The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6

by Sisavath, Sam

  There were zero vehicles (other than the RV) inside the lot, which told him that the place was being used for storage. The lack of a sign or company logo was a bit confusing, though. Then again, if they weren’t doing business out of here, the people who ran it wouldn’t necessarily need to advertise. Even with all those excuses, the emptiness, combined with the encounter with the soldiers this morning, made him jumpy.

  And I thought the woods were dangerous…

  “You think the fence can keep them out?” Carrie asked, glancing backward.

  “Not in this lifetime,” Keo said. “But maybe it’ll deter them anyway. If they’ve been through here before—and chances are they have—they won’t bother coming in again unless we give them a reason to.”

  She gave him a doubtful look.

  “What?” he said.

  “You talk about them like they’re smart. Like they can think.”

  “Carrie, look around you. What do you see?”

  She did. Then, “I don’t understand.”

  “They did this. One night. That was all it took. Now tell me—can stupid, mindless creatures that can’t think do something like this?”

  “I guess not.”

  “These things—these ghouls—might not be the smartest kids in class anymore, but they can still think and reason. Never, ever underestimate them.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s see what’s in the bus.”

  “It’s an RV,” she smiled.

  “Same difference.”

  The RV used to be white, but it was now a faded gray color with long brown and black patterns, like the Nike swoosh, from front to back. It was about thirty feet long and eleven feet high, give or take a few inches, and parked along the length of the garage, taking up the entire space with a few feet to spare up front. Despite the deflated tires and dust-covered windows, it seemed to be in relatively good condition.

  “It looks cool,” Lorelei said. “I’ve always wanted to travel around the country in an RV. My parents used to—” she stopped and didn’t say anything else.

  Carrie walked over and put an arm around the girl, and the two of them exchanged another one of their brief, private smiles.

  “Stay here,” Keo said. “I’ll check the warehouse first.”

  He left them at the RV and walked around the warehouse. He ran his free palm along the building’s side, feeling the heat that the metal walls had been absorbing all day. There were closed windows at the top, but too far to reach from ground level. Both front doors were locked, and pulling at them didn’t get him anything. More layers of dust along the doors themselves and there were no telltale signs that they had swung open recently.

  He located a smaller side door and two large ones at the back, but all three were similarly locked. It wouldn’t have taken much to pry them open, but if the creatures—or one of their human lackeys—stumbled across the damage, they might know someone had taken up residence. If that happened, he’d have to defend a large property by himself. He could probably count on Carrie to lend a hand, but Lorelei, not so much.

  I should just dump them. Both of them. Gillian would understand.

  Probably…

  He headed back to the girls.

  “Anything?” Carrie asked when he reached them.

  “Doors are locked.”

  “Can we break into them?”

  “We could, but we shouldn’t. It’s a big warehouse with too many access points. I doubt it’ll have a basement or anything more secure than an office or a bathroom. If they catch us in there, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “So where, then?”

  “Let’s check the RV first.”

  He wiped at the thick layer of dust over the security window on top of the RV’s door. He peered through it, but despite the bright (falling) sun, he couldn’t see more than a few feet inside. He glimpsed the driver’s seat, the big steering wheel, and what looked like an empty can of Diet Coke on the floor.

  “Stay out here,” he said to the girls.

  They looked back at him, as if to say, “What, you thought we were going to go in there with you?”

  He smiled to himself then tried the door. It clicked open without a fight. He pulled it all the way open and slipped inside, sweeping the immediate area with the MP5SD. He took out an LED flashlight from one of his pouches and ran the beam over the seats in the middle. He was greeted by the very good sign of dust along the headrests and the smooth surface of a table to his right, half-encircled by a booth with plastic seats.

  He moved up the aisle, boots squeaking softly against the vinyl flooring. There was a small kitchen complete with sink and range to his left. A dining table was fastened to the floor across from it, and more booth seating. Two doors at the very back. One opened up into a small bathroom and the other into a surprisingly spacious bedroom with a twin-size bed that had a wooden frame in one corner and an oak dresser on the other. There was a single window at the back, but it was blocked by the warehouse wall on the other side.

  He rasped his knuckle on the solid fiberglass door and liked the sound he heard. It had a 12x21-inch tinted window at the top and a deadbolt lock on the inside. The odds of it withstanding a prolonged assault were good, especially with the dresser and bed as reinforcements.

  Keo headed back to the front door.

  Lorelei was leaning through the opening, giving him an anxious look. “Is it safe?”

  “Safe enough,” he said.

  Carrie followed Lorelei up the steps. “Okay?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’ll do. We only need it for one night, anyway.”

  “So,” Lorelei said, “can we eat now? I’m starving.”

  Carrie smiled wryly at Keo. “I told you. Like a horse.”

  “Hey!” Lorelei said.

