Will and Danny had circled back around and headed up to the second floor of Gaine’s Meat Market, using a catwalk in the back, but only after they had witnessed the soldiers searching it and, finding nothing, moved on. The last thing they wanted was for Josh’s boys to show up unexpectedly and get them involved in a gunfight. That would bring everyone down on them, as well as stopping their search for Gaby in its tracks. They couldn’t afford that. Not now. Will didn’t know for sure, but he felt as if she was close. Now all he had to do was find her before someone else did…
He glanced at his watch: 4:15 p.m.
Two hours and change before nightfall. So was this it, then? Had the soldiers only stopped at Dunbar to spend the night? Did that mean they didn’t have protection after nightfall the way they used to when they wore those hazmat suits? Or was he right and the ghouls just knew to ignore them?
Dead, not stupid.
“They coming back?” Danny asked behind him.
Will shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Good. Oh, by the way, I call dibs on the chair.” Danny had settled down on a big, comfortable-looking black felt couch in the corner of the room and was stuffing his mouth with beef jerky from a bag of Oberto.
“How many of those do you have?” Will asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” He threw his boots up on an ottoman and leaned back. “Turn on the AC, will ya?”
“I’ll get right on it.”
There was enough light coming through the curtains over the closed window in front of Will to see with, but it did nothing to help with the heat or the lack of circulation. Opening the window for some wind was a no-go after the soldiers had searched the room earlier. There was a chance one of them might remember that the window was closed if they should walk back in this direction. It was a small risk, but there was too much at stake to do something that stupid just because he couldn’t stand a little (or a lot of) sweat.
Will glanced to his left, down the state highway and back toward the strip mall. He couldn’t see much of anything from this angle. The soldiers left behind hadn’t moved from their spots as far as he could tell, and the ones that had fanned out in pairs had begun to drift back one at a time as the hour dragged on.
What’s in the U-Haul?
“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” Danny said behind him.
“What’s that?”
“The U-Haul.”
“Nope.”
“Let it go. We’re here to find Gaby and get the hell outta Dodge. Keep your eyes on the prize, Kemosabe.”
“You’re not curious?”
“Of course I’m curious. But I’d also like to get home to Carly. This little adventure is fun and all, but I’m frankly tired of walking around with sweaty balls.”
“Good to know, good to know.”
“I’m just sayin’. A man needs more in life than a wet scrotum.”
Will caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. It came out of nowhere and forced him to take a step back from the window before sliding against the wall.
A second later Danny was standing across from him with his rifle. “Company?”
“Not the kind I was expecting.”
Danny followed Will’s gaze to the rooftop of Tom’s Billiard, a one-story building across the street from them. A lone figure in jeans and a black T-shirt was hurrying across the gravel floor toward the edge, where he went into a crouch and peered up the street with a pair of binoculars. He was looking at the same strip mall parking lot.
The one with the U-Haul...
What the hell is in there?
“Now how’d he get up there?” Danny said.
“Probably a ladder in the back.”
“Not one of Josh’s boys, from the looks of his outfit.”
“Maybe a local.”
The man unclipped a radio and raised it to his lips and spoke into it.
“I guess he’s not alone,” Danny said. “What are the chances that Gaby’s with him, that she’s drinking lattes somewhere around here?”
“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.
Danny chuckled. “Hey, we’re due for a little luck.”
“Gaby said that, too. Then she disappeared.”
“You and your half-empty glasses. Can’t you think positively for once?”
The man stood up and jogged back the direction he had come—the other side of the rooftop—where he leaned over the edge.
“What’s he doing now?” Danny said.
“Taking a leak?”
“Should we be watching that?”
“What, you’re not confident enough with your manhood?”
“Hey, the kid could be packing a cannon.”
“Is that what Carly calls it?”
“She calls it lots of things. Paul Bunyan, her favorite glow stick, the nightstick to end all nightsticks…”
The man was pulling up a second figure from the side of the building. This one was bigger, with a round gut, and also wearing civilian clothes. He was carrying a faded green duffel bag over his shoulder.
“Oh, look, he’s got a BFF,” Danny said.
“Look at what he’s carrying.”
“About fifty extra pounds. So the poor guy has an eating disorder. Give him a break.”
“No, over his back.”
“Oh, yeah.” Danny looked for a moment, then, “Looks like they’re up to no good, these two.”
“Yep.”
“Should we stop them?”
“Nah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Besides, I really wanna know what’s in that U-Haul.”
“What if it’s people?”
“People?”
“Like captives.”
That hadn’t occurred to him. “Good point.”
“Really?”
“Hey, even the sun’s gotta shine up a dog’s asshole at least once.”
“And I got a pretty bright asshole, too.”
“Good to know, good to know.”
The two men moved back over to the edge overlooking the street. The fat one put down the duffel bag and unzipped it. He reached in and took out something long and metal. Will knew what it was before the sun glinted off the green camouflage barrel of the M40 rifle. Not the original M40, but a later model. Likely an M40A3 from the looks of it.
