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

by Sisavath, Sam

  “Gaby, get down!” Danny shouted from the other side of the hallway.

  Her mind was reeling, the sight of the creature still standing after she had put three silver bullets into its chest making it hard for her to think straight.

  “Remember: shoot them in the head,” Will had said.

  Shoot them in the head!

  The creature wasn’t looking at her anymore. It was already turning and bounding up the hallway toward Danny, who was firing, having switched to full-auto. Bullets pierced the creature’s body and embedded into walls as Danny tried to track its constantly moving and shifting form. It was dodging his gunfire. How was that even possible? Were they really that fast?

  Stupid question, because she could see it with her own eyes.

  Danny’s silver rounds that did land were penetrating the creature’s body and continued on, zip-zipping up the narrow space like flies buzzing, slamming into the wall around her. She had to duck to keep from being hit by a stray bullet, and suddenly the prospect of dying by friendly fire was very real.

  In a crouch, Gaby lifted her rifle and tried to get a bead on the creature as it fled away from her (“Shoot them in the head!”). Before she could fire, she lost track of it as it disappeared into the room. It was suddenly on the floor and Danny was under it, fighting for his life, and she couldn’t make out where the creature ended and Danny began.

  Instead, she reached down and pressed the PTT, and shouted, “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

  Where the hell was Will? Couldn’t he hear what was happening up here? What was he doing down there? What—

  There was a massive BOOM! and the entire house shook from its foundations all the way up to its ceiling, as if a bomb had gone off on the floor under her.

  The first floor. Will.

  What the hell was happening down there?

  She started forward toward the stairs—

  —when a second creature fell through the same hole the first one had made with the sledgehammer and landed in an elegant crouch in front of her. It made so little noise, and there was so little effort in its movements, that for a moment the sight of it straightening up, stretching its body like some twisted, deformed ballerina, startled Gaby to the core.

  It had its back to her as it rose to its full height—it was at least a foot taller than her, maybe more—and turned around. Gaby became instantly mesmerized by its ethereal blue eyes. Like two impossibly bright orbs washing over the darkened hallway, reaching into her very soul.

  It opened its mouth, revealing twisted and cracked brown and yellow teeth stained with oozing black liquid that looked, for some reason, as if they, too, were alive and wiggling.

  “Wanna play?” it hissed, eyes glinting with mischief in the moonlight.

  33

  Will

  The darkness did things to you these days. It lulled you into a strange state of numbness with its overwhelming silence, the unnatural sense of calm that seemed to pervade everything, while at the same time it made you dread all the things out there that you couldn’t see.

  Inevitable. Night after night.

  Are we just living on borrowed time? Is that all it is?

  Tonight. Tomorrow night. The week after. The next month?

  How long can we keep the island? How long can we keep fighting them before it becomes too much? Before the costs are too great?

  How long…

  He had to shake himself to rid his mind of those depressing thoughts. Being downstairs by himself didn’t help. The most he could do to keep busy was move from window to window, checking every corner of the front yard. He couldn’t really see the soldiers on the road from here, but he knew they were still out there, somewhere.

  When they finally came, he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand. His senses were never more razor sharp as they were during the preamble to combat. He felt it now, the hyper awareness of his surroundings. Every sound, every flickering image, and every glowing blue eye.

  As he watched them toying with Harrison, he realized just how different these creatures were. They were the same, but not—an entirely new breed of what he was familiar with. Radically different. More dangerous. This was why they had kept the other ghouls back in Dunbar. Because this was their show. Their sport. Harrison was a warm-up and now they were coming for the main event. He and the others inside the house.

  So where were they now? What was taking them so long?

  Will glanced back at the staircase behind him. It was too dark to make out much of anything on the first floor even with the slivers of moonlight filtering in through the barricades over the windows, one next to him and the other one on the other side of the door. He could just make out the stair landing—

  There was a loud crash from above him, and the entire house shuddered.

  He reached for his radio. “Gaby!”

  He waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. Instead, he heard the pop-pop-pop of an M4 exploding from the second floor. Three-shot burst. Gaby’s rifle, because Danny still had his M4A1 and he would have either used single shots or gone full-auto.

  Will abandoned the window as more gunfire erupted from the top of the stairs. In the packed confines of the house, the sounds were thunderous, but they couldn’t quite drown out the voice. Danny’s, shouting between gunshots. He wasn’t using the radio, either. That was a bad sign.

  The first floor. Stay on the first floor! Don’t abandon—

  Then Gaby’s voice, blasting through his earbud. “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

  He was at the stairs, grabbing for the wooden globe on top of the newel, when shadowed movements flickered across the wall in front of him. Figures, moving outside one of the windows, their shapes casting across the room by moonlight.

  He spun back around and saw the indistinguishable shapes moving on the other side of the window he had abandoned just seconds ago. As soon as he saw them, the silhouetted forms raced away again.

  What—?

