The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (35 page)

Will slipped his hand around her waist to let her know he was there. She relaxed a bit, but not much. He kept his other hand on the Remington, lying on the mattress next to him.

He felt safe in here, surrounded by the preparations they had put in place. Even if they were discovered, getting in was another matter entirely.

What had Miguel said? “
Have you seen those semitrailers? You can’t tear into those things. They’re like a moving safe.”

Thanks for the idea, Folger, you dead piece of shit.

The noises outside became more obvious as a single ghoul became two, then two became a dozen. Then he heard them moving on the roof above him. They were hopping from trailer to trailer, and each time one of them landed and leaped off, the steel container trembled slightly in their wake.

On cue, his right ear clicked, and he heard Danny’s voice, soft and calm, but clearly whispering on his end: “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your semitrailer down.”

“You felt that, huh?” Will whispered.

“Felt it, heard it, and smelt it. How many do you think? A dozen?”

“At least.”

“They can’t sniff us, right? Cause I haven’t taken a shower in a while.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Good. Carly says I reek. Maximum BO.”

“Go to sleep. Nothing’s going to happen tonight.”

“Sleep. Right. That’s going to happen.” Danny paused, then added, “A clown wakes up one morning and decides to visit his doctor. His doctor takes one look at him and asks, ‘So what’s the problem? Why are you here?’ To which the clown replies, ‘I dunno, doc, I woke up this morning and I just felt funny.’”

“Go to sleep,” Will said.

Lara was looking at him in the darkness.

He shook his head and whispered, “Just Danny being Danny.”

She laid her cheek against his chest, and Will tightened his arm around her. His hand accidentally brushed against her breasts. “Not tonight, dear, we have company,” she whispered, her words slurred by the Percocet she had taken for the pain earlier.

He smiled and wondered how the kids were doing back there. He couldn’t tell if they were moving, or even breathing.

Will caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his left eye. He looked over at the breathing hole about a meter from the end of his mattress and saw something flitting across the other side of the opening.

Black eyes stared up through the hole, searching, searching…

Dead, not stupid
.

Will lifted the Remington to his lap and slipped his finger into the trigger guard, but he didn’t thumb off the safety yet. From his angle, he could see the tiny drilled hole, but the ghoul wouldn’t be able to see much of anything except for the ceiling directly above it. And there was nothing up there to give away their position or indicate there was anything inside. The closest LED lamp was three meters away, but the creature wouldn’t be able to pick it up with the naked eye given its limited angle.

Hopefully.

Ten seconds later, and the damn thing was still there, under the trailer, looking through the hole.

Had it smelled something? Seen something?
Sensed
something?

They weren’t stupid. Turning hadn’t robbed them of their intelligence, even if it had reverted them to an almost primal, animalistic state of being.

And animals could sometimes sense their prey…

Will inched his forefinger toward the safety switch of the Remington and was about to slide it into firing position when the black eyes on the other side of the breathing hole disappeared.

He had started to relax when he heard footsteps on the roof above him again, and this time they didn’t disappear right away like before. These new sounds were lingering.

Will flicked the safety off the Remington, mindful of the soft
click
it made, such a minor noise sounding like an explosion in the stillness.

They were still up there, moving around lazily. What the hell were they doing up there? He fought back the urge to start firing with the Remington. He could probably pick them all off with a few choice blasts from down here.

Tempting…

When he looked back down at the breathing hole, the black eyes were back.

Will didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

Go away, you sonofabitch. Shoo.

After about thirty seconds, the searching eyes obeyed and disappeared again, replaced by dark asphalt in the background.

A moment later, the footsteps above him also vanished.

Will waited, wondering if this was some kind of feint.

Dead, not stupid.

Ten seconds.

Twenty.

Thirty…

And still just asphalt below him through the hole, and no hints of a tremor above him on the roof.

Will allowed himself to breathe again and lessened his grip on the shotgun after flicking the safety back on. He slowly lowered the weapon down to the mattress next to him, still within easy reach.

After a while, the ghouls must have been convinced the semitrailer lot was clear, because there was a loud flurry of movement, fading away from them…

…and then silence.

He relaxed a bit.

Lara had gone to sleep next to him. He could also hear the teenagers snoring lightly in the back. Or maybe it was just one of them. It was hard to tell.

He sat awake and waited, listening, trying to feel the slightest vibrations from outside. Soft wind against the steel walls of the containers, debris blowing across the concrete parking lot. What may or may not have been a car horn in the distance, or possibly just his imagination playing tricks on him.

He lost the battle to stay awake around three in the morning, and was surprised he didn’t dream of Kate again.

BLAINE

They hadn’t been
in a city as big as Beaumont since they had abandoned Dallas, so it felt a little odd to be driving up a highway that was suddenly stuffed with cars, giving him flashbacks of afternoon rush-hour traffic. Except there were no horns, no fumes, and none of the grinding sounds of machinery inching forward every few seconds.

There were vehicles in their path when they approached the outskirts of the city, but it only got worse as they continued on. Whenever the highway seemed to thin out and become passable, another huge block of cars appeared to prove him wrong.

After a while, Sandra began stopping more than she was moving. Finally, she simply stopped and parked next to an overturned Ford truck and a red Camaro buried in its exposed belly.

She sat back, then let out a frustrated sigh. “It’s not going to get any better, is it?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Blaine said. “Want me to drive?”

“You can’t even walk.”

“I can walk fine.”

“Oh yeah? Get out and show me.”

“Not now, it’s too hot outside.”

