“First light. Be ready...”
4
Will
“We go in, hit the bars, deflower the virgins, and we’re outta there with no one the wiser,” Danny said. “Easy peasy.”
“What about the guys with guns?” Will asked.
“Weekend warriors. We’ll be nice and give them a couple of rounds’ head start. But that’s as far as I’m willing to bend over for these bozos.” He glanced back at Kellerson. “What do you think? That strike you as fair?”
Kellerson stared blankly back at him. He couldn’t have said a word even if he wanted to, not with a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His hands, resting limply in his lap, were bound at the wrists. The pinky and ring finger of his left hand were missing, and blood was seeping through the fresh gauze Will had put on the man this morning. Kellerson was quickly becoming more trouble than he was worth.
“Not much of a conversationalist, huh?” Danny said.
“He’s shy,” Will said. “Cut him some slack.”
“‘Cut him’?” Danny snorted.
Will smiled. “No pun intended.”
“What pun? Oh, you meant those missing fingers of his?”
They were hidden in the woods, looking out from cover at what used to be a small town called Downer Plateau. There was a good kilometer of open clearing and small roads between them and the town, now referred to by the collaborators as simply L15. Behind them, hidden by trees for at least another three kilometers, was Interstate 49, the primary road through this part of Louisiana.
L15—or what parts of it he could see—had been a good-sized place once upon a time. Big enough for thousands of people to call it home. It was connected to the interstate by a state highway, and from what he could see most of the buildings were concentrated around a central main street. The place gave off an old-fashioned vibe, which was exactly what the ghouls and their human collaborators were going for.
“We think it’s because they want us to start over,” someone had once told him. “A fresh start. The cities are filled with reminders of the old world. Our achievements, our art, our evolution as human beings. Out here, surrounded by farmland, woods… It’s like going back to our roots. No power, no electricity... It’s easier to believe the last two centuries never happened.”
It wasn’t a bad place, if you were looking to start all over without actually beginning from scratch. The people moving around the streets were there willingly. Children poked their heads out of apartment windows, and every now and then he heard the clop-clop of horseshoes on roads meant for cars. The last collaborator town he had been this close to had armed men on rooftops and walking the streets. But there was a noticeable lack of anything resembling “the enemy” at L15.
He looked back at Kellerson again, leaning lifelessly against a tree. The man’s face was white, his eyes hollow, and Will kept expecting him to bolt any second, but losing two fingers must have taken all the fight out of him. That, and he just didn’t look like he had the strength to stand up, much less think he might be able to outrun them.
“L15,” Will said to Kellerson. “That means there are fourteen more towns just like this one?”
Kellerson nodded and mumbled something behind the duct tape.
“How far does the number go? Twenty? Higher?”
Another nod.
“Thirty?”
Kellerson seemed to think about it, then shrugged.
“You don’t know for sure.”
Nod.
“I guess you were right,” Danny said. “Little buggers have been busy while we were twiddling our thumbs back on the beach and drinking piña coladas.”
“Looks like it.”
Will glanced at his watch. 4:14 p.m.
Two hours before sunset. Even with the ATVs Kellerson and his men had been using (when they weren’t tooling around in their armored Humvees), it had taken him and Danny too long to travel from Lafayette, where they had parted company with Roy and Zoe earlier this morning. He couldn’t afford to let Zoe go yesterday after she had been shot, not until he was sure she wouldn’t die on Roy while they were en route. Zoe was a doctor, and those were more valuable than bullets these days.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” Will said.
“Of course it is,” Danny said. “If it didn’t, then this would just be another boring jaunt through the woods. And I forgot my jaunting pants at the island.”
“Shoulda packed appropriately.”
“Shoulda, coulda, but didn’ta.”
Will gestured at Kellerson, who pushed himself off the tree with some effort, turned around, and began marching back through the woods. There was enough light splashing through the trees around them that Will didn’t feel like he was walking through a nest of ghouls, something that you had to take into consideration these days, especially when you were close to an area filled with humans—or prey, to the creatures. They crunched dried leaves and snapped twigs under them, the noise swallowed up by birds perched along branches.
“You think he’s back there?” Danny asked. “Our little buddy Josh?”
“If she’s there, he’s probably there, too.”
“Kid’s got it bad. I remember the last time a girl had me so head over heels. Of course, it never occurred to me to sell out the human race for her affections. Then again, Dad always did say I lacked ambition.”
“If only he could see you now.”
“Yeah. Take that, Pops.”
They hadn’t gone more than a few minutes before Will heard it—felt it, really. He grabbed Kellerson and pushed him down onto one knee, while at the same time he and Danny went into a crouch and looked to their right through a small grouping of trees.
They were less than forty meters from the highway that connected the town to the interstate, and Will had previously spotted a couple of vehicles—both trucks—coming and going. At the moment, he caught a flash of red paint, then dull green. A pickup truck up front, followed by an Army five-ton transport, its thick tires kicking up clouds of dust in its wake.
