Too close. We’re cutting it too close…
Donna wasn’t wrong when she said there wasn’t much between Dunbar and I-10. Route 13 was barren and low to the ground. The highway was surrounded by vast, flat, and empty scenery, and they were still too close to town to spot any farmland, not to mention the houses (shelter) that would be sitting on them. There were also no vehicles in sight. She hadn’t spotted a car since they left the city behind twenty minutes ago.
“Donna,” Gaby said. “We need to find shelter.”
Donna nodded and glanced around them, turning a full 360 degrees. Gaby could practically see the gears turning inside the girl’s head.
“Donna,” Gaby said. “We need a place.”
“I’m thinking,” Donna said.
“Think faster,” Claire said, sneaking a look at the darkening clouds above them.
“Shut up already,” Donna said. Then, after a while, she turned to Gaby. “Okay, I know a place. It’s not far from here, but you might not like it.” And at Claire, “You’re definitely going to hate it.”
“I can take it if you can,” Claire said.
“We’ll see.”
“Does it have a basement?” Gaby asked.
“It sort of has a basement,” Donna said.
“Sort of?”
Donna shrugged. “We don’t have a whole lot of choices, do we? It’ll be dark in half an hour.”
“Okay,” Gaby nodded reluctantly. “Take us there.”
Donna led them over to the ditch, then down into it and back up again onto the other side. They followed her across flat, undeveloped land for five, then ten minutes. With every step they left the highway behind, but there was no way to leave the graying sky above them. It chased them wherever they went, undeterred and inevitable.
Donna wasn’t kidding when she said they might not like the place she had in mind.
It was a cemetery.
Milly’s face grew paler as they neared the wrought-iron fences that surrounded the place. They walked alongside it for a minute or so before entering through the open front gates with a big sign that read, “Dunbar City Cemetery.”
Donna seemed to know exactly where she was going.
“How far?” Gaby asked.
“Not too far now,” Donna said. She glanced over at Claire. “So?”
“So what?” Claire said, putting as much defiance into her voice as possible. Gaby thought she wasn’t entirely successful.
“You scared yet?”
“No.”
“We’ll see.”
Donna led them off the main pathway and across the grass, all four of them moving with obvious urgency. No one had to say it. Not Gaby, and not Donna. Even Claire and Milly knew that time was running out for them. If it wasn’t the skies above them, it was the tombstones jutting out from the weed-infested ground, along with the long-dead flowers and personal keepsakes scattered nearby.
How appropriate would it be if everything ended here tonight? It would be poetic if it weren’t so damn depressing.
Gaby pushed the thought away and concentrated on the steps ahead of her instead, doing her best to ignore all the reminders of the dead and the grieving from their loved ones around them.
“How much farther?” she asked Donna.
“There.” Donna pointed at a white structure flanked by two large trees that looked like ancient sentries that had been there long before man and would remain there long after.
Oh God. She wasn’t kidding.
It was a crypt, and it was made of either concrete or white marble. She had a hard time distinguishing the material under the fading light. It wasn’t particularly big, maybe the size of a small backyard shack. The front entrance was shaped into an arch and a rusted-over metal gate covered the front doors. “Evans” was engraved at the top in Roman alphabet.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Gaby said.
“Hey, it’s the only thing I could think of,” Donna said. She turned to her sister. “So? You still not scared?”
“No,” Claire said, though this time she didn’t have a prayer of making it sound the least bit convincing.
“How are we going to get inside that thing?” Gaby asked.
“There’s a key,” Donna said.
“You have a key to a crypt in a cemetery?”
“No, but I know where they keep it. Well, these guys I know.” Donna hurried over to one of the trees and crouched in front of it. She groped the ground around its base, pushing aside blades of overgrown grass. “It should be buried around here somewhere…”
Buried. She just said ‘buried’ in a cemetery.
Gaby waited for Donna to give her a hint that she had used ‘buried’ on purpose, a pun to break the ice. But she didn’t.
She looked over at Milly, whose face had grown deathly pale during the walk from the front gates to the crypt. Even the usually taciturn Claire looked just a little bit disturbed as they watched Donna rooting about the grass.
“Eureka!” Donna said. She stood up and brushed dirty hands on her shorts. “I thought someone might have taken it for a moment.”
She gave Gaby a half-terrified, half-elated grin before walking to the crypt and sticking a large old key into the lock and twisting it. The gate unlatched with a loud craaaank, like giant metal cogs grinding against each other. The painfully brown metal bars squeaked loudly as Donna pulled at them.
Gaby gave her a hand. It was heavy, like pushing boulders.
“You guys, um, played here?” Gaby asked.
“Not really, well, played,” Donna said, grunting with the effort while trying to hide a bit of embarrassment at the same time.
She means they made out here. And...other stuff.
With the gate open, all Donna had to do was push the thick doors of the crypt inward. These, surprisingly, moved without much effort. They looked inside, using what little light was left to make sure the place was empty. Not that Gaby expected it not to be. Who would be hiding in there, with the doors locked? The place gave off the smell of an enclosed space that had been sealed for almost a year—maybe even longer.
