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

by Sam Sisavath

  “It must have been a lot of work.”

  “It was, but idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say.”

  Lara spent the next few hours with Rose in the Green Room, listening to her stories, watching her work diligently on one trough, then another. She seemed to have twice as much energy as Lara did despite their age difference and wasn’t the least bit bothered by the bright UV lamps above them. Or maybe, like Rose had said, she was just used to them.

  Lara found the UV lamps too bright, and they stung her eyes unless she shielded them with her hands. After a while, Rose took pity on her and found a straw hat in a closet. Lara put it on and instantly felt relief.

  After that, the lamps became an afterthought, though they never really left Lara’s mind completely…

  CHAPTER 31

  WILL

  They had to get more silver. That was the most important thing. That meant runs on the surface for Will and Danny to look for the precious metal, while at the same time looking for supplies to stuff the facility’s coffers.

  But the silver was always priority, and Ben agreed.

  Will found locating a ghoul was now much harder. It was more difficult to know if there were creatures inside a place regardless of whether there were coverings over the windows or not. They were constantly adapting, constantly changing their modus operandi.

  Dead, not stupid.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of silver to be found in Starch, Texas, though they built up enough of a reserve of silverware, jewelry, and everyday home items to start making more ammo. After their encounter at the bank, he decided the shotgun shells were more valuable, and they concentrated the bulk of their silver production on that. Ben deferred to his experience.

  Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Before they knew it, winter had come and gone, and spring had arrived. Christmas, once on every adult’s mind and every kid’s lips, passed without any recognition. The leaves changed colors, as did the grass in the clearing. The only people who noticed were the ones who went topside with Danny and him. Life in the facility moved on, one day identical to the previous.

  Will saw Kate intermittently, though not for lack of trying. She had stopped responding to his visits, and she seemed to be purposefully timing her comings and goings to avoid him. Eventually, Carly became his only contact with Kate. She still opened the door for Carly, though even that was becoming rare. Kate didn’t just avoid him; she avoided all of them, and had begun to take her food back to her room.

  Those were just some of the many troubling signs that he was losing her. Not that he felt he owned her, but they had something once, and he was hesitant to let it go without a fight. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to believe it was a one-sided affair.

  All of it crystallized one day, almost three months after they arrived at the facility, when Carly sat down across from him in the Cafeteria, where he was catching a quick bite. The rest of the big room was empty. Not a surprise, given that no one had set timetables and people regularly came and went as needed. The facility had no clocks to punch, no work schedule written in stone, and though everyone had their own contributions to make, only the Turbine Room really required 24-7 supervision.

  Harold Campbell had the Cafeteria fully stocked with crates of bagged prepackaged meals called Meals Ready to Eat, as well as Number 10 metal cans, each one the size of a gallon of paint and filled with food designed for a long shelf life. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner involved a process of mixing and matching salads and vegetables from the Green Room with canned food, though he, Danny, and Ben usually settled for MREs when they could, having grown used to them from their Army days.

  Carly looked across the table at him now, watching him pick at mashed potatoes and slabs of slightly hardened and overly salty turkey from a recently procured bag of MRE.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “I’m worried,” Carly said.

  “That bad?”

  “I don’t think she’s eating anymore. I tried bringing her food, but she just stares at it and then goes back to writing in her journal.”

  “She’s keeping a journal?”

  “She started about a week ago. Have you tried talking to her again?”

  “She won’t answer the door.”

  “Oh.” Carly frowned. “I didn’t know it had gotten that bad between you two.”

  “I think she’s avoiding me.”

  “She barely talks to me, Will. Most of the time I sit there talking and she just listens. Honestly, sometimes I don’t think she’s even listening. Whenever I get up to leave, I think she’s relieved. It’s not exactly fun times in there for me, you know. It hasn’t been for a while.”

  “Don’t give up on her, Carly. You’re the only person she’s even talking to anymore.”

  “I have Vera and Danny… I can’t keep devoting twenty-four hours of the day to making sure she doesn’t slit her wrists.”

  He gave her an alarmed look. “Are you saying she might do that?”

  “I don’t know, Will.” She let out a heavy sigh. “It’s hard to know what’s going on with her when she won’t talk to me. I mean, really talk to me.”

  Carly looked tired, the teenage girl from Houston almost completely gone now, replaced by a woman. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Carly had always been a woman. He just never noticed.

  “It’s not the same Kate we left Houston with,” Carly said. “You know that, right? Losing Ted and Luke, but especially Luke… I don’t know, Will, I think we might have lost her back at the bank.”

  He nodded. He saw Kate change that night, when the ghouls poured into the bank. The way she stood in the middle of the room, disoriented and confused. Ted’s death had paralyzed her, and Luke’s death crushed her spirit.

  “Have you eaten yet?” he asked Carly.

  She gave him a wry smile. “How’s the food?”