“Haven’t seen those in a while,” Danny said. “My ass hurts just looking at them.”
Will reached over and peeled the duct tape half off Kellerson’s mouth. The man sighed with relief and sucked in a deep, fresh breath.
“Those five-tons,” Will said. “Are they always full when they show up at these places?”
“Yeah,” Kellerson nodded. He sounded hoarse, even though he had just drank some water a few hours ago. “The kid believes in efficiency, and he’s been organizing everyone into a military mindset. Thinks he’s a major or something.”
“The kid.” Josh.
You actually entrusted one of your operations to an eighteen-year-old kid, Kate? Really?
“How many does a town like L15 hold?” Will asked.
“Maybe two or three thousand,” Kellerson said.
“How many dickheads do they have watching that many people?” Danny asked.
Kellerson shrugged. “Anywhere from ten to twenty.”
“Ten to twenty for a few thousand?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “You telling a fib, Kellerson? Want Willie boy here to start working on those toes next?”
“He doesn’t get it, does he?” Kellerson said, looking at Will.
Will slapped the duct tape back over Kellerson’s mouth.
“Get what?” Danny said. “You BFFs have a joke you wanna share with me? Come on, I’m starting to feel like the third wheel here.”
“He means they don’t need a lot of guards,” Will said. “The people in these towns are here of their own free will. They don’t want to leave. My guess is, ten is more than enough, and twenty is overkill.”
“So what you’re saying is, when we finally get around to going in there guns blazing, they won’t be throwing their virginal daughters at us?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
Danny grunted. “Well, damn. I certainly signed up for the wrong road trip, didn’t I?”
They walked for another
hour until they reached the spot where they had stashed the camouflage ATVs earlier—a small group of buildings about half a kilometer from I-49. It was a homestead connected to the highway by a spur road that hadn’t looked traveled even before The Purge. The house’s main building was a bungalow flanked by an empty garage. A long red barn, the paint badly chipped by neglect and weather, squatted in the back with a rusted-over tractor out front. The place was as out-of-the-way as they could find on short notice.
The ATVs were hidden inside the barn among the unused bales of hay and horseless stables. Walking the rest of the way to L15 had been necessary. Sound traveled these days, and the roar of all-terrain vehicles would have been obvious to even a deaf man.
There hadn’t been much of the bungalow to explore, and their biggest worry was the decayed sloping roof falling down on them. They found what they were looking for in the back of the house, hidden behind rotting twin doors that opened up into an underground cellar. There wasn’t much inside except for old tractor parts and stacks of cinder blocks under dust-covered tarps. They cleared out just enough space in one corner and dropped their bedrolls and supply packs.
Kellerson sat down in one corner on the dirt floor. Will let him eat a stick of beef jerky and gave him a bottle of water to wash it down with. When he was done, Will covered his mouth back up before he could say a word. The fight had gone out of Kellerson about the same time Will threatened to take the collaborator’s third finger.
They found a way to lock the doors by looping coiled steel cables around the handles and snapping a padlock in place. When that didn’t look like it would hold against a prolonged assault, they stacked the cinderblocks in front of the entrance, then threw the heavy tarps over them to make sure not a single inch of space could be seen from the other side. The creatures had proven themselves too smart at detecting people to take any chances.
If their luck did happen to run out, at least they had plenty of the right ammo to fend off an attack. Danny and Roy had left Song Island well prepared, and Will had taken all of Roy’s before they parted company this morning. Roy took the regular ammo because in the daytime, any ol’ bullet would do. Will and Danny carried two heavy bags and two tactical backpacks with them, stuffed with a combination of what Danny and Roy had brought and what they had salvaged from Kellerson’s dead crew. Dead men didn’t need beef jerky, bottled water, and spare ammo. The portable ham radio he had been using to communicate with Song Island was among the supplies.
Will looked down at his watch’s glow-in-the-dark hands: 5:34 p.m.
“You think she’s still alive in there?” Danny asked. He was chewing loudly on a stick of jerky.
“Gaby?”
“No, Yoko Ono. Yeah, Gaby.”
“She’s Gaby.”
“Yup. That’s her name, all right.”
“What I mean is, she’ll be fine. She’s a survivor. You should have seen her at the hospital.”
“Yeah?”
Will nodded. “Yeah.”
Soon, the only evidence that Danny was even leaning against the dirt wall next to him was the sound of chewing. Somewhere to his right, Kellerson was breathing deeply. How the man could make so much noise while only inhaling and exhaling through his nostrils was a mystery. Will had considered removing Kellerson’s duct tape to make it easier on him, but it never took long for the man’s crimes—those that Will knew for a fact, and likely more he didn’t even know about—to come up again, and it took all of Will’s strength not to execute him on the spot.
Night came, and they heard scurrying outside almost immediately. The soft patter of bare feet against hard ground vibrated through the dried dirt around them.
Will flicked the fire selector on his M4A1 rifle from semi-automatic to full-auto just in case.
