The Horns of Avalon (Purge of Babylon, Book 8)

by Sam Sisavath

  She was sending everything she had downrange because it was her job to slow them down (or stop them, but she didn’t think that was possible) in order to give Danny and Nate just enough time to—

  The pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons coming from her right told her she had done her job and given her friends the time they needed. Danny and Nate were pouring it on, and the ping-ping-ping! of bullets punching through the truck’s body were some of the best sounds she’d ever heard in her life.

  She kept shooting, waiting for the GMC to stop under the prolonged assault, but the damn thing kept coming. It wouldn’t stop or slow down even as bullets raked its front windshield and grill and hood. The pavement around it exploded, chunks of asphalt flickering into the air like missiles.

  And then the thing she had been dreading: The ferocious roar of the machine gun finally coming alive, the brap-brap-brap of the MG drowning out her shots and Danny’s and Nate’s—

  She ducked as bullets smashed into the other side of the Ford, the ping! ping! ping! like bombs going off next to her. It was all she could do to reload the M4, concentrating on getting a solid grip on a fresh magazine from one of her pouches even though her hands were covered in sweat. Every inch of her trembled every time a round slammed into the vehicles and road around her. The damn machine gun never seemed to run out of bullets and continued to rain long after she had finished loading her rifle and pulled back the charging handle.

  And then, just like that, nothing.

  The suddenness of it froze her in place, still crouched behind the bullet-riddled truck, her breath hammering out of her. It took her three full seconds before she allowed herself to finally believe what her ears were telling her.

  It was quiet. Unbelievably quiet.

  It took her another five full seconds to will herself to stand up—her legs were wobbly for some reason, and her hands trembling slightly—and look over the hood of the vehicle up the street.

  The GMC had come to a stop (Thank God) at an odd angle in the middle of the road about twenty meters from the red pickup, its hood facing her end of the street, which allowed her to see the (at least) two dozen or so holes spread out from one side of the windshield to the other. Spilled gasoline tickled at her nostrils, and the painfully gradual drip-drip-drip sound of leaking fuel from somewhere at the back of the vehicle was the only thing she could hear other than her own labored breathing.

  The enemy truck was so close that she didn’t have to look through her weapon’s optic to see the smoke coming out of holes along the grill and hood or the driver slouched over the steering wheel, unmoving. The machine gun on the cab was resting on its stock, the muzzle pointed up at the cloudless sky. Sunlight beat down on the shiny black coat of paint as if it had just come off the lot.

  She was so focused on the dead-in-the-street truck that it took her a while to recognize the sound of an engine roaring to life. She scanned past the GMC and spotted the Jeep still fifty meters up the road. It was attempting to make a wide U-turn and almost crashed into a stop sign in the process. The driving was erratic, to put it mildly, which made her wonder if the driver was hurt.

  Pop! as someone fired at it, the round hitting the back of the Jeep as it completed its desperate U-turn before speeding away. She thought about shooting after it, but it was already too far away and hitting a moving target—even one as big as a car—was never an easy shot, even if her hands weren’t shaking.

  “Gaby!” a voice shouted. Danny.

  “Yeah!” she shouted back. She didn’t take her eyes off the unmoving technical; a part of her expected it to come back to life as soon as she relaxed, the man in the back rising behind the machine gun like some unkillable monster.

  “You good?” Danny asked.

  “Yeah! You?”

  “Right as rain.”

  “Now what?”

  “Clear the technical!”

  She stepped away from the Ford and climbed over the metal pole barrier—keeping her eyes on the target the entire time—before finally moving up the street. The smell of spilled gasoline became more evident as she drew closer, and broken glass crunched under her shoes. Her heartbeat had slowed down, her breathing returning to (mostly) normal, and she picked up her pace to cover the remaining distance.

  Gaby glimpsed the fading Jeep in the distance just before it vanished completely, taking the sound of its engines with it. With that threat gone, she turned her attention to the technical, her finger testing the M4’s trigger, ready to shoot anything that moved. Any goddamn thing at all.

  But nothing moved in or around the truck. At least, nothing living.

  She kicked empty brass casings around the vehicle before finding the soldier in the truck bed. His hands were clutched around his throat where he’d been shot. By the amount of blood pooled under him, she guessed he had bled out soon after he fell.

  There were two more bodies in the truck—the driver and his passenger. They were both wearing black uniforms, and the passenger was crumpled on the floor in an impossible ball shape. For a moment Gaby thought the man was hiding, but no; he was just dead. She made sure by opening the door and nudging him in the shoulder with her rifle’s barrel until he toppled sideways in the other direction and didn’t move.

  “Clear!” she shouted.

  She gave the street one last look, listening for the Jeep’s engines, and when she didn’t see or hear any signs of it, she turned and jogged back to Danny and Nate.

