The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (42 page)

He tried to smile reassuringly back at her.

God, I hope this works…

*

It didn’t take
much to convince Blaine that Mason didn’t really trust them. For one, the man wouldn’t give them their guns back. Or let them carry any kind of weapons at all. The only thing he issued them, other than their ugly gray hazmat suits and gas masks, were radios.

“What about our guns?” Blaine asked.

“You won’t need them,” Mason said. “You see anything, you hop on the radio and we come running.”

“You get guns when you prove you deserve them,” Gerry added.

Mason left them with the cowboy, who sat by himself at a table across the food court from them. Gerry ate greedily from a can of SPAM. Blaine wondered how long it would take before the cowboy accidentally stuffed too much of the canned meat into his mouth and choked on it.

With my luck, never sounds about right.

“When would that be?” Blaine asked instead.

“
When you deserve them
,” Gerry said. “Which part of that don’t you understand? You want I should speak slower so you can
habla
?”

Blaine grinned back at him. He wasn’t sure which part of Gerry he disliked more—his face or his country twang.

“What exactly will we be doing?” Sandra asked Maddie, who was sitting at another table nearby.

Sandra sat next to Blaine, both of them in their hazmat suits, the gas masks on the round metal table in front of them. The seat was uncomfortable and dug into Blaine’s ass even through the suit. He picked at the can of tuna with a flimsy plastic spork while Sandra ate a can of chicken. There was plenty of canned food to go around, Maddie told them, showing them boxes and boxes of the stuff in a storage room next to the Sortys employee lounge.

“Guard duty, mostly,” Maddie said.

“Without weapons?” Blaine asked.

“Guard watch,” Maddie corrected herself. “You don’t need weapons for that.”

The food court was next to the non-working escalator they had previously taken up to the second floor, and Blaine could see the guy Maddie had been standing guard with yesterday still up there. His name was Bobby, and he had yet to take the gas mask off, so Blaine still didn’t know what he looked like underneath it.

“It’s not that bad,” Maddie said. For a second, Blaine thought she was trying to convince herself more than them. “After a while, you get used to it. It’s boring work. When it’s your turn, you stand on the second floor and watch the sleepers. That’s what we call them.”

“Food” is more like it
.

“What happens if one of them wakes up?” Sandra asked.

“They don’t,” Maddie said.

“But what happens if they do?”

“They don’t,” Maddie repeated. “At least, none of them have woken up before in all the time I’ve been here.”

“You don’t know what the ghouls did to them?” Blaine asked.

“Not a clue,” she said. Then, “‘Ghouls’?”

“That’s what they look like to me,” he lied. “Ghouls.”

Maddie smiled a bit. “Yeah, you’re kind of right. They are ghoulish looking, aren’t they?”

Everything about this is ghoulish.

“What now?” Blaine asked.

“I’ll show you the rest of the mall first,” Maddie said.

“Bullshit,” Gerry said, his voice coming out of nowhere. For a moment Blaine had forgotten he was even there. “Why the fuck are you showing them where everything is?”

Maddie flashed him an annoyed glance. “They already joined us, dickhead. What’s the point of hiding things from them now?”

“Just because they say they’re ‘with us’ doesn’t mean they’re actually
with us
, you idiot.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Maddie spat back.

Gerry shot up from his seat, so fast he almost knocked the can of SPAM from his hands. Blaine instinctively reached for his hip, for the gun that wasn’t there. Not that Maddie needed his help. She sprang up from the table and glared back at Gerry.

Blaine was wondering how badly this was going to go when all of their radios squawked at the same time, and he heard a male voice that was new to him: “They’re moving.”

“Where?” Mason’s voice responded through the radio.

“Leaving, I think,” the man said.

“Who’s that?” Sandra asked.

“Dirk,” Maddie said. “He’s the one Mason sent to watch over the people who came through here yesterday, before you guys showed up.”

Will and the others.

“He’s watching them now?” Blaine asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible. He could see Gerry, still standing and wound up, watching him closely from across the food court.

“He’s been watching them since yesterday,” Maddie said.

“Yeah, they’re definitely moving,” the man named Dirk said through the radio. “If you want to do something, this is going to be it. We’re going to lose our chance in a few hours.”

“No,” Mason said. “Stay out of sight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Did I stutter?”

“Come on, we can take them,” Dirk insisted.

“Stay the fuck out of sight,” Mason said.

“Okay, okay,” Dirk said, and the radio went quiet.

Maddie picked up her can of tuna and tossed it into a trash can that was almost topped off. “Dirk’s an okay guy. He can be a bit of an idiot sometimes, but he’s a guy, so that comes with the territory.”

“Tell me about it,” Sandra said.

The two women exchanged a brief knowing look.

“Come on, I’ll show you where everything else is,” Maddie said.

Blaine and Sandra got up and followed Maddie away from the food court. He could feel Gerry’s eyes, like lasers, burrowing deep into his back the entire way.

*

“SPAM can last
for over five years if you store it right,” Maddie said. “Of course, whether you want to still be eating SPAM five years from now is another matter entirely.”