  “It’s great.”

  “Really?”

  “It kind of tastes like day-old bread and newspaper. Cheap newspaper that’s been used to wrap week-old fish.”

  “Yum,” Carly said.

  *

  The conversation with Carly about Kate bothered Will and lingered with him for the next few days. It took Lara and that undead hand of hers to break the spell.

  “You got a minute?” she asked him through his radio.

  Ben had assigned them all radios to keep in contact, though not everyone made use of them. Kate had one, too, but he didn’t think she ever actually turned it on.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I have something I want to show you.”

  “Where?”

  “Infirmary.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  When he got to the Infirmary, he found her at an examining table looking at the ghoul hand. Or at least, what was left of it. He knocked on the door to announce himself.

  She smiled at him over her shoulder. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Sure.”

  He hadn’t realized how blue her eyes were—crystal blue—and how well they complemented the shape of her face. Was she always this attractive? For some reason he hadn’t noticed she was no longer the girl from the Sundays’ cabin, in the filthy dress, with the wild, terrified eyes.

  He forced himself not to stare. “What’s up?”

  Lara had dissected the hand into little chunks, with all five fingers sliced off at the second joint. The hand itself was tied onto a wooden block with a rope around what was left of the wrist and fingers. As he approached it, the remainder of the hand moved slightly underneath the rope.

  “Aw geez,” Will said, looking down at the thing.

  Lara had sliced the hand open then sewed it back up numerous times, so that sewing thread crisscrossed the hand from end to end. It still looked lively, straining against the restraints as if sensing his presence.

  “Jesus, Lara, should I be worried?”

  “I told you, I wanted to do some tests. So I’ve been doing some tests. Don’
t worry, it doesn’t seem to mind regardless of how many times I cut it up and sew it back together. It just keeps on ticking like the Energizer Bunny.”

  “You’ve been doing this by yourself?” he asked, alarmed.

  “Of course not,” she said, looking slightly annoyed. “We agreed, remember? I always had someone here with me whenever I worked on it. Danny, Carly, Ben, some of the other guys.”

  “What did Ben have to say about this?”

  “He was…squeamish about it at first. But he got over it. Mostly.”

  She looked at home here, surrounded by patient beds and medicine, wearing the white doctor’s coat. The handful of times he had seen her over the last three months involved follow-up visits to treat the burns on his hands and evening meals in the Cafeteria. She was always busy, Ben’s people eagerly embracing her as their doctor, third-year medical student qualifications or not. As Ben said at one point, her three years were still three years more than all of them had combined.

  “So, I’m here,” he said. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Watch this.”

  She picked up a scalpel and stabbed it into one of the fingers lying motionless on the wooden board, then held it up to him like some kind of trophy.

  “Well, that’s never happened before,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We haven’t done anything yet, and you’re already giving me the finger.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

  He grinned, pleased with himself. “I thought so.”

  She ignored him and pushed on. “What’s the difference between this finger and this hand?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “At least think about it, Will.”

  He did. “The hand is still alive?”

  “Exactly. But this finger was still alive, too, until it wasn’t anymore. You know why it died? I mean, died again? Blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “After I cut it off at the hand, it still had blood, but eventually, with the open wound, it bled out. Once it bled out…once the blood left the finger, it died. Again. Do you see?”

  “Not really. People can’t survive without blood either, Lara. What’s your point?”

  “That’s true. But your hand wouldn’t still be moving if I cut it off. In fact, it would instantly become just a lump of meat sans the rest of your body. But this thing”—she looked back at the hand roped against the board—“continued to survive. Thrived, even.”

  “Then why didn’t the fingers live? I mean, not live, but not die. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  She smiled. “I know what you mean. It’s the blood. With enough blood, pieces of the ghoul can keep surviving. Deny it blood, and it shrinks and ceases to be.”

  She put the scalpel down, then picked up another one. She held it to her palm and made a small incision.

  Will almost tackled her, but she quickly held up her other hand, “Wait, watch.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Just watch for a sec.”

  She held her left palm over the ghoul finger she had stabbed with the first scalpel. She squeezed her palm, putting pressure near the small incision, and a drop of blood fell and landed on the side of the finger. The blood seemed to move along the length of the finger before it was absorbed into the skin.

  “Oh, man,” Will groaned.

  “Watch what happens next,” she said, shushing him.

  The finger on the board started to move. A small twitch at first, but then it became more active and was moving against the scalpel holding it down. She quickly grabbed the scalpel and lifted it into the air. The finger continued wiggling against the sharp point, trying to escape.

  He could only stare, unable to find any words.

  “Do you see?” she said. “It’s only alive as long as it has fresh blood to sustain it. Blood reanimates it, Will. But you take it out again…”

  She held the finger so that the severed end faced the board, and thin trickles of blood began dripping out. The blood wasn’t red anymore—it was a thick, clumpy black ooze, the kind that poured out of ghouls when they bled.

