The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (14 page)

He rasped his knuckle on the solid fiberglass door and liked the sound he heard. It had a 12x21-inch tinted window at the top and a deadbolt lock on the inside. The odds of it withstanding a prolonged assault were good, especially with the dresser and bed as reinforcements.

Keo headed back to the front door.

Lorelei was leaning through the opening, giving him an anxious look. “Is it safe?”

“Safe enough,” he said.

Carrie followed Lorelei up the steps. “Okay?” she asked.

He nodded. “It’ll do. We only need it for one night, anyway.”

“So,” Lorelei said, “can we eat now? I’m starving.”

Carrie smiled wryly at Keo. “I told you. Like a horse.”

“Hey!” Lorelei said.

A
s dusk fell
, visibility inside the RV began to drop. Carrie sat in the booth across from Keo while they listened to Lorelei snoring inside the bedroom in the back. The teenager had gone to sleep almost instantly. Keo wondered if she was tired from all the walking or the talking. Maybe both.

Carrie had her legs pulled up against her chest, sneakers resting on the seat. “What now?” she asked after they had been sitting there in silence for a while.

Keo reached into his pack and pulled out a Glock, then handed it to her butt-first. “Just in case.”

She took the gun and laid it on the table between them. Keo took out two spare magazines and placed them next to the weapon.

“How many of these things are you carrying around with you?” she asked, sounding amused.

“Plenty. Now, pay attention. It doesn’t matter where you shoot them. As long as you hit them with a silver bullet, they go down. Understand?”

She nodded and picked up the magazines, putting them into her pocket. “So, you’re like Chinese or something? I know you’re Asian. But not the whole way.”

He smiled. “‘Not the whole way’?”

“You know what I mean.”

“My mom was Korean.”

“Ah. What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

“Chuck was taken.”

She stared at him, unsure how to process that response.

“You can take the bedroom with Lorelei,” Keo said. “I’ll sleep out here and keep an eye out.”

“You sure?” she asked, the tiredness coming through.

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Keo. For everything.”

She picked up the Glock, stood up, and headed to the bedroom in the back.

Alone again, Keo pulled the tab on a can of Dole pineapple and sporked himself a nice big chunk dripping with syrup. He finished the entire can in a few minutes, watching as night fell outside the window like a canvas draping over the streets, the Spartan grounds within the hurricane fencing, and finally, the RV itself.

He picked up his MP5SD and put it on the table next to him, then leaned back against the wall. There was another window behind him, but it was blocked by the garage wall so there was no chance of anything coming through it. That only left three possible points of entry—the window directly across from him, the door to his left, and the front windshield. The windshield was mostly concealed by one of the other three walls, which really left just the window and door.

He closed his eyes briefly and thought about Gillian to help pass the time…

K
eo wasn’t asleep
, but he had settled into a peaceful state somewhere been dozing off and wide alert. It was an old trick he had learned a long time ago, something that had become very useful when he found himself stuck up a tree recently.

When he heard the noise, he knew immediately what it was before he even opened his eyes, slid off the plastic seat, and glided across the RV to the other side and pushed up against the window.

Headlights speared the street, cutting across the fading light outside. From the sounds of it, a truck. Despite his limited perspective, he could tell it was moving erratically, headlights swaying left and right as it got closer.

One of the trucks with the soldiers? How did they find us?

Keo watched it near, wondering what was going to reach him first—the truck or the falling night. If he were a betting man…

Click.

Carrie squeezed out of the partially open bedroom door and looked across the darkened vehicle at him. He lifted a finger to his lips, hoping she could see, and when she quietly closed the door and walked on her tiptoes toward him, he guessed she had.

She flattened her body against the wall next to him. “I heard a car…”

He nodded.

“Did they find us?” she asked. “The soldiers?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The pickup finally came into view. It might have been red, but it was hard to tell against the falling night. The vehicle had begun to slow down a bit, but it was still swerving from lane to lane, clearly out of control.

