The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival (Purge of Babylon, Book 1)

by Sam Sisavath

  She was putting away syringes when she heard a knock behind her. She looked back to see Will in the doorway. “I was hoping you might have something for this,” he said, holding up his right hand, though he could easily have held up his left since they both were covered in fresh bandages.

  She waved him over to a swivel chair near a counter. “I need to see,” she said.

  He held out his hands for her to unwind the bandages. It must have looked worse this morning, when the burns were at their reddest. They were second-degree burns, with the first and second layer of skin damaged, but that looked to be the full extent of it.

  Will looked around the room. “How does a third-year medical student know where everything goes in an infirmary?”

  “I spent most of my weekends for the last two years working at free clinics around town. I learned a lot, but it might also explain why I had trouble holding on to a boyfriend.”

  “Their loss.”

  She blushed and instantly looked over to see if he noticed. He was looking somewhere else, thank God.

  “You got lucky,” she said.

  “Did I?”

  “First and second layer skin burns, but there won’t be any permanent tissue damage. You’ll get blisters later, and the skin will keep getting redder. Not to mention the severe pain and swelling.”

  “But the question is—will I ever play the piano again?”

  “It’s going to hurt a lot, Will.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Tough guy, huh?”

  “I once walked across the street without glancing both ways.”

  “Jaywalking. Nice.” She nodded at the sink. “You’ll have to soak it for a while.”

  She let cool water run into the sink. While he soaked his hands, she searched for sterilized gauze bandages, avoiding the fluffy cotton ones.

  “Where’s your hand?” he asked.

  “In the fridge,” she said, nodding to a big freezer in the corner.

  “Are you trying to freeze it to death?”

  “After I went through all the trouble of digging it out of the rubble and bringing it here? No way. When I have time, I’ll bring it out again.” She nodded. “Okay.”

  He pulled his hands out of the water, and she wrapped the bandages around them. She kept a close watch for any signs of discomfort or pain, but he looked calmly back at her with his light brown eyes. His hair was a mess and he was growing a thick stubble. He looked tired, but then he always looked tired in the couple of days she knew him.

  “When was the last time you shaved?” she asked.

  “A week ago?” He rubbed one of his bandaged hands underneath his chin. “I should ask Ben if he has a razor.”

  “I’m sure there’s plenty lying around. Carly told me there’s even a gym here somewhere.”

  “It’s in Quarters.”

  “That’s the living area, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What do you call this area we’re in?”

  “Operations.”

  “That all sounds very military-ish.”

  “Harold Campbell fancied himself as being very military-ish.”

  “Can you flex your hands for me?”

  He held up his hands and made fists with them. “They’re good, but I guess I won’t be using that gym for a while.”

  “Let them heal a bit first. At least a week. But for now, how’s the pain?”

  “It was worse earlier, but it’s manageable now.”

  “Is that you being a gung-ho soldier who thinks he has to constantly keep up appearances, or are you being honest with me, Will?”

  “The latter.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Probably.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Tough guy. But just in case, I’ll give you something for the pain. There are whole buckets of pills for almost every conceivable ailment in the world on these shelves. You said this Harold Campbell guy was paranoid?”

  “And then some.”

  “He apparently also believed in being absolutely prepared for everything.”

  “When you’re rich and paranoid, you can afford to indulge in your hypochondria.”

  “Lucky us. I’ll give you some acetaminophen to start with, but if the pain is still too much, we can go stronger. If it starts to swell and ooze pus, we might be looking at an infection. Otherwise, besides some discoloring around the area, you should heal up fine in a few weeks.”

  “So, about that piano…”

  “I thought jokes were Danny’s area.”

  “He’s rubbing off on me.”

  “Not very well, I see.”

  “He’s a lousy teacher.”

  She finished wrapping and brought out the pills, dropping them into two small, empty bottles. Will pocketed them.

  “You’re not going to take one now?” she asked.

  “Maybe later.”

  “Where’s Danny? I should replace his bandages, too.”

  “He’ll come around later tonight. You’ll still be here, right?”

  “And leave this absolutely wondrous place of hardened concrete, surrounded by undead ghouls on the outside? Perish the thought.”

  They exchanged a brief smile, then she watched him walk to the door.

  “Will?”

  He stopped and looked back. “Yeah?”

  “You need to get some rest, okay? Go to sleep. Third-year medical student’s orders.”

  “Aye aye, doctor!” He saluted and left.

  *

  Danny appeared two hours later. “I was told you wanted to see if I could still play the piano?”

  “Will already used that one,” she said.

  “Sonofabitch, he’s stealing my jokes now?”

  “Get in here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She cleaned his wounds and wrapped them back up, giving him the same pills she had given Will and delivering the same diagnosis, then finishing with, “Just keep an eye on them. If they start to itch too much or you see pus, come back immediately.”

  “Will do, Doc.”

  “You don’t have to call me Doc.”

