The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (38 page)

“We’re thinking about it,” Blaine said.

He said it quickly, before Sandra could answer. He needed Maddie on their side, and the more she considered them potential allies, the better. Blaine didn’t think he had a chance in hell of convincing Mason, the cowboy, or Lenny.

Maddie is the key…

“Think fast,” Maddie said. “Mason will kill you. I hope that isn’t something you’re doubting. He will, and he won’t lose sleep over it for a single night.”

“He had a gun to my temple,” Sandra said. “I don’t doubt that at all.”

Maddie nodded and opened her mouth as if to say something else, but stopped. She turned and left instead. Blaine heard a key turning in the lock, then footsteps fading down the hallway.

Sandra looked over at him. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“To not have to keep looking over our shoulders. Not have to keep trying to outrun the day.”

He nodded. “It would be nice, yeah. But it hasn’t come to that yet. Give me until tomorrow.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He could see how tired she looked, how beaten down and exhausted by the last few days. She opened the bag and pulled out a box of animal crackers and two Gatorade bottles, one lemon-lime and the other Hawaiian punch.

She tossed him the crackers. “Your favorite.”

Blaine caught them and sat down next to her. He opened the box and fished out an elephant and took a bite. It wasn’t bad. Sandra opened one of the Gatorade bottles and drank from it. For a moment, they sat quietly and drank warm artificial drinks and snacked on slightly stale animal-shaped cookies. From time to time they glanced up at the fading light coming from the other side of the window.

“Gatorade,” Sandra said. “I used to hate this stuff. Hated it even more when it was warm like this. Now? It’s not so bad.”

Blaine felt bloated after a half-dozen crackers and handed her the box. He didn’t have to look up at the window or glance at his watch to know that night was closer. The room had started to get dark around them, inch by inch, until he couldn’t see half of the employee lounge anymore.

“That thing about the blue-eyed ghoul,” Sandra said. “Do you believe her?”

“Yes. Because I saw one, that night at the house.”

She looked at him, shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought we were going to die. And when we didn’t… I guess I just forgot.”

“Did it…say anything to you?”

He shook his head. “I saw it from the second-floor window. It was in front of the house while the rest of them were attacking. Like it was coordinating the attack, I guess.”

“You think it was a woman? You asked Maddie if it was a woman.”

“It could have been. It looked like a woman. But like Maddie said, it’s hard to tell with them.”

Sandra looked back toward the door. “Blue-eyed ghoul or not, I don’t want to think about what’s going to be happening outside that door tonight.”

“Then don’t.”

“How can I not?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, like she was finally lying down for the first time after centuries of being awake. Blaine wrapped his arm around her body and pulled her tight.

“We have to get out of here,” she whispered softly. “We can’t be a part of this.”

“I have a plan. But we’ll need Maddie’s help.”

“You think she’ll help?”

“God, I hope so, otherwise there’s no plan.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t been able to convince myself it has a chance in hell of actually working yet.”

“Oh. That good, huh?” she said, smiling a bit.

“Yeah.”

Soon, they were swallowed up by darkness along with the rest of the employee lounge.

“Blaine?” she whispered in the darkness.

“Hmm?”

“When I went back to find your body and you weren’t there?”

“Yeah?”

“I wasn’t going to leave Grime.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that was it. I was going to find a place and lie down, and that would have been it.”

“Oh.” He didn’t know how to respond. After a while, he said, “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Me, too,” she whispered.

Blaine tightened his arm around her and heard her sigh in the darkness.

Outside the mall, beyond the window, he thought he heard what sounded like rats scurrying. But of course he knew it wasn’t rats.

It was a much more dangerous infestation…

JOSH

Pros and cons:
What were they?

Pros: He was with Gaby. Not just with Gaby, he was lying on his bedroll with Gaby in his arms.

Cons: None.

Conclusion:
Gaby was sleeping in his arms.

Small rays of sunlight penetrated the semitrailer through one of the breathing holes a few inches to his left, where the floor met the side wall. There was just enough light for Josh to see Will moving around. Lara was still asleep, and Will moved around her. He slipped on his assault vest and began filling up the pouches, then wrapped his gun belt around his waist and holstered his Glock.

“Lara said you and Danny were Army Rangers,” Josh said.

“That’s right.”

“You guys were in Afghanistan.”

“We were.”

“What’s the difference between this war zone and that one?”

Will smiled, as if he found the question amusing, and Josh once again felt like a kid asking his dad questions that, to his old man, were obvious.

“There’s a lot more of them here,” Will said. “Other than that? Not a whole lot. It’s still hard to tell friend from foe when the sun is up, and the roads are still deceptively dangerous.”

“I would have never made it through boot camp. Much less Ranger training.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“You think?”

“You never know what you’re capable of until you don’t have a choice. Everyone thinks they have a certain limit, a threshold, things they are able and willing to do in order to survive. That only lasts until they’re actually confronted with it. When there’s no turning back, when there’s just one path and one path only, you’d be surprised how hard you can fight. Take you for instance.”

“Me?”

“I’m guessing you weren’t a two-sports athlete in school.”

Josh grinned. “Lucky guess.”

“But look at you now. You’re alive. With a pretty blonde sleeping in your arms. Where do you think all those two-sport jocks in your school are right now?”

“Running around outside at night in their birthday suits would be my guess.”

“But not you. Did you think you would survive the end of the world?”

“Not in a million years.”