“It’s in trouble,” Carrie whispered.

As if on cue, the truck flipped and a figure—thin, gaunt, and unmistakably
ghoul
—flew off the bed where it had been holding on and was slingshot across the night sky as if shot out of a cannon. It landed somewhere further up the road, well beyond Keo’s line of sight.

The truck rolled on its side like a ball of steel and metal and aluminum, chunks of its frame firing off in every direction like missiles. Its bright front and rear lights shattered against the asphalt, showering the road with fireworks.

“Oh God,” Carrie gasped.

Finally, the truck came to a stop, settling on its roof with a loud groaning noise as smoke flooded out of its crumpled hood. They heard the metallic
clinking
of car parts big and small rolling around the road and dropping from the overturned vehicle.

“We should go out and help them,” Carrie said.

Keo didn’t say anything.

“Keo…”

“It could be a trap. I can’t tell if the truck is one of the three we saw earlier…”

A figure crawled out of the truck. It was a man. Or, at least, it had the size and large shoulders of a man, though Keo couldn’t make out details in the darkness. The man
(?)
crouched and reached into the truck and was pulling something out (another person, maybe?) when he suddenly let go and staggered back, and two loud gunshots exploded across the empty city.

The man fired again and again and again.

Until he finally stopped, turned, and ran—
right at the fence in front of them.

He leaped desperately and reached out for the top of the fence, just barely managing to get a handhold, and began to pull himself up. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt. Definitely not one of those camo uniforms.

“He’s not one of them,” Carrie whispered next to him. “We should go help.”

“It’s too late,” Keo said. He kept his voice calm, measured, and unyielding. “He’s on his own.”

“We can’t do this. We have to help—” She gasped again when she saw them. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

There was a tide of them, so many that at first he thought the night was actually moving, that it had somehow come alive. But no, it wasn’t the darkness that had changed into a living thing, it was the living things
inside
it.

Ghouls. Hundreds, maybe more. Thousands?

He didn’t know where they had come from, only that they weren’t there one moment and then there was nothing
but
them. They swarmed toward the man, swallowing him up as if he were a fish trying to outswim the ocean itself. But he couldn’t, and Keo heard the scream, the sound of gunshots that wasn’t quite as loud as before because this time they were muffled by suffocating flesh.

Something grabbed onto Keo’s arm. He looked down at Carrie’s hand, her fingers digging into his skin. She stared out the window, face frozen in horror, the sight too frightening to comprehend yet too fascinating to look away from.

“Carrie,” he whispered when he felt a trickle of blood along his arm.

She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were transfixed by the amorphous blob moving outside the window, just beyond the flimsy hurricane fencing that would fall in a split-second if the creatures ever knew they were in there—

“Carrie,” he said again, a little louder this time.

That did it. She looked over at him, then down at his arm, and quickly unfurled her fingers and pulled her hand back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

He slid down to the floor and took a handkerchief out from one of his pouches and wrapped it around his arm.

Carrie sat next to him, clutching her knees to her chest. She stared forward and rocked absently back and forth. “What were they doing out there, Keo? What in God’s name were they doing out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Everyone knows not to be outside at night. Everyone knows. Even Lorelei knows.
Everyone
…” Her voice trailed off.

Keo put his arm around her and pulled her against him. She came willingly, anxiously, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and it wasn’t because of the slightly chilly night air inside the RV.

“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “It’ll be better tomorrow.”

“Will it?”

“Yes. I promise.”

Carrie’s body slackened against him and Keo tightened his grip on her with one hand, the other holding the MP5SD in his lap. He kept his eyes and ears open and knew he wasn’t going to be getting sleep anytime soon. Which was okay. He was used to not getting a decent amount of sleep these days. Hell, these last few weeks and months...

He thought about Gillian, walking on a white sandy beach, barefooted. He wondered if she had given up on him by now or if she still looked off at the Gulf of Mexico every day, waiting for him to arrive, for him to finally make good on his promise.

