The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival (Purge of Babylon, Book 1)

by Sam Sisavath

  He let go of her and quickly left the room, but not before looking back one last time. She smiled back, and for a split second she wanted to grab his hand and tell him to ignore what was happening out there, to stay with her instead, that they could be happy here, just the two of them.

  But she didn’t, because she knew this was what Will did. He ran toward danger, didn’t shrink from it.

  She stood alone in the darkness for a moment, trying to decide what to do and feeling a little flushed. It had been a while since she felt this way about someone. Will was so different from all the other men she had ever been involved with. In another life, they would never have met. When would she have ever come in contact with a guy from Harris County SWAT? Or an Army Ranger?

  She pulled herself out of her thoughts. She felt silly, like a teenager in love for the first time. She was too old for that, she reminded herself, and began looking again for her T-shirt on the floor. She finally found it crumpled up near the foot of his cot and pulled it open. She found her shoes farther back toward the door and slipped them on one by one before stepping out into the brightly lit hallway.

  She heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Danny rushing toward her. He was still buckling his gunbelt. “Will?” he asked.

  “He’s headed there now.”

  Danny nodded and ran past her. He hadn’t bothered to ask where “there” was.

  Lara looked after him for a moment, then remembered her Glock and hurried down the hallway to her own room. She found it amusing that her first instinct was to go for her gun. The old Lara would have been terrified at such a thought. Then again, the old Lara had survived The Purge by pure dumb luck.

  She thought about checking up on Carly and the girls farther down the hallway, but it was late, almost midnight, and they were probably asleep. Unlike Will and Danny and her, most of the facility seemed oblivious to the gunshots, which alarmed her.

  Wake up! she wanted to shout. Something’s happening! Can’t you people hear it?

  The Glock was in the drawer next to her cot where she left it. She was clipping the holster onto her belt when there was a knock on her door.

  “Come in!”

  She looked back to see Carly standing in the open doorway in pants and T-shirt, her eyes groggy from sleep. “Is it bad?” Carly asked, looking at Lara’s gun holster.

  “I don’t know, just to be safe.”

  She glanced at her wall clock: 11:55 p.m.

  “Danny woke us up,” Carly said. “He said he heard gunshots.”

  “We heard them, too. How’s Elise?”

  “She’s fine—”

  The sound of a third gunshot stopped Carly mid-sentence. This one was closer—much closer than the two shots from earlier.

  “Oh my God,” Carly said.

  “Danny’s there with Will,” Lara said. “They’ll be fine.”

  I hope.

  She unclipped the radio from her belt and pressed the lever. “Will, come in. What’s going on? I heard another gunshot.”

  Will’s voice came through the radio: “Where are you?”

  “In my room. Carly’s here with me. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Will said.

  Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t tell if he sounded anxious or excited. It was hard to read Will’s emotions at any given time when he was standing in front of her. Trying to guess his thoughts through a radio was next to impossible.

  “We have a situation here,” Will said. “I need you to go back to Carly’s room and lock yourselves in with the girls.”

  “Will, what’s happening?”

  “Lara, did you hear me? I need—”

  “And you need to tell me what’s going on,” she interrupted, a lot more forcefully than she had really wanted.

  But it did the job, and Will said, “It’s Kate. She shot Ben and Rick, and she has Ben’s pendant.”

  “Pendant…?” But she knew what that meant as soon as she said it.

  “Yes,” Will said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Entrance Hallway. Kate’s here. So I need you to go to Carly’s room and lock yourselves in. Don’t come out for anything, no matter what you hear, unless it’s Danny or me knocking on the door. Lara? Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Go. Now.”

  “Be careful,” she said quickly.

  “I will.”

  She looked over at Carly and saw the younger woman’s pained expression. “They’ll be fine,” Lara said. “Danny and Will are together.”

  Carly gave her a forced smile and nodded.

  Lara hurried over to her. “Come on, you heard what Will said.”

  She took the other woman’s hand and led her back outside. They turned right and headed down the hallway toward Carly’s room. It was almost all the way at the back, with the community bathrooms farther down.

  She opened Carly’s door and guided her inside. “Stay here with the girls.”

  “What? What about you?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “But Will said—”

  “I know,” Lara said and tried to put as much confidence into her smile as possible. Maybe fifty percent. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Until then, do what Will said. Lock the door and keep it locked, okay?”

  Carly was about to argue, but Lara quickly closed the door and ran up the hallway.

  It seemed to take forever to get to the first turn up ahead. Then she was running around another corner, heading toward the Entrance Hallway, which was exactly halfway between Quarters and Operations.

  It felt as if she had been running for miles when she finally heard voices coming from the turn in front of her. She slowed down, using the opportunity to catch her breath.

  She heard Will’s voice first: “… you don’t want to do this, Kate. I know you. Let’s talk about this.”

  And a female voice, which Lara had a hard time placing at first because it had been such a long time since she had seen Kate, much less heard her voice: “Do you really think there’s anything to talk about, Will? I killed Ben and Rick. And I just shot Davies. What’s stopping you from shooting me now?”

