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

by Sisavath, Sam

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” Danny said, looking out at Benford.

  “Yeah, well, don’t say that to him,” Fritz chuckled.

  “Mum’s the word.”

  Gaby drank her bottle of water and dabbed some onto her fingers to clean them against her pants. Like Danny, she knew something Fritz and Benford didn’t—the collaborators hadn’t abandoned Gallant despite the constant attacks and lack of reinforcements because they couldn’t. She remembered how Mason had talked about them earlier and how unsettled he had looked. He had tried to hide it, but she could see through his façade.

  She looked up when Benford came back inside the bank and put the radio away in his pack.

  “What did they say?” Fritz asked.

  “They don’t have any intel about this place,” Benford said. He looked and sounded disappointed. “As far as they know, there’s nothing important about Gallant, no reason why the enemy didn’t want to leave or why there are nightcrawlers all over the place.” He looked over at Danny. “What about you? You don’t know what they were doing down here?”

  “Not a clue,” Danny said. “The only reason we’re here is because Port Arthur was crawling with soldiers. Your guess is as good as mine why they’re messing around this place.”

  Benford seemed to believe him. Maybe it was the way Danny had told the story—while casually eating his prepackaged food without a care in the world—but even Gaby would have bought the lie if she didn’t know better.

  “So that’s that, then,” Fritz said. “We bugging out or what?”

  “Short of tearing the place apart?” Benford nodded. “We had our fun. Besides, there’s plenty of other targets out there to pick from.”

  “I can dig that.”

  Just then, the crack! of a gunshot echoed outside, and all four of them dropped to the floor instinctively.

  Two more shots followed, then silence.

  Gaby glimpsed Danny’s bag of MRE skidding across the tiled floor and looked over in time to see him reaching for his hip for a sidearm that didn’t exist. He looked over at her and mouthed an exaggerated sigh.

  Benford had unclipped a two-way radio from behind his back and hurried over to the hole in the wall. “Justin, Kip,” he said into the radio, “give me a sitrep.” When they didn’t answer, “Justin, Kip. Give me a sitrep, goddammit.”

  The radio in Benford’s hand and the one clipped to Fritz’s waist squawked in reply, and a male voice said, “You boys should have left town when you had the chance. This is what happens when you lollygag.”

  Fuck me, Gaby thought when she recognized the voice.

  “Do yourself a favor and let us go in there and collect your guns,” Mason said through the radio. “Trust me when I say it’s your best option, because you’re not going to like what happens when night falls. Nosirree, you are not.”

  Then, because it was Mason and he knew exactly how to get on her nerves:

  “Oh, and that hot blonde number who is no doubt listening in on this? Hey, sweetheart, you miss me yet?”

  14

  Lara

  “The rig was designed to accommodate about 150 crewmen, but we don’t have nearly that many onboard right now,” Riley said as he led her off the top platform and into a stairwell, their boots clanging off heavy metal stairs as they went down.

  She expected to feel claustrophobic as they entered the belly of the structure—like moving around in a submarine—but their path was lit by LED lights, and everything, including the walls, was surprisingly clean. She didn’t know why, but she thought a place that was supposed to house oil workers who slaved on heavy machinery for most of the day would be grimier…and smellier.

  “Sounds like it should be pretty comfortable with all the extra space,” Lara said. “So why are you in such a hurry to abandon it?”

  “Comfort isn’t the problem.”

  “So what is?”

  “We’ll get to that later.”

  “You keep saying that, but I’m not hearing anything that would make me hand the Trident over to you.”

  “I’m not asking you to hand it over to me, Lara. You just need to let me borrow it for a while.”

  “I still haven’t heard anything that would make me do that, either.”

  “I haven’t gotten to my sales pitch yet,” he said as he pushed through a door and they stepped inside a hallway lit by bright natural sunlight.

  “Where are we?”

  “The crew area, where the workers stay when they’re not working.”

  She found out why the place was so bright when Riley led her past an open door and she looked in at two kids about Vera and Elise’s age, propping their chins and arms against an open window on the other side of the room. One of the children, a girl, glanced over and smiled at her, and Lara reflexively smiled back.

  “You said you had civilians onboard, not children,” she said. “How many?”

  “About a dozen in all.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Because their family is here.”

  They walked past a couple of closed doors, and Lara thought she could hear voices coming from the other side of both of them.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?” she asked. “Two kids in a room?”

  “It’s a beginning.”

  “So there’s more.”

  “I wouldn’t be much of a salesman if I didn’t have more under my sleeve.”

  He stopped at another open door, then took a couple of steps out of the way to let her look in.

