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

by Sisavath, Sam

  She focused out the smashed front wall of the hardware store and concentrated on the two bodies next to the blue truck—one was on the sidewalk; the other lay almost perfectly in the middle of the two-lane road. Two bodies that she could see, but more that she couldn’t. She knew for a fact there was one body in the back of the red truck she was hiding behind at the moment, and another one at her feet.

  Two plus two made four collaborators accounted for.

  Then there was the blue truck’s driver and the dead machine gunner in the back.

  Two plus four made six.

  “Take out the machine gunners first,” Danny had said this morning. “Those bad boys are going to chew us up and spit us out in little vomit chunks if we let them get going.”

  So she had waited for Danny to take out his man before she targeted hers while Nate sprayed the street to sow confusion. One of those bodies on the streets might have been his—not that any of them were going to be taking a tally after this.

  That left them with three live bodies to account for, including the woman. Unless the passenger of the blue technical was already dead and somewhere on the floor of the vehicle. Then that would leave two. Two or three.

  She had to admit, she liked those odds.

  Gaby watched and waited. What were the remaining two (or three) going to do now? If they were smart, they’d stay right where they were and radio for backup. Which meant…

  She looked into the truck and saw the two-way, covered in blood, on the front passenger seat. She waited for it to squawk, for the soldiers outside to radio for help, because there had to be other collaborators outside Starch at this moment, right? These nine couldn’t possibly be all there were. Maybe—

  A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned around in time to see a figure—a man—leaping up the back of the blue truck. He was going for the machine gun. That was the plan, anyway, but the man hadn’t finished throwing his other leg over the tailgate before a shot rang out and he stopped his forward momentum. A second later, he collapsed and disappeared over the back.

  “So much for that idea,” Nate said. “One left?”

  “Maybe two.”

  “You saw two?”

  “No, there might be two, but definitely one more. The woman.”

  “What’s she going to do now?”

  “The smart thing would be to call for help.” Gaby glanced back at the silent radio again.

  “You’re assuming they’re sm—” Nate started to say, but he ended up shouting “Shit!” instead as two figures made a run for it on the street.

  She stepped sideways, away from the door, and tracked them. She ended up filling her optic with the back of the woman, and fired—and missed again! Her bullet went high, and the woman ducked and turned left—toward the mouth of an alley.

  Gaby took her time and fired a second bullet and saw the woman spin in mid-stride.

  Gotcha!

  Next to her, Nate was shooting, his bullets raking the wall behind the woman, who was still moving despite her wound. A second later the figure disappeared from the sidewalk.

  Or not, she thought when there was a single crack! from above them, and the man who had taken off at the same time as the woman stumbled and dropped to the opposite sidewalk, about eighty yards up the street.

  “Gaby!” Danny shouted from above them. “Secure Speed Racer!”

  Gaby raced out of the building. Nate, as always, was right behind her.

  She jogged up the street, waiting for the man to make a move, but he never did. He must have known he wouldn’t have gotten far even if he managed to pick himself up. Gaby peeked at the alleyway where the woman had disappeared just as she ran past it. Splashes of blood on the sidewalk, but no signs of the collaborator.

  Pieces of paper, the objects she had seen falling out of the plane earlier, reflected back the sunlight around her, littering the streets, but she didn’t have time to stop and pick one up.

  “I got the alley!” Nate shouted behind her.

  She continued on toward the wounded soldier alone.

  He was lying on the pavement on his back, clutching his right leg. Danny’s shot had gone through his thigh and the collaborator was grimacing in pain. His teeth were clenched, and Gaby wasn’t sure if he was going to curse her or scream for help when she finally reached him. A pool of blood gleamed under him.

  “Fancy meeting you here, beautiful,” the man said. “I should have known it’d be you and your little friends running around out here causing trouble again.”

  Mason.

  Of course he was still alive. The man really was like a cockroach, showing up whenever they least expected him.

  “You’re looking well,” he said as she picked up his rifle lying a few feet away. He held his hands up in surrender as she pulled his handgun out of its holster and stepped back.

  “Clear!” she shouted.

  She took a moment to scan the streets. There was no way someone within miles of them hadn’t heard those back-and-forth volleys. If there were more collaborators around, they would be here within minutes. The fact that they hadn’t shown up yet put her slightly at ease. Maybe Mercer’s attacks had spread them out thinner than she had imagined.

  Footsteps behind her, followed by Nate’s voice. “The woman’s gone. You got her good, though. She bled all the way to the back of the alley where she went over a fence.”

  “I guess I should have gone left instead of right, huh?” Mason said.

  “Guess so,” Nate said. Then, recognizing the man, “Sonofabitch. You again.”

  “I’m like Steven Seagal. Hard to kill, even though I’ve been marked for death, under sieged, and have stood on deadly ground many a times before. Get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Never mind,” Mason sighed.

  More footsteps behind her, then Danny’s voice: “How was my shot?”

  “True,” she said.

  “That’s how I likes ’em. The other bird?”

