The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4)

by Sam Sisavath

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

  Danny didn’t take his eyes off his scope as he continued shooting, calmly pulling the trigger again and again. “We’ll talk about your terrible choice of fighting positions later, missy. Right now, grab the kids and head back to Big Willie.”

  She looked over at Will, positioned behind the open door of a parked truck behind them, also firing calmly over her and at the horsemen farther up the highway.

  Gaby scrambled up and opened the Dodge’s back door. Claire, her small body practically merged with the floor, looked up at her with wide eyes. “Come on,” Gaby said, and held out her hand. Claire took it and Gaby pulled her out. “Run to the truck!”

  Claire glanced past her at Will.

  “They’re my friends,” Gaby smiled.

  Claire nodded and ran off, smartly keeping herself as low as possible.

  Gaby looked back into the car and found Milly on the floor behind the front passenger seat. “Milly, come on.”

  The girl hesitantly held out her hand and Gaby took it, pulling her toward the door. Milly leaped into her arms and Gaby, holding her tight, began backpedaling.

  “Danny,” Gaby said.

  “Right behind you,” Danny said. He fired two more shots before ejecting his magazine, making sure to catch it and put it away before slamming in a fresh one. “Go go go.”

  Gaby turned around and ran, Milly clutching her so tightly she could barely breathe. She kept as low as possible while still running, which was amazingly hard with Milly’s weight pulling her down to the road.

  Will said, “Hey, kid,” as she ran past him.

  “Hey, Will,” Gaby said. “You look like shit.”

  “Don’t tell Lara.”

  “I won’t if you don’t tell her about my face.”

  “Deal.” Will switched his rifle to full-auto, said, “Danny,” before firing off a single, continuous burst.

  Danny ran toward them, using Will’s fire as cover. When Danny was back at the truck with her, Will switched back to semi-auto and continued firing off one round at a time again.

  Gaby put Milly down behind the back bumper of the truck next to Claire. She took a moment to compose herself, her chest pounding so loudly she had difficulty hearing Milly’s sniffling. Gaby had to put one hand against the truck to steady herself before leaning back out to look up the highway.

  There were four riderless horses out there now, two moving along the right side shoulder while the other two had escaped into the ditches and were grazing on sunburned grass. Their riders lay still on the road. The remaining two soldiers were fleeing up Route 13 at a fast gallop as Will fired casually after them, but by now they were already too far away to be picked off.

  “What happened to your face?” Danny said to her.

  “What happened to yours?” she said.

  “Touché.”

  Will fired a final shot, then walked back to them, reloading his rifle as he did so. “Anyone missing an arm or a leg or have holes where there shouldn’t be extra holes?”

  Gaby shook her head and wiped at trickles of blood along her arms where falling glass had cut her. None of them were too deep, thankfully. “Just a couple of scratches. I’m good.”

  “Yeah?” Will said, watching her carefully.

  She gave him her best smile. “Good enough for now. Thanks for the rescue.”

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t stop at that sushi place down the road,” Danny said. “You know how much I love roadside sushi.”

  She looked at Will, then at Danny, this time more closely. They were still the same guys she knew, but in the week or so since she had last seen them, they looked beaten up, bruised, and battered. Danny, in particular, had a broken nose and cuts along his face, as far removed from the California blond surfer she was so used to. Will still looked like Will, which was to say, tired and weary, but somehow still moving around. But then, Will always did hide his wounds well.

  “Man, you guys look like total crap,” she said.

  “You should see the other guy,” Danny said.

  “Bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “What could be worse than the sight of you two?”

  “Dead.”

  “Yeah, that’s definitely worse.”

  Will had turned back up the highway. She walked over and stood next to him and looked over the roof of the Dodge. She hadn’t realized just what bad shape the vehicle was in until she got enough distance from it. All four tires were punctured and every window was broken. There had to be dozens of holes across the length of the car that she could see and probably more that she couldn’t on the other side.

  My God. How did we survive that?

  Will fished out a pair of binoculars from his pack and peered through them.

  “The interstate,” Gaby said. “They’re guarding it, aren’t they?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “How many are up there?”

  “A dozen,” Will said, lowering the binoculars. “Horses aren’t the only thing they’re riding around on. Looks like they have technicals, too.”

  “Technicals?”

  “Improvised fighting vehicles,” Danny said, walking over. “Basically, they put a machine gun on top of a truck.”

  “Oh.”

  “How many?” Danny asked.

  “Two that I can see,” Will said.

  She saw a vehicle—maybe a truck—moving up the road toward them. She could just barely register the silhouette of a man standing in the back. Then a second truck appeared and joined the first, the two of them riding side by side.

  “Here they come,” Gaby said.

  “Come on,” Will said. “We’re not going to survive a stand-up firefight against those.”

  Danny circled the vehicle over to the driver side while Will slipped into the front passenger seat. Gaby opened the back door and was surprised to find two people already inside. A man and a woman, both in their twenties.

