The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5)

by Sam Sisavath

  “Hey!” a voice shouted from behind him.

  A man. It didn’t sound familiar, but it was close.

  Keo stiffened, kept his back to the man, and didn’t move. Unfortunately for him, he was still holding the rifle at hip level.

  “Terry?” the man asked.

  The crunch crunch of boots on grass as the man neared. The name was clearly accompanied by a question, so the guy wasn’t certain who Keo was. Then again, he was surrounded by shadows and trees. In here, the moonlight picked and chose what it wanted to reveal, and at this very moment he was standing in one of those patches of darkness and wearing black.

  “Yeah, what?” Keo said, keeping his voice as level as possible. He just hoped “Terry” didn’t have a deep voice. Or a feminine one. Hell, for all he knew, “Terry” could have been a girl.

  But apparently not, because the guy said, “Where is everyone?” and the crunch crunch of grass got louder as the man got closer.

  “I don’t know,” Keo said, spinning around.

  He fired the carbine without lifting it first, just in case the guy had a rifle pointed at him. The first three-round burst knocked a man in a black uniform to the ground…and revealed four more standing about twenty meters behind him.

  Keo pulled the trigger again but only got a click!

  He turned and ran as all four opened fire at the same time.

  *

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been running, but sometime between either the third or fourth time he bent down to keep his head from getting blown off, he collided with a large tree that popped out of nowhere. Well, that wasn’t true. The tree was always there, but he hadn’t seen it because he was essentially running blind through the woods, too afraid to put on the night-vision goggles for fear of limiting what little vision he had.

  Southeast.

  That was all he knew; he was heading back toward the beach.

  Then the tree said “Hi” and Keo bounced off it, but the impact knocked the radio loose from his hip and it went flying. He thought about trying to find it—for a brief nanosecond, anyway—but when the crack! of rifles sounded behind him, he decided he didn’t really need it and kept running instead.

  With the radio now lying in some bushes behind him, Keo ripped out the earbud and throat mic and tossed them. He had also dropped the M4 to further lighten his load, because he needed the extra speed more than he needed firepower at the moment.

  The four chasing him were fast and relentless, and they apparently had plenty of ammo, because they kept shooting. A couple of rounds came dangerously close to detaching his head from his shoulders, but he credited that more to dumb luck than skill. It was hard enough hitting a running man, but it was next to impossible to hit him while you were running, too.

  He did manage to lengthen his lead by turning suddenly left, which threw them off a bit. About half a minute later, he righted his direction until he was running toward the beach again.

  He could almost feel the lake water somewhere up ahead. Almost there. All he had to do was reach one of the boats and get the hell off this island and forget this night ever happened. Or the last few nights. Dammit, where would he be now if he hadn’t picked up Carrie and Lorelei? Probably on his way to Gillian. Or maybe already there, drinking piña colada. Did they have piña coladas on Santa Marie Island? He preferred to think they did.

  To get off the island, he had to traverse about fifty meters of open beach while being shot at, which was why he was sticking to the woods for as long as possible. It had been a while since a bullet buzzed near his head, though he could still hear his pursuers crashing through branches and stomping the ground with their heavy boots behind him.

  He couldn’t hear the loud mechanical roar of boat motors anymore, but that wasn’t surprising. After a while, the motors would turn off by themselves. As long as there was enough fuel left in one of the tanks, he could always turn them back on. There would be keys in the ignitions still. He didn’t remember any of the soldiers taking the time to pocket those before leaping off the beached vessels.

  He was certain he was back at his old spot, where he had been lying in wait for the assaulters, when he saw moonlight glinting off spent shell casings on the ground. That was good, because a man could only run for so long. How long had he been in constant motion, anyway? He had no idea. Time had a way of slipping by when you were trying to keep from getting shot.

  The sudden burst of pop-pop-pop from behind him made Keo duck his head instinctively, praying for the twentieth time in as many seconds that one of those bullets didn’t get lucky and take out his legs. Except he didn’t have to duck, because nothing was coming at him. Bark on the trees around him weren’t flying, and branches weren’t snapping into kindling. Instead, the gunfire continued behind him but, for whatever reason, it wasn’t being directed at him.

  He told himself to keep running, to keep going—

  Then someone screamed.

  Then someone else joined in…

  Keo slid to a stop and twisted around, lifting the MP5SD to fire. He was breathing hard, all the running finally catching up to him. He expected to see the four men in pursuit, but instead there were only two of them, and they were backing up toward him while shooting at something behind them.

  It took only a second for Keo to see what they were shooting at.

  He stared, because the sight was too much. Too…insane.

  There had to be hundreds of them, so many there was no room for the trees, for the branches, for him and the two poor saps standing twenty meters in front of him, firing regular bullets into the creatures. Keo couldn’t see the other two, but he didn’t have to know where they were or what had happened to them. He could hear them screaming from inside the thick mass of moving ghouls.

  I guess the uniform’s not working anymore, Keo thought before he turned and lunged out between the trees and felt mushy white sand under his boots a second later.

  Run! Run, run, run, run!