  She hadn’t seen the pickup earlier because she was so focused on the enemy, but if Danny thought it was a jalopy before, she wondered what he was going to call it now. The side facing her was covered in holes, and like the GMC’s, its tank was leaking gasoline. Sheets of glass covered the road and one of the back tires had been shot out, though she didn’t remember hearing anything that sounded like a tire blowing. Then again, given how fast she was emptying her rifle, she probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb going off next to her at the time.

  The truck was there (mostly, anyway), but there were no signs of Danny or Nate. Or Mason, for that matter.

  “Danny!” she called.

  “Here,” Danny said, his voice coming from the other side of the truck.

  She jogged the rest of the way and went around the pickup. Danny had his back to her, but she could see that he was crouched next to Nate, who sat with his back against the driver-side door. Their weapons were on the pavement.

  “Nate,” she said.

  He looked past Danny and smiled at her, but it was overly forced and that realization only made her run faster to him. She went around Danny and kneeled on the other side of Nate, her stomach dropping at the sight of blood gathered around his waist.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “I’ll be okay,” Nate said.

  She ignored him and fixed on Danny. “How bad?”

  “Could have been worse,” Danny said. When she gave him a disbelieving look, he added, “He could be dead.” Then, “Press here,” and pulled his hands from a T-shirt he was holding against Nate’s left side.

  She replaced his hand with her own, her fingers turning red as soon as she touched the fabric. She looked down at Nate.

  He was smiling at her. Or trying to. “I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.”

  “Right. Just a scratch,” she said quietly.

  Danny had stood up and was looking around them, his rifle back in his blood-covered hands. “He’s gone.”

  “Who?” she said, glancing over.

  “Mason.”

  She looked around them—at the car lots to both sides of the street, then the empty road out of town behind them. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”

  Danny was too busy squinting at the cars in the dealerships to answer, as if he could magically pick up Mason’s scent if he made his eyes small enough. Gaby looked back at Nate, keeping her hands on the bloody bundle of clothing pressed against his wound. As much as the idea of Mason escaping made her furious, she found it easy to push it aside to concentrate on keep
ing Nate from bleeding to death.

  “My fault,” Nate was saying, his voice so soft she barely heard him. “He was my responsibility. I wasn’t paying attention…”

  “Shut up, it doesn’t matter.” She was trying to find the balance between pressing too hard and not hard enough against Nate’s side. She couldn’t even tell what color the T-shirt used to be anymore. “What about Nate, Danny?”

  Danny slung his rifle. “We’re going to have to look for the bullet and take it out. Can’t leave it in there.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  He shrugged.

  “Danny,” she pressed. “You’ve done this before?”

  “Well, there was that time in a diner, though Willie boy did most of the work. But I think I got the gist of it.”

  Nate groaned.

  Danny grinned at him. “Relax, Nathaniel-san. Back in college they used to call me Danny the Surgeon, and it wasn’t because I always wore white surgical gloves around campus, though yes, I could see the confusion. Those things are super soft, you know.”

  * * *

  The pickup may have been beaten up before it was shot up, but it was a tough old thing. Despite leaking fuel and brandishing new bullet holes along most of one side, once they replaced the blown tire, the truck was still serviceable, and the engine came alive when Danny turned the key.

  “I told you I picked a winner,” Danny said before he righted the vehicle and pushed them down the street.

  She sat in the back with Nate, keeping an eye on his paling face and the bandages around his waist. Like the shirt earlier, the white fabric was already soaked with blood and growing a darker shade of red every second.

  She must have grimaced at the sight because Nate made an effort to smile up at her. “It looks worse than it really is.”

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “No, really.”

  “Stop lying.”

  “What makes you think I’m lying?”

  “Because I know you.”

  He smiled again. Or tried to again. He was doing a very poor job of it, and she wished he would stop. The effort alone was probably causing him more harm than good.

  “You know me too well,” he said.

  “Not well enough,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.

  She kept her arms around his body to keep him from moving around too much. Danny was driving just fast enough to get them as quickly down the street as possible while glancing at the map of Gallant spread out on the front passenger seat next to him. He only swerved once or twice, which was amazing given everything he was multitasking. He was also amazingly calm, but she wondered how much of that was a façade, or maybe she was just projecting her own fears and emotions onto him. Danny was an ex-Ranger, after all. It wasn’t as if blood was anything new to him.

  “How much farther, Danny?” she asked.

  “A mile or two,” Danny said. “Can’t go too far in this thing, with your boyfriend back there bleeding all over the upholstery.”

  “Sorry about that,” Nate said quietly.

  “You’ll clean it up later.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She put a hand over Nate’s mouth to shush him, then said, “How much gas do we have left?”

  “Not enough,” Danny said.

  “Maybe we should have siphoned some from the GMC…”

  “Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe it’s Maybelline. We’ll be fine.”

  “Will we?”

  “You betcha.”

  He sounded confident, and that more than anything did a lot to ease her mind. This was the new Danny. The leader. Other than Lara, there was no one else Gaby would trust with her life. Except maybe Nate…

  “See, we’re almost there,” Danny said as he slowed down and made a right turn.