“You promise me,”
she had said. “
You’ll follow us to Santa Marie Island.”

“Yes,”
he had answered
. “I promise.”

“I’ll wait for you. Just hurry.”

That had been months ago. Did she still remember the exchange between them as vividly as he did? Was she even still waiting for him? There was only one way to find out.

First, though, he had to make good on a dead man’s promise, and that meant going to Song Island…

W
hat are you doing
, you idiot?

Turn around. Right now. Run back to the door.

Do it.

And then what? There was no way out. No way to open the door. (She would need a doorknob for that.) No windows to climb out of, either. Not even a vent to crawl into.

They were inside the building, just like whoever had led them in here had planned it.

You’re screwed. You’re so screwed.

She must have sighed out loud because she heard clothes rustling as Peter, somewhere in the darkness with her, turned in her direction. Or she thought he did, anyway.

“You okay?” he whispered.

She shook her head before realizing he probably couldn’t see, not with the flashlight beam in front of them instead of on her face. “I’m fine,” she whispered back. “Keep the flashlight in front of us.”

“Okay…”

They had been walking down a long, empty hallway toward another intersection for the last ten minutes, though it didn’t seem as if they had gone very far from the alleyway door. That probably had something to do with the inability to see beyond the end of Peter’s flashlight. She must have gripped and re-gripped the M4 at least a dozen times.

At least there was a window in front of them this time, even though it was covered up so thoroughly with thick slabs of wood that not a single sliver of sunlight managed to slip through. Peter’s circle of light illuminated the occasional paintings of birds and ducks and flowers on the wall, along with end tables that held delicate-looking vases with nothing inside them.

It continued to be deathly quiet inside the building, not helped by the normal silence beyond the walls. It seemed as if she and Peter were the only two people still alive in the world at that moment, moving in the dark.

Moving in the dark…

She had trouble figuring out what kind of building they were in, much less its size. Maybe some kind of boarding house, judging by the hallways? Or an apartment building, maybe. Was there more than one floor? She hadn’t come across any stairs yet, and there were no sounds above her. She had been so busy chasing Peter through the streets and then the alley that she hadn’t taken even a second to take a look at the buildings around them. Her situational awareness, Will would say, had been utter shit.

How long had they been moving through the darkness? Twenty minutes? More? Less? Hard to tell. Hard to
breathe.

But it wasn’t hard to sweat. She was doing a lot of that. The thickness in the air was made worse by the boarded-up window. She assumed the rest of the windows in the place were similarly covered, which would explain the complete lack of ventilation. Peter was sweating almost as much next to her; she could tell because whenever they accidentally brushed up against each other—which was about once every other step—his sweat rubbed off on her exposed arm and vice versa.

They waited to hear from Milly or her captor the entire time. Noises, movements, as long as it was something
(anything)
that told them that she was still alive in here, somewhere. There was nothing except their dual labored breathing.

Crash!

Gaby spun around. Peter mirrored her action, his flashlight spinning a full 180 degrees until it exposed a small figure standing behind them.

A boy. Barely a teenager. His eyes bulged against the light, though he didn’t look scared—just guilty, as if he had been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He wore dirty slacks and a sweat-stained T-shirt, bright blue eyes looking back at Gaby through stringy brown hair that fell over his face. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and he stood next to one of the end tables, the vase on top of it having fallen down and broken on the floor.

The boy turned and ran.

“Wait, kid, stop!” Gaby shouted before chasing after him.

Peter was slow to react, but eventually his flashlight moved and the beam bounced up and down the dirty floor, erratically picking up the fleeing form. Gaby was close enough that she could see the kid—or at least, the outline of his shape—as he scrambled
down the hallway.

Damn, he was fast. Which was becoming a theme today. First Peter had outrun her in the streets, and now this boy. Was she really that slow, or was the ammo really dragging her down? Maybe she should—

The boy glanced over his shoulder back at her while never breaking his stride.

“Wait!” she shouted. “We’re not going to hurt you!”

