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

by Sisavath, Sam

  Lara smiled, then glanced at her watch again: 7:34 p.m.

  Two times a day, Will. That was all I asked. You can’t even do that for me. If I didn’t love you so much, I’d hate your guts right now.

  She stared at the designated emergency radio on the other side of the table, willing it to come alive, for Will’s voice to blurt through the speakers.

  Instead, she heard the loud roar of an outboard motor rising in the distance. No, not in the distance. Closer.

  Lara ran to the south window and looked toward the beach.

  “Is that one of ours?” Maddie said behind her.

  “I don’t know.” Lara unclipped her radio and keyed it. “Who’s at the beach right now?”

  “I am, Lara!” Benny said through the radio. He was on the verge of screaming, trying to be heard over the loud noise of the outboard motor in the background. “I was about to call in!”

  She could see it—a small white light moving away from the pier. It was a spotlight on one of the boats. It was moving fast, so she guessed it was one of the bass fishing vessels.

  “That’s one of ours, all right,” Maddie said. She was peering through the M4 with the ACOG mounted scope. “Blaine was using it earlier to recon the area for those sounds I thought I heard.”

  “What’s going on down there, Benny?” Lara said into the radio. “Who’s on the boat?”

  “It’s Roy and Gwen,” Benny said. “We saw something on the lake. A white boat. It looked adrift, so they’re going to intercept it.”

  “Goddammit, who told them to do that?”

  “I’m sorry, Lara. I tried to stop them. What should I do?”

  “Stay right where you are.”

  She took a breath and tempered down the anger and frustration. What the hell were those two thinking, running off like that?

  She gathered herself, then keyed the radio again. “Roy, Gwen…come in. Roy, Gwen, answer me.”

  She waited, but there was no response.

  “They might not be able to hear over the motor,” Maddie said. “It can get pretty loud standing right next to it.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Either that, or they were ignoring her. She wasn’t sure which answer was more aggravating. “I need you up here—”

  “Got it,” Maddie said before she could finish. “Go.”

  Lara nodded gratefully back at her. At least she could count on Maddie, Blaine, and the others. Carly, and even the kids. They had been together since Texas. Roy and Gwen and the others had shown up on the island recently and were still wildcards, trying to get used to how they did things over here. Or maybe it was her leadership. Maybe they didn’t fully respect her enough to do what she told them not to do…like running off on a boat to catch something floating in the lake like a bunch of amateurs.

  Will would never have this issue.

  She raced through the door in the floor and sprinted down the spiral staircase. She keyed her radio as she leaped onto the second floor below and found the second set of stairs. “Blaine, did you hear all of that?”

  “I heard,” Blaine said through the radio. “What the hell are they thinking?”

  “I don’t know. Grab your rifle and meet me at the beach.”

  “On my way.”

  “What about me?” Bonnie asked through the radio. “Carly’s out here with me.”

  Like all the adults on the island, Bonnie had her own issued radio tuned into the same channel and it was powered on at all times, so whenever someone broadcasted, they all heard it. It was another one of Will’s protocols, and its singular purpose was to keep everyone in the loop. It was also why she was fuming that Roy and Gwen were ignoring her. If they could hear her radio call, that is.

  Yeah, let’s go with that. The other answer is too aggravating.

  “I need you guys on the patio,” Lara said. “Everyone else, stay put inside the hotel, and anyone who isn’t already in the hotel, get there now.”

  “Got it,” Carly said through the radio.

  “Carly…”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need a rifle.”

  “Gotcha, boss.”

  Lara burst out of the Tower and jogged across the grounds, making a beeline for the beach. Bonnie was already back outside the hotel’s front patio, cradling a Remington shotgun. The ex-model waved at her and Lara waved back.

  Carly jogged down the patio steps as she reached them and handed Lara an M4 rifle. “Blaine’s waiting for you at the beach.”

  “What were Roy and Gwen thinking?” Lara said to Bonnie.

  Bonnie shook her head helplessly. “I don’t even know what they were doing down there at this time of the night. They know better than that. The curfew…”

  “They’re, uh, involved,” Carly said. The other two women looked over at her. “What, you guys didn’t know? They’ve been sneaking into each other’s rooms for the last few days. I guess they were down there doing, you know.”

  “Spare me the details,” Lara said, finding herself even more annoyed than before. “I need you guys here. There are other ways on the island besides the beach.” She met Carly’s eyes. “Remember?”

  Carly nodded back. She remembered that night, too. “We got this. Go.”

  Lara slung the carbine and jogged along the cobblestone pathway toward the beach. “Blaine,” she said into the radio.

  “I’m on the beach with Benny,” Blaine answered.

  “What do you see?”

  “I think they stopped the other boat.”

  Lara noticed how quiet it had gotten suddenly. They shut off the motor, she thought, and keyed the radio. “Roy, Gwen…can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” Gwen said through the radio.

  It took all of Lara’s self-control not to tear into the twenty-something right then and there. “Are you and Roy all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Gwen said. “We have them, Lara.”

  “The other boat?”

  “Yes. There are two women onboard. They’re both unarmed.”

