God, Josh, how did you ever convince yourself any of this was okay?
She turned back around in the front passenger seat and got a quick glimpse of herself in the tilted rearview mirror. If seeing Nate in the fresh soldier’s uniform still threw her for a loop, seeing herself in one was even more jolting.
There was a hole in the back of the shirt she was wearing now, along with some dried blood. The man Nate had shot in the back had been about her size, though a few inches taller and wider around the hip area. The pants barely fit, but she was able to cinch it mostly in place with the gun belt. Not that she was going to have to wear it for long, which was why she kept her original clothes crumpled on the floor at her feet.
There were hardly any vehicles left along the interstate to look at, or obstructions in the roads to avoid. This stretch of the countryside had been barren of stray cars for the last twenty minutes ever since they drove out of the woods and made their way back onto I-10. According to all the signs, Lake Dulcet was still five minutes ahead of them.
“I know you want to ask,” Nate said after a while.
“Later,” she said.
“If we live through this.”
Gaby sighed and hoped Claire and the others hadn’t heard that. But of course they had. They were sitting right behind them, after all.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, a little louder than she needed to because she wanted the girls in the back to hear her clearly. “Danny knows what he’s doing. You just have to trust him.”
God, I hope Danny knows what he’s doing.
“You really trust him,” Nate said.
“We’ve been through a lot together.”
“So have we.”
“It’s not even close, Nate.”
“Not even close?”
“Night and day.”
“Even after the pawnshop?”
“Even after the pawnshop.”
“Oh.”
He sounded genuinely hurt that time, though she couldn’t understand why. He had to know, didn’t he, that what she had gone through with Will and Danny was beyond anything he and she had shared in the couple days they knew each other before he was taken? Didn’t he know that?
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
“Okay,” Nate said. Then, “They’re there? Dwayne, Kendra, and the others? They made it to Song Island safely?”
“They did.”
“Good. Not knowing what had happened to them kept me up at night.”
“After what you went through, you were worried about them?”
“I’ve been responsible for them for a long time. Old habits are hard to break, I guess.” He paused for a moment, then, “How sure are you they’re going to attack the island tonight?”
“Will seemed pretty sure.”
“I’m sorry about that. Will, I mean.”
“You don’t know Will. As long as he’s breathing, he’s capable of anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if he beats us to the island.”
God, I almost believed myself that time.
“You didn’t know about the ambush on Route 13?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I know they were setting up an ambush, but not that you were involved. I told you, they really don’t tell us anything. Just where to go and what to do. I didn’t even know you were still alive until I saw you through my scope.”
“When did you decide?”
“Decide what?”
“To change sides.”
“I was never on their side,” Nate said. Again, he sounded slightly frustrated with the question—or the accusation, she guessed, was the more appropriate word. “You have to understand what happened to me after Lafayette—”
“Later,” she said, cutting him off and leaning slightly toward the dashboard. She peered out the windshield at what she had been waiting to see since they returned to the highway.
Nate saw it, too, and went quiet.
There were two vehicles up ahead, parked nose-to-nose in the middle of the two-lane highway. The shoulders were wide open, but getting to them would be a miracle with the four men standing around the trucks, aiming assault rifles down the interstate at them.
Nate began to slow down. “Ready?”
She nodded, then turned around slightly in her seat. It was a minor move that was (hopefully) unnoticeable from outside the car. “Guys, get down, just like we rehearsed.”
There was a lot of movement behind her as Annie and Milly sank into the floor behind Nate’s seat, and Claire did likewise behind hers. She imagined the thirteen-year-old clutching her shotgun and steeling herself for what was about to come.
Gaby faced fully forward again and gripped the M4 leaning against her right leg. It had been there the entire time, just out of view.
Please let this work. Please don’t let us all die in the next few minutes.
The two-way radio on the dashboard squawked, and they heard Danny’s voice. “Easy does it, Nathaniel Ramsey. Just pretend you’re back at the Colonial Congress of the Confederation.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Nate said to her.
Gaby couldn’t help but smile. “I have no idea. Just keep going. Remember who you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“A traitorous scumbag who sold out humanity.”
“Ouch.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” he said.
She nodded. “I didn’t say it before, but it’s good to see you again, Nate. I’m glad you’re still alive.”
He smiled at her, genuinely touched by that. She almost blushed under his gaze.
“Ditto,” he said.
Now all they had to do was survive the next few seconds.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Danny. God, I hope you know what you’re friggin’ doing…
CHAPTER 9
WILL
“One door closes, another door opens.”
Or maybe the better saying was, “Up a creek without a paddle and nothing to show for it but a wet ass”?
The point was, he was in trouble. Maybe. There were options in front of him, but as always, the trick was to pick out the best one and go for it. Choose the wrong one, and he was likely a dead man. And Lara would so be pissed off if he went and died on her.
Don’t worry, babe, I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
“You’re from Dunbar,” Will said.
