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

by Sam Sisavath

  “You don’t think so?”

  “If it were just those black-eyed bastards? Yeah. But that’s not the case, is it?”

  I guess I’m not the only one who remembers.

  She looked at her watch, the white neon hand more green than white: 5:20 p.m.

  * * *

  If they thought Gallant was quiet before, listening to the excruciating silence from inside a small office in the back of a bank surrounded by four walls and a barricaded door was an entirely new experience.

  She sat with Nate at the back, with the door in front and to her right. Danny sat to their left in the corner. No one had said a word since they settled down to wait, and as they listened to what Mason called “the real world” coming awake around them, they continued to maintain the quiet, the anticipation of what all three of them knew was coming (Anytime now, you bastards) almost suffocating.

  The ghouls were out there by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, so why hadn’t they begun assaulting the door yet? Despite straining to hear, she couldn’t detect them outside in the hallway or the bank lobby. Which didn’t make any damn sense at all. They had to know the three of them were in here. Even the black-eyed creatures, with their limited intelligence (Dead, not stupid, right, Will?) could trace the new blood from the streets to the gaping hole in the wall and sniff their trail to the back of the building. And if even by some miracle they couldn’t, the presence of the blue eyes would make up for it.

  “He’ll come for them soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when he does…”

  “We’ll end him.”

  “Finally…”

  All of this was for one man. Who the hell were they waiting for?

  The question turned over and over in her head and had been since last night. Except now it was so much louder and so much more persistent, with nothing for her to do but listen to the silence as she waited and waited for the creatures to show themselves.

  What are you waiting for?

  She looked over in Danny’s direction, his face covered in the green light from the glow sticks. He had his rifle between his legs, the muzzle pointed up at the roof, and was staring at the door across from him. She couldn’t tell if he was lost in his own thoughts or if he was just as mystified by the lack of an attack as she was.

  She felt welcome warmth as Nate reached over and found her hand and squeezed. “Can’t wait to get our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.

  “It’s going to be loud down there with the engine next door,” she said, matching his soft pitch.

  “Who cares. That’s what earplugs are for. Plus, no one will know what we’re doing down there. Know what I mean?”

  “Not a clue.” She kissed him on the cheek, then pulling back slightly, whispered, “I love you.”

  “Finally,” he whispered back. “I didn’t think you would ever say it.”

  She smiled and kissed him again, then rested her head against his shoulder.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  She nodded. “You?”

  “Like every part of me is about to go all Scanners.”

  “Scanners?”

  “You know, that movie where the guy’s head blows up?”

  She shook her head.

  “We’ll add it to the Netflix queue when we get back to the Trident,” Nate said.

  “Deal.”

  The office looked different swimming in green, almost surreal somehow. Nate slipped an arm around her, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget about what was going to happen in the next few minutes, or hours. But it was going to happen tonight. The blue eyes hadn’t gone through all this trouble to forget about them now.

  “He’ll come for them soon,” one of the creatures had said.

  He. Who the hell was he?

  She allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment even as her ears kept listening for telltale signs that the creatures had finally arrived outside their door, or beyond the walls of the bank, or maybe even above them on the rooftop. Except they weren’t in any of those places because there was just dead silence all around them.

  What in God’s name are they waiting for?

  She had her eyes partially closed and was concentrating on the warmth of Nate’s body against hers when there was a massive boom! that tore through the room, so close and immediate that her ears were still ringing even as she struggled to open her eyes and move, move, move, dammit!

  By the time she managed to fully open her eyes, green tendrils of smoke were already starting to fill the room at a dizzying speed. Then Danny was shooting, his face lit up by a staccato effect of green and white and orange as flames stabbed from his M4. He had somehow made it onto his feet before either she or Nate could react and was actually pushing his way into the smoke instead of running away from it like a sensible human being.

  Since when does Danny qualify as “sensible?” she thought even as she scrambled to get ahold of her rifle, which she had dropped about the same time the explosion knocked Nate’s arm from its place around her body.

  She wasn’t sure when she lost sight of Danny, but one second he was in front of her and in the next breath he had vanished into the spreading green smoke, and the only thing she could make out was the pop-pop-pop of his rifle assaulting her ears as the ringing from the explosion subsided. The M4s they were armed with were only capable of three-round bursts, but Danny was squeezing the trigger so fast that they sounded almost like one continuous full-auto blast.

  She finally (finally!) got her numbed feet under her and scrambled up, gripping her rifle in one hand and shouting, “Stay here!” back at Nate.

  He was coughing and trying not to gag against the smoke, but he somehow still managed to flash her a defiant look as he shook his head. “The hell I am!”

  “Nate, please!”

  “No!” he shouted back.

  Loud crackles of gunfire reached them, coming from the hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before.

  They blasted through from the other room. Jesus Christ!