“And yet you did. Eight months later, and you’re still going strong. That whole thing in Folger’s semitrailer was impressive. You came up with that.”

“It was survival instinct,” Josh said, feeling a bit embarrassed by the praise. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Exactly. You were confronted with a situation that would have resulted in something unacceptable. Maybe they would have killed you, maybe not, but they would have definitely done something to Gaby. Faced with that, you fought and you survived.”

“I didn’t even know it was going to work.”

“Like I said, you never know what you’re fully capable of until you have no choice.”

“Thanks,” he said, feeling himself swelling with pride.

“It wasn’t a compliment,” Will grinned at him. “It was an assessment. Don’t doubt yourself. You’re capable of more than you think you are. You already proved that when you survived, while the vast majority of the world didn’t. They failed—but you didn’t. That girl is depending on you. Don’t let her down.”

“I won’t,” Josh said, and he realized he meant it. Every word of it.

Will glanced down at his watch. “Sunup is in five minutes. I have a mission for you, if you’re up to it.”

“I am,” he said quickly.

“We’re going to be moving out as soon as we can, but it’s going to take about an hour to fill up the gas tanks and get everything moved back to the trucks and cargo trailer. Take Gaby and see what else is out there, including on the other side of the freeway.”

“Just recon?”

Will smiled. “Yeah, just recon. Don’t go inside. Make a mental list of places we can hit for supplies if we have the time, then come back here. Understand?”

“Gotcha.”

“Do
not
go inside, Josh.”

“Don’t go inside,” Josh repeated.

*

Gaby was all
for doing a little reconnaissance. She had usually stayed behind whenever Josh and Matt went out for supplies when it had been just the three of them, but he could tell by the way she quickly answered that she had been waiting for this moment. He was glad because it meant spending more time alone with her.

Josh was anxious to get out there again, but it wasn’t until he started walking through the plaza’s big lot that it occurred to him this was his first supply run without Matt. It felt strange to be walking outside with Gaby, but she looked to be in good spirits. He figured it was because she was free of the claustrophobic constraints of the semitrailer.

For the third time in as many minutes, Josh touched his Glock to make sure it was in his hip holster. The Glock was still loaded with silver bullets, and he had a second magazine loaded with regular ammo in a pouch. Gaby was also wearing a gun belt, but she didn’t look like she was used to it yet.

“What are we looking for?” Gaby asked, when they reached the Exxon gas station.

“Anything we can use.”

“Supplies?”

“More like medicine, weapons, and silver.”

“I can’t believe we survived this long without knowing about silver.”

“Better lucky than good, I guess.”

They peered into the Exxon. It was a combo gas station and Taco Bell. He smelled rotting meat from inside and immediately shut off his smelling faculties when he got the first whiff. Gaby made a face and they quickly jogged across the street to another strip mall, this one full of electronic stores, a GameStop, a Payless shoe store, and a Verizon outlet.

“You need a new phone?” Josh asked.

“God, I used to text so much. I miss texting. Don’t you?”

“Not really. I miss the Internet.”

She smirked. “You miss Internet porn, you mean.”

“Wait, there are other things on the Internet besides porn?”

“I miss shopping,” Gaby said wistfully.

It was amazing the things they used to do before the end of the world. Getting a car, finding a girlfriend, worrying about exams late into the night. All of those things had seemed so important, once upon a time. Now they were like bad jokes that weren’t quite as funny as he had once thought. He wondered if this was what it was like to grow up.

What was that saying his mom liked to use on him whenever he acted like a brat? “
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Something like that.

They walked past a Radio Shack and looked in through the smashed windows at thick dark patches in the back.

“I miss Matt,” Gaby said quietly.

“Me too,” Josh said.

They walked silently for a while, weaving their way through the parking lot. Josh peered in at parked cars, hoping to spot something valuable. They found a lot of old, dried blood on car seats, doors, windows, and floors. Empty cans of soda. Water bottles. A Chrysler yielded an iPod that wouldn’t light up when he tried to turn it on.

After a while, Josh stopped, and Gaby stopped with him.

“What is it?” she asked.

Josh looked around them. “Will said not to wander off too far.”

“But we haven’t found anything yet. I don’t want to go back empty-handed.”

Josh considered their options. If they kept going straight, it would just take them farther away from the others. So what else was there? He glanced over at the street to their left, and the elevated highway behind that.

“We can try the other side of the highway,” he said.

“Race ya!” she shouted and dashed off.

Josh ran after her, but she was much faster, even with the gun on her hip. Gaby had always been a natural athlete, and she had bounded across the parking lot before he had even managed the halfway point. Soon she was on the feeder road and running up the sloping side of the highway. By the time he reached the feeder road, she was already hurdling the guardrail and was waiting for him on the other side.

“Come on, slowpoke!” she shouted down.

Josh grunted. He might have been a survivor while everyone bit the dust, but that hadn’t improved his athletic ability. He chugged his way up the hill, which was a lot harder than it looked, until he finally reached Gaby. She laughed and pulled him over the railing. He slumped down on the other side, next to a big red Ford truck with gaudy stripes along the sides.

“God, you’re out of shape,” Gaby said.

“Hard to believe, but this is the best shape I’ve ever been in,” he said between gasps.

“That is hard to believe.”

“Oh, that hurts,” he said, and slowly pushed himself back up to his feet. Then he grinned at her, shouted, “First person across wins!” and raced off across the highway lanes.