“How’d you know?” This was Leo, the forty-something who, along with the woman, had found him inside the Palermo. He was the talkative of the duo; which was to say, he was the only one who talked.
“The direction you came from, for one,” Will said. “That, and your less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the soldiers.”
“‘Soldiers,’” Leo snorted. “Don’t call them that.”
“What do you call them?”
“Wannabes. Killers. Pieces of shit. Take your pick.”
Will nodded. He would have gone with “weekend warriors” himself, but “wannabe killer pieces of shit” was just as good.
Natasha, the woman, was watching him closely from across the room. Not that there was a lot of space between them. They were sitting on the dust-covered floor of one of those small pick-up centers for Domino’s Pizza. The building was on the other side of the I-10, beyond the underpass, and to the right of Route 13. They were close enough to the highway that he could see out the windows at the Palermo and Chevron signs jutting in the air. There were two more men in a Valero gas station across the street from them, both heavily armed individuals that were, like the three of them, waiting for signs of a counterattack from Mason’s men.
Dunbar’s fighters didn’t have the desire to go anywhere anytime soon post-attack, he had discovered. They were at least nice enough to give him back his painkillers and a half-full bottle of water to wash away the caked blood from his face while they waited, though Will spent most of it keeping dehydration at bay.
He sneaked a look down a
t his watch: 1:06 P.M.
Almost an hour after Leo, Natasha, and the others laid waste to the ten or so men Mason had left behind at the intersection. Since then, no one else had shown up yet. Looking around him at Leo’s gnarled face and Natasha’s dead-serious eyes, he couldn’t shake the feeling he had found himself in the company of people who had embraced a death wish. Attacking the soldiers had been a hell of a gamble and had cost them two of their own, leaving behind just six, including the two in the technical hidden next to their side of the highway now, ready to burst out and open fire at anyone who came down Route 13.
That was the full extent of their “plan,” as it turned out. He wondered if he could use that lack of ambition to his advantage. What would a group of people who just wanted to kill some assholes that had laid waste to their city do when those intended targets never showed up?
Maybe I should find out.
“You’ve been to Dunbar?” Leo was asking him.
“We thought about it, but we never got that far down the highway,” he lied.
“Where you from?”
“Mississippi.”
“That was you,” Natasha said. “We saw a minivan not far from here, at a farmhouse. It had Mississippi plates.”
Will nodded. He was hoping they would have stumbled across it on their way down the road. The minivan belonged to a young man named Lance and his girlfriend, Annie. The two had come to Louisiana from the neighboring state with other survivors looking for salvation.
Old story. New characters.
Annie was the only survivor after last night, and she was with Gaby and Danny right now on their way to Song Island.
Song Island. That was the key.
But first, he had to slowly build up his credibility. Maybe Leo and Natasha knew about his and Danny’s presence in Dunbar two nights ago, and maybe they didn’t. Right now, he needed them to see him as an unaffiliated third party who wasn’t a threat. After all, it was hard to take suggestions from someone you’d rather shoot in the head.
“You alone?” Natasha asked him.
He shook his head. He had a feeling she already knew about the other truck—the one Danny and Gaby had managed to escape in earlier. What was that Michael had said?
“They came out of nowhere. They must have…they must have been crawling along the fields all day toward us.”
That kind of stealth approach took a long time. It hadn’t surprised him to learn Leo and Natasha’s group had been approaching Mason’s long before his and Danny’s vehicles made their mad dash to reach the interstate. Which meant there was a very real possibility the two people watching him closely right now had witnessed the ambush from cover.
So he had to choose his lies and truths carefully. Very, very carefully. He could see it in Natasha’s stare—and, to an extent, in Leo’s, too. Days later, they were still reeling from what happened back at Dunbar.
“No,” Will said, looking Natasha in the eyes, because this version of him that he was trying to sell had nothing to hide. “After we left the farmhouse, we ran across a couple of the soldiers in trucks. We managed to overpower them and take their vehicles. We were trying to escape when they ambushed us.”
“How many more of you are out there?” she asked.
“Four.”
“Christ, how many did you fit into that minivan?” Leo asked, with just a hint of amusement.
“We didn’t just come in one vehicle.”
“Why did you burn down the farmhouse?” Natasha asked. She was still staring at him, trying to read him, maybe catch him in a lie. Sunlight streamed through the windows to their right and splashed across her hardened face.
“After they attacked us, we thought there were some left in the basement in the morning,” Will said. “We couldn’t stay there anymore, so we burned the house down in hopes of getting some of them, too.”
It wasn’t a total lie. All of it was true, except for the part where he inserted himself into Lance’s role.
“You’re talking about them, them,” Leo said. “The creatures.”
Will nodded.
“Did you get them?” the older man asked. He sounded almost hopeful. “Did it work?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. “We never opened the basement door to check.”
