The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (9 page)

Josh’s eyes darted to his left and right. There was nowhere to go. There was the house behind them, but Matt was in there. The good news was, Matt was in the basement, which still left the rest of the house. If he and Gaby could make it back inside, he could open the backpack and grab more bullets.
If
there were more bullets to be grabbed. He wasn’t even sure about that.

It was a plan. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a plan. He only knew he couldn’t let these men get their hands on Gaby. He saw the way all three of them were looking at her, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“Five bullets,” Folger was saying. “At least. The way you were firing it, over and over again, my guess is you didn’t have time to reload before the two of you bolted out of that house. So, I’m willing to bet you either have one bullet left in that gun, or none.”

“You don’t want to find out,” Josh said.

“I think I do,” Del said.

“No, you don’t—”

But he never got the chance to finish before Del walked forward and snatched the gun out of his hand with such swiftness for a man of his size that it stunned Josh. He was still trying to come to terms with what had happened when Folger drew his gun and stepped forward and hit him across the face.

Josh felt a massive stabbing pain, like someone had thrown ten tons of rocks on his head, and he was aware of falling. Then darkness.

From somewhere in the blackness, the sound of screaming cut through.

It wasn’t him screaming, though, it was Gaby…

No, no, I’m the guy… I’m the guy…

LARA

Will considered continuing
on to Lancing, a city farther down the road, before stopping for the day, but eventually they decided to pull off Route 69, turning into the driveway of a sprawling estate on the side of the road. It was an impressive house and looked relatively new, with a huge surrounding yard filled with something they had seen plenty of recently—an overgrown lawn that in a year or two would probably end up covering half of the house. They went up a concrete driveway, and Lara saw an attached two-car garage.

She looked back at the man they had picked up, literally, from the road, just to make sure he was still alive. She hadn’t been sure he would even survive the short trip, but he had. The man looked back at her through a mask of pain.

“Man’s got something to live for
,” Will had said when they carried him off the road.

She had done the best she could with his wounds, but she didn’t give him much of a chance. The man had, after all, been shot three times and was lying on the road for God knew how long. Fortunately, there was only one bullet still in him—in the right shoulder, about half an inch from shattering his humerus bone, which would have completely taken away the use of his right arm. He was lucky, or as lucky as any man could be with three bullet holes in him.

“Will says you’ve got something to live for,” Lara said to the man.

He looked back at her, and she could tell he wanted to respond, but he couldn’t. His lips quivered and he blinked once, twice, but even that seemed to take a lot out of him.

“Don’t try to speak,” she told him. “We’re going to stop for the day and I’m going to sew you back up. You’ve already survived this long, stay with me for a few more hours and I promise, you’ll live through the night. Do you understand?”

He moved his head.
Yes.

Tough guy. Let’s see if he’s tough enough to last the night…

*

Lara waited outside
the house with Carly, both of them armed with shotguns. It wasn’t just for show. They were trained on the weapons—had been ever since the ghouls had laid siege to Harold Campbell’s facility in Starch. During the first few days of training, she had gone to sleep with throbbing pain in her shoulders, which wasn’t too bad since every other part of her body from the waist up was also aching. If she thought the Glock had a kick, the shotgun was like getting body-slammed by a mule.

Slowly but surely she had gotten used to it, and though she still felt it every time they did target practice, the ear-shattering blast didn’t surprise her anymore and she was able to hit her target. Most of the time, anyway. That was the point of a shotgun. It had spreading power, which made it invaluable in close-quarters battles.

Lara and Carly stood watch at the trucks, with the girls still inside Danny’s Ranger. The man from the road was in the black Ranger, unconscious in the back seat. Lara kept her eyes on the road behind them, a good fifty yards away. The house was big, and she could see at least three bedrooms from the front. She guessed there were probably more inside. Five, maybe six in all.

She glanced down at her watch: 2:11 
p.m.

Will and Danny had gone inside ten minutes ago, and she considered it a good sign that they hadn’t fired a single shot. It never took them more than twenty minutes to clear a building, depending on how many rooms they were confronted with.

Lara found herself staring at two Labrador dog statues perched on their hind legs, standing guard at the front doors like dutiful sentries.

“Cute dogs,” Carly said. “If I ever get a house, I’d like one of those. Or maybe one of those weiner dogs. What do you call them?”

“Chihuahuas? I don’t know my dogs.”

“Sounds right.”

“Not much of guard dogs, though.”

“Danny with a shotgun should make up for that.”

Lara smiled at the image of Danny standing permanently outside a house with a shotgun, boyish blond hair fluttering in the breeze. “Now that’s an image.”

“I know, right?” Carly looked over at the black Ranger. “Has he said anything yet? Like his name?”

“He’s trying.”

“Danny said he was shot three times.”

“He was.”

“How do you survive being shot three times?”

“Determination. Guts. A reason to keep living…”

“Who do you think Sandra is?”

“Probably a girlfriend. Or a wife. Someone he met on the road after The Purge, maybe. There’s a lot of that going on.”

Carly chuckled. “Tell me about it.”

