The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9

by Sisavath, Sam

  Could she make the shot? Unlikely, given how badly she was shaking, but all it would take was one lucky round. Of course, he could avoid it easily. All he had to do was snap her neck—

  No. Not that way.

  He stared back at the girl. “Don’t,” he hissed.

  Confusion swept across her dirty face. Long, stringy brown hair drooped over her eyes, and the gun continued to tremble slightly in her hands.

  In the back, the boy leaned out of the shadows, dull knife ready.

  “They’ll hear you,” he said to the girl, “and come back. Do you understand?”

  Her eyes darted to the loft opening, then back to him. Did she believe him? Maybe. Was that why she and the boy were hiding? Had they seen the ghouls streaming across the fields earlier, even before he did? Or was this their home? Did they live here in the barn?

  “Understand?” he asked.

  Finally, she nodded, and he sensed hesitation as the gun lowered. Not much, just half an inch, but it was enough. Even better, her finger eased back on the trigger.

  “Good,” he said.

  “What are you, mister?” the girl asked, cocking her head, still trying to get a better look at him under the hoodie.

  When he didn’t respond, the girl said, “Mister? Are you…?”

  “Hide,” he said.

  “Emmy?” the little boy whispered from the back of the loft. “What’s happening?”

  “Shhh!” Emmy snapped back at him.

  She was turned around facing the boy when he leaped outside, landed on the ground, and ran off. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop the girl’s voice from echoing over and over inside his head.

  “What are you, mister?” she had asked.

  He slipped into a patch of woods and skirted around a pair of dead cities, racing against the night, trying to outdistance the coming morning. Never tiring, never sweating, never slowing down.

  Out there, somewhere, someone was bringing the war to Mabry’s doorsteps. Someone who wasn’t afraid, who had a plan. Someone with planes and bombs, and maybe even an army at his disposal.

  He pushed through the brush and emerged out onto the side of a highway next to a town still filled with the smell of death and destruction, of gunpowder and explosive residue. The streets were once filled with bodies, but they had been taken away; the ones buried under rubble had also been dug up.

  He ran across the remains of homes and buildings, and all the while, the girl’s voice echoed in his head:

  “What are you, mister?”

  He smelled the sweat under their clothes before he even heard or saw them: two soldiers perched in a pair of trees wearing black clothing and black paint over their faces. Almost invisible against the night. Almost. They cradled weapons attached with long suppressors in case they needed to fire them.

  And something else. He had detected a trace of it earlier, but wasn’t sure. Now, closer, he was certain.

  Silver bullets.

  Their weapons’ magazines were loaded with silver bullets. He tasted the bitter metal against the tip of his tongue and swallowed it down, then made no sounds as he moved under them. They never saw him—never heard or smelled or felt him. The woods hid his presence, the heat and cold emanating from his pores indistinguishable against the chilly air.

  He picked up the familiar scent of fresh gasoline that he had been tracking for the last hour. They had abandoned the roads and picked their way here, where he found the barely day-old tire tracks in the ground. The vehicles were hidden now, their engines cold and undetectable against the pulse of the night. They had picked wisely, hiding in a part of the world that humans had abandoned years ago and the black eyes had stopped searching months earlier.

  Except it was nearly impossible for his heightened senses to ignore the combined heat radiating from their bodies. They were pressed against each other, finding strength and comfort in accidental contacts, the quickening heartbeats of so many people crammed into a couple of old abandoned buildings like jackhammers.

  He sniffed the men on the rooftops. Multiple snipers, gripping recently oiled machine guns. A couple were dozing off, but more than enough were still awake, jacked up with the help of chemicals.

  Again, the metallic taste of silver bullets bit against his tongue.

  They had so much silver. Not just on them, but also inside the buildings, in the crates piled in the backs of their vehicles. They were well-organized, well-prepared. Was he really looking at an army?

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said.

  Maybe, maybe…

  He looked back into the woods. He could still smell them, the two brave souls watching the perimeter behind him.

  Maybe they would have some answers.

  The older of the two men almost managed to pull the trigger in time. Almost. There was a second of hesitation—which was all he needed to grab the younger man’s weapon—and he pulled, sending the soldier flailing to the ground below.

  Before the older man could lift his rifle to fire, he leaped across the open space and smashed the man’s head into the tree trunk. The resulting crunch! caused him a second of remorse, but he pushed it aside as the body disappeared into a bush below.

  He leaped down soundlessly and stalked toward the first man, who was scrambling for his holstered sidearm but finding it slippery. There was no suppressor on the gun, but the man either didn’t notice or was too frightened to think of the consequences.

  He batted the gun away just as the man managed to lift it, and the weapon disappeared into the grass. He’d heard the crack as the soldier’s wrist broke, and before the man could open his mouth to scream, he placed a hand over it. Pale gray eyes flew wide, but pain or not, the man had enough remaining sense of self-preservation to reach down with his other hand for the handle of his sheathed knife.

