The Bones of Valhalla (Purge of Babylon, Book 9) (34 page)

Frank’s plan and Danny’s stupid name for it.

Plan G.

Oh, to have a backup plan.

Plan H?
he thought, and wanted to laugh out loud, but of course he was too busy shooting and so was Gaby next to him, and Danny and Hanson were behind him doing the same thing.

There was no path forward and no road back. They had come to a complete standstill in the tunnel, somewhere between the platform in front of them and the hole in the wall behind them. Darkness was closing in from both sides, though the creatures had begun to slow even further because of the sheer number of dead bodies in their path.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Hanson was shouting behind him.

“Get a new vocabulary, Hanson!” Danny said, laughing as he did so.

“Fuck you!”

“Sorry, already married! But if you wanna buy me dinner first, I might think about it!”

Danny laughed again, and for some reason Hanson joined right in.

Keo had switched back to semi-auto to conserve ammo. He didn’t need to know he was down to his last magazine. The lightness around his waist was all the evidence he needed. Pretty soon he’d be down to his pistol, just like Gaby, who had just reloaded a second time—

Click!
as the MP5SD went empty.

Keo slung it instead of just dumping it into the water the way Hanson had done with his M249 earlier. After all, you didn’t find a whole lot of Heckler & Koches lying around Texas these days, and Keo was a man who appreciated good firearms—even if they were empty and were only going to be useful as a blunting instrument in the next few minutes.

Minutes? We’re being a little optimistic, aren’t we?

Try seconds, pal!

He squeezed the trigger on the Sig Sauer again and again, and though the handgun didn’t have a laser pointer, it didn’t matter because the ghouls had gotten so close that he didn’t even have to aim to take out one, two, three with a single shot. Another time and another place and the kill ratio per bullet would have made him a happy man, but right now all it did was open space for another one or two or
five
to take a fallen undead thing’s place.

And they kept coming…and coming…

“Keo!” Gaby shouted next to him.

He ignored her and reloaded.

“Keo!” she shouted again.

He finally glanced over and saw that she had stopped shooting. The Glock was back in its holster and she was palming something in her left hand. The parts of the oblong object that he could see behind her clutching fingers gleamed green against his NVG.

He stared at her—or at her night vision—and they didn’t have to say anything. He knew exactly what she was going to do.

Keo pulled the mask off his face—retching smell be damned—and grinned back at her. “Do it!”

She pulled off her own mask and smiled back, then took a step closer to him even as she slipped her right index finger into the grenade’s pin.

Behind him, Danny and Hanson had stopped shooting, either because they were out of bullets or dead. He could have turned around and made sure, but at the moment he didn’t want to find out. Besides, it wasn’t going to matter anyway in the next second or so.

“Do it!” he shouted at Gaby.

She nodded and started to pull the pin—

“Wait!” he screamed, and Gaby was maybe half a heartbeat from finishing the pulling motion when she stopped.

Keo looked up from the frag device in Gaby’s hand and down the tunnel, and stared right into the twin black eyes of a ghoul. It was so close that Keo almost let out an involuntary gasp, but he didn’t because he was too busy taking aim with the Sig Sauer and was on the verge of pulling the trigger—except he didn’t.

Because it was quiet.

The tunnel had gone completely and terrifyingly
silent.

The creature in front of him looked frozen in place, even as its twin blackened eyes stared at him.
(Jesus Christ, how did he get so close?)
Except there was something wrong with its eyes—they were hollow and lifeless like all the rest, but that wasn’t it. It looked almost like it was in some kind of a trance.

And it wasn’t alone. The ghoul standing immediately to its right, and the one immediately to its left had also gone still and lifeless. The same was true for the legion of hunched over forms behind them.

The only noise in the entire tunnel, other than Keo’s racing heartbeat—and that of Gaby’s to his right—came from the
drip-drip-drip
of condensation around them.

“Keo?” Gaby whispered. She was still clutching the grenade in her left hand, still in mid-pull with her right.

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

He stared at the ghoul standing less than a foot from his face. It was looking at him, but he didn’t think the creature actually saw him, as if he had simply stopped existing in its universe. So what the hell was it looking at?

The same was true for the others. They looked in his and Gaby’s direction, but not
at
them.

Keo took a quick step away from the closest ghoul and glanced behind him. He saw the back of Danny’s head, the Ranger’s right fist holding a Glock at his side. Next to him, Hanson was gripping his knife, the silver blade gleaming against the fluorescent green of Keo’s night vision.

