by Sam Sisavath
Without the turbine constantly turning in the background, the only sounds were their heavy breathing, footsteps, and the air conditioner cranking out the heat, powered by the emergency generators.
Inside the Armory, he and Danny rearmed themselves with new Remington shotguns and refilled their ammo pouches with silver ammo. It may have been daylight outside, but the facility had plenty of dark spots where sunlight couldn’t touch. Every single room held a potential nest. Deep in his mind, he considered that the evacuation by the ghouls could have been a feint. Send most of the foot soldiers home, and leave a few behind as a surprise.
Dead, not stupid…
Both Carly and Lara rearmed with Glocks, loading magazines with silver bullets, while the girls looked on in the background. The new kid, Elise, was handling it well. Maybe it was Vera’s presence. The two of them looked joined at the hip.
“What’s the plan?” Danny asked.
“Clear out the rooms, then take tally of the damages.”
“Are we staying here?” Carly asked.
“For now,” Will nodded. “We still have power and weapons and food. Until we find a better place, this is still our best bet. Even if the power goes, we still have the Door. Of course, opening it is another matter without the power, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
“Hopefully the bridge won’t be on fire,” Danny said.
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Will said.
Lara said, “How much damage did they do to the turbine, do you think?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Will said. “You guys stay here in the Armory while Danny and I clear the rooms.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I’ll go with you.”
“Lara, I need you to stay here.”
She looked hurt and fixed him with a stare that told him this wasn’t going to end with him raising his voice. So he took her aside. He held her face in his hands, kissed her softly and looked her in the eyes.
“I need you to be safe,” he said quietly. “I can’t do what I have to do out there if I’m worrying about you, because I will. Because you mean that much to me.”
She softened against him, and finally nodded. She kissed him quickly and glanced across the room at Danny. “Watch his six.”
Danny grinned back. “Yes, ma’am.”
Danny kissed Carly and followed Will outside.
They closed the Armory door, then waited until they heard the door lever turning and locking into place. Danny banged on the door twice, then they headed off, stepping over eviscerated ghoul corpses.
*
They moved from room to room with shotguns, finding no survivors. There were no ghoul corpses in the Quarters area. Which made sense. Will and Danny were the only ones who had managed to arm themselves with silver ammo, and they never made it past the Entrance Hallway during the siege.
Sunlight continued pouring through the Door like a great big welcoming bath. The feel of sunlight against his skin as they walked across the Entrance Hallway was one of the best damn feelings in the entire world. Second, he concluded, only to Lara in his arms.
On their way back from Quarters, Danny said, “What about Kate?”
“What about her?”
“We know what happened to her?”
Will told him about what Lara saw in the Green Room last night.
“Blue eyes?” Danny said. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”
“If it was actually her…”
“Lara was pretty sure.”
“Shit. That’s new.”
“Yeah.” He paused for a moment. Then said, “I saw something in the Green Room that I haven’t seen before.”
“Share with the class.”
“They were scared. Freaking out. They knew the sun was coming and they were trapped down here with us. That’s why I thought opening the door early for them to leave would work.”
“Still, a hell of a risk. What if they had just sent in more ghouls?”
“I figured, what the hell. There was already a billion of them inside.”
Danny grunted. “Oh sure, what’s another billion more, right?”
“Exactly.”
They cleared the Cafeteria next. It was easily the biggest room in the whole place, and it took them longer than the rest of the facility combined, but eventually they found nothing except more patches of blood, the red and the black kinds. Scattered around the facility were bullet casings of different calibers and shredded clothing. There were also left-behind guns, and someone had resorted to using a spatula as a weapon, which lay in a corner covered in blood.
“Last stand of the spatula,” Danny said, with surprisingly little humor.
They moved on to the Turbine Room, which looked undisturbed, except for the fire ax sticking out of the computer dashboard. The massive, towering turbine itself looked fine, and sat coldly, silently on one side of the room. He didn’t think he would ever miss the sound or feel of the turbine’s omnipresent hum, but he was wrong.
They stood looking at the machinery for a moment, before he said, “You know how to fix a computer?”
“I don’t even know how a computer actually works,” Danny said. “Do you?”
“Not really, no.”
“You mean you know a little bit?”
