The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (29 page)

A large swath of brownish color
(dried blood)
covered one side of the wall, parts of it hidden in dark shadows. Josh heard clicking sounds and saw lights appearing from underneath the barrels of Will’s and Danny’s shotguns.

Gotta get me one of those, too.

Danny moved toward the reception desk, then peeked over it, his shotgun always moving in front of him. He pulled his head back and headed toward the hallway to their left. Josh followed, Will bringing up the rear. Sunlight illuminated most of the hallway, and what they couldn’t see at first, Will’s and Danny’s flashlights illuminated.

It was a small clinic, with four doors along the hallway, including a restroom at the very back. They passed a door marked “Office” to their right, then came up to one marked “Exam Room.”

Danny put his hand on the door of the exam room and leaned against the wood to listen. After a while, he pulled his head back. “Did I tell you I used to have a dog?”

“No,” Will said.

Danny threw the door open and Will slipped inside, disappearing for a brief moment before there was a loud boom that made Josh flinch. Then he heard what sounded like something landing on a table. He peered into the room and saw a ghoul lying half-on and half-off the end of an exam table, half of its body sheared by buckshot. It looked dead, thick black blood dripping onto the polished tile floor under it.

Silver buckshot
.
It actually works.

Suck on that, mofos!

Danny went into the exam room and unclipped the LED lamp from his belt. He turned it on to full power and the room instantly swelled with light. Danny set the lamp on a counter as they began rummaging through drawers and shelves.

“What are we looking for?” Josh asked.

“Syringes, gauze, gloves, small vials of medicine,” Will said. “Anything that looks useful goes into the bag. Lara will pick through it later.”

Josh carefully stepped around the dripping ghoul blood and opened the closest drawer. He looked in at boxes of gloves and gauze tape stacked in neat rolls. He tossed them into the bag. Will and Danny put everything they found on the counters, and Josh scooped them up, careful with unopened boxes containing small vials. They quickly filled the bag, and Josh had to open the second gym bag. He began filling that one up, too.

“His name was Rocky,” Danny was saying. “Cutest dog you’ll ever see. He had this long tail he loved to wag. And he wagged and wagged and wagged. I thought about calling him Waggler, but you know, that would have been weird.”

“Cause Rocky isn’t weird for a dog,” Will said.

“It’s not weirder than Waggler. I mean, can you imagine? ‘Come here, Waggler! Come here, Waggler!’ That’s just weird, man.”

“So what happened to Waggler?”

“You mean Rocky.”

“Right, Rocky.”

“Well, everything was just fine and dandy, until one day my uncle accidentally ran him over. Or at least, he said it was an accident. Personally I thought the old-timer had it in for Rocky.”

“Ouch.”

“That’s what it said.”

Josh chuckled.

“I like this kid,” Danny said.

“Don’t encourage him,” Will said.

*

The third and
last door in the hallway was a janitor’s closet that doubled as a garbage room of sorts, with old, used items in cinched garbage bags along a metal shelf. They opened one of the bags and found used rags. Another yielded used sponges.

With two gym bags full of syringes, pill bottles, and other medical supplies, they headed back to the front lobby. Josh carried one bag while Will carried the other. They were in the parking lot and under the bright, hot sun again, and Josh was feeling good. He had done his part and had even learned that silver actually worked on the ghouls, just as promised. The idea that he could finally kill these things made him strangely giddy.

Suddenly both Will and Danny froze in front of him, and as Josh tried to figure out why, he heard the distant echoes of gunfire in the air. It didn’t take long to realize where it was coming from.

The church.

“It’s Lara,” Will said. He was holding one hand over his right ear—over the earbud. “Someone’s attacking the church.”

They ran to the truck. Josh hadn’t even gotten all the way inside when Danny turned on the engine and put the car in reverse and stepped on the gas. Josh careened across his seat, the gym bag falling to the floor. He picked himself back up as the truck sped out of the parking lot and onto the road, swerving around the same overturned Volkswagen.

“We’re coming,” Will said calmly into his throat mic.

Jesus, he’s calm.

“ETA ten minutes,” Will said.

“Five minutes,” Danny said, gunning the gas. Josh heard the truck roar loudly under them.

“Five minutes,” Will repeated into the radio. “Hold on, we’re coming.”

The truck shot forward and Josh toppled in his seat a second time.

Danny maneuvered around cars in the road, swiping other vehicles that he couldn’t get around fast enough. Soon he was driving almost entirely on the shoulder, the buildings around them flashing by in a blur.

Will had put down his shotgun and was unslinging his rifle. His voice, still unfathomably calm: “Josh, when we get to the church, you need to stay in the truck.”

“Gaby’s in there,” Josh said.

“Have you ever shot someone before?”

I shot my friend Matt
, he thought, but said instead, “No.”

“Stay in the truck,” Will said, and the hard, unmistakable,
“Don’t argue with me”
tone in his voice reminded Josh so much of his father.

Josh nodded. He wondered if he was secretly relieved and just didn’t have the courage to admit it. After all, they were running
toward
gunfire. It wasn’t something he had ever pictured himself doing. Ever.

More gunshots. Louder somehow, more persistent.

“Danny, faster,” Will said.

Danny didn’t answer, but he somehow coerced the truck into going even faster. Josh didn’t think that was possible, but he was wrong. The truck started to shake violently as they tore down the street.

LARA

Her boyfriend, who
could very well end up being the love of her life, had told her about his dream last night. More importantly, he had told her about
who
was in that dream with him.

“It felt real,” Will said. “But unreal at the same time. It’s difficult to explain. Like being caught between sleeping and waking. It’s hard to tell what it is while you’re in it. It’s still hard to tell now.”