But it was the sight in front of the two men that made Keo stare for more than a few seconds. The ghouls on that side of the tunnel were standing like permanently frozen stalks of grass jutting out of the filthy water, staring at Danny and Hanson (and Keo now) but not seeing them.

Danny shot a quick look back at him and whispered, “What the hell did you say to them?”

“I didn’t say shit,” Keo whispered back.

“It’s him,” Gaby said. “It has to be him.”

Keo glanced over at her, saw that she had taken her finger away from the grenade pin and was holding it nonthreateningly at her side, and had drawn that weird cross-knife with her right hand.

“Him who?” he asked.

“Will,” she said. “This is him. He’s doing this.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Keo looked over his shoulder again and saw Danny watching him back, equally as confused. The fact that Danny didn’t have a single smart-ass thing to say was more stunning than the ghouls simply just stopping.

“Um, maybe we should, uh, go?” Hanson said.

“Big man’s got good ideas,” Danny said.

Keo turned back around and tried to locate the platform down the tunnel through all the still bodies, but there were so many of them and even with the NVG, all he could see were bloated corpses in the water and motionless ghouls—

There.

There was just enough of a sliver in the creatures’ ranks that he was able to make out the edge of the platform twenty meters away.

Twenty goddamn meters away.

“You first, Kemosabe,” Danny said behind him.

“Why me?” Keo said.

“You’re closer.”

“Not by much.”

“Still, closer.”

Keo sighed. “I fucking hate you.”

“You don’t mean that,” Danny said, and Keo could imagine him grinning when he did.

“Be careful,” Gaby whispered next to him.

He nodded.

Be careful. Right.

Keo took a big breath—didn’t even smell the filth that was his entire world at the moment—and took one step, then another one, around the undead thing that was almost on top of him. He maneuvered around the ghoul, then another one, then two more until he had reached the wall. He hugged it with his back and slid more than he walked forward down the length of the tunnel. He jostled a ghoul (actually heard Gaby gasping behind him), but the stick-thin figure didn’t seem to notice, so he kept going.

He didn’t look back at the others until he was a third of the way to the platform and saw all three of them watching him. Hanson was sweating profusely, and Gaby and Danny were either mesmerized by his every movement or about to vomit. Keo knew exactly what they were feeling, and he tightened his grip further on his Sig Sauer at his side.

Then he resumed sliding his way through the limbs and wet bodies.

About halfway to the platform, he was unable to keep moving in the same manner and had to step forward, then around one, two, then three of the creatures. It was impossible to go around them without bumping into them, which he did again and again, and each time he swore his luck was going to run out, but it never did.

The ghouls continued to ignore him and stared off, even as he rubbed up against them and had to push floating bodies out of his path and into them. There were so many and they were so small he felt like an adult trying to make his way through a field of children.

Finally
(finally!)
he reached his destination and climbed up onto the platform. He spent a moment to strip off his NVG before stepping forward and craning his head up while leading with the Sig Sauer in both hands. He expected a head or two to stare back down at him from topside, but there was only the round covering still in place. Keo might have actually let out a loud, involuntary sigh as the brilliant rays of sunlight caressed his face.

He moved back to the platform’s edge and was able to see the others easily over the domed heads of the creatures between them. He waved them over.

Gaby moved first, then Hanson, with Danny coming last.

Keo hurried back to the ladder, afraid his luck was going to run out
any second now
, and started climbing. Every step took him closer toward the sunlight and away from the filth of the sewer. After not smelling the stink of the tunnel for so long, he was starting to lose his tolerance. Or maybe it was the fresh air filtering through the gaps in the round lid above him, reminding him there was another world beyond this stinking hellhole.

He finally reached the top and pushed the heavy metal covering up with one hand before sliding it completely out of the way. He held his breath for the sound of a gun discharging, but his head was still attached to his shoulders a second—two, and even three seconds later—so he kept moving, sticking first his head up into the euphoric brightness, then the rest of him.

He climbed out into the sunlight, realized he had been holding his breath for the last thirty or so seconds, and finally gave himself permission to breathe again as he rolled away from the round hole. He swallowed in a lungful of fresh air
(God bless you, fresh air!)
as he pushed himself up on one knee and raised the 9mm.

Footprints and splatters of dried blood covered the area around the opening, but there were no signs of anyone living or dead. He looked toward the parking lot, where they had carved an LZ for the Sikorsky earlier and come under fire, but only saw bullet-riddled cars and no collaborator presence.