  “Oh yeah,” Danny said. “It’s a little crowded back there. But that’s what laps are for, right?”

  Gaby held open the door for Milly and Claire as they squeezed into the back. “Milly, sit on my lap.”

  The girl nodded. She had stopped crying and her cheeks were covered in dried tears, but she looked ready to start all over again at a moment’s notice.

  Gaby closed the door as Danny started up the truck and reversed. Then he somehow swung the vehicle around until he had it turned a full 180 degrees. He stepped on the gas and they were flying down the highway, away from Josh’s approaching soldiers.

  It was a tight fit in the back. Even though the other two people were doing their best to make themselves small, they had to fight for space with weapons and boxes of supplies piled on the floor. Claire ended up sitting on one of the boxes while Gaby had to place her legs over another one, with the edge of crates poking into her ribcage.

  Danny looked up at them in the rearview mirror. “Just think of it as a studio apartment and ignore the smell. Annie and Lance, that’s Gaby. I have no idea who those kids are, so don’t ask.”

  “We’re sorry about your friend,” the woman, Annie, said.

  “Friend”? Gaby thought, then, Oh, she’s talking about Donna.

  “Thanks,” Gaby said, and wondered if Claire had deduced the same thing.

  Gaby looked over her shoulder and out the back window.

  Two trucks—the “technicals”—were coming up the road after them, but they weren’t going to catch Danny anytime soon. At least, she hoped not. After surviving Harrison and reuniting with Will and Danny, the idea of having all of that ripped away now was too difficult to stomach.

  Will looked into the backseat and observed her for a moment.

  “What?” she said.

  “How’s the face?” he asked.

  “It hurts. What do you think?”

  He smiled, then took something out of one of his cargo pants pocket and tossed it to her. “Something for the pain.”<
br />
  She caught the bottle. It didn’t have any labels, and there were only a few pills left when she opened it. She didn’t ask him what the pills were because she trusted Will. Gaby swallowed two of them.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “There has to be a back road, another way to the interstate and around what’s waiting up there.”

  “And if there isn’t?”

  “Then we’ll do what we always do,” Will said. “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

  CHAPTER 29

  LARA

  “Everyone’s in one piece,” Bonnie said through the radio. “I don’t know how, to be honest with you. I think one of them had a machine gun. We could hear it shooting from miles away.”

  A machine gun. Jesus.

  “Where are you now?” Lara asked.

  “Almost home. Thank God. I can see the sun starting to set, or maybe that’s just my imagination.”

  “I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “Okay. Over.”

  Lara put down the radio. “They’re on their way back.”

  Carly moved over to the north window and peered out with her binoculars. “I see them coming down the road now. Sarah will be relieved to have them back.”

  “Blaine?”

  “No, Lara, she’s been nervous about Bonnie. Of course Blaine.”

  Lara smiled. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Everyone’s getting some nookie these days except us.”

  “Danny will be back soon and you can make up for lost time.”

  “Done, and done,” Carly said. “Has Will radioed in yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  She looked down at her watch: 5:29 P.M. It would be dark in less than an hour, and Will hadn’t called yet. If he was on his way, he would have told her so. But he hadn’t, which meant he was nowhere close to home and was busy doing something else (like surviving). For some reason, she wasn’t surprised by that. She just hoped he had spent all that time out there looking for Gaby.

  No one gets left behind, Will. Find Gaby. Find her and come home to me.

  “Looks like all that time you put into convincing Keo paid off,” Carly said. “How did you know he’d go for it? Or come through with flying colors?”

  “I didn’t. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, remember?’

  “Well, you did good, kid.”

  “Only if they don’t attack us tonight.”

  “You think they might anyway? Even after what Keo did with that grenade launcher?”

  Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know anything for sure.” She picked up the radio again. “Roy, come in.”

  “What’s up?” Roy answered.

  “Blaine and the others are headed back now. I need you to get one of the fast boats ready just in case they need a hand. Grab a battery out of the supply building and get Maddie to help you gas it up.”

  “Will do.”

  “I heard some Russians on the radio today,” Carly said behind her.

  “Russians?” Lara said.

  “Yeah. They were talking to some Italians.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “I have no idea. The Russians were talking in Russian to the Italians, who were talking Italian back at them. It was, uh, kind of confusing for everyone, not to mention super surreal.”

  Lara smiled at the thought. She’d done that. Got people around the world communicating with one another. Even if they couldn’t understand a single word the other was saying, her broadcast had connected them by letting them know there were other survivors out there. That, she found, was what they needed to hear most—that they weren’t alone.

  We started something. Now all we have to do is survive it.

  Yeah, no pressure.

  *

  Blaine and the others didn’t shove off from shore on their way back to the island until five minutes after six. They were cutting it close, and Lara only allowed herself to breathe easier when they were halfway home and she could see their boat in the distance, with the sight of the sun dipping in the horizon behind them. She still didn’t feel comfortable sending people out there, and she didn’t think she ever would be.

