The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) (50 page)

Will had endured pain before. He had been shot more than once, for God’s sake, but actually hearing his wrist breaking—the
snap!
like firecrackers in the cold, still night—was a new revelation.

He opened his mouth to scream again but only sucking sounds came out, any noises he might have made drowned out by the blood pouring down his face. He swallowed as much of it as he could and did his best not to choke on his own plasma.

She still had a firm grip over his right hand, the one with the gun pointed at nothing—less than useless—and she was pressed so close to him that instead of the heat of her body, there was just the unnatural cold emanating from every pore. Why was she so cold? The other blue-eyed ghouls hadn’t been. Or was he misremembering? That was entirely possible. At the moment, the only sure thing was that he was going to die and he would never reach Song Island and never see Lara again.

He wasn’t sure when it happened, but he was sitting again, the uneven brick and mortar wall pricking against his back, keeping him upright. His right hand was on the ground, the gun lost somewhere in the grass. He didn’t remember if she had taken it from him and thrown it away, or if he had simply dropped it.

He thought about looking for it (
The head. Shoot her in the head and end it!),
but soon the only sensations he was aware of were coming from the side of his neck, where Kate was bent over and—

Teeth.

He felt teeth penetrating skin. Strangely, it didn’t hurt quite as much as he thought it would.

Those are teeth.

She’s…

“Don’t fight it,”
Kate said.

Her voice was inside his head again. They weren’t hisses anymore, but the Kate he remembered. No, that wasn’t true. The Kate he had known didn’t really sound like this. This was an artificial version of her. This was the voice of the Kate-that-never-was.

Stop it.

“It’s too late.”

Lara…

“She’ll never accept you now.”

No…

“But I will.”

No!

There was no response that time. Maybe she was busy, or maybe she realized it was pointless to argue with someone who didn’t have a choice.

Instead, there was just the sound of
slurping
, of Kate drinking him.

Lara.

His thoughts were filled with Lara on the beach of Song Island, walking side by side with him because they always snuck away before the others woke up. Even before Danny could rise, which was not an easy feat.

He was back on the beach with Lara, holding hands like teenagers. Not really talking, but doing a lot of smiling. Because he was happy. He was most happy when he was with her.

Lara…

I’m not coming home.

I’m so sorry, baby, but I’m not coming home after all.

Please forgive me.

He came back to the present when Kate finally pulled herself off his neck. Her blackened mouth was covered with blood. His. It dripped from teeth that were crooked and devastated and brown and black.

She smiled gleefully at him, cradling his painfully broken right hand in hers as if they were lovers. “Let it wash over you, Will. Don’t fight it. Accept it. This is the way of things now. We’ll build the future together, beside Mabry. You and I.”

No.

“Yes,” she hissed, that hint of anger flashing across her eyes again like blue fire.

No…

She frowned. “Why do you keep resisting? When the transformation is over, there’ll be no more pain. No more diseases or illnesses or wounds to worry about. You’ll finally be
free
.”

No!

He summoned what strength he had left and lunged at her, seeing the surprise register on her face. Maybe she was still drunk from his blood, and it made her slow to react. Or maybe it was because she was too close, and was crouched and wallowing in her triumph. Whatever the reason, and despite all her preternatural speed, she couldn’t move fast enough.

He barreled into her with his entire body and knocked her back, reaching behind him and wrapping his hand around the hilt of the knife (Millard’s knife, the one he wouldn’t be caught dead carrying around, if he had a choice). He screamed as he forced his mangled fingers to tighten around the grip and he pulled, pulled until the blade came out of the sheath. Crushed fingers were not meant to be moved, much less grab something, and the pain was unbearable and speared him like a thousand bullets.

Below him, Kate glared, her lips moving like worms underneath the wet coat of his blood around her mouth. Her body rose, but he threw himself into her again, and though she was longer, he was still bigger and heavier. He used his body as a blunting instrument and knocked her back to the ground. He wrapped his left arm—the one with the useless broken wrist—around her long, thin neck and held on for dear life.