  Oh, no, not Davies, too…

  Lara slowly took the corner and came up behind Will and Danny, standing with their Glocks drawn and hanging almost casually at their sides. They were looking across the long, brightly lit Entrance Hallway at Kate, who stood at the foot of the stairs. The smooth titanium steel plating at the base of the Door rested at the top of the steps above her.

  But it was the figure slumped on the floor between the three of them that got her attention. It was Davies, lying on his back, a big, wet bloody patch spread across his chest where he had been shot. From her position, she couldn’t tell if he was still alive or not. She couldn’t see his eyes, or tell if he was still breathing even underneath the bright halogen lights.

  Will had tilted his head slightly to his right when she initially came out from around the turn. He had already picked up her presence without having seen her.

  Kate was holding a long, plain string in her left hand, her thumb rubbing against a slightly circular object that Lara recognized as Ben’s pendant, the same one he kept around his neck at all times.

  The same pendant that controlled the Door above Kate’s head.

  The same Door that stood between them and the creatures outside…

  Oh God, Kate, what are you doing?

  And Davies. Poor Davies, on the floor. Dead or dying.

  She had to make sure…

  Without even realizing she was doing it, she moved around Will and toward Davies when Will, his eyes on Kate the whole time, said in a soft voice meant only for Lara to hear: “Don’t. He’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?” she whispered back.

  “Yes.”

  She relented and took a step back, continuing to look at Davies’s still body for indications that Will might be wrong. She wouldn’t put it past him to tell her a baldfaced lie to get her
to stay back, to protect her.

  She heard footsteps coming up behind her, fast. Then haggard breathing from people who hadn’t had to run in a while.

  She looked back as Rhonda, Tom, and Mike appeared around the corner, sliding into the Entrance Hallway. Mike had a six-shot revolver, the kind she had only seen in movies, and he was still wearing his pajamas. Rhonda was fully dressed in slacks and shirt, and Tom still had bed head. They piled around the corner, freezing at the sight of Will and Danny, then Davies on the floor, and finally, noticing Kate standing at the bottom steps of the Door.

  “Stay back,” Danny said, looking back at the newcomers.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Tom demanded. He was a short man in wire-rimmed glasses, and hearing the profanity come out of his mouth sounded incredibly wrong to Lara for some reason.

  “We heard gunshots,” Rhonda said between breaths.

  “Jesus, is Davies dead?” Mike asked, moving forward a bit before another quick glance from Danny stopped him cold in his tracks.

  “He’s dead,” Danny snapped. “Now shut the fuck up and stop moving around.”

  That deflated all three newcomers, and they hung back in the hallway as ordered.

  She knew all three of them pretty well. They had, at one point or another, come to her in the Infirmary for various ailments. Rhonda was a former school teacher, while Tom was retired, and Mike worked as a mechanic on the weekends. They had all barely survived The Purge, mostly thanks to Ben’s quick thinking.

  “Where’s Ben?” Rhonda asked behind her.

  He’s dead, she wanted to say. And so is Rick and now Davies. And Kate—who looks half-crazed—has her hand on the Door’s switch. Any more questions?

  Will was talking to Kate, in that calm voice of his: “Kate, don’t let it go further than this. It can all end now.”

  Kate looked almost amused. “Now you’re just being silly, Will.” She looked as if she was about to laugh, but all that came out was a smirk. “There’s no going back from this. I killed Ben. Did you miss that part? I put a bullet in his head. Then I shot Rick in the chest. They’re dead, Will. There’s no going back from that.”

  Rhonda gasped behind her, and either Tom or Mike swore under their breath. Maybe both of them.

  “It’s done,” Will said. “It’s over with. Forget about that.”

  He sounded so convincing that Lara wondered if he actually meant it. Or was he just saying whatever he thought Kate wanted to hear? It was so hard to tell with him.

  “Are you going to shoot me, Will?” Kate asked. “You should, you know. It’s the only way you’re going to stop me from doing what I have to do.”

  She held up the pendant, and her thumb rubbed back and forth over the button that controlled the Door, that would open the facility to the undead things waiting up there.

  “Oh my God,” Rhonda groaned behind them.

  “She has Ben’s necklace,” Mike said.

  Or was it Tom? She had difficulty distinguishing between the two of them, and she was so focused on Kate and the small object in her hand that everything else was hazy.

  The Door. Don’t let her open the Door…

  “Kate,” Will was saying, “I can’t let you open that door.”

  “You’re going to have to shoot me to stop me,” Kate said.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “Of course it does. And if you can’t, Danny will.” She turned her head slightly to look at Danny. “Right, Danny? I bet you wouldn’t have any problems shooting me down.”

  Lara didn’t know if Kate was purposefully trying to antagonize Danny, or if she really thought this was one big joke. There was something about Kate’s eyes, the way she was smiling. Kate looked like someone who thought they had nothing to lose, who thought they knew things that others didn’t and as a result felt confident in their actions, even if no one else understood. Lara called that kind of person crazy.

  Then Kate’s eyes shifted, settling down on Lara from across the well-lit hallway. Lara instantly felt vulnerable and naked under that gaze, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was standing in front of a woman she never really got to know, whose lover she had taken, and who, right now, was standing before her with a gun in her hand.

