“That good, huh?”
“Hey, we’ve been in worse situations. Compared to that whole Larkin snafu, this one’s a peach. At least no one’s trying to strafe us from above.”
“Good point.”
“That’s why they call me Good Point Danny.” He took a drink from a bottle before continuing. “The smart move would have been to adios outta here before dark. Take our chances on the road.”
“You know we couldn’t do that. Not with Nate’s situation.”
“Nate schmate.”
“You don’t mean that.”
He shrugged. “You might be overestimating my fondness for him.”
She didn’t believe him for a second. Danny would never leave her or Nate, just as she would never leave the two of them. And Nate…well, she knew Nate would never leave her. He had proven that twice now.
“Maybe it’s not too late to find a better hiding spot,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure this is as good as it’s gonna get. At least, in the time we have left.”
“That’s disheartening.”
“Just have to get through the night; then we’re home free.” He stood up and walked back over to the door. “If you hear something that sounds like bad news, you know what to do.”
“Take Nate into the bathroom.”
“I was gonna say run outside and see if I might need some assistance, but sure, do the other thing, too.”
Danny stepped outside and closed the door after him.
She looked down at Nate again and brushed specks of dirt out of his hair. Maybe it was the chaos of the day combined with the stress of almost losing him (again), but somewhere between six and seven o’clock she closed her eyes and went to sleep without realizing it.
Tap-tap.
Her hand was reaching for the M4 leaning against the wall next to her before she had fully opened both eyes. Nate was snoring lightly, the rise and fall of his chest underneath the flimsy throw blanket drawing her attention temporarily.
Tap-tap.
It came from above and slightly in front of her, which made sense because there was nothing behind her except the back of the house. She pulled her eyes away from Nate and turned them upward, trying to pinpoint the exact location—
Tap-tap.
More than one. Two at least, but likely more because where there were two there was usually a horde right behind them. They were moving back and forth on the roof of the residence directly above her. There was no pattern to their movements that she could detect, almost as if they were testing their footing, which didn’t make any sense. The creatures were almost reckless when it came to their lives.
She sat perfectly still on the mattress next to Nate, acutely aware of everything about her surroundings, including her own slightly labored breathing, which provided a stark contrast against Nate’s slow and steady heartbeat. She located the second rifle—Nate’s—nearby and reached for it, then laid it on the floor next to her. The fact that both weapons were loaded with regular bullets made her question why she was even arming herself.
Danny. Where was Danny?
The bedroom door was still closed and she craned her head slightly forward, hoping to hear something from the hallway on the other side, but there was nothing.
Did Danny know they were out (up) there? If she could hear it—if they had been loud enough to wake her up—it would have been impossible for Danny to miss them. Unless he had gone to sleep, too. Was that possible? Could Danny be asleep right this minute, oblivious to what was happening above them?
She started to get up when the door clicked open. She lifted the rifle as a silhouetted figure slipped inside and slid the door closed before leaning against it.
Danny.
The whites of his eyes searched her out in the darkness, but if he said anything, she didn’t hear it. Gaby finished getting up and tiptoed across the room toward him. Halfway to Danny, she glanced back at the window on the other side of the room. The armoire remained pressed against the bed, which was long enough that it covered up the entire window frame and didn’t allow any moonlight to penetrate inside.
She pushed up against the wall next to Danny, whose head was slightly tilted as he listened to the persistent tap-tap above them.
“Are they inside?” she whispered.
He shook his head and whispered back, “Not yet.”
“How many?”
“Don’t know. Dollars to donuts it’s a buttload.”
She looked back across the room again and could just make out Nate in the pitch darkness. With just his head sticking out from underneath the blanket, he looked like a bodiless head floating in the shadows. They had purposefully put the mattress with him in the corner closer to the bathroom to make moving him in there easier if they had to.
Tap-tap-tap.
She glanced up, drawn irresistibly by the noise. If there had only been a few before, they had just gotten some company. Five? Ten? Not that it mattered—
Tap-tap-tap!
“Danny,” she whispered.
“The bathroom,” he whispered back.
“And then?”
“We’ll cross that bathtub when we get to it.”
They hurried across the room to Nate. Gaby slung her rifle, then picked up the spare M4 and added it to her own. She grabbed their backpacks as Danny bent at the knees before standing back up with Nate cradled in his arms. She half-expected Nate to wake up as soon as Danny lifted him, but he remained limp as the ex-Ranger turned and, with some effort, carried him into the bathroom. Gaby hurried over to open the door for him.
“Much appreciated,” Danny said, grunting with the strain of Nate’s weight.
Danny went into the bathroom first, then gingerly laid Nate down on the small single-size mattress they had inserted into the bathtub earlier. She thought Nate might have groaned as Danny lowered him, or it might have actually been Danny sighing with relief.
“Guy weighs a ton,” Danny said. “Time to put him on a diet.”
