The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (41 page)

She stared back at Wilson. If she was going to die, she would look into the eyes of her killer. At least she could do that much.

Wilson matched her gaze, and his finger tightened around the trigger—

“Stop!” a voice shouted. “I said stop, goddammit!”

Wilson lowered his rifle reluctantly and looked back. “Orders were to shoot on sight,” he said, his voice muffled by the gas mask.

“They weren’t
my
orders,” the voice said. It sounded equally distorted.

“I didn’t know you were in charge now.”

“You don’t know a lot of things. That’s the point.”

The men gathered around her and Nate began to part, and a new figure in a hazmat suit and gas mask appeared. The others reacted strangely to his arrival—as if they didn’t care for him, but felt the need to obey him anyway.

The newcomer was the only one without a name tag over his hazmat suit, which made her think he didn’t really belong here. Maybe he was just passing through, or maybe he was part of another group, like Kellerson and Harris and the men who had attacked Mercy Hospital. She didn’t remember a single one of them wearing labels, either.

He looked down at her and Nate, and by the way his eyebrows raised, he seemed to be focusing on the way she held Nate’s limp body in her lap.

“Who is he?” the man asked. “Why’s he so important to you?”

That voice!

Even muffled by the gas mask’s breathing apparatus, there was something familiar about the voice now that the man was closer. She couldn’t quite place it, though. It was a maddening feeling, especially because she thought the voice belonged to someone who was, at one point, very important in her life.

But that couldn’t be, could it? That man was…

“They killed Ray,” Wilson said. “And David, too.”

The newcomer ignored Wilson, and his eyes remained fixed on hers. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

That voice! I know that voice!

When she didn’t answer him, the man pulled off his gas mask.

Gaby stared into brown eyes she hadn’t seen in months, belonging to a man she thought she would never see again.

But it was impossible.

The man
(the boy)
those soft, gentle brown eyes belonged to was dead. He had drowned in a lake. She knew this because Will had told her so himself. He had seen it happen. Blaine and Maddie had seen it happen, too.

That was over three months ago.

You’re supposed to be dead!

“Answer me, Gaby,” Josh said. “Who is this guy? Why is he so important to you?”

WILL

Getting into the
camp was easy once he put on the hazmat suit and gas mask. They belonged to a man named Givens, according to the label taped over the suit, which was a good fit if a bit loose around the midsection where Givens had stretched it out. Clasping on the gun belt fixed that.

The camp was much more encompassing when viewed at ground level. He was surprised by the breadth of it, along with the human congestion, and had to actually stop and take it all in. It was, in many ways, a self-contained city built from the ground up, even though there was a temporary vibe to it.

“How many people do you think are down there?”
Gaby had asked.

“A thousand?”
Nate had answered.

He was close. If there weren’t a thousand people down here, mingling around the campfires and the hundreds of tents of every shape, size, and color, it was pretty damn close.

Now that he was seeing it from up close, the hurricane fencing around the camp looked haphazardly installed. He got the impression it was a minor inconvenience, a fait accompli with the people it was supposed to be holding in. Their acceptance of the situation was what kept them here, not a fence that looked as if it could be toppled by a five-year-old leaning against it. Certainly, the thirty or so collaborators he had spotted around the place weren’t enough to keep this many people in line.

Will entered the camp through one of the gates interspersed every fifty meters or so. The gates had latches and coiled steel cables with padlocks, though none were being put to use. It was just another sign that this was less an internment camp as he had surmised from Sandwhite Point, and more of a voluntary way station of sorts.

As he walked through, the people didn’t seem surprised or scared of him. Some nodded and moved on, and others—mostly children—looked on with what Will thought was admiration. That was disturbing, but he had to remember that the hazmat suits were essentially uniforms, and children, regardless of the situation, were naturally inclined to be wowed by a spiffy uniform—even if it happened to be something as aesthetically unpleasing to the eye as a Level B hazmat suit. Of course, in the eyes of a child, a chemical suit might have looked pretty impressive.

Directly ahead of him and impossible to miss was the blue tent. It reached so much higher into the air than the others that it almost looked like a mountain. Will walked toward it, maneuvering around the tents, campfires, and people in his path. He walked as if he belonged, unhurried, meeting every eye that bothered to catch his.

Then he saw something he didn’t think he would ever see again:
a pregnant woman
sitting under a small pup tent. She was eating beans out of a can, while a young boy in an LSU Tigers T-shirt chewed on a stick of beef jerky next to her. They sat on the grass, so immersed in their surroundings that they were oblivious to him when Will stopped and stared. The woman was in her late twenties and looked at least a few months along. There were futons lying out on the grass in the tent behind them.

Will moved on just as the woman felt his stare and glanced up.

He hadn’t gone another few steps when he saw
another pregnant woman.

Then another one, and another…

What the hell is going on here?

They were everywhere. Two pregnant women came out of a beige canvas tent talking and laughing about something. They saw him and nodded, continuing on their way. One of the women looked further along in her pregnancy, while the other had a barely-there bump.

He walked on, doing his best not to stray, not to stop and stare, but feeling dazed by what he was seeing. There was something wrong here. Something
not right.
One pregnant woman would have been extraordinary, but two, or three, or a
dozen?

What the hell is going on here?

He must have been walking in a fog, trying to process the incongruous appearances of the pregnant women around him, because suddenly he had arrived at the blue tent and didn’t recall how he had actually gotten there.

The tent was octagonal, the flat sides extending eight meters high all around and held in place by thick beams of extruded aluminum alloy. He eyeballed the structure’s span at sixty meters, held together by PVC-coated polyester textiles. It looked very much like a mini version of a sports dome, with multiple, unguarded tunnel entrances/exits jutting out along the sides.

