The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6

by Sisavath, Sam

  He shot the machine gunner in the back, then put a second bullet into the man’s collarbone as he was falling down. The sudden silence of the M240 must have surprised the driver, because he stopped shooting up the highway and looked back, saw Will, and swiveled his rifle around just before a bullet chopped through the door’s open window behind him. The soldier stumbled forward, looked surprised, then collapsed to the ground in a heap.

  Will maneuvered around the Tacoma, sweeping it for signs of movement, before moving on to the Titan. There was no body outside the front passenger side door, and when Will got closer, he saw the third man slumped over the dashboard with a neat bullet hole drilled through the windshield in front of him.

  “We good?” Danny said in his right ear, his voice barely audible over the blaring horn.

  Will didn’t answer until he had completed a full circle around the two vehicles. He reached into the driver side window of the Tacoma and pulled the dead man off the horn. Blessed silence.

  “Right as rain,” he said into his mic.

  “Anyone hurt?” Gaby asked.

  “My butt’s a little sore from sitting down for the last hour and change,” Danny said.

  “So what? You want me to massage it for you or something?”

  “Would you, please?” Danny said.

  They dumped the bodies on the highway and drove the trucks back to the farm where the others were holed up. They had been careful not to damage the vehicles during the firefight (bullet holes in windshields and broken car windows didn’t count) and as Will expected, there were more 7.62x51mm ammo for the M240s and supplies in the backseats. The machine guns would come in handy, and Will had no intention of giving them up now. He was already thinking about ways to set them up along the island’s perimeters in preparation for one of Kate’s assaults…

  Gaby and the others came out of the house while they were driving up the dirt road. The farm was surrounded by fields of dry grass, which made it like every other homestead they had passed since starting up Route 13 out of Dunbar. At one point he imagined that horses, cows, and other livestock grazed the vast acres and kept the family fed. They might have even raised enough to sell at the market.

  The two-story house wasn’t anything special, but it looked sturdy, with a front porch and peeling paint, along with evidence of rotting foundations if you looked closely enough. For their purposes, it would work just fine.

  The thirteen-year-old girls, Claire and Milly, stayed close to Gaby the entire time. Milly looked just as shell-shocked now as when Will first saw her, but Claire seemed to be amazingly composed for someone who had just lost a loved one. According to Gaby, the girl he and Danny had found on the road earlier was Claire’s sister, Donna. In so many ways, Claire looked like a younger version of Gaby—strong, determined, and way tougher than most people probably had given her credit for in her pre-Purge life.

  “Nice rides,” Gaby said.

  “The machine guns will come in handy on the island,” Will said.

  “Pump out some silver rounds for those belts and we got ourselves a bona fide ass kicker or two,” Danny said.

  “We can’t use our silver bullets for them now?” Gaby asked.

  “Wrong caliber,” Will said. “We’ll fix that when we get back to the island—”

  He was cut off by the distant sound of car engines.

  “Or not,” Danny said.

  Will took out his binoculars and turned back to the highway. Men on horseback, maybe a half dozen, were galloping alongside a light green truck heading in their direction.

  “How many?” Gaby asked behind him.

  “At least six on horseback and a technical,” Will said.

  The caravan stopped about half a kilometer away, and men climbed out of the back of the trucks and began taking up positions, the vehicle moving to straddle the two lanes. The riders climbed off their horses and began spreading out, some sliding down the ditches along the shoulders. They were already passing around bottles of water.

  “Are those little rascals doing what I think they’re doing?” Danny said.

  “Yeah,” Will said. “Looks like they’ve come prepared to stay a while.”

  “Does that mean they’re not attacking?” Lance asked. He sounded almost hopeful.

  “Maybe their friends have the answer,” Danny said.

  He was looking down the other side of the highway as another technical appeared and parked across the lanes, while more men in uniforms climbed out of the back. There were no horsemen on this side, but Will counted seven men in all, including one perched behind another machine gun mounted on the roof of the vehicle.

  “What are they doing?” Annie asked, sounding already panicked.

  “They’re boxing us in,” Will said.

  “Why?” Lance asked.

  Will glanced at his watch. 3:59 p.m.

  “Does this mean we’re not going to the island?” Milly asked, her voice on the verge of cracking.

  “I don’t know,” Gaby said. She walked up beside Will and exchanged a look with him. “What now?”

  He glanced back at the house, the barn next to it, and a smaller building they had checked earlier that contained farming equipment. Then he looked at both sides of the highway one more time to make sure the soldiers still weren’t moving. They weren’t. His first instincts were correct: they were settling in.

  Night is their ally. But it’s not ours.

  “Will?” Gaby said. “What now?”

  “We get ready for nightfall,” Will said.

  “How are you for silver bullets?” he asked Gaby as he handed her a box of ammo from one of the two technicals.

  “I’m out,” Gaby said. “I used everything up in Lafayette when me and Nate got caught in the pawnshop.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  Gaby nodded. “He was a nice guy.”

  “Yeah. He was a good soldier, too. We could have really used him at the island.”

