He didn’t answer. Instead, he drew the Sig Sauer and tossed it to her.
She caught the gun easily, and by the startled look on her face, he guessed she figured it out pretty fast.
“It’s not loaded,” Erin said, weighing the gun in one hand.
“Not as dumb as I look, remember?”
She sighed and tossed him back the gun. “Dick.”
“Not the worst thing I’ve been called tonight,” Keo said as he holstered the gun.
“You said you needed to get this done before morning.”
He nodded.
“So tell me you have a good plan to make that happen,” Erin said. “Tell me that this isn’t a spray-and-pray suicide run.”
“I have a plan,” Keo said. “Whether it’s a good plan… Well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
22
Gaby
“Back at Starch,” Danny said. “It was the same one. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but I always knew there was something different about that one. It just took me a little time to figure it out.”
“Danny, its eyes look just like all the other blue eyes,” Gaby said. “How can you tell it apart from the ones that attacked us last night?”
“Trust me on this, kid. It’s him.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.”
“But what if?”
Danny shook his head. “I’m not. And I need you to trust that I’m not.”
She didn’t answer him, because she didn’t know how. She was afraid of what would come out if she opened her mouth. Instead, she stared at him across the semidarkness of the hallway and said nothing. Danny was bleeding from a number of cuts along his temple and arms, and despite the stink of smoke, sweat, and blood clinging to every inch of him—and her and Nate, and the entire building, for that matter—he was still in one piece.
Danny was looking at her, but not at her. He was staring at—and through—the closed door behind her. On the other side was the creature that had literally fallen into their laps when the back section of the bank’s roof caved in from the blast. It had been some kind of bomb, and if it had detonated any closer they would all be dead right now instead of just dirty and smelly and bleeding from small cuts.
“Torch it,” Benford had said into the radio. Whoever he had been talking to hadn’t managed to set the town on fire, which she was grateful for, but if the First Gallant Bank was any indication, the lone warplane had left plenty of wreckage behind outside their walls. Thank God there had just been the one plane. If there had been more, with extra munitions available to drop…
She glanced out the hallway at Nate, just to make sure he was still there. He was crouched next to the counter in the lobby and only had eyes for the large pile of rubble that had inadvertently covered up the hole put in the front wall by Benford’s grenade launcher. Slabs of partially intact concrete jutted out of the chaos, the big and small pieces awash in the blue of the moonlight that pooled inside the bank through the large, jagged opening where that section of the roof used to be. Rooftop gravel carpeted almost the entire length of the lobby, with most of it concentrated near the front.
Gaby was just glad she couldn’t see the street outside, because that meant whoever (whatever) was out there couldn’t see in, either. Not that she had any delusions a pile of brick and mortar and concrete was going to keep back the creatures if they wanted to come in. All it would take was a short climb and they would be inside.
Except they didn’t climb over, or do anything to show themselves.
But they were out there. She knew that without having to hear or see them, even if she thought she could smell their stench coming in through the multiple holes that pockmarked the bank’s ceiling. It was also a lot colder now, and she clutched her jacket to her chest while making sure her rifle remained within reach.
She looked back at Danny still staring past her. “What are you going to do with it, Danny?”
He shook his head and didn’t answer right away. She could tell by his expression it was a question he had been asking himself all night.
“If it is Will—” Gaby said, but stopped herself short. Then, “If it was Will, then it would explain a lot.”
“Why it told me to put on the uniform in Starch,” Danny said.
She nodded. “I don’t suppose he told you how he knew that would work?”
“No lips, remember?”
“Right. No lips. You think he can grow them back? The black eyes never could. When they lose something, it seems to be gone for good.”
“He’s not one of them.”
The question is, what is he?
“If that is Will,” she said, “how do you think he did it? How did he save us at the hangar without actually being there?”
“I’ve been thinking about that…”
“And?”
“Willie boy always thought the creatures had a kind of hive-like mind, always connected somehow. He thinks that’s how they know where to swarm when they discover survivors, or how the blue eyes control them.” He tapped his temple. “Think of it like a network of bloodsucking, well, bloodsuckers.”
“Like what, the Internet?”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Some kind of ESPN shit.”
“You mean ESP.”
“Uh huh. The Worldwide Leader in Bloodsucking.”
Gaby managed a smile. There wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t sore and dirty (and smelly, even if that part was harder to confirm), but the upside was that they were all alive. Still wearing bloody dead men’s clothes, yes, but alive nonetheless, and right now that was all that mattered and all she wanted to concentrate on.
After a while, she said, “If it is Will, do you think he was the one the other blue eyes were trying to lure here? Were they using us to get to him?”
Danny, she saw, was grinning stupidly at her.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, annoyed.
“You said he, not it.”
“I did?”
“Uh huh. More than once.”
