The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (25 page)

“So now you know.”

“Yeah.”

She frowned at him. “You almost died.”

“But I didn’t.”

“But you almost did.”

“But I
didn’t.
” He reached up and stroked her cheek. “Face it, lady, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. I don’t care how many times you call the cops.”

She smiled and leaned against his hand, and he felt her tears falling over his fingers.

*

It was
6:17 
p.m.
when he was able to sit up, and Sandra transferred a box with bottled water, canned fruits, and a half-dozen bags of Kung Fu brand noodles from her car to his truck. Her white Ford Neon had barely any gas left, and she had been looking for supplies a mile away when she had heard the gunshots, arriving to find him lying unconscious and bleeding all over the seat of his truck.

She helped him into a new shirt from the care package Lara had packed for him. He hadn’t even known there were clothes in there until Sandra rifled through it. “Boxers, too,” she said.

“Lara’s very thorough, I guess.”

“What kind of people are they?”

“Good people. They found me on the road and picked me up and put me back together. They didn’t have to, but they did.”

She nodded. “I want to meet them so I can thank them.”

“That’s the plan.”

She settled behind the steering wheel before glancing down at the gas gauge. “I think we need more gas.”

“There’s enough to make it back to Lancing.”

“Let’s hope so.”

She slammed the door shut and turned on the engine.

“You didn’t hear me screaming your name?” he asked.

“You were screaming my name?” She flashed him an amused look.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“I’m not. It was kind of pathetic.”

“Now I’m
really
sorry I missed it.”

Sandra drove them out of the truck stop, turning left and heading back along Pine Street/US 287. “Are you sure they’ll still be in Lancing? What if we get there and they’re gone?”

“The only reason they’d leave early is if something happened that put the group in jeopardy.”

“How will we find them when we get there?”

“They were staying at a courthouse. The same place where Folger was keeping you in the semitrailer.”

“Did you get them? Folger?” she asked.

“I got one of them, and Will got another one.”

“What did they look like?”

“Why?”

“I just need to know…”

She kept driving, both hands on the steering wheel, and wouldn’t look at him.

“It doesn’t matter, Sandra,” he said.

“Of course it matters,” she said quickly.

“Not to me.”

“Bullshit. It matters.” Her voice was cold and matter-of-fact.

“No, you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter.”

“You say that now. But it matters. Maybe not now, but later. It’ll come up and it’ll
matter.
”

She drove in silence for a while, her fingers tightening around the steering wheel. They hadn’t gone more than a minute before tears spilled down her cheeks and she stepped on the brake. He had to grab the door handle to keep from getting thrown into the dashboard.

She put the truck in park and looked over at him. She was crying freely now. “You’re lying to me,” she said through the tears.

He leaned over the seat. It took a lot of effort and a sharp jolt raced through his body, but he did his best to ignore it. He cupped her face in his hands, then kissed her softly on the lips.

She blinked back at him, and she looked as vulnerable as he had ever seen her.

“The day I found you was the best day of my miserable life.” He smiled. “This changes nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Look at me, and tell me I’m lying to you.”

She looked at him. Closely. Reading. Trying to decide if he was lying to her…

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

She nodded, and the tears rolled down in waves and she lunged forward and grabbed him in a tight hug. Blaine grimaced, the pain exploding through his body, but he said nothing and didn’t make a sound, and held her back as tightly as he could.

WILL

It was somewhere
between being awake and being asleep—a netherworld of sorts. That was the only explanation for why he was walking in a park, through a large baseball field with short, recently cut grass.

No one cuts grass anymore
.

Slowly, the sights became familiar, and he pieced together the evidence.

There, a gazebo surrounded by hurricane fencing, with a sign across the entrance gate reading: “Gazebo Reservations Available.” Long piers extending out into a still lake, and men and women in shorts and hats casting fishing lines with night crawlers attached to hooks. Behind him, kids playing baseball on a big, well-manicured diamond as parents cheered them on from the stands. The sound of aluminum bats striking cowhide-covered baseballs.

He was in Deussen Park, back in Houston.

A hot day, and he was wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt. He left the baseball diamond behind and walked across a large parking lot dotted with cars and trucks with empty boat trailers, though he couldn’t spot any boats on the lake at the moment. The water was unsettling in its stillness, except for the occasional ripple caused by a soft wind. Lake Houston never had much shelter from the winds, so this was another oddity his mind couldn’t quite explain.

“You’re over-thinking it,” a soft, familiar voice said.

Female
.
Very familiar.

“Oh, come on, you’ve forgotten about me already, Will?”

She stood in the distance along a two-meter-wide wooden walkway where the park ended and the water began. She wore a plain Sunday dress, but it looked radiant on her. He had forgotten how beautiful she was, how physically different from Lara. Taller, with a fuller chest, curves, and long, toned legs. She was at least thirty meters away, but for some reason he could make out every detail, which really shouldn’t have been possible.

Kate.

She smiled across the parking lot at him. “Come on, Will, you know this isn’t real, don’t you?”

“What is this, then? A dream?”

“In a way. Come closer.”

Suddenly he was standing next to her on the wooden walkway, and when she walked, he walked alongside her. They crossed the park casually, passing elderly men in tan hats perched on overturned pails with fishing poles, but no one seemed to have caught anything.

“This is Deussen Park,” he said.

“Yes,” she nodded. “You like this place. So do I. We have that in common, though I don’t think we ever talked about it, did we?”

