“What else?” he asked.
She shook her head, when Wash asked, “Is it there, too?”
Lyla froze, her eyes widening into saucers.
“Oh yeah, it’s there,” the Old Man said.
But because he had to be sure, Wash asked Lyla, “Is it there right now? With Keith? Is that why they haven’t dealt with me yet?”
Lyla wouldn’t answer him, and when Wash put one comforting hand on her shoulder, he could feel her entire body trembling.
“Lyla,” Wash said. “I need to know. Is it there? Now?”
“Not for long,” she said. “It’ll be back.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“When, Lyla?”
“Soon,” she said, staring over his shoulder. “They drew it away. The people who took over the no-name town. Keith had to go, too. That’s why I came for you.” Her lips were quivering slightly when she looked back at him. “We have to go. They’ll be coming back soon. Keith, it, and all the rest of them.”
Lyla turned, hesitantly, to go. Maybe she was expecting Wash to grab her wrist to stop her again, but he didn’t.
Instead, he watched her go.
After five steps, maybe six steps, Lyla realized he wasn’t behind her, and stopped and turned back around. “What are you doing? Did you hear what I said? We have to go.”
“I can’t go,” Wash said.
“What?”
“It’s the reason I’m here.”
“I don’t understand…”
“The creature,” Wash said. “It’s why I’m here in the first place. But you already know that. Keith told you.”
Even in the darkness, Wash could make out Lyla’s cheeks turning paler, as if Wash had stepped over her grave.
“It has one eye, doesn’t it?” Wash said. “A one-eyed, blue-eyed ghoul.”
Lyla didn’t answer, but her shoulders had drooped slightly. She didn’t have to say a word. He could read it all over her face.
Yes. The answer was yes.
“You should go,” Wash said.
She walked back to him. “You’re not coming with me?”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I can’t, Lyla.”
She narrowed her eyes at him for a moment, trying to understand, but having trouble.
“You should go before they come back,” Wash said.
“But you’re not coming,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“You’re going to stay here?”
“I can’t leave.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
Is there a difference? Because I don’t see a difference.
He said instead, “Get going before they come back.”
“They’ll come after me…”
“They’ll have other things to worry about.”
“You don’t understand. The only reason I helped you escape was so you could help me get out of this place. I can’t survive out there on my own. Have you been out there?”
Wash almost laughed. Had he been out there? He’d been surviving out there since he was a teenager. First on his own, then with the Old Man. He knew exactly what was out there, but he didn’t think Lyla needed him to confirm her greatest fears about the world outside Jasper.
“You’ll be fine,” Wash said, and thought, Did that sound convincing? Shit, I hope that was convincing.
“What if it comes after me?”
“It won’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it wants me, not you. It’s not going to come after you. At least, not until it’s done with me, and it’s not going to be done with me that easily.”
“What about Keith? He’s working with it.”
“Working with it, or working for it?”
“Is there a difference?”
Good question, Wash thought.
“He does what it tells him to do,” Lyla said. “He says it’s to protect us, to keep the town safe, but…”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” She shook her head, desperately searching for the right answer. “I just know that I can’t keep doing this. I can’t live like this. Jasper is a prison. It didn’t used to be, but that’s what it is now.”
“You think Keith will come after you?”
“Maybe…”
“If he’s working for One Eye, he’ll stay behind until it’s done with me,” Wash said. “It won’t come after you, and neither will Keith, for a while,” he added, and thought he was almost convincing that time. Almost. He had no idea if Keith would stay behind, but that was also not something Lyla needed to hear tonight.
She shook her head. “You’re crazy.”
He grinned and thought, Yeah, I know, but said, “Good luck.”
“Here, you’ll probably need this if you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do.” Lyla took a small plastic bottle out from her pocket. “Painkillers. I don’t know what they are, but our doctor—or the closest thing we have to a doctor in town, anyway—gives them to us for pain. I stole a bottle.”
Wash took the bottle, opened it, and shook two of the small, round white pills straight into his mouth.
“Wait, don’t—” Lyla said, but he was already crunching the pills between his teeth.
“What?” Wash said.
“They’re pretty strong. You probably shouldn’t have done that. One is usually enough.”
Wash gave the bottle another look, but there were no labels on it. “Should be fine.”
“You better hope so,” Lyla said as she began backpedaling. “You’re crazy for staying here, knowing everything you know. Why are you doing this?”
“I made someone a promise,” Wash said.
“Well, I hope they appreciate it,” Lyla said, before she twisted around and broke off into a sprint.
Wash watched her slipping into the darkness beyond two buildings, the pale black colors of her jacket fading, fading…before disappearing completely.
Yeah, I hope he appreciates it too, Wash thought as he turned around.
He smelled it about a split second before the hairs on the back of his neck turned to spikes. That was just enough warning for Wash to reach for the kukri, tighten his fingers around the handle, and take one, two, three steps away from the nearest wall.
