The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (11 page)

The newcomers consisted of four women, one elderly woman, and three children—two girls in their early teens and a boy. They stared at the island and its white beaches with a mixture of awe and barely-contained joy. The women looked on the verge of tears.

Please God, let this be the right decision.

One of the women was striking and tall, with auburn hair that looked red under the sun. She helped the older woman out of the boat. “Easy, Mae, don’t rush it.”

Mae looked to be in her sixties, brushing frizzled gray hair out of her face as she reached up and took the attractive woman’s hand to be pulled up. Danny and another woman, a short blonde in her twenties wearing a slightly dirty sweater and cargo pants, also lent a hand. Lara was afraid the older woman might break under the three people pulling at her slim figure all at once, but she somehow got onto the pier in one piece.

“Just luggage?” Lara asked.

“The rest are back with the men,” the tall woman said. She smiled and held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie.” She pointed at the others. “This is Mae. That’s Gwen and Jo, and the kids are Lucy, Kylie, and Logan. Thank you for letting us come here. We’ve been…looking for it for a long time.”

Lara managed a smile back. “You guys must be hungry.”

“Starving,” a young woman with ash blonde hair, Gwen, said. She was short and barely went up to Bonnie’s chest, but she made up for that with breasts that were twice the size of Bonnie’s.

“Come on, we have some food at the hotel,” Lara said.

“You have a
hotel
?” the younger brunette, Jo, said. Lara guessed Jo and Bonnie were related. They had similar prominent cheekbones and hazel eyes. Jo looked barely out of her teens but was already taller than Lara.

The women and the boy exchanged excited looks at the mention of “hotel.”

She had to smile at that. “When was the last time you guys had cold water? Or ice in your soft drinks?”

“I…” Bonnie began to say, but couldn’t get it out.

Jo laughed. “I think what Bonnie’s trying to say is, it’s been so long, we can’t remember.”

*

Lara and Danny
watched the women and the boy feast on plates of fried, boiled, and baked fish in the big dining room next to the lobby. The unfinished room was massive, with a large marble table that seated twenty. The new arrivals didn’t seemed to notice the lack of proper flooring or walls—or ceiling, for that matter—when the food was served.

Sarah and Carly brought out the dishes and the newcomers devoured everything put in front of them, probably a combination of real hunger and having to eat out of cans and bags for the last eleven months.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

Danny tapped her on the shoulder and nodded toward the door. She followed him back into the lobby, then over to the front doors.

“So how’d I do, boss?” Danny asked.

“You did good, kid,” she said, playing along. “I have a cookie here somewhere.”

“Yum.”

She put on her serious face. “What about the men?”

Danny looked back at the open dining room door, at the women inside. “It’s still early. I’ll let them stew in the sun for another couple of hours.”

“That seems kind of mean.”

“I want to see how they react.”

“Meaning?”

“When I go back, I want to see their reaction. Are they agitated? Annoyed? Ready to shoot me between the eyes?”

“Sounds kind of dangerous.”

“Will and I would never have let some guys we didn’t know from Adam take you and Carly to an island while they left us behind. The fact that these guys did means they’re willing to bend over backward to get here. You have to wonder why. And like I said, there are two guys back there that I don’t really trust.”

“You’ve said that before. What about them bothers you so much?”

“They have squirrelly eyes.”

She smiled. “Squirrelly eyes, Danny?”

“Will and I had a CO back in the Stan. Guy had squirrelly eyes. One day, we were on assignment in the mountains and we walk right into an ambush. They knew we were coming, don’t ask me how. Anyway, long story short, first thing our CO does is he bails. Just like that. Drops his rifle and takes off for cover, while his men are in the middle of the road with bullets flying everywhere.” Danny smirked. “Moral of this lesson? You can’t trust guys with squirrelly eyes.”

“Okay, so guys with squirrelly eyes are bad.”

“I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m saying they’re untrustworthy.”

“Untrustworthy, then. But what if you’re wrong?”

What if I’m wrong for even letting any of them on the island?

I should have called Will…

Danny looked back at the women. “That’s been known to happen once or twice, sure. After all, I’m making assumptions based on a couple of minutes with them. But I bet those women know them more than we do. You can learn a lot about someone after spending months on the road with them.”

“You think we should ask them?”

“Not ‘we,’ you.”

“Why me?”

“You guys share similar sensibilities. By which I mean, you both have boobies.”

“Nice of you to notice.”

“I got eyes.”

“Even if I did ask, how could I trust their answers? What if those two can’t be trusted, but they feel a sense of loyalty to lie about them anyway? Like you said, they’ve been on the road together for months now. That kind of experience builds bonds, Danny.”

“Call it a hunch, but when I saw them together, the women—especially the big redhead—seemed overly protective of the others.”

“From you?”

Danny shook his head. “No. From the other two. The ones with squirrelly eyes. I got the sense she was happy to leave them behind back there at the marina. You gotta wonder why, after all this time on the road together.”

Lara looked back inside the dining room at Bonnie. “You think we can trust her?”

“She’s one of your species,” Danny said. “You tell me.”

“How would I even approach the topic?”

“Let her know she’s safe now, that whatever happens, she and the others aren’t going anywhere. That might get her to open up.”

She smiled back at him. “For a guy who doesn’t know anything about women, you sure know a lot.”

“It’s my secret weapon,” Danny grinned. “How do you think I convinced Carly to do all the creative—”

“Enough,” she said, pressing her palm against his mouth. “She’s my little sister. I don’t need to hear all the vile things you’ve been doing to her in bed.”