“But Kate was there?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“And she specifically mentioned Blaine.”

“Yes.”

“What else did she say?”

“That was it.”

“Is he alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Dreams
.

It wasn’t bad enough the ghouls were hunting them—now they were invading their dreams, too. Lara might have even felt indifferent about it if it had been someone else who had showed up in Will’s dream.

But no, it had to be Kate.

Kate, who Lara had seen that night when the ghouls laid siege to Harold Campbell’s facility. Not the Kate she knew, however briefly, but the ghoul version of Kate. The new Kate.

Of course it had to be the ex-girlfriend.

She believed Will when he said he didn’t think it was a dream. Not entirely a dream, anyway. Even the third-year medical student in her had come to believe a lot of things lately. Things she would have scoffed at just eight months earlier. Lara was always a practical person, a direct result of her upbringing. She went where the evidence took her, not where her imagination led. But she had seen too many things to start ignoring the possibility of something as metaphysical as psychic dreams now.

Of course, just thinking those words (
psychic dreams
) made it sound absurd.

After Will and Danny came back from their early scouting run, they left again with Josh in tow. That left Lara with Carly, Gaby, and the girls. The time away from the men always gave her other things to do, like keep up with hygiene. She and Carly had amassed an impressive crate with nothing but feminine products over the months, something Gaby gleefully attacked, having gone without most of them for so long.

Gaby was brushing her teeth with a battery-powered electric toothbrush in the basement bathroom when Lara found her. They had cleaned as much of the bathroom as they could—or as much as humanly possible. Even if they left the church tomorrow, at least they could enjoy the bathroom now. Lara and Carly had learned to carve out as much of the old world as they could, even if it was just for a few days—or in some cases, a few hours. You had to make do with the simple pleasures, or else the long days and nights wouldn’t be worth it.

“Are you and Josh having sex?” Lara asked Gaby.

The teenager almost choked on the toothbrush, eliciting a smile from Lara.

Gaby quickly washed and rinsed out the toothpaste into the sink with bottled water. Lara thought her cheeks were flushed red. “God, no.”

“Oh, I thought… Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.” Something else occurred to her, and she asked, hesitantly, “You’re not…?”

Gaby giggled. “No, I’m not that, either.”

“Josh?”

“I don’t know. You think?”

“Well, if you’re not having sex with him, then I’m guessing probably.”

Gaby leaned against the sink and seemed to think about it. “We never talked about it. It never occurred to me to even think of him in that way. I always just thought of him as more of a little brother.”

“He’s not that little, Gaby.”

“I know.” She smiled. “I know he likes me. That’s obvious. I just don’t know how I feel about him, you know, in that way.”

“You wanna know what he thinks?”

She laughed. “He’s a guy, Lara. I know what he thinks.”

Lara smiled, too. She could imagine how popular Gaby had been back in high school. The tall and athletic frame, the better-than-average breasts, and the long blonde hair. She must have driven the boys crazy and made the girls nuts.

“Just in case,” Lara said. She took out a small white-and-blue box from her back pocket and handed it to Gaby.

“The patch?” Gaby said, taking the box.

“Just in case. It’s easier to use than the Pill, and stopping everything to pull out a condom might not be very romantic.”

The Ortho Evra Patch, otherwise known to women everywhere as “the patch,” was a contraceptive device placed on the body that released estrogen and progestin. It did one thing and did it well—it prevented unwanted pregnancies. Lara and Carly had been using it for a while now, because the patch was more efficient than the Pill, which required daily dosage and didn’t last quite as long. One patch was good for an entire week, and you didn’t need it for the fourth week during your period. They usually found them by the packs in drug stores, probably because, Lara guessed, contraceptives weren’t in high demand at the end of the world.

“Were you sexually active before?” she asked the teenager.

“A few guys,” Gaby said. “I wasn’t a slut or anything.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. God, I hope you didn’t think I meant it that way.”

“It’s cool,” Gaby said. She opened the box and pulled out the two-inch, peach-pink squares. “My mom got me the Pill when I was sixteen.”

“So, you haven’t had sex since…?”

“Just once. With Matt, and it was only the one time when I was on my period.”

Lara knew about Matt, a young man who had traveled with Gaby and Josh after The Purge. He was gone—turned, according to Josh, when one of the ghouls bit him.

“That was smart,” Lara said. “Waiting for your period.”

“I’m not as airheaded as people think.”

“You never struck me as being an airhead, Gaby.”

“No?”

“You’ve survived eight months in…
this
. I think you’re anything but an airhead.”

“Thanks.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easier to let people think that about me. When people think you’re not very bright, they don’t expect a lot from you.” She grinned. “And I can get away with more.”

“Smart girl.”

“Shhh,” Gaby said, putting a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“Scout’s honor.”

Gaby tucked the box into her back pocket. “You think I should? With Josh?”

“I don’t know the two of you well enough to say either way. What do you think? Do you like him?”

“I do. I just never thought of him in that way. How did it work out for you and Will?”

“It took a while.”

“How long?”

“About three months. Things were a little hazy back then.”

“Josh and I have been hiding together for eight months. He’s a really good guy.” She smiled, and Lara could tell she genuinely liked Josh. “And he hasn’t tried anything. Ever. Which is really cool of him.”

“He does look like a good guy.”

“He is.”

“Besides, it’s slim pickings out there.”

“Yeah, getting slimmer every day.” Gaby made a face. “Then again, it’s easy for you and Carly to say. Your men are hot.”

Lara laughed. “They are, aren’t they?”

“What about Will?” Gaby said, grinning mischievously. “Wanna share him?”