Daybreak
Copyright © 2019 by Sam Sisavath
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC
www.roadtobabylon.com
Edited by Jennifer Jensen, Wendy Chan, and Shavonne Clarke
Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design
Contents
Books in the Road to Babylon Series
Also by Sam Sisavath
About Daybreak
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
Epilogue
More From The Road to Babylon…
Books in the Road to Babylon Series
Glory Box
Bombtrack
Rooster
Devil’s Haircut
Black
The Distance
Hollow
Daybreak
Also by Sam Sisavath
The Purge of Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series
The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival
The Gates of Byzantium
The Stones of Angkor
The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)
The Fires of Atlantis
The Ashes of Pompeii
The Isles of Elysium
The Spears of Laconia
The Horns of Avalon
The Bones of Valhalla
Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)
The After the Purge Post-Apocalyptic Series
Requiem
Tokens
Requiem
Mist City
The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series
Hunter/Prey
Saint/Sinner
Finders/Keepers
Savior/Corruptor
The Red Sky Conspiracy Series
Most Wanted
The Devil You Know
About Daybreak
ALL HE HAS TO DO IS SURVIVE THE NIGHT.
On his way back from a vital supply run, Keo is ambushed and stranded in an abandoned town that, as it turns out, isn’t so empty after all. With little to count on except his wits and what weapons he can scavenge, he’ll have to fight tooth and nail to see morning.
But Keo isn’t alone forever. He’s joined by a group of slayers bent on cleansing the town of its ghoul infestation. Potential allies should be good news, but these humans also bring along their own problems—a blue-eyed ghoul with a particularly sadistic streak.
The blue eyes have always been unpredictable creatures, but this one in particular seems to take great joy in playing with its victims before striking the fatal blow. And Keo has just found himself in its crosshairs.
The only thing that matters to Keo is to get home. To do that, all he has to do is survive long enough to see daybreak. It’s just one night.
One very, very long night…
One
“No meandering. Get there, get what you need, and come home. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I mean it, Keo.”
“I know you do.”
“If I have to go after you, I’m going to be really angry.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we?”
That was the plan, anyway. Get there, get what he needed, and head back home. No muss, no fuss. Wham, bam, thank you very much, ma’am, but I best be going before my lady comes and finds me and kicks my ass.
Of course, it hadn’t exactly gone as planned.
Keo liked to think it wasn’t his fault. Well, not entirely, anyway. It was possibly 10 percent his fault. Maybe 15 percent, if he were feeling generous, but definitely not more than that.
Probably.
But how he got here wasn’t of paramount concern at the moment. Getting out of it was what he was focusing on. That and Lara’s voice, in the back of his mind, warning that she was going to find him and kick his ass if he didn’t make it home. He wasn’t entirely sure what was scarier—his current predicament or Lara’s wrath.
No, that wasn’t true. As scary as disappointed Lara could be, being stalked through a dilapidated warehouse where every step he took seemed to cause the metal walls to vibrate and create an ungodly loud echo was likely much more frightening. That, and the fact there were things out there looking for him.
Things.
Not people.
But things.
As in, undead things.
Should have waited for morning before coming back. But no, you had to push your luck, didn’t you? Had to ride through the night.
Yeah, this was probably about 50 percent his fault.
Now he was stuck up the proverbial creek without a paddle. But at least he still had a knife with a silver-coated blade, so that was something.
Something? It was probably the only reason he was still alive. He’d used up all his ammo running for his life along three blocks of empty streets after he lost Mirabelle. Well, “lost” probably wasn’t quite the right word. The Appaloosa had been taken away from him by force. She hadn’t gone willingly, but in the end, she’d succumbed. Keo was still trying to figure out how he was going to explain losing the horse to Bunker. He imagined a lot of talking on his part and a lot of fuming on the rancher’s.
Probably should come up with a better explanation before I see him.
“You see, Bunker, they came out of nowhere. Totally out of nowhere. If it wasn’t for Mirabelle, they would have gotten me, too. The bastards were so focused on her that I was able to make my escape.”
It was the truth, but it was probably not going to be much comfort to Bunker, who loved his horses more than he did other human beings, Keo included.
There’s something wrong with that guy.
