“How bad?” she asked.
“I’ll be okay,” Nate said.
She ignored him and fixed on Danny. “How bad?”
“Could have been worse,” Danny said. When she gave him a disbelieving look, he added, “He could be dead.” Then, “Press here,” and pulled his hands from a T-shirt he was holding against Nate’s left side.
She replaced his hand with her own, her fingers turning red as soon as she touched the fabric. She looked down at Nate.
He was smiling at her. Or trying to. “I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.”
“Right. Just a scratch,” she said quietly.
Danny had stood up and was looking around them, his rifle back in his blood-covered hands. “He’s gone.”
“Who?” she said, glancing over.
“Mason.”
She looked around them—at the car lots to both sides of the street, then the empty road out of town behind them. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”
Danny was too busy squinting at the cars in the dealerships to answer, as if he could magically pick up Mason’s scent if he made his eyes small enough. Gaby looked back at Nate, keeping her hands on the bloody bundle of clothing pressed against his wound. As much as the idea of Mason escaping made her furious, she found it easy to push it aside to concentrate on keeping Nate from bleeding to death.
“My fault,” Nate was saying, his voice so soft she barely heard him. “He was my responsibility. I wasn’t paying attention…”
“Shut up, it doesn’t matter.” She was trying to find the balance between pressing too hard and not hard enough against Nate’s side. She couldn’t even tell what color the T-shirt used to be anymore. “What about Nate, Danny?”
Danny slung his rifle. “We’re going to have to look for the bullet and take it out. Can’t leave it in there.”
“You’ve done this before?”
He shrugged.
“Danny,” she pressed. “You’ve done this before?”
“Well, there was that time in a diner, though Willie boy did most of the work. But I think I got the gist of it.”
Nate groaned.
Danny grinned at him. “Relax, Nathaniel-san. Back in college they used to call me Danny the Surgeon, and it wasn’t because I always wore white surgical gloves around campus, though yes, I could see the confusion. Those things are super soft, you know.”
The pickup may have been beaten up before it was shot up, but it was a tough old thing. Despite leaking fuel and brandishing new bullet holes along most of one side, once they replaced the blown tire, the truck was still serviceable, and the engine came alive when Danny turned the key.
“I told you I picked a winner,” Danny said before he righted the vehicle and pushed them down the street.
She sat in the back with Nate, keeping an eye on his paling face and the bandages around his waist. Like the shirt earlier, the white fabric was already soaked with blood and growing a darker shade of red every second.
She must have grimaced at the sight because Nate made an effort to smile up at her. “It looks worse than it really is.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“No, really.”
“Stop lying.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
“Because I know you.”
He smiled again. Or tried to again. He was doing a very poor job of it, and she wished he would stop. The effort alone was probably causing him more harm than good.
“You know me too well,” he said.
“Not well enough,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.
She kept her arms around his body to keep him from moving around too much. Danny was driving just fast enough to get them as quickly down the street as possible while glancing at the map of Gallant spread out on the front passenger seat next to him. He only swerved once or twice, which was amazing given everything he was multitasking. He was also amazingly calm, but she wondered how much of that was a façade, or maybe she was just projecting her own fears and emotions onto him. Danny was an ex-Ranger, after all. It wasn’t as if blood was anything new to him.
“How much farther, Danny?” she asked.
“A mile or two,” Danny said. “Can’t go too far in this thing, with your boyfriend back there bleeding all over the upholstery.”
“Sorry about that,” Nate said quietly.
“You’ll clean it up later.”
“Gotcha.”
She put a hand over Nate’s mouth to shush him, then said, “How much gas do we have left?”
“Not enough,” Danny said.
“Maybe we should have siphoned some from the GMC…”
“Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe it’s Maybelline. We’ll be fine.”
“Will we?”
“You betcha.”
He sounded confident, and that more than anything did a lot to ease her mind. This was the new Danny. The leader. Other than Lara, there was no one else Gaby would trust with her life. Except maybe Nate…
“See, we’re almost there,” Danny said as he slowed down and made a right turn.
The road under them went from smooth asphalt to uneven dirt road. Nate groaned in response.
“Danny,” she said.
“I know,” Danny said. “We’ll be there soon. Better he suffers a little now than die a lot later.”
A sheen of sweat had covered Nate’s face as he looked back up at her. She smiled at him, then bent down and kissed him softly on the lips. When she pulled back, he was smiling again, and this time it actually looked acceptably convincing.
“Gotta get us our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.
She nodded. “Definitely.”
“It’ll be nice. Our own room. We can sleep in whenever we want. Finally.”
“You always want to sleep in.”
“Or maybe we won’t sleep at all.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.”
“It’ll be nice,” he said again, and closed his eyes.
She fought the urge to tighten her arms around him to keep his body steady against hers as the truck continued to rumble down the patch of dirt road, afraid too much additional pressure would hurt him.