He watched people moving in and out of those tunnels for a moment, before slipping in among one of the lines going in. Like with the rest of the camp, the sight of men in hazmat suits around the blue tent was apparently so common that no one gave him more than a couple of glances, if they even bothered at all.

Alarm bells went off when he spotted the shoulder of a man in a hazmat suit standing guard at the end of the tunnel.

Will kept walking, moving steadily but in no hurry. He casually lowered one hand toward his holstered Glock, then moved forward until he was walking behind a pregnant woman who was waddling more than she was actually walking. By the size of her bump, he guessed she was even further along in her pregnancy than the ones he had seen outside. She was leaning on a young woman’s arm as they moved through the length of the tunnel, which extended for about five meters. The women were talking about clothes.

The three of them finally reached the end and stepped out into the main housing area. As he expected, the hazmat suit standing guard was just for show; the man was reading a magazine, paying zero attention to anyone coming or going. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his gas mask hung loosely around his neck.

Will let the women continue on, then he turned left and continued walking for a bit. He finally stopped and took a moment to orient himself with the scope of the blue tent’s interior.

There was really just one vast, open room. The height of the tent, with its upwardly extended middle, gave the place the feel of being cavernous. Hundreds of civilians took up space among the grass floor, which was divided into two sections—a smaller area filled with cots, the type he had slept on in the Army, with the bigger area dotted with mats. The cots looked as if they were reserved almost exclusively for the women.

More pregnant women.

If he thought there were a lot of them outside, there were even more of them in here. There were, as far as he could tell, about one hundred cots, though only half of them were filled at the moment. The others, he assumed, were outside the camp walking around.

The mats were occupied by a more varied group of people: girls, women, men, and boys. There didn’t seem to be any real organization to where they sat, though they all looked as if they were resting. There had to be over 300 mats spread out around the tent, almost all of them occupied with a warm body either lying down or sitting and chatting casually with the person next to them.

Will started moving through the tent, ignoring the voices buzzing and overlapping all around him. Hundreds of people talking at once, without a care in the world.

As with the campers outside, the ones in here barely gave him a second look. Their acceptance of his presence—or more specifically, the hazmat suit he wore—bothered him tremendously.

There were others moving through the tent—men and women in blue, green, and white hospital scrubs. He counted two, maybe three dozen in all. They were moving efficiently through the throng of bodies, dispensing everything from water to pills to medical advice. The bits and pieces of conversation he could overhear were overwhelmingly about the pregnancies.

Jesus Christ. This is a maternity ward.

“You,” a female voice said behind him.

Will looked back at a woman in her early thirties, wearing a white doctor’s coat. She had long blonde hair in a ponytail and was eyeing him with light green eyes. She had one of those envelope labels over her right breast pocket, with the name “Zoe” written on it. A stethoscope was draped around her neck, and she was holding a young pregnant woman’s arm, apparently taking readings while talking to him.

“What are you doing, Givens?” the woman asked.

“Givens?”

Right. Givens. The dead guy.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You’re just walking around. Is that in your job description? Walking around?”

Will didn’t quite know how to answer that, and felt a little bit like a kid who just got caught in the hallways trying to skip school.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what? You need something?”

“Yes, I do. Where are my cots? I have more patients than I have cots.”

Cots. Right.

“Who did you talk to about that?” he asked.

“How the hell should I know. Half of you guys don’t even wear name tags. I can’t keep track of how many of you breeze through this camp in a given day.”

Kellerson and how many others?

“How many more cots do you need?” he asked.

“Eleven—” She stopped, then corrected herself. “Twelve, since this morning. You wanted preggos, you got preggos.”

Preggos?

“Right. I’ll see what’s keeping the cots,” he said.

“You do that.”

He turned and started to walk away.

“Givens,” Zoe called after him.

He looked back. “Yeah?”

She gave him a pursed smile. “I didn’t mean to put it all on you. We’re both just trying to do our parts here, right?”

“Right,” Will said, and gave her a smile back behind the gas mask, before realizing she probably couldn’t see it since his mouth was entirely hidden. He said instead, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“You in a hurry?”

“No, why?”

“I got that list your boss wanted.”

“Okay…”

Zoe turned to the young pregnant woman whose hand she had been holding, and gave her a friendly, reassuring smile. “You’re coming along just fine, Anne. Just keep doing what we discussed, okay? No deviating.”

Anne, the young woman, nodded gratefully. “Thanks, doc.”

“Lay down and rest.”

Anne did as she was instructed. Will thought she couldn’t have been older than seventeen.

Zoe stood up and began walking off.

Will briefly considered continuing on and ignoring her, but thought better of it and followed her instead.

“Where’s your boss?” Zoe asked. “I haven’t seen him all day, and he promised to come talk to me before we start the next transport.”

“What are we transporting?”

She stopped and looked back at him, eyes narrowing a bit. “What is this, some kind of game to you, Givens?”

She doesn’t know who Givens is. Use that.

“I’m new here,” Will said. “I’m just trying to get caught up.”

She chewed on his excuse for a moment, then continued leading him through the blue tent. “The next transport scheduled to leave for the town. This new group is further along than the last one, so you guys need to bend over backward to make them more comfortable.”

She led him to a small grouping of tents near the back. There were a dozen lined up. She slipped inside one of them and he followed. Inside was a small cot next to a portable fold-out desk and a stack of worn clothes.

Zoe walked over to her fold-out table, picked up a piece of paper, and handed it to him. “Here’s the list your boss wanted.”

“What’s it for?” he asked, taking the list.

“The names of everyone that’ll be on the next transport, organized by need.”