The Gates of Byzantium (The Babylon Series, Book 2)

by Sam Sisavath

  Blaine glanced at his watch. They were pushing up against five in the evening. They had, at best, just over three hours of sunlight left.

  Suddenly there was the loud crack of gunfire in the distance.

  A second shot followed, then a third. Not a burst, or a three-shot burst, but carefully squeezed-off shots. They came from the water, though Blaine couldn’t tell from which direction, or how far away.

  Then the loud rattle of return fire, like fireworks, rolling across the lake surface for a good five seconds. More than one assault rifle firing, unloading on something. That, or someone was wasting a lot of bullets answering the first three shots.

  They heard the crack of another gunshot, then a fifth and sixth shot followed.

  Then there was silence.

  They waited to hear something else—more returning fire—but whatever had happened seemed to have run its course. The quiet settled back over the lake as if nothing had happened.

  “That’s not a good sign, right?” Maddie said. It wasn’t a question. “Gunfire from Song Island. If that is Song Island out there.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “What about your friends? You think they’re on the island right now?”

  “They must have arrived a full day ahead of us, so it’s possible.” Then he heard something else. It was a grinding sound, gradually growing in intensity. “You hear that? What is that?”

  “Outboard motors,” Maddie said. “Boats.”

  *

  IT DIDN’T TAKE the boats long to reach the shore, but by then Blaine had moved the Jeep out of the road and into the side of the ditch. The Jeep wasn’t completely hidden, at least not from anyone with eyes traveling along the road. From a distance, it had a chance of going unseen, though that was probably a stretch, too.

  They crouched along the edge of the ditch, watching with binoculars as the boats—there were two—chugged down the inlet between the marina and the house, then turned left and headed toward the boathouse on the property. Blaine saw four men in one boat and four more in the other. He couldn’t make out faces, but it wasn’t hard to see they were all heavily armed.

  “One of them’s hurt,” Maddie said beside him.

  “Which one?” Blaine asked.

  “First boat.”

  Blaine looked again and saw that she was right. One of the men was sitting down, slightly slumped over, holding his shoulder.

  “The second boat’s motor is damaged,” Maddie said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s coughing up smoke. Too much smoke.”

  Blaine saw that, too, though he didn’t know what a damaged boat motor looked like. She was right, though, the motor on the second boat was definitely putting out more smoke than the first one.

  The boats pulled up to the boathouse, which had three slots, the third slot empty. A man appeared from the side of the binoculars’ field of view and guided the boats in. The men climbed out, two of them helping the injured one up.

  “Make that two injured,” Maddie said.

  “Which one?”

  “Second boat. Looks like his right leg.”

  Blaine focused on the second boat as the men climbed onto the dock. And yes, one of them was limping badly. One of the limping man’s comrades reached over and helped him up the wooden deck. They left the boathouse, arguing and gesturing wildly. He followed them to the two-story house as far as he could, glimpsing trucks parked in front of the house, and was sure one of them was the Silverado from earlier. Another vehicle might have been the blue Tundra.

  “That’s a lot of firepower,” Maddie said. “You think they were attacking the island?”

  “If they were, it didn’t go well.” Blaine lowered his binoculars. “I only heard six shots in all, not counting the loud free-for-all in the middle. What about you?”

  “Six.”

  “What about you, Bobby?”

  Bobby held up one hand and one finger on his second hand.

  “So six shots in all,” Blaine said. “That’s not a lot. But it might be enough for a pair of Army Rangers to put the hurt on a couple of boats trying to land on their beach. The question is, why are they even attacking the island? What’s going on over there?”

  “So you think your friends took the island?” Maddie asked.

  “I think they’re on it, yeah. I’ve seen them shoot. They wouldn’t need more than six shots to repel an attack by boat. Even a couple of boats with four guys apiece.”

  “Are they that good?”

  “They’re really well-prepared, and they know what they’re doing.”

  They settled back down into the ditch.

  Maddie wiped at a bead of sweat along her forehead. “So what now? We can’t just stay here forever. Sooner or later it’s going to get dark, and we’re going to need shelter.”

  He didn’t have any good answers for her. They could attack the house from the front, but he flashed back to the gunfight at the mall. What happened that day was forever etched into his brain. He reminded himself that he, Maddie, Bobby, and Sandra could barely take on two men they had the drop on. Which made it unlikely they were going to take on at least eight heavily armed people in a two-story house, even if two of them were already hurting. That still left six.

  Six too many…

  Blaine glanced down at his watch: 4:16 P.M.

  “Well?” Maddie said, watching his face carefully. “Should we attack the house?”

  “That wouldn’t be a very good idea,” a voice said behind them.

  Blaine shot up and spun around—and found himself staring into the barrel of an assault rifle.

  CHAPTER 31

  WILL

  MORNING BROUGHT SALVATION and sent the ghouls back to their point of origin. It wasn’t hard to figure out where that was. All they had to do was follow the jagged lines of white bones scattered across the island, the flesh seared off completely by the sun’s rays. The unnatural mist of evaporated, tainted flesh and ghoul blood lingered in the air long afterward. Thank God for the wind that appeared out of the north to help drive the smell away.