  After a dozen of the black drops had left it, the finger stopped moving, then went still.

  “That’s disgusting,” he said. “But what does it mean?”

  “They change us at cellular level, Will. We’re talking DNA. They’re literally rewriting our DNA. They take what we are, infect us with their own blood, make us into something else. Them. This…is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. It’s like some kind of super virus. But whatever changes they make, it destroys the body’s ability to replenish blood, so they need a constant supply once they’ve used up what they have—or acquired, for lack of a better word. Once they’re out of blood, they’re dead. Or, you know, dead again, again.”

  “What about the hand?”

  “It has some blood left. It’s conserving, that’s why it’s moving so slowly. Once all the blood leaves it, it’ll die, too. You can see how weak it’s already become. When I put it in the freezer, the blood congealed, and it prolonged the hand’s lifespan. It’s losing strength. Pretty soon, it’ll dry up and die. I mean, again.”

  “What about the silver?”

  “What about silver?”

  “Why does silver do what it does to them?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I guess I could study up on that. But it’s funny. They can sense it, you know. The silver.”

  “Sense it?”

  “Yeah. Watch.” She walked to the counter and came back with a silver bullet in her palm. “Watch closely,” she said and brought the bullet toward the hand. As she neared it, the hand started to move, struggling against the rope holding it. When she stopped, the hand stopped. “How does it know the silver is getting closer?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. You’re the doctor, doctor.”

  “It senses it,” she said.

  “Senses it,” he repeated. “Like a sixth sense?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Does it see ghosts, too?”

  “What?”

  “You know, like that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “The one about the kid who can see ghosts. Bruce Willis is really dead. That movie.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t watch a lot of movies. Between school, the free clinic on weekends, and a part-time job, I’m lucky if I get to even see my TV when I’m at home, much less actually watch it.”

  “Never mind.” He nodded at the hand. “So, what does all this mean? About the blood?”

  “They’re feeding on us,” Lara said. She returned the bullet to the counter. “They need us to survive. Once we’re gone, who knows what they’ll do for sustenance? They can’t attack and feed on each other. They’ve already altered the composition of the blood they ingested. I guess they can always feed on the animals, but those aren’t going to last, either.”

  “But they could survive on the animals.”

  “I don’t see why not. It’s probably just a matter of, well, tastes. But I could be wrong. I’m just guessing here. I’d love to get my hands on some medical textbooks. Rose, from the Green Room, used to work at a library in town. One of these days I’d love to raid it for books. You think we could do that?”

  He nodded. “We have a surface run coming up in two days. We could probably swing by the library.”

  “Great. I’ll start making a list of books I’ll want to grab.”

  “Maybe you should add some nail files and clippers, too.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Your nails, Lara.”

  She held up her hands and stared at the dirt underneath her nails. She had meant to clean them earlier but was too excited to show Will the finger. Thank God she hadn’t had any patients yet today.

  “Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to play with dirt?”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rose in the Green Room.” She walked to the sink and washe
d her hands with soap, working up a thick lather. “It’s serene in there. It’s funny, because I was never much of a nature person. But in there, even with those bright UV lights…” She smiled. “It’s soothing.”

  She grabbed some paper towels and dried her hands.

  “So,” Will said. “Everything you’ve shown me is fascinating, but how does it help us?”

  The question seemed to stump her. “I have no idea.”

  “No idea?”

  “No idea,” she repeated.

  “So you’ve spent the last three months on this, and you have no idea how any of it will be useful?”

  “I wouldn’t say three months. I’ve only been working on it on and off. This facility may be a Godsend, but it didn’t stop people from getting sick or hurt. I’ve poked and prodded it when I could, but there were always other things.”

  He smiled. “Like Rose and the Green Room?”

  “I told you, it’s serene in there. And Rose reminds me of my grandmother.”

  “I can see that.”

  “So this doesn’t impress you at all?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s all pretty fascinating. I guess I was just hoping you were going to tell me an easier way to kill them.”

  “Sorry.” She wrinkled her nose and actually looked a little embarrassed. A strand of blonde hair fell over her eyes and she blew at it.

  He smiled.

  She saw him and said, “What?”

  Crap.

  “Hmm?” he said, trying to play it off.

  “You smiled.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was just thinking about a joke Danny told me this morning…”

  “Yeah? Let’s hear it.”

  “Maybe later…”

  She didn’t look convinced. “I think you’re lying.”

  “No, really—”

  He was saved by a loud squawk from the radio clipped to his hip.

  “Saved by the radio,” she said.

  Ben’s voice came through: “Will, if you got a minute, head over to the Control Room.”

  He unsnapped his radio and pressed the lever. “What’s going on?”

  “Come see for yourself. And oh, swing by the Infirmary and grab Lara, too.”