by Sam Sisavath
GLORY BOX
ROAD TO BABYLON, BOOK 1
SAM SISAVATH
GLORY BOX
Copyright © 2017 by Sam Sisavath
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC
www.roadtobabylon.com
Edited by Jennifer Jensen & Wendy Chan
Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design
CONTENTS
About Glory Box
SIX YEARS AFTER THE PURGE
FIVE YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF HOUSTON
Radio Broadcast From 5 Years Ago
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
A Word From the Author
ABOUT GLORY BOX
(THE ROAD SO FAR… & AUTHOR’S NOTE ABOUT POTENTIAL SPOILERS)
FROM THE PURGE, A NEW BEGINNING.
It's been six years since a terrifying breed of seemingly unkillable creatures emerged from the darkness to topple the unprepared governments of the world, in the process knocking mankind down the food chain.
Survivors called it The Purge.
A few brave souls rose from the ashes of the old world to fight back, often against overwhelming odds. Led by indomitable heroes, they risked everything to achieve a final, stunning victory over the supernatural “ghouls” in The Battle of Houston.
Five years later, what remains of the ghouls have fled back into the shadows, and humanity now resides in isolated communities in relative peace. But human ambition and greed have also survived, and with no laws to stop those willing to pursue them, it’s every man for himself.
Keo, one of the unknown heroes of The Battle of Houston, has found serenity in a small town in Texas. But he will discover that a violent past is not so easily cast aside when a madman rises to dominate those around him, and in the process shatters Keo’s new life.
It’s a brave new world, but monsters still exist—and thrive. And where there are evil deeds, good people must rise to stem the tide...on the Road to Babylon.
Author’s Note About Potential SPOILERS
The Road to Babylon series is a follow-up to The Purge of Babylon, a 9-part storyline that introduced readers to the post-apocalyptic world that is further explored in GLORY BOX. Although it’s not necessary to have read PoB in order to understand this book and future installments, it is nonetheless highly recommended. GLORY BOX goes to great lengths to avoid spoilers as it relates to PoB, but some things are simply unavoidable. So if you do decide to later visit the early series after reading this book, you may already have some very important plot points, like the fates of certain characters or the outcomes of pivotal battles, spoiled for you.
SIX YEARS AFTER THE PURGE
FIVE YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF HOUSTON
RADIO BROADCAST FROM 5 YEARS AGO
“This is Lara, and if you’re listening to this, then you’ve survived the unimaginable. It doesn’t matter how you did it, just that you did when so many didn’t. By now you’ve seen the endless piles of bones outside and you’ve heard the rumors. They’re true. All of them. We’ve struck a crippling blow against the ghouls, but it’s not over. It’s far from over. They’re still out there, along with the blue-eyed ones. But they don’t control us anymore, and we know how to defeat them. It’s their turn to be afraid. We’re going to organize and we’re going to hunt them down and destroy every single one of them, and they’re going to find out that the night is no longer theirs. Make no mistake, this is the chance we’ve been waiting for—this is the start of a new beginning. For all of us. Because we’re in this together, whether we called ourselves collaborators or rebels, or didn’t call ourselves anything at all in the last year. None of it matters. Not anymore. A lot of very good and brave people paid the ultimate sacrifice to give us this second chance. Don’t waste it like we did before with endless bickering and petty grievances. Let the past die with the past. This is our chance to make the world ours again. Help me—join me—and we’ll take it back. I’m Lara, and I’m a survivor. If you’re listening to this, then so are you…”
PROLOGUE
“GO TO BED. Get some sleep. Wake up and do it all over again.”
It was a simple enough plan, and for almost a year Keo had been able to make it work. Not tonight, though.
He was on the verge of REM sleep when the ghoul broke through the cabin window. Keo opened his eyes and slowed down his breathing, then listened to it crawling through the shattered glass pane. He imagined the sight of it—thin, frail, little more than a skeletal revenant of its former self. He could almost hear it breathing, smell the growing stench of rotting garbage starting to slowly, slowly fill up the air inside the living room.
Or maybe it was all in his mind. With the bedroom door closed, he couldn’t really smell much of anything. And he didn’t want to get up, not while snuggled comfortably underneath the thick blanket against the chilly night air. It was Texas, so even winter wasn’t really winter, and nights where he got the chance to bundle up were a rarity. So he really, really didn’t want to get up.
Keo sighed and pushed the blanket aside, then sat up when he heard the thump as the thing finally pushed its way through the row of iron rebar he had fastened over the windows. Just one of many improvements he’d made to the place after moving in. Not that the original owners minded; they were either dead or had found greener pastures. That was the best-case scenario, anyway. The worst case had them crawling around somebody else’s house right now looking for a little blood to keep them going.
