Road To Babylon Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Sisavath, Sam

  Double shit.

  “You know what the M stands for, don’t you?” Buck asked.

  “Yeah,” Keo said.

  “Of course you do. You killed him. Blew his brains out. I wasn’t there when you did it, but I heard about it. I heard all the grisly details. Then you somehow escaped the hangman’s noose.” Buck paused. Then, “You’re a hard man to kill, Keo.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “I don’t doubt that whatsoever. A man of your skills. The things you must have done even before the world went to shit. You are indeed impressive, Keo.”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “So now that we know each other better, where do we stand?”

  “I think we both know the answer to that one,” Buck said. “If you want the people from Winding Creek back, you’ll have to come and get them. I’ll even make you this promise, Keo, from one professional to another: I won’t hurt them. I won’t lay a single hand on them or try to find out which one you’re so stuck on.”

  “That’s mighty big of you.”

  “So thank me.”

  Keo clenched his teeth for a brief second. Then, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Buck said. “Now, let’s see you make good on your promise. You know where to find me.”

  “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” Keo said.

  Buck laughed again. This time, it came through more convincing. “They did say you were an odd duck for a killer.”

  “So that’s it, then.” Keo added, in his best game show host voice, “Is that your final answer?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t give a chance.”

  “Likewise.”

  “I’ll see you again very soon, Buckaroo.”

  “Don’t keep me waiting too long, Keo,” Buck said, just before the radio went silent.

  Keo put the two-way back down and finished the slice of venison.

  What exactly had he expected?

  Pretty much this.

  He was wiping his hands on his pants legs when Horse, standing next to him, lifted his head and snorted loudly.

  “Yeah, I know, I can hear them, too. Ol Buck was stalling me, that little scamp.”

  He stood up and unslung the MP5SD submachine gun, then took a second to think about what Hatch had said about Fenton:

  “They’re just…strong. Have you been out there? If you’re not strong, you get run over. People come and take things that you have, that they want. That’s just how it is out there. Fenton is strong. No one’s going to take anything from them.”

  No, maybe not, but Keo had seen stronger forces buckle when you hit them at just the right spots. He had personal experience with that.

  Right now, he swore he couldn’t just hear them trampling around the woods, snapping branches like primitive apes, but he could also smell them.

  And they reeked, all right, but it wasn’t body odor in the air. They were emanating excitement because they were hunting him.

  Keo grinned at Horse. “The more things change, blah blah blah.”

  The animal snorted back.

  “Exactly,” Keo said, before picking up Horse’s reins and starting off, the two of them vanishing like ghosts.

  About Bombtrack

  (c) 2017 Sam Sisavath

  BEHIND ENEMY LINES, BUT FAR FROM HELPLESS.

  Six years ago, Gaby was the most popular girl in high school. Then the world ended. Times have changed, and everyone’s unanimous choice for homecoming queen is all grown up.

  These days she’s part of something greater than herself: a group whose sole mission is to restore order to a ravaged world that badly needs them. Gaby will do whatever it takes to get the job done—as a soldier, a leader, or when necessary, a killer.

  Dispatched into Texas to investigate a series of deadly raids on former ghoul collaborator towns, Gaby’s mission is to collect intel and report back. Except nothing is ever that simple, and she finds herself face-to-face with those very same raiders.

  With no help coming anytime soon, Gaby is forced on the run and must fight for her life every step of the way. For anyone else it would be too much, but most people aren’t Gaby, who has been trained by the very best to fight and survive…at all costs.

  In Book 2 of The Road to Babylon series, a new enemy with a secret agenda will put Gaby and her group to the test. It will take courage, sweat, and a lot of bullets to uncover the terrible truth behind the town of Fenton…and beyond.

  One

  The brap-brap-brap of machine gun fire froze her in place.

  One second…

  Jesus.

  Two seconds…

  Christ.

  Three seconds…

  Move, you idiot. Move, move, move!

  She did. Finally. Her joints unlocked and her legs turned, followed by her hips and shoulders—spinning from left to right even as her hand instinctively stabbed down to the SIG Sauer pistol holstered along her right hip.

  Four!

  Someone screamed just before glass shattered, but the sound was barely audible over the continuous brap-brap-brap.

  A machine gun.

  Jesus, that’s a machine gun.

  “Gaby! Gaby!” someone screamed a split second after the radio on the other side of her hip squawked. A male voice. Berryman.

  A brief flash of memory from a minute ago, a conversation between Geoff and Kylie through the same two-way:

  “You hear that?” Geoff had said.

  “Hear what?” Kylie had answered.

  “Car engines.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Listen closer.”

  “I am.” Then, a few seconds later, “You’re right. I hear it now. Who are they?”

  “Hell if I know,” Geoff had said. “Not like I live here.”

  Here was Kohl’s Port, Texas, a small town near the southern coastline where Gaby and four others had arrived only an hour ago. It was supposed to be an easy assignment: Get to know the locals and find out what they knew, if anything.

  But it hadn’t turned out that way.

  The pop-pop-pop of automatic rifles snapped her back to the present, and Gaby’s mind shouted, Stop thinking and act! You were trained better than this!