“What are you doing, Will?”
she screamed inside his head.

He ignored her and swung the knife from behind his back. Moonlight gleamed off the sharp seven-inch blade, and Kate’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to it.

Recognition spread across her face and her straining under him grew exponentially, but he held on with his left hand and continued to crush down on her with his entire body. He refused to give an inch, to let her curl her legs underneath him in order to kick him off. As inhumanely strong as she had become, she had no leverage, and he saw something that looked amazingly like fear flicker across her eyes.

“Will!”

Her voice boomed inside his head, ricocheting off the sides of his skull. Just his name, in that feminine, unreal voice that was the real Kate but at the same time belonged to the Kate-that-never-was.

“Will!”

There was a sudden and fierce stabbing pain in his gut as she drove her fingers into his stomach. She shoved and pulled—

He screamed the flesh-rendering sensations away and drove the knife into the center of her forehead, even as her fingers wrapped around something inside him—maybe a kidney, maybe a lung—and tried to pull it out. He forced the knife to go deeper and deeper, until the guard bumped against her skull and refused to go any further.

Her hand, buried somewhere inside his stomach, went limp, and so did her body. Her eyes, once full of
(unnatural)
life, faded quickly, as if someone had hit a light switch, and her head lolled to one side, taking the knife with it.

He gasped for air, every inch of him shuddering, and crawled off her still form. He slid against the wall. He would have reached for his midsection to stem the flow of blood if he could, but he no longer had any control over either one of his hands. Instead, he let them dangle from his sides like the two useless limbs they had become.

Breathing hurt too much, and the air had become impossibly frozen. His insides burned, as if trying to make up for the cold outside, and he wasn’t entirely sure how his intestines weren’t already splayed in his lap.

Kate’s body lay in front of him, still so close to him that his legs were touching her malformed ones. Her head had ended up turned in his direction, the eyes—with the knife buried in the forehead between them—staring accusingly back at him.

Well, Danny, I guess any ol’ bullet (or knife) would do it, as long as you get them in the brain.

Mystery solved, ol’ buddy.

He coughed up blood and didn’t bother to wipe it from his lips or stop it from dripping off his chin. There was going to be more where it came from in the next few seconds or minutes, or however long it took him to die. Not only had she bitten
(infected)
him, but the human body was not designed to survive someone shoving their hand into your gut.

Soon. Very soon.

He closed his eyes. It hurt too much to keep them open.

Besides, he didn’t need to see them. He could smell them just fine and hear them shuffling against the grass. They were everywhere, their stench overwhelming his senses, trying to suffocate him in their thickness.

How long before they ripped him limb from limb, then drank him dry? If he was lucky, they would kill him before he could turn. He didn’t want to become one of them. Worst, he didn’t want to turn into something like Kate.

Was that how it even worked? He didn’t know. Shit, he didn’t know anything.

“How did you ever think you could beat us when you know so little?”
Kate had said to him.

She was right. As much as he had learned about the enemy in the year since The Purge, he still didn’t know enough.

It was too late to change that now, though. Way too late.

Will relaxed and let his mind drift. He detached himself from his convulsing body and floated away from the gas station, then glided across the night sky and headed southward, back toward Song Island.

Back to Lara.

Instead of the sight of his guts spilling into the grass in front of him, he focused on the color of Lara’s crystal blue eyes, the shade of her skin under the morning Song Island sun, and the gentle sway of her blonde hair in the crisp wind.

Instead of the
clacking
of bones as the creatures moved closer, he concentrated on the sounds of Lara’s laugh when she allowed herself those rare moments to enjoy life again, the feel of her body against his when they came together at night and never wanted to come apart, but knowing that inevitably they would have to.

Because the days would go on, the nights would come to an end, and there would always be another sunrise on the other side.

Lara.