When Mirabelle went down, she’d taken the supply bags with her, including the submachine gun and extra ammo. Keo had two magazines for the SIG Sauer, but without the pistol—somewhere on the streets right now, maybe half a block from his current location, but it wasn’t like he was familiar with the place—they were dead weight holding him down. Still, he resisted the urge to toss them; you never know when they might come in handy, especially since all the bullets were silver-tipped.
Keo changed up his grip on the KA-BAR. Seven inches of blade gleamed in the semidarkness, the silver coating along the very sharp edge still slathered with a thin layer of viscous liquid that looked as if it might drip off the knife at any second but somehow hung on.
Thick, black blood.
Ghoul blood.
They’d followed him to the warehouse and inside it. Not all of them—most of them were busy with the horse—but enough. He had also glimpsed additional fleeting shadows on the rooftops of the buildings along both sides of the street as he fled through the darkness with only the moonlight to gui
de his way. The flashlight, along with everything else, had gone down with Mirabelle.
He still didn’t understand where they’d all come from. And so close to the ranch, too. Too close. How did Bunker not know about their existence? You just didn’t see this kind of concentration of ghouls out here anymore. There were the big cities, of course, but anyone with half a brain avoided those.
So where the hell did they come from?
Keo was going to have to sit Bunker down and have a good long talk with the rancher and find out how much he really knew about his area. But that could wait until he got out of here. Right now, Keo had more urgent matters to deal with.
He didn’t have to see them to know some of them were inside the warehouse. He could smell them. Their stench tarnished the air around him, tainting everything they came in contact with. And then there was the soft patter of their footsteps.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap…
Bare feet, moving—gliding?—across the dirty concrete floor still slick with a variety of oils that had been used to keep the machines around him functioning. He was leaning against one of those hulking objects right now. It was bulky, and the steel was cold against his back even through his thick jacket and the thermal shirt underneath. While the cargo pants and boots gave him plenty of additional shelter from the surprisingly cold Texas nights, they did nothing to keep his breath from coming out in puffs of white clouds whenever they left his lips.
His breathing was under control, and his heartbeat steady. He’d had ten, maybe eleven minutes to rest and gather himself. It was more than enough time for Keo to push back the adrenaline that had sent him racing through the streets of Paxton like a man possessed. It’d been a while since Keo had to tread lightly after nightfall. There was that time in Axton, but he’d had a horse named Horse to help him get through it. That wasn’t really the animal’s name, but one Keo had given him. Horse was as fast as he was smart. Too smart, in fact, because he eventually decided sticking around Keo was not good for his health.
Smart horse, that Horse.
Mirabelle hadn’t been nearly as clever as Horse or had the thoroughbred’s speed. But she’d done her best. It wasn’t enough, as it turned out.
Should have waited for morning to travel. Dammit, why didn’t I wait for morning?
Because he’d been anxious to get home, to return to Lara. She needed—
The stench was a silent explosion, ripping across the chilly space around Keo’s immediate vicinity and trying to suffocate him. It came out of nowhere and without warning, and Keo almost didn’t react in time.
Almost.
He took two steps away from the bulky machinery he’d been hiding behind and glanced up as it fell out of a pocket that had opened in space-time above him. Keo stabbed upward with the KA-BAR, the sharp point ripping through the creature’s flimsy chest cavity, the knife and Keo’s hand punching right through its body and out its back. It hadn’t taken very much force because the creatures were so weak. It was that lack of girth that made them so fast and quiet, allowing this one to sneak up on him.
He’d forgotten how ugly the buggers were up close. The pruned black flesh that covered their bony frame, the shiny domed heads devoid of even a single strand of hair, and the almost obsidian black of their eyes, simultaneously lifeless and filled with desire to suck every last millimeter of blood from his veins. Seeing them up close again, after so long, was a shock to the system.
Darby Bay had been a painful reminder of how dangerous they could still be, but months after that battle had reset the status quo. Ghouls weren’t supposed to be a threat anymore. There weren’t supposed to be this many of them in one place.
And yet, here they were.
And yet, here he was, in the thick of them.
I gotta get out more.
The ghoul died instantly upon contact with the silver that covered the KA-BAR, but its body slammed into Keo and knocked him down to one knee. That was more out of surprise than the impact. He struggled back up and stumbled away, shaking the creature off and watching it slide with a lifeless thump to the greasy floor.
Keo turned, his knife instantly up and ready. Where you found one ghoul you usually found more, and he was damn sure they’d tracked him into the warehouse.
