The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (36 page)

“Go ahead,” the guy said, like a ventriloquist speaking through Sandra. “Shoot back and you’ll hit her. I’m guessing you don’t want to do that. Not to this fine piece of ass, am I right?”

Blaine saw Sandra’s reaction, and this time it was all fear. The moment had passed, they both realized. They were royally fucked.

“One,” the guy said.

He didn’t get “two” out before Blaine lowered himself to the ground in a crouch, then laid the gun down carefully, feeling the barrels of the two M4 rifles tracking him every step of the way.

“All right,” Blaine said. “Let’s talk about this.”

“Good boy,” the guy said, coming back out from behind Sandra.

The man to Blaine’s right hurried forward and kicked Blaine’s gun away, while the one to his left grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him up, then threw him into the Cavender’s glass door. Blaine felt balls of flame raining down on him, but did his best to stamp out any sounds before they could leave his lips.

“Be careful!” Sandra shouted behind him. “He’s already hurt!”

The man who had thrown Blaine into the glass door looked back at Sandra. “Where?” he asked. Blaine heard a thick country accent.

“He was shot in the side,” Sandra said.

“Which side?”

“The right side.”

“Good to know,” the guy said, then he turned back around and punched Blaine in the right side, directly over the duct tape.

Blaine felt blinding pain and lost control of his feet and went down like a sack of meat and bones, quivering in a pile on the scorching hot concrete walkway.

*

They were in
the Sortys department store employee lounge, sitting on a plastic couch. Mason, the guy who had threatened to shoot Sandra in the head, straddled a chair in front of them, his chin resting on the backrest.

Mason tore at a big stick of jalapeno-flavored beef jerky and devoured it in a few bites. He looked even shorter outside of the hazmat suit, with uncombed black hair just this side of greasy. He wore cargo pants, Army boots, a white T-shirt, and the same gun belt he had worn over the hazmat suit. When he grinned, Blaine saw a big gap where he was missing a front tooth. The guy was five-four, tops.

The room they were in was bright, with an open window near the ceiling. Dust and paper were scattered along the floor, and an overflowing wastebasket sat in one corner.

There was another guy in the small room with them. It was the same cowboy who had given Blaine a nice “hello” to the side with his fist. Blaine was still smarting from that, and he gave the cowboy a once-over with cold, hard eyes. The man was dressed almost identical to Mason, but instead of a white T-shirt, he had on a black one. Other than that, he looked like a taller, skinnier version of Mason, and Blaine thought he could probably break the guy over his knees.

“Keep dreaming,” the cowboy said, smirking back at him.

Mason snapped his fingers, directing Blaine’s eyes away from the cowboy and back over to him. “So, one more time. You don’t know the guys that came through earlier today?”

“No,” Sandra said, her voice calm.

That’s my girl.

Mason looked over at Blaine. “And I don’t suppose you know them, either?”

“No idea,” Blaine lied.

“They were packing some pretty impressive firepower,” Mason said. “We thought about doing to them what we did to you, but there was something about those two guys, the way they held their weapons…” Mason shrugged and bit off another big piece of beef jerky. “Not worth the hassle. We’re just caretakers here, after all.”

“Here” was the Willowstone Mall, the big, sprawling complex behind the Cavender’s Boot store. Mason and the cowboy had brought them over with the third man, whose name Blaine didn’t catch, and who had disappeared as soon as they were inside the dark, dank confines of the mall. They had walked through the Sortys department store, passing racks of unused clothes.
At least they’ll never run out of things to wear
, he remembered thinking.

He had noticed right away there were no barricades against the windows or doors, and there were shadows everywhere—at least a good half of the store was untouched by sunlight. Mason and the others didn’t look disturbed by this shortcoming, though. At first Blaine thought it might have been the hazmat suits, giving them some kind of false confidence, but he quickly realized it was more than that. It wasn’t that Mason and the others thought they were safe in here. Blaine somehow felt that these men
knew
they were safe. How, he couldn’t fathom.

“So,” Mason said, eyeballing Blaine again. “What are we going to do with the two of you? That’s the question.”

“Why aren’t you scared?” Blaine asked.

“Of what?”

“
Them
.”

Mason smiled. “We don’t have to be. We’re…partners.”

“Partners?” Sandra said. “With
them?”

“They’re not as mindless as you think.”

Blaine remembered what Will had told him about the ghouls:
“Dead, not stupid.”

His mind raced back to that night at the house, looking down from the pink bedroom window and seeing the blue-eyed ghoul below. A lone figure staring back up at him, eyes brimming with intelligence.

“In fact, they’re pretty fucking smart,” Mason said. “How did you think they managed to pull this off? One night, that’s all it took.” He snapped his fingers. “That takes planning. Intelligence. Discipline. They have it in spades.”

“I don’t understand,” Sandra said. “You’re ‘partners’ with them? How?”

“Survivors might be a better word. We do something for them, and they let us live. It’s not a bad trade-off if you really think about it. What’s better—running around like you two, always trying to beat the night, or being able to live your life without worrying all the time that it’s about to get dark? I’ll take that trade-off any day.”

“It’s not like you can kill the fuckers,” the cowboy said.

They don’t know about silver.

“Well, you can kill them with sunlight,” Mason said. “But that’s only half the day, and it’s not like you can holster or fire the sun whenever you want. Have you ever tried shooting these things?”