  Behind him, from inside the woods, the screaming and the gunfire continued, but Keo didn’t waste a second looking back. He didn’t have to. He knew what was back there. God knew he had seen plenty of it to last a lifetime. Tens of lifetimes. Right now, there was just the blood-soaked beach under him, the bodies left behind where they had fallen, and the boats still perched on the other side waiting, so close and yet so, so far away.

  Christ, he didn’t remember the beach being this wide. Had it always been this wide?

  Keo pushed harder, leaping over bodies and dodging rifles buried in the sand. There was so much blood it looked as if Song Island had soaked up all the plasma and was trying to give itself some kind of Grand Guignol makeover. And yet, and yet, the air still smelled fresh and clear, as if he could lie down and go to sleep right here and now and never notice the horrors.

  Then the ground under his feet started to rumble. It felt like an earthquake, but of course he knew better. It wasn’t a natural disaster. Hell, there was nothing natural about this.

  He didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know what was back there, but he did it anyway.

  Because he had to be sure.

  Because there was a chance he could be wrong—

  He wasn’t wrong.

  They came out of the woods, between the trees, and the sight of the beach being swallowed up by the wave of pruned black flesh, like a living flood, sent a shiver up and down his spine. This was the stuff of nightmares, and Keo might have given in to his instincts and let out a loud mindless scream if he still had any energy left to make his mouth do anything besides gasp for breath.

  To keep himself from freezing with fear, Keo looked forward instead and counted the steps to the nearest boat.

  Twenty meters. Not too bad.

  Then what?

  Jump up into the boat. Turn the engine. Pray the motor still worked. Then somehow back out into the lake—

  Dead. I’m dead meat.

  He didn’t have to look over his shoulder this time to know t
hey were almost on top of him. He could smell them. The air had changed, shifting from that pleasant clean lake aroma to something thick and grimy that made breathing difficult. His lungs continued to burn from all the running he had done, and his legs became dangerously wobbly.

  Ten meters…

  Gunshots rang out, and Keo glanced left without breaking his stride. Someone else was also moving toward the row of boats further down the beach. Because of the distance and with only moonlight to see with, he couldn’t tell if it was a lone figure or multiple people huddled together. Or hell, an entire basketball team.

  But at least they knew where they were going.

  The water. Get to the water!

  Five…

  Four…

  Three…

  Then he was there, the splash of wetness against his boots, letting him know that he had made it. He ran past the closest boat without looking at it, because the air behind him crackled and he felt warm, tainted breath hit the back of his neck and what sounded like a guttural squeal of delight—

  Keo took a leap of faith. Or maybe he just leaped. Through the air. He imagined he must look like some kind of dolphin.

  He hit the water headfirst and went under, unable to squash the laughter even as he sucked in a mouthful of Beaufont Lake water, because this was the third time he had gone for a swim in as many nights. He sank with his entry, but thank God he was a strong swimmer, because Keo quickly righted himself.

  “They will not cross bodies of water,” Lara had said in her broadcast. “An island, a boat—get to anything that can separate you from land.”

  Why, exactly, wouldn’t the ghouls cross bodies of water? Lara didn’t know. No one knew. The creatures just didn’t.

  Well, it was time to test that theory. Up close and personal.

  Hello, Guinea Pig Island!

  He was halfway to the bottom of the slanted lake floor when he whirled around and almost choked on more of the clear water when he saw them dive bombing into the lake around him, shattering the surface one by one by one. They looked like missiles falling from the sky, but they were so light (bags of bones) that they didn’t sink right away.

  Keo counted.

  Five…ten…

  Twenty!

  Maybe one more. Maybe one less. Twenty or more (or less) ghouls in the lake with him were more than enough to make this a very short swim.

  He was reaching for his MP5SD, hoping the German gun would still prove effective. He had never actually fired it under water before. But hey, there was a first time for everything. Like the end of the world. Like keeping a stupid promise to a woman he hadn’t seen in half a year. Like almost giving up his life for an island full of strangers run by a third-year medical student—

  Keo never had to try shooting the submachine gun under water, because one second the creatures looked as if they would right themselves at any second and the next they seemed to be convulsing, desperately trying not to swallow the lake water. Their arms and legs were thrashing about wildly and one or two, maybe more, of them began trying to swim back toward the shore. Or what appeared to be an attempt to swim. It actually looked more like frantic kicking and clawing, movements he’d seen more than once from dumb tourists who got to Mission Beach and realized, too late, that they didn’t know how to swim.

  He watched with a combination of fascination and exhilaration as the closest ghoul struggled to stay afloat, its dark eyes bulging as water poured into its agape mouth, bony fingers reaching out toward him as if for a handhold. Keo treaded water, neither sinking nor going up, too mesmerized by the sight to go anywhere.

  Then they stopped moving entirely, and one by one they began to sink toward the bottom. They looked like stones, blackened gargoyles with arms and legs frozen in mock surrender. These creatures that he always thought of as being entirely devoid of humanity were suddenly very human and he saw, to his surprise, what looked like terror frozen across their faces. They sank and sank, before resting softly, almost delicately, against the angled incline of the lake floor.

