“I try not to think about it too much. Whatever’s happening, it’s out of our hands. Mercer, the collaborators…” She focused on Elise and Vera, the two girls holding hands as they cannonballed into the water side by side. “This is all that matters. The lives on this boat.”
Zoe nodded, and the two of them watched Dwayne landing hard enough into the water that it splashed not just everyone in the area, but also his mother Kendra and Carrie standing on the platform watching them.
“Thanks,” Lara said after a while. “For the pep talk.”
“Normally we’d let Carly do it, but we thought you might need to hear it from someone else from time to time.”
“Who’s up next?”
“Bonnie. Then Blaine. And I think Carrie called dibs after him.”
“I hope you guys at least wrote down the order.”
“Oh, we did. Sarah’s in charge of all the paperwork.” Zoe turned around. “If you want to talk, about anything, you know where to find me.”
“Thanks,” Lara nodded and realized she meant it.
“Sure,” Zoe said before pushing off the railing. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell Bonnie she’s up next.”
Lara glanced after the doctor before turning back around to look out at the clear blue horizon. The Trident was anchored far enough from land that she couldn’t make out Texas in the distance, which meant no one along the coastline could see them, either. At least not without high-powered binoculars, and what were the chances someone was scanning the ocean this moment?
Below her, Carrie let out a scream as Kendra grabbed her from behind and pushed her into the water. Carrie went under for a moment before resurfacing, wet clothes and rifle clinging to her.
Lara smiled to herself and thought, I’ll get them to the Bengal Islands, Will. I’ll keep them safe. I promise…
“You’re going to catch a cold. Again.”
Elise pouted but didn’t stop turning around in a circle so Lara could wipe her dry from head to toe. The girl didn’t completely stop shivering until she was wrapped in a big, fluffy cotton bath towel that Lara had laid out. She should have been annoyed at the puddles of water the girl had tracked into her cabin, but she was strangely okay with it. Maybe it was because it was Elise, and Lara had forgotten how much she enjoyed these moments.
She sat down on the end of her bed and watched Elise slip out of her bathing suit and into a pair of long pants and a sweater. She was growing up and filling out, and Lara barely recognized the skinny kid she had rescued from Dansby, Texas, nearly a year ago. Elise hadn’t gotten any taller—not yet, anyway—but she wasn’t as rail thin as before thanks to the plentiful food in the ocean that regularly graced their lunches and dinners.
“You’re getting better at swimming,” Lara said.
“Practice makes perfect,” Elise smiled back.
“You’re not there yet.”
“Maybe one day.”
“Maybe one day,” Lara nodded. “Until then, it’s going to get colder, so this might be the last time for a while.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“Cold enough. Doctor’s orders.”
“Zoe said so?”
Lara made a face. “Clever.”
Elise grinned. “When are Danny and Gaby coming back?”
“Soon.”
“I miss them.”
“Me too.”
“Hey,” Elise said suddenly, as if something had just occurred to her.
Lara smiled. The way the girl’s thoughts shifted from topic to topic was something to behold. “What?”
“We were outside one night, and we thought we saw something.”
“Who is ‘we’ and when was ‘one night?’”
“Me, Vera, and Jenny, and it was last night.” Elise’s head tilted slightly to one side, a clear indication she was lost in thought.
“What were you guys doing out at night?” Lara asked.
“Jenny said it was a boat,” Elise said, ignoring her question.
“Was it a boat?”
“I don’t know; it was kind of small.”
“What color was it?”
“Black, I think?”
“You’re not sure?”
Elise shook her head.
“Did you see it again today?” Lara asked.
“Nope.”
“And you’re sure it was a boat?”
“Maybe…”
“If you see it again—or something like it—you need to come and tell me or one of the adults right away, understand?”
Elise nodded. “Will do, boss.”
Lara rolled her eyes. “Not you, too.”
“A boat?” Blaine said.
Lara nodded. “She said Jenny thought she saw a boat.”
“But she’s not sure.”
“That’s the problem. It could have been a boat. Or it could have been anything. Or nothing.”
“Maybe it was Blaine,” Carly said. “He’s pretty dark.”
Blaine smirked. “What does Danny see in you?”
“Must be my winning personality.”
“It’s not that winning.”
“Personality is what I call my vagina.”
Blaine groaned. “I hate talking to you.”
“I love you, too,” Carly said, and blew him a kiss.
Lara ignored them, said, “If it was something, it was too far for either girls to make out. Who was on watch last night?”
“Carrie,” Blaine said. “But she would have said something if she saw a boat out there. The same for Maddie; she relieved me at midnight as usual and was up here until morning.”
“Vera didn’t mention seeing anything, either,” Carly said.
“Elise didn’t even want to mention it,” Lara said. “I think she just did because it came to her at the moment.” She shook her head. “We need to do a better job letting them know to report what they see.”
“Could be another body,” Blaine said.