It was surprisingly roomy inside, with a large rectangle-shaped concrete block in the center. There were none of the cobwebs or scampering bugs she always envisioned invading crypts like these. It looked amazingly well-kept, the people who owned it clearly having shown great care with whoever lay inside the coffin at the moment.
She looked back at Milly and Claire. They stared back at her, perhaps hoping she had changed her mind. “Let’s go, girls.”
The two girls stepped inside first, Milly groping the walls for support. They went all the way into the back, keeping as much distance from the coffin as possible. Gaby and Donna pulled the heavy metal gate closed after them. Donna stuck her hand out between the bars and locked it back up. She had clearly done all of this before. They stepped into the crypt and pushed the doors closed from the other side.
Gaby was prepared for it, but as darkness enveloped her inch by inch, she felt dread rushing down her body anyway.
We’re inside a crypt. We’re going to hide from the night inside a pitch-black crypt.
God help us.
Somewhere in the darkness, Milly might have sniffled. Then Gaby heard a click just before the beam of an LED light splashed across the walls, then illuminated the coffin and Donna, who was standing nearby. Claire was holding a small flashlight in the back.
“Where did you get that?” Donna asked.
“It’s the same one I always carry with me,” Claire said.
“Since when?”
“Since forever.”
“Let me have it.”
“It’s mine. Get your own.”
Donna sighed at Gaby, as if to say, “See what I have to deal with?”
Gaby smiled back. This very human moment was a welcome absurdity when they were trapped—voluntarily, too—inside a crypt with a dead body. How old was the body, anyway? And was it a man or a woman? Maybe they should find—
She unslung her pack and weapons, needing to move, to be doing something so she wouldn’t entertain more idiotic thoughts like opening up a coffin to find out who was inside it. Claire helpfully shined her flashlight over so Gaby could see what she was doing.
She pulled out the bags of MREs and handed the girls one each. “Be careful with them. They can be pretty messy. Claire, help everyone with the flashlight. Why don’t we all sit together so Claire doesn’t have to move around too much?”
They moved to the very back and sat down on the floor. Claire’s flashlight appeared as Gaby opened her MRE.
At least the room didn’t smell too bad. There was a musty aroma, but none of the death stench she was expecting. Did all crypts smell this…nice?
“You, uh, played in here?” Gaby asked Donna.
“It’s really not that bad,” Donna said, again with just a shade of embarrassment. “It doesn’t smell at all. You’d think a room with a dead body would smell, right?”
“It’s probably the coffin. It keeps the body from the elements, so it doesn’t…you know.”
“I guess.”
“No one ever found you guys out?”
“Nah. We always cleaned up after ourselves and we only came here at night. There’s not a lot of people here at nights.”
Gee, I wonder why.
“Where’d you get the key?” she asked. She didn’t really need to know, but she felt it necessary to stave off the silence for as long as possible.
“It’s a copy,” Donna said. “This guy we know used to work here one summer. He made a duplicate and after he went off to college, it sort of became a thing within our group. Anyone who wants to use it can. Pretty cool, right?”
If you like making out in crypts while surrounded by the decaying bodies of other people’s dead loved ones, then yeah, it’s pretty cool.
She said instead, “I guess so.”
“I mean, there’s not a lot to do in Dunbar,” Donna said.
There’s less to do now.
“You guys lived in the city?” she asked.
“We had a farm about two miles on the other side of town. Dad, me, and Claire. Our mom passed away a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, she was the lucky one, as it turned out. I guess we’ve always kind of been stuck around Dunbar our whole lives.” Donna paused for a moment to eat, the sound of chewing and the (grateful) aroma of food filling the crypt. “I was really looking forward to getting out of town, too,” Donna said after a while. “I guess better late than never.”
They didn’t say much after that, and there was just the sound of everyone eating.
After a few minutes of silence and darkness, Gaby heard Milly crying softly next to her. She put an arm around the girl and was glad Claire hadn’t shined the flashlight at them to see what was happening. She knew enough to give them their privacy.
Gaby squeezed Milly’s shoulder tightly and thought of Peter.
Probably dead now, back in the VFW basement. If not from his injuries, then when Harrison went back and found him. Or if not Harrison, then whomever he was fighting with and had killed him and his men.
There was another soft click from somewhere in the darkness, then Lara’s familiar voice, slightly muffled by the recording, reverberated against the hard walls around them:
“To any survivors out there, if you’re hearing this, you are not alone. There are things you need to know about our enemy—these creatures of the night, these ghouls…”
Gaby smiled and thought of Song Island.
South leads home.
Go south, young girl…
15
Will
“Looks like this party’s going to go all night,” Danny said. “Are you sure our invitation didn’t get lost in the mail?”
“Anything’s possible,” Will said.
