The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (26 page)

“He sounds human.”

“We were all humans, once. Like me. Like all the other children.”

“Ghouls.”

“That’s such a nasty word.”

“It’s appropriate.”

“Perhaps to you.”

“If you’re really Kate, then you know I don’t give up easily. Even when the odds are against me.”

“Of course I know, but I had to try anyway. I have to ask, though. Do you really think you can win this?”

“Maybe.”

“Be practical, Will,” she said, again with that air of motherly annoyance. “You’re not just fighting us, you’re fighting each other. Humans as a species are unworthy of survival. You’re dying, being hunted like dogs, and yet you still find time to indulge in petty violence against one another. Humanity is not worthy of this planet.”

“So I should just give up?”

“They depend on you. Danny. Lara. The others. If you let go, they’ll let go, too. There’s no point in fighting this. You know there’s no point in fighting this, Will.”

“And if I don’t just…quit?”

She stopped and looked at him, and Will felt a breeze and shivered slightly, only to realize it wasn’t from the air around him, but from the hard, piercing stare of her eyes.

“Then we’ll keep hunting you. Wherever you go, wherever you think you’re safe, you won’t be. Never truly safe. We’ll always be there at your door. Every hour that ticks down to nightfall will feel like the end of the world. Give up and save yourself all the misery, all the sleepless nights, all the pain of seeing your friends and lovers be lost to you one by one. Because it will happen. You know it, deep down. You’re a soldier, Will, you’ve fought in wars. You know this is a war you can’t win.”

Will looked around him, at the short grass, the still lake, the fishermen perched on their overturned pails. It all looked so real, but he knew it was all a lie. There was nothing real here, just a construct of his mind. Even Kate, standing next to him, beautiful in her dress, was not real.

“You still don’t think I’m really here, do you?” she asked, slightly amused.

He didn’t answer.

“Oh, ye of little faith. It’s a miracle you’ve survived this long, Will.” She stepped closer to him, and he could feel her breath against his face, and it was cold and lifeless. “Give up, Will.”

“No.”

“You can’t win.”

“That’s never stopped me before.”

She looked like she was going to laugh, but instead she stepped away and turned around until her back was to him. “Have it your way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when it starts going bad. Because it will. This world belongs to us now, Will. You’re the anomaly. The cockroach in the light.”

“These cockroaches have silver bullets.”

“You think you have enough silver bullets for a few billion foes?”

“Attack, and find out.”

She looked back and smiled. “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache. Besides, I’m a little busy at the moment. Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen closer. Can you hear it now?”

Will listened, but he didn’t hear anything except the water lapping softly behind him, a child squealing with delight as she reeled in a catfish, and an old man grumbling as he packed up for the day.

Then he heard a slight, but very distinctive sound. Drifting to him from afar.

Pop-pop-pop.

It was the sound of gunfire. So light, so far away, that the noise was surreal, like faint echoes from history. He looked around him but couldn’t trace the origins.

“I found him, Will,” Kate said. “I found Blaine.”

BLAINE

“Here?” Sandra said,
stopping the Toyota in the middle of the road.

Blaine leaned forward a bit to look past her at the two-story house, like some ancient relic from the past towering behind a sea of tall grass that hadn’t been mowed in eight months. It looked the same as the first time he had passed it a few hours ago.

“That’s it,” Blaine said. He glanced at his watch: 6:57 
p.m.

They could have easily reached Lancing before nightfall, but the more Blaine had thought about it, the more he wasn’t sure he could find Will and the others if they had moved away from the courthouse, which they had already been planning to do when he left them. If they went all the way to Lancing and couldn’t find the others, then what? They would have to find someplace to stay the night. That would take time and effort, neither of which he had very much of at the moment.

“You guys stayed here for the whole night?” Sandra asked.

“The windows and back doors are already reinforced. We can do the same to the front door.”

“No basement?”

“None that I saw.”

“Risky,” she said, clearly not sold on the idea.

“It’s probably the least risky choice.”

She turned the truck into the driveway. With the grass grown on both sides of them, it felt like driving through a forest, albeit one with a smoothly paved road. The Labrador statue with its missing head still sat in the front lawn, while its companion guarded the front door.

Sandra put the truck in park and reached for the lever when he stopped her. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Just in case.” He reached into the ammo bag on the floor and grabbed a handful of shotgun shells with a white “X” marked across them.

“What’s the ‘X’ for?” Sandra asked.

“They’re filled with silver buckshot. You know how when we shoot the ghouls, they just keep coming?”

“They’re impossible to kill.”

“Not with silver.”

“Silver?” She gave him another doubtful look. “Where did you learn that?”

“Will and the others have been using it since day one.”

“And it works?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t used it before. They say it works, and I believe them. Why bullshit about this?”

She nodded. “They wouldn’t.”

Blaine ejected shells from the Remington shotgun and shoved in new ones with silver loads. “What are you carrying?”

She took a Glock out from behind her back. “I grabbed it last night.”

“I have some ammo for that.” He dug into the bag and came out with a magazine with an “X” across the side. “This should fit the Glock.”