Keo turned around when he heard Gaby coming up behind him, then reached down and pulled her out of the sewer. She had been holding her breath too, and Gaby finally sucked in a large lungful when she collapsed on the pavement and stayed down there for a while.

He hurried over to help Hanson up. The big man was halfway out of the hole when Keo looked past him and down at the platform below.

“Hanson,” Keo said, “where’s Danny?”

Hanson gave him a confused look, then stopped climbing and glanced down. “He was right behind me.”

“So where is he?”

Hanson shook his head, mumbled something incoherent, then started climbing back down.

“Hanson!” Keo hissed, but Hanson didn’t respond.

“What is it?” Gaby asked. She had picked herself up and was holding her Glock at her side while looking around at the parking lot. “Where’s Danny?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. He stayed at the opening, looking after Hanson as the last of Mercer’s men hopped down the ladder and craned his head (hesitantly, very hesitantly) back into the tunnel he had just escaped from.

“Keo,” Gaby said. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

Hanson came back, got on the ladder, and began climbing up with surprising speed for a man his size. Keo scooted away as Hanson reached the opening, and Keo grabbed his proffered arm and pulled him out.

“Where’s Danny?” Gaby asked.

Hanson shook his head. “He’s not down there.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Keo asked.

“Just that,” Hanson said. “He’s not in the tunnel.” The big man shook his head, looking, Keo guessed, probably as bewildered as he and Gaby were at the moment. “He’s gone.”

“
S
o here you are
. At last. Tell me: Am I everything you imagined?”

Mabry’s voice was everywhere—inside his head and outside. The duality of it was jarring, and it took him a moment to adjust. Fortunately he had enough experience shielding himself from unwanted voices and was able to limit the effects on his senses. Even Mabry’s hiss was comforting, which shouldn’t have been possible but was.

“All that effort to avoid me. To run away. Only to come here. So much time wasted for nothing.”

Mabry didn’t resemble the creature he had seen outside the Cleveland bank all those months ago. The ghoul was taller, his chest fuller, and his shoulders broader. The blue of the eyes so incandescent that he couldn’t look away even if he wanted to, and he didn’t for fear of losing track of his target, his mission.

Make it count!
a voice that wasn’t Mabry’s echoed inside his head. The words came tumbling from the past, at a time when he was surrounded by sand and blood, heat and cold. Danny had been there. He didn’t remember much, but he remembered enough. Was it Danny’s voice? He couldn’t be sure.

Danny…

He was back there, in the tunnel. With Gaby and Keo, and Mercer’s men. Maybe dead. Maybe barely alive. He couldn’t hear or feel them because he couldn’t afford to extend his senses beyond the room. Everything he had, every ounce of willpower, was focused on Mabry. In this room, right here, right now.

His mission. His final mission.

“Tell me,” Mabry said, “was it worth it? Was all of this worth it?”

“Yes,” he said.

Mabry smiled. A true smile, the kind the other blue eyes could never quite master no matter how hard they tried—how hard
he
tried. “It must be fate, then. Or maybe you think it’s providence. That night in the apartment, when you stumbled across the silver. You, of all people. A man who doesn’t believe. And yet, and yet, it was there when you needed it most.”

“Coincidence,” he said.

Mabry laughed. It was dry and humorless, and it reverberated off the walls and the interior of his skull. He willed himself to ignore it, to push through.

Concentrate.

Concentrate!

“I’ve been alive too long to believe in coincidences,” Mabry said. “There was a time when I was a nonbeliever like you. But that was long ago. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve witnessed men do—the things
I’ve
done to get this far.”

There was an entire room between them, and it should have been difficult to hear Mabry’s soft
(soothing)
exterior voice, but it wasn’t. The air around him hummed, the sensations both warm and cool, stale and fresh—at once freezing and scorching.

It didn’t make any sense. Nothing made any sense.

Concentrate!

“Men were never meant to have dominion over the planet,” Mabry said. “They’re too destructive for their own good. They poison the oceans with their filth, and they would have done the same to the sky before I stopped them. It’s not their fault, really. It’s in their nature to destroy.”

His nostrils flared at the stench of human bodies. Too many to count even if he had wasted the second or two it would have taken to do so. They were shoved inside the lockers that lined the walls around him and hung from heavy metal hooks. Men and women, old and young. Frail and naked, resembling black-eyed ghouls, but not there yet. They were very much still alive, and if they were lucky, they wouldn’t know what was happening to them, that Mabry fed on them whenever he needed the blood that flowed through their veins.