“You sound like you know this from experience,” Blaine said.

She laughed. “Yeah, we weren’t exactly the richest people in our county.”

“Where you from originally?”

“Travis County. Around the Austin area.”

“I thought Austin was a rich city,” Sandra said.

“I said around the area, not actually in it. We didn’t have a lot, so we made do. I also grew up hunting. I killed my first deer when I was thirteen. I’m pretty handy with a hunting rifle, but this assault rifle stuff is all new to me. It kicks like a bastard.”

“What about the country boy?” Blaine asked. “Gerry.”

Maddie snorted. “He’s mostly talk. Don’t let him get to you.”

“He got me pretty good yesterday,” Blaine said, feeling the soreness in his side all over again.

“Yeah, he’s good with the cheap shots, too, you have to watch out for that.”

Maddie led them back through the Sortys department store, where the group made their base camp. They passed racks of clothing and shoes and towels sitting undisturbed on the same hangers from eight months ago. There was just enough sunlight from the windows up front to navigate by.

“Why Sortys?” Sandra asked.

“Mason decided,” Maddie said. “It’s close to the food court and it faces the highway. Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Does he decide everything?” Blaine asked.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Who put him in charge?”

“He was the guy who made the deal with the creatures. The ghouls.”

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t know. Bobby and me met up with him about two months after everything went tits up. He already had it set up pretty good here, with Gerry and Dirk, and a few other guys.”

“Lenny?”

“No, Lenny came later. I don’t even remember those other guys’ names. Dan or Phil or something.” She shrugged. “Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. They’re dead now, anyway.”

“What happened?”

“People driving by, like you two. That’s why Mason pulled up on you like he did. He doesn’t want to take any more chances. The last time he did, his guys got killed.”

“Is that why he didn’t attack the other people who rolled in before us?”

“Pretty much. He’s an asshole, but he’s a smart asshole. He doesn’t fight battles he knows he can’t win.”

“I guess that’s why he decided to betray his own kind,” Sandra said.

Blaine saw Maddie physically flinch next to them.

Oh, Sandra, you gotta learn to stay quiet, baby. This is no time to be riling up the only person who may be our friend in this entire place.

He said quickly, “He was trying to survive. Hard to blame him for that. We all do what we have to do.”

“That’s right,” Maddie said.

Sandra looked over at him, half angry and half questioning. He shook his head back at her, thankful Maddie had moved farther in front of them and couldn’t see.

They eventually reached a back hallway in the department store Blaine guessed used to house the Sortys staff.

“This is where we stay,” Maddie said. She led them past a half-dozen rooms, all offices that now held sleeping bags and sofas and boxes of food and supplies. “I guess eventually you’ll be able to grab one of these rooms.”

“When Mason’s sure we’re fully onboard,” Blaine said.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Maddie led them to the very back and pushed open the door into a room about the same size as the employee lounge. There was a bank of security monitors along one side of the wall, and a half-circle desk and a small jail on the other side. Half of the jail cell contained boxes, the other half housing five, maybe six plastic moving crates filled with weapons. He saw shotguns, handguns, and hunting rifles. Everything was just far enough away from the bars that he wouldn’t be able to reach in and grab a gun.

“Store security,” Maddie said. “Cameras don’t work anymore, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with the jail. All the weapons and ammo we could find from the mall and from the buildings around the city we’ve been able to search so far. People out here really like their guns.”

Blaine spotted his Remington 870 leaning against a crate.

“Yeah, that’s yours,” Maddie said. “You’ll get it when Mason says you can have it back. Before then, I can’t help you.”

“Who has the key to the jail cell?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Is that an invitation to search you?”

She laughed. “You wish.”

Mason has the key
.
Of course he does.

“Come on,” Maddie said, and headed back to the door.

Blaine and Sandra followed her out, and when Maddie had gotten far enough ahead of them, Sandra said in a low voice, “Are you trying to piss me off on purpose?”

“What?” he said, matching her quiet pitch.

“First that bullshit with Mason out in the hallway, and now the flirting?”

“Flirting? I wasn’t flirting.”

She rolled her eyes at him and walked ahead. “Whatever.”

Blaine followed her, wondering if she was right.
Was
he flirting with Maddie? He didn’t think he was. He was being friendly, trying to win her over. That was the point, wasn’t it? She was the only person here who was a potential ally, and he was doing his best to bring her over to their side. If he was flirting at all, it wasn’t on purpose.

Or at least, he didn’t think it was.

Blaine was still trying to justify himself in his own mind when he heard two soft, faded
pop-pop
sounds in the distance.

He stopped and listened and heard the echoes.

Maddie and Sandra heard them, too, and also stopped in the hallway.

“Was that…?” Sandra said.

“I think so,” Maddie said. She pulled her radio free and keyed it: “Did anyone else hear that? Were those gunshots?”

“It’s Dirk,” Mason said through the radio. He sounded more annoyed than angry. “That son of a whore. I told him to stay the hell away from those people.”

*