The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

by Sam Sisavath

  “I’m not saying I do,” Danny said. “I’m just saying me not believing in God doesn’t preclude it from being God’s work.”

  “How could it be God’s work if you don’t believe in God?”

  “God is God. He doesn’t need me to believe in him for him to do what he does. If that were the case, he wouldn’t be God.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Danny shrugged. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Of course it does,” Will said.

  They lay still and watched more ghouls emerge from the Walmart. There had to be 500 now, maybe a thousand since the last time he had looked. Even through the night-vision binoculars, the creatures had become indistinguishable, like pebbles on a black beach covered in tar.

  “They look excited,” Danny said, peering through his own night-vision binoculars. “The gunshots have them all afluttered.”

  “Afluttered?”

  “Yeah, I’m sticking with that. Afluttered.”

  “I guess they do look afluttered,” Will said.

  “How do they communicate, you think?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of hive mind, maybe.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s just a thought. Remember at the Wilshire? The way they attacked and retreated. It’s like they were communicating without saying a word. They knew when to time their attacks and when to retreat when it wasn’t working. Like a hive mind.”

  “So you’re saying they’re like psychic undead creatures now?” Danny chuckled to himself.

  “Something like that,” Will said. “You asked.”

  “That’s almost crazy enough to be true.” Danny paused, then added, “Or you’re just crazy.”

  “That’s entirely possible, too.”

  They heard movement behind them, but neither one looked back. Will would have liked her to be quieter, but she was just a kid and didn’t know any better, even though she seemed more mature than girls her age. She was nineteen, but anyone with a “1” in front of their age was a kid to him.

  Carly crawled over on her belly until she was lying next to them. She had followed their lead and dressed in black clothes taken from the plentiful racks in the Archers. Her eyes went wide at the sight of the ghouls flooding out of the Walmart next to them, and she inhaled a sharp gasp of air.

  “Oh my God, how many of them are there?”

  “That’s about the last of them,” Danny said. “They’ve been coming out of there for the last ten minutes.”

  “I think I’m going to pee my pants.”

  “They can smell pee.”

  “Really?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Oh, nice,” she said.

  Carly, her sister Vera, and the big guy, Ted, had showed up earlier in the day, when he and Danny were still clearing out the two dozen or so ghouls asleep in the back of the Archers store. It was slow going because the creatures were spread out, but as soon as Will staked the first one, the rest came out of the shadows. They were lucky, because unlike the Walmart next door, the Archers had been relatively sparse of undead inhabitants.

  Will liked having the newcomers with them. He and Danny had been moving on pure adrenaline for the past two days, fighting to survive in the Wilshire Apartments, then moving from spot to spot afterwards. They had developed an idea of what to do, but hadn’t considered what to do after. The presence of civilians put things in perspective. He was already beginning to formulate a survival plan, one that went back to the first few weeks after he left the Army.

  Harold Campbell.

  I knew that name would come back sooner or later.

  He had chosen the Archers for a reason. They found everything they needed among the hunting gear and DIY equipment. With Ted’s help, they transported all the weapons and ammo from the squad car into the store, adding them to the existing stock supply of rifles, shotguns, and handguns that Archers carried. They already had more bullets than they needed, but they weren’t the right kind of bullets. It took half an hour, but they located all the supplies they needed to make the right kind.

  He was surprised how easily the newcomers accepted his and Danny’s story about the silver. Then again, he supposed once you’ve seen creatures that can’t possibly exist not only exist, but kill and turn others into more of them, the as-yet unidentified power of silver wasn’t all that far-fetched.

  Melting down the silver came first, and it required setting up a workbench in a back room with a window. Ted’s size came in handy, and soon he and Danny were adding the jewelry from Johan’s into the heated pot, watching it melt into liquid form. They didn’t need pure silver bullets—that would be a waste. If the crosses had taught them anything, enough silver did the job. So they added lead from the bullets they were replacing into the pot, creating a bigger pot from the combined materials.

  Will found everything he needed from the shelves to make their own bullet molds. They kept it simple, banging out just three types of molds—9mm for the Glocks, 5.56 x 45mm for the M4A1s, and buckshots for the shotgun shells. By the time he finished, Danny had brought over the first pot, and Will knocked out the first dozen bullets with a plastic mallet within the hour. Resizing, priming, then recasting the bullets came later, using more equipment already assembled from the shelves. Will set up a mini assembly line and was cranking out silver bullets by nightfall, with Danny eventually joining on the other set to push the production.

  By the time darkness crept up on them outside the store, they had enough bullets to load a half-dozen magazines, four clips for the M4A1s, and fifty shotgun shells. Ted swapped his .38 for one of the Glocks in the store, while Will and Danny loaded their M4A1s and four pump-action shotguns. They kept the silver crosses as insurance.