Eureka, he thought when he saw Natasha casually slide her finger out of the trigger guard of her M4. She probably didn’t even know she had done it—an unconscious act that told him she had stopped seeing him as the immediate danger he once was.
Or, at least, he hoped he was reading her reaction correctly. He had to remind himself that he was treading on very dangerous ground here. One wrong lie, one creative story that couldn’t be collaborated by evidence or what they already knew, and he’d never make it to Song Island.
Like walking a tightrope fifty stories up…while getting shot at.
Will sat back against the dirty wall, took out the bottle of meds, and downed two more, leaving just three lonely white pills at the bottom. He had been surviving on mostly adrenaline and sweat these last few days that the old wounds throughout his body had begun to fade into the background. He just had to worry about the ones still held together by stitches, especially the one in his side. That, more than anything, was his primary concern.
“What’s that?” Natasha asked.
“Painkillers,” Will said.
“You hurt?”
“You’re not?”
She almost smiled. Almost.
“Who isn’t, these days,” he said.
“Dead people,” she said.
Leo chuckled. “Hallelujah.”
The older man was sitting to Will’s left and rummaging through a school backpack. Will had been hoping one of them had picked up his tactical pack, along with all the silver ammo inside, but it was gone. Either Mason had thrown it into his own inventory, or it was lost somewhere in all the rubble back in the Palermo.
There were also no signs of his M4A1, which really hurt. From Afghanistan to Harris County to the end of the world, only to lose it at a lousy gas station in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t ask them about it, either, because that would mean he was a guy who knew guns, and the Will he was trying to sell right now was a civvy through and through.
“Here,” Leo said, and tossed him another refilled bottle of water along with a vacuum-sealed bag with strips of jerky inside. “Eat up; it might be a long wait.”
“Thanks,” Will said. He pried the bag open and devoured the jerky. It tasted like deer meat. “You made this?”
“None of that store-bought junk. I’ve been hunting since I was twelve and learned to make my own jerky when I was thirteen.”
“Where did you even find deer?”
“They’re around, if you look hard enough. Not easy by any means, but there are a few still running around out there in the woods. Of course, turns out surviving the bloodsuckers is easier than dodging me.”
“He’s really proud of his jerky,” Natasha said. She unzipped her own pack and took out a similar bag, then produced another long strip of jerky. “He should be. It’s better than the crap we hoarded after everything fell apart.”
“And that’s the closest you’ll come to getting a compliment out of Nat, kid,” Leo said.
Will smiled, then, “How long are you guys going to stay here?”
Leo and Natasha exchanged a brief look.
They have no idea. They’re just making it up as they go. Swell.
“Maybe an hour,” Leo said with a shrug. “If they send more over, we’ll deal with them the same way we dealt with the others. Too bad we already used up the frag grenade.”
“Whose bright idea was that?”
Leo grinned at him. “One guess.”
Natasha. Of course.
“I expected the damn gas station to go up like a Roman candle,” Leo said. “I guess it’s a good thing for you that Nat doesn’t throw like a girl. You should have seen that fastball vanish into the Palermo. Boom. If it had landed over the st
orage tanks under the pumps, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
“No kidding. Where’d you get your hands on something like that?”
“From the same meatheads we took the truck from. The stuff these guys are carrying around, all those M4s and MGs. They must have hit a fort or something. Who knows what else they have stashed around the state.”
Will glanced down at his watch again.
“You in a hurry?” Natasha asked. The edge had crept back into her voice.
“Yes,” Will said, meeting her suspicious gaze.
Sell it. She expects you to run from her glare. So don’t.
“My friends got away, and I need to find them again,” Will said. “We came here together, survived all this as a group. You guys seem okay, don’t get me wrong, but these are my people. I need to catch up to them.”
He must have sold it well enough, because Natasha nodded. “They went up the interstate. West.”
So they really had been close enough to witness the ambush. Where the hell had they been hiding during the whole thing? The sunburned grass in the fields around them wasn’t exactly a sniper’s dream. There were thicker woods further up the highway, but there wasn’t much of that over here, where the businesses were concentrated.
“Where they headed, anyway?” Leo asked.
And there it is.
“Have you ever heard of Song Island?” Will asked.
*
They waited another thirty minutes.
Then thirty minutes became an hour.
And no one showed up.
Meanwhile, the carrion birds had begun circling over the corpses left behind in the streets and parking lots of both the Palermo and the Chevron.
Ray, one of the two guys in the Valero across the street from them, jogged over, his lanky six-three frame like a scarecrow against the heavy afternoon sun. “We’re leaving,” he said as soon as he was inside the Domino’s. “They’re not coming.”
Then he left and ran up the street, toward the parked technical.
Leo stood up, brushing dust off his pants. “Come on,” he said to Will, “let’s see if you can convince the others about this Song Island. If we’re going, it’s gotta be as a group, or not at all.”
Purge of Babylon (Book 5): The Ashes of Pompeii Page 13