  “Flew the coop,” Nate said.

  “Well, that’s disappointing. I guess it’s true what they say: You want someone dead, you gotta shoot them yourself.”

  “What do we do with him?” Gaby asked.

  “Good question,” Mason said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Blue truck’s still good,” Danny said. “We’ll grab Doogie Howser, M.D. here and boogie before more of his friends show up. Nate, salvage what you can.”

  Gaby hadn’t looked away from Mason. A part of her thought he might vanish if she turned away for even a second. He had struggled to sit up and was still clutching his leg.

  “Why?” Gaby asked.

  “Why what?” Mason said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” She looked back at Danny. “Why are we wasting our time dragging this piece of trash along with us?”

  “Hey, come on now, no need for that kind of language,” Mason said.

  “Shut the hell up,” she said, and pointed her rifle at him.

  He stared defiantly back at her. She could almost believe he wasn’t frightened, but she knew better. He was putting on a good front, but men like Mason didn’t want to die.

  “Because he’s still got friends out there,” Danny said. “What are the chances we’re going to get around all of them? Unlikely, and you know how optimistic I can be. But I bet our new friend here’s willing to point out all the ambush spots so we can go around them.”

  “And why would I do that?” Mason asked.

  “Because if we get caught, you’re going to be the first to go. And I ain’t talkin’ about the bathroom, short stuff. You comprehende my bad Spanishe?”

  Mason grinned widely. “Well, you do make a persuasive argument.”

  “See? We’re practically BFFs. That’s how I am. I live and let live. There’s even a word for that.”

  “Magnanimous?” Mason said.

  “No thanks, I just ate.”

  Gaby sighed. S
he didn’t like it. The thought of having to spend another minute around Mason made her queasy, but Danny was right. They needed to get home, which meant making their way back to Port Arthur. There was a lot of highway between them, and with Mercer out there, more dangerous than when they had first traveled the same miles.

  Her eyes drifted to the road around them, at the white pieces of paper strewn about, as if someone had dumped their office trash out of a second-floor window. “Danny. The plane. They were dropping paper.”

  Danny snatched one up. “You guys littering now?” he asked Mason.

  “Not us,” Mason said.

  There were large, blocky capital letters on the paper in Danny’s hand, but she couldn’t make out the words over his shoulder.

  “What’s it say?” she asked.

  He skimmed it, then handed it to her. It looked like some kind of advertising flyer, about half the size of the paper she was used to back in school. The letters were clearly generated by a printer, and they read:

  JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

  WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

  THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

  She returned her gaze to Mason, still sitting on the pavement, either too hurt to try to get up or too afraid of being shot.

  “Mercer,” she said.

  “Would be my guess,” the man nodded.

  “Looks like we got ourselves a regular Hatfields and McCoys situation,” Danny said. “Hide the relatives and pass the ammo. Me personally, I like to stay out of other people’s civil wars.” He looked back at Mason. “So the question of the moment is, how many more of your pals are out there beyond the town limits?”

  “This is it,” Mason said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you want.” He nodded at the flyer in Gaby’s hand. “We got bigger problems right now. They sent us back here just to see what happened to their friends.”

  “Sent you?” Gaby said. “You used to be in charge of a whole town.”

  Mason sighed almost wistfully. “Things change, blondie. We’re not in Louisiana anymore. New job, new position. That whole Song Island fiasco messed up my cred with the bosses. I guess you could say I’m back in the mail room.”

  “So we won’t run into more of you out there?” Danny asked.

  “I didn’t say that. The towns may be on lockdown, but the guys in charge aren’t just going to sit back and wait. It’s the Wild West out there—multiple kill teams running around shooting each other. Theirs and ours. Lucky for you, I know where our guys will be. I know their movements.”

  “And Mercer’s peeps?”

  Mason shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Danny,” Gaby said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t trust him.”

  “We have to,” Danny said. “He gives us a better chance of getting home.” Danny tapped his Sig Sauer for effect when he added, “Of course, for someone with a ten-year-old girl’s body, he’s got a nice big juicy head. I bet I could plug that thing from fifty yards using this here handgun, easy.”

  Mason swallowed, but smartly didn’t say anything.

  Danny looked over at her. “Let’s go home, kid.”

  “What if he’s lying, and he leads us right into a trap?” she asked.

  “Then we’ll kill them, along with anyone else who gets in our way,” Danny said, and turned to go.

  29

  Keo

  They had been walking north for the last hour, keeping parallel to the highway about fifty yards to their right while staying out of the open. Unfortunately, that meant traveling across fields of farmland and grass that at times went all the way up to their knees. Fortunately, the land wasn’t fenced off, which saved them the trouble of having to go around each individual property. The extra precaution didn’t make them completely hidden from the road, but it was better than just walking around out there exposed, the way they had done in the truck yesterday. They’d eaten a rocket for that little bout of stupidity.

  “Remember what that guy said about Angleton?” Keo said.

  “Something about it being dead,” Jordan said. “For a year now. Why?”

