Purge of Babylon (Book 7): The Spears of Laconia

by Sam Sisavath

  Gaby looked back and down at Mason, standing at the bottom of the incline they had climbed up earlier, shielding his eyes in their direction. The sun glinted off the bloodied weapon in his right hand; his way of warning them that he was ready should they try anything.

  “Climb up and find out for yourself,” Danny said.

  “No thanks,” Mason said. “I’m going to let you go out there first, then I’ll follow later. Go our separate ways after that. No muss, no fuss.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “What about them? After last night, they can go fuck themselves. And as far as I’m concerned, the three of you never existed.” His eyes fell on her when he added, “Especially you. No offense, but you’re some bad luck, kid. Josh figured that out too late, unfortunately for him.”

  She gritted her teeth at the comment but managed to stop herself from responding. There was no point. Mason wasn’t worth wasting her breath on.

  Danny, next to her, snorted. “And they say friendship among thieves gets a bad rap.” He nodded to her and Nate. “Let’s find out if anything survived last night’s jamboree. Also, I don’t wanna be walking around with just our sticks and berries to throw if his friends come back looking for him.”

  “We’ll be lucky if we can find a bullet in all that,” Nate said.

  “How are we getting down?” Gaby asked.

  “Jump,” Danny said.

  “Jump?”

  “Just pretend you’re a really big bunny,” Danny said, before taking a step toward the edge and, saluting them, jumped down.

  *

  “ANYTHING?” GABY ASKED as she rolled a two-by-two chunk of concrete off a rifle stock, only to find the pulverized rest on the other side.

  Twisted metal rebar stuck out of the blocks, sharp edges scraping against her palms. She let go and moved on. The last thing she needed right now was to get gashed in the arms or legs because she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Dick Butkus,” Danny said from a few yards away. He turned over a piece of landing strip and finding nothing useful, straightened up with a heavy grunt. “Less than dick. Right now, I’d settle for a tiny bit of dick.” Then, he added quickly, “Don’t tell Carly I said that.”

  Despite everything, she managed a small smile anyway.

  They had been moving steadily up the airfield, hoping to find something they could use as a weapon, always wary of the remains of the buildings up ahead. An hour and a lot of physical labor later, they still had nothing to show for it, and hour two was creeping up on them fast. Nate, having spread out to their right side, had come up just as empty-handed.

  Gaby spent almost as much time not falling into holes that hadn’t been there yesterday as she did trying not to roll rubble onto her feet or leg. Thank God she was still wearing boots, pants, and a long-sleeve shirt, or all the gathered dust from last night’s explosive booby traps and concentrated bombing would have covered her from head to toe. Even so, she still had to keep her shirt over most of her face to spare her senses from not just the stench of evaporated ghoul flesh, but other harmful elements still clinging to the air.

  A saying of her father’s came to mind—as much as he hated his office job, at least he wasn’t “digging ditches.” She felt like she was digging ditches right now…with her bare hands.

  There, something on the ground.

  She crouched next to a gun barrel jutting out between a skeletal chest and a block of half-buried concrete. It wasn’t much, but it was about a foot long and heavy enough to make a decent blunting weapon. She pulled it out and put it into her back pocket and continued on.

  The closer they got to the buildings, the more pieces of guns and shredded black uniforms they stumbled across. Most of the collaborators from last night had stayed behind at the structures, but not all of them. Not that it mattered. Out here or over there, they were still sitting ducks when the Warthogs swooped in. She tried to imagine the terror of hearing that awful bellowing noise. Did they even know what it was? It was strange to say, but she would have preferred not to know.

  “Are we going to talk about it?” she said after a while.

  “Talk about what?” Danny said.

  “You know what. Last night. That creature… It protected us, Danny.”

  “Was that what it was doing?”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  He shrugged and tossed away the broken remains of a rifle’s magazine he had picked up. “Maybe it was greedy, wanted us all for itself.”