  “I don’t even know what happened to him, Will. Not really, anyway.”

  Gaby was looking at Claire, standing across the yard from them, watching the road. Will had given her the FNH shotgun and it hung across her back, its thirty-nine inches just a foot shorter than her entire frame. A large pouch bulged against her hip, stuffed with extra shotgun shells. She had learned surprisingly fast when he showed her how to load and fire the weapon less than thirty minutes ago. The girl was a natural, which again reminded him of Gaby.

  “Are you sure about that?” Gaby asked.

  “Not really,” Will said. “Fact is, if we need her to start shooting, we’re already in trouble.”

  “Just don’t give Milly one of those, okay?”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  Gaby followed Will back to the house. He glanced up at Danny, watching the roads from one of the open second-floor windows. He had chosen a spot that gave him a clear view of both sides of Route 13. Lance stood next to him with binoculars, peering left, then right, then back again every few seconds.

  “We should have brought Tommy’s rifle,” Danny said down at them.

  “Shoulda woulda coulda,” Will said.

  Danny made a gun with his fingers and said, “Pew, pew,” up at the road.

  “Who’s Tommy?” Gaby asked.

  “A kid we met in Dunbar,” Will said. “He had a sniper rifle. He was pretty good with it, too.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Will shook his head, recalling Tommy’s decapitated body in the hallway outside the bathroom in the Dunbar Museum. The next morning, it was gone.

  They take the dead. Why the hell do they take the dead?

  They walked up the rickety steps to the front porch and stood underneath the awning. It was old and cracked and there were holes up and down its length, but it still provided a welcome respite from the heat. They stood in the shade and looked back out at the yard, Claire’s tiny figure standing sentry, the sun-drenched road beyond.

  “Ev
eryone’s dying around us, Will,” Gaby said quietly.

  “Not us.”

  “What makes us so special?”

  She peered out at him through the broken nose and bruises around her face. Even with all of that—and all the cuts and scratches from the helicopter crash, if he looked closely enough—Gaby was still just the eighteen-year-old girl he and Danny had molded and trained to be a killer on the island. He guessed she would never outgrow that image in his head.

  “We’re not,” Will said. “We’re just well-prepared. And we have something to live for. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.”

  “The island,” Gaby said.

  “No, not the island. The people on it...”

  “You radioed Song Island yet?” Danny asked.

  “Not yet,” Will said.

  “What’s keeping you?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Good news and bad news. Good news, we found Gaby. Bad news, reunion time won’t start until tomorrow. Don’t tell her we’ll probably die tonight, though.”

  “Good advice, Danny.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” Then, “Sunset at 6:30, give or take.”

  “Yup.”

  “They got us by the balls.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Kinda, yeah. And itchy, too. Is it supposed to itch?”

  “When was the last time you bathed?”

  “You’re asking me?” Danny sniffed him. “You smell like week-old cabbage. No, I take that back. That’s giving week-old cabbage a bad name.”

  Will smiled. Pouring bottles of water over himself took away some of the stink, but it wasn’t nearly enough. “I’ll shower when I’m dead.”

  “So soon, then?”

  Will smirked. “Captain fucking Optimism.”

  Danny chuckled. He was leaning on one side of the open window across from Will. The main bedroom on the second floor gave them a perfect view of Route 13 and the soldiers at both sides of the road. With only one vehicle parked across the lanes, it was less a barricade and more of an invitation. Will knew a fake opening when he saw one, and he was looking at two right now. Danny had come to the same conclusion.

  “Maybe we should give it a shot anyway,” Danny said, alternating between looking out the window and finishing a can of SPAM with a steel spork. “Give them what they want. You know me; I’m a people person.”

  “We’d never make it. Even with the M240s on each truck. A machine gunner out there is a sitting duck. We proved that.”

  “Maybe we can move it inside the cab.”

  “How?”

  “I dunno. I’m just throwing out ideas. That’s me. The idea man.”

  “We’d never make it,” Will said again. “Not with the girls and the kids.”

  “When did you get to be such a Debbie Downer all of a sudden?”

  “I’m just being practical. The ones along the ditches are the problem. They’ll pick us off because we’ll be sitting ducks in the middle of the road. Before we know it, the ones on the other side will flank us, cut off our retreat.” He shook his head. “No, there’s no way around that. And they know it.”

  “I hate sitting and waiting. Did I tell you that? They used to call me Action Danny back in college.”

  “So I hear.” He glanced down at his watch again. 5:31 p.m. “It’ll be dark soon, and they’re still out there.”

  “‘They’?” Danny said.

  “Yeah. They.”

  “Oh. They.”

  The other two blue-eyed ghouls. They’re out there somewhere. Waiting for nightfall.

  Always waiting…

  “Maybe we got lucky and they’re not around here anymore,” Danny said. “Maybe they went home. They have homes, don’t they? Maybe when you put down the other two, they got scared and ran off.”

  Will didn’t say anything.

  “Of course not,” Danny said. “When has anything ever been easy with you around?”