“I know how to turn it on and search for porn.”
“You and every other male on the planet. That doesn’t do us any good here.”
“Nope.”
“So we’re screwed.”
“Ben said Harold Campbell designed the turbine to be operated by laymen.”
“Yeah? You’re a layman, right?”
“Last time I checked.”
“So you can probably operate this thing.”
“Sure.” Will looked back at the dashboard, with the ax sticking out of it. Half of the machine was destroyed, the other half scattered about the room. “But how do you put that thing back together?”
“Carefully?” Danny said.
*
Will knocked on the Armory door and it swung open, Lara standing on the other side with her Glock next to her hip. “Good?”
“Good,” he nodded.
“What about the turbine?”
“It’s still there, but the computer that runs it is smashed to hell. We don’t have any ideas about how to go about fixing it. Hell, we don’t have any ideas where to even start. You know computers?”
“Not really,” she frowned.
“Yeah.”
“What about the generators?” Carly asked.
They had used Ben’s pendant to go down to the sublevel and checked on the generators. The machines were still running fine, and the computer told them they had at least a month of stored electricity left.
“If we conserve,” he said, “we should be able to make it last more than a month. Maybe two or three.”
“Captain Optimism,” Lara smirked.
“Hey, that’s my job,” Danny said.
*
They went topside, if just to feel the sun against their skin again, to remind themselves that there was another world beyond the blood-covered concrete universe of Harold Campbell’s facility. In a lot of ways, the facility had functioned exactly as Campbell predicted, though he guessed even a paranoid billionaire never quite envisioned strangers using his place to fend off undead creatures at the end of the world.
The girls didn’t seem to notice, though. They ran around chasing each other as soon as they burst out into the sun, seemingly oblivious to the nightmare of the previous night, while Danny and Carly stood watching them, holding hands.
Lara walked up beside him and took his hand and squeezed. They watched Elise and Vera picking flowers from the overgrown grass, sticking yellow daffodils in each other’s hair and giggling.
A couple of bluebonnets were growing farther out. Bluebonnet was the official state flower of Texas, and they tended to grow where you leas
t expected them.
After a while, Will said, “We’ll stay here for as long as we can.”
“Then what?” Lara asked.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
Carly looked over. “Did we ever find out if the rest of the country is like this? What about the rest of the world?”
“We never did,” Will said. “Too busy trying to stay alive to worry about some Frenchman in Paris.”
“Maybe it’s time to go out there and find out,” Carly suggested. “Not Paris, of course. But what about the surrounding States?”
Will nodded. It had been gnawing at him, too.
Was the rest of the country like Texas? What about the rest of the world? There was a big planet out there. The ghouls had managed to conquer Texas in one night, but what about the other forty-nine states? Had they fallen as easily? Were there now bands of humanity fighting back in conclaves? Maybe there were other facilities like Harold Campbell’s out there. Maybe remnants of a United States government hiding in underground bunkers around the country.
He wanted to find out. He needed to find out.
“What about those poor bastards back at Dansby?” Danny asked.
“Look around,” Will said. “We’re no good to them now, not in our current jam.”
“It didn’t work out so well for Megan, either,” Lara said quietly.
“Okay,” Danny said, brightening up. “Sounds like a plan. A lousy plan, but I guess a plan is a plan, right?”
“Plan Z?” Lara smiled.
“Plan Z is for when everything hits the fan,” Will said. “We’re not quite there yet. For now, it’s still Plan A.”
Then he thought about it.
“Okay, maybe it’s more like Plan E…”
EPILOGUE
KATE DIDN’T SO much see the blood coursing through the veins as hear it and smell it. It was an odd sensation, to see with her other senses so clearly, so vividly, while her eyes were dull and weak and lazy. It was the same with the other ghouls. She didn’t hear or see them moving around her, she sensed them. It was a tricky concept to grasp at first, but Mabry told her she would get used to it soon enough.
Mabry revealed to her that he first became aware of the danger Will posed all the way back to their time in Houston, even before Will and Danny destroyed the Archers warehouse store and killed hundreds of Mabry’s soldiers. He first encountered them at the Wilshire Apartments, where they had discovered the silver. Mabry wasn’t there personally, but he watched from afar, through the eyes of those that were, as they attempted to kill the ex-Rangers. Mabry was too busy that night, painstakingly organizing the takeover of the city, to deal with the threat himself. It was one of his biggest regrets, he told her.