  The silver coating on the blade made his skin crawl, but he ignored it and grabbed the soldier’s hand as he lifted the knife and twisted—not too hard this time, just enough to force the man to let go of the weapon. The figure underneath him thrashed, terror washing over his painted face. Unlike the girl at the loft, the soldier could see him clearly for what he was—the icy blue of his eyes under the hoodie, the impossible cold and heat that oozed from every pore of his flesh.

  “Shhh,” he hissed, putting one finger to his lips.

  The soldier went still, the horror in his eyes giving way to confusion.

  “Don’t scream,” he hissed.

  The smell of urine leaked through the man’s thermal clothing, but the soldier might not even realized what he had done.

  “Scream, and you’ll die,” he hissed. “Scream, and the others will die. You’ll bring death on them. The others, like me, in the woods around you. Do you understand?”

  The soldier was no fool and he understood, going perfectly still as a result. But the gray eyes continued to stare, unable to pull away from the dark face hiding underneath the frayed fabric of the hoodie.

  He removed his hand.

  “What are you?” the soldier said, the three words coming out in a breathless whisper that formed clouds of mist between them.

  “Shhh,” he said, staring back at the man under him. “This might hurt a little, but I have to know.”

  “Know what?” the soldier said, fear flickering back across his face.

  “Everything,” he said, placing one hand on the soldier’s forehead and leaning in closer.

  Mercer.

  The man’s name was Mercer. He was responsible for the ambush at the airfield, a single day that was months in the planning.

  Images of warplanes streaking across the sky and over clear blue waters. An endless expanse of ocean that made his skin quiver at the sight. People cheering. Children in overalls…fishing?

  “You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

  Men in uniforms training for hours, days, weeks, and months. Firing hundreds—thousands?—of bullets. That’s okay, because bullets are plenti
ful. You can always make more—or pick them up.

  A voice on the radio resulting in a new kind of bullet. Silver bullets.

  Where did they get all the silver?

  Everywhere. From homes. Buildings. Piles of silver being smelted down.

  Someone spray painting a white sun emblem onto the side of a vehicle. A tan-colored tank.

  No. Tanks.

  Another place, another time. A new mission. Watching bombs being attached to fixed wings. Then those same bombs dropping in the distance. The ground rumbling. Burning trees. Excited reports of hundreds dead over the radio. Thousands?

  “You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

  A city on the ocean. Another one underground. Gray walls and mazes of metal pipes, yellow tubing, and machinery.

  Civilians. Soldiers. Uniforms. Guns. Ammo.

  Flocks of birds? Bird soup…

  Pull back, pull back…

  Mercer. Concentrate on Mercer.

  There. Fifties. Imposing, but just a man. A very dangerous man in control of an army.

  “You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

  More images of people, places, and things, but none of them involving Mercer. He had to know more about Mercer. Can he be trusted? Does he pose any danger to her?

  No, no. He’d lost his way.

  Find it. Have to find it again.

  There...

  A boy on his tenth birthday blowing out a candle in a backyard as people cheered. (No.) A brand new bike falling, a boy crying. (No!) A nervous first kiss in the back of a car. (Pull back! Pull back!)

  No, too far back. He’d lost his way.

  No, no, no…

  Blood trickled out of the soldier’s nose, somehow finding its way to the corners of his mouth. Gray eyes stared accusingly up at him, the blackened face frozen in a mask of shock, confusion, and pain.

  He stood up from the lifeless body and stared for a moment. A flash of guilt, and then it was gone. He wasn’t sure if that should have disturbed him. He had felt the same way—and passed it over just as quickly—with the older man in the tree. He couldn’t help but think he should have been more disturbed by how easily he killed them.

  Shouldn’t he?

  He might have lingered on the conflicting emotions if not for the encroaching sunrise against his back. It wouldn’t be long now. Maybe an hour. Maybe less. He could already feel the heat pressing against his skin, urging him to move on, to forget about the dead.

  He fled through the woods, replaying the soldier’s memories in his head. The man hadn’t been privy to much, but he had known enough. Snippets of important things, events, and speeches that he had been around to see and hear.

  “You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

  Mercer’s words, a clear signal that today was just the beginning, that the worst was yet to come.

  He had sought out an army, hoping to find allies to use against Mabry. But all he had found instead was…what, exactly? Another enemy? Or something worse? Was there something worse than Mabry?

  Maybe. One way or another, the answer would come.

  It always did, eventually.

  15

  Keo

  Bleached white bones crunched under his boots, and the acidic smell of burnt flesh lingered in the early morning sun, threatening to suffocate him if he so much as let down his guard. It was only bearable because of the size small T-shirt he had found in the storage shed covering the lower half of his face, and though that made breathing difficult, it was preferable to the alternative.

  He was making steady progress toward the M1 Abrams tank that had, sometime during the chaos, ended up in the fields about 200 meters from where it had started on the road. He wouldn’t be surprised if the thing had simply run out of fuel, given how active it had been last night.