  As dusk fell, visibility inside the RV began to drop. Carrie sat in the booth across from Keo while they listened to Lorelei snoring inside the bedroom in the back. The teenager had gone to sleep almost instantly. Keo wondered if she was tired from all the walking or the talking. Maybe both.

  Carrie had her legs pulled up against her chest, sneakers resting on the seat. “What now?” she asked after they had been sitting there in silence for a while.

  Keo reached into his pack and pulled out a Glock, then handed it to her butt-first. “Just in case.”

  She took the gun and laid it on the table between them. Keo took out two spare magazines and placed them next to the weapon.

  “How many of these things are you carrying around with you?” she asked, sounding amused.

  “Plenty. Now, pay attention. It doesn’t matter where you shoot them. As long as you hit them with a silver bullet, they go down. Understand?”

  She nodded and picked up the magazines, putting them into her pocket. “So, you’re like Chinese or something? I know you’re Asian. But not the whole way.”

  He smiled. “‘Not the whole way’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My mom was Korean.”

  “Ah. What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

  “Chuck was taken.”

  She stared at him, unsure how to process that response.

  “You can take the bedroom with Lorelei,” Keo said. “I’ll sleep out here and keep an eye out.”

  “You sure?” she asked, the tiredness coming through.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Keo. For everything.”

  She picked up the Glock, stood up, and headed to the bedroom in the back.

  Alone again, Keo pulled the tab on a can of Dole pineapple and sporked himself a nice big chunk dripping with syrup. He finished the entire can in a few minutes, watching as night fell outside the window like a canvas draping over the streets, the Spartan grounds within the hurricane fencing, and finally, the RV itself.

  He picked up his MP5SD and put it on the table next to him, then leaned back against the wall. There was another window behind him, but it was blocked by the garage wall s
o there was no chance of anything coming through it. That only left three possible points of entry—the window directly across from him, the door to his left, and the front windshield. The windshield was mostly concealed by one of the other three walls, which really left just the window and door.

  He closed his eyes briefly and thought about Gillian to help pass the time…

  Keo wasn’t asleep, but he had settled into a peaceful state somewhere been dozing off and wide alert. It was an old trick he had learned a long time ago, something that had become very useful when he found himself stuck up a tree recently.

  When he heard the noise, he knew immediately what it was before he even opened his eyes, slid off the plastic seat, and glided across the RV to the other side and pushed up against the window.

  Headlights speared the street, cutting across the fading light outside. From the sounds of it, a truck. Despite his limited perspective, he could tell it was moving erratically, headlights swaying left and right as it got closer.

  One of the trucks with the soldiers? How did they find us?

  Keo watched it near, wondering what was going to reach him first—the truck or the falling night. If he were a betting man…

  Click.

  Carrie squeezed out of the partially open bedroom door and looked across the darkened vehicle at him. He lifted a finger to his lips, hoping she could see, and when she quietly closed the door and walked on her tiptoes toward him, he guessed she had.

  She flattened her body against the wall next to him. “I heard a car…”

  He nodded.

  “Did they find us?” she asked. “The soldiers?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  The pickup finally came into view. It might have been red, but it was hard to tell against the falling night. The vehicle had begun to slow down a bit, but it was still swerving from lane to lane, clearly out of control.

  “It’s in trouble,” Carrie whispered.

  As if on cue, the truck flipped and a figure—thin, gaunt, and unmistakably ghoul—flew off the bed where it had been holding on and was slingshot across the night sky as if shot out of a cannon. It landed somewhere further up the road, well beyond Keo’s line of sight.

  The truck rolled on its side like a ball of steel and metal and aluminum, chunks of its frame firing off in every direction like missiles. Its bright front and rear lights shattered against the asphalt, showering the road with fireworks.

  “Oh God,” Carrie gasped.

  Finally, the truck came to a stop, settling on its roof with a loud groaning noise as smoke flooded out of its crumpled hood. They heard the metallic clinking of car parts big and small rolling around the road and dropping from the overturned vehicle.

  “We should go out and help them,” Carrie said.

  Keo didn’t say anything.

  “Keo…”

  “It could be a trap. I can’t tell if the truck is one of the three we saw earlier…”

  A figure crawled out of the truck. It was a man. Or, at least, it had the size and large shoulders of a man, though Keo couldn’t make out details in the darkness. The man (?) crouched and reached into the truck and was pulling something out (another person, maybe?) when he suddenly let go and staggered back, and two loud gunshots exploded across the empty city.

  The man fired again and again and again.

  Until he finally stopped, turned, and ran—right at the fence in front of them.

  He leaped desperately and reached out for the top of the fence, just barely managing to get a handhold, and began to pull himself up. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt. Definitely not one of those camo uniforms.

  “He’s not one of them,” Carrie whispered next to him. “We should go help.”

  “It’s too late,” Keo said. He kept his voice calm, measured, and unyielding. “He’s on his own.”

