Road to Babylon (Book 9): The Ranch

by Sisavath, Sam

  “The other one,” Gummy said.

  “What other one?”

  “The one that was playing with us,” the girl said.

  She pointed at where they had been playing the Candyland board game. Except there was only Abby sitting there, lining up the colorful gingerbread men in a row. The other girl seemed oblivious to everything going on around her, or that she was the only one “playing” at the moment.

  “Thuy,” Keo said. “She’s talking about Thuy.” He stood up and glanced around. “Where did she go?”

  Lara did the same. “I don’t know.” She looked back down at Gummy. “Where did she go, sweetheart?”

  Gummy turned and pointed at the door that separated the common area from the entry room. Keo wasn’t sure who had closed the door, because it wasn’t him. He distinctively remembered telling everyone to keep it open.

  “Dammit,” Keo whispered, and began running toward the door.

  “Keo,” Lara said from behind him.

  He glanced back at her. “Stay there!”

  “Be careful.”

  He nodded and turned around—

  —just as the door opened before he even reached it, and Wilson stumbled through. She was holding onto the lever with one hand. One bloody hand. Her other hand was equally covered in a coat of red paint as she clutched to her side.

  The teenager’s face was a mask of pain. She could barely contain the scream Keo imagined was welling up inside her when she gasped out, “The door. She’s trying to open the door, Keo!”

  Wilson’s bloodied hand slipped off the lever and she fell to the floor, pushing the door open at the same time. Keo stared through the opening and into the entry hallway, and across it.

  Thuy was where he was afraid she would be. Her back was to him, and she was turning the round submarine wheel with her hand. She only had one good arm to work with, so it was slower than it should have been, and the effort was clearly taking a lot out of her.

  There was a bloody knife on the floor next to Thuy’s feet. Like Wilson, Thuy’s right hand was bloody, but it wasn’t nearly as dramatically thick as the red that coated Wilson’s. And there, Wilson’s rifle, on the floor.

  “Thuy!” Keo shouted even as his hand stabbed down for his holstered sidearm. “Stop!”

  The woman did stop—just long enough to look over her shoulder at him. Even across the distance he could see how wide her eyes were, giving her the appearance of a feral animal. A desperate, feral animal.

  “I have to!” Thuy shouted back as she returned to turning the wheel with her one arm. “It won’t let Abby and me go! It’ll never let us go! This is the only way! I have to give it what it wants! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  She was still shouting “I’m so sorry!” when Keo ran toward her.

  A door into one of the private quarters opened to his left, and Bunker stepped through. “What’s with all the commotion out here?”

  “Thuy’s trying to open the door!” Lara shouted from somewhere behind Keo.

  “What the hell?” Bunker said.

  Keo didn’t have time to fill him in. He ran past Bunker and jumped over Wilson’s crumpled form on the floor and landed in the entry hallway. He hated to do that—acting as if Wilson’s currently bloody state didn’t matter—but there was no choice. He had to reach Thuy. He had to reach her now.

  Thuy had stopped turning the wheel, because she’d already unlocked it, and was now pulling, pulling it with everything she had. Which wasn’t very much. Besides the fact that she was a small woman and only had one good arm to work with, the door wouldn’t have been a last line of defense if it’d been easy to open by a lone, injured woman.

  He was halfway across the room, consuming ten of the twenty yards as fast as he could, even while he raised the SIG Sauer and took aim.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “This is your last chance!”

  But Thuy didn’t stop. She continued to pull, both legs fighting against the smooth metal floor, her face straining. Maybe she might have gotten the door opened faster before he could reach her if she’d had both arms, but that was a moot point.

  Even so, the door continued to open—if slowly.

  So, so slowly.

  Keo lined up the iron sights on Thuy.

  “Stop!” he shouted.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, she pulled even harder.

  Keo fired, and the round entered her right temple and burst out of her left, and splattered everything in-between against the cold steel metal frame like a grotesque version of a Jackson Pollock painting, only with more muted red and black and brown.