  “Might be worth looking for supplies there.”

  “You really think there’ll be something useful after all this time?”

  “Won’t know until we look.”

  “But wouldn’t your friend Marcy and her pals have already raided it by now? I got the sense they were based around here.”

  “My ‘friend’ Marcy?”

  “She did give you back the spork.”

  “She gave us back the spork. And as I recall, she threw it into the cage.”

  “Probably her idea of foreplay.”

  Keo glanced over, not sure if all of this was her way of teasing him or—

  She was grinning.

  Right. Teasing. Walked right into that one, didn’tcha?

  “I’m just messing with you, Keo,” she said. “Have to keep myself entertained somehow.”

  “Good to know.”

  She shooed away a bug that had launched from one of the sunburnt blades of grass around them and landed on her forehead. “How long have we been walking, anyway?”

  “An hour.”

  “You sure? It feels like more. By the way, I’m hungry.”

  “Too bad, because there’s nothing to eat.”

  “Can’t you go, I don’t know, make a trap out of some twigs and catch us a rabbit or something?”

  He wished there were something in the endless acres of untended farmland spread out to the left, right, forward, and back of them. He would have settled for a fruit or two. Jordan wasn’t the only one starving this morning.

  “What am I, your servant?” he said instead.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well that’s disappointing. What kind of relationship can we possibly have if you won’t even go out there and hunt down food for me?”

  He chuckled and whirled the tire iron in the air, listening to the whoosh-whoosh it made, the only sound other than their tired footsteps for miles around. The lack of anything made him wonder who the farmhouse they had escaped from belonged to, and why the people had come all the way out here, so far from another living human being.

  “Jesus, where is everyone?” Jordan said after a while.

  “We’re in the boondocks.”

  “This isn’t the boondocks, Keo. This is Mars. Only drier.”

  He looked toward the highway. It was flat and empty and cut across the fields, the only stubborn hint of civilization having even reached this far out into the countryside. Like Jordan, he wondered where Marcy and her collaborators had gone to. Was there a city nearby that he didn’t know about or hadn’t seen on the map when they still had one? It would make sense, assuming the machine gunner wasn’t lying when he told Keo Angleton was “dead.”

  “I’m hungry,” Jordan said next to him.

  “You already said that.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “I got the gist when you said you were hungry.”

  She sighed. “Do something, Keo. Go find a cow and beat it over the head with that tire iron and cook me something to eat.”

  He smiled. He would, if he could, but there was nothing around them but unfettered tall grass swaying in the morning breeze. What were the chances there was an animal or two hiding among them? Towns like T18 had their share, but they were far from T18 at the moment.

  “Car!” Jordan half-shouted and half-whispered.

  He went into a crouch even before Jordan had finished saying the word. She did the same next to him, clutching the machete, the dull brown-colored blade so rusted over he was afraid it might fall apart if she moved it too fast. He changed up his grip on the tire iron, but like the last hour, still found it incredibly lacking.

  What’s that old saying? “Don’t bring a tire iron to a gunfight.”

  Or something like that.

  It was a white Ford truck, overturned in the ditch
on the other side of the road, about forty meters in front of them. Its wheels were sticking out just above the grass line, sunlight glinting off their rims. He scanned the empty acres around them but came up as empty now as the last dozen or so times he’d searched for clues of humanity.

  He glanced at Jordan. “I’ll go first. Don’t move until you see me reach the other side.”

  He expected an argument, a variation of “If you can do it, I can too” girl power nonsense, but Jordan just nodded back.

  He must have looked surprised, because she said, “What?”

  “Keep an eye out around us, just in case,” he said, then got up and jogged forward, angling right as he went.

  He bent over at the waist to lessen his profile as much as possible, but he knew it wouldn’t be nearly enough if someone was out there watching him. The fact that he was wearing dark clothes and moving through a mostly tan/brown sun-scorched field likely didn’t help. He stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  Keo breathed easier (though not by much) when he finally reached the ditch on their side. He snapped a glance up, then down the road, saw pieces of glass, metal, and aluminum spread across the pavement, and burnt tire tracks. Sections of the truck had broken loose as the vehicle skidded off the road before finally landing on its roof on the other side. He sniffed freshly spilled gasoline and leaked motor oil, so whatever had happened hadn’t been all that long ago. Maybe even this morning.

  He took a breath, then climbed out of the ditch and darted across the road, still keeping himself as low as possible. He waited for gunshots, but they never came. He finally reached the other side and hopped down, breathing with relief when he flattened his back against the cold dirt wall, because no one had fired a shot yet.

  He started up the ditch, crunching glass hidden among the thick weeds. There were still no signs of people or blood in the ditch or on the road to his left, and he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad sign. Cars didn’t drive themselves, and they certainly didn’t lose control and overturn without a reason.

  Keo stopped for a moment and peeked over the top of the ditch to see Jordan moving steadily from the fields and toward the other side. She finally got there and hopped into the ditch, then peered up and across at him. They exchanged a brief nod.