She sighed. “Give me a break. I’m doing my best to wrap my head around all of this, but it’s not easy. I feel like my head is spinning and I don’t know which direction is up or down.”
Danny chuckled. “Now you know how I’ve been feeling since Starch.”
“What did Danny say?” Nate asked when she crouched next to him beside the island counter, about five feet from where the pool of moonlight ended in front of them.
“He’s not sure yet,” she said, readying her M4 across her knees even though there was nothing to shoot at (Jinx!).
She looked out at the opening where the wall used to meet the ceiling, but there was now just a gaping hole staring out at the moon above them. With so much bright moonlight, it was easy to make out the footprints plastered across the lobby floor, so many that they overlapped each other many times over. When they were retreating, the creatures had taken the bodies of Benford and the dead collaborators that had been assaulting the bank with them.
Wouldn’t want to waste a single drop of that precious blood, right, boys?
The silence inside and outside the bank hung over them like a physical thing, a blanket that could drop at any second and smother them underneath it. The thought made her nervous and Gaby clutched the rifle tighter, if just to give her hands something to do.
“What about you? You really think it’s him?” Nate asked. He glanced briefly backward at the manager’s office.
“Danny seems to think it is.”
“He would know, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long have they known one another? If anyone would recognize Will, even under all that, it would be Danny. Who knows him better?”
She nodded. “Once you’ve been in combat with someone, survived the end of the world side-by-side with them… That kind of connection is hard to come by.”
“Like us?”
“We still have a long way to go.”
“But we’ll get there.”
“Maybe, if we can get out of this town alive first.”
“Eh, I don’t know, it’s not that bad. Bullet holes and destroyed buildings notwithstanding, I think it’d make for a pretty good summer vacation spot.”
She smirked. “You’re doing Danny now, is that it?”
“You know what they say, ‘If you can’t beat ’em…’”
“Become as annoying as them?” she finished for him.
“How’d you know?”
“I’ve been around Danny too long.” Her legs were tiring, and she finally gave in and sat down on the floor, but only after brushing small chunks of rooftop gravel away. “How’s your side?”
“Hurts, just like everything else.”
Pain lets you know you’re still alive. Right, Lara?
“I was expecting fire,” Gaby said.
“From the bombing?”
She nodded.
“I guess there isn’t anything left in Gallant that’s flammable,” Nate said. “Or, at least, not enough to start and maintain a fire. We’re lucky that Warthog only had two bombs to drop.”
“Yeah, lucky,” she said quietly. Then, “We have to get back. The Trident. Whatever it takes, we have to get back.”
“We will. Just a few more hours, and it’ll be sunup. Then we’ll go home.”
He put an arm around her, and Gaby leaned against his shoulder, welcoming the warmth of his body to help fight back the cold that swamped the lobby. She wondered if she would ever be able to enjoy moments like these without guns within reach or undead things moving outside her walls. Were those things even possible anymore?
“I was thinking…” Nate said quietly.
“What?”
“That thing in the office. If it really is Will…”
“It’s a big if...”
“I know, but if it really is Will, then it changes everything, doesn’t it?”
“How?”
“He saved our lives at Larkin, then again in Starch. He did that, Gaby. He didn’t have to, but he did. The question is: Why?”
Why? I’ve been asking that question all night, and I’m no closer to the answer.
“If he’s still Will, what else can he do?” Nate continued, though now Gaby wasn’t sure if he was even talking to her anymore or just speaking his thoughts out loud. “What does he know? How long has he been out here? What has he been doing?”
“We think the blue eyes were trying to lure him here, using us as bait.”
“There,” Nate said.
“What?”
“He knows something, Gaby,” he said, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. “Get it?”
“No…”
“Think about it,” Nate said. “If they’re this desperate to stop him, if they’re going through all this trouble just to bring him here, he must know something they don’t want us to know. The question is: What?”
She fell asleep with Nate’s voice in her head, asking her “Why?” and “What?” over and over again, and opened her heavy eyelids back up to the sight of Danny hovering over her.
“You catching a little nap there, little girl?” he said, grinning down at her.
“Oh, God,” she said, and hurried up to her feet, the sound of loose gravel crunching under her boots. “Nate…”
She didn’t have to look far to see him leaning against the counter where she last saw him, his head lolled slightly forward. He was snoring softly yet somehow still clutching the rifle resting across his lap.
She shook off as much sleep as she could and picked up her rifle from the floor, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and angry with herself. “I’m sorry, Danny. I must be more tired than I thought.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, Tex,” Danny said. “No harm, no foul.”
She snapped a quick look at the front wall across the lobby, at the undisturbed barricade and the pools of moonlight coming in from the openings above. Still dark, and nothing had come in while she was asleep.
Stupid. So stupid.
“I’m sorry, Danny,” she said again.