He was looking through his binoculars at the surrounding ocean. From up here, on the upper deck of the Trident, they had the next best view of the Gulf of Mexico. The only better vantage point was on the roof above them. Lara didn’t need binoculars to know there was nothing out there right now. At least, nothing she could see with the naked eye.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be trouble if it didn’t sneak up on us.
“We still don’t know where that body came from,” Carly was saying. “Or what or who put it in the water in the first place.”
“There are a lot of things going on out there that we don’t know about,” Lara said. “For all we know, there’s more than one body floating around. It’s a big ocean. It was a one in a million chance that one would come close enough for us to see it.”
“Like winning the lotto,” Carly said, and wrinkled her nose. “A really smelly, bloated lotto.”
Blaine let his binoculars hang around his neck and glanced over at her.
“What’s wrong?” Lara asked.
“I don’t like the idea of another boat out there watching us.”
“I don’t like the idea of anything out there watching us,” Carly said, shivering slightly. “Maybe it was a perverted whale.”
“And Elise said it was black?” Blaine asked.
“She thinks it was black,” Lara nodded.
“That’s a good way to blend into the night if you were on a scouting mission. You don’t usually find a lot of black-painted boats precisely because you don’t want to get run through at night by another vessel.”
“You think someone painted their boat black as camouflage?” Carly asked.
Blaine shrugged. “That’s what I would do. Not exactly a lot of chances you’d run across another boat all the way out here. So what other reason would there be to paint a boat black?”
No one said anything for a while. Carly looked back out the bridge and Lara joined her.
After a while, Lara said, “Exactly how far are we from l
and, Blaine?”
“I’ve kept us steady at twenty miles out,” Blaine said. “No one should be able to spot us from the coastline. Especially at night with our lights manually shut off.”
“Damn, I wish Danny were here already,” Carly said, reflexively crossing her chest with her arms and rubbing her shoulders.
“Who’s got guard duty tonight?” Lara asked.
“Gwen,” Blaine said.
“Ask for volunteers to join her. I want to double all the sentries until otherwise noted. We’ll also need to post someone permanently at the back, too.”
“I’ll draw straws with whoever doesn’t volunteer to back up Gwen tonight,” Carly said.
“One last thing,” Lara said. “I want all the adults armed again, including Dwayne, even if they’re not on guard duty.”
“Dwayne too?” Blaine asked.
“He’s really good with that bolt-action rifle of his,” Carly said. “Scary good, for a thirteen-year-old.”
“I thought he was twelve,” Lara said.
“He turned thirteen three weeks ago, remember?”
No, she thought, but said, “I guess I forgot.”
“Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind.”
Lara nodded and gave her friend an appreciative nod.
“What about Claire?” Blaine asked. “Gaby’s been training her…”
Lara shook her head. “She’s not ready yet.”
“So it’s settled,” Carly said.
“I’ll bring my cot back up here and tighten the shift between me and Maddie,” Blaine said. “I’ll make sure someone’s always up here every hour of the day from now on.”
“Maybe bring two cots, one for Sarah,” Carly said. “You know, in case you guys want a little late-night boom-boom action.”
Blaine groaned. “Please don’t ever say ‘boom-boom action’ ever again.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“Something like that.”
“You guys should do what I do. Send one of you out there. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or some crap like that.”
“You get that out of a Hallmark card?” Blaine asked.
Lara stepped closer to the windshield and could barely hear them going back and forth behind her as she looked out at the never-ending expanse of blue ocean outside. Her mind swam with all the potential hidden dangers she hadn’t seen—or even tried to look for—before. She had almost convinced herself there was no one out here but them, even though she knew better. There had been the dead body they had fished out of the water off Sunport, and later, that voice on the radio asking her to make contact.
They had been floating around the Gulf of Mexico for so long, safe and sound onboard the Trident that she had almost made herself believe they could be safe so long as they stayed far away from Texas. She should have known it wouldn’t last forever, and maybe she always did but had just done a very good job of deceiving herself.
The girls could be wrong. There might not have been another boat out there last night watching us.
Yeah, right…
3
Gaby
This must be what God feels like.
The man’s head drifted slightly left, then right in her rifle’s ACOG scope. It had been a while since she found herself in possession of an optic that could shoot long distance, and this one had come courtesy of a dead man.
I can kill him right now. It would be so easy. Just squeeze the trigger…
She did it even as she thought it—tightened her forefinger around the cold steel. All it would take was a little more pressure. Just a little bit more. That was how easy it was to end a life. The Purge might have devastated the planet, but it hadn’t changed the way a gun could kill.
“How many?” Nate asked, his voice bringing her out of her own world.
She depressed the trigger and pulled slightly back from the eyepiece, if just to chase away the temptation. “Too many.”
“Again.”
“Uh huh.”
“When has it ever not been too many?” he said.