She kissed his unresponsive lips instead.
Stay alive, Nate. Please, stay alive.
I can’t bear to lose you too…
Gallant had more land than it did people, so the houses on the outskirts of the main commercial area were spread out. The dirt road Danny had turned into eventually became smooth asphalt again, and they passed a series of residential homes with large front and backyards.
Danny finally settled on a house with a dirt driveway and nothing but empty fields behind it. If not for the map, they would have driven right past this part of town and never known people lived here. The house had a white truck parked in the front yard and an unattached garage big enough for two cars, which was good because she didn’t think the jalopy was going anywhere after this. If they could even start it again with the drain on its already leaking fuel tank.
She stayed inside the truck with Nate while Danny cleared the house by himself, then did the same to the garage next door. When he came back, they hid the pickup in the garage, then carried Nate inside the house and put him down in the living room. The residence was a single-floor building with burglar bars outside the windows and over the front door. Those security measures were the main reason Danny had chosen it out of all the other houses in the area.
“I’m going to need your help,” Danny said as he shrugged off his pack, took out a bottle of water, and poured it over his hands.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
Nate lay on the couch with his eyes closed. His hair was soaked in sweat and his entire midsection was covered in blood, as were his pants and what was left of the shirt Danny hadn’t already cut away to put on the bandages earlier.
“Tell me you can do this,” she said to Danny.
“The first-aid kit has everything we need.�
�
“Danny, tell me you can do this.”
He nodded. “I can do this.”
She stared at him for a few long seconds before finally nodding. “Okay.”
“Let’s get to work,” Danny said, then handed her another bottle of water to clean her bloody hands with.
“Want a souvenir?” Danny asked.
She shook her head. “Be my guest.”
“Eh, souvenirs are for old people anyway.”
Danny flicked the bullet he had dug out of Nate into the bathroom sink. There was just enough light coming from the small rectangular opening behind her to see the 5.56 bullet as it clinked around the porcelain bowl before vanishing down the drain.
All that damage, from such a small thing…
Gaby concentrated on rubbing Nate’s dried blood off her fingers, but it didn’t seem like she was making any real progress. After a while, she gave up and grabbed a blue cotton towel hanging off a rack and forced herself to be satisfied with wiping the sweat off her face.
“He’s gonna be out the entire night from the morphine,” Danny said, “which means you and I get the privilege of guard duty.”
“Yay us.”
“What I said. Anyway, we have everything we need to survive the night. Burglar bars over the windows, extra food, and water. All we have to do is stay as quiet as mice and they won’t ever know we were here.”
“Who are we talking about? Ghouls or humans?”
“Both.”
“You think there’s more of them out there? Besides the guy in the Jeep?”
“I think that technical was already on its way here before the fun started. Maybe because of whoever they were exchanging fire with earlier.”
“It had to be Mercer’s people. They’re everywhere.”
Danny nodded. “Yeah. Mercer’s fun boys are becoming a real pain in my ass. Right now, though, I’m more concerned with why those boys in black were here in the first place. That technical came later.”
“The Jeep.”
“Uh huh.”
“What if Nate was right? What if they were tracking us?”
“The question is why.”
“Mason?”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“No. Something else is going on.” He shook his head. “I’d give my left pinky finger to find out what.”
Danny seemed to drift off, lost in thought, and Gaby did the same, staring at herself in the mirror above the sink. She was already covered in dirt and sweat, but now she’d added streaks of blood by touching her face with her bloodied hands. A year ago the sight of the girl looking back at her would have horrified her, but these days it barely registered. She wetted the towel with a dab of water from what was left in her bottle and went to work.
“He’s still out there,” she said after awhile. “Mason.”
“Yup,” Danny nodded.
“We should have killed him.”
“Probably.” Then, “Get some rest, kid. It’s been a long morning, and it’s going to be a long night. We can’t travel with Nate in his condition, at least not if you want to keep him alive for cuddling later.”
“I’d really like that.”
“A little cuddling, a little premarital sex…” Danny said before turning and leaving the bathroom.
She smiled wryly after him before returning to cleaning Nate’s blood off her cheeks and forehead. When she was (mostly) done, she tossed the towel into the overflowing trash bin, snatched up her rifle, and went outside to join Danny. She could already feel the temperature starting to drop around her.
It would be dark soon. Very soon…
6
Keo
Well, this didn’t quite go as planned.
Or maybe that wasn’t entirely true. The fact of the matter was, he was (somehow, some way) still alive, and more importantly, there was a good chance he was being taken to Mercer. Of course, that was the best-case scenario, and he had a feeling he knew what Danny would say if he ever caught wind of Keo’s presently overflowing optimism.
Not that he had much of a choice. It was either focus on the positive or wallow in the pain. Because there was a lot of pain.