  He lowered the gun and kept running even as Thuy let go of the round wheel and she slid down to the floor. If there was any life left in her body, it faded quickly.

  The door behind her continued to open.

  What the fuck?

  Not just opening, but swinging open at an even faster rate.

  How was that possible? It was so heavy. It had nearly killed him and Lara to close it earlier, but to look at it now, he’d think the damn thing weighed next to nothing and was moving on springs.

  Unless…there was something opening it that was stronger than both he and Lara combined.

  Fuuuuuuuck.

  Keo slid to a stop five yards from the door as it swung all the way open, crashing into the wall with a loud clannnnnnng! that echoed and vibrated through every inch of the underground shelter.

  It strode through the opened door as if it owned the place.

  Blue eyes glowed, dazzling underneath the shelter’s bright LED lights.

  Razor-thin lips, like sentient creatures, wrapped into a joker-like smile that bordered on maniacal glee along the lower half of its unnaturally elongated face.

  “Round three,” it hissed.

  Twenty-Two

  Five yards.

  Five measly yards.

  That was all that separated Keo from reaching the door and pushing it back into place and keeping everything that was supposed to be out there, out there. Except he couldn’t make up the distance in time.

  And now there was a blue-eyed ghoul standing inside the shelter, and there was just five yards separating them.

  Just five measly yards.

  The creature could have made up that distance before Keo could even breathe. Before he could even start the process of breathing.

  It was fast.

  It was that fast.

  But it just stood there, looking back at him, with that impossible grin (Was that a grin, though? Or was it something else? Something that was only an approximation of a grin, but wasn’t quite one, and would never, ever be?) on the smooth, hairless dark black flesh it called a face.

  That’s not a face, either. That’s not even close to being a fucking face.

  It stood in front of the wide-open door, Thuy’s lifeless body on the floor next to the twigs it called legs. He’d done that. Keo had killed Thuy. He’d shot her in the head, and she’d gone down like she was supposed to.

  …shot her in the head.

  Keo raised the SIG Sauer.

  One shot. That was all it would take. One shot in the creature’s brain, and this was over.

  That was all it would take.

  He aimed.

  Its freakish grin widened, the corners turning up even higher. (Was that even possible?)

  What the hell are you so happy about, you piece of shit?

  The answer came when the darkness on the other side of the open door began moving. At first Keo thought he was looking at a black ocean, but it was, in fact, a wall of skeletal figures as the ghouls outside came alive and surged forward on command.

  They flooded in through the opening, moving like one continuous sentient entity instead of creatures made of deformed clacking bones and black flesh. They fell through the door, squeezing in between the limited space, fighting to be the first ones inside. Extra limbs wrapped around the blue-eyed ghoul, embracing it, pushing through, and through.

  Ghouls fo
rced themselves into the entry hallway one after another. They looked like fish flopping on the smooth floor, spreading their stench through the air until they reached all the way across the room and grabbed a hold of Keo’s senses.

  He stumbled back, the gun bucking in his hand.

  The blue-eyed ghoul turned its head, then its body, and Keo’s rounds sailed harmlessly past it…and struck the ones behind it.

  Ghouls fell, but other black eyes simply replaced them.

  Too many. There were always too goddamn many of them!

  Keo backpedaled faster, switching his fire to the ones that had already made it into the room. They were bounding across the space toward him like rabid animals, baring fanged teeth that glinted disgusting yellow underneath the lights.

  He shot the closest ghoul in the chest, heard the ping! as the round punched through its sunken chest and ricocheted off the floor before striking another one as it was leaping in the air. It fell like a dead bird, but before it’d even gotten the chance to settle on the floor, two—three—five ghouls were already trampling its lifeless corpse under their feet.

  Keo was moving backwards at record speed now, all the while firing nonstop.

  Bang!

  Another ghoul fell.

  Bang!

  Two more this time.

  Bang! Bang!

  He stopped counting. Stopped looking.