  The P226 was in her hand when she broke off into a run, the interior of what passed for the town’s city hall blurring by at the corners of her eyes and practically lunging through the door being held open by the burly man whose name Gaby had forgotten, even though he had introduced himself less than forty minutes—

  Brap-brap-brap!

  Someone was shouting behind her, but the only sounds she could focus on was the hellacious gunfire outside the building. That, and her own heartbeat pounding, pounding away, threatening to explode out of her chest like one of those creatures from the sci-fi movies that Danny liked so much. It had been such a long time since she’d felt it—the burst of excitement and fear and runaway adrenaline making every inch of her tingle.

  She slid to a stop when she saw it—a bright-red Chevy truck parked in the middle of the cobblestone circle that made up the center of Kohl’s Port, with every building in town seemingly wrapped around the centralized location like an ever-widening maze of brick and mortar and wood. Gaby glimpsed the turning head of the driver through the bullet-scarred front windshield from fifty or so meters away, about the same time the man spotted her and punched the ceiling of his vehicle in reaction. That alerted the second man standing in the truck bed, manning an M249 machine gun sitting on a tripod welded on top of the cab.

  Oh, fuck me.

  The machine gunner was wearing some kind of black assault vest, his face partially hidden behind a balaclava, and he was swiveling the MG in her direction when Gaby twisted at the hips and dove just as the first hail of 5.56 rounds eviscerated the windows behind her.

  Fuck me fuck me fuck me!

  Someone screamed—no, not someone
, someones—but the pained voices were mostly lost in the brap-brap-brap of the M249 as it chewed through everything in its path—wood, brick and mortar, glass…and flesh.

  Gaby slammed chest first into the hard sidewalk and grunted, but there was no time for anything else, because her mind was shouting, Get up! Get up, or you’re going to die!

  And she did exactly that, scrambling to her knees, then crawling forward behind a parked gray pickup on the curb. She hadn’t fully stopped moving when the ping-ping-ping! of bullets punching into and then through the other side of the truck filled her ears.

  Jesus!

  Rounds pierced through the flimsy door to her left and destroyed the windows to her right, and even more bullets pek-pek-pek off the brick walls, sending showers of debris all around her.

  Christ!

  She threw herself down a second time, chest slamming back against the surprisingly cold concrete sidewalk. Gaby forced her legs to go equally horizontal behind her to get as low as possible to the ground. Somehow, through all that running and diving and scrambling, she had managed to maintain her grip on the SIG Sauer, and thanked God because it was the only weapon she had. The trip to Kohl’s Port was just supposed to be a courtesy call, nothing more.

  Some goddamn courtesy call!

  But it wasn’t the people of Kohl’s Port shooting at her. If she had any doubts about that, all she had to do was look up at the remains of the storefront along the sidewalk. Glass covered the pavement, and blood dripped from the broken window frames. There were bodies inside the buildings, even if she couldn’t see them. The smell of death was in the air, ruining the perfect, crisp morning breeze.

  She glanced back at the city hall building. There was barely anything left, and she was shocked the roof hadn’t caved in on the structure yet, given how much damage the front had taken. There wasn’t a single shard of glass still intact, and the door dangled stubbornly off one lone hinge. There were no signs of the burly man who had held the door for her and none of Paul and Louis, Kohl’s Port’s representatives. The two men had greeted her when she arrived less than an hour ago with big smiles and old fish smell clinging to their clothes.

  “It’s a diplomatic mission,” Danny had said. “Go over, say hi, ask some questions, and come back. No muss, no fuss.”

  “No muss, no fuss” huh, Danny? she thought now as the machine gun started firing again after a brief second or two of silence. This time the pickup behind her wasn’t exploding because the shooter wasn’t targeting her anymore. The MG wasn’t the only thing making noise—there was the pop-pop-pop of small arms in the background, though the screaming she had heard earlier had stopped. Or at least she couldn’t hear them from where she sat, biding her time and wiping the sweat (Why was she sweating? It had to be sixty degrees out here) from her face.

  The shooting was coming from all around her, and though occasional rounds ricocheted off the buildings to her right, they were clearly all stray rounds.

  Stray rounds can kill just as easily as a focused one, girl.

  Gaby shook off the pieces of broken glass that had fallen on top of her and reached down for the radio clipped to her left hip—

  Shit.

  She glanced down the sidewalk and saw it lying out in the open. The radio. She might have risked going for it if she couldn’t already see the portable’s cracked shell and wiring guts sticking out of it—

  Bullets crack-crack-cracked into the brick wall nearby, stitching it almost perfectly from left to right in a straight line, just before a body crumpled to the sidewalk beyond the pickup’s front grill.

  The figure landed on its stomach, face turned in Gaby’s direction.

  Geoff.

  His face was frozen in shock, a small trickle of blood dribbling out of one corner of his mouth. A much bigger pool of blood formed underneath his dark blue long-sleeve thermal shirt, but because of the way he had fallen—half on the sidewalk and half off—gravity was pulling most of the bright-red liquid (God, that’s red) to the street and into the gutter. There was more blood along his dark cargo pants, and his boots were still muddy from when they had walked up the beach earlier.

