“What now?” Keo asked.
“My primary concern is keeping the Trident and everyone on it safe. And that’s what I’m going to do while we head back to Port Arthur to wait for Danny to make contact.”
“How long has it been?”
“Yesterday morning. His last position was outside a town called Hellion. Close enough to Starch that the next time he radioed in, I expected him to be doing it from inside Harold Campbell’s facility.”
“Did you say Hellion and Starch?”
She nodded somberly. “I saw them on the map.”
“He could have gone around it. The Ranger’s resourceful, bad jokes notwithstanding. And the girl’s good.”
“Gaby.”
“Yeah, her. I’m not sure about the kid with the Mohawk, though.”
She managed a smile. “He’s a good kid.”
“Yeah, but that haircut…”
“I know.”
She looked off into the ocean, in the direction where she knew Blaine and the Trident were waiting for them right now. She couldn’t see the yacht from here, which made her feel relieved. The last thing she needed was to have to fight off collaborators on the ocean, too.
“We’re dealing with a Ranger here,” Keo was saying. “I’ve crossed a few of them in my time, so don’t press the panic button just yet. At least not for another day, and maybe not even then.”
She wanted badly to agree with him, but the doubts made that impossible.
Would you have done it, Will? Or would you have been satisfied with staying on the Trident?
God, where are you when I need you most?
“What about Gillian and T18?” she asked. “How are you going to handle that one?”
“It’s tricky.”
“When is it not tricky with you?”
He grunted before glancing back at Jordan, on the road behind them with Bonnie. The two women still looked like they were in the middle of conversation.
“You got extra room for her?” he asked.
“If you’re not coming, I have a feeling she won’t, either.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Lara gave him an almost pitying look. “For a smart guy, you can be amazingly dense at times, Keo.”
“When are people going to stop overestimating me? I keep telling everyone I’m just a guy with a gun.”
“Right,” she smiled. “You’re just a guy with a gun.”
17
Gaby
“How many, you think?” Nate asked.
She shook her head. “It’s hard to tell. God knows how many more are buried underneath all that.”
“It looks worse than I thought it would be.”
“It’s kind of what I expected.”
“Really?”
“Mostly.”
“I guess you have a better imagination than me.”
“Well, this looks familiar,” Danny said, climbing up the rubble behind them. He walked the short distance over and crouched next to her and looked out at the airfield. “Plan Z,” he said quietly.
“What?” she said.
“Just thinking out loud. Don’t mind me.”
She followed his gaze back out to the world beyond the hangar. Or what was left of it. If she didn’t already know she was looking at an airfield, she wouldn’t have been able to guess from the remains. The ground had taken a lot of punishment, the slabs of asphalt and concrete that made up the runway scattered across the surrounding area. The group of administrative buildings on the other side was practically invisible against the widespread destruction.
Bleached white bones poked out of the discombobulated green, brown, and gray of the obliterated field like furless prairie dogs playing hide and seek with the sun. Dead (again?) ghouls. So many that she could have started counting and never finished before nightfall, and those were just the ones she could see from her perch. How many more were hidden underneath all that loosened earth and man-made material? What about behind them right now? Or among the scorched trees that flanked the airfield?
“Cluster bombs,” Danny had said when Nate told him about the small parachutes he’d seen falling from the sky last night.
There was just enough wind to disperse most of the lingering stench of vaporized ghoul flesh, otherwise it would have been unbearable against so much unnatural death. Even so, she pulled her shirt up over half of her face, Danny and Nate doing the same next to her. Her eyes stung, a combination of the acrid smell of the dead and the scorched foliage from the woods around them.
They were crouched on a section of the hangar’s front wall that was still standing, the top half blown off by one of the blasts from last night. Pieces of the caved-in roof provided a ladder of sorts, with just enough hand and footholds to crawl up its length. The only thing left now was to hop the ten feet down to the sturdy ground below, where most of the bombs had fallen short. Or maybe the pilots had hit exactly what they were supposed to and the hangar wasn’t one of them.
Pilots. Because there was more than one plane last night. How many? Maybe it didn’t matter. One or two, or ten of those Warthogs would still have changed everything. The bloody mess at T29 was proof of that.
“Well?” a voice said from behind them, from inside the hangar. “What’s the verdict?”
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 Nate 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 thoro
ughly 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 much 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.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 22