  Nate was already on his feet when she began moving forward. She could hear him coughing behind her as he followed, and Gaby lifted her rifle as—

  A figure stumbled through the jagged opening in front of her. He was wearing black and she glimpsed the shiny lens of his gas mask—

  She fired, and the man, moving between rooms, fell awkwardly, landing in the middle of the hole with one part of his body in their room and his legs in the manager’s office.

  How the hell did he get past Danny?

  It was impossible not to inhale the smoke—a combination of disintegrated Sheetrock and explosive powder swarming around the opening—and she started to cough along with Nate even as they kept pushing forward.

  Questions swirled around in her head as she forced her legs to move:

  Why did the collaborators attack? Why risk an explosion when Mason had strict orders to keep them alive? Or had the “him” that the blue-eyed ghouls were waiting for finally arrived, and their usefulness as bait had finally come to an end?

  “Danny!” she shouted as she stepped over the dead man and into the connecting room. There had been a lot of smoke in the other office, but there was even more in here, almost as if the collaborators hadn’t properly executed their breach.

  The only response to her shouting of Danny’s name was the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from outside the room, through the open door to her right.

  “Danny!” she shouted as she stumbled over bodies on the floor.

  New bodies, and not the ones they had stacked in the back of the room. These were all black, with gas masks jutting out from their faces like plastic elephant tusks.

  “Gaby!” Nate’s voice, shouting from behind her. “Wait!”

  But she didn’t wait. She couldn’t. Danny was out there by himself, the continued banging of ferocious back-and-forth of automatic rifle fire forcing her to move faster and faster.

  “Gaby, wait!”

  S
he ignored Nate’s desperate plea and finally made it out the door and into the hallway, ready to see caverns of yellow and white and brown fangs coming at her. She twisted right toward the alley door, but it was still closed and there was just suffocating darkness back there. She turned left toward the lobby—

  Pop-pop-pop!

  A figure was shooting in the direction of the street while backing up toward her. She couldn’t tell what kind of clothes he was wearing—it looked dark, either black or blue, so it could have been Danny or a collaborator uniform. After all, weren’t they wearing the same colors right now?

  She lifted her rifle and took aim when the man threw a glance over his shoulder. She couldn’t see his shadowed face, but there was nothing that looked like a gas mask, and that was the only reason she didn’t pull the trigger.

  “Back, back!” the figure shouted. Danny! “We got incoming, kid! A shit ton of incoming!”

  She looked past him and saw that something had swallowed up the hole in the front wall of the bank. No, not something, but some things.

  Oh, so there they are.

  She never believed they would make it through the night without the ghouls finding them. It was simply beyond the realm of possibility, the kind of optimism that only the old Gaby could have fallen prey to. And yet, and yet, she had wanted to believe. God, she had wanted to believe so badly.

  But the truth stared her in the face as she took in the forest of pruned black flesh and heard their bones clacking as they surged through the opening and poured across the lobby floor like an endless ocean wave.

  She turned and ran, and heard Danny’s footsteps close on her heels.

  “Faster!” he shouted. “Faster!”

  Up ahead, Nate had finally found his way out of the door, and his eyes widened at the sight of her and Danny racing back to him.

  “Nate, run!” she shouted. “They’re inside! They’re inside the building!”

  She saw the whites of Nate’s eyes, and he might have screamed something back at her but she couldn’t hear, because at that very moment the floor and the walls and the ceiling began vibrating uncontrollably. She heard the very distinct clink-clink-clink of empty brass casings (Danny’s, the collaborators, whoever’s) that were littering the floor began jumping around like beans.

  At first she thought they were being hit by an earthquake, but then she heard it, and the sound sent a spear into the very center of her soul. The first time she was introduced to it was on the road, then again later, outside of Larkin. It was a sound that she would never forget for as long as she lived, whether that be the next few seconds, or minutes, or years from now.

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  18

  Frank

  He was close. So close. He could almost feel them nearby.

  Danny and Gaby.

  It was a trap. He knew that without a shred of doubt. Danny, Gaby, and the boy whose name he couldn’t remember were being used to lure him to the town of Gallant. They knew he would come, that he would have no choice because the (small) part of him that was still human demanded he come.

  They were waiting for him. The blue eyes. And they wouldn’t be alone.

  He knew all these things, and yet he had come because he had no choice. Simply no choice. Because they had Danny and Gaby, and if there was a shred of humanity left in him, he couldn’t ignore it.

  They were so close and yet so far away. He wished he could pinpoint their exact location, but there was too much chaos inside his mind as well as outside in the physical world. The universe was breaking apart, death pouring from above, and he caught random flashes of memory from faraway places filled with sand where it was hot and cold and sometimes both at the same time.

  Somewhere above him, Mercer’s warplane shook the heavens as it returned for another pass.

  He didn’t know how he had gotten here, but he was sure Danny and Gaby were close even as he concentrated on the two black-clad figures, almost indistinguishable in the pitch-darkness of the floor. They were facing the far wall when he crashed through the window and tucked and rolled and snapped back up to his feet. They turned—fast, but not fast enough—and he saw the whites of their eyes shining through the clear glass of their gas masks.