“Right.” Then she smiled at him. “Besides, I like this. Driving you around. It’s liberating. I just wish the damn road would cooperate.”

Blaine wondered if Will and the others had encountered the same thing and how they got around it. You could go around the city, but that would add a lot of time to the schedule. Maybe even a day. No. Sticking to the highway, or near it, was the shortest route.

“What time is it?” Sandra asked.

He glanced down at his watch. “Three fourteen.”

They had made pretty good time since Lancing. The highways between towns and cities were always easy to travel, and it wasn’t until you hit the towns that things got complicated.

“Look,” Sandra said, pointing.

Blaine looked at where she was pointing, saw a Burger King to their right, in front of a big sprawling group of buildings. A mall, with a Sortys department store taking up most of the space on this side of the structure. The parking lot was almost entirely empty.

He searched out a sign and found one near the street that read: “Willowstone Mall.”

“Is this really the time to go shopping?” Blaine said.

She rolled her eyes. “No, not the mall. In front of it.”

She pointed again, and following her a second time, he saw a Cavender’s Boot City store near the feeder road. It was in front of the mall and squeezed between a Best Buy and a Petsmart. Cavender’s sold cowboy boots and hats and general Western wear. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place he visited regularly.

“I need new boots,” Sandra said. “This pair’s getting a little worn around the heels.”

He looked down at his own sneakers. They were dirty and worn around the edges. They were blue once, but were mostly white now, the colors faded from heavy use.

“Let’s go shopping,” he said.

*

They pulled into
the Cavender’s and parked between a beat-up brown Toyota truck and a white Ford F-150. The storefront windows were intact, and there was enough sunlight that he could see racks of jeans, boots, hats, and belt buckles. There were a lot of belt buckles.

Yee haw.

The second he climbed out of the Silverado, Blaine flinched with pain. He stopped for a second and looked down, expecting to see blood on his shirt, and was relieved when he didn’t. Still, there was no mistaking where the pain was coming from. He felt like sitting down to catch his breath, but Sandra might be watching, so he forced himself forward, toward the front door of the Cavender’s instead.

“You think any of those jeans will fit me?” he asked.

He was at the doors, reaching for the handle, when he stopped. He saw Sandra’s reflection in the store’s glass door, and she wasn’t alone.

Sandra stood frozen next to the truck, with some kind of alien standing behind her. No, not an alien. It was a
man
wearing some type of black gas mask, with a large, elongated clear lens and two small breathing filters jutting out from the sides like shorn tusks. He was wearing some kind of gray hazmat suit. Not the big, bulky kind, but the thin, tactical types he had seen soldiers wearing on the news. The suit was light enough for the man to wear a gun belt with a holster. The Browning automatic that should have been in the holster was instead pressed up against Sandra’s temple.

Blaine spun, drawing his Glock. The sudden, quick movement made him grimace as pain shot through him like some pissed-off demon from Hell. He pushed away the pain and concentrated on taking aim at the man standing behind Sandra instead. He couldn’t see the face clearly through the gas mask, but he could see dark, small black eyes. The man was at least half a foot shorter than Sandra, and the sight of him holding her at gunpoint struck Blaine as absurd.

“Put the gun down or I put a bullet through her brain,” the man said. His voice sounded hollow behind the gas mask, but there was no mistaking the menace.

Blaine didn’t lower his gun. He wasn’t stupid enough to think doing so would magically free Sandra. And maybe Sandra knew it, too, because she looked right back at him. He saw fear in her eyes, but also grim determination. The guy had snuck up on Sandra before she had even had the chance to slam the truck’s driver-side door shut.

“That’s not going to happen,” Blaine said.

“You wanna get her killed? Is that it?” the man asked.

“It’s not going to happen,” Blaine said again.

“Tough guy, huh?”

“You expect me to believe you’ll let her go if I put this gun down?”

The guy might have grinned. It was hard to tell, because Blaine couldn’t see the man’s mouth. His eyes did seem to narrow, in the way eyes did when people were grinning.

“I guess you’re smarter than you look,” the guy said.

“No one’s ever accused me of that before.”

The guy chuckled. “Not like you have a choice, though.”

“I got a gun, I got a choice.”

“You think so?”

“You hurt her and I hurt you. Simple as that.”

“You’re right. It is as simple as that. The problem with that is, though?”

“What’s that?”

“I got friends and you don’t.”

This time Blaine heard them, except it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t take his gun away from the guy standing behind Sandra anyway. If he had, he knew the guy would end it right there and shoot him dead. Instead, Blaine let two more men come up on both sides of him, fighting every instinct to turn around to confront at least one of them.

He risked a quick glance left, then right—less than a second each time, but just long enough to see they were both wearing the same hazmat suits and holding M4 rifles pointing at him. They had come from around the corners of the Cavender’s, moving surprisingly cat-like for guys in chemical suits.

Had they been waiting there this whole time? Probably. Just like the guy behind Sandra had been waiting to sneak up on them. Hell, they probably saw the Silverado coming from a mile away. God knew they were the only car still running in the city for miles all around. He couldn’t imagine the noises they must have made moving along the highway.

“Here’s the plan,” the guy behind Sandra said. “I’m going to count to five. If you don’t drop your gun, they’re going to start shooting. Oh, and just in case you’re thinking of taking that shot anyway?”

The guy moved until he was completely hidden behind Sandra’s bigger frame. And because he was shorter than her, he didn’t have to bend at the knees. Blaine thought that was kind of absurd, too.