“You nervous in the service, son?” Danny whispered somewhere in the darkness.
Will smiled.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your flimsy cellar doors down,” Danny whispered.
A soft click as Danny flicked at his carbine’s fire selector.
Will sat back against the cool dirt wall and groped his pack for the all-too-light bottle of painkillers. He shook out two Tramadol and popped them into his mouth, then swallowed without chewing. He pulled up his shirt and ran his palm over the stitching along his right side and considered it a good sign he didn’t feel any wetness. His left arm had numbed over since yesterday, and he hadn’t felt anything more than the occasional slight tingles coming from his left hip in a while. Either the pills were working, or he had become used to them.
What he wouldn’t give to have Lara look him over. The last thing he needed was an infection. Battlefield wound treatment was a crapshoot at best, but leaving them for days was just asking for it.
Of course, having Lara treat him meant going back home. Back to Song Island.
And he couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not while Gaby was still out there…
Around midnight he drifted off, waking up two hours later to let Danny sleep.
Each time Will woke up, he could hear Kellerson moving erratically in the darkness, possibly from a nightmare. Or it could be the bugs and hairy legs of spiders crawling up and down his body. Will felt them too, but they were small enough that he didn’t bother chasing them off. He did slap a few that wandered too close to his neck and face, squashing them against his palm, then wiping the leftover goop on the floor.
When he was awake, he listened to the occasional movements on the other side of the cellar doors, like rats scratching in the walls. He wasn’t surprised they were out there, though it did make him more than a little uncomfortable they were this close. There was no one in the house, and surely they must have already searched it a hundred times since The Purge, so why were they back?
But the creatures’ presence in the area didn’t surprise him at all. There were people nearby in L15. Humans that had given up liberty for salvation. Blood for safety.
“They’re not like you, Will,” Zoe had said to him once. “They’re not soldiers. They’re just trying to survive the end of the world the best they can.”
I would rather die first.
Danny woke up two hours later, and Will went back to sleep.
He felt the heat building inside the cellar with the morning, and small slivers of sunlight flitted through the barricade in front of him when he opened his eyes. Not much light, just enough to illuminate parts of the room.
He sat up and soaked in the peace and quiet of a waking world. The birds had already begun chirping, and Will thought about Lara, about waking up next to her and wishing he were there now instead of sitting inside a room literally dug out of the ground.
After about an hour of tranquility, he stood up and woke Danny, who had been sleeping soundlessly next to him.
“I’m up, I’m up,” Danny said. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Beef jerky.”
“That’s what we had yesterday.”
“Ain’t life grand?”
“I could have stayed on the island and eaten pancakes. Speaking of which, you know what else Sarah found in the kitchen freezer?”
“What’s that?”
“Jimmy Hoffa. Turns out he was in there this whole time.”
“You don’t say.”
“I just did. Sheesh. You never listen.” Danny looked over at Kellerson, sleeping awkwardly on his side across from them. “Should we wake up Sleeping Beauty?”
Will looked at Kellerson for a moment. He had been thinking about what to do with the collaborator for some time now and had even devoted one of his two-hour awake times last night just to mull over the question. The possibilities were endless. Some were bloody, others were cruel, and there were a few merciful options in there, too. Each time he had to weigh the lives Kellerson had taken against the man’s fate…all the bodies Will knew about, and all the ones he didn’t…
Finally, Will said, “We should put him out of his misery. He’s already served his purpose.”
Will was reaching for his Glock in its hip holster when a faint noise from outside the cellar drew his attention.
“You heard that?” Danny said.
“Yeah,” Will said. He moved toward the doors and began removing the barrier they had put up there last night.
The noise they had both heard was a faint wet pop sound, something they wouldn’t have detected eleven months ago when the world was still alive.
As he and Danny were throwing cinderblocks out of their path, they heard it again. This time it wasn’t a single sound, but a continuous rattling pop-pop-pop. They knew exactly what it was and where it was coming from.
Behind them. L15.
Gunshots.
5
Gaby
She stood next to the door, just out of the path of the sunlight pouring across the length of the room through the open window. Her back was pressed against the wall, and Gaby willed her breathing into slow beats to allow her senses to concentrate on what was outside the second floor at this very moment.
Mac was out there again, moving around loudly. He might as well be stomping cockroaches in boots. The man would be carrying his usual gear, including the AK-47, a belt with full ammo pouches, and a sidearm.
“First light. Be ready.”
It was first light, but no one had come.
Not Milly the girl or her accomplice. She knew Milly wasn’t working alone because of the first note she had received: “If we help you escape, will you take us with you?”
The “we” was the dead giveaway. If this was real. She didn’t put it past Josh to play games with her, though that was a worst-case scenario. There was no reason for Josh to deceive her now. Not after he had won. She was locked inside a room and not allowed to leave for any reason except to use the bathroom. In every way that mattered, she was at his mercy, so it was doubtful he would stoop so low as to mess with her head.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 6