  The road under them went from smooth asphalt to uneven dirt road. Nate groaned in response.

  “Danny,” she said.

  “I know,” Danny said. “We’ll be there soon. Better he suffers a little now than die a lot later.”

  A sheen of sweat had covered Nate’s face as he looked back up at her. She smiled at him, then bent down and kissed him softly on the lips. When she pulled back, he was smiling again, and this time it actually looked acceptably convincing.

  “Gotta get us our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.

  She nodded. “Definitely.”

  “It’ll be nice. Our own room. We can sleep in whenever we want. Finally.”

  “You always want to sleep in.”

  “Or maybe we won’t sleep at all.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.”

  “It’ll be nice,” he said again, and closed his eyes.

  She fought the urge to tighten her arms around him, to keep his body steady against hers as the truck continued to rumble down the patch of dirt road, but she was afraid even too much additional pressure would just hurt him.

  She kissed his unresponsive lips instead.

  Stay alive, Nate. Please, stay alive.

  I can’t bear to lose you too…

  * * *

  Gallant had more land than it did people, so the houses on the outskirts of the main commercial area were spread out. The dirt road Danny had turned into eventually became smooth asphalt again, and they passed a series of residential homes with large front and backyards.

  Danny finally settled on a house with a dirt driveway and nothing but empty fields behind it. If not for the map, they would have driven right past this part of town and never known people lived here. The house had a white truck parked in the front yard and an unattached garage big enough for two cars, which was good because she didn’t think the jalopy was going anywhere after this. If they could even start it again with the drain on its already leaking fuel tank.

  She stayed inside the truck with Nate while Danny cleared the house by himself, then did the same to the garage next door. When he came back, they hid the pickup in the garage, then carried Nate inside the house and put him down in the living room. The residence was a single-floor building with burglar bars outside the windows and over the front door. Those security measures were the main reason Danny had chosen it out of all the other houses in the area.

  “I’m going to need your help,” Danny said as he shrugged off his pack, took out a bottle of water, and poured it over his hands.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  Nate lay on the couch with his eyes closed. His hair was soaked in sweat and his entire midsection was covered in blood, as were his pants and what was left of the shirt Danny hadn’t already cut away to put on the bandages earlier.

  “Tell me you can do this,” she said to Danny.

  “The first-aid kit has everything we need.”

  “Danny, tell me you can do this.”

  He nodded. “I can do this.”

  She stared at him for a few long seconds before finally nodding. “Okay.”

  “Let’s get to work,” Danny said, then handed her another bottle of water to clean her bloody hands with.

  * * *

  “Want a souvenir?” Danny asked.

  She shook her head. “Be my guest.”

  “Eh, souvenirs are for old people anyway.”

  Danny flicked the bullet he had dug out of Nate into the bathroom sink. There was just enough light coming from the small rectangular opening behind her to see the 5.56 bullet as it clinked around the porcelain bowl before vanishing down the drain.

  All that damage, from such a small thing…

  Gaby concentrated on rubbing Nate’s dried blood off her fingers, but it didn’t seem like she was making any real progress. After a while, she gave up and grabbed a blue cotton towel hanging off a rack and forced herself to be satisfied with wiping the sweat off her face.

  “He’s gonna be out the entire night from the morphine,” Danny said, “which means you and I get the privilege of guard duty.”

  “Yay us.”

  “What I said. Anyway, we have eve
rything we need to survive the night. Burglar bars over the windows, extra food, and water. All we have to do is stay as quiet as mice and they won’t ever know we were here.”

  “Who are we talking about? Ghouls or humans?”

  “Both.”

  “You think there’s more of them out there? Besides the guy in the Jeep?”

  “I think that technical was already on its way here before the fun started. Maybe because of whoever they were exchanging fire with earlier.”

  “It had to be Mercer’s people. They’re everywhere.”

  Danny nodded. “Yeah. Mercer’s fun boys are becoming a real pain in my ass. Right now, though, I’m more concerned with why those boys in black were here in the first place. That technical came later.”

  “The Jeep.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What if Nate was right? What if they were tracking us?”

  “The question is why.”

  “Mason?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “No. Something else is going on.” He shook his head. “I’d give my left pinky finger to find out what.”

  Danny seemed to drift off, lost in thought, and Gaby did the same, staring at herself in the mirror above the sink. She was already covered in dirt and sweat, but now she’d added streaks of blood by touching her face with her bloodied hands. A year ago the sight of the girl looking back at her would have horrified her, but these days it barely registered. She wetted the towel with a dab of water from what was left in her bottle and went to work.

  “He’s still out there,” she said after awhile. “Mason.”

  “Yup,” Danny nodded.

  “We should have killed him.”

  “Probably.” Then, “Get some rest, kid. It’s been a long morning, and it’s going to be a long night. We can’t travel with Nate in his condition, at least not if you want to keep him alive for cuddling later.”

  “I’d really like that.”

  “A little cuddling, a little premarital sex…” Danny said before turning and leaving the bathroom.