  And just pulled the trigger again and again.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  And they kept coming even while the blue-eyed creature stood at the door watching him, that fanatical grin on its face. It could still have taken him right then and there—made up the space in a heartbeat—but it didn’t.

  Instead, it stood and watched, and enjoyed every second of Keo’s futility.

  Because this was futile. There were simply too many of the Black Eyes, and Keo didn’t have unlimited ammo. Even if he did, the act of reloading would have cost him seconds between each magazine swap. And sooner or later, the seconds would add up. The numbers would go against him. The—

  “Stop messing around, will you?” a voice (Bunker!) shouted from behind him.

  Keo holstered the SIG Sauer and reached for the MP5.

  “Today, hoss, today!” Bunker shouted.

  Keo turned—and Bunker was right there, standing just a few feet to his left. The rancher had his AR in his hands. Both hands, because he had removed the sling off his left arm in order to raise the rifle to take aim.

  “Git!” Bunker shouted at him even as he opened fire.

  The brap-brap-brap! of Bunker’s AR unleashing its full-auto load was deafening, the gunshots echoing off the metal walls like Mini Cannon firecrackers. Keo’s ears were ringing as he ran past Bunker, somehow managing to avoid the empty brass casings flying out of the rifle’s ejection port as they filled the air in arcing waves.

  He ran toward the open door in front of him, looking through it at Lara. She was trying to pick Wilson off the floor with Gummy’s help. Lara glanced up and met his eyes, and he saw the desperation on her face. Maybe she could see the same thing mirroring on his.

  There were no signs of Abby, and at the moment, Keo didn’t have the luxury to care where she was.

  “The vault room!” Keo shouted. “Get into the vault room!”

  Lara nodded and dragged Wilson up to her feet. The teenager let out a scream of pain. Or, at least, Keo thought she did. The truth was he couldn’t hear anything over the roar of Bunker’s rifle firing nonstop behind him. Hell, he wasn’t even sure Lara had heard his shouts earlier, and all he really had to go on that she had was the nod she’d given him.

  Keo spun around when he finally reached the door, but he didn’t go through it yet. Thank God he was wearing boots, because its soles gripped onto the metal surface of the floor and kept him from slipping on Wilson’s blood that caked a generous portion of it. Christ, the kid had bled out a lot.

  He spun around just as Bunker’s rifle went silent. By the time Keo had finished his turn, the rancher was running toward him, reloading as he went. For a man who had his left arm in a sling almost the entire night, Bunker looked surprisingly unaffected by his wounded shoulder. Either that, or he was putting on a hell of a front.

  “Go go go!” Keo shouted.

  Bunker went, jumping through the open door as Keo focused on the entry hallway again.

  For a second—just a split second—Keo had allowed himself to think that maybe Bunker had managed to fall the Blue Eyes, that it was down on the floor instead of—

  It was still there, grinning back at him from the other side of the hallway.

  Fuck you! Keo thought but didn’t waste the energy to actually put into sound as he lifted the MP5 and unloaded half the magazine in one pull.

  He had no choice, because the ghouls were almost on top of him. Bunker had felled dozens—maybe dozens upon dozens, it was hard to tell with so many of the squirming black flesh and domed heads blinking underneath the bright lights—but not all of them.

  It wasn’t even close to being all of them.

  Keo filled the entry hallway with 9mm silver-tipped Parabellum bullets, swinging his fire left and right. He could just barely make out the ping-ping-ping! of rounds bouncing off the shelter’s metal floor and walls and ceiling and ghoul bones over the mechanical whirring of the submachine gun as it fired.

  His ears were ringing, partially from Bunker’s gunfire, and now his own. The shelter’s construction made sure that every noise was given a proper echo, and for a brief couple of seconds, that was all Keo could hear—gunfire and the squealing of ghouls as they dropped in a never-ending wave before him.

  God, there were so many of them. Why were there always so damn many of them?

