The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) (47 page)

“You don’t have to lose your humanity. Not all of it, anyway. I can show you how.”

Then he was kneeling, trying to rise, but unable to against their sheer number. One or two, or even a dozen wouldn’t have done it, but there was more than that. There were two, maybe even three dozen, crawling over him. Whatever had happened to them—this infection, this deviant transformation—it had shrunk them into husks of their normal size. They were shorter and lighter, but that didn’t matter when there were
so many of them.

“Let go.”

He fell. He had no choice. He went down on the grass, trying desperately to punch and kick at them, but he could barely move any of his limbs.

“Just let go…”

No.

“It’s over…”

No!

“Yes…”

He couldn’t see anything—just a world of black, even darker than the night itself. This nothingness, this void was complete and suffocating. He waited to feel their teeth penetrate his skin, to inject their poisoned blood into his veins and turn him from who he was into what they were—

“No, Will. You’re not for them. You were never meant for them.”

There was a sadness in her voice. He didn’t know how he knew, but he felt it in every fiber of his being that this Kate was once again the Kate he knew, the survivor of The Purge and not the one that had become a monster. Or maybe he was fooling himself again.

“Soon you’ll understand everything.”

They had pinned his right arm against the ground near his hip, bony fingers wrapped around every inch of his skin like pricking needles.

Never.

“Yes.”

Never…

It took every ounce of muscle, but he was able to move his hand partially up the length of his body despite the arms—so many fingers, and so strong—tugging at him the entire way. Or maybe they weren’t strong at all. Maybe it was just their sheer number. How many now? Three dozen hands? Four?

It didn’t matter. There were too many. There were always too damn many.

He kept pulling anyway, willing every muscle to work, and slowly, very slowly, turned the gun in his hand until it faced up instead of down.

Lara, I’m sorry. I tried to make it back home.

He wrapped his finger around the familiar cold trigger.

I tried, baby. I really tried.

The gun wasn’t exactly right under his chin where he could be guaranteed of a killing shot, but it was close enough. Or it would have to do, anyway.

I can’t become one of them, Lara. I
won’t
become like her.

He wished he could see where the barrel was pointing, just to be sure. He wished, he wished, he wished…for so many things at the moment.

Please understand.

He had to get it right with the first shot, because he wouldn’t have a second one. If he just wounded himself, he might not have the strength to try again.

I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.

He started to pull the trigger…

“What are you doing, Will?”

He didn’t remember the trigger being so strong, so difficult to pull. It felt as if the gun was purposefully fighting him. Or was he just weak from all the struggling? That could have been it.

“No.”

He ignored her and closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of the wall of black flesh. He didn’t need to see them to know this was the right thing to do. He couldn’t become one of them. Never. Lara would understand.

“You can’t do this.”

At least Danny and Gaby had made it home. At least there was that. If nothing else—all the failures, the near-misses—at least he had done that one thing right.

Take care of her, Danny. I’m counting on you.

There, almost there—

“Stop it,” the voice said, and this time it wasn’t inside his head. This time it was coming from
outside
. “It can’t end like this.”

The ghouls pinning him to the ground unraveled, their thick layers dissolving like liquid around him. They released his arms and legs and slithered backward on their hands and knees.

He could breathe again, and sucked in a deep lungful of biting cold air.

He was still on the ground, his chest heaving, the thickness of the night sky exposed above him. It was ironic that it would end here—out in the open and under the stars. The Purge had begun inside an apartment building for him, and it seemed as if he had been hiding inside back rooms and basements ever since.

Except for all those wonderful times when he was at the island with Lara. Those were the best days of his life. The best nights, too. Because of her.

Lara…

Something moved in the darkness, flickering in the corners of his eyes. He sat up and scrambled to his feet, backing up until he was pressed against the brick wall of the store, the Smith & Wesson clenched tightly in his hand.

Almost. He’d almost pulled the trigger.

He didn’t shoot the approaching figure right away; not yet, not until he could see what he was shooting at. He could feel the weight of the gun even through the gauze covering the raw (and probably bleeding again) flesh underneath—the magazine was half empty, and he knew with absolute certainty he wouldn’t have time to reload if he emptied it now.

Not yet, not yet…

The lone ghoul emerged out of the black canvas like a ghostly apparition; it was taller than the others, and it stood straight. It walked toward him with a preternatural fluidity that shouldn’t have been possible and had the obvious hips of a woman even though anything resembling breasts were long gone, replaced by a sunken chest that, nevertheless, managed to still look strong and boastful.

The way it moved was undeniable: It owned this moment with every step, and it knew it.

Bright blue eyes pulsated in the darkness.

He knew this day would come. Somehow, some way, he knew it would end this way, with the two of them face to face in the middle of a lonely, dark night.

“Hello, Will,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

LARA

“Run!”
the kid
shouted.

Kid
?
Why was she calling him a kid? The Josh who had come back to the island after supposedly dying wasn’t a kid anymore. Far from it. The fact that he had just shot Danny with a pistol erased any doubts about that.

Lara was struggling to pick Danny up when Gaby grabbed him on the other side. They exchanged a brief look and as much of a smile as they could manage before they lifted Danny up from the cobblestone road.

“Run!” Josh was shouting behind them. “Get out of here, Gaby! Leave him, and get out of here now!”

But Gaby didn’t leave him, and Lara couldn’t be any more prouder of her. The girl who had come back to her was hardly recognizable, but it wasn’t because of the bruises and cuts. Gaby had changed. She had grown up. She might have still been nineteen, but Lara saw a woman when she looked across Danny.

She’s a soldier, Will. You’d be proud of her.

And she was going to need Gaby, too, because Danny was heavy. God, he was so heavy.