  It sat unmoving under the bright sun now, jagged pieces of white bones wedged between its tracked wheels, bony fingers clutched around sections of the 120mm cannon and limbs jutting out along the crevices of the turret. A couple of ghouls had managed to wedge themselves into the loader’s armored gun shield, for all the good that had done.

  Further visual evidence of last night’s carnage could be found all across the fields around him. The craters of 120mm impacts dotted the landscape, and the crumpled heaps of destroyed homes made him question if he had emerged out of the storage box into a landfill instead of a beachside neighborhood. Miraculously, the house with the red roof that he and Jordan had hidden underneath had been spared. Maybe his luck was looking up after all.

  Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, pal.

  He stepped through the carcass of a white house with Trex decking, then wound his way through the remains of the living room and out the back, into a crater about a meter deep, before climbing back up among blackened grass. The tank was frozen about fifty meters in front of him, sunlight glinting off its desert tan hide and the shattered remains of bones draped over it.

  He slipped out from behind the leftovers of another house and jogged across charred grass, doing his best to skip around as many skeletal remains as possible, though he might as well be trying to avoid the ground for all the good that did. It was impossible not to crunch or snap an arm or a limb or a deformed skull as he made his way toward his objective. After a while, he just gave up trying. If the tankers heard him coming through all that armor, then so be it.

  Forty meters to the Abrams, and Keo was finally able to make out the words “Eat Me” along the length of the 120mm cannon, while “Get Off Me Bro” was spray painted across the armor tiles that covered the track wheels. A white circle with triangle-shaped objects coming out of it was prominently displayed at the front of the tank. After a second glance, he concluded the emblem was supposed to be a sun, and the “triangles” its rays. He had seen a lot of U.S. Army insignias, and that was definitely not one of them.

  Thirty meters later, Keo was able to identify some kind of modified flamethrower welded in place of a machine gun inside the loader’s gun shield on top of the turret. An M240 was mounted on the second station, but he didn’t remember machine gun fire from last night. He could, though, recall in great detail the thick smell of barbecuing meat.

  Keo changed up his approach and began moving sideways so he could take the remaining distance from the rear. He felt a flood of relief not having that smoothbore cannon pointing right at him—or anywhere close to him, for that matter. He knew it was stupid; chances were, they had blown all their load last night. Still, the sight of that thing staring right at him…

  With just five meters left to go, Keo was feeling good about making it to the tank undiscovered. That was, until the loud grinding of metal filled the air. He dived to the ground and rolled to his right until he was covered in the shadow of the M1’s turret. Keo pulled down the shirt and took in a deep breath, his first unhindered one since he had stepped out of the storage shack. Thank God for the constant waves of fresh air coming from the ocean nearby, otherwise he might have choked on the stench.

  There were impossibly white skeletal remains all around him, a shattered skull directly two inches from his head, and his rifle was resting on a pile of white and gray ash. He did his very best to ignore something pricking at his legs through the fabric of his pants. Probably a broken hand, or fingers…

  A loud clang!, followed by a figure with a shaved head raising himself out of the commander’s hatch of the tank. The man was wearing a tan shirt and pants, and the same sun emblem was embroidered across a red collar, but nothing to indicate rank. The shirt had a white patch of the Lone Star State in the front, with scribbling inside it, but Keo was at the wrong angle to read the letters. It was a military uniform of some sort, but not one he was familiar with. But then, BDUs came in all shapes and sizes, and maybe this was a new variation for a new world?

  The possibility that Jordan might have been right, that maybe he was looking at remnants of the U.S. Army, made him question what he was doing out in the fields hiding from them. The last
thing he wanted was to start popping U.S. soldiers.

  Keo took his hand off the M4, then reached down and drew the Glock. His fingers brushed against something sharp hidden among the grass, and something else was poking at his stomach and had been for the last few seconds, but he managed to ignore it, too, even though he had a pretty good idea what it was.

  The soldier (?) had climbed out of the tank and was stretching. When he was done, he opened a canteen and took a long drink from it while glancing around at the fields. “Jesus Christ,” the man said. He tossed the canteen back into the open hatch, then dug out a white silk handkerchief and pressed it against his mouth.

  Keo heard a second voice, this one coming from inside the tank, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  “We made a hell of a mess,” the man standing on top of the Abrams said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Got a whole fuck lot of them, boys.” He lowered the handkerchief and let out a satisfied sigh. “Who’s got mop-up duty—” the man continued, but he stopped in mid-sentence because he had been turning when he said it, and—

  Keo pushed himself up from the ground at the same time the man’s eyes locked onto him. He got his knees under him, then held out his left hand, the palm outward, while his right kept the Glock pointed down at the ground.

  “Wait,” Keo said.

  The man stared at him, mouth partially agape. His right hand was holding the cloth, and while he wore a gun belt, the sidearm was on his right side, which meant he was right-handed.

  “Don’t—” Keo said, when the man dropped the handkerchief and reached for his holstered weapon.

  Keo shot the man in the chest.

  The soldier fell, slamming into the turret before sliding off it, the white silk cloth fluttering in the air after him.