If he heard her, he didn’t care, because he soon turned right and kept going.

She grabbed for the corner and slingshot around the turn so she didn’t have to slow down. The M4 bounced against her chest, all the magazines and equipment in Mac’s web belt weighing her down like a ton of bricks. She was used to carrying the load, but not running full speed with them.

She glimpsed the boy’s back up ahead. Jesus, he was fast. By the time she saw him again, he was already halfway to the side door, the same one they had come through earlier. Did he know it didn’t have a doorknob?

“Wait!” she shouted. “Stop, goddammit!”

The boy didn’t respond to her commands, but he was moving with purpose, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Which was where? More importantly, how had he gotten behind them in the first place? There was nothing back there…right?

Peter was still slow to catch up, and he was just now making the turn behind her when she was already ten feet up the hallway. She couldn’t see where the alleyway door was, which wasn’t a surprise since she couldn’t see much of anything anyway. Finally, Peter’s flashlight appeared, throwing a pool of light on the tiled flooring, peeling wallpaper—and up there, the boy again, racing like a little demon through the darkness.

The kid took another right turn.

Gaby primed herself to do the slingshot maneuver again, reaching out with one hand to grab the wall as she approached the corner—

Her vision—or what little of it there was—exploded as something smashed into her from the side just as she was starting to make the turn. She was flung across the narrow passageway and smashed into the wall on the other side and crumpled down to the cold, dirty tiled floor in a heap. She wasn’t sure if most of the pain was coming from the blow that sent her flying, the impact, or from the M4 unwittingly digging into her stomach and chest as she slammed down on top of it.

She hurt. All over.

Was her back broken? That would explain why she could barely move her arms and legs. Maybe her spine had been snapped. Was that possible? She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t breathe without feeling stabs of brutal pain, and it took every effort to turn her face away from the floor and to her side just so she could suck in a lungful of air.

Get up. Get up!

“Gaby!” Peter shouted, his voice not quite clear because he was still around the corner.

She managed to move her head, looked up, and saw the shape of a large figure standing over her. Was this what had hit her? A
man?
It hadn’t felt like a man. It had felt more like a speeding train…or a dozen.

The man turned his head down the hallway as a bright beam of light splashed across his broad chest. She wanted to tell Peter to lift the flashlight up a bit so she could see the man’s face, but she couldn’t form anything that even sounded like words. Was she even still breathing? Of course she was. Wasn’t she?

“Get away from her!” Peter shouted somewhere from the other side of the universe. “I’m warning you!”

Peter, just shoot him, you idiot.

The man’s large legs backpedaled as Peter came closer, his footsteps getting louder.

Shoot him, Peter, shoot him!

She wanted to shout it out, but whenever she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out were short, labored gasps. God, her chest burned…

“Gaby—” Peter said, when there was the loud sound of something wooden hitting flesh and the bright beam of Peter’s flashlight fell away from the big man hovering over her.

She heard the
clatter
of metal falling against the floor and rolling around before settling against a wall and illuminating the big man’s shoes—well-worn Nike sneakers—standing next to her head.

Those same shoes squeaked as they moved past her and a thick male voice said, “Damn, you saw that, Harrison?
Bam!
She never had a chance.”

“You idiot, get her weapons,” another voice snapped.

“Oh, right,” the first one said.

Gaby felt herself being turned over onto her back and rough, meaty hands pawing at the M4 and pulling it away. The same pair of hands groped her web belt and drew the Glock.

She was starting to get some semblance of feeling back in her arms and legs. She could move her fingers, which was a good sign. So she wasn’t paralyzed after all. Right? God, she hoped so. She could only think of a few worse things these days, and being paralyzed was one of them.

“Did you kill her?” the second voice asked.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” the first one said.

“You don’t think so?”

“She looks alive to me.”

She was on her back, but Gaby couldn’t see much of anything. These people seemed to be able to move around in the darkness just fine, though. She wasn’t sure how that was possible. At least, not until a figure crouched next to her and leaned over. She looked up at a pair of round and green lights staring down at her.

