The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5)

by Sam Sisavath

  Nate slung his weapon and ran back, then hopped into the bed of the Chevy. Gaby had to be satisfied with looking back one second for every five she paid attention to her side of the road.

  “Wait until they get closer before you shoot,” Danny said.

  “How much closer?” Nate asked. “I’ve never fired one of these things before. What’s the effective range on it?”

  “You’re overthinking it, Nateroni. Squeeze the trigger when you can smell them.”

  Nate grumbled as he perched the machine gun against the closed truck gate and settled down into a crouch. The ammo belt clinked against the truck with every movement he made.

  Danny had stepped forward a bit and was now looking through his rifle’s scope.

  “Danny!” she shouted.

  “Yeah?” he shouted back.

  “Stop messing around and kill them already.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and fired.

  A single shot. She waited for him to pull the trigger again, but he didn’t.

  Instead, she listened to the shot echo for a second—maybe two—before the Jeep began swerving as if the driver had suddenly lost control. Then the vehicle seemed to make a sharp right and disappeared into the ditch, even as two men in the backseat were flung into the air, arms and limbs and rifles flailing wildly around them. Clouds of dirt plumed briefly about 200 meters from their position.

  “Holy shit,” Nate said, sitting up in the back of the truck. “Nice shot.”

  “Eh, I was aiming for the engine block,” Danny said. “But I guess that’ll do.”

  A lone figure stood up from the fields, but there were no signs of a second or third man. The survivor picked something up from the ground, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then after stumbling around, turned and began jogging back in the direction he had come.

  They waited to see if anyone else would rise from the grass, but no one did.

  “Should we go see if there are survivors?” she asked.

  “We might be able to use the Jeep,” Nate said. “If it’s not too damaged.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Danny said. “We’re not going to need a Jeep where we’re going.” He glanced to his left. “Besides, our ride’s here. Everyone look presentable. First impressions count and all that.”

  She looked over at the lake as a vessel appeared, getting bigger as the sound of a boat motor made its presence known. There were two figures onboard, mostly silhouettes against the bathing sun. One of them was pointing a rifle up the road, looking for something to shoot, which meant they had either seen the Jeep or heard Danny’s gunshot and were taking precautions.

  Nate looked through his binoculars. “Two people. A man and a woman. The woman’s short and the man’s a blond.”

  “That’ll be Roy, the guy I was talking to earlier,” Danny said. Then, to Gaby, “You’ll like him. Handsome kid. Good with his hands, and I hear the ladies like that in a man.”

  Gaby wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she didn’t say anything.

  “Then, of course, there’s Benny,” Danny continued. “Face it, kid, you’re going to have your hands full with the gentlemen callers when we get back to the island.”

  “Hey, I’m right here,” Nate said.

  “So you are, Natepoleon Bonaparte, so you are.”

  “Give it a rest, guys,” Gaby said, smiling anyway, because it allowed her to think about something other than what she was going to say to Lara when she finally saw her again very soon.

  *

  Maddie steered the old but dependable pontoon around the big white vessel anchored in front of Song Island. It was massive and occupied a ridiculous amount of real estate. Or maybe that was just her imagination, since she’d never seen a yacht up close before, never mind one that probably cost more than her parents made in their entire lifetime. The word Trident was written along its side.

  Gaby saw a familiar figure leaning over the railing at the top of the boat waving to them. Blaine. She’d recognize his hulking size anywhere. She waved back, as did Danny and the girls. Blaine wasn’t alone on the yacht. Two women on the other two decks watched them coming in. They were all heavily armed and looked the part of soldiers waiting for a fight.

  Song Island has been getting ready for war. God help us.

  Gaby felt the familiar pangs of guilt whenever she looked back at Claire, Maddie, and Annie. The three of them seemed awestruck by the sight of the big white yacht, and then later the beaches of Song Island and the towering solar panels that ringed it. She couldn’t shake the nagging fear that she had made a terrible mistake by bringing them here. What was she doing? Song Island might have been a sanctuary once upon a time, but if Will was right and Kate was going to throw her human forces at it tonight, the place might as well be a death trap. And she had led them here with promises of a soft bed, their own rooms, and ice-cold water.

  Song Island’s not safe. I shouldn’t have brought them here. Anywhere but here.

  And then they were past the yacht and slowing down as they approached the piers. And there, standing at the end of one of the wooden structures sticking out of the beach, was what Gaby had been dreading since she stepped onto the boat.

  Lara.

  She was standing with a man Gaby hadn’t seen before. Like Blaine and the two women on the Trident, Lara and the stranger were heavily armed and wearing assault vests.

  Lara looked so different from the last time Gaby had seen her, and she suddenly realized that it wasn’t just her who had gone through the kind of metamorphosis that even her parents wouldn’t have recognized while she was running around out there trying to stay alive. Lara had changed, too. They all had. You had to, these days, or you didn’t survive.

  “Who’s that?” Nate, standing next to her, asked.

  “That’s Lara,” Gaby said.

  “I thought you said she was some kind of medical student.”

  “She was. I mean, she is.”