His face was on fire, and moving even just a little bit sent jolts of electricity coursing through his body. But it wasn’t the type of pain that signaled a broken rib (or two), so that was the good news. The bad was that his captors hadn’t bothered to clean up his face, which explained the feeling of sandpaper scraping at his eyeballs. He still had a mouthful of blood, most of it coming from his broken nose. His forehead might have been slightly cut, though that was currently taking a backseat to the pounding originating from between his eyes.
The pain should have been worse with the helicopter pulsing continuously through him as it traveled over the state of Texas, the whup-whup-whup of its rotors like sledgehammers pounding nails into his skull. He had no idea where they were or where they were going, only that they were already in the air and moving when he opened his eyes and (discreetly) took stock of his situation.
He was surrounded by the same people he had seen back at the barn—three of them sat across from him while two more flanked him. A sixth, sporting aviator shades, was perched behind a machine gun mounted along the open starboard-side hatch. The weapon looked like an older model M240 with a box magazine; the man behind it pointed the weapon playfully at a flock of birds outside and mimed shooting them. The port-side door was closed and the only thing Keo could see out the windows were empty skies.
Six men and one woman, and two in the cockpit. It wasn’t even close to being manageable numbers; not that he had any ideas about escaping anyway, especially with his wrists and ankles duct taped together. Never mind the fact that he had never learned to fly, because going out one of the open doors was probably his only real option at the moment. They had removed everything he had on him, leaving just his clothes and the blood on his face.
He wasn’t sure how long the woman had known he was awake; she was watching him with a curious expression on her face. She looked tall even sitting down—maybe just a shade under five-ten, and like most women he had encountered since The Purge, carried very few if any excess pounds on her. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and that made the bags under her eyes more apparent.
Someone hasn’t been getting their beauty sleep lately.
She looked tired but was trying to power through the fatigue. He’d seen plenty of guys do that on jobs either with caffeine or pill-sized stimulants. She had short black hair, but he could imagine her with a long, flowing mane just a year ago. The obvious Parisian genes were easy to spot and she reminded him a little of Bonnie, the ex-model with whom he had spent a lot of time with back on the Trident. Like the men around her, the woman wasn’t wearing anything that looked like a uniform or a name tag, which made perfect sense if they were indeed Mercer’s men and were out here launching guerilla-style hit-and-run attacks on collaborator positions.
His ruse exposed, Keo gave up pretending to still be asleep and straightened up, or as much as he could manage while restrained. His nose felt as if there were cotton balls jammed into both nostrils, and the hard floor was sticky with fresh mud and dirt and (no doubt his contribution to the mess) blood.
“Where we going?” Keo asked, directing his question at the woman. He had to shout to be heard over the turbine engine that made every inch of the helicopter thrum as if it were going to come unglued at any second.
She didn’t answer him, but she didn’t take her eyes off him, either. The guy behind the machine gun glanced over at the sound of Keo’s voice before returning his gaze out the hatch as the helicopter caught up to another flock of birds.
“Can I get some water?” he asked the woman.
She stared but still didn’t say anything.
“Towel?”
Nothing.
“I smell jerky in the air. I wouldn’t mind some of that. I’m famished. Haven’t eaten all day and most of yesterday.”
“Shut up,” the man sitting to his left said.
Keo ignored him and said to the woman, “Ever heard the idiom ‘You catch more flies with honey?’”
“If I give you some jerky, will you shut up?” the man sitting to the woman’s left said.
“Absolutely,” Keo said.
“Too bad. I finished it off this morning. Chased it down with some coffee and an oatmeal cookie.”
“Sounds like fine dining.”
“It ain’t the Hilton, but it’ll do.”
He turned back to the woman. “Maybe you can tell one of these gentlemen to give me some water.”
“What makes you think she’s in charge?” Beef Jerky Guy asked.
“Oh, come on. It’s obvious she wears the pants around here.”
Something that looked almost like a smile flickered across the woman’s face, but it only lasted for a blink of an eye before vanishing.
“Right?” he said to her.
She ignored him, said instead, “What happened here?” and traced one side of her face with her forefinger. “Looks like it must have hurt.”
“It did,” Keo said, remembering the cold steel of Pollard’s knife as it sliced its way into his flesh. “You should see the other guy.”
“Prettier than you?” Beef Jerky Guy said.
“Not even a contest.”
“Considering how you look, that’s saying something.”
“I still have nightmares about it.”
“I bet.”
“Where we going?” he asked the woman again.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“Give a guy a hint.”
She didn’t answer.
“Then can I at least get some water?” Keo asked.
“You already asked that,” she said.
“Figured I didn’t have anything to lose by asking a second time.”
She nodded at the man sitting next to Keo. The guy produced a canteen and leaned over. Keo opened his mouth gratefully and took as much water as he could, then swished it around to wash away the blood clinging to the walls of his mouth before swallowing the whole thing down.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 45