“I’ll get on it as soon as we get back to the Trident.” She looked back at the bedroom. “What—”
A loud crash! tore through the house before she could finish. It came from their left and was soon followed by the unmistakable sound of glass breaking. On cue, the tap-tap noises above them ceased entirely.
“Danny,” she said breathlessly.
“I know, I know,” Danny said. “Maybe we should have barricaded those windows after all, huh?”
“Gee, ya think?”
He grinned back at her then nodded at Nate. “Keep an eye on him.”
“Where are you going?”
“Be right back.”
“Danny,” she said, but he had already vanished through the door, the darkness on the other side swallowing him up in a matter of seconds.
She unslung the rifles, laying one across the sink, then spent a few seconds pushing their backpacks and supplies into the crevices around the toilet so she didn’t accidentally trip on them if she had to scramble around the tight confines. It was dark enough inside that she couldn’t even see her own reflection in the mirror above the sink. She only knew where to find Nate because the white porcelain tub stood out—
Another loud crash! and Gaby thought, There goes the bedroom door…
She spun toward the open bathroom door at the same time the first gunshot rang out. It was followed by two more shots, both single shots but fired in such quick succession it was easy to mistake them for burst-fire. They seemed to have come from right outside the bathroom, except she didn’t see the telltale staccato flash of gunfire, so it couldn’t have been that—
The single shots became a volley as the shooter switched from semi-auto to full-auto, the pop-pop-pop blowing across the house and she thought, At least Nate won’t be awake to see this.
She ran back into the master bedroom and immediately made out a solitary figure (Danny) crouched in front of her and firing at where the door had once been. Something had shattered the slab of wood into
pieces that were now spread across the room—something either very heavy or very, very strong.
Danny snapped a quick look behind him as he stood up, his hands busy with loading a fresh magazine. “Get back inside! We’re fu—”
She was pretty sure she knew what he was going to say but didn’t get the chance to, because one second he was standing up in front of her trying desperately to feed a magazine into his rifle, and the next he was on the floor and there was a ghoul perched on top of him.
Jesus!
The thing had moved so fast she hadn’t even seen it coming through what remained of the door. It was just suddenly there and on top of Danny, pinning him to the floor with one hand while ripping the rifle out of his grip and tossing it across the room as if he were a petulant child in need of discipline.
Then it turned its head, and deep, pulsating blue eyes bored into her soul.
“Run!” Danny shouted despite the creature’s hand wrapped tightly around his throat.
Run? Run where, Danny? Where can I run that it can’t find me?
Of course, she didn’t say any of those things out loud. She was too busy backpedaling, moving as fast as she could (though it didn’t seem to be nearly fast enough) toward the bathroom door behind her. She lifted her M4 (Go for the head! Shoot it in the head!), but before she could pull the trigger, something moved in the corner of her left eye.
She finished the pull anyway, but her aim was off and the round sailed past the creature’s head and disappeared into the shadows. She had missed! How the hell had she missed from such a short distance? Or had the thing simply moved its head to avoid her shot? Could it move that fast?
Yes. Yes, it could. She remembered that time at the farmhouse in Louisiana and how fast that blue-eyed monstrosity had been—
It was just a blur, but even before her eyes could report its presence to her brain, it had already reached her and broadsided her. It couldn’t have been flesh and blood because the blow was too strong, like being hit with a jackhammer, and it sent her flying across the room and into the armoire. She was still trying to comprehend why she was no longer holding her rifle (or standing) as she was falling and finally slammed into the floor.
She couldn’t find the wherewithal to stick her hands out in time to stop her fall, and the face-first blow with the floor sent pain rippling through her entire body. Which was just as well, because most of her bones were still rattling from being slammed into by that semi-trailer (Anyone get the license plate of that thing?), then not even a second later crashing into the armoire.
Which part of her wasn’t screaming at the moment?
She expected to hear gunshots, something to indicate Danny had gotten the upper hand on the monster that had knocked him to the floor, but there wasn’t any. Which were more bad signs. With Danny, silence was never a good thing.
Gaby managed to flatten her palms against the floor and pushed herself up, if just slightly, even as her face throbbed. She turned her head and saw two figures entering the room, stepping over splintered wood sprinkled across the floor. But they moved like men, not ghouls, and were wearing gas masks and carrying rifles.
A pair of bare feet entered her line of vision, blocking her view of the figures in gas masks. The legs in front of her were black but somehow still stood out against the suffocating darkness inside the room. She craned her head, her neck straining with the effort, until she was staring into a pair of blue eyes. They looked like crystal heartbeats hanging in the air, beating slowly. The thing’s skin emitted an unnatural combination of cold and heat that had little difficulty piercing through her thermal clothing, making every inch of her shiver uncontrollably.
“So frail,” the blue-eyed creature (hissed) said. Thin strips of purple lines on the lower part of its face twisted into a grotesque facsimile of what must have been a mocking smile.