  Half of the parking lot was gray by the time they pushed heavy shelves and exercise equipment in front of the store’s front entrance. Like most Archers stores, this one had two sets of doors. The first consisted of an outer section with three doors—two along the sides and one larger one in the middle. They opened up into a waiting area, with benches and chairs along the walls. This interior section was about seven meters wide and slightly longer than three meters. At the other end of the waiting area were the inner doors. Both sets were made of glass and reinforced with a shatterproof film.

  Will was certain the ghouls would use the front doors, but just to be safe, they also reinforced the two back and side entrances with enough heavy objects that it would have been easier to break down the walls rather than go through the doors. Or at least, that was the idea.

  The exercise equipment—benches, weights, and bars—piled high up front was heavy, and it was going to be a bitch to move the next morning. But that was for next morning. Surviving the night was the priority.

  Lying on the rooftop now, he watched the ghouls moving impossibly quietly across the parking lot, vanishing one by one into the streets. The creatures had ignored the Archers completely, and Will started to doubt his own theory that the ghouls had a hive-like mind. If that was the case, wouldn’t they know what had happened to the other ghouls in the Archers earlier in the day? Or maybe things got lost in translation in the daytime, when they were asleep? If it was the latter, then they were lucky. If not…

  He turned to Danny and Carly. “Time to go, kids. Pack up your toys.”

  They crawled backwards almost two meters, then got up and ran, hunched over, through the rooftop door. Inside, he and Danny made sure the steel door was locked, then followed Carly down to the store below. There was only one entrance onto the rooftop, making defending it easier if the ghouls decided to climb the walls and give the Archers more than a cursory look. They hadn’t done that so far, but better safe than sorry.

  They had made base near the back of the store, using battery-operated lamps and sleeping in camping gear. The lamps were the only sources of light in the entire store, far enough from the front windows to be undetectable. Will found Ted listening for noise from a portable radio he had brought with him
, while Vera had her face buried in one of her coloring books, using light from one of the lamps to work. The girl had a bag full of coloring books and crayons.

  “Anything?” he asked Ted.

  Ted shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “There’s never anything,” Carly said with a smile.

  “Gotta try, keep optimistic, right?” Ted said, smiling back at her. Will figured it was an inside joke between the two of them.

  He nodded at Ted. “Get some sleep. Danny and I will keep watch.”

  “If you wake me, I can relieve you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Carly sat down on her sleeping bag next to Vera’s. “So what’s the plan? Keep low and quiet, and hope they don’t notice us?”

  “That’s basically it.”

  “Kind of a lame plan.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a plan.”

  “Wake me up at midnight,” Danny said and slipped into his sleeping bed and closed his eyes.

  “Everyone get some sleep,” Will said. “God knows we all need some after last night.”

  Vera looked up and gave him a thumbs up. The girl didn’t talk much.

  He headed toward the front of the store, unslinging the M4A1 as he went. The rifle was now equipped with silver bullets and a night-vision sight he liberated from one of the shelves. It was a ridiculously expensive piece of equipment he would have loved to have in Afghanistan, but Uncle Sam would never have shelled out that kind of money.

  Shadows moved across the front glass doors as he arrived. Too many. Way too many. They could fire every single bullet and they wouldn’t make a dent in the enemy’s numbers.

  Stay quiet. Survive. Come up with a plan tomorrow.

  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  He took out some granola bars and bit into one. It wasn’t bad, but he doubted the health claims on the packet. Two or three were enough to fill him up, and there was plenty of water in refrigerators around the store. Warm, yeah, but water was water. He took a sip of some generic energy drink. Like drinking warm piss.

  He glanced at his watch, the digits glowing in the darkness. 7:15 p.m.

  He was thinking about Harold Campbell again when he heard movement behind him. He didn’t have to turn his head to know who it was. Women smelled differently than men—better, even when they hadn’t taken a shower in a few days.

  Carly sat down next to him and took out a bag of Doritos. He flinched. The sounds of her crunching in the pitch darkness were like gunshots. “Want one?”

  He held up the remaining half of his nutrition bar.

  “How’s the taste?” she asked.

  “Like week-old grass.”

  “Yum.” She emptied the Doritos bag, crumpled it up, then tossed it into a nearby trashcan. She brought out a box of Pringles from somewhere and offered it to him. “Don’t be shy.”

  “How’s the taste?”

  “Definitely not like week-old grass.”

  “I’ll pass for now.”

  “Your loss.” She popped them into her mouth. More gunshots in the darkness. “By the way, thanks for not shooting us.”

  He smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  “We weren’t sure. Ted and me. We took a really big risk looking for you guys. I heard you driving past our building earlier in the day.” She explained to him why she hadn’t tried to flag him down.

  “We wouldn’t have heard you anyway,” Will said. “The siren was too loud.”

  “I figured.” She shook out another handful of Pringles. “I’ve been meaning to ask…”

  “The silver?”

  “Yeah. How did you and Danny know about it?”