“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s hunky dory.” He took out a bottle of water and handed it to her. “Partially my fault. I was too preoccupied in the office, didn’t think to check up on you lovebirds until now.”
She chased away more of the grogginess with the water before handing the bottle back to him. “Any progress?”
“If you call the fact that we had a nice, long chat progress, then yes.”
“He’s talking now?”
“Lips grew back.”
“So they can regenerate flesh.”
“One second he’s mouthless, the next he’s making sounds. Or hissing, anyway. Musto presto, new lips-for-you-to.”
“What did he—it—whatever—say?”
Danny sat down and she did the same, her eyes wandering back to the front wall again.
“It’s him. One hundred and twenty-two percent,” Danny said. “He knew things I never told anyone. About me, about us.”
“Like what?”
“Afghanistan. SWAT. This really hot blonde who I picked up at a bar and was convinced I was going to marry, only to find out—Well, you don’t need to know all the details. Point is, he knew things that only Willie boy would know.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.”
“But what if.”
“We already went over this, kid. You just have to trust me. I’m not wrong.”
“You’re that sure?”
He nodded. “Sure as sure can be. Surest, if you will.”
“That’s pretty sure.”
“You’re damn straight.”
She managed a half-smile. “What is he doing right now?”
“Recuperating. He took a pretty solid beating before he dropped in on us. It was apparently quite the death match on the rooftop, with attempted quartering and such. Real serious shit.”
“So he’s really hurt.”
“On a scale of Ouch and FUBAR, he’s about plus ten beyond FUBAR.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope. That’s why I dug him out of the rubble to help him heal faster.”
She must have gasped out loud, because Danny chortled and looked barely able to contain himself.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s free, and as you can see, I’m still in one piece and adorable.”
“You should have waited for us.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know; watch over you in case it tried something?”
“It didn’t.”
“But it could have.”
“But it didn’t,” Danny said. “It’s Willie boy. He’s skinnier—okay, he’s basically skin and bones—and he’s seen better days hair-wise. But you have to admit, he looks pretty snazzy in that trench coat.”
“That’s a trench coat?”
“Well, it was, about a few million pieces ago.”
“Why was it—he—wearing a trench coat?”
Danny shrugged. “Fashion sense?”
She sighed and shook her head with exasperation, not sure if she was angry with Danny or unable to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a loose blue-eyed ghoul behind her right now, with nothing between her and it (him?) but a single door. She had seen what they could do back at the farmhouse and last night. How fast and strong and so goddamn hard to kill they were unless you got them in the head, and that was so, so much easier said than done.
“Did he tell you how it happened?” she asked.
“He said it was Kate’s doing.”
“His Kate?”
“One and only. That night, after we ran the gauntlet from the farmhouse…”
She nodded. How many times had she relived that day? Too many to count.
“She got to him, then,” Gaby said.
“Yeah,” Danny nodded.
He didn’t add anything else and she h
ad difficulty finding the right words, so the two of them sat in silence and listened to Nate snoring lightly next to them while staring at the barricaded wall. She knew Danny was thinking the exact same thing that she was: That day after the farmhouse, when they lost Will to the roadblock…
After what seemed like hours, though it was probably just a few minutes, she said, “So what now?”
“We wait until sunup, then go home,” Danny said.
“What about him?”
“He had a pretty interesting story to tell me. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger, as the saying goes. New Willie has been reconning the enemy, gathering intelligence. Apparently he’s made himself such a nuisance that the enemy cooked up this little scheme and stalked us all the way from Starch just to use us as bait to lure him here.”
She looked over at Danny. “So does he? Know something they don’t want us to know?”
Danny grinned back at her, his blue eyes glinting with mischief—or maybe that was just the moonlight reflecting off them.
“Well?” she said. “Does it—him—Will know something or not?”
“I guess you could say that,” Danny said. “Does knowing a way to save the human race count?”
23
Keo
“This feels familiar,” Erin shouted about two hours into the trip.
She stood behind the helm of the twenty-footer, the balaclava that covered almost her entire face except for her eyes playing tricks with her voice. If he were sitting anywhere on the fast-moving vessel besides a few feet in front of her on a narrow bench, he might not have heard a single word she said.
He pulled his balaclava down slightly to shout back: “Yeah, but this time I’m not in any danger of getting tossed overboard.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
He grinned and pulled the mask back up, leaving the cold wind to smack against the exposed parts of his face.
The offshore boat they were moving in had a T-top, but the canopy was missing. Even so, it was the best and fastest vessel Hart had to offer. If anyone were around to see them, they would spot a long, white object slicing at fast speeds across the wide-open Gulf of Mexico. There was absolutely nothing else around them, the Ocean Star having faded into the distance (Probably for good) a long time ago.
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 66