  The sight of so many dead ghouls in one place took Will back to the bank outside of Cleveland, Texas, all those many months ago. That was the day he had lost Kate. He didn’t know it until much later, but that was when she had started to slip away. His failure to notice cost them Harold Campbell’s facility and forced them on this journey to Song Island. Maybe, in the long run, it would all work out.

  If they could hold the island…

  Less than thirty minutes after sunup, Will and Danny emerged from the Tower. Instead of a cobblestone pathway, they followed the bones from the eastern cliff back to the power station in the west. They bypassed the hotel. There wasn’t anything in there they hadn’t already seen last night. The dead would be gone, including Al, Jake, Debra and her son, and Berg. Will didn’t know if Berg had ever made it out of the zip ties before the ghouls had invaded the hotel, and he didn’t particularly care.

  He did care just a little bit about the others, especially Al, whose screams were one of the last things Will had heard before the cook had vanished under a sea of swarming creatures. He hadn’t seen what happened to Debra or her son Kyle, though he had seen Jake swinging a golf club when the ghouls had entered through the windows around them. He remembered grabbing Sienna and dragging her away. She had fought him, trying to get back to Jake, and Will had been half a second from letting her go when she had decided to finally stop fighting and run.

  That was last night. This morning, they were alive. Most of them, anyway.

  Gaby and Josh, armed with shotguns and radios, stayed behind in the Tower. As soon as the sun rose, they could see everything for miles from the windows. The south and east directions gave them a clear line of sight of the lake’s shorelines, including the marina and the two-story house. The Tower, as Will had predicted, made for a brilliant sniper’s perch.

  Now all he needed to do was turn Gaby into a
shooter…

  The others had begun clearing bones out of the hotel and the grounds around it. The light bones were easy to pick up, stack in wheelbarrows, and roll away. They gathered the remains of the dead in a pile along the north side of the island, next to the cliff.

  Will and Danny reached the power station and stepped over the trampled hurricane fencing, still half-buried in the dirt. The big gray building hadn’t been touched, but there was a clear path from where the front gate used to be to the small shack. As he got closer, Will noticed it wasn’t really a shack. It was a stand-alone brick building with a steel door that opened inward, revealing very little on the other side. He thought he could hear rustling wind through the opening, though most of it was lost in the loud, rumbling hum of the generator next door.

  Will turned on the flashlight duct-taped to the side of the Benelli M4 shotgun and aimed it at the door. Four pairs of charcoal eyes stared back at him before quickly shrinking back into the darkness, trying to escape the probing light.

  “Hellooooo, nurse,” Danny said.

  They were squeezed inside the building, just beyond the reach of sunlight, simultaneously salivating at the sight of them and morbidly afraid of the brightness splayed across the open metal door. It was hard to tell how many of them were actually in there. Will guessed the building had a flight of stairs that angled downward and under the island. Where the stairs went after that, and where the ghouls came from, were questions that played themselves over and over in his head. The only way to find out was to go into the shack—or find where the tunnel ended, which had to be somewhere on land, along the western cove. Neither option was particularly viable at the moment.

  Will walked around the shack to get a better look at what he was dealing with. It wasn’t any bigger than anything he would have found in someone’s backyard. The front was about two meters wide, the length around three and a half. It was concrete from top to bottom, with a flat, unremarkable roof and a metal door.

  When he circled all the way back to the front, he took a quick step toward the door and fired with the Benelli. Regular buckshot ripped through a ghoul standing defiantly in front of him. The creature was thrown back by the impact, half of its side shorn off, revealing bone and flesh underneath. It picked itself up and glared at him, gaunt cheeks flickering in the flashlight beam.

  “I don’t think it likes you,” Danny said.

  Will fired again, taking off the top half of the creature’s head, where its brain would have been if it still had one. The creature stumbled back into the wall of ghouls crowding behind it before picking itself up and looking back at him through its remaining right eye.

  “You got any silver on you?” Will asked.

  “Just the knife. You wanna reach in there and stab it?”

  “Not particularly.” He tried to get a better look at the interior of the shack, but he couldn’t see anything past the squirming black mass of prune flesh. “Basement?”

  “Has to be, right?”

  “Must be a big-ass basement. How many came out of it last night? A thousand?”

  “Don’t exaggerate. A few hundred, at the most.”

  “Looked like a lot more than a few hundred to me.”

  “Okay, maybe just a shade under a thousand.”

  “So where are they coming from? A tunnel at the end of the basement? Connected to the shore? That would explain where Karen went.”

  “What do I look like, an island tunnel expert?”

  Will took a step back. “How many you think are in there now?”

  “Lots.”

  “Not very scientific.”

  “Bunches.”

  “Better.”

  “I found my C4 in the Tower’s basement this morning while I was poking around.”

  “How many were left?”

  “Bundles.”

  “That a lot?”

  “Better than bundle. See, the plural?”

  Will smirked. “So you wanna to blow it up, is that what you’re telling me?”

  Danny shrugged. “That would seal the tunnel, wouldn’t it? Cave it in on itself?”