He licked his lips involuntarily.

No, this wasn’t him. He wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t like Mabry.

No.

“I knew the time would come,” Mabry continued. “All I had to do was wait. But I’ve always been patient. You learn to be when you’ve survived for as long as I have. Time loses its power when age and disease no longer matter.”

“Everything dies,” he said.

Mabry’s lips creased again. Even standing so far apart
(so near)
, the two of them bathed in absolute darkness, he could see the gentle
(caring)
smile. “Do you really think it’s going to be that easy? That you would come here, kill me, and save everyone? Save your beloved Lara?”

No
, he thought, and tightened his grip around the hilts of the knives hanging at his sides. If their silver blades nauseated Mabry as much as they did him, the ghoul didn’t show it for even a split second.

“You didn’t even tell her the truth,” Mabry said. “Not all of it. What does that say about your commitment?”

He had told her enough. Told Danny and Gaby enough. They didn’t need to know everything. Not yet, anyway.

“Do you know how many have stood where you are now?” Mabry continued. “And I’ve survived them all. Every single one of them. What makes you different? What makes you
special?”

He couldn’t help himself, and the corners of his lips curled into a smile (or at least, what he thought was a good version of one).

Mabry cocked his head slightly to one side. “Kate. You think because she turned you, that this time it’ll be different. This time you’ll succeed where all the others have failed. You and your two little knives.”

He refused to stop smiling.

“I’ve braved armies,” Mabry said. “I’ve mastered monstrosities the likes of which you couldn’t imagine. Untold lives have been cast against me, but I’ve always continued on while they fell and rotted into the ground.”

“This time it’ll be different,” he hissed.

“That’s what the others thought, too. But it never is. Maybe fate brought you here, maybe it was providence lending a hand. Whatever it was—whatever it is—it’ll all be for nothing. Humanity’s days have come and gone. Lay down the knives and embrace it. I still have room for you by my side.”

“No.”

Another sigh, this one slightly more impatient than the last. “You should have come home earlier. I would have sent people for your beloved and brought her to you, given you the happy ending you so desperately crave.”

“You’ll never touch her. You’ll never get close to her.”

“We’ll see about that. When we’re done here, I’ll send for her. It doesn’t matter how far she hides from me. I’ll find her—somehow, some way—and bring her here. I’ve already reserved a spot. And whenever I feed on her, I’ll think of you, and how silly you were, how wrong Kate was about you.”

“No.”

“You won’t have a choice. You never did. Neither will she. None of you ever did. You think you know how long I’ve been planning this? Putting all the pieces into place? You don’t have a clue. You’ll never truly grasp the complexity of it; you couldn’t possibly appreciate how much patience and planning and effort it took to get this far.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You talk too much.”

A hint of anger flared across Mabry’s eyes. “Show some
respect.
”

“You don’t deserve it.”

The razor-thin smile returned to Mabry’s lips. “I should have taken you outside the bank. It would have been mercy. For both of us. All it would have taken was a few hundred more of my children.”

“You made a mistake.”

“Yes. I did. I thought I saw something in you, something Kate thought she saw, too. But we were both wrong.”

“She’s dead. Kate.”

“Yes, she is. You took her from me.”

“You can join her.”

“No, I won’t. Every mistake can be rectified, but you will never find peace with your precious Lara. You will never find peace anywhere, because you will never leave this room alive.”

“We’ll see.”

He gripped the hilt of the knives even tighter and took the first step across the room.

“Come then,”
Mabry said, and this time the ghoul’s voice thrummed, hollow and lifeless, inside his head.
“Show me what you’ve learned. Show me how you’ll succeed where whole armies have failed.
Show me.
”

His walk became a run—faster, faster,
faster—
and he was on the other side of the room in the blink of an eye, and slashing—

—
and missed!

He had been fast. As fast as he had ever been. Faster than he thought he was capable of—and it hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t even been close.

“Pathetic,”
Mabry said.

He shut off the pain receptors to his left arm as soon as Mabry grabbed it by the wrist and broke it, and the knife clattered harmlessly to the hard floor.

“This is it?”

He hacked away with the remaining blade, but Mabry jerked his head back and the blade missed again, and again, and
again.

“This is all you have?”

His chest quaked against Mabry’s open palm, bone and muscle quivering against the impact. But there was no pain, just numbness.

“You woke me up for this?”