  “Wow,” Nate said. “Medical school in Texas is, uh, really different.”

  Gaby couldn’t help but smile a little bit.

  “Who’s the string bean?” Danny asked Roy. The two of them were standing at the back of the boat.

  “Keo,” Roy, the blond who had come to pick them up along with Maddie, said.

  “What kind of name is Keo?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. Showed up a couple of days ago. He’s the reason the collaborators haven’t attacked the island yet.”

  “So that’s Keo.”

  “Yup. That’s Keo,” Roy said.

  Gaby was listening to their conversation, but she was mostly focused on Lara standing on the pier with Keo. They were watching the pontoon on approach and talking. Gaby wondered how long it would take Lara to notice that Will wasn’t among them.

  She caught her breath and waited for the inevitable.

  “Welcome home,” Lara said as Maddie shut off the pontoon’s motor and sidled it alongside the pier. “Guys, this is Keo. Keo, this is Gaby and that’s Danny and…I don’t know who the rest are.”

  The tall Asian guy nodded at them. Gaby could just barely make out a long, thin scar running down one side of his face, and he seemed to be favoring his right shoulder for some reason. Instead of an assault rifle like the others were carrying, he had a weapon with a long suppressor attached to the end. It looked mean and dangerous, and she wanted one.

  “What kind of name is Keo?” Danny asked, climbing out of the boat.

  “Lou was taken,” the guy said.

  Gaby hadn’t made it onto the pier yet when Lara said, “Gaby, Danny—where’s Will?”

  CHAPTER 15

  JOSH

  “We almost had him,” Travis said. “Smiley said he might have even tagged him.”

  Smiley? Right. The sniper.

  Or as close to a sniper as he was going to get out here. Josh had to constantly remind himself that he wasn’t actually leading a group of soldiers. It took more than a nice polished uniform to turn some accountant or
restaurant manager or, in Travis’s case, a construction supervisor, into a full-blooded killer.

  Will and Danny would laugh at these guys.

  “But he was too fast,” Travis was saying. “Lucky bastard somehow managed to do a U-turn in the channel and slipped back into the lake before the others could catch him.”

  “So where is he now?” Josh asked.

  “Back on the island’d be my guess.”

  “Just one guy?”

  “Just one guy.”

  “I guess one more or less won’t matter.” Then, “Have you heard back from Mason?”

  “Sonia didn’t say anything, so I’m guessing not. He’s probably still trying to deal with those other guys that popped out of nowhere and laid waste to his group back at Route 13.”

  “The Dunbar people.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought we killed everyone in that city.”

  “That’s what Mason thought, too. But apparently not. It’s funny…”

  Funny? Nothing about this is funny, Travis, Josh thought, but he said, “What’s that?”

  “I think this is the first time I’ve heard of them not being able to finish a job.”

  “First time for everything,” Josh said.

  The “them” Travis was referring to were the blue-eyed ghouls. They had slaughtered almost everyone in Dunbar a few nights ago and took the women and children. Or, well, most of the ones that were still alive at the end of the night, anyway. Josh didn’t want to think about it too much. He accepted what the ghouls were, what they did, but it didn’t mean he wanted to dwell on it. As long as he wasn’t directly involved, it was easy to pretend it wasn’t actually happening.

  “I don’t know what’s giving Mason so much trouble,” Travis said. “He’s got what, thirty or forty people with him?”

  “Something like that.”

  “He should have had them by now. They were right there for the taking.”

  Mason.

  The man was irritating. Or was that aggravating? Maybe both. The worse part of it was that Mason just didn’t care. Sometimes Josh wondered if he should bring it up with Kate during one of their talks. It would serve Mason right. What Josh needed were dependable men, not lazy ones that did whatever the hell they wanted.

  Will and Danny could whip them into shape. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes. Or maybe some people just aren’t meant to be soldiers.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Travis said behind him.

  “What’s that?” Josh said, even though he knew the question, because it always came up.

  They were always so curious about how it worked. He couldn’t really blame them. Even now, after having gone through it dozens of times, it still freaked him out, though he would never admit it out loud. He had learned in those first few weeks that the only way to lead men was to make them fear your authority. Josh was never the biggest or most imposing kid, and he didn’t have to be. He had something better. He had them standing behind him. Most of all, he had her.

  “How does it work?” Travis asked. “How do they contact you?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “It’s dreaming…but not really dreaming. It feels more like reliving a memory.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours, theirs… Whatever they want it to be.”

  “So they control it.”

  “You really have to ask that question?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Travis paused, and Josh could see him weighing the pros and cons of continuing this conversation. Like the rest of them, Travis was trying to balance wanting to know more and being afraid of the answers.

  Finally, Travis said, “And they tell you what to do while you’re in these dreams?”

  He nodded. “It takes some getting used to, but yeah, that’s essentially how it works.”

  “Freaky,” Travis said. He might have also shivered involuntarily.