He had to think about the last time he had seen a ghoul. Almost eight months ago now, back in a town just outside of Oklahoma City. He still didn’t know how the hell he had ended up in Sooner country, but there hadn’t been very much to see, so Keo had retreated back south. Besides, winter was coming, and there was an old saying about the weather in Texas. Don’t like the weather? Just wait a few minutes.
Or something like that.
Keo didn’t wait a few minutes now. Maybe half of one before he got up from the full-size bed and reached under the pillow for the P220. He opened the nightstand drawer nearby and took out the suppressor and rolled it into place. There was no point in waking the rest of the world up. Unlike him, they were probably having a very nice sleep right now. And sound tended to travel far these days, especially unsuppressed gunshots.
He stood up and padded in his bare feet over to the door. He wasn’t in any hurry. If the creature had the ability, it would have found its way to the bedroom by now. It could probably sm
ell him already, maybe even hear the blood pumping through his veins, because that was what it had come here for. His blood. A single drop of it could sustain the thing for days.
His heartbeat accelerated slightly for the first time in a long time. But it wasn’t out of fear. Keo wasn’t afraid of them. He had stopped being afraid a long time ago. Once you’ve been stuck in an underground sewer with a few thousand of the things, one lone ghoul invader didn’t even come close to igniting his fear-o-meter.
So why was he so excited?
It had been a while, that’s all.
Yeah. Let’s go with that.
There was enough moonlight in the great room that Keo saw it almost as soon as he stepped out of the back hallway. It was on the floor, pulling itself in his direction, and had been, from the looks of it, for some time now.
Keo glanced over at the window it had broken into in order to get inside. The two lower glass panes were shattered. The ghoul had squeezed through the broken portions but hadn’t done a good enough job of creating an opening. There was thick black sludge along the edges of the hole where the creature had sliced itself as it entered. Coagulated blood covered portions of the windowsill and dripped onto the floor, leaving a trail behind as the thing pulled itself, one inch at a time, toward him. The rebars were equally oiled in black liquid.
It was a miserable-looking thing, malnourished and as pathetic as any he’d seen in recent years. One of its arms hung limply at its side while its right leg dragged behind it, just barely hanging onto the rest of its delicate frame. He imagined the ghoul getting snagged on a nail jutting out from the floor and not being able to pull itself free. Or maybe its useless leg would get caught and the creature would spend so much effort to escape it would simply pull the appendage loose.
There were a million possibilities, and Keo had seen most of them with his own eyes. The ghouls were capable of doing just about anything, as long as there was a goal. Right now, that was him.
He lowered the SIG Sauer to his side and relaxed his grip on the gun before cocking the hammer. If the creature was afraid of the weapon, it didn’t stop crawling—inch by inch by inch—across the floor toward him. There were silver bullets in the .45 semiautomatic. There was more silver around the house—in the kitchen, in the room he was standing in now, even in the bathroom—but if their presence meant anything, the creature was oblivious. Maybe it was too hungry to care, or maybe its senses were dulled by its weakened state. And yet, it had known he was inside the house.
It was weak, and though he’d seen weaker, this one was near the very bottom. He couldn’t begin to identify the ghoul’s sex even if he wanted to. It was beyond gender, beyond anything that once made it human. Pruned black flesh hung off a bony frame like a film of liquid instead of actual skin, torn and dirty. It was impossible to ignore the stench that radiated from its skin—like month-long garbage left to rot in the sun. He would have gagged if he wasn’t so used to it, even if he hadn’t been in the company of one in nearly eight months. It was one of those things you couldn’t forget once you were exposed to it.
Keo winced a bit when the ghoul slipped into a bright shaft of moonlight, its badly-damaged head revealed for the first time in all its unholy glory. The thing had been forced to not only traverse the small hole it’d created in the window but also squeeze through the rebars. Even though its head was already small—it could have passed for a child’s—it hadn’t been small enough to get through undamaged. Blood dripped from its deformed skull, the sides forcefully flattened almost comically. Its eyes—black irises, like tar pits—bulged against its sockets, and it was missing most of its nose.
It had the appearance of a sickly child, but sizes could be deceiving. It could have been a fully-grown man or woman once upon a time or a giant whale of a couch potato in its former life. None of that mattered now, because at this second it was nothing but bones as it pulled itself toward him. It opened its mouth and stuck out its tongue, and saliva dripped freely. Caverns of jagged brown and yellow teeth showed themselves (“Meth teeth,” someone once described them to Keo), as if it could taste him standing there watching it with morbid fascination.