It was a common refrain these days. There were always too many. In the daytime, in the nighttime, there were always too many. Too many dangerous men in the day and too many undead things at night.
Too many. Always too many.
“Are they tracking us?” Nate asked. He sounded run down from the last few days, even a little annoyed, but not scared. Or, at least, she couldn’t detect any fear in his voice. “They must be tracking us…”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“First Port Arthur, and now here…” He shook his head. “Gotta be, right?”
“I don’t know, Nate.”
“Gotta be,” he repeated, mostly to himself that time.
She looked over at him lying against the edge of the rooftop next to her. The Mohawk was mostly gone, his hair grown in (out?) around the ridiculous stump in the middle. He had dirt on his cheeks and forehead but didn’t seem to notice it. The girl in her spent a moment being self-conscious about her own appearance, but the woman that had emerged easily dismissed the thought without much resistance.
Nate lowered his binoculars and met her gaze. “But why would they be tracking us? For Mason? I thought he was just another grunt these days.”
“I don’t think he was lying about that part. After Louisiana”—And Josh and that terrible night on Song Island—“he’s not what he used to be, and I know for a fact he wasn’t just another grunt back then.”
“Makes no sense,” Nate said. “We’re not that important, especially with Mercer’s people running around blowing up people. The three of us should be at the very bottom of their to-do list.”
She nodded because he was right. They weren’t important at all. What were three more people when the entire state was on high alert? The collaborators they’d (managed to avoid so far) run across in the last few days were on a war footing; they had their hands full with small teams of hit-and-run…what the hell were they? Rebels? Insurgents? Or maybe she should just think of them as Mercer’s killers, because that was exactly what they were.
Even now, she hadn’t dismissed the possibility that either Mercer’s men or the collaborators had found Taylor and Alice at their cabin in the woods outside of Larkin. The place had been empty when they showed up to collect the sisters for the trip home like they had promised. The door was open and there were no signs of the girls. More baffling, there was no evidence of a struggle. The sisters had simply…vanished. Nate thought it had to be ghouls, that the girls’ luck had finally run out, but she wasn’t so sure. Mason, of course, said he didn’t know anything about it, but the man was a liar and it was hard to believe anything that came out of his mouth.
In the end, they’d had to move on, with the sisters added to a long list of failures since returning to Texas.
We should have stayed on the Trident. We should never have come back.
We should never have come back…
She focused on the present, on the here and now, and looked through her M4’s optic again, picking up the same man she’d had in her crosshairs before. He was still leaning against the metal guardrail with his back to her. He had brown hair and spent most of his time working on a thick piece of beef jerky he’d fished out of a see-through bag earlier. He hadn’t come alone; his friend had climbed up onto the hood of the Jeep parked between the two highway lanes and was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. They were both wearing black uniforms, and if she squinted, she could almost make out the Texas patch on their shoulders.
What the hell are you guys doing here?
Gallant, Texas, was a small town of about 3,200, surrounded by flat country land almost exactly halfway between Port Arthur and Galveston. The tiny city’s one major (only?) contribution was the slightly raised I-10 interstate road that joined it with Beaumont and Port Arthur to the east, Baytown to the west, and Galveston somewhere in the southwest.
The soldiers were loitering on that highway right now, looking
for…something. They hadn’t found this place by accident. She was almost certain of that. So what were they doing here? Could Nate be right? Could these men have been tracking them?
What the hell are the two of you doing here?
She laid the rifle on the rooftop and rolled over onto her back, blinking up at the sun. She didn’t have to look at her watch to know they still had hours to go before nightfall. Her body was in tune to her environment and had been since they began picking their way south from Starch, skirting potential ambushes along the way, only to find Port Arthur crawling with collaborators.
“Hey,” Nate said.
She glanced over. He was holding a small piece of white paper and handed it to her. It was half the size of a regular writing sheet and was blank on one side. She had to turn it over to see the familiar writing:
JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS
WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
The words were clearly typed on the sheet using a machine, maybe even a computer printer. The idea that someone out there was printing out a bunch of propaganda flyers had been an interesting topic of discussion for a while, but after encountering more of them as they made their way southeast, it had become less interesting.
“First and only one I’ve seen in Gallant so far,” Nate said. “Wondered where it came from.”
“Probably from the same batch they dumped over Port Arthur,” she said. “It’d make sense for them to bypass the small cities for the bigger ones. Less wasteful that way.”
“How many you think have picked a side? Or, I guess, a new side?”
She shook her head. “Who knows? Maybe a lot, maybe very few, or maybe none.”
“After all that bombing? I don’t know, Gaby. If I were in those towns and I saw what happened to the next town over…”
The memories of what had happened to T29 were burned into her soul. She couldn’t forget what she had seen, and God did she want to so badly.
The town, the sisters, all the failures of the last few days…
She closed her eyes. “Can we not talk about this?”
“You okay?”
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 41