  “You know that’s bullshit,” she said, stepping over a terribly deformed head buried in the rubble, wide-open blue eyes staring up at her. She didn’t know where the rest of the man’s body was, or if it was even still attached to him underneath his asphalt tomb.

  “Do I?” Danny said.

  “It saved us, Danny.”

  “I have no idea what happened last night. Willie boy was always the brains of the operation. If he was here, he’d probably have come up with a dozen theories for you by now. Unfortunately for us, I’m less theory-inclined. Or capable.”

  “So you didn’t spend all of last night and most of this morning replaying what happened in your mind?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I am telling you I didn’t come up with anything that even remotely makes any lick of sense.” He glanced over. “You?”

  “Same.”

  “So there you go. What’s that old saying about keeping your trap shut if you don’t know anything?”

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  “Touché,” Danny said. He glanced over at Nate, who had expanded his area further to their right. “Found any gold in them thar hills, Nate-o-rama?”

  Nate looked over and shook his head.

  “Guess the grass ain’t any greener on the other side,” Danny said. Then, a few seconds later, “Hey-yo.” He bent down and picked something up from the ground. “Eureka.”

  He turned a knife over in his hand. It was a Ka-Bar and it looked mostly intact, though the grip and a part of the serrated section was blackened by fire.

  “Lucky you,” Gaby said.

  “Mommy did always say I had the bestest luck. You know what they used to call me in college?”

  “Lucky Danny?”

  “Best Luck Danny. Now that I think about it, Lucky Danny would have been preferable.” He grinned and slipped the knife into his back pocket, then rubbed his hands together. “Now, let’s see what we can do about getting Lucky Danny an M4. Big money, big money…”

  *

  “WHAT TIME IS it?” Nate asked.

  “Time for you to get your own damn watch,” Danny said.

  “I had one, but some assholes took it.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” Danny glanced down at his watch. “Two hours till noon. That hot date’s going to have to wait.”

  “Shhh, Gaby’s here.”

  Gaby ignored them and said, “I didn’t know we’ve been searching for that long.”

  “Long enough for Mason to finally poke his head out of the ground and see what all the fuss is about,” Danny said, looking back across the airfield at the hangar on the other side.

  It was the only structure still standing (if barely) and was hard to miss. Mason was crouched on the same spot she and the others had been earlier this morning. She waited for him to move, but he didn’t; he seemed content to sit up there like some gargoyle, biding his time.

  “Are we really just going to let him go?” Nate asked. He shielded his eyes as he looked back at Mason.

  “You want to take him out?” Danny asked.

  “We could take him. Shank or not.”

  She glanced over at Nate, surprised to hear him making the suggestion and not Danny. Nate was always the idealist, the easygoing guy who turned the other cheek when he could. It was one of the reasons why she liked him, because a part of her was afraid she had gone too far over the edge. Nate, in so many ways, balanced her out.

  It was T29, she thought. It had affected her, but it had altered Nat
e even more.

  “Fuck him, he’s not worth the trouble,” Danny said. “One or a dozen more collaborators running around out here won’t make any difference, but we do need to get the hell gone before more show up with something other than a knife the size of their dicks in their hands.”

  Gaby stood up from the remaining half of a large oak desk she had been resting on. It stuck out of the ground from what she assumed was the main administrative building, surrounded by charred furniture and toppled walls, some with holes larger than her fists in them. Her boots had been resting on a deflated tire, the rest of the vehicle hidden somewhere in the rubble.

  “Where do we go from here?” Nate asked.

  “Starch,” Danny said. “We still have a mission to accomplish.”

  “How far off course are we?” she asked.

  “Sixty miles. More or less.”

  She sighed. “Sixty miles, more or less, is a lot of walking, Danny.”

  “It’ll be good exercise,” he said before pulling his shirt back up over his mouth and nose. “Come on; let’s split this joint. All this death and destruction is really bringing me down.”