It kept coming, an inch at a time.
An inch at a time…
He wondered how long it had been out there searching for someone—anyone—with blood pumping through their veins before it finally found him. If it had kept going, it would have stumbled across a town full of people. Instead, it’d found the cabin. Alone out here, close enough to what passed for civilization these days, and yet purposefully distanced.
“You’ve seen better days, huh?” Keo said out loud. “How long has it been since you had a little taste?”
It didn’t answer him. Not that it could, even if it wanted to. Ghouls didn’t speak. They could growl, and sometimes he swore he heard them screaming, but they didn’t speak, though Keo knew of other variations of the creature that could, and did.
He thought of blue eyes and hissing sounds…
He shivered unwittingly. It wasn’t from the cold or the fact he was standing in the draftiest part of the cabin in nothing but pajamas and a T-shirt.
The creature had made it halfway across the great room when Keo started thinking about the mess that awaited him tomorrow. There was just enough silver in the bullet to put the miserable thing out of its misery, and the sun would do most of the cleaning up in the morning, but there would still be the bones to take care of.
Now where did I put the shovel? he thought as he lifted the SIG Sauer and shot the ghoul in the forehead.
The pfft! of the suppressed gunshot wasn’t nearly as loud as the empty cartridge that flicked into the air, arced for a bit, before falling back down to earth and clinking against the wooden floorboards. It rolled for a bit before finally coming to rest against the leg of an old stool.
The creature’s upturned head plopped to the floor and it stopped moving completely, as if someone had hit a light switch and it simply…stopped.
Keo was used to the sight. Ghouls were practically unkillable unless you shot or stabbed or cut them with silver. He’d seen headless ghouls, even ones missing half of their bodies, still attacking. It was the blood that coursed through their veins. The same disease that had infected them, turned them into monsters, made them vulnerable to silver. As long as the metallic element came into contact with their bloodstream, it was game over.
“Like magic,” someone once said to him.
Keo didn’t think it was magic. More like science. Not that he knew the answer, or cared to think about it too much. It wasn’t exactly his field of expertise. Not even close. Besides, there were scientists and historians (the ones still alive, anyway) out there trying to figure it out right now, he was sure of it: Where the ghouls came from, how the infection worked, or why silver was so poisonous to them that even a tiny drop caused instantaneous death. The only thing more fatal to the ghouls was sunlight, but it was hard to wield the sun or wear it in a holster at your hip.
But those were questions for someone else to think about. He was tired and it was chilly, and he was going to have to dig a hole in the yard tomorrow. He wasn’t looking forward to that at all.
Keo turned around and went back into the bedroom. He checked the wall clock before he slipped into bed.
3:14 a.m.
The hour of the wolf.
He smirked and went back to sleep, but the P220 remained on the blanket over his chest, clutched in his right hand. As someone else once said, “Just in case.”
ONE
“HOW MANY WERE THERE?”
“Just one.”
“What did you do with it?”
“You mean after I killed it?”
“Well, yes.”
“I buried it in the yard.”
“Was it hard?”
“Which part?”
“Killing it.”
“Not with silver.”
“I meant… How long has it been since you killed one of them?”
�
�It hasn’t been that long.”
“Right,” Emma said. “I keep forgetting you’ve been here for less than a year. Before that, you were out there.”
“What’s it like?” Megan asked.
Keo looked over at her. Ten years old going on thirty, with her mother’s green eyes and light brown hair. The girl picked at her plate of corn and meat loaf (her least favorite of Emma’s cooking) and waited for an answer.
“What’s what like?” Keo said, even though he knew perfectly well what she was referring to. He always wondered how long it would take her to finally ask, and apparently conversation between him and her mother about “out there” was the opening she’d been waiting for.
Smart girl.
“You know,” Megan said. “Out there.”
“There’s nothing out there,” Emma said.
“Are there a lot of them out there? Jim says there’s a lot of them out there.”
“Are,” Emma said. “Jim says there are a lot of them.”
“So there are?”
Emma sighed.
Keo smiled. “She’s correcting your grammar.”
“Oh,” Megan said. Then, still to Keo, “How many have you killed? In total? Grace says you were in Houston when they killed the big one.”
“Who’s Grace?”
“Adam’s sister.”
“I don’t know who Adam is.”
She squinted her eyes at him, unsure if he was playing with her or not.
Keo shrugged. “Scout’s honor.”
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“What’s Scout’s honor?”
Right. She may be ten going on thirty, but she spent the last five years living in Winding Creek and the five years before that being a kid.
“Just something people used to say,” Keo said before looking across the table at Emma for help.
She gave him an amused smile. “You’re the one who kept it going.”