  “Well, there’s a problem with that. We don’t know how far or deep the tunnel goes. What if we rupture it, but don’t cave it in completely? Water’s gotta go somewhere once they get inside the tunnel. Like up here on the island.”

  “So, no C4, then?”

  “We’ll save them for later. I didn’t get farther than the stairs where he stacked our stuff last night. What else did you find down there?”

  “There was a pretty sweet tritium ACOG scope in a case. Four-by-thirty-two.”

  “Nice.”

  “Ol’ Tom’s got some expensive gun habits. I’m mounting it on my rifle.”

  “You’re definitely getting sentry duty.”

  “Figures.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “That place is huge. Like a friggin’ pawnshop. Who knows what’s down there? Another ACOG, maybe, if we’re lucky. Maybe a bazooka or a tank, possibly even Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “Tom’s been collecting for a while…”

  “Yeah. Tom was a real hoarder. A back-stabbing, hoarding piece of crap.” He looked back at the door. “So we can’t blow it up. How do we seal it, keep those pesky buggers from coming out later tonight? This door might not hold forever. Remember that sorry incident with the car back at the bank? That was pretty out-the-box thinking for a bunch of undead prune faces.”

  Will thought about it. “I have an idea, but we need to close the door first.”

  “Sounds simple enough. Not.”

  “Can you reach the door?”

  Danny studied the angles for a moment, then shook his head. “Not before they’re all over me.”

  He was right. The ghouls were less than a meter inside the open door frame, about the same length it would take to reach in and grasp the lever. Then there was the extra second or two to actually swing the door. More than enough time for a creature to latch onto an extended arm. The only positive was the key, still stuck in a lock four inches above the lever. Of course, in order to lock the door, they would have to close it first.

  “We need to close that door,” Will said again.

  “Do we?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Danny said.

  *

  SARAH WAS THE one who told them about the concrete mix and unused concrete blocks stored in one of the unfinished rooms of the hotel.

  “We never could figure out what to do with them,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t like anyone had ever built anything before. Though I guess Tom had, when he was younger. Can we use them? I mean, if we can’t destroy them, or push them back, what if we just sealed them inside the shack?”

  They found the Quikrete concrete mix bags where Sarah said they would be. There were enough blocks stacked on top of one another in a row to put together a small house. All the building equipment was also in the same room.

  Will called Josh down from the Tower to help carry everything over to the power station. It took them two hours of trudging back and forth, hauling bags of easy-to-mix and block after block of concrete, before they were even ready to start. It was almost ten in the morning when they were finally able to break their first bag of Quikrete over the mixer, pour water inside with a hose, and create usable mortar. Both Will and Danny had worked construction before, and Will had done his share of mixing and slapping mortar on concrete blocks with trowels when he used to work with his father in the summers.

  Lara took a break from bone duty, as the others had begun calling it, and came over with food and cold bottles of water, something they couldn’t get enough of. You could only drink so much warm water before the taste of something cold was like a miracle drug.

  “So we’re just going to cover it up?” Lara said, staring at the darkness inside the open shack door, at the unblinking eyes peering back out at her. She shivered a bit.

  “That’s the plan,” Will said.

 
; “They can’t break through?”

  “Probably not.”

  “That’s not very reassuring.”

  “Mostly not.”

  “So you’re Danny now, is that it?” She smirked at him. “Bad jokes and all?”

  “I’m right here,” Danny said.

  “It’ll hold,” Will said, doing his best to sound convincing.

  The truth was, he didn’t know if it would actually hold. Or if it proved effective now, how long that would last. The ghouls had proven themselves to be resourceful creatures, and they had unlimited numbers and time on their hands.

  Dead, not stupid.

  Lara nodded, but looked only partially convinced. “We’re almost done clearing out the bones. I can’t believe they all came out of that one building. Do you think Karen is one of those things staring at us right now?”

  “I think she knew she’d survive,” Will said. “It explains the hazmat suit.”

  “Like Kevin…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then that means there’s a tunnel down there. She would need a way off the island. Plus a way for these things to reach the island without having to swim. And if they need the tunnel, that means the water really does keep them back.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Well, at least the island’s safe. Sort of.” Lara shivered again. “Hurry up. I hate the idea of that door open like that, with those things inside.”

  She left them, clutching her shotgun as she went.

  Will looked over at Danny. “Ready?”

  Danny grunted. “No.”

  “Good.”

  Will picked up the Benelli and took two quick steps toward the open door and fired. The buckshot ripped the faces off the two closest ghouls and they stumbled back into the others behind them. Even before the rest of the creatures had a chance to respond, Will fired again and kept firing until he had emptied the entire shotgun. Each shotgun blast shoved the creatures back little by little. It wasn’t much, but it was just enough.

  As soon as Will fired his last shot, he stepped aside as Danny lunged forward and grabbed the door by the lever. The closest ghoul started forward, but before it could get close, Danny slammed the door shut and held on. Almost immediately, ghouls crashed into the door on the other side, banging relentlessly against the steel. The lever moved under Danny’s grip, but he held on while Will grabbed the key, turned it, and heard the deadbolt latching into place.