  She followed him and Nate, stepping over a small section of still-standing wall and around a half-burned American flag jutting out from a pile of bricks. A blood-smeared arm, its owner invisible somewhere underneath the stack, waved to her as she passed.

  Gaby shot another glance across the field and at the hangar. Mason, still on the wall, little more than a stick figure in the distance. She wondered if he was watching them back, waiting for them to disappear before making his move.

  “Hey,” Nate said from in front of her.

  She looked over as he took a charred but still-in-one-piece bottle of water out of a pants pocket and held it out to her. There was some water sloshing around inside, just enough to make her lips suddenly wet.

  Gaby took it gratefully. “Nice find.”

  “Don’t tell Danny,” he smiled.

  “Don’t tell Danny what?” Danny said from further in front of them.

  “That your jokes suck,” Nate said.

  “Hey, I don’t take critique from people with monkey haircuts.”

  They followed Danny out of the ruins and toward a winding road. The trees flanking it were scorched and blackened, their leaves stripped bare from last night’s fire blast. The entrance looked almost foreboding, like a mouth with teeth waiting to swallow her up.

  Gaby took out the gun barrel from her back pocket and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

  *

  SHE SHOULD HAVE been afraid of the dark parts of the woods, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t explain why, exactly, but maybe it had a little something to do with how Mercer’s people had so thoroughly devastated the area that there was still gray ash lingering over the two-lane road as they walked over it.

  She stopped fearing the woods and concentrated on other potential dangers instead. They were flanked by guardrails, and a sign they had passed a few minutes back confirmed they had been in Larkin Airport. There was no housing in the area, just miles of woods as far as she could tell. She hadn’t seen anything that indicated the presence of the town of Larkin itself, but if the airport was here, it stood to reason the town couldn’t be further down the road.

  There was a lot of shade, which made the December weather even chillier than it had been in the airfield, where they were standing directly under the sun without protection. She hadn’t realized how many extra layers the assault vest had given her until she didn’t have it anymore. Minus her equipment and weapons, she felt naked and exposed, though the sounds of birds chirping among the trees helped to alleviate some of her wariness.

  “You know where we’re going, right?” Nate asked after a while.

  Danny, walking about ten yards in front of them, nodded. “Mercer showed me his map. Starch is west.”

  “But we’re going east.”

  “I noticed that. We’ll look for a vehicle inside Larkin, re-gear as best we can, and then start west.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is that approval I hear?”

  “Eh,” Nate shrugged.

  “Tough road,” Danny said.

  Gaby smiled. Danny and Nate bickering like an old married couple helped convince her they weren’t screwed, that they could still make it out of Texas alive. She hadn’t realized how much she missed having the constant moving waves of the Gulf of Mexico under her until they were gone. Of course, there was also the food, the company, and the safety of the Trident. She missed all those things even more—

  “Car!” Danny hissed in front of them, just before he darted right.

  Gaby didn’t know why, but she went left. She hopped the guardrail and slipped behind the trunk of a large tree, Nate doing the same with another tree two feet over. She had been afraid he had gone right with Danny and was glad to see him hugging the trunk next to her.

  She looked across the road at Danny, nearly invisible behind another gnarled tree on the other side.

  “Someone asked for a ride?” Nate whispered.

  It was a beat-up red pickup truck. A Chevy, by the emblem on the front grill. Like the vehicle itself, the engine had seen a lot of wear and tear, and Gaby got the impression getting it started was half the battle, and keeping it running was the other. She spotted a figure behind the wheel, wearing a cap, but the man was still too far up the road for her to make out any details.

  The truck was slow, moving at barely twenty miles per hour. She couldn’t tell if that was because the Chevy couldn’t go any faster or if the driver wasn’t certain his vehicle could handle any more speed. Either way, it seemed to take the truck forever to rumble up the road toward them. She realized now that they could have taken their time hiding and would still not have been spotted.