  She was halfway to the beach, the wooded area that separated the hotel grounds from the water to both sides of her. Birds took flight as her footsteps warned them of incoming humans.

  “Two women?” she said into the radio. “On a boat in the middle of a lake at night?” Alarm bells went off inside her head. “You and Roy need to be careful. It could be a trap.”

  “What should we do with them?” Gwen asked.

  Oh, so now you want orders? she wanted to ask, but instead said, “Bring them in.”

  “Will do.”

  The soothing breeze brushed up against her as soon as she reached the soft, mushy sands and heard the slowly lapping waves. It was always colder on this part of the island and was the main reason everyone loved to sneak in an hour or two near the evenings. There was no better place to forget about the state of the world than running barefoot across the white sands.

  Which, she guessed, explained why Roy and Gwen were down here last night. She tried very hard not to picture them hiding in the woods somewhere doing…something.

  She spotted Benny standing on top of the boat shack, peering through binoculars out at the water. It was impossible to see much of anything too far out beyond the lights along the piers—except for the bright spotlight of the boat that Roy and Gwen were on at the moment. Next to them, she guessed, was the other boat….with the two unarmed women.

  Blaine was moving up one of the piers and Lara jogged past the shack, exchanging a quick nod with Benny. She headed up the middle pier, one of three that stuck out of the beach like the teeth of a fork. The wooden planks clapped loudly under her boots.

  Blaine glanced back. “Doc.”

  “You heard?”

  “Two unarmed women in the middle of the lake, at night? Doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The loud outboard motor had started up again and the bright light floating on the surface of the lake started moving, this time coming back toward
them.

  “How did they catch up to the other boat?” she asked.

  “Benny said he heard a low whining sound, so they were probably using a trolling motor,” Blaine said. “It would explain how they managed to creep so close to the island without being seen. Well, until they were spotted, anyway.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Benny saw it first with his binoculars. I guess they were drifting and got too close. He said Roy and Gwen were walking back to the hotel when he called them over. It didn’t occur to him those two idiots would jump into one of the boats and take off to intercept.”

  Lara ground her teeth together. She had a lot of things to say, most of them vulgar. But this wasn’t the time. Not now. Roy and Gwen had come to the island at the same time as Bonnie and her sister Jo. They were in the same group, and it made perfect sense the two of them would be drawn to each other. It was almost inevitable, in a way.

  It didn’t take long for the boats to reach them. The bass fishing boat was towing along a white vessel by a rope, and the two women they had caught were sitting on the floor at the front, while Gwen, all five-two of her, stood next to them (too close for Lara’s liking) with her Glock in her hand. Roy steered the boat over to the pier and cut off the engine.

  Lara stared at Roy, who quickly looked away. She wasn’t sure if that was embarrassment or realization that he had done something she didn’t approve of. She ignored him (for now) and turned her attention to the two women while Gwen tossed a second line over to Blaine. The women were a brunette in her twenties and a blonde teenager peering back at her through long, stringy hair that seemed to shine under the pier lamps.

  The older woman met Lara’s eyes. There wasn’t fear there, just a lot of reluctance. “We didn’t mean to start any trouble.”

  “What are you doing here on a boat in the middle of the night?” Lara asked.

  “Looking for a place to stay. We heard a message on the radio. It said to get to an island…”

  Lara exchanged a glance with Blaine.

  The radio broadcast. Her radio broadcast. A lot of things were happening because of what she had sent out into the world. A lot of it was good, but a part of her, deep down, wondered if the bad was around the corner…

  “What’s your name?” she asked them.

  “I’m Carrie and this is Lorelei,” the brunette said. “We were just looking for a safe place—”

  The crack! of a gunshot exploded across the island from behind her.

  She spun around and traced the shot back to Benny, standing on the roof of the boat shack. He was looking down his rifle at something further up the beach.

  Benny fired again.

  Lara looked where he was shooting and glimpsed a figure moving out of the water and darting up the white sands. It was a man, and he was moving fast. Sand erupted behind him as Benny fired a third time and missed badly.

  “Blaine!” Lara shouted.

  Blaine was already pointing his rifle at the two women in the boat. They stood frozen and terrified because both Roy and Gwen had also drawn their weapons.

  “I got ’em, go,” the big man said.

  Lara ran back up the pier, looking right, trying to track the figure’s progress as it slashed across the beach, making a straight line for the trees. He was moving too fast for her to see any details, except that he was running in wet clothes and was still somehow managing to outpace Benny’s shots. That was one hell of a feat. Could even Will move that fast?

  She heard voices through the radio in her hand.

  Bonnie, from the hotel patio: “I hear shooting. Guys?”

  Maddie, in the Tower with the ACOG: “I can’t get a shot!”

  Carly, also at the hotel: “What’s happening? Is everyone okay?”

  Lara leaped off the pier and landed in the soft sand. She almost lost her balance, but managed to regain it quickly enough to run up the beach. She unslung her rifle as she ran and took aim—

  —when the man disappeared into the woods.

  Shit.

  Lara lowered her rifle and pulled up. Her heart was pounding and the adrenaline was pouring through her.