It plummeted down from the night sky and slammed into him, knocking Wash to the ground and all the breath from his lungs. Its stink clawed its way into his nostrils, while icy-cold and pruned black flesh scraped against his exposed skin. His legs buckled and he went down, but thank God the creature was as light as a feather, and instead of burying Wash into the soft, wet dirt with the impact, it just pushed roughly against him as he landed on his back. Not that it still didn’t hurt, because it could have been much worse if the creature were bigger or heavier.
He got his legs underneath it and catapulted it off him, then rolled away—one revolution, two revolutions—and was scrambling to his knees a second later. He drew the kukri, spinning around on his knees as the nightcrawler, already back on its feet, lunged at him, bony fingers raking at his face. Wash jerked his head back, the stench of rot on its fingernails-less hands caressing his cheek as they swept past.
He wasn’t entirely sure how he was moving so fast. Maybe it was all muscle memory taking over, refusing to acknowledge his sore joints and aching bones, because there were definitely a lot of those. However he was doing it, Wash let it happen.
He stumbled back, still moving on his knees. There was no time to bend his legs and rise fully to his feet. The creature wasn’t going to let him anyway, as it threw itself at him a second time, going again for his face.
Wash struck out with the machete, aiming for its exposed throat. He cut into the side of its head instead, entering at the spot where its left ear used to be, and the sharp blade of the kukri exited halfway down the bridge of the nightcrawler’s nose. The undea
d thing’s flesh and bone offered no resistance whatsoever. Its body flopped forward and to the ground, slamming with a lifeless thump even before the severed top half of its body landed with a squishy plomp next to it.
Wash staggered up to his feet and had to reach for one of the nearby walls to keep from going right back down. He sucked in some of the cold air, ignoring the foul smell emanating freely from the dead ghoul at his feet. It wasn’t moving. They never did once you hit them with silver.
He looked left, then right, then upward into the black sky. He expected more. When you saw one ghoul, you usually got its partner or two—or a dozen. But the creature was alone. Wash should have been glad for that, but it just stoked more of his paranoia. It couldn’t have just been one of them out here, could it?
“Maybe this is your lucky night, kid,” the Old Man said.
About damn time.
Wash pushed off the wall and walked back to the barn. The building was as unremarkable-looking on the outside as it had appeared from the inside. He looked past it and toward where all the shooting was coming from. It wasn’t hard to find. All he had to do was seek out—and locate—the burning wick in the pitch darkness.
“They drew it away,” Lyla had said. “The people who took over the no-name town. Keith had to go, too. That’s why I came for you.”
Wash tightened his grip on the kukri. The blade was slick with blood, and he bent slightly to clean it off using some pathetic-looking weeds sticking out of the ground. The dead ghoul lay behind him, unmoving, but it had seen Wash. Which meant…
“It’s seen you, too,” the Old Man said.
Yeah, I know.
Wash slid the machete back into its sheath and started walking again. No one had come out from any of Jasper’s buildings to stop him earlier, and no one came out now. They might have missed his escape, but there was no way they could have been deaf to the streams of gunfire out there. Not tonight.
“See no evil, hear no evil,” the Old Man said.
That seems to be the plan.
He looked toward the fire. It may or may not have grown in size in the last few seconds. Or maybe that was just because the fire had begun to spread. From his distance, he couldn’t be sure of anything.
Nothing, that is, except where to go.
Wash took the bottle Lyla had given him and shook out two more of the round, white pills. He popped them into his mouth and this time swallowed them without bothering to break them apart with his teeth first.
“Might want to go easy on that. Never know when they’ll come in handy later,” the Old Man said.
Wash started jogging toward the fire and the echoing pop-pop-pop.
“It knows you’re coming,” the Old Man said. “You know that, right?”
I know.
“But you’re still going. You’re still running right toward it.”
I guess I am.
The Old Man laughed. “Hey, if you gotta go, might as well go in a blaze of glory, right? That’s the slayer way, after all.”
The night opened up in front of him, and Wash ran straight into its underbelly, using the flickering flames in the black sky as a beacon.
Here I come, you fucker. Here I come…
Ana
Fifteen
Ghouls.
There were ghouls all around her.
There wasn’t one, or two, or ten. Maybe she could have dealt with ten. (Yeah, right.) Or twenty. (Now you’re just daydreaming.) But there was more than that. More than the ones she could see. A lot more.
My God, where did they all come from? Where have they been hiding all this time? I didn’t even know there were this many still alive!
This wasn’t exactly where she thought she’d end up after staring at the barrel of a shotgun pointed down at her face less than four hours ago, but here she was anyway. The question was: Did she regret running south after Wash?
Yes. Yes she did.
But it wasn’t like she had any other choice. He’d saved her sister’s life and saved hers, too, from something even worse than death. What would Mathison have done to them if Wash hadn’t burst into the cabin, with guns blazing, like some maniac cowboy? She’d managed to get the upper hand on Mathison before then, sure, but there were all his men outside still to deal with. To get through all of that, alone, with a scared girl depending on her…
Wash had changed all that, and they escaped together—Ana and her sister. And Wash, too, though there were a few moments when she didn’t think she’d find him alive in those woods after all the shooting was over.