Lara…

KEO

He wasn’t sure
how far he had gotten toward the shoreline in the last five or ten minutes since he lost track of time. Frankly, he was just trying not to drown. Keo had learned to adapt to the water long ago, and a part of that was forgetting about everything else except the waves pushing against you.

He had taken off his boots, socks, and assault vest, and had been swimming in pants and a T-shirt for the last kilometer or so. Just as it was difficult to tell time, it was next to impossible to gauge how far he had come and how much further he had to go before he reached the nearest land mass. His vision was limited by darkness; which was to say, he couldn’t see shit at the moment.

He had, though, managed to hang onto the MP5SD.

Have German gun, will swim.

Just because he was tiring didn’t mean Keo stopped. Besides, he was used to being tired. Hell, the last year was one long run after another. What’s that old saying?

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”

Whoever came up with that hadn’t been living in his boots for the last year. Sprinting from one spot to another was all he had been doing. Screw the marathon.

He couldn’t remember the last time he wasn’t tired. It seemed like just yesterday when he had taken Delia to a motel after she got off work at that terrible country and western bar. Things went downhill fast from there.

But there had been some good spots, too. Gillian, for one. Norris wasn’t such a bad guy, either. But for every Gillian and Norris, there was a Pollard and assholes in black commando uniforms trying to kill him.

None of that did anything to help with the lead weights someone had attached to his arms and legs when he wasn’t looking and were trying to pull him down to the bottom of the lake. He was pretty sure his cargo pants had ballooned to five times the size (not to mention the complimentary bloated weight), and he had drunk more of the lake than any fish that ever existed. At least he wasn’t a ghoul. If he were, he would have turned to stone and sank to the bottom.

Now
that
was something you didn’t see every day. He still couldn’t get over the sight of watching fear flashing across their eyes.

I guess they still remember fear. Welcome back to the human race.

Well, sort of.

He was doing calm, slow breaststrokes, simultaneously hoping to find shore and dreading it. He hadn’t figured out yet what he would do when he finally got there. Climb up and…then what? There were going to be creatures waiting for him. He had seen them from the Tower, racing back and forth like little speed freaks along the shoreline.

Where the hell was he going, anyway? Dammit. He’d lost track of his direction again. The closest shoreline would be the marina and the burnt-down house, but he couldn’t see signs of them at the moment even after stopping and twirling around in a circle.

Then again, it was so dark he could barely see more than a few meters in front of him, so that certainly didn’t help. For all he knew, he had been swimming around in circles these last few minutes…hours? No, minutes. It couldn’t have been hours yet. Could it?

He sighed. Maybe he should be grateful he couldn’t locate land. Drowning might be preferable to fighting a horde of those things, even with the silver bullets in his submachine gun and two spare magazines.

One year. He had survived for one year. Not so bad. Most of the world’s population had turned into ghoulish creatures overnight, except him. Certainly no one would have put money on him making it through this long. Only God knew how he had made it when so many hadn’t.

God.

That was funny. He didn’t believe in God, and he was pretty sure the old guy didn’t believe in him, either. Keo didn’t blame him. He had too much blood on his hands to think anyone—any
thing
—floating on a cloud up in the sky was looking out for him.

Keo looked up at the twinkling stars. It was peaceful tonight, with only the waves
sloshing
against him to fill the silence. Everything was so serene he didn’t know why he was even still treading water. It was time to just stop and let go. He, too, would sink to the bottom of Beaufont Lake and join those pesky black-eyed bastards. Some people would call that poetic, but Keo was just lazy and felt like giving his legs and arms a rest.

“See the world. Kill some people. Make some—”

The gradual whine of a motorized device intruded on his thoughts.

He spun around and caught the white spotlight as it danced across the water and blasted him in the face. Keo flinched and held up one hand to keep from being blinded. He managed to peer through his fingers at a white boat. Long and sleek, being powered in his direction by what sounded like a trolling motor. He wouldn’t have heard it at all if it wasn’t the only thing running in the entire lake at the moment, and was almost on top of him.