  She wore the same clothes as Geoff—nothing too military, but enough of a BDU to stand apart from the civilians of Kohl’s Port—including the patch on his right shoulder with the inguz rune: two black X’s, one stacked on top of another over a white background.

  Gaby stared at Geoff’s face for longer than she should have. Unlike her, Geoff and the rest of the team were carrying more than just handguns. They had fully automatic rifles, except Geoff’s M4 was nowhere to be found on him. Had he dropped it on his way here? What was he doing running around out there in the open anyway? Didn’t he see that technical sitting right out there?

  Then she understood.

  Me. He was running to me.

  Gaby sighed and pursed her lips.

  Geoff, you idiot. You stupid, chivalrous idiot.

  She began crawling toward him, mindful that the shooting was still happening around her, but it seemed to be moving away from her position. Either they thought she was dead or they had other, richer targets to engage.

  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, girl.

  Kohl’s Port was a group of buildings that branched off from the town square—the big cobblestone circle where the truck had been parked earlier—and extended north and south. From the continuous crackle of gunfire, she concluded that the fighting was happening in both directions simultaneously.

  As long as they’re not here…

  She hated the thought—she was being spared while others were suffering—but someone had taught her a long time ago that she couldn’t affect what other people did, and wasting time berating herself over it wasn’t going to change anything.

  “Stay alive. That’s your job. Dead men can’t do anything or help anyone.”

  Will’s voice echoed softly in her head. It was nothing new. Whenever she needed to be reminded about survival, his was the first voice that came to mind.

  She kept moving toward Geoff until she was almost at the pickup’s front bumper and a few inches from exposing herself. She concentrated on not obsessing over Geoff’s lifeless face (Geoff, you stupid idiot) while getting a better, closer look at his body—or more specifically, what she could salvage from it.

  Geoff didn’t have his radio on him (Shit), and there were still no signs of his rifle, so he hadn’t fallen on top of it. The pouches around his waist looked only partially full, so he had reloaded his carbine at least once. So where the hell was the M4?

  Gaby took a breath before peering out and turning left—

  There. Sunlight glinted off the matted black frame of Geoff’s rifle.

  It was a good meter or so in the street where its owner had dropped it. She didn’t have to wonder when the MG had caught Geoff—there was a long string of blood starting very close to where the rifle lay now and where her friend was. How Geoff had managed to keep going after being shot, she didn’t know. Maybe it was momentum that had carried him. Or maybe it was something else…

  She pulled back until she was behind the truck again and hidden. She looked down at Geoff, lingering again on that handsome face of his for much, much too long.

  Gaby had always liked him, and he’d made it obvious (subtlety wasn’t something Geoff did well) that he wanted to be more than just friends. She had entertained doing something about it more than once but had never gone through with it. It wasn’t the age difference—ten or so years was nothing these days—but the fact that he was a part of her team. Her team. Leadership carried responsibilities and rules, and one of the biggest one was “Don’t shit where you eat.” Danny had taught her that.

  Geoff, you idiot. You stupid, handsome idiot.

  She was on her feet before she had even made the decision—just in case she developed second thoughts—and jumping over Geoff’s unmoving form. She turned left as soon as her boots touched back down on the hard pavement—

  Two men, wearin
g the same black assault vests she’d seen earlier on the machine gunner, were walking across the cobblestone floor in front of her. Unlike the others in the truck, who were partially hidden from her, these two weren’t, and Gaby had no trouble seeing the jeans and sneakers on them. Their pouches bulged with spare magazines and equipment, and if not for the vests, they might have looked like every other civilian she’d crossed in recent years.

  Except, of course, they weren’t. Not by a long shot.

  They either heard her landing or saw her out of the corners of their eyes (Who cares!) and turned around. They were quick and alert, and their ARs snapped up and over in her direction. But they were at a disadvantage because she had seen them first. It was just a second or two, but a second or two was all she needed.

  She acted without thinking, all those months of training with Will and Danny—then later, endless drilling with Danny and others on the island—kicking in. Her gun was already pointed at what she was seeing, so she didn’t have to move it over to line up a shot.

  Will’s voice echoed in her head (“Your muzzle should always be pointed at what you’re seeing, so if you see it, you can shoot it.”) even as she shot the first one in the chest. The second man lifted his rifle and scrambled to find her through his optic. That was a mistake, because it gave Gaby another half second—an eternity in a combat situation—to move the barrel of her handgun just slightly and squeeze off three quick rounds, hitting the second target twice and dropping him.

  The first one she’d shot had fallen to one knee, but the man was trying to get back up. Gaby had gotten him in the vest, and she wondered if she’d hit one of his spares instead and only stunned him—

  Shut up and shoot!

  She did, hitting him a second time—this one in the face, just to be sure. His head snapped back while he was on one knee, and he crumpled, then lay still next to his friend.

  Gaby didn’t waste a second—she didn’t even stop to take a much-needed breath—before she snatched up Geoff’s fallen rifle and ran toward the two dead men. Her heartbeat was hammering mercilessly against her chest, and she was only aware of moving, moving, moving.