  “Damn, that thing’s slow,” Nate whispered. “I think I can get out and push it down here faster.”

  “Give it a try,” she smiled back.

  “Nah, I don’t feel like getting run over.”

  “It’s moving way too slow to run anyone over.”

  “Yeah, but why take the chance? This tree is so nice and comfy…”

  Eventually the pickup finally reached them, and as it was passing them by, she looked into the front passenger door at the side profile of the driver. He was leaning into the steering wheel, concentrating on the road ahead. She knew now why Danny had gone right—so he would be closer to the driver side.

  Ping! as something struck the other side of the truck.

  The driver instinctively jammed on the brake, and even as the tires squealed against the road, Gaby caught a flash of movement as Danny bounded over the guardrail behind the vehicle and leaped into the truck bed. Gaby didn’t even know Danny had the ability to move that fast. Where the hell had he been hiding that kind of speed all this time?

  Before she knew what she was doing, Gaby had slipped out from behind the tree and was running back to the road.

  “Gaby!” Nate hissed behind her, somehow managing to shout and whisper at the same time.

  She didn’t stop, because she couldn’t. Danny was out there, exposed.

  She leaped over the guardrail, and, ducking to lower her profile, ran toward the passenger-side door just as the driver climbed out on the other side, his door creaking loudly as he pried it open. Gaby caught a glimpse of a rifle over the top of the cab, and the driver, visible from the neck down through the windows, was already turning toward the back where Danny was.

  “Hey!” she shouted.

  The driver seemed to freeze momentarily, as if unsure of where to point his weapon. It was just enough of a distraction for Danny to jump out of the truck bed, the vehicle dipping and rising slightly as he did so.

  A loud bang! as the driver fired, and Gaby thought, Oh no, oh no, and raced around the front hood and to the other side—

  The driver was on the road, the rifle still clutched in his right hand but pointed away from Danny, who was st
raddling the man’s chest. Danny had the sharp edge of his fire-kissed Ka-Bar pressed up against the truck driver’s exposed skin. The man was gasping, the round eyes underneath the cap’s brim impossibly wide.

  It was a girl.

  She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with long auburn hair spilling out from under the weathered cap. She was grimacing up at Danny, simultaneously trying not to swallow for fear of the knife pressed against her throat and wanting desperately to swing the rifle up and shoot him.

  “Gaby,” Danny said.

  She hurried over and reached for the rifle, making the girl’s eyes flicker over to her in alarm while her fingers tightened on the weapon.

  “Oh, come on,” Danny said, almost exasperated. “I hate to be chauvinistic about this, but I’m clearly on top here.”

  The driver sighed, and Gaby wrestled the weapon from her. She stepped back and glanced up and down the road, listening for signs of another vehicle. There had been hundreds of collaborators at the airfield last night, all of them buried under the rubble this morning. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more still in the area that could have heard the girl’s gunshot.

  “Oh shit, you’re bleeding,” Nate said as he rounded the back of the truck.

  Gaby thought he was talking to her, but no, it was Danny. Blood dripped from the bottom of his right ear, where the bullet had creased him.

  Danny wiped at the scratch. “You shot me.”

  “You threw something at my car!” the girl shouted back.

  “It was just a rock. Relax.”

  Gaby noticed a large dent in the driver-side door.

  “A couple swings with a hammer, and it’s good as new,” Danny said. “You got insurance, right?”

  “You can’t take my truck!” the girl shouted (too loudly).

  “Afraid I can, and I must.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Yes, I can.” Danny stood up, taking the knife away with him. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

  The girl didn’t answer him. She stood up, stumbling a bit and cradling her left arm. Her elbow was scraped and bloodied, and she kept looking back at the vehicle.

  “What’s inside?” Gaby asked.

  The girl gave her a quick, scared glance. Gaby wondered if she ever looked that young, even before the world ended.