*

Lara expected the
two men Danny described as “squirrelly” to look, well, squirrelly. But apparently her definition of “squirrelly” wasn’t quite the same as his, because the two men looked like cowboys, complete with jeans and Levi’s shirts and empty gun belts, as if they had just returned from the range…in the mid-1800s.

One of the men introduced himself as Brody. He was in his early thirties, with one of those ridiculous jawlines she used to think only existed in movies starring action heroes from the ’80s. He was well over six feet tall, and the only thing missing on him was a big Stetson hat. Instead, he wore a bandana around his neck to help soak up the sweat.

“Thank you for letting us on this island,” Brody said, his thick
(exaggerated?)
Texas drawl coming through. He shook her proffered hand lightly, as if he were afraid he might break her. “You don’t know what this means to us. It’s dangerous out there.”

Don’t get ahead of yourself, buddy.

Brody’s friend was named West. Like Brody, West looked as if he had just stepped out of an old-fashioned Western about righteous Texas cowboys who worked hard and played harder. When he leaned over to shake her hand, he towered over her like a giant. His hand felt rough, and the bright sun glinted off a gold watch around his wrist.

“I second what Brody said,” West said. “You won’t regret your decision.”

“We’ll see how it goes,” Lara said. “Nice watch.”

“Thanks,” he smiled. “My dad gave it to me.”

“Miss,” a voice said.

Lara looked between the two cowboys at a third man. Compared to Brody and West, he was tiny, but he was actually about Will’s height. He was wearing a sweat-stained white dress shirt and black slacks, as if he had just come from work in an office. She found that oddly amusing.

He leaned between Brody and West to shake her hand. “I’m Roy. Thank you for letting us on the island. I know it’s not easy trusting complete strangers these days. This is Derek—” He pointed at a teenager standing awkwardly behind them, in jeans and a hoodie. It wasn’t nearly cool enough for a hoodie, so she found that a bit strange.

“Hey,” Derek said, lifting a half-wave.

“Hi, Derek,” Lara said.

She hadn’t failed to notice that Danny had strategically placed himself on the other side of the pier, behind the newcomers. He was holding a thick leather bag stuffed with weapons.

“Are you guys hungry?” Lara asked the men.

“Starving,” Brody said.

“Whatever you can spare,” West added.

She gave them her best hostess smile. “Follow me to the hotel. The women are already getting settled in.”

“Wait, you have a
hotel
?” Roy said. “I was just hoping for a soft patch of ground to sleep on where I don’t have to worry about bloodsuckers.”

“We have a hotel,” Danny said, “but only basic cable, so it’s sort of like sleeping on dirt if you really think about it.”

Roy glanced back at Danny, not sure how to take that.

“He’s kidding,” Maddie said, following them from the back. “He does that a lot. He’s got an unlimited supply of jokes. Very, very bad jokes.”

“You know you love it,” Danny said.

“When do we get our guns back?” Brody asked Lara.

“Why? Do you need them back?” she asked.

He smiled widely. “We’ve depended on them for so long, we feel naked walking around with an empty holster. I’m sure you guys know what that’s like.”

“Like Roy said, trust is hard to come by these days. This is our house, so if you want to stay, you’ll have to play by our rules. And right now, our rule is no guns until we decide we can trust you to have them back.”

“That sounds fine with me,” West said. “You, Brody?”

Brody shrugged. “Makes sense.”

“So we’re good, then,” he said, smiling at her.

“It’s not like we need them, right?” Roy said, sounding overly anxious. “The creatures, they can’t cross the water. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Lara nodded.

“Then we don’t need our weapons,” Roy said, and she thought that last statement was directed more at Brody and West than her.

Roy moved ahead of the others until he was walking beside her. He was carrying a backpack, as were the other three. She assumed Danny had checked their bags before letting them on the pontoon.

“Thanks again for letting us on the island,” Roy said as they walked down the pier. “You don’t know what this means.”

“Like I said, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how it goes.”

“Absolutely, I understand.”

“Danny says you guys came all the way from Oklahoma.”

“Most of us, except for Brody and West. We started out from Tulsa.”

“I’ve never been up that far.”

“It’s a city of about 400,000 people, about two hours from Oklahoma City, give or take. Home of the Tulsa Hurricane.”

“You get a lot of hurricanes there?”

He grinned. “No, the Golden Hurricane is the mascot of the University of Tulsa. I’m an alumnus.”

“Oh. What did you major in?”

“Computer science. Basically, the most useless degree you can think of these days, and I have it.”

“So you know how to fix computers?” Danny asked from behind them.

“Sure, I was an IT manager in my old job,” Roy said, sensing the sudden interest. “Why? You guys have a working computer on the island you need fixing?”

“Not on the island, no,” Lara said. “Though we do have a couple of laptops.”

“Working laptops?”

“Well, we have power…”

“But no Internet, sorry, kid,” Danny said. “You’ll have to get your porn elsewhere.”

Lara exchanged a brief look with Danny and smiled. She was pretty sure they were thinking the exact same thing at that moment: Harold Campbell’s facility back in Starch, Texas, was still waiting for them to reclaim it. They had left so much behind, from the supplies to those ultraviolet lamps inside the Green Room that had saved their lives. If they only had the time and the right personnel to fix what was broken, the facility would make for an invaluable backup plan. Jen’s helicopter was the key, though. Without it, braving the highways again was simply too risky.