“This is why you should always tip your friendly neighborhood mailman during Christmas. That, or invite him in for tea.”
“I always knew you were a teabagger.”
“I’ll try anything once. Or thrice.”
The gunfight had raged on for the better part of two hours, with Will and Danny content to watch (and listen) from the safety of Gaine’s Meat Market. The sniper on the rooftop of Tom’s Billiard across the street had left, replaced by two men with AR-15s who fired up the street at the soldiers, the clink-clink-clink of their empty brass casings pelting the street below them like never-ending raindrops. The two down on the sidewalk were also gone, and a woman with a ponytail firing calmly with an M4 had taken over.
Every now and then Will saw figures in civilian clothes running up and down the streets that were visible from his limited angle behind the window. They were almost always moving in pairs, all of them well armed, and he often saw them talking into radios. Which told him these weren’t complete amateurs. Either they had been well trained or they had been out here surviving long enough to know how to fight as a unit.
Or, well, a unit-ish.
He was never going to mistake them for a Ranger battalion, that was for sure. Like Josh’s soldiers, these were civilians playing at being weekend warriors. That didn’t make them completely incompetent, but he had seen real soldiers, and these weren’t them.
About an hour ago, they heard footsteps moving on the rooftop above them. The man (or woman) stayed up there for almost thirty minutes, pouring fire up the street. Eventually, he (or she) left, too, maybe for a better position elsewhere. The locals were moving around like busy bees, never staying in one place for too long.
The phrase “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” flitted across his mind throughout the two hours, but he had learned not to put too much stock in strangers with assault rifles. They could turn on you at a moment’s notice, especially given the number of fighters he saw just outside his window alone. From the intensity and spread-out nature of the chaos, there were more of them across the city. The fact that they were fighting the ghoul collaborators from multiple angles was further proof these were dangerous people not to be underestimated.
And maybe the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy…
“You getting flashbacks, too?” Danny said after a while.
Will smiled across the window at him. “Just a little bit.”
They were intimately familiar with the whole scenario playing out before them. The fact that the faux soldiers were clearly outnumbered and outmatched, fighting in a city they didn’t know, facing what, from all appearances, were people who called this place home. People who knew all the angles and how to get to all the rooftops.
It’s Afghanistan all over again. Minus the camels.
“It’s almost just as hot, too,” Danny said, pulling at his shirt collar for effect. “The only thing missing? That wonderful goat smell. Of course, you’re making up for it.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“I’d settle for you taking a shower once per century.”
“Yeah, well, can’t do anything about that now.”
Danny snorted. “Guess not. Who you think’s winning, anyway?”
“If I was a betting man, I’d put money on the locals.”
“That seems kind of wrong.”
“You think?”
“I mean, I’m no fan of Josh’s boys, but still… Uniforms and everything. I’m partial to a man in uniform, but don’t tell Carly.”
“Mum’s the word.”
The fight continued, gunshots like firecrackers, the insistent pop-pop-pop without end. But this gunfight had been going on for some time, which meant the soldiers were dug in, the strip mall parking lot they were calling a base likely providing plenty of protection. Was that on purpose? Had someone chosen that spot for its defensive capabilities? Probably not. He hadn’t found the collaborators to be especially good at tactics. Then again, Kellerson had been pretty smart, and Will was quickly learning not to underestimate Josh.
Not that the fight was going t
o last for very long either way. Well defended or not, the soldiers were at a great disadvantage. They were pinned in, and sooner or later Dunbar’s fighters would get just close enough to finish it. He could already see the locals surging up the street, taking over new buildings as they pushed forward. Already, the fight had almost completely abandoned their window, and they were now listening instead of watching what was happening.
Will glanced down at his watch: 5:52 p.m.
“They’re cutting it close,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“Speaking of which, we got a place to go when it’s night-time time?”
Will looked around the room. He had been thinking about that, too, especially since it was becoming obvious they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. “This room looks decent. Barricade the door and window. Push comes to shove, there’s the bathroom.”
“Hide in a bathroom with you all night?” Danny wrinkled his noise. “Talk about torture.” Then, “The kids still going at it out there? I can’t see them anymore.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I guess they really, really want to kill Josh’s boys.”
“Or maybe they’re just really curious about what’s in that U-Haul, too.”
Danny smirked. “You and the U-Haul. Remind me never to ask you to help me move.”
Will peeked up at the darkening skies above them. Patches of shadows were spreading and the sun was dipping in the horizon like a giant orange ball. “Thirty minutes before nightfall. Give or take.”
“Checked in with your girlfriend on the radio yet?”
“Aw, hell, I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me—”
The crack! of a rifle cut him off.
It had been a few minutes since he last heard or saw anyone firing nearby, with the fight having progressed up the street, so the shot made Will instinctively jerk his head away from the window just as a neat hole appeared in the glass pane in front of him. The bullet kept going and embedded itself into the ceiling across the room. The point of impact had been so clean that the glass somehow managed not to break apart.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 20