  By now he’d lost sight of the blue-eyed ghoul, but he knew it was back there somewhere, at the other end of the room. Keo couldn’t see it because all he could focus on was the tide of Black Eyes rushing forward even as he finished off the last of his 9mm rounds.

  Too many. Too many!

  “Go go go!” Bunker’s voice, behind him.

  Keo spun and didn’t have very far to go to dive through the door and into the common area. Bunker immediately slid into his place and opened up, even as Keo grabbed the door and waited.

  “Come on!” Keo shouted.

  Bunker stopped shooting long enough to step back and through the door. Keo pushed and the steel door clanged! home, Keo jerked down the lever to lock it.

  Almost immediately there was the heavy but dull thump-thump-thump! as ghouls reached and began beating on the door on the other side, their assault like gunfire instead of flesh and bone.

  Keo stumbled back even as Bunker ejected his half-spent magazine and slammed home a new one. He glanced over at Lara and Gummy as the two women were halfway across the common area, on their way to the vault room, while doing everything possible to keep Wilson upright between them. It didn’t help that Gummy was much shorter than either one of them, and she didn’t so much as hold her sister up as she sort of clung to her leg, while Wilson kept an arm around her shoulder. Keo wasn’t sure who was holding who up at the moment.

  Thump-thump-thump! from behind him.

  He ignored it and looked for—

  There. Abby. The girl was where Keo last saw her—sitting on the floor next to the Candyland board game, still lining up gingerbread men in rows. She was oblivious to what was happening around her.

  “Abby!” Lara shouted. “Abby, come on!”

  The girl didn’t even look up or acknowledge Lara.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  “Abby!” Lara shouted again.

  “Forget her!” Keo said.

  He ran over to Lara, slinging the reloaded MP5. He grabbed Wilson and pulled her away from both women and up into his arms. Wilson let out a pained grunt but clenched her teeth and kept the rest in. Keo could see how much all of this was hurting her, but she was being a trooper about it. Her clothes were soaked in blood, but Lara had, in the
thirty or so seconds she’d been given, put a compress against her side where she’d been stabbed by Thuy and duct-taped it into place.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  Lara, meanwhile, was running over to Abby. “Come on, Abby, we have to go.”

  Like before, the girl never looked up. That is, if she was even aware of Lara’s presence. It was if a switch had been triggered and she was gone.

  Just…gone.

  “Abby,” Lara said.

  “Lara, forget about her, and come on!” Keo said.

  But Lara couldn’t do that. She snatched the kid up from the floor. Abby didn’t exactly fight her, but she didn’t make it easy, either, and struggled against Lara’s grip. But Lara was stronger, and she held on.

  “Dammit, woman,” Keo said.

  “Shut up, and let’s go,” Lara said as she half-carried and half-dragged Abby past Keo and into the vault room.

  “Go, kid, I got your sister,” Keo said to Gummy, who reluctantly followed Lara inside.

  Keo, with Wilson in his arms, glanced back at Bunker as the rancher walked calmly toward him. Behind Bunker, the thump-thump-thump! of ghouls beating on the door continued unabated. They were going to keep at it forever if they had to, but Keo didn’t think they had to. The Black Eyes would never be able to open that door, but it wasn’t just them on the other side.

  “That’s not gonna hold, is it?” Bunker said, glancing back at the door.

  “Fuck no,” Keo said. “It’ll open it when it feels like it.”

  “So why hasn’t it?”

  “Because this is a game. It likes making grand entrances.”

  “Fuck this thing,” Bunker said.

  “Yeah, fuck it,” Keo said.

  “Guys, shouldn’t we be running?” Wilson asked. She was staring at the door, unable to look away.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  Keo turned and followed Bunker to the vault room.

  “You know there’s only one way out, right?” Bunker said. “And it’s—” He glanced down at his watch “—still dark on the other side? We’re a long way from morning, hombre.”

  Thump-thump-thump!

  “I don’t think we have a choice, Bunker,” Keo said.