The fat man handed the Marine sniper rifle over to his friend, who took it and extended the tripod underneath the barrel before lying down on the rooftop on his stomach. He settled in behind the long scope and positioned his shoulder against the stock.
The kid’s done this before.
“It’s all fun and games until someone breaks out the peashooters,” Danny said. “Then it’s eyes and balls getting popped. Never good.”
“They got friends, too.”
Will nodded down the street, where two more men had appeared and were leaning out from the side of Tom’s Billiard. One had an AR-15 with an ACOG scope and he was zeroing in, while the second one stood behind him peering down the street with binoculars while talking into a radio.
“Oh boy,” Danny said. “Looks like we done run right into a good ol’-fashioned gunfight at the OK Corral. Question is, we wanna get involved in this?”
“Let’s steer clear and see who comes out on top. The Clantons, or Doc Holliday and the Earps.”
“Which one is the Clantons and which ones are the Earps, though?”
“Hell if I know. Does it matter?”
“Hey, you’re the one who made the half-assed analogy. You tell me.” Danny peered up and down the street for a moment. “You think there are more of them hanging around?”
“Gotta be. Whoever’s coordinating this seems to know what they’re doing. Probably a couple more snipers on a few more rooftops. If they’re locals and this is their city, they’ll know all the good spots, including all the ins and outs of the surrounding buildings.”
“Ambush.”
“Looks like it, yeah.”
“Can’t say
I’m feeling sorry for the Earps.”
Will grinned. “Josh’s boys are the Earps?”
“They have the uniforms and the lot down there kinda look like outlaws, what with their sweat-stained shirts and AR-15s and whatnot.”
“Let’s go with that, then.”
The sniper on the rooftop fired, the gunshot impossibly loud in the still city. The shot was still echoing when the man with the AR-15 below them began sending rounds up the street, the clink-clink-clink of his bullet casings flickering into the air and dropping one after another like loud metallic raindrops on the sidewalk.
“I wish we had popcorn,” Danny said, dipping into another bag of Oberto and pulling out a big stick of jerky. “But I guess this’ll have to do.”
“Seriously, how many of those things do you have?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
The gunfire continued unabated, the steady pow!, pause, pow! of the sniper rifle banging out a tune with the rapid pop-pop-pop! of the AR-15 as its melodic companion. They were clearly shooting at something, and Will wished he could see what, but his angle was all wrong.
He thought about moving, going to find another window in the building, when someone up the street unleashed with another rifle and the brick wall the two men were hiding behind flew apart. One of the men ducked behind cover, while the second one calmly pulled himself back and reloaded.
Then all hell broke loose, and the all-too-familiar rattle of dozens of assault rifles firing at the same time on full-auto filled the air. It was like rolling thunder, sweeping up and down the streets of Dunbar, Louisiana.
And all the while, Will’s thoughts kept going back to the parking lot. To Josh’s soldiers. And that one vehicle they seemed to be surrounding like precious cargo.
What’s in the U-Haul?
14
Gaby
Claire returned to the basement about ten minutes after disappearing up the stairs. She came back with a tall blonde girl, the two of them racing down the steps as if they were afraid of being caught. Which, Gaby guessed, wasn’t too far from the truth.
The new girl looked all of seventeen and fresh-faced. Gaby couldn’t remember when she last looked that innocent. The girls were definitely sisters—blonde, slender, and one of these days (probably soon) Claire was going to sprout and become just as tall as her sister. In the time it had taken them to come back, Gaby could tell Claire had already filled Donna in.
“When are we leaving?” Donna asked as soon as she climbed down the stairs.
“Now,” Gaby said.
While waiting for the sisters, Gaby had time to take stock of their surroundings. She and Peter were being kept in the basement of a Veterans of Foreign Wars building somewhere in the center of Dunbar. Someone had converted the room into a bomb shelter, with two sections—the interior where she and Peter were being kept and an exterior portion with the stairs. There was plenty of light out here thanks to LED lamps hanging from hooks. Nearly thirty percent of the space was filled with weapons and ammo, with the rest reserved for nonperishable canned goods, cases of bottled water, plastic red cans of gasoline, an entire corner of propane tanks, and stacks of MREs in crates.
Gaby had grabbed one of the M4 rifles off the rack as soon as she saw them. The carbine had a nice pistol grip under the barrel and a decent, if not great, red dot scope mounted on top. She’d worked with worse all day, so this was definitely an upgrade. She had also snatched up a web belt and began stuffing the pouches with magazines. She was still choosing and adding supplies, shoving them into tactical packs and feeling better with every additional pound, when the girls returned.
“Grab Peter,” she told them.
Claire and Donna helped Peter up from the floor and he hung between them, looking even paler and weaker than when Gaby had first managed to shoulder him into the outer room. His right eye was almost completely shut now, the skin around it giving off an abnormal appearance. Donna looked uncomfortable being this close to Peter, but she didn’t say anything.
Gaby picked up a heavy-duty nylon bag from the floor and stuffed food and water into it before handing it to Donna. “Can you carry this?”