  Josh smiled. He didn’t bother telling Travis that in the dreams, Kate always came to him as her former human self, a major change from the first time he had seen her. It was sometimes difficult for him to reconcile the beautiful thirty-something woman, who moved with dreamlike sensuality and elegance, with the ghoul-Kate that had first recruited him not far from where he was standing now.

  As much as he told himself he had become used to Kate’s presence, or the sound of her voice inside his head, he could never quite shake the feeling there was something odd about her existence that went beyond the skeletal frame, pruned black flesh, and blue eyes. It was as if she was straddling the line between human and ghoul, trying to hold onto something that was long gone.

  Why? he always wanted to ask her. Why bother?

  He knew why he was bothering, though.

  Gaby. I’m doing this for you. For us.

  Josh lowered his binoculars and wrinkled his nose. It had been months since Will burned down the two-story house across the small inlet, but Josh thought he could still smell the damage. The marina had also been reduced to ashes, but the wild grass around it hid the scent better.

  He looked down at his watch: 3:36 P.M.

  It wouldn’t be long now before Josh could finally leave this place and put Song Island into the back of his mind for good. He was looking forward to that. Beaufont Lake hadn’t been very good to him. He still remembered getting shot and almost drowning and dying out here. Those were memories he’d rather bury in the past.

  “You used to live there, didn’t you?” Travis was saying.

  Josh didn’t need binoculars to see Song Island in the near distance. It was the only thing to break the monotony of calm lake water for miles around, its Tower jutting out like a sore thumb. It looked so insignificant, like a stain holding back progress. How did Will ever think this place could save them?

  “I wouldn’t say I used to live there,” Josh said. “I was there for a couple of days, long enough to know it’s just another island.”

  “Still,” Travis said, “it must feel a little weird to be leading the attack on it.”

  He had thought the same thing, once upon a time. It only took looking at the place from afar to realize it wasn’t true at all. Song Island was just another patch of dirt on a lake. That was it. Nothing more, nothing less.

  “No,” Josh said, turning and walking back to the Jeep, “it doesn’t feel weird at all.”

  Travis jogged after him. “So, it’s settled. We’re attacking tonight. Even with that guy going back? That’s an extra gun.”

  “You see that big thing sticking out of the island?”

  “The lighthouse?”

  “Yeah. There’s a basement at the bottom. Song Island’s always had all the guns and ammo it needs. One more guy isn’t going to make any difference.”

  The former construction supervisor glanced back at the island one more time. “Man, it’s gonna get bloody. I was hoping it’d go down easier.”

  “It could have, but that ship’s sailed.”

  “What about the big boat that showed up last night? Did you tell them about that? Maybe they’ll let us delay the attack—”

  “They don’t care,” Josh said, cutting him off. “Besides, if we’re lucky, all that shooting last night did was cut down their numbers. Either way, it’s going to happen tonight.”

  Josh climbed into the front passenger seat of the Jeep while Travis slipped into the driver side. He still had to fight back a big smile whenever one of the older men had to drive him around, which was pretty much every time. Nineteen-year-old boys weren’t supposed to be leading armies, but here he was anyway, doing just that. All of this, because he was one of the chosen ones.

  Soon you’ll be one, too, Gaby. Then you’ll understand why I’m doing this.

  I’ll make you understand.

  *

  Sonia jogged down the outer stairs of the two-story red house as he and Travis arrived in the Jeep. She looked excited, which told Josh she probably had news from Mason
(finally). Sometimes Josh thought Mason was the most capable man under his command, and other times he couldn’t be trusted to look for gas for their vehicles.

  Travis parked in the driveway, among the trucks and people in uniforms milling about and talking excitedly among themselves. They were anxious and scared, and they had every right to be. Most of them had never shot anyone or been in real combat. Some of them knew how to use the weapons they were carrying, but the majority had never fired at a living, breathing person in their lives.

  He felt almost sorry for them, for what they were about to experience tonight. But whenever that pity threatened to paralyze him into backing out of the plan, he just had to remind himself that this was for the best. He was doing this for them—he and Gaby. He needed to prove himself to Kate and Mabry and the others. And once tonight was over, he could move on and prepare for the future.

  With Gaby. Because none of this mattered a lick without Gaby at his side.

  Sonia smiled at him as he climbed out of the Jeep. She was here the last few days and had lived through the grenade launcher attack. She was a Southerner, like Travis, minus the accent for some reason. Of course, that could have just been the hormones talking. For all he knew, she sounded exactly the same as Travis, except the visual was throwing him off.

  “Mason?” he asked.

  “Got word from him about ten minutes ago,” Sonia said.

  She fell in beside him as they walked across the large yard. Josh liked the fact that she hadn’t even acknowledged Travis’s existence, and Travis no doubt noticed that, too. He could tell the older man had a thing for the twenty-something. He didn’t blame the guy. You had to be dead not to pitch a tent at the sight of Sonia. Somehow, that gun belt around her slim waist only made her more—

  Gaby. There’s only Gaby!

  “What did he say?” Josh asked.

  “They lost the trail at the interstate around Lake Dulcet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They killed some guys he had stationed outside the city. Apparently, they used a machine gun. One of ours, if you can believe it.”