  You wanted to be a leader? Well, here’s your chance. Make it count.

  She keyed her radio. “Someone’s in the woods. I repeat: we have an intruder in the woods. Consider him armed and dangerous. If you get a shot, take it.”

  19

  Will

  Tommy woke up around one in the morning along with another man, Bratt, to take their turn on guard duty over Will and Danny in place of Rachel and Milch. Rachel had gotten up and disappeared into the shadows while Bratt replaced her in the light, sitting down next to Tommy.

  It was dead silent outside the basement, and the only sound was the breathing of the people inside. Will watched Tommy continuing to struggle to keep his eyes open while Bratt looked as if he had gotten his full eight hours, even though Will knew for a fact he had only slept about four since they fled to the basement after the massacre.

  And that was exactly what it had been. Rachel and the others didn’t want to admit it, but everyone they knew in the city was likely dead except them. Kate’s ghouls—especially the blue-eyed ones—had made sure of that. That was bad for Rachel, but it was also bad for him and Danny. They had come to Dunbar expecting to find Gaby. Unless she had made it out of the city before everything went to hell, chances were she was just as dead (or worse) as Rachel’s people.

  What were the chances she had actually gone around the city? There was a small—very, very small—possibility of that. But unlikely. Dunbar was too big. It would have taken too long to go around. Easier to just go through it. Plus, Gaby would have wanted to look for supplies on the way to Song Island. She was traveling south—and there was only one thing down there.

  Home.

  The more he turned over all the possibilities in his head, the more Will reluctantly concluded that the chances of finding Gaby now had lessened dramatically. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he and Danny were going to survive tonight. Despite Rachel’s assurances about letting them go in the morning, Will wasn’t too confident there was going to be a morning.

  Not with Kate’s ghouls out there. Her blue-eyed ghouls.

  Four of them. Jesus. There were four of them out there right now. One was bad enough, but four that didn’t go down even after you shot them with silver bullets?

  Then there was what Kate had said about the island, about Lara’s broadcast:

  “Like a certain little island that should have stayed quiet. This is what happens when you stick your head out and get my attention, Will. I grab a hammer.”

  He needed to get his hands on the radio. Even if Lara was asleep, someone would be monitoring the emergency frequency twenty-four hours a day in the island’s Tower. It was protocol. He should know; he was the one who put it together.

  But to get to the radio, he needed to get through Tommy and Bratt. Maybe if he could talk to the kid, get him to understand. It was always easier to convince someone to do something when he didn’t look at you as an enemy.

  Then there was Bratt. The man was cleaning a silver-chromed Smith & Wesson automatic with a small toothbrush. He was quiet and invisible for a big man—240 pounds easy—with a full graying beard and dark eyes. Bratt hadn’t said a word since he sat down.

  Will only really needed to convince one of them, so it had to be Tommy. It was a no-brainer.

  “Where did you get that?” Will asked the teenager.

  Tommy was clutching the M40A3 sniper rifle, the same one he had been shooting during the gun battle yesterday afternoon. “It’s my dad’s. He taught me how to shoot with it.”

  “It’s a hell of a rifle. Was he a Marine?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’ve only seen Marines using the M40 when I was in Afghanistan.”

  “You were in Afghanistan?”

  “Danny and me. You good with it?”

  “Not bad. I’ve been shooting with it since I was eleven.�
��

  “So, five years ago?”

  Tommy grinned. “Eight going on nine, wise guy.”

  Will smiled back at him, feeling like a pervert on a playground trying to lure a kid into his ice cream truck.

  “I always thought I’d enlist when I was old enough,” Tommy was saying. “Never got the chance, with everything that happened. What branch were you in?”

  “I was Army.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  Will chuckled. “Yeah, well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

  Tommy glanced briefly at Danny, sleeping with his back against the wall next to Will. “Is he really asleep?”

  Will looked over at Danny, then shrugged. “I think so.”

  “He doesn’t look asleep.” Tommy narrowed his eyes. “He’s faking it, isn’t he?”

  “He’s tired. We’ve been moving on water and beef jerky for the last couple of days, trying to get home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tommy said. “If it was up to me, I’d have let you guys go.”

  There it is. There’s the opening.

  “I need the radio, Tommy,” Will said. “I really need to give my friend a message. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  Tommy didn’t answer right away. But he also didn’t say no right away, either.

  “Tommy,” Will said, keeping his voice calm, conversational, “it’s just a radio. What’s it going to hurt?”

  “I can’t,” Tommy said finally, shaking his head. “Rachel’s orders. I’m sorry.”

  “She doesn’t have to know.”

  “She’ll know.” The kid shrugged. “Anyways, it’s not going to work. Look around you. Concrete walls and floor. It’d be a miracle if you could get a signal out of this room.”

  “I have to try. You have to let me try. A lot of lives are at stake.”

  This time Tommy shook his head faster without even taking a moment to think about it. It was a bad sign.

  “I can’t,” the teenager said. “I’m sorry. You’ll get it back tomorrow. It’s only, what, six hours away?”

  Six hours too long…

  This wasn’t going to work. So he tried another tact.

  “You saw them?” Will asked.