She learned that the war was all but won, except for small, annoying pockets of resistance around the country and in scattered parts of the world. Mabry was certain that the resistance wouldn’t last for very long. Eventually, as with Harold Campbell’s facility, humanity always found a way to do itself in.
She still remembered who she was, her name, and her life before being turned. But she was not surprised to realize that the “Kate” she knew was dead. She was wearing Kate’s skin now, and though she knew all the things that Kate did, she no longer felt like Kate. She was more of a historian of Kate’s extinguished life.
It was another odd concept, one that took time to grasp, but Kate—the new Kate—discovered that it wasn’t too hard to wrap her mind around once she accepted it. That was the key. Acceptance. After all, she was the one in control now, not the old Kate. That Kate had lost control long ago, allowed chaos to rule over order.
This Kate, this new version, had order again.
They were inside a warehouse, somewhere in Texas. Her first day as one of them was spent traveling, moving fast to beat the approaching sunlight. Mabry knew why Will had opened the facility door as sunup neared. It was a ceasefire, he told her, and Mabry gladly accepted if it meant he could save more of his soldiers. Mabry had many soldiers at his disposal, but he abhorred the idea of needlessly throwing their lives away. They were his to care for, after all, like children, and what parent wanted to sacrifice their children’s lives needlessly?
The warehouse had been converted into another blood farm. One of many. There were more around the state, around the country, and even around the world. So many more.
She stood among the ghouls, listening to the sound of blood as it coursed through the veins of a young girl who couldn’t possibly be older than thirteen. Kate knew that her old self would have been horrified by the sight of the girl on the floor. The girl was no more than a reservoir of blood now, flesh and bones harnessed for her ability to generate a constant flow of the precious liquid.
She leaned over and lifted the girl’s arm toward her mouth. There were no teeth marks on the arm. This one was fresh. She could feel Mabry standing behind her in the darkness. They didn’t need light to see, because they didn’t see with their eyes.
“I saved her for you,” Mabry said inside her head.
She opened her mouth and closed it around the girl’s arm. She bit into the girl’s skin, so hard that her teeth, still white and pristine, like Mabry’s, scraped against the bone underneath. The blood, like hundreds of tiny streams, flowed freely into her mouth. At first she didn’t think she could handle the flood, and she felt as if she were drowning in blood. Then something happened—it became easier, as the blood poured down her throat and she sighed with pleasure and suckled some more.
She lifted her head and tasted the wetness along the corners of her mouth with her tongue, which had gotten longer, almost reptilian. She swiped at the thin drops hanging from her chin, catching every little sweetness.
She didn’t have to use her eyes to see the men in green and yellow hazmat suits standing around the warehouse, trying to stay as much as they could within the shadows, as if that somehow could save them from witnessing what they had helped make happen. She could almost taste the disgust on their faces, hidden behind gas masks.
Instead of feeling ashamed or guilty, she reveled in it.
“Yes,” Mabry said inside her head. He sounded pleased.
Why do you let them live? she asked.
“They’re useful,” Mabry answered. “This is just the beginning, Kate. There is more to be done. Progress. Continuation. Expansion. All of it, to further the evolution of our species.”
You’ll tell me?
“Of course. In time…”
Around her, ghouls hunched over other human forms, the sound of suckling filling the warehouse a hundred fold. She was struck by how much like children the ghouls looked, feeding because their parents provided for them. Mabry was their parent, but of course he couldn’t do it alone. As with all households, it was always easier to have two parents around to shoulder the chores.
She lowered her head back down and bit harder into the girl’s arm, all the way to the bone underneath, and the blood started to flow again. She sighed audibly, loudly with intense pleasure.
Someone in a hazmat suit fidgeted uncomfortably in the darkness, and Kate smiled.
Be on the lookout for …
THE GATES OF BYZANTIUM
(Book 2 in the Babylon Series)
Coming in Early 2014
Visit www.roadtobabylon.com for news, updates, and announcements.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Book Two
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Book Three
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
The Gates of Byzantium
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