  “You blaming all of this on me?”

  “I thought that was pretty obvious.” He shoved another chunk of SPAM into his mouth. “We need a new plan.”

  “We already have a plan. Sit and wait and see what they do, and react accordingly.”

  “That’s a sucky plan. Come up with a better one.”

  “You know what they say about plans.”

  “That yours suck?”

  “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  As soon as he said the words, he thought about Kate. She had said the same thing back in Dunbar. In the dream. The nightmare. One of those.

  He looked out the window and scanned the flat empty landscape around them.

  Are you out there, Kate? Are you pulling the strings right now?

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Danny said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Contact with the enemy. The real enemy. The last time that happened—” he touched his broken nose “—I got just a little bit uglier. I mean, sure, I’m still male model material compared to you, but a guy can only take so much abuse before he starts losing gigs, ya know?”

  Gaby, Lance, and Annie were downstairs hammering the closet doors they had pulled off the rooms on the first and second floor over the windows as well as the front and back doors. They had found everything they needed from the shack on the property, including buckets of rusted nails. Lance, who didn’t look as if he had ever picked up a tool in his life before The Purge, handled a hammer surprisingly well, while the girls, Milly and Claire, pitched in as best they could.

  Will had no illusions that the barricades were going to hold, but putting them up gave everyone something to do and took their minds off what was about to happen in less than an hour. It was either this or watch them staring off into empty space, waiting for the inevitable darkness to fall.

  Gaby glanced over when he came down the stairs. “We’re almost done. What about the upstairs windows?”

  “Three windows—main bedroom and two additional rooms in the back,” Will said. “We’ll save the rest of the doors for them.”

  “What if we run out?”

  “We’ll pull the floorboards. There’s just dirt under them anyway.”

  The house was old and the stairs groaned. The wallpaper was peeling, and the floorboards were real wood that could be easily ripped free with the proper tools, like a hammer or a prying bar. Everything moved and creaked as they walked around.

  Lance sat down on a couch and drank deeply from a warm bottle of water. His clothes were soaked, his face was flustered, and his tired, hollowed eyes sought out Will. “They’re not going to hold. You know that, right? I told you we had them up at the other house, too. They broke in after a couple of hours.”

  Gaby and Annie didn’t say anything. Even the two girls seemed to greet the matter-of-fact comment with subdued acceptance and were paying more attention to the heat. The temperature had been tolerable earlier, but now with the windows covered, it had become insufferable.

  “We don’t need them to hold,” Will said. “They just need to keep them out for a while.”

  “And then what?” Lance said.

  “Then we make our stand on the second floor.”

  “What about the basement?” Gaby asked. “Those have always worked for us in the past.”

  “Against the black-eyed ghouls, it’s a no-brainer. But not with the blue-eyed ones around.” Images of Dunbar and the basement under Ennis’s flashed across his mind. “They’re too smart. Even if they couldn’t get through—and that’s a big if—there are the soldiers to worry about. If we seal ourselves down there, we’re trapped with only one way out.”

  “Like what we did to the other house,” Annie said softly.

  “What did you do?” Gaby asked.

  “We burned it down because we thought there might be creatures—the things you call ghouls—in the basement.”

  “Did that kill them?”

  “I don’t know. We never checked.”

 
“We’ll make our stand on the second floor,” Will repeated. He glanced at his watch again. “We need to finish up soon, so let’s get it done.”

  Lance got up and held out his hand, and Annie took it and the two of them exchanged a private smile. Will thought they looked almost resigned to their fates as they walked past him and up the stairs. Claire and Milly followed, leaving him on the first floor with Gaby.

  The nineteen-year-old stood next to him and looked after the others. “It’s going to be close,” she said, keeping her voice low enough that the others couldn’t hear.

  He nodded. “So what else is new?”

  “These blue-eyed ghouls… They can be killed?”

  “Yeah, but you have to shoot them in the head.”

  “Regular bullets or silver?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll default to silver just in case. I stabbed one of them in the head with my knife and that seemed to work, too.”

  She glanced down at the cross-knife at his hip. “I really gotta get me one of those.”

  “I’ll make you a copy when we get back to the island. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  They walked up the stairs together. Slowly, as if they had all the time in the world.

  “So it’s the brain,” Gaby said. “Which would explain why you say they’re smarter than the others. They actually still have brains.”

  “As good an explanation as any.”

  Gaby smiled at him through her scars, bruises, and broken nose. “I thought you were dead after we split up in Harvest.”

  He smiled back. “Someone once told me I’m too stubborn to die.”

  “They’re probably right.” Then, she surprised him by hugging him in the middle of the stairs. “I knew you’d find me. I always knew you would.”

  Will hugged her back and felt her body trembling in his arms. He decided she didn’t need to know that he was prepared to leave her behind, thinking she was dead, until he found out differently just a few hours ago.

  Instead, he said, “There’s someone else who’ll be glad to know you’re still alive...”

  “Gaby,” Lara said through the radio. She sounded breathless and happy. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”