  The same gun she had already used to kill three men…

  And she’s crazy. Don’t forget that part.

  Lara fought every instinct to step back and cower behind Will, to escape the harsh spotlight of Kate’s scrutinizing eyes. She didn’t, because she couldn’t. She found the strength to stand her ground, returning Kate’s glare with as much intensity as she could manage. It wasn’t very much at all.

  Kate smiled. “Hey, Lara. We never really got to know each other, did we?”

  “No,” Lara said. She was surprised she could actually talk. She hadn’t been sure before the word came slipped through her lips. “We can change that, if you want.”

  Kate cocked her head to one side, as if she was considering it. “No, not really. I’d rather just shoot you.”

  There was a loud bang! and it took Lara a split second to realize that Will had just shot Kate in the chest. She had been so focused on Kate’s crazed smile that she never noticed the other woman lifting her gun in her direction.

  Kate stumbled backward and Lara watched, horrified, as Kate’s thumb moved, pressing down on the pendant—

  No no no NO!

  They heard it, like the sound of some angry god rising from the pits of hell, the loud grinding noise as the Door began to move.

  “No!” Danny screamed, racing toward Kate.

  He wrestled the pendant easily from her weak fingers, as she sat down heavily on the steps like an old woman resting for the very last time.

  Danny was repeatedly hitting the button on the pendant, not that it did any good.

  The Door was already moving, opening, and what was initially just an inch of moonlight—a dark, milky sea of blackness in the sky, something she had rarely seen these last few months—turned into two…then five…then ten inches, all within a couple of heartbeats.

  She felt the rush of spring wind from outside, the coldness of the March night flooding in, giving her the kind of chills that raced up and down her body in an endless rush of terror.

  Will shouted next to her, “Danny! Get back!”

  A pair of dark, black eyes appeared above the stairs, peering through a small sliver of opening. Then one pair of eyes became two, then five, until suddenly there was a dozen of them peering in, waiting, waiting…

  As the Door continued to open, grinding away against the still night outside and inside the facility, she reached for her Glock and found the handle cold and strange and uncomfortable. She pulled it out just as Will took a step back, and Danny started backpedaling, the pendant in his hand. Danny was still pressing the button desperately.

  She knew it was pointless, and wanted to shout it at Danny, even as he kept backpedaling toward them. She didn’t doubt he already knew it was futile, because, like Will, he had been out there more than most and had had to wait each time for the Door to close behind them before they could set out on a mission. Because the Door couldn’t begin to close until it was fully opened. A “quirk” in the facility’s construction that bothered Will, but there was nothing they could do about it.

  Harold Campbell strikes again.

  As the first ghoul slipped through the hole, all she could think of was a conversation she had had with Will. She had asked him how many ghouls he thought were out there, standing silently inside the dark woods, waiting for their chance. Just waiting, and waiting, and waiting…

  “A lot,” he had said.

  “But how many?” she insisted.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “A hell of a lot.”

  Her hands trembled as several ghouls dropped out of the widening hole at the top of the stairs and landed on the top steps. Even Kate, sitting on the bottom step, must have felt them behind her, because she looked back at them as they slip
ped through like rain, one after another after another after another…

  Will grabbed Lara’s wrist and dragged her back, his voice so forceful that it immediately seized her attention: “Go back to Carly and the kids and lock yourselves in their room! We’ll come for you! Go!”

  She didn’t argue. There was no point.

  She turned and ran, almost crashing into Rhonda standing behind her staring dumbly as the ghouls came in. Lara wasn’t sure if she pushed Rhonda out of the way or if the other woman just fell.

  She just ran, turned the corner, and kept running.

  The girls! Get to Elise and Carly and Vera!

  She heard gunshots behind her. Loud, crashing gunshots, and knew they were from Will’s and Danny’s Glocks. They were using regular bullets, not silver, and regular bullets only slowed the ghouls down long enough to make them mad. The silver bullets were in the Armory, where they were always kept until they had to go out on missions.

  She kept running, fighting the urge to look back, even as the gunshots rang out one after another. She ran as fast as she could, taking corners almost haphazardly, grabbing at walls to keep from sliding and spilling, willing herself to go even faster.

  Familiar faces came out of rooms in front of her, flooding into the hallways one by one, woken up by the loud, undeniable sounds of gunshots. They couldn’t ignore it now. There were too many gunshots, one after another, rumbling through the facility like thunderclaps.

  They looked at her with dazed eyes, confused by the sight of her barreling down the hallway toward them, gun in hand, passing them with reckless abandon.

  What must her face look like to them?

  But all she could think to do was scream at them as she ran: “Get back inside! They’re through the Door! Get back inside and lock your doors!”

  Some listened and quickly retreated, but most just stared dumbly at her. She knew them all by name, had treated all of them in the Infirmary at one point or another.

  She saw Sandra, whose little daughter, Mandy, Lara sometimes saw sneaking around the hallways by herself. Sandra looked stunned at the sight of Lara racing down the hallway. “My God, what’s happening? I heard gunshots…”

  “Get back inside!” Lara yelled.

  “What?” Sandra said, confused.