“Yeah,” Blaine nodded.

“I’ve shotgunned one in the face and the fucker just kept coming.”

“I put a machete through the forehead of one and it didn’t even feel it,” the cowboy said. “You can’t fight that.”

“That’s how they beat us, you know,” Mason said. “They’re unkillable. Well, maybe if you used a nuke, but who the hell knows even then?”

It occurred to Blaine that Mason didn’t have to do this, sit here talking to them, trying to justify what he was doing. But he was.

Why?

“So what now?” Blaine asked.

“Now, you decide what you want to do with the rest of your life,” Mason said.

“Meaning?”

“You have a choice. You can keep doing what you’ve been doing. Running from city to city, hiding in basements, praying they don’t find you tonight, or the night after that, or the week after that. Or you could do the smart thing and join the club. I got plenty of hazmat suits for two more.”

“That simple, huh?”

“It’s that simple.”

“Bullshit,” Sandra said.

Blaine could tell Mason was surprised to hear that coming from her. Maybe they had expected him to say it, to be the dissenting voice, and not Sandra. He detected a slight tweak along the corner of Mason’s eyebrow that might have been amusement.

“There’s more to it than you just ‘partnering’ with them,” Sandra continued. “What is it that you’re
really
doing for them?”

Mason grinned. “Well, that’s a little hard to explain.”

*

He didn’t explain
it. Instead, he showed them.

Mason led them out of the Sortys employee lounge. The cowboy walked behind them with the M4. Blaine noticed the guy kept at least ten yards between them. Not that Blaine had any ideas about wrestling that rifle away. Even if he wasn’t hurt, even if each step didn’t make him wince just a little bit more, he couldn’t risk a fight now, with Sandra so close and Mason right in front of them.

No, this wasn’t the time. Not yet. He had to wait for the right moment, the right circumstances. It would come. It always came, sooner or later.

As they passed the jewelry section of Sortys, Blaine noticed some of the glass counters had been smashed. Jewelry was scattered everywhere, some on the floor, crunching under his shoes. He imagined someone excitedly bashing the cases open, grabbing the expensive merchandise, and then having second thoughts. What the hell were you going to do with jewelry now?

But then he saw it—silver. The pieces were under one of the still-intact glass displays. A fancy pen, a folded label under it boasting that it was 100% silver. A whole set of silverware—forks, spoons, and butter knives. Things no one looked at twice, but invaluable in the new world. Blaine made mental notes.

They continued through the shoe area before exiting the opened gates where the department store connected to the rest of the mall. Their shoes squeaked against the dirty ceramic tile floor, the only noise in the entire place. The stores were open around them, basking in sunlight pouring down from the skylights.

“There isn’t a single creature inside the mall during the day,” Mason said, up-front. “That’s the compromise. This place is all ours. It’s not a bad way to live, if you think about it. The mall has everything we need to survive. Food, shelter, entertainment.”

“Entertainment?” Blaine said.

“There are two gyms in the place. Basketball court, track, everything to keep busy. Plenty of non-perishable food to last years. Bottled water, soft drinks. Endless boxes of the stuff from around the world, just lying around. You can die an old man eating this stuff.” He chuckled. “I’m not saying you’d be a very healthy old man, but hey, you’d get to be old.”

Mason led them up an escalator frozen in place.

As he took the first step, Blaine thought,
Steps. Awesome.

He did his best to hide his discomfort as he took the steps one at a time, but he thought the cowboy might have picked up on it. When Mason and Sandra started to outpace him, Blaine forced himself to move faster.

Two figures looked down at them from the second-floor railing. They were both wearing hazmat suits and carrying M4 rifles, and he could tell by their shapes that one of them was a woman. The hips were a dead giveaway. Their weapons looked new. In comparison, he remembered the scratches and dents on Will’s and Danny’s rifles.

By the time they reached the second floor, Blaine was winded but fought through it and kept moving anyway. Sandra had stopped and was waiting for him, and she reached out a hand and he took it. She squeezed and smiled at him.
“Our secret
,” that smile said.

“Beaumont’s a big city,” Mason was saying, his voice echoing off the second-floor storefront windows and the big glass skylight above them.

A thick pool of sunlight poured down on top of them like an ocean, illuminating almost all of the second floor.

Including the bodies.

Dozens. Hundreds.

Thousands.

At first Blaine thought he was staring at a cemetery covered in dead bodies, but then he realized they were still alive when he saw their chests moving slightly underneath their clothes. They looked like coma patients, stuck somewhere between sleep and death, with grotesquely thin frames, gaunt faces, and cheeks hollowed from malnutrition. Some looked frailer than others, and some were no more than just skin and bones, reminding him, in so many ways, of ghouls.

A woman lay less than six feet from the tips of his dirty sneakers. He couldn’t tell her age; all he could see was a skull underneath loose flesh that fell over her face like a flimsy, thin piece of see-through film. They all looked like that, and it was impossible for him to tell adults from children, old men from boys. Their hair looked like dried-up leaves exposed to the sun too long, and he was reminded again of freshly buried corpses.

The sight of them—and the sheer
number
of them—took his breath away. They were spread out across the entire second-floor structure, and he could spend all day counting without ever getting to the end.