  It was beginning to darken, and still no word from Will. That meant there was no chance he was coming back today. A part of her always knew they’d have to survive another day without him. Maybe that was why she took such a big gamble with Keo.

  “How many?” she asked Keo later while he was eating in the dining room.

  Keo tore apart a white bass and gobbled up the meat. “Over twenty, easy. They were definitely preparing for an assault.”

  “One hundred percent sure?”

  He nodded. “They were loading supplies onto boats when I showed up. And they had night-vision gear.”

  “Even after you killed some of them, they were still coming…”

  “Like I said: they really have a bug up their ass for you people.”

  Will was right. Kate’s coming, and nothing’s going to stop her.

  Keo grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down and didn’t stop until he had drained the entire thing. Even Blaine and Bonnie, eating across the table from him, looked impressed. Lara exchanged a brief grin with them.

  “Ice cold water,” Keo said, putting the glass down. “Worth its weight in gold these days, especially in the summer.”

  Lara had already eaten with the others two hours ago, so she was the only one at the table not pulling apart fish at the moment. Blaine and Bonnie still looked a bit shell-shocked by their experience, and to hear them tell it, they hadn’t really done much except dropped Keo off, then picked him back up when the shooting started. Keo, who had been in the middle of the firefight, didn’t look the least bit fazed. At first she thought it was an act, a tough guy façade. She only had to watch him eating for a few minutes to realize that wasn’t the case.

  “What happened exactly?” Lara asked Keo. “It sounded like you had to improvise.”

  “There was a kid,” Keo said. “He ruined the plan.”

  “We didn’t see him,” Bonnie said. “But then we had to stop the truck pretty far away so they couldn’t hear us coming.”

  “Carrie told me about them,” Keo said. “The soldiers are using them as lookouts. They send the brats across the cities to look for survivors, then radio in if they find any.” Keo wiped fish oil from his lips. “I should have shot the little bastard.”

  Lara and Bonnie stared at him.

  “I said should have,” Keo said. “I didn’t, for the record.”

  “So, in your expert opinion,” Lara said, “do you think you stopped them?”

  “Stopped them? Not even close.” He shook an ice cube out of his glass and popped it into his mouth, crunching it loudly. “Delayed them, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know these ghouls as well as you do, so I can’t predict what they’re going to do next. I would have liked to take out more. That house, for instance. But situations being what they were…”

  “The kid,” Lara said.

  “Yeah. The kid.”

  “They’re using children,” Bonnie said, shaking her head. “It’s hard to believe they’ll stoop that low.”

  “It’s actually pretty smart,” Lara said. “Kids are impressionable. Adaptable, too.” She thought about Elise and Vera and how the two young girls had carried on despite everything they had been through. “You give them a job and they’ll glom to it. Especially if you make them think it’s the most important thing in the world. And by extension, they’re important for doing it.”

  “Yeah, well,” Keo said, “I still think I should have at least stolen the little tyke’s bicycle. That was a pretty sweet-looking ride.”

  *

  “There are plenty of rooms left to choose from if you don’t like the one I picked out for you,” Lara said when she was walking with Keo up Hallway A after dinner. “This is assuming you’re at least
staying the night.”

  “It’s a little too dark out there to be sailing, don’t you think?” Keo said.

  “I didn’t want to presume. You’ve already done more than enough to earn everything I promised you. We’re grateful. I’m grateful.”

  “Are you propositioning me?”

  “What?”

  He laughed. “I’m just messing with you, Lara.”

  “Oh.” Then, because she thought she had been blushing just a bit, “You’re anxious to get going.”

  “I made a promise, and I’m way overdue.”

  “She doesn’t know you’re trying to make your way over?”

  “No. We didn’t exactly plan to separate. It just came up at the last minute, so we didn’t put any kind of communications system into place, the way you have with your boyfriend. You guys are a lot smarter than us.”

  “We have our moments.”

  “But it’s not going to last, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Regardless of how many times you push them back, delay them, or repel a full-on frontal assault. You can’t do it forever. Sooner or later, if they want this island bad enough, they’ll get it. And when that happens, a lot of people will die.”

  She didn’t answer him because she knew he was right. She had spent countless days and hours thinking about it, trying to find a way out, a way that would keep them all alive. And each time she failed to see the answer. Always.

  They walked in silence for a moment, the only sounds coming from their footsteps against the hallway and the slight hum of the lightbulbs.

  “What would you do if you were in my position?” she finally asked.

  “The odds are against you,” he said with that matter-of-fact tone that annoyed her, but at the same time she found herself grateful for because it was the truth—or at least, as he saw it. “Even with the Army Rangers, you won’t be able to keep the island indefinitely. I understand why you don’t want to leave. The hotel, the power supply, the beach… Hell, I’d risk it just to have ice water every day, but that’s me. I’ve survived past my sell-by date even before the world went kaput. Bottom line? There’s no reason why you and the others can’t start again someplace else.”

  “Where would we go?”