  The explosion (or was that explosions?) shredded the window, the barrier over it, and a large section of the house around them. Will dived to the floor as chunks of the wall and even the porch buzzed over and around his head, sharp pieces embedding into the floor inches from him. Debris rained down across the room and his ears were buzzing. He was sure he had gone temporarily deaf (Please let it be temporary), though that couldn’t possibly be the case because he could still hear continuous gunfire from above him.

  Grenades? Did they just use grenades on the wall?

  Jesus Christ.

  He looked up from the floor, expecting the entire house to come tumbling down on top of him at any second. But it didn’t. Somehow, by some miracle, the second floor remained where it was—above him—despite the jagged, gaping hole across the room looking out into the moonlit yard. Absurdly, the door next to it had remained intact, as had the repurposed lumber they nailed over it. Smoke from the explosion poured out of the house, and he became aware of the chilly night air for the first time in the last few hours.

  He managed to scramble to his knees, glad he hadn’t lost the M4A1 during his swan dive. Pieces of wood and glass fell off his shoulders and back and head, and there may or may not have been a trickle (or two or a dozen) of blood flowing down his face. His ears were still ringing, which made the sight of two figures, both in camo uniforms and gas masks, stepping through the hole in the wall and moving against the lingering smoke look like monsters in a bad dream.

  He couldn’t hear his carbine firing, but he could feel it bucking against his hands.

  The first man slumped forward while the second one tried desperately to track him in the smoke. His vision was likely blocked by the limited view of the gas mask.

  Sucks to be you.

  Will put a bullet into the second man’s right eye. He stumbled awkwardly before collapsing into a pile.

  Will struggled to his feet. His equilibrium was off and he swayed left, then right, then left aga
in. The coughing fits didn’t help him adjust any quicker as he reached out with his free left hand, got a grip on something solid, and finally managed to steady himself.

  Or as steady as he could get, anyway. The room had begun to spin and he considered falling back to the floor, where it would be so much easier to regain his senses. The world had looked pretty stable from down there, and he didn’t remember coughing nearly as much, either. Up here, though, the smoke was everywhere, and it was hard to just breathe.

  The wall he was touching shook, but he had a hard time tracing where the vibrations were coming from. Behind him? Above? Maybe from outside the house. It could have been more steady gunfire from the second floor. Gaby and Danny were still up there. So were Lance and Annie and the two girls.

  What’s happening up there?

  He made to turn back toward the stairs to go find out when he saw the shadows shifting once again out of the corner of his eye. He spun back around just in time to see a pair of blue slits glowing in the swirling smoke.

  They were coming—launching—at him.

  Will reflexively struck out with the rifle, because lifting it and firing would have taken more time—a second, maybe two, that he didn’t have. The M4A1 vibrated on contact, both his arms shaking long after he had swung from right to left, his body turning with his momentum.

  It didn’t fall very far and it was back up on its feet even before Will could right himself. It attacked again, springing like an animal on all fours, barreling into his chest and knocking him back. He groped for the wall but couldn’t find it and briefly had a feeling of being weightless as he was thrust through empty air before crashing back down to earth.

  He was in the back hallway, past the stairs leading up to the second floor. The door was farther behind him, invisible in the darkness. For a moment, he waited for another blue-eyed ghoul to break its way through that side of the house—

  Concentrate! Focus!

  The creature climbed up the length of his body and he felt (impossibly) cold dead fingers wrapping around his throat, over the plastic band of the mic. A pair of glorious gems in the blackness bore down at him even as thin, pencil-like lips curled into a smile. It leaned down until its face—the deformed shape of the skull obvious behind smooth black flesh—was inches from his own.

  Will stared up at it, fumbling with his fingers for the cross-knife in its sheath along his left hip, cursing himself for losing the rifle. He hadn’t even remembered when he had lost it. Hopefully it was still somewhere nearby.

  The rifle.

  Lara called it superstition, but he called it habit.

  She’s probably right. I am superstitious about the damn thing. I should tell her that when I get back to the island.

  I love you, Lara, please forgive me for dying.

  He couldn’t breathe. How long had it been since he took his last (smoke-filled) breath? A second ago? Two seconds? Ten? An hour?

  The creature’s fingers were tightening with every erratic heartbeat he managed, and he momentarily rejoiced at the touch of the cross-knife’s smooth handle.

  The brain.

  Go for the brain.

  Will pulled the knife out and swung it upward in a wide arc—

  —but the sharp point never reached its destination. The creature’s other hand had intercepted his swing well short of its intended target.

  Oh, shit.

  “We know,” it hissed at him. “Didn’t Kate tell you?” It was holding his hand up in the air with hardly any effort. “We know what happened with the others. How it happened. You didn’t think we’d let you get away with it twice, did you?”

  He could hear its voice, which meant he hadn’t gone deaf after all. Thank God.

  “Don’t worry,” the creature hissed. “It’s not going to end that easily for you, Will. Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you. Of course, she didn’t say anything about punishing you for what happened at Dunbar first.”