Lara’s radio, resting on the hood of the black Ford Ranger, squawked and they heard Danny’s voice: “All clear. And I call the master bedroom.”

“That’s my man,” Carly said.

*

She was close.
The house had five bedrooms—one on the first floor and four more, including the master bedroom, on the second floor. Will and Danny carried the wounded man inside, putting him into one of the smaller rooms on the second floor before heading back downstairs to move the trucks into the parking garage next door.

There was a fenced-in section at the back of the house, with two trucks parked in the dirt and a third with lumber stuffed in the back. The ground was flattened and trees chopped down to make room for whatever grand plans the family never got to put into action. For once, they didn’t find any blood or signs of struggle inside the house. The front door was unlocked and the windows intact. There were also no cars in the garage. It all pointed to the family abandoning the house in a hurry.

Like she always did whenever they took over someone’s house for the night, Lara wondered where the family had gone. Were they still alive? Maybe they were even on Song Island in Beaufont Lake. Wouldn’t that be something?

Lara and the girls brought in their personal carry-ons first, stuffed with clothes and personal items. The big plastic crates with the emergency rations came next. After that, they lugged in the thick, heavy bags of guns and ammo.

And finally, they brought in the four portable fans they carried with them everywhere, dividing them up between rooms on the second floor. The fans were the only things keeping the Texas summer at bay and made whatever room they were bedding down in for the night mercifully breathable. All four ten-inch oscillating fans ran on a ridiculous eight D cell batteries and could, conceivably, work continuously for forty straight hours. Fortunately the D cells, like all of the batteries they carried, were rechargeable using solar-powered adapters. Even with the fans, it was still always too hot, but that was Texas.

Lara left Elise with Carly and Vera and found her medical bag. It was a black bag filled with medical supplies and reminded her of old movies where small-town doctors went from house to house.

A simpler time, when creatures from the darkness didn’t try to eat you
.

She went to check up on the wounded man upstairs. He hadn’t moved from the bed where they had deposited him earlier. He was still dangerously pale, and his eyes opened and closed intermittently, as if he were afraid to fall asleep.

It was a small room, and she guessed it was for one of the family’s children. A teenage boy, from the looks of the
Call of Duty
and gaming posters along the walls. A baseball bat lay among a pile of sports toys in one corner and discarded clothes in another. Tidiness hadn’t been the kid’s modus operandi.

She put her medical bag on a chair close by. Before they had left the facility, she had stocked up on everything she thought she would need for a portable MASH unit. The items in the bag were just a small sampling—her emergency supplies. The rest were in the trucks Will and Danny had hidden inside the garage.

She pulled out a syringe and a bottle of morphine and leaned over the man. “Can you hear me?”

His eyes darted, seeking out her voice. Finally locating her, he managed to nod—or as much as he could.

Yes.

“This is morphine,” she said, showing him the syringe.

His eyes widened in alarm.

“You need this,” Lara said, “or you’re going to die when I pull the bullet out of your shoulder. And it has to come out, you understand?”

Yes.

“Good. Is Sandra your wife?”

No.

“Girlfriend?”

Yes.

“Did someone take her? The same people who shot you?”

Yes.

“How many were there? More than one?”

Yes.

“More than five?”

Yes.

“Do you know where they went?”

No.

“Okay. Enough with the twenty questions for now. You’re going to see Sandra again, but you need to trust me first. Understand?”

He looked uncertainly at her.

“If we’d wanted to kill you, we would’ve left you on the road, don’t you think?”

He paused.

Then:
Yes.

“Don’t fight the morphine. You’ve fought enough, and it’s got you this far. You don’t need to keep fighting. I’ll keep you alive, but you’ll have to let me. And that means taking the morphine and sleeping through the day. Agreed?”

Yes.

“Good.”

She gave him the shot and watched him slowly drift off.

Lara took out a small portable IV bag and looked for a place to put it. She saw a framed picture of a good-looking teenager, about twelve or thirteen, posing in a baseball uniform with one knee on a baseball field, holding the same baseball bat she saw on the floor. Lara removed the photo and looped the IV bag over the hook in the wall, then attached the other end to the man’s arm.

Carly came in while she was getting the man’s shoulder ready to extract the bullet. “You need a hand?”

“If you’re not too busy.”

“I had some shopping on tap, but what the hell, digging a bullet out of some stranger we picked up on the road should be fun, too.”

“You’re all heart.”

As Lara worked on the man, she could hear Will and Danny moving around the house, pulling doors out of hinges and nailing them against windows in the rooms around them. She closed out the sounds of hammering and concentrated on prying the bullet out of the man’s shoulder. It moved grudgingly, but after fighting with it for a couple of minutes, she pulled it free and dropped it onto a plastic plate Carly had brought up from the kitchen.

“Souvenir?” Carly smiled.

“My guess is he’ll want to forget what happened as soon as possible.”

“Did he ever tell you who Sandra was?”

“Girlfriend.”

“Must be true love for him to hold on this long.” Carly tossed the plate into a nearby trash bin. “Ah, romance. It lives, Lara, it lives.”