  It was some kind of exercise room, except the equipment had been removed and the space taken over by people. Sunlight streamed inside through windows along the far wall, and she counted at least twenty civilians either standing or sitting around. Some were occupied with card games while others were gathered around a TV watching some kind of movie on a Blu-ray player. A few had staked out private spots to read books. There was conversation, but it was of the hushed variety, as if they were all waiting for something—something bad, or big, or maybe both—to happen. A few of them glanced nervously over at her and Riley.

  “Who are they?” she asked. “What are they doing here?”

  “Everyone has their own rooms, but I guess they find it easier to all be in the same place,” Riley said.

  “No. I mean, what are they doing here, on the Ocean Star?”

  “They’re part of a support network. Cooks, mechanics—basically the lifeblood of every war effort. They’re here because this is an FOB and our job is to keep the war going.”

  “What war are you talking about?”

  Riley was looking at her intently. “I think you know.”

  He’s talking about Mercer’s crusade in Texas.

  She’d known who Riley was as soon as he began talking about what was happening back in Texas. He was a part of Mercer’s army. So were Hart and Faith, and now, the people in this room. She didn’t have any doubts anymore, but she couldn’t let Riley know that. At least, not until she had squeezed him for every piece of information.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “Are you sure about that?” he asked, not taking his eyes off her.

  “I should know what I know, Riley, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He nodded, but there was a ghost of a smile on his lips, as if he had just gotten what he had been waiting (looking?) for. “All right. Let’s stick to that story for now.” He turned and continued up the hallway. “Come on; I have more to show you.”

  She looked into the room one more time before following him. “How many people are on the rig?”

  “Thirty-two civilians.”

  “I thought you said you were all civilians.”

  “Some are more civilian than others.”

  They turned a corner and passed another large room, this one equipped with flat screens along the walls, but unlike the previous room, none of the TVs in this one were turned on. There was a stack of red chairs in one corner because the space had been conv
erted into living quarters. Instead of civilians, there were a half dozen men and women in assault vests sitting or lying down on spring cots. Everyone wore gun belts, and rifles leaned against their beds or the walls nearby.

  They didn’t stop at the second room.

  “So this is where you’re hiding the rest of your Harts,” she said.

  “I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

  “Which would be what?”

  “That I was looking to jump you as soon as you were onboard.”

  “They’re soldiers.”

  “They’re the security force that’s supposed to keep the FOB safe.”

  “How many?”

  “Fifteen. I’m responsible for forty-seven lives in all, not counting myself.”

  “They look a little jumpy.”

  “Things are a little tense right now,” Riley said. “Not just here, but back in Texas, too. Which you don’t know anything about.”

  She smirked at his back but if he heard or saw it, he didn’t react.

  “There are more FOBs like the Ocean Star out there,” Riley continued. “Not quite like this one, and staffed differently, but we all serve the same purpose.”

  “Which is?”

  “Keep the war effort alive. Keep the fighting on course. Keep the killing going.” He stopped and turned around to look at her. “Mercer.”

  “Mercer who?”

  “Cut the shit, Lara. You know about Mercer,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  So here it is. The moment of truth.

  “No more lies,” she said.

  “No more lies,” he nodded.

  “I’ve heard stories about Mercer, but I’ve never met him or seen what he’s doing out there in person.”

  “Everything you’ve heard is true, and it’s the reason I need to get these people as far away from the Ocean Star as possible.”

  “I’m listening…”

  “We don’t want anything to do with the bloodbath that’s taking place in Texas right now. That’s why I need the Trident. It’s the only thing big enough to carry everyone here away.”

  “So you’re running, is that it?”

  “Yes,” Riley said without hesitation. “We’re running, Lara. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s why I volunteered for this job in the first place, why the people in the other rooms are here, too. Will you help us get as far away from Mercer as possible?”

  She didn’t answer him, and Riley never took his eyes off her.

  “Lara,” he said. “Please. I need your help. I’ll beg if you want.”

  “I don’t want you to beg.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Tell me everything about Mercer. About this war of his. If you want a prayer of me saying yes, I want to know everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything,” she said. “Start at the beginning…”

  They sat across from one another in the Ocean Star’s galley—the only two people in the entire place—with chunks of SPAM and fried fish on plastic trays between them. Like life on the Trident, Riley’s people had no trouble fishing the Gulf of Mexico for a steady diet of fish every day. She took note that the kitchen in the back still had a working refrigerator, which meant Riley had plenty of diesel fuel to waste.

  We could definitely use some of that.

  “The people here and the ones out there fighting his war right now wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him,” Riley said. “He saved our lives. Literally and figuratively. The first few weeks were the hardest, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You were out there, too.”

  She didn’t say anything. The first few weeks of The Purge were not something she liked to dwell on.

  May you burn in hell, John Sunday. You and your brothers.