  He waited for more of the creatures to drop down from the sky after him, into the water, and die, too. But there were no more. He could see them on the other side of the surface, like staring through a murky, flickering mirror. They crowded the beach, black shapes easy to make out, and looked after him but unwilling to pursue.

  “They will not cross bodies of water. An island, a boat—get to anything that can separate you from land.”

  Keo turned around and continued swimming. He stayed under for as long as he could before finally breaking the surface to suck in a lungful of fresh air.

  He wasn’t surprised to find that he was surrounded by darkness. When he turned around, the island sans lights was barely visible in the distance. He couldn’t even see the beaches anymore, and it took him a few seconds to realize why.

  The ghouls. There was nothing on the beaches at the moment but those shriveled black things that used to be human, so many that they blotted out the white sand.

  He was staring at them when he thought he heard the sound of a motor droning somewhere behind him. Keo glanced around, but there was no boat in sight. At least, nothing on the water. There were plenty on the beach, but given what was also waiting for him there, they might as well not exist.

  He pointed himself in the direction where he thought the shoreline was—even though it was impossible to see right now—and started kicking toward it.

  He always liked swimming in the ocean at night anyway. You had to, in order to avoid the crowds during tourist season along San Diego’s beaches. Of course, if he had known he’d spend this much time in the water at night, he would have put in even more time.

  Live and learn, pal.

  Live and learn…

  CHAPTER 24

  WILL

  “We’re going to die,” Natasha said. “I should have stayed in the back room and not come out to save you. You’re going to get me killed. Jesus, you’re going to get me killed.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about dying,” Will said.

  “I changed my mind.” She was visibly shaking, even in the semidarkness of the store. “I changed my mind, you hear me? I want to live. I didn’t think I did, but now I want to live.”

  Check out Captain Optimism here, Danny.

  “Shut up and listen,” he said.

  “Listen to what? That? I can hear that just fine!”

  The constant bang! bang! bang! of ghouls smashing themselves into the glass curtain wall hadn’t let up, not even for a second for him to catch his breath. There were so many of them, and they were raining blow after blow on the windows that the cracks were now stretched from one end of the frame to the other and connecting like river veins along the way.

  It wouldn’t be long now. Soon, very soon, the windows would break and there would be nothing to stop them. Then it would be over. He would never reach Song Island. Never get to see Lara after so long. Never hold her hand or walk on the beach with her again.

  Kate. This is your doing, isn’t it?

  “Yes.”

  Her voice echoed inside his head. It was unnatural and yet so intimate. Too intimate. It was like talking to a lover. Pillow talk. He shivered at the thought.

  “How sweet.”

  Had she just laughed? Giggled? Was it possible to project that sort of thing through…what was this? Telepathy? ESP? Insanity?

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Will.”

  Where are you?

  “Close.”

  You’re coming here.

  “Yes…”

  You know.

  “Yes…”

  How?

  “I can see you,” she said. “Inside that store. In that uniform with the woman. You’ve looked better, Will. But we can fix that. Imagine: No more wounds, no more scars, and no more illnesses.”

  The uniforms aren’t going to work, are they?

  “Haven’t you figured it out by now? It only works when I tell them it works.”


  He stared out the cracked (breaking) windows at the creatures, past the ones flying into the glass like raindrops falling to the sidewalks, and at the wall of skeletal figures standing like good soldiers in the back. The sight of them, unmoving in the moonlight, was somehow more distracting than the ones smashing into the windows.

  For some reason, he wasn’t really frightened. Disappointed and saddened, yes, but the fear wasn’t there. Even if everything ended tonight, he could take solace in one thing: At least Kate was here and not on Song Island. If nothing else, there was comfort in knowing she was too busy to pay attention to Lara—

  “Oh, Will.” He sensed, even if he couldn’t actually hear it, amusement dripping with every word that echoed inside his head. “I don’t have to be there to be there. Will, Will, Will. How did you ever think you could beat us when you know so little?”

  You’re attacking the island now, aren’t you?

  “Not me. The island is an annoyance, but it’s not worth my time. I have people for those things.”

  Like Josh. Like Mason…

  “Two of many. So, so many. You have no idea.”

  It made sense she wasn’t at the island in person, because she didn’t have to be. There was a legion of human collaborators willing and anxious to do her bidding. People like Rick and Millard, dead on the floor in their boxers behind him. Opportunists like Mason. Then there were all the poor, easily malleable souls like Josh, who didn’t know any better.

  She laughed inside his head. “You, on the other hand…I can devote time to you, Will.”

  What do you want from me, Kate?

  “You’re living in the old world. It’s time to join me in the real one.”

  No…

  “Don’t be so naïve. You don’t have a choice.”

  CRASH!

  The first section of windowpane shattered and fell in streams to the tiled floor. The creature that had used itself as the final hammer flopped through among the shower of cubed glass, like sand pebbles, but only thicker and sharper. It rolled forward, bones clacking, shards of shiny glass sticking out of its cheeks and body and shoulder and chest—