes earlier, but Gaby always lingered a minute or two each time, not moving and barely breathing.
Just in case…
Reese was very good about keeping the noise down. In fact, she hardly made any whenever
Gaby did her check. She also didn’t say a word, but Gaby knew that was only temporary. She was just a kid, after all, and Gaby had been around too many kids to know that the quiet wasn’t going to last.
After the third time Gaby stopped to check, found nothing back there, and they continued on their way, Reese finally said, “How did you do that?”
Gaby looked over at the kid walking beside her. She had started moving slower on purpose so the girl wouldn’t need to almost-run to match her pace. Even if Reese weren’t five-two and short-statured, she probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Not everyone, after all, had had the privilege of being trained by two ex-Army Rangers.
“Do what?” Gaby asked, even though she already knew the question.
“Kill those men,” Reese said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Reese was staring at her, and Gaby was afraid the girl might walk into a tree and poke her eyes out, so she slowed down even further, though she didn’t want to. She thought she should already smell more of the ocean water; soon they’d be on the coastline.
“Training,” Gaby said.
“What kind of training?” Reese asked.
The kind that makes every muscle on your body ache, even the ones you didn’t know you had, every morning and every night, but you do it anyway because you know it’s worth it, and the alternative is to be helpless and weak and a victim, and never again. Never again.
Gaby said instead, “Hard training.”
“Can I get trained, too?”
“You wanna train?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want to kill them.”
Gaby looked over at Reese again, at those wide eyes that seemed much too large for such a small, cherubic face. That mask of determination shined through, as if nothing was going to stand in her way once she set her sights on something.
That reminds me of someone I know...
“Is that why you followed me?” Gaby asked.
Reese nodded. “They killed Dad.”
“Back in town.”
“Yeah.”
“What else did you see?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how many men did you see? The ones that attacked the town?”
The girl thought about it, seemed to even struggle with the question. Finally, she shook her head. “There was a lot.”
“How many is a lot?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
Well, that didn’t go anywhere, she thought, and asked instead, “Where did they kill your dad?”
“At the marina.”
“Did he get any of them?”
“No. He didn’t have a gun. He never has a gun. Most people in town didn’t.”
Gaby had seen that for herself. Paul and Louis, Kohl’s Port’s spokesmen, had been wearing gun belts when they met her and her team at the marina, but Gaby had the feeling they had just put them on that very day, almost for show. And yet Redman had still lost seven men. That was counting the two she’d shot, which left five unaccounted for. Gaby wondered if her people—Kylie, Geoff, Martin, and Berryman—had managed to take out the other five.
That last thought should have made her happy—or at least proud of her team—but it just reminded her again that she was alive and they weren’t.
What’s there to be proud of? Team leaders who lose their whole team don’t deserve to be proud of a damn thing.
“You okay?” Reese was asking next to her.
She looked over at the girl, into those curious big eyes again. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Reese shrugged but didn’t say anything.
“Where were they taking you in that wagon?” Gaby asked.
“They didn’t say.”
“I only saw women. What happened to the men?”
“They killed them.”
“All of them?”
The girl nodded. “They could have killed me, too, but they didn’t. Instead, they put me into a building with the others.”
Gaby walked in silence for a moment, her mind racing. Was the girl right? Had Redman’s people killed all the men and spared the women to take them as captives? Was that the objective all along?
She thought back to the town square, remembered running across the cobblestone circle and then the street, before seeing the bodies… Had they all been male? She couldn’t be certain, because she hadn’t stopped to look closely at the corpses. She’d only scanned them, noticing the ones wearing the black assault vests, the ones in civilian clothes, and not recognizing any of her team members among them.
Had all of the dead ones been men?
Maybe, but she couldn’t say with 100 percent certainty.
“They put you and the other women into a building?” Gaby asked the girl.
“Uh huh.”
“Do you remember how many there were?”
“A lot. I think all of us? Maybe almost all of us…”
So they purposefully killed all the men and kept the women? Why?
“And the kids, too,” Reese added.
“The kids?”
“Yeah. Clyde and John was there. And Kaitlyn and Peter. A lot of others, too.”
Murder the men, but keep the women and kids. Why?
Gaby sneaked a peek at the girl walking next to her. She wondered how much of Reese’s memory she should trust. The kid was, after all, still traumatized by this morning’s ordeal. She could have been misremembering or confused. It was possible. More than possible, actually, it was highly likely. Town massacres tended to leave people rattled, never mind kids.
“How old are you?” Gaby asked.
“Thirteen,” Reese said. “How old are you?”
“Twenty…something.”
“Something what?”
“You don’t need to know that.” Reese gave her a confused look, but Gaby ignored her and said instead, “Why didn’t you go with the others?”
“I saw what you did.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want to do what you do.”
And what is that? Get her entire team wiped out?
“Why?” Gaby asked.
“Because they killed Dad, and I want to make them pay,” the girl said.
Great. Just what I need. A thirteen-year-old kid that wants revenge against men with technicals.
“Will you teach me?” Reese was asking her.
Gaby shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a teacher, and you’re just a kid.”
“I’m thirteen.”
“And that makes you a kid.”
Reese puffed up her cheeks. “I helped my dad fish. I was up before him every morning. I could do things that most adults in town couldn’t. I’m not a kid.”
“Killing is not fishing, Reese,” Gaby said, and walked on ahead.
The girl stopped, and Gaby could feel her eyes drilling into her back, and she half-expected Reese to turn around and stomp away in anger. But instead, the teenager ran to catch up and didn’t stop until she was walking beside Gaby again, matching her step for step even if it was clearly taking a lot of effort.
“I’m going to make them pay whether you help me or not,” the girl said. “They killed Dad. They killed all those people in town. Someone has to make them
pay.”
“And that someone’s going to be you?” Gaby asked.
“If it has to be. If you won’t do it.”
Gaby shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Reese. This isn’t a game. It’s life and death. You don’t want to get into this if you don’t have to. I wish I didn’t have to, but I didn’t have any choice.”
“Neither do I.”
“Yes, you do. You don’t think you do, now, but yes, you do. Kids can be kids again. I know plenty that still are.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Reese said.
“Why not?”
“Because—”
Before Reese could finish, the branches around them began shaking, and Gaby heard a very familiar noise.
She glanced up just in time to see the drab olive-green belly of a large metal object flashing by overhead, the whup-whup-whup noise it was generating piercing the tree crowns at about the same time a large gust of wind washed over them.
“Whoa, it’s a helicopter,” Reese said.
Gaby turned to follow the aircraft’s path—west, back in the direction she and Reese had come. She hadn’t been able to see any writings on the chopper with so many trees between her and it, but how many other helicopters were out there right now?
The pop-pop-pop of small arms fire broke through the afternoon calm, coming from behind them. Gaby reached over, grabbed Reese by the wrist, and dragged the girl down into a crouch with her.
It didn’t take her long to recognize what was happening:
They’re shooting at the helicopter. So what does that make it? A friendly?
But that thought was quickly replaced with, Shit. The gunfire’s way too close.
How had she allowed them to get so close? Easy. She had been so busy (arguing) talking with Reese that she hadn’t been paying attention to her surroundings. How close had the shooters been able to creep up on her in the last few minutes? If they had been within hearing distance, she might be lying on the ground bleeding out right now instead of chastising herself.
Get your head back into the game!
She did that now, listening to the pop-pop-pop starting to fade as the last gunshot echoed and began to die in the wind. She couldn’t hear the helicopter’s rotor blades anymore, and the trees were too thick for her to see anything beyond random streams of sunlight above and around her.