  “Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be able to use my ‘What’s up, Doc?’ in my best Bugs Bunny voice every time I come over.”

  “Of course, what was I thinking.”

  “There you go. Hey, wanna hear a joke about a second-year medical student and the medical examiner?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll love it. There’s originally a dead body in there somewhere but I’ll take it out just for you.”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Danny.”

  “Come on, I promise you’ll totally dig it.”

  She picked up a scalpel and playfully waved it in front of his face. “No!”

  He laughed and hopped off the seat. “You’re no fun.” He headed for the door. “Thanks for the pills, Doc. You said only one bottle a day, right?”

  “Only if you don’t want to ever wake up again.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  After he left, she went back to cataloging all the medicine she had found hidden away in bags and boxes and bottles. It was a miracle no one had raided the place for drugs before, although she could see signs that people had looked around. It helped that most of the medicine wasn’t labeled for the layman. Harold Campbell had probably expected to have a medical professional down here with him.

  She was putting away the IV bags when she heard a noise. She stopped and listened, and it didn’t take very long to trace the sound to its source.

  She walked across the room toward the huge, silver chrome freezer, the size of a small closet. It had three sections, each with its own pullout drawer. She went straight to the bottom one and pulled it out, looked in at the backpack with the hand inside.

  Then the fingers strained against the backpack’s fabrics and tried to climb over the side of the drawer, carrying the backpack with it.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She
picked up the backpack by the strap and flung it viciously into the side of the fridge. The backpack was half-frozen and she almost expected it to break into little chunks upon impact, the hand inside right along with it.

  But it didn’t. Instead, it went slack, and she held it in front of her and waited. She felt a slight movement, but nothing aggressive.

  “Good. You’re learning. I don’t want to have this talk again.”

  *

  She fell asleep with her forehead resting on the laptop’s keyboard and woke up panicked. It took her a moment to calm down, to remind herself that she was underground, in the facility, and safe.

  Safe…

  It was such an odd concept, and seemed…wrong somehow. She hadn’t felt safe in a long time. Not in Houston when it all began, not even during those days leaving the city with Tony. Then the Sundays entered her life and threatened to choke it out of her. Finding Will and the others was a godsend. Then this underground facility of Harold Campbell’s.

  Safe…

  She was safe down here. Or as safe as she was ever going to get these days. The concrete walls were cold and gray and monotonous, but they kept out the undead things outside. No, not outside. Topside.

  Up there.

  What were they doing up there right now? Searching for her and Will and the others, probably. Maybe even the same ghouls that attacked them at the bank, led by the blue-eyed ghoul.

  She believed Will when he told her he had seen a ghoul with blue eyes outside the bank. He wouldn’t lie about something like that. There was no point. Nothing to gain. And in the short time she knew him, he had proven to be trustworthy.

  She yawned, stretching on the stool. When was the last time she had actually gone to sleep in a bed without worrying about surviving the night?

  She turned the laptop off and made sure the hand was still in the freezer before she left the Infirmary. Not that she thought the hand could possibly open the drawer from the inside while still trapped inside the backpack. That was an absurd notion, wasn’t it? Still, spending the extra few seconds to make sure cost her nothing.

  What was that Will said about the ghouls? “Dead, not stupid. Just keep that in mind and act accordingly.”

  Good advice.

  It was quiet in the hallway, but she heard voices from the Cafeteria as she walked by. She considered stopping in to say hi, introduce herself, but she was tired. Too tired. The last month was finally overcoming her, threatening to crush her under its weight.

  She fell on her small, uncomfortable cot inside her room and went straight to sleep.

  *

  She woke up sometime in the middle of the night, in the darkness, and for a moment struggled to breathe. Then she remembered she was still safe, still underground in the facility, and she was able to catch her breath again.

  She lay back down on the small cot and willed her heartbeat to slow.

  Slowly, slowly…

  She tried to go back to sleep, but that proved fruitless after an hour of lying in the darkness staring up at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the turbine engine through the walls, the floor, in the tips of her fingers. She wondered how long it would take before she got used to the sound.

  She finally surrendered, climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to wander the hallways.

  *

  Lara found the Gym near the back of the Quarters area. It was a large room, big enough for a decent track that looped all the way around and a boxing ring in the center. There were treadmills, bicycle machines, and mats stacked high in one corner, though none of the machines looked as if they had gotten much use in recent weeks. The place smelled of disinterest, and didn’t have that strong odor of sweat and exhaustion that usually accompanied every gym she had ever been to.

  She warmed up, then tried walking on one of the treadmills for a few minutes, more into the idea of doing something than actually working up a sweat. After a while, the quiet in the Gym began to get to her, and she cleaned up and found herself back in the hallways.

  Voices came from the Cafeteria as she neared it. She listened for a bit but didn’t hear anyone she recognized, so she kept going. Eventually she would have to get to know everyone in the facility, but that was for later.