So where were the rest? Maybe he’d gotten lucky and only one had managed to find him.
No, he couldn’t afford to believe that. Not tonight.
He began moving, heading further into the building. That required going around the massive blocks of shiny steel, each new one seemingly bigger than the last. Keo hadn’t figured out what they were doing here before the end of the world put everyone out of business; there’d been no signs outside, and it was much too dark to get a good look at all the machinery. Not that he had the free time to investigate anyway. There would be—
Tap-tap-tap!
The sudden patter of footsteps behind him.
There they are!
They were coming from the front, which meant he was going in the right direction. He was making a lot of noise himself too, his boots pounding against the hard concrete floor, every step ricocheting off the steel walls. Even a deaf man would know where he was right now, not that he could do anything about it. Sure, he could walk softer, but that would mean slowing down, and right now “slow” wasn’t in the cards.
Tap-tap-tap!
Tap-tap-tap!
Bare feet, like pounding drums, behind him.
Faster. Move faster!
Intermittent streams of moonlight poured in from high windows along the top of the building, keeping him from running into one of the machines. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but extra light always helped—
A ghoul bounced out from behind one of the many towering structures in front of him, moving with such speed that Keo realized right away that he couldn’t stop or dodge it. It was simply too fast and there was no warning, so instead of slowing down, Keo ran at it.
He thought he might have seen something that looked almost like surprise in the undead thing’s eyes, but that couldn’t have possibly been true because ghouls didn’t have emotions. Surprise was a human reaction, and these creatures were far removed from what they used to be. Weren’t they?
Whatever it was that flickered across the ghoul’s eyes just before Keo slashed at it with the knife, getting it across the chest and slicing off a part of its chin, it vanished as the creature fell. Keo immediately stepped over it.
Move move move! No hanging around to enjoy your handiwork, pal! More of them coming, remember?
He remembered. Even if he didn’t, he could hear them.
Tap-tap-tap!
Tap-tap-tap!
They were so loud. How many were back there? All he had to do to find out was to glance back.
But he didn’t want to.
Tap-tap-tap!
Or did he?
No. Resist the urge.
Tap-tap-tap!
Resist it!
He couldn’t, and looked back.
Aw, hell.
He was right. There were more than a few of them back there. A lot more. So many that they couldn’t all chase him on foot, so some had scampered up onto the bulky machines and were jumping from one steel block after another to keep up. The ones on the ground were dark black shapes twisting and turning against the shadows, while the ones on top were more silhouetted monkeys against the spilling moonlight.
Goddamn, there was a lot of them. Where had they all come from? He hadn’t expected to run into a nest of ghouls on the way back. He’d ridden Mirabelle right through Paxton nine days ago on his way to Galveston without a problem. It was a small Texas town in the middle of nowhere, and he wouldn’t even know it existed if he hadn’t stumbled across it while making his way north. Bunker hadn’t mentioned it, maybe because he didn’t know it was out here himself. There were little ghost towns like this everywhere in the country now.
The first time he’d gone through Paxton, it was daytime. He’d had no reason to be
lieve the night would change anything. He hadn’t seen the obvious signs of ghoul occupation: boarded windows from The Purge days, blood in the streets, and evidence that, once upon a time, people had fought to survive here. There had been none of that. Not a single thing. So where the hell did the ghouls come from?
He darted around something with a long, protruding metal lever and almost ran right into a giant block of brushed metal. Keo skirted around it, losing a few precious seconds in the process. Thank God he had a nice head start.
Wait. He still had a head start, right?
Keo glanced back.
Yup, still back there. More of the creatures had joined the ones jumping from machine to machine. He wasn’t sure if they were any faster than the ones on the ground below. The time it took to just leap—
One of them missed its landing spot and tumbled down and crashed into the heads of three others below it.
Damn, that looked like it hurt!
But pain was another human trait. Ghouls didn’t feel pain. They didn’t feel anything at all.
As if to prove Keo correct, the one that had fallen bolted right back up and was running among the pack on the ground.
Keo turned and focused on what was ahead of him, just in case another lever showed up out of nowhere. How much longer did he have before he hit the back of the warehouse? Twenty meters? Thirty? It was a little hard to gauge distance in the semidarkness. He just hoped there was a door back there—a rear exit out of the place. If not, he was going to have to turn around and actually count all the ghouls behind him.
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