“No.”

“I used to come here with my father,” Kate said, “when I was younger. I had some of the best times of my life here. I was free then. But then again, what girls aren’t at that age?”

“I can’t picture you as a little girl, Kate.”

“We were all little once, Will. Then we grow up, and we accept the reality of being an adult. Making decisions. Life-and-death struggles.”

Deussen Park was clean, wide open, and free to use. He remembered making a point to come here at least once a month, if just to toss some bait into the water. Not that he ever went home with a lot of fish. That was never the point, anyway.

There wasn’t much of a wind today, and yet it wasn’t terribly hot.

“Don’t take it so seriously,” Kate said. “It’s just a dream.”

He looked closely at her. She hadn’t changed much since the last time he had seen her, over five months ago. He remembered shooting her, back at Harold Campbell’s underground facility, on the night the ghouls had laid siege to the place.

“No,” she said.

“No?” he repeated.

“I didn’t die that night. Not really.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to.”

“You can read my thoughts…”

She laughed. It was a beautiful laugh, full of life and energy and spirit. It was so unlike her. The Kate he knew was solemn and serious. He wondered if this Kate, the one he was walking with in this very strange dream that seemed at once real and so artificial, was in fact the real Kate, the one he never got to know.

“Yes,” she said. “In a way. I’m sorry you never got to know me before…everything.”

“You couldn’t have been that different.”

“Oh, I was. Very different. Driven. Ambitious. Frankly, the type of girl who never would have given you the time of day if you had asked me out in a bar. I guess you could say I was even a little stuck-up.”

He smiled, and she laughed again.

“But that’s the past,” she said. “We’re both beyond that now, aren’t we? There’s no use in clinging to the past. It’s time to move on. Don’t you want to move on, Will?”

“Do I?”

“Of course you do. And you should. I’m talking about the future, Will. And where we fit into that future.”

“We?”

“We. The ones you call ghouls.”

“You’re one of them now. Lara said she saw you that night in the facility…”

“She was right. I was there.”

“But you’re…still you.”

She gave him a pitying look, like a mother regarding an uncomprehending child. “This is just a dream, Will. Don’t take it too seriously. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Then I don’t have to take you seriously if this is all just a dream.”

“You can ignore me if you want. But I’m real in the sense that this is me. Talking to you right now.”

“I don’t believe in psychic powers. You should know that.”

“Funny, coming from a guy who deduced ghouls had a hive-like mind that allowed them to communicate. Remember?”

Will smirked. “So I was right.”

“You’ve been amazingly prescient about a lot of things. The honest truth is, even he’s impressed with you.”

“He?”

“The one you call the blue-eyed ghoul. The first one you saw, outside the bank in Cleveland.”

“Lara said you had blue eyes, too, when she saw you that night at Harold Campbell’s facility.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just is. I haven’t asked him, and he’s never told me.”

“You don’t care?”

She shrugged. “Eventually, maybe.”

“But you’re like him now.”

“To a lesser extent, yes.”

“You control them. The ghouls.”

“I have control
over
them, yes.”

“So what are you exactly?”

“I don’t know how to put it into words.” She seemed to think about it, then smiled. “Maybe the assistant supervisor. I’m not the top dog, but when the boss is away, I get to play.”

He smiled despite himself.

“It’s the best analogy I could come up with,” she added.

“You don’t sound like a bloodthirsty ghoul right now. You sound …”

“Human?”

“Human.”

She laughed that same lyrical, poetic laugh that didn’t seem entirely real. “Because it’s easier if I come to you this way.”

“How are you doing this? How did you get into my dream?”

“Your mind is tired, Will. You’re exhausted. When was the last time you had a good night’s sleep that lasted more than a few hours? Hard to remember? That’s because it’s been a while. You’re tired, Will. Very, very tired. And you should be, because you’re right. We are hunting you.”

“
You’re
hunting me.”

“Yes. He put me in charge. He thought I would be able to track you better, because of our past relationship.”

“Because we slept together that one time.”

She laughed again. “I like to think it went beyond that.”

“Maybe it did.”

“But it was good, that one night, wasn’t it?”

He ignored the question, and said instead, “So you know where I am right now.”

“Of course.”

“Then why haven’t you attacked?”

“What’s the point? I don’t have enough ghouls with me for a full frontal assault. 500 or 600 ghouls aren’t going to take the basement. Like you always do, you chose too well. Even if we could break through the doors, I would lose too many.”

“You care about them?”

“They’re like my children.”

He looked at her again, trying to see if he could pierce through the artificial veil that was Kate and see into the real Kate, this
new
“Kate” that had taken over the woman he had once known and, for one night, had loved.

But he couldn’t see anything beyond an attractive brunette smiling back at him.

“What do you want from me?” he asked. “What’s the point of all this?”

“I want you to give up, Will.”

“Give up? That’s your big sell? Just give up?”

“Giving up doesn’t mean the end. Giving up means to stop fighting, stop running, and accept. You have to know, in your heart of hearts, that you can’t win this. There are billions of us and there are thousands of you left.
Barely
thousands. You’re not a stupid man, Will. Crunch the numbers. You know full well you’re just delaying the inevitable.”

Will smiled. “Then why are you so desperate to snuff us out if we’re so insignificant to you?”

She sighed, sounding almost exasperated. “Because we have other things to do that don’t involve you. But your continued existence—well, let’s just say it bothers him. He would like to nip it in the bud.”