  She walked the hallways listlessly, with no real destination. She pressed her hand against the wall and felt the slight vibrations. The sound of the turbine, vibrating through every inch of the facility, was slightly hypnotic. Could she go to sleep touching the wall? She’d have to try it out.

  Somehow, she ended up back in the Operations area. She thought she would eventually end back up in the Infirmary—she was comfortable there, and there were a couple of beds in the corner…

  But on the way she got sidetracked by a steel door—all the doors in Operations were reinforced steel—marked Green Room. The door was open, and bright lights flooded out into the hallway. The facility’s halogen lights were already bright, but the light coming out of the room was on another level entirely.

  Curiosity got the better of her, and she entered, immediately overwhelmed by the size.

  It was almost half as big as a football field and just as wide, and she found herself standing in front of rows and rows of plants growing in large troughs, each at least two yards wide and over thirty long. Vegetables, fruits, and plants whose names she didn’t know were growing in their own little parts of the room.

  Industrial-sized lamps hung from the rafters directly above the troughs, and their light was so bright she had to blink every few seconds. There had to be over two dozen, enough to illuminate every one of the troughs. Interspersed among them were smaller halogen lights, the kind that dotted the rest of the facility’s ceiling.

  A woman in her fifties, crouching next to one of the troughs near the center of the room, looked over and smiled knowingly. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  She looked grandmotherly, with luxurious white hair and soft, patient gray eyes. Dirt and soot spotted her clothes, and she was running a silver trowel through the trough.

  “You, too?” Lara asked.

  “I don’t usually clock out until midnight,” the woman said. “Then it’s back up around six. I guess I don’t need as much sleep as I used to. So I come here, do a little tinkering. The name’s Rose.”

  “Lara.”

  “Looking for a little late night snack, Lara?”

  “I was just walking around…”

  “Ah. That old thing.” Rose gave her a compassionate smile. “It’s this place. It’s hard to get used to it at first. You’re thinking about them, up there scampering about right now.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  “It takes time,” Rose said. “You have to first accept that this place is safe before you can allow yourself to close your eyes and stay asleep. It was the same with me. It’s the same with everyone, I suspect.”

  “But it happens? Eventually?”

  “Yes, eventually.”

  Lara walked around the room. Carrots, peas, and stalks of corn grew along one trough. There were other vegetables and maybe some fruits that were mysteries to her. Some grew as high as the ceiling, wrapped around sticks that had been stuck into the soft dirt for that purpose. Where did they get all the dirt?

  Lara said, “It’s bright in here.”

  “Only at first, but you get used to that, too.”

  She glanced up at the lamps above them. She couldn’t imagine ever getting used to that level of brightness. “What kind of lights are those?”

  “Special ultraviolet lights. Or so they tell me. I don’t really know, to be honest with you. They’re supposed to mimic the sun, I guess. I didn’t even know they existed until I came down here. I used to rely on the sun itself, but hard to do that nowadays.”

  “Do they work?”

  “Proof is in the pudding, as they say. We turn them on for just half the day. They’re quite the resource hog, I’m told.” Rose bent and twisted something free. “Here, catch.”

  She stuck out her hand, and the o
bject miraculously landed in her palm. It was beets. Brown and slightly reddish, about the size of a walnut.

  “Not nearly as big as I had hoped,” Rose said. “But I guess they’ll do for now. Maybe the next batch will come out better.”

  “Do you take care of this room by yourself? It’s massive.”

  “Yes, it certainly is. Much, much bigger than my garden back home. But I have a couple of helpers—asleep at the moment, I’m sure. I suspect it was either this or wander around the place bored out of their minds. Or they could always go up top, and we all know what’s going on up there. You came with the others earlier today.”

  Lara nodded.

  “We’re glad to have you. Always nice to have some new blood.” Then, with a crooked smile, she added, “So to speak.”

  Lara smiled. “What did you do before all of this?”

  “I was a librarian. Before that, I was a schoolteacher. And before that, housewife. All in that order. Though most of my time was spent in my garden doing exactly this. I wouldn’t be here if not for Ben. God bless him.”

  “Is everyone down here from Starch?”

  “Yes, most of us have lived in Starch all our lives and have known each other since we were young children. It’s the end of the world, and we find ourselves down here. Still with the same people we’ve known for most of our lives.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

  “It could be worse, as they say. You’ve lost people, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  She thought about her parents. About her disapproving mother. Her gentle, overly approving father, who showered her with affection mostly to compensate for her mother’s lack of it. She thought about Tony, who kept her alive in those early days. About Tracy, her roommate… God knows what had happened to her.

  “We all have,” Rose said.

  “Your husband?” Lara asked.

  “He passed away a few years ago. Thank God. I don’t know what I would do if he suddenly came back and… Well, you know.”

  She nodded. She knew pretty well. They all did.

  “You planted all of this? In less a month?” she asked.

  “Oh gosh, no,” Rose said, amused by the idea. “They were already growing. This Harold Campbell had them planted long before we got here. This room was a big mess then, but we’ve straightened it out.”