  Collaborators. Traitors.

  The one on the left was the first to react, and he had almost fully lifted his rifle when his neck snapped. The second one was slower and dropped his weapon and stumbled back in mortal terror. It didn’t save him.

  He grabbed the man by the uniform and flung him into the wall with one hand. There was a heavy crack! as bones shattered and the thump! as the limp body slid unconscious to the floor.

  He turned his head at the sound of a few hundred stampeding feet surrounding the building outside. They poured themselves into the first floor below him, and more were coming from up and down the streets.

  Moonlight glinted off one of the men’s fallen rifles, and he picked it up. It had a name. M-something. And a number. He couldn’t remember either details at the moment; not that it mattered, because it would come to him.

  It always did, eventually.

  The air shifted and the familiar gust of wind swamped the walls of the building, signaling the return of another kind of monster—this one made of metal and fire. The wall in front of him exploded, a tsunami of glass and brick and mortar reaching out at him like spidery tentacles. Shards sliced what remained of the trench coat as he lifted his arms to protect himself and spun at the same time, making himself as small as possible.

  Then, a second after its armaments had razed the street outside and everything around it, there was the delayed sound of the plane’s roar:

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  He staggered away from the wall—or what was left of it. Blood dripped from his wounds, long pieces of glass jutting out of flesh, an extended gash across his right cheek, and something the size of his fist protruding from his chest. He picked and pulled at shards both big and small, like annoying wood splinters, the slurp of his blood spraying the already-filthy carpet.

  Thomp-thomp-thomp!

  They had finally made it to the second floor and were now racing through the hallway. In a matter of seconds, they would find the right room and overwhelm him.

  “He’s inside!” the voices shouted. “Don’t let him escape!”

  He didn’t have to break his way through the windows this time, because there weren’t any left—or even a wall to stand in his way. There was just a jagged hole, and he charged and leapt and shot free like a bullet through it. The cold night air flooded his hyper senses, the shredded remains of his coat snapping angrily like unwanted limbs behind him.

  He sailed through the night air, free of the restraints of gravity, even of human logic, the rifle still clutched in his hands. Maybe he had clung to it as a token of his old self, a reminder of what he once was but could never be again.

  As he slashed through the night air like a knife, he glimpsed rubble in the streets below. Vehicles had been reduced to junk, the concrete pavement a shell of its former self. The concentrated fire had left behind severed limbs and decapitated forms, still-intact bodies buried under the upended road. A carpet of (re?)death as far as he could see, and yet, miraculously, the buildings around the devastated killing field remained mostly intact. Clearly the sign of a highly skilled pilot at work.

  Then he was across and crashing into metal scaffolding that was holding a white sign with letters on it. It buckled and snapped, the grinding of metal like nails on a chalkboard in his ears, so loud that no one could have missed it.

  Noises—pop-pop-pop!—coursed through the soles of his feet like electricity. Gunfire, coming from the building below him.

  Then a new noise—thump-thump-thump!—racing wildly.

  Heartbeats, also from below.

  Human heartbeats.

  Had he found them after all? Danny and Gaby and the boy whose name he couldn’t remember? Were they below him now, fighting for their lives?

&nb
sp; He managed a single step toward the edge when the world quaked as half of Gallant vanished in a ball of fire in the distance. Some kind of bomb. The heat washed across the air, forcing him to turn his shoulders against it. Unnatural warmth made his flesh tingle as the dead and dying filled his head with tortured screams, hundreds of ghouls blinking out of existence as flesh was stripped from bones, which were then pulverized into powder milliseconds later.

  He managed to quiet the pained voices in his head, the relentless screams, just as the air above him quivered. He looked up as the creature fell down, smashing him with its fists and driving him to the graveled rooftop floor. Blue eyes glared at him as impossibly long, bony fingers tightened around his throat.

  “There you are,” it said, even though its lips, inches from his own, didn’t move. “We’ve been looking for you for so long.”

  He smashed the weapon he’d held onto since picking it up from the building across the street into the side of the creature’s head. The rifle disintegrated like brittle twigs, but it stunned the ghoul just enough to knock it off him.

  He sprang up, realizing too late that the monster wasn’t alone.

  They surrounded him, blocking his paths of escape.

  “We knew you’d come,” they said, four voices forming one coherent thought inside his head.

  “So predictable.”

  “…so human.”

  “Look at him…”

  “…clinging to the façade.”

  “Pathetic.”

  “Now you’re going to die.”

  “Again.”

  “But this time…

  “…for good.”

  “And he’ll be pleased…”

  “…that we finally ended you.”

  “…so pleased...”

  They attacked as one, and from all four sides simultaneously. They were faster than any of the black eyes could ever hope to be, and stronger. So, so much stronger. He didn’t have the element of surprise on his side, and there was no advantage to be had. None.

  They went for his arms and legs. He managed to dislodge one, but his attempt to punch through its chest went wrong and he only landed a glancing blow.