  “We can’t do this. We have to help—” She gasped again when she saw them. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

  There was a tide of them, so many that at first he thought the night was actually moving, that it had somehow come alive. But no, it wasn’t the darkness that had changed into a living thing, it was the living things inside it.

  Ghouls. Hundreds, maybe more. Thousands?

  He didn’t know where they had come from, only that they weren’t there one moment and then there was nothing but them. They swarmed toward the man, swallowing him up as if he were a fish trying to outswim the ocean itself. But he couldn’t, and Keo heard the scream, the sound of gunshots that wasn’t quite as loud as before because this time they were muffled by suffocating flesh.

  Something grabbed onto Keo’s arm. He looked down at Carrie’s hand, her fingers digging into his skin. She stared out the window, face frozen in horror, the sight too frightening to comprehend yet too fascinating to look away from.

  “Carrie,” he whispered when he felt a trickle of blood along his arm.

  She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were transfixed by the amorphous blob moving outside the window, just beyond the flimsy hurricane fencing that would fall in a split-second if the creatures ever knew they were in there—

  “Carrie,” he said again, a little louder this time.

  That did it. She looked over at him, then down at his arm, and quickly unfurled her fingers and pulled her hand back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay.”

  He slid down to the floor and took a handkerchief out from one of his pouches and wrapped it around his arm.

  Carrie sat next to him, clutching her knees to her chest. She stared forward and rocked absently back and forth. “What were they doing out there, Keo? What in God’s name were they doing out there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Everyone knows not to be outside at night. Everyone knows. Even Lorelei knows. Everyone…” Her voice trailed off.

  Keo put his arm around her and pulled her against him. She came willingly, anxiously, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and it wasn’t because of the slightly chilly night air inside the RV.

  “Go to sleep,” he whispered. “It’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “Will it?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  Carrie’s body slackened against him and Keo tightened his grip on her with one hand, the other holding the MP5SD in his lap. He kept his eyes and ears open and knew he wasn’t going to be getting sleep anytime soon. Which was okay. He was used to not getting a decent amount of sleep these days. Hell, these last few weeks and months...

  He thought about Gillian, walking on a white sandy beach, barefooted. He wondered if she had given up on him by now or if she still looked off at the Gulf of Mexico every day, waiting for him to arrive, for him to finally make good on his promise.

  “You promise me,” she had said. “You’ll follow us to Santa Marie Island.”

  “Yes,” he had answered. “I promise.”

  “I’ll wait for you. Just hurry.”

  That had been months ago. Did she still remember the exchange between them as vividly as he did? Was she even still waiting for him? There was only one way to find out.

  First, though, he had to make good on a dead man’s promise, and that meant going to Song Island…

  12

  Gaby

  What are you doing, you idiot?

  Turn around. Right now. Run back to the door.

  Do it.

  And then what? There was no way out. No way to open the door. (She would need a doorknob for that.) No windows to climb out of, either. Not even a vent to crawl into.

  They were inside the building, just like whoever had led them in here had planned it.

  You’re screwed. You’re so screwed.

  She must have sighed out loud because she heard clothes rustling as Peter, somewhere in the darkness with her, turned in her direction. Or she thought he did, anyway.

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  She shook her head before realizing he probably couldn’t
see, not with the flashlight beam in front of them instead of on her face. “I’m fine,” she whispered back. “Keep the flashlight in front of us.”

  “Okay…”

  They had been walking down a long, empty hallway toward another intersection for the last ten minutes, though it didn’t seem as if they had gone very far from the alleyway door. That probably had something to do with the inability to see beyond the end of Peter’s flashlight. She must have gripped and re-gripped the M4 at least a dozen times.

  At least there was a window in front of them this time, even though it was covered up so thoroughly with thick slabs of wood that not a single sliver of sunlight managed to slip through. Peter’s circle of light illuminated the occasional paintings of birds and ducks and flowers on the wall, along with end tables that held delicate-looking vases with nothing inside them.

  It continued to be deathly quiet inside the building, not helped by the normal silence beyond the walls. It seemed as if she and Peter were the only two people still alive in the world at that moment, moving in the dark.

  Moving in the dark…

  She had trouble figuring out what kind of building they were in, much less its size. Maybe some kind of boarding house, judging by the hallways? Or an apartment building, maybe. Was there more than one floor? She hadn’t come across any stairs yet, and there were no sounds above her. She had been so busy chasing Peter through the streets and then the alley that she hadn’t taken even a second to take a look at the buildings around them. Her situational awareness, Will would say, had been utter shit.

  How long had they been moving through the darkness? Twenty minutes? More? Less? Hard to tell. Hard to breathe.

  But it wasn’t hard to sweat. She was doing a lot of that. The thickness in the air was made worse by the boarded-up window. She assumed the rest of the windows in the place were similarly covered, which would explain the complete lack of ventilation. Peter was sweating almost as much next to her; she could tell because whenever they accidentally brushed up against each other—which was about once every other step—his sweat rubbed off on her exposed arm and vice versa.