She reloaded the Glock, then gave him an amused look. “First duct tape and now silver bullets. Who are these people, the Lone Ranger and Tonto?”

*

The inside of
the house looked the same as it had this morning, with a repurposed door leaning against the wall next to the front door. The door still had long nails driven through it, ready to be re-used. Blaine wondered if Will and Danny did that on purpose, leaving a convenient way for someone else to seal the place later.

“We’ll need a hammer or something to nail them back in place,” Blaine said.

“I’ll check the kitchen.” Sandra walked off with her Glock at her side.

Blaine took the opportunity to struggle over to the foyer, where he sat down on a comfortable wooden chair. He made sure he could hear Sandra in the kitchen behind him, sifting through the drawers, before he took out the bottle of Tramadol and shook out two more.

As Blaine swallowed down the pills, he remembered Lara telling him jokingly,
“At this point I’m supposed to tell you not to take more than three a day or you’ll run the risk of addiction, but I doubt you’ll listen anyway.”

Smart girl
, he thought, squirreling the bottle away.

Sandra came back with a rubber mallet. “Will this do?”

“Probably.”

“You all right?” she asked, looking at him with one hand on her hip.

He smiled. That pose never failed to get his blood pumping. “I’m fine. Why?”

“You look pale.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“I’ll open a window.” She smiled. “Just kidding.”

He waited a few more seconds until he was sure the pills were kicking in. When he stood up and didn’t feel any pain—or at least, not as much pain—he knew they were (mostly) working.

He and Sandra didn’t have any trouble putting the door back in place. The nails were straight enough, and he banged the ones that were slightly crooked back into the correct angles. While Sandra held the door at a slight angle—so the length covered as much of the doorway as possible—he hammered the nails into the walls on both sides.

That done, they stepped back and gave it an appraising look.

“It looks decent,” Sandra said. “We’ll have to thank your friends for making it so easy.”

“At this rate, I’ll spend the rest of my life thanking them,” Blaine said.

*

With an hour
until nightfall, they ended up in one of the rooms upstairs. It was clearly a girl’s room, decorated with pink dressers, pink bedsheets and, of course, pink blankets. The idea of staying in the same room from this morning, where he lay half-dead, didn’t appeal to him at all. They considered the master bedroom, but it was too far away from the stairs.

They had some time, so they lay down on the bed and he held her in the semidarkness of the room. They didn’t say a word, neither one of them wanting to ruin the moment. The feel of her body against him was more than he could bear, but doing anything else was out of the question in his current condition.

Eventually, they got up and left the bedroom and walked the short distance to the top of the stairs, where they sat down next to the supplies crates they had brought in with them. Blaine put down the ammo bag with the shotgun shells and spare magazines for the AR-15 and Glock.

There were a couple of windows behind them, and tiny remnants of sunlight filtered inside through doors fastened over the frame. The stairwell was exactly in the middle of the house, with a perfect view of the kitchen and its island counter below. The second floor was a bit of an oddity—it was split up into two sections, which were joined in the middle by a walkway, like a bridge, with the stairs to one side and additional bedrooms on the other.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Blaine said. “If they find us and start up the stairs, I want you to go back into the bedroom and close the door.”

“Not without you.”

“Sandra…”

“No.” Her voice was calm but firm. “Not without you. Not again.”

He didn’t think there was any point in arguing, so he said, “All right.”

They sat and waited.

At 8:30 
p.m.
, it got pitch-dark outside, and the less light he had to see by, the more tense he became. Slowly, the pain around his stomach came back. He shook out another pill from the bottle and saw Sandra look over. She sat in the darkness with him but was close enough that he could see the concern on her face.

“How many of those have you taken already?” she asked.

“Not nearly enough,” he said glibly, hoping that would prevent what he knew would come next.

It didn’t.

“You should rest,” she said. “You can’t keep going on pills alone.”

“I’m not. I have you.”

Her face remained grave. “I’m serious, Blaine. You need to rest. You were shot three times yesterday. That’s not going to heal any time soon.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for rest later.”

She sighed, but didn’t pursue it, even though he could tell she wanted to. Instead, she laid her head against his left shoulder.

He was sure the ghouls would have found them by nine o’clock, but they hadn’t. Or if they had, they didn’t attack right away. He sat in the silent blackness with Sandra next to the stairs and listened.

For anything. For
something.

He heard nothing, just the wind outside, sometimes pushing up against the wall or windows. He tried to imagine what ghouls moving through the lawn, with its forest of grass, would sound like. Barefoot movements were hard to detect, but dozens, maybe hundreds, might be easier to pick up.

Ten o’clock came and went.

Sandra started to relax next to him and wasn’t clutching the Glock quite as tightly anymore. “Maybe we got lucky,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” he whispered back.

They were both wrong.

About ten minutes later, there was a loud crashing noise from the front of the house. Before the sound had even finished its echo, another loud crash erupted from the back. He recognized the sharp noises instantly. God knew he had heard them often enough—they were the very real clamor of shattering glass.