  “He knew about the oil rigs,” Riley was saying. “He knew about a lot of other things that never occurred to me or most people. I don’t know how he knew. It’s one of the many mysteries surrounding Mercer. He doesn’t talk much about his past, and he doesn’t have to. His actions did all the speaking for him.” Riley paused and seemed to take a few seconds to search his thoughts. Then, “What you have to understand is, we followed him because we wanted to, because we believed in him. Nothing he did up until what they call R-Day affected that belief. For most of us, anyway.”

  “What finally changed your mind?”

  “The realization that it was happening. The war. It was actually happening. Before, it was just theory. And then…it wasn’t.”

  “You said there are forty-seven people on the Ocean Star—forty-eight, counting yourself. How many are out there running around Texas?”

  “Over 500,” Riley said. “That’s not including the people in the other FOBs.”

  “In all?”

  “Almost a thousand.”

  It sounded like a lot, but even as she turned the number over in her head, she knew it wasn’t really. There was a colonel in Colorado who had over 4,000 civilians and military personnel hiding in a bunker called Bayonet Mountain with him at this very moment. Compared to that, “almost a thousand” people wasn’t nearly as impressive. Then again, it wasn’t as if you needed a lot of warm bodies to drop bombs and shell a helpless town filled with pregnant women and civilians.

  “He managed to save that many all by himself?” she asked.

  “Not by himself,” Riley said. “He started small, with a handful, but the numbers grew and soon they were able to cover more ground, pull more people out of their hiding places. In the beginning, there were just four of them. Mercer and three others. I made five.”

  “You were there at the planning stages of his war.”

  Riley shook his head. “It wasn’t a war then. Not really. Yes, he talked about it, but he never gave any specifics, and for the longest time it was just this abstract thing he would bring up every once in a while. Mostly it was just people trying to stay alive and help each other do the same. He found out about the silver a long time before we even heard your radio broadcast. But he didn’t know about water or UV lights, otherwise we would have used places like the Ocean Star a lot earlier.” Riley poked unenthusiastically at his food with a plastic spork before continuing. “Eventually we transitioned from survival mode to planning. We’d always been good at searching and loading up on food, supplies, and fuel, but I didn’t know what they were really for.”

  “His war.”

  Riley nodded. “He’s had it on his mind from day one; he just never let us in on any of the details. Back then, we were just glad to be alive and searching for other survivors, and we never knew any better. I guess you could say we were blissfully ignorant and loving it.”

  “Where did you get the war machines? The planes?”

  “The problem isn’t finding them; it’s training people to use them. We only had one pilot, a former Iraq War airman named Cole. He was able to train two others.”

  “Why just two?”

  “Not everyone can fly a plane, Lara. It’s not as easy as climbing into the cockpit and stepping on the gas pedal.”

  “I guess not.”

  “We located a unit of Abrams tanks at an Army base. All the ammo we needed was just sitting there for the taking. The tanks are easier to train for—all you really need is a manual and a lot of space—but they have limited range and they’re not exactly subtle. From the reports we’re getting out of Texas, Mercer’s already lost two of his tanks assaulting the towns. The kill squads will eventually do more damage to the collaborators than the war machines as the war goes on.”

  “Kill squads?”

  “Basically hit-and-run teams. They’re mostly autonomous, and their job—their only job—is to sow confusion among the enemy ranks, make them think there are more of us out there than there actually are. It’s a dangerous job, and the ones running around out there are all volunteers. The hardest of the hardcore Mercer believers.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of nice guys.”

  “Not really. Anyway, th
is is just the beginning. His version of shock and awe. Strike first and fast, before the enemy knows what’s happening.”

  “By indiscriminately killing a lot of innocent people?”

  “That part…” He shook his head. “It caught a lot of us by surprise. It’s why I’m here. Why everyone’s here.”

  Lara considered that the look in his eyes might have been all for her benefit, but she didn’t think so. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she was sitting across from him and neither one of them had moved for a long time, she saw the bags under his eyes, proof that rest wasn’t something Riley was familiar with for a while now.

  “Phase one was shock and awe,” she said. “What’s phase two?”

  “Recruitment,” Riley said. “Mercer knows he can’t keep fighting this with just 500 soldiers, even as well-trained and committed as they are. Guns and ammo aren’t the issue. We cleaned up more than one Army depot before all of this. His plan was always to start with Texas, get the Texans behind him, before expanding to the other states. He thinks if he inflicts enough damage, make them fear him enough, that he can convert the collaborators, including all the townspeople that can pick up a gun and fight with him.”

  “Why now? Why didn’t he just wait until he had more men?”

  “He said we couldn’t, that the longer we waited the more comfortable the townspeople would become with their new life, and it would be harder to convince them. That, and with every FOB we establish, we increase our risk of being discovered. I don’t know how much of that was bullshit, honestly.”

  “What if that doesn’t work?” Lara asked. “What if the collaborators won’t turn? What if they keep resisting him and he has to kill more and more people?”