Everything led her here. This no-name town, where the only thing worth saving was a big white church without a cross on top. She knew now why the buildings looked so abandoned. That was because they were. They hadn’t been lived in or kept up for years, maybe even before The Purge dramatically decreased the human race. This place had always been dead.
And as luck would have it, she was going to be too, very soon.
Yeah, I don’t think this qualifies as luck, girl.
She would have chuckled to herself if she could make her mouth move, but her jaw was too busy opening wide at the sight of the creatures as they slowly, oh so slowly, appeared out of the darkness around her one by one by one.
There were five that she could see at first. Then three more joined them. There were more out there that she couldn’t see but could smell. The air stung with their stench, groping at her cheeks and wide-open eyes and trying to choke the life from her.
Good. Then maybe I won’t have to see what happens next.
There were plenty of times in her life when she felt helpless, but Ana was always convinced there was a way out of them. Even a sliver of a path to freedom was better than none, and she was usually very good at spotting them. Here, she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t even imagine one, no matter how hard she tried.
It didn’t help that her sense of smell was being dominated by the fresh hell that was ghoul presence, and all she could concentrate on was the drip-drip-drip sounds her blood made as they fell from the tips of her fingers and down to the dirt ground.
Blood. Her blood.
One of her captors had cut three strips into her forearm with a knife Ana wasn’t sure wasn’t rusted. That was after they had tied her to a pole. She didn’t know where the pole had come from; it hadn’t been there this morning when she arrived with Randall and Shelby in the truck. Maybe they had put it up while she was locked in the shack earlier. But it was here now, and she was fastened so tightly to it with thick ropes that breathing took effort and she could feel every wooden splinter pricking at her back.
Drip-drip-drip.
The cuts, thank God, weren’t large or deep enough to kill her. But that, she assumed, was the point. Like sharks in the ocean, the ghouls could smell blood. That was, if the large fire gathering steam as it crackled underneath the dark night sky behind her wasn’t already enough to attract their attention. That was the reason for all of this, the answer she had been desperate to know while imprisoned earlier.
She was being used as bait.
But not just her…
Ana glanced over at Randall. They’d strapped him onto his own pole next to hers, the ropes wrapped around his body literally the only thing holding him upright. His chin rested against his chest, his disheveled and wet (Why is his hair wet? I’m freezing out here.) hair draped over his forehead. She couldn’t see his eyes, and she could just barely detect his chest moving underneath his shirt. Maybe. It was difficult to be 100% sure with the fire behind his back, causing shadows to grow in front of him.
Don’t be dead, Randall. Don’t be dead.
She hadn’t gotten a good look at him as they were dragged across the town and roped into place. Ana had been too busy trying to get a solid grasp of what was going on, where they were being taken, and, more importantly, why. She found that last part out very quickly when night fell and the smell in the air changed. Her skin tingled, and she saw the first one stepping out from between two of the
smaller buildings in front of her.
I’m bait. Me and Randall. That’s why they attacked us. That’s why they didn’t bother talking to us or do anything with us during the day. Because this was the plan all along.
To use us as bait…
The church was about fifty yards behind her, far enough that she wasn’t in fear of being swallowed up by its flames but close enough that she could feel the heat seeping through her clothes. There was no way for her to avoid what was about to happen. Oh sure, she could close her eyes and attempt to block out all her senses, then wait for the inevitable. But that wasn’t how Ana was raised or how she’d lived her life before, during, or since The Purge. She didn’t give up when the world went to shit, and she wasn’t going to just surrender now.
That suddenly defiant thought made her renew her fight against the rope—a blend of polyester and nylon fabric—but it was as useless now as it’d been when she started an hour earlier. It was too tight and bit into her arms even through her long sleeves. When she’d seen Ball Cap bring it out, she thought it looked like something a cowboy would use to round up cattle. Ana guessed that wasn’t too far from the truth.
Dark black eyes were watching her struggle, and Ana thought again, Where did they all come from? Where have they been hiding all this time?
They moved under the cover of darkness, from between buildings and patches of thick shadows. The air grew denser with each new figure, moonlight gleaming off their hairless domed heads and dirty black skin. It should have been difficult to make them out against the blackness of night, but it wasn’t. The light from the fire behind her danced off their solid obsidian eyes.
She snapped a quick glance over at Randall again. Blood dripped from his own wounds cut along his forearms, mirroring her own. Poor Randall. He hadn’t woken when they dragged him across the town and hadn’t opened his eyes when they tied him in place. They’d manhandled him, and a part of Ana thought the slayer was playing dead, that he was already conscious but was just waiting for the chance to surprise and overwhelm their captors.
But no. Randall just wasn’t…here.
You’re lucky, Randall. You’re so lucky you don’t have to see this.
After The Purge: Vendetta Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 63