  Its lips curled into a devilish grin.

  He somehow found the strength to look away from its face to his own hand, suspended in the air, the cross-knife (Go for the brain!) frozen in place. It didn’t even look like the ghoul was exerting any effort at all. It was so strong. So fast and so strong. What chance did he have against an army of these things? What chance did Lara and the island have?

  Lara. At least I got to talk to her one last time.

  Please forgive me for dying.

  His vision was faltering and the creature’s fingers were still tightening, and Will swore he could feel cold bones cutting into the skin around his throat. Was that even possible? Who the hell knew? He didn’t. Right now, all he could do was lie on the floor and wait to die, wait to be taken, wait to be given to Kate…

  BOOM!

  The hallway trembled, as if it had been hit by an earthquake.

  The walls, the ceiling, and even the floor underneath him quaked in the aftermath of the shotgun blast at such close proximity.

  Will’s eyes snapped open because he could breathe again.

  Air!

  The creature was still perched on top of him, but it had turned its head and was glaring at something behind it. Chunks of its shoulder and neck were gone, and blood arced out of the ruptured flesh and splattered the wall next to it in a grisly shower of thick, clumpy black blood.

  Will looked past the ghoul and saw a small figure standing at the mouth of the hallway, holding a shotgun.

  Claire. It was Claire. The little girl with the FNH semi-automatic shotgun.

  How’d she get down here?

  Claire fired again—the massive BOOM! lighting up the hallway a second time.

  The blue-eyed ghoul’s head jerked backward as buckshot tore into its face, shards of shiny white skull shattering and imploding in the air. Meaty globs of foul-smelling flesh hit Will in the face before he could turn his head in time.

  Then his left hand was free and Will wrestled it loose from the ghoul’s grip, even as the lifeless (again) body on top of him flopped sideways to the floor. The creature’s form was so much lighter now that Will found it difficult to understand how this almost feathery thing landing next to him was the same creature that had, just moments ago, smashed into him like a five-ton elephant.

  He sucked in air like a drowning man, scrambling up from the floor, trying desperately to command his legs to work properly. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, or the throbbing pain. Despite what the creature had said about promising Kate (What the hell did that even mean?), it sure didn’t seem to care that it was about to crush every bone in his throat.

  Claire was standing in front of him, staring at the dead (headless) body resting in a thick pool of its own blood. She didn’t seemed to notice him as he finally got back on his feet and grabbed the wall to steady himself, the creature’s flesh and blood caking his face and clothes like a second layer of rotting skin.

  Goddamn, it smells.

  The continued loud clatter of gunfire from the second floor told him everything he needed to know—it wasn’t over. Far from it.

  The gunfire snapped Claire out of it, and the girl rushed over and grabbed his waist with one hand—the other still clutching the shotgun—to keep him upright because, even though he didn’t realize it, he needed her help. She was a small, frail thing, but she gave herself up as a crutch so he could stand on wobbly feet.

  “My rifle,” Will said, his voice coming out as a croak. “My rifle,” he said again, louder and clearer this time.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. Her own voice was strained but somehow still impossibly calm.

  She’s going to make a great soldier…if we survive this.

  “What are you doing down here?” he asked.

  “They told me to run,” Claire said.

  Gaby and Danny…

  He clutched the knife in his left hand, thanking God he had held onto it all this time, and searched the darkness for his rifle, doing his best to squint through all the pockets of shadows.
There were no traces of the carbine anywhere. Of course, there was so little light that it could have been right next to him, and if he didn’t step on it, he might never find—

  Claire gasped.

  Will looked up at a new pair of blue eyes piercing the darkened living room from the jagged hole in the wall. Its tall, elongated frame looked theatrical against the light of the moon splashing in behind it. Will couldn’t figure out if it really was that tall or if the angular shape of its body added to the preternatural deceit.

  He reached down and pulled Claire’s arm away from him, pushing her back into the hallway. She went willingly.

  The creature’s eyes shifted from Will to the dead carcass of the other ghoul lying on the floor behind him and Claire. What was it the creature was seeing? Was it the twisted body of its friend? Comrade? Maybe even a lover? Did they even love anymore?

  “Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you.”

  What the hell does that mean?

  Will reached for the holstered Glock at the same time the creature moved, but he only groped empty air. The Glock was gone. He hadn’t realized it until now, but he should have sooner. The gun belt felt lighter, but in all the moments of trying to survive, trying to just learn to breathe again, he had missed it.

  He switched the knife to his right hand and prepared himself for the inevitable when Claire fired next to him. She was standing so close that he swore this time he really did go deaf from the noise of the shotgun blast. She didn’t stop with one shot, either.

  The girl fired again and again, the self-loading gun allowing her to shoot without having to manually rack the weapon each time. She was so small she would never have managed it anyway, though Will was awestruck that she somehow held onto the shotgun after every shot. What was she, eighty pounds soaking wet?