Night-vision goggles.

“She’s still alive,” the man behind the goggles said. “She might wish she wasn’t pretty soon, though.”

More movement around her. There were at least four pairs of feet in the hallway now. Where did they all come from? And more importantly, how the hell did that kid get behind them in the first place?

So many questions. Pointless, stupid questions, because none of it mattered. Not to her. Not now.

It was a trap. A big, stupid, elaborate trap.

Milly. The kid in the hallway. The door that can’t be opened.

And you fell for it like the big, stupid girl that you are.

Will would be so disappointed in you right now. So, so disappointed…

She struggled to keep her eyes open. The pain had become unbearable, and it was easier to lay still and absorb it, let it sweep over her entire body and think about how stupid she had been, how clueless, as she stumbled into their elaborate little trap.

Stupid. So stupid.

She found it easier to ignore all the voices around her. Ignore all the footsteps moving back and forth. Ignore the rough hands grabbing her and pulling her up from the floor as if she were a rag doll without any feelings.

There was the boy—the same one that had lured her down this path—as he played with her M4 rifle as if it were a toy. He looked up as they dragged her away, and she couldn’t tell if that was innocence on his face or just a kid beaming with pride at a job well done.

S
he woke
up lying on her side. Her bones ached and she wasn’t sure if she could still move her legs, but when she tried extending them, they seemed fine. She couldn’t pry them apart, though, because they were pressed together at the ankles by a rope. Her head throbbed and opening her eyes to blinding LED lights didn’t help.

She was inside some kind of basement. She could tell that much even while looking at it from the floor at an angle. The floor was cold and uncomfortable but that didn’t stop her from feeling the sweat along her face, neck, and arms anyway. Someone had removed the camo jacket she took off Mac, and her web belt was gone.

And she was unarmed again.

Dammit.

A small figure was crouched in front of her. A girl, maybe fifteen, though it was hard to tell her age with the long, dirty-blonde hair covering half of her face, reminding Gaby of the boy from the hallway.

They use the kids. The bastards use the kids.

That immediately got her thinking of Milly. Where was she now? Was she fine? Safe? In danger? Given her own situation, Gaby thought it was probably too much to think that the girl was fine…somewhere out there.

The girl in front of her now was wearing cargo pants and sneakers and had a rifle lying across her lap. She recognized the weapon from the movies. Westerns with cowboys and Indians. Winchester? Was that what those were called? You cranked the lever to load a new round after you fired. Give her a carbine with a thirty-round magazine any day.

The kid had bright blue eyes that reminded Gaby of Lara. She was short, barely five feet, and there was a seriousness about the way she eyeballed Gaby that convinced her the girl meant business. Or, at least, she was putting on a hell of a game face.

She couldn’t tell how large the room was because there was only one portable LED lamp in the entire place. It dangled from a hook along the ceiling, casting an ethereal halo around her, the girl, and…blood.

Why is there blood?

There was coughing next to her. Gaby pulled herself up from the floor and sat on her butt. It was difficult with the thick rope binding her hands, pulled so tight that it dug into her wrists. She looked to her right.

Peter was leaning back against the wall, his own hands bound behind his back. His face was red and purple and some other color Gaby didn’t have a name for. His cheeks were puffy, his right eye swollen, and he peered back at her through fresh bruises that covered every inch of his face. His lips were cut and fresh blood clung to his sweat-stained shirt, and Peter didn’t look as if he was breathing at all. There was surprisingly very little blood on the floor, which told her whatever had happened to Peter hadn’t been inside here. He had been taken outside, then brought back…after.

“Peter, God, what happened?”

He shook his head, as if he wanted to talk but couldn’t. His mouth quivered, and although she had only known him for a few hours
(has it only been half a day?)
, she felt something shattering at the pitiful sight of him. He looked in so much pain and his entire body seemed sapped of energy.

This wasn’t the man who had rescued her this morning.

This man was…broken.