Donna nodded, taking the bag with her free hand. “It’s either me or Claire, right? I mean look at her. She can barely carry herself.”
“Hey, I can carry myself just fine,” Claire said. “I’m still growing.”
Gaby turned back to the gun racks and picked up an additional Glock, this one smaller than the one she already had in her hip holster, and held it out, butt-first, to Donna.
The girl looked at the gun, then at her. “I don’t know how to use that.”
“You want a rifle instead?”
“I don’t know how to use one of those, either.”
Gaby glanced over at Claire and the rifle slung over her back.
“Claire’s been using that since we were kids,” Donna said, picking up on Gaby’s unasked question. “Our dad taught her.”
“And he didn’t teach you?”
“I didn’t want to learn. I wasn’t a tomboy like her.”
“You were just lazy,” Claire said.
“Keep telling yourself that, daddy’s girl,” Donna said.
Gaby stared at them for a moment. If she had any doubts they were actually sisters before, that would have gone away after listening to them. Only siblings bickered like that. She was pretty sure they weren’t even aware of it because it came so naturally at this point.
“I’ll take it,” Claire said, nodding at the gun in Gaby’s hand. “You can teach me how to use it.”
“Later,” Gaby said.
She shoved the spare Glock into her tactical pack, then flicked the safety off the M4. She walked over to the stair landing and glanced up at the closed door at the top. She stood perfectly still and listened but couldn’t hear voices or sounds of any kind from the other side. Definitely no telltale signs that Claire and Donna’s arrival had triggered some kind of an alert from upstairs.
“How many men did Harrison leave behind?” she asked.
“None,” Donna said. “Just the women and children. Harrison took all the men to the north side of town.”
“What’s happening there?”
“Some soldiers showed up.”
“Soldiers?”
“They looked like soldiers, anyway, but I don’t know what soldiers would be doing around here. I didn’t even know they were still around.”
Because they’re not. They’re Josh’s people.
She remembered the town guards in their nice and clean uniforms. She knew they weren’t actually soldiers, just collaborators playing dress up. Not that it mattered now. What was important was that Harrison had marshaled all his forces to deal with it.
What was that saying? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”?
“Are the women up there armed?” Gaby asked.
“Some of them,” Donna said, before adding with some concern, “You’re not going to shoot them, are you?”
“Only if I have to.”
“They’re good people. You don’t need to hurt them.”
“I won’t if I don’t have to.” Donna didn’t look convinced, but Gaby didn’t care at the moment. “What’s Harrison going to do? With the soldiers?”
“He’s going to attack them.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what he does.”
“He’s done it before,” Gaby said. It wasn’t a question.
“He says this is our city, that we have to fight to keep it.”
Like with Peter, Harrison?
Gaby looked back and stared at the three people standing behind her. Really, really stared at them.
They looked back at her intently, anxiously.
Except for Peter, who hadn’t looked any better since she handed him off to the girls. Despite their size, Donna and Claire were holding Peter up surprisingly well, but she could see Claire grimacing with the heavy weight. Peter was limp between them, as if he would fall
and never get up again if they let go even just a little bit.
At first she had thought Harrison’s people had only beaten Peter around the face during the interrogation (because Harrison “needed to know for sure”), but she knew better now. When she had helped him up from the floor, he had flinched with every contact regardless of where she touched him. And walking from one side of the basement to the other had been an ordeal she wasn’t sure he would even survive.
At the moment, Peter was looking back at her with his one good eye. His right was never going to open again. He seemed to know what she was thinking, and he nodded. Or, at least, he motioned with his head in something that resembled a nod. It was mostly just a slight tremble.
“It’s not just the broken ribs,” he said. His voice was very low, coming out almost a whisper, because that was all he could manage, and even that seemed to take a great deal out of him. “I’m bleeding internally, too. This is the end of the road for me, kid.”
“Peter…”
“My right eye’s gone. I can barely see out of the left. I can’t walk without feeling like every bone in my body’s going to break apart at any second. I don’t think I’ll even make it up those stairs.”
“What are you saying, Peter?”
“I want you to go. Take the girls, find Milly, and go.”
He struggled against the sisters then somehow managed to untangle himself from them. They looked on worriedly as he stumbled over to the nearest wall and sat down. He let out a loud sigh, actually managing to smile back at the girls.
“Go,” Peter said. “I’ll be all right.”
“You’re going to die down here, Peter,” Gaby said. She was surprised by her own matter-of-fact tone.
Damn. When had she gotten so cold?
He shrugged back, almost indifferently. “I’m thirty-six. You’re just kids. This is your world now. Go.”
“Peter…”
“I’m not having this conversation, Gaby. Go, now, before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” Gaby was about to say when the first gunshot reached them as a slight echo—a wet, barely noticeable pop noise.
She knew it hadn’t come from the hall above them. It originated from across the city, and it was quickly followed by a burst from an assault rifle. Then there was another shot and suddenly the city of Dunbar exploded with gunfire, the noise so intense that Gaby and the sisters found themselves standing perfectly still and listening to it, transfixed, for almost an entire minute.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 18