  He told her about their last stand in the Wilshire Apartments, and the discovery of the silver, left behind by the former tenants of Apartment 1009.

  “A cross, huh?” she said. “I guess it’s true what they say. God works in mysterious ways. You think he has something to do with it?”

  “He?”

  She pointed up at the ceiling. “You know, he.”

  “I was raised agnostic, so I guess sure, it’s possible.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “I’ve seen too much.”

  “Danny said you guys were in Afghanistan together.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He took out the cross from the sheath he once used for his combat knife. It didn’t really look like a cross anymore. He had sanded down the two long sides to make them resemble the guard on a knife, and honed the sides into a double-edge blade. Plastic wrapped around everything past the guard to make the handle easier to grip.

  She took it with reverence and gripped the handle as if she were holding a small sword. “I don’t know how you didn’t instantaneously convert after discovering something like this. I’d have been on my knees.”

  He smiled at the imagery. “How long have you been taking care of your little sister?”

  “Oh my God, I don’t remember. It’s been a while. Our mom…she tries, you know, but it’s hard for her. She’s on social security disability. Not that you could tell there’s anything wrong with her. I think she got some scumbag lawyer to do some papers for her, and now she’s living off the government. Yes, you’re looking at someone who has been sucking on the government teat most of her life.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Like I said…”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ve been taking care of Vera since she could walk. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s very smart. Way smarter than me at her age, anyway.”

  “She likes her coloring books.”

  “That’s like saying air is good for you. She goes through them like her life is at stake, but only when she knows I have the money to buy her new ones. She can sense if I’m running low, then she makes them last.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “Yup.” She paused for a moment. “Hey.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You think we would date if we weren’t surrounded by blood-sucking creatures from the deepest bowels of hell?”

  Will grinned. Another great use of imagery. “Sure, why not.”

  “Gee, try to put a little enthusiasm into it, jerk.” She took another chip from the can. She didn’t say anything for a while, and he listened to her chewing in the darkness.

  Still too loud…

  “You married?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Ever been married?”

  “Nope.”

  “You like girls, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Weird that you’ve never been married. What are you, thirty?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “No girl ever snatched you up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me guess. You’re a player.”

  Another fine image. It was also the first time someone had ever called him that. “No. I’ve just never met the right woman.”

  “Gonna be difficult now.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?”

  “What are the chances we’re going to live through the week?”

  “They’re not great.”

  “Couldn’t you at least sugarcoat it a bit?”

  “Sorry. I meant to say, they’re pretty good.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not really.”

  “God, you suck.” She held out the Pringles can again. “Chips?”

  “Sure.”

  He took one. Sour cream exploded against his taste buds. Not half bad, as it turned out.

  “What’s that French word about seizing the day?” she asked.

  “Carpe diem. And it’s actually Latin.”

  “I knew it had to be one of the two. So what I’m saying is, you think Danny’s into me?”

  He smiled again. Somehow he knew that question was coming. “Are you in
terested?”

  “He’s cute.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “That’s a yes.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s into you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You want me to pass him a note? I’ll pretend I need to talk to him after class, get him alone in the hallway, then slip it to him. Just like that. No one will notice.”

  “You’re such an asshole,” she said and punched him in the shoulder.

  She sat with him for another hour, asking him questions about Danny. By eight-thirty he was alone in the darkness again, finishing off her box of Pringles. Sour cream. Who would have thunk it.

  Around midnight, Danny tapped him on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going.”

  Danny laid his M4A1 on the cold tiled floor and adjusted his night-vision goggles. He scanned the front windows and parking lot beyond. “We good?”

  “Peachy.” Will got up to leave. “By the way…”

  “What?”

  “The girl. Carly. She’s into you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be the new deodorant,” Danny said.

  “You wearing new deodorant?”

  “Yeah. It’s called sweat and hard work. You want me to bottle it so you can enjoy the benefits, too?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Your loss.”

  Will jogged back to the sleeping bags, expecting to hear gunfire by the time he reached the makeshift camp. He didn’t.

  The others were asleep, Ted snoring loudly in his bedroll. Vera had abandoned hers and was sleeping with Carly, whose hands were wrapped protectively around her little sister.

  Will lay down and waited to hear those gunshots he had been expecting from the front of the store. He drifted off to sleep around one in the morning, and woke to sunlight in his eyes and the sound of Danny and Carly flirting nearby.

  He rolled over and went back to sleep for another hour.

  CHAPTER 15

  KATE

  KATE AND LUKE emerged from the pawnshop in the morning. Luke stretched and yawned next to her, making noises she hadn’t heard before. She had finally given in to sleep at around three in the morning, though Luke had drifted off an hour before that.

  She emptied a bottle of water over her head and drank the remainder in the sunlight. She was amazed by the little things she had begun to miss—like cold water straight from the fridge, showers, clothing that didn’t smell…