He swung the knife in desperation at Mabry’s neck, but the ghoul effortlessly sidestepped it and got ahold of his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

“How sad.”

The second knife fell away as he stumbled back. Long—impossibly long—and warm fingers snatched him around the throat before he could retreat too far, and flung him across the room into one of the lockers. He collapsed to the floor, the warm body hanging in the locker coming loose from the impact and collapsing on top of him.

“Kate spoke so highly of you.”

He struggled to stand, but it was difficult with arms that didn’t—and couldn’t—obey his commands. At least he couldn’t feel the pain.

“She would be disappointed by this effort.”

He managed to stand and attempted to refocus on Mabry as the air around him shifted and then the ghoul was there, in front of him and grabbing him by the throat again and slamming him into the locker. Metal fragments stabbed through his back, and blood splashed the cold concrete.

“I expected more from you,”
Mabry said, and smashed him into the locker, twisted sharp metal spearing his back and drawing more blood.

“I expected more fight.”

And again, into the remains of the locker.
Bam!

“I expected more spirit.”

Bam!

“But Kate was wrong.”

Bam!

“And so was I.”

Bam!

“You’re just another husk.”

Bam!

“And that’s all you’ll ever be.”

The fingers finally, mercifully released him and he slid to the floor, a heap of shattered bones and ripped flesh. Blood pooled under him. Too much blood. All his. His senses were out of control, and he couldn’t focus on any one thing.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” Mabry said, talking aloud now. “Maybe you never were. I welcomed you to my side, but maybe I shouldn’t have.” Thin lips formed a frown, the disappointment radiating from every pore of the creature’s blackened flesh. “You don’t deserve it.”

“Yes,” he said, forcing the word out through a sheet of blood that dripped down his face from the open gashes along his skull. He didn’t feel any pain, but he knew it was there.

His body was broken. Everything was broken.

“Yes?” Mabry said, standing over him.

Blood dripped from the ghoul’s fingers, the rhythmic
drip-drip-drip
as intoxicating as what poured out of his back, his thighs, and his arms where the sharp edges of the locker had dug deep enough to slice bone.

“Yes,” he said again.

Mabry bent and grabbed him by the throat and lifted him effortlessly into the air. He had no strength left to resist. The ghoul held him in place as if he were nothing—and maybe he was nothing.

Concentrate!
the voice from somewhere in his past shouted.
Make it count! This is it! Make it count! You won’t get another chance!

You won’t get another chance!

He thought of Lara. It was always Lara at the back of his mind, even in his lowest of low moments. She was always there—a radiant glow, waiting to bring him back from the abyss, back to where things mattered.

Except there was something wrong with his memory of her this time. She wasn’t quite as easy to see, the crystal blue of her eyes not quite as bright, and he began to lose his way.

Lara.
Lara!

“Yes?” Mabry said, leaning forward. “Yes what, Will?”

“You’re right,” he said. Croaked. Whispered?

“About what?”

“I can’t beat you.”

“No, you can’t. You never could. And you never will.”

“I can’t beat you…”

“You said that already,” Mabry said. “So what made you think you ever could?”

“I can’t beat you,” he said for the third time.

Mabry sighed and his face softened. It was such a human emotion for such an inhuman creature. Even his grip seemed to lessen out of mercy, though the ghoul didn’t let him down.

“Good-bye, Will. Go with the knowledge that you won’t be alone for very long. She’ll join you—your precious Lara. Then Danny and Gaby and the others will follow. In the years to come, we’ll train the rest to serve us, and in time they won’t remember any other life. It will be
glorious.
”

Now
,
he thought.
Now
,
now
,
now!

He’d heard the footsteps when they were still in the hallway while Mabry was talking, gloating. By the time he tasted the bitter bite of new silver in the air, the figure had slipped inside the room through the open door and was running—and running
fast—
at Mabry.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

Mabry spun and struck, and the dark figure flew across the room and crashed into the lockers on the other side.

In that split second, he reached out and grabbed Mabry’s arm, the one still holding him in the air, and pulled himself forward and toward the ghoul. It was difficult because of his mangled hands, and getting a good grip was impossible, so he wrapped his shattered appendages around Mabry’s arm instead and kicked out and backward at the wall behind him for leverage.

Mabry turned, eyes enlarging—not in fear, no, he was beyond that—as he lunged forward. If Mabry knew what he was going to do, he didn’t stop him in time. Despite everything—his superior speed, his impossible strength—Mabry entertained a brief moment of indecision, of confusion.