She hadn’t taken more than a few steps when the air became drenched with a nauseating smell. It was indescribable, and though she hadn’t seen them in such a long time, she knew exactly what the stench was a harbinger of even before she glanced back over her shoulder. She had to see for herself—the proof that all of this was happening, that Song Island really was lost to them.

The wall of pruned flesh moved against the night, blackening the already dark background on the other side of the open pathway. She swore she could hear them not just in front of her, but through the woods to both sides, too—the loud and stampeding
crunch!
of grass and the
snap!
and
thwack!
of branches assaulting every one of her senses.

“Faster,” Lara said, the word coming out in a breathless whisper. “Faster, Gaby!”

Gaby didn’t answer, but she did pick up her pace, and together they pushed their way through the four soldiers staring, a couple of them already lifting their rifles at the legion of creatures swarming down the pathway toward them.

Run!
Lara wanted to shout at them.
Run, you fools! Bullets don’t stop them! Even silver bullets only slow them down until the next hundred more take their place!

She didn’t, because she didn’t care what they did or didn’t do. She didn’t have any interest in their lives at all. They were the enemy—people who had come here to kill her and her friends—and she didn’t give a damn what happened to them. But a small part of her that thought maybe, just maybe, having the soldiers between her and the ghouls would slow the creatures down.

What was that old joke?
“I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you!”

She wanted to laugh, but of course when she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out was harried breathing. She was already out of breath and they hadn’t even gone a few yards yet.

“Run!” someone was shouting behind them.

Josh. He wasn’t talking to her or Gaby; he couldn’t be, because they were already running. So who was he screaming at?

The soldiers. Of course.

“I can’t control them!” Josh was shouting. “Run! For God’s sake, run!”

Lara risked a second look back.

Josh was running after them even as his soldiers opened fire on the creatures bounding down the pathway at them. She had forgotten just how unnatural they looked in motion, like a flip picture book colored all in black.

“Go!” Josh shouted at her. “Don’t stop! Kate sent them! They’re not going to stop! I can’t stop them! No one can!”

“Lara, she’s coming,”
Will had said.
“She’s coming…”

Kate. Lara remembered how the woman had chased them from Starch, Texas to Beaumont, then all the way into Louisiana and finally, Song Island. She wouldn’t let them go. No, that wasn’t true. She was more than happy to let them go. She just wouldn’t let
Will
go.

You and your exes, Will,
she wanted to laugh.

If Lara went another day without having to hear that creature’s name, she would die a happy woman.

As Josh chased them—no, not chased, followed—the soldiers he had abandoned were still shooting behind them. The men, anyway. The only woman among them—the twenty-something with the black ponytail—was looking after them. After Josh. There was an expression on her face that Lara had seen plenty of times before.

Hurt. Regret.
Betrayed.

“The boats!” Josh shouted at her. “Get to the boats! They won’t go into the water! Get to the boats!”

Lara didn’t know what he was doing, or why. She only knew that he wasn’t shooting at them with the gun clenched in his hand, and that was all she cared about.

She turned around and got a better grip around Danny’s waist just as they stepped off the pathway and she finally—
finally
—felt the squishy beach under her. The sand seemed to sink under her boots and she wasn’t running nearly as fast as she had been just a second ago.

It wasn’t that she was running slower, it was Danny. He was too heavy even with her and Gaby carrying him at the same time. His head hung against his chest, his eyes closed, and sweat dripped off his temple and down his painfully pale, unresponsive face. She couldn’t help but wonder if he was already dead, if she and Gaby weren’t carrying around a dead man with them at this very moment.

Bang! Bang!

Two quick gunshots from almost directly behind her. Lara didn’t have to look back to know who was shooting. Josh. She recognized the sound of his handgun from earlier, when he’d shot Danny.

“Faster!” Josh was shouting behind them between gunshots. “Get to the boats! Gaby, get to the boats!”

Lara looked over at Gaby on the other side of Danny, but she couldn’t see the teenager past Danny’s bouncing head. She could hear Gaby’s heavy breathing just fine, though, even over the
pop-pop-pop
of assault rifles and Josh’s earsplitting gunshots behind them.

The water! Get to the water!

She willed herself not to look back a third time (it was hard, so hard) and kept running—or ran as much as she could, anyway. The fact was, she was mostly stumbling, Danny’s weight like a giant boulder on her shoulders. It was his feet—they were dragging across the sand like an anchor. But that couldn’t be helped. He was simply too heavy for her and Gaby to lift completely off the ground.

Josh was still firing behind them. She didn’t know why he was wasting his time. Did that handgun of his (some kind of black semiautomatic) even have silver bullets? If they didn’t, he mind as well be picking up handfuls of sand and throwing them at the ghouls for all the good he was doing.

Of course, she didn’t bother to tell him that. If he fell now, that was one more thing for the creatures to waste a precious second or two on. Another speed bump on the road to salvation.

Speed bump of the dead. Ha ha. Good one, Lara.

She might have chuckled to herself that time.

I’ve finally developed Danny’s morbid sense of humor. God help me.

They were halfway to the water when Gaby began to slow down noticeably. Lara thought about shouting encouragement when she realized the teenager was only mirroring her own flagging pace. It wasn’t just that they were both tiring, they were also literally sinking into the beach with every step.

She didn’t know why it felt as if they were running in quicksand until she looked down and saw the blood. It was all over the beach, supplied in generous amounts by the dead men that had assaulted the island. The dozens of bodies lay across the white sand, multiple jagged lines of lost lives thrown away by Kate as if they were little more than expendable sacks of meat.

That’s all we are to them. Meat.

What chance do we have? Why do we keep fighting—

The shooting behind them had suddenly stopped and there was just her and Gaby’s labored breathing, along with Josh’s (he was so close behind her that she swore she could feel his warm breath brushing against the back of her neck) crashing against the lapping waves in front of them.