She looked past the creature and at Danny, unmoving on the floor behind it. The blue-eyed ghoul that had been perched on top of him was gone—no, not gone; it had simply abandoned him after Danny was no longer a threat and was now standing over him.
“Danny,” she said, his name coming out as barely a whisper.
The creature in front of her bent, grabbed her by the throat, and lifted her up from the floor as if she weighed nothing. It held her effortlessly in the air, and she struggled to breathe even as the toes of her boots scraped the floor, desperately trying to find the solid footing that was no longer possible.
Being in such close proximity to the creature, being touched by it, made her almost gag. If not for the pain, she might have lost the battle. Its fingers were more bone than flesh, and she swore she could feel every single joint that made up all five digits. And as hard as it was to fathom, she didn’t think it was even using most of its strength, because it looked almost amused by her flailing. Its lips (or what passed for lips) again formed that twisted thing that might have been an attempt at a smile.
“How did you ever survive for so long, little thing?” it asked her, its voice a sharp hiss that left no room for doubt it was no longer human.
Did it expect her to answer? And if so, how? She couldn’t reply with its hand around her throat, constricting her ability to do something as simple as breathe, never mind articulating sounds into understandable words.
Behind the creature, the two figures in gas masks had grabbed Danny by the legs and were dragging him out of the room. His body was limp and she couldn’t tell if he was even still alive. Had the monster done something to him? And what about her? What were they going to do to her?
She remembered Nate in the bathroom behind her. She thought about the teeth marks that covered his body that he went to great lengths to hide unless he was with her. Maybe they were going to do just that to Danny, use him the way they had poor Nate after the pawnshop. And once they were done with him, she would be next. And there would be nothing she could do about it. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.
No.
Hell no!
Her fingers brushed against the Glock holstered at her hip as she focused everything she had left on the ghoul in front of her. It seemed content to watch her struggling to breathe, finding some sick amusement in her pain, which it could clearly see on her face. It wasn’t as if she were trying to hide it; she couldn’t even if she wanted to.
Fuck you.
Fuck you!
The gun slid out easily—
The head!
—and she raised her arm and fired from almost point-blank range—
Shoot it in the head!
Its head seemed to twitch slightly, and the bullet vanished into the wall behind it.
No!
Before she could squeeze the trigger a second time, it casually grabbed the barrel with its other hand and twisted, and she somehow managed a scream despite its fingers wrapped impossibly tight around her throat, constricting everything from breathing to sounds. Or had she screamed at all? Was it all in her head?
It dropped her to the floor as if she were nothing, and Gaby forgot all about the fire burning in her throat because there was fresh, excruciating pain from her right wrist. She scooted back, away from the creature, cradling her hand in her lap, sure that it was broken, or if it wasn’t, then something was broken somewhere.
The second blue-eyed ghoul appeared behind the first (How the hell had it moved so fast?), and it too looked down at her as if she was barely worth its time. The mere presence of two of them in the same place, standing so close to one another, combined to give off an intense cold and heat pulse that threatened to drown her in some thick invisible ocean.
They looked down at her, blue eyes like living orbs against the darkness, but for some reason she didn’t think they were really seeing her at all. She had stopped mattering to them; they’d had their fun with her and now she had become…insignificant.
“How long until he comes?” the second one hissed.
“Not long,” the first one said. “He spies on us. The clever boy.”
“Not cl
ever enough.”
“He’ll come for them soon.”
“Yes.”
“And when he does…”
“We’ll end him.”
“Finally…” the first one hissed, its thin lips worming their way into something that almost—almost—resembled a smile.
9
Frank
“We have him.”
He didn’t need the voice to tell him that. He had seen the black-eyed ghouls swarming on the small Texas town, waiting as the men in gas masks entered the house. He could taste the acrid smell of gunpowder on the tip of his tongue as the creatures swarmed the building only to hang back as the two blue eyes made their entry.
“But you already know, don’t you?”
He had hoped they would have made it back to the sea by now. Back to the safety of the ocean, where she waited. From Larkin to Starch and back again. It was risky, but if anyone could do it, it would be them. Danny was well trained, and Gaby had been a quick student. But Port Arthur was a nest of ghouls and collaborators, and they’d been forced to reroute.
“You saw us take him.”
The voice wasn’t Mabry’s. No, Mabry had gone silent these last few days. (Why? You know why.) It was someone else drawing him into the river of consciousness that connected the brood, showing him images in the aftermath of the assault on the house. The projection was vivid, which meant they were close, though sometimes distance could be deceptive when he was in the hive mind. They knew he would be listening and watching while hiding along the edges, always beyond their reach.
“And the girl.”
It was his fault. He had exposed them to the enemy because of what he had done outside of Larkin. He had revealed himself, but even worse, he had shown them his weaknesses. (Danny…Gaby…) He couldn’t sever those ties and didn’t want to, not if he had any hope of clinging onto what still made him who he was, and without that he might as well be one of the mindless husks that serviced Mabry’s will.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 48
