The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (59 page)

Behind him, the darkness seemed to shift and move, as if alive.

Because it was alive.

It wasn’t the darkness, or the night. It was something else. Something familiar.

Ghouls.

A wave of them, pouring out of the power station gate, moving so fast and crashing so indiscriminately against each other, against everything, that the fence shook and threatened to collapse under their charge. But the fencing didn’t fall fast enough, so they began vaulting it, leaping over each other to get to the other side, until finally there were too many of them clinging to the fence at one time and the whole thing careened forward and buried itself into the ground with a loud, grinding squeal, like nails on a chalkboard.

She had forgotten how fast they were, how thin and skeletal, and how inhumanly dark their eyes were. It was like staring into the abyss and seeing the blackness staring back.

Danny was almost on top of her. He grabbed her arm and dragged her with him, shouting, “Go go go!”

She turned and ran alongside him. “What about Will?”

“Keep going!”

Danny stopped and turned around just as Will flashed past him.

Will reached for her arm, found her wrist, and pulled her along with him, even as she heard Danny’s shotgun firing behind them.

Guys, I’m not a baton,
she thought to herself, but her thoughts were interrupted by Danny’s shotgun blasts.

Once, twice, three shots.

Then four, five, six, and seven shots.

Seven shots. The Remingtons have a limit of seven shots.

Will released her hand and stopped and turned.

She looked back and saw Danny coming, passing Will, who had begun firing back at the moving, surging wall of ghouls, each one of his blasts sending a wave of flaming death that shredded the creatures. They were still far off, the closest one thirty yards away, but they were close enough she could see the silver buckshot ripping into them, searing flesh—or what little they had left—from bone. They fell in a row, but it didn’t matter, because one, two—a
dozen
—were soon leaping over the fallen ones, coming in a relentless deluge across the open ground.

She felt her heart sink at the sight of them.

Where the hell did they all come from?

“Go go go!” Danny was shouting, grabbing her wrist and pulling her with him. She thought her arm might snap out of its socket, but it didn’t.

Lara ran as fast as she could, and suddenly the pain in her left arm came screaming back like a roaring train, engulfing her in a firestorm. The Remington seemed to have tripled in weight, and it was all she could do to hold desperately to it, too afraid to let go. She gritted through the pain and kept running, her legs pumping hard under her.

Behind her, she heard Will’s shotgun roaring, firing again, and again…and again.

And each shot got closer, and closer…and closer still.

We’ll never make it. We’ll never make it…

JOSH

Pros and cons:
What were they?

Pros: They had taken the island from Tom, Karen, and Marcus. Tom was dead, which was a major plus. Josh didn’t ever want to deal with that asshole again, and stumbling across his body on the second floor of the Tower hadn’t disturbed him nearly as much as he had thought it would. Marcus was also dead, which to a lesser extent Josh supposed was a good thing. The others, like Sarah, had just gone along in order to survive. Josh could understand that. Hell, he might have done the same thing if Gaby’s life were at stake.

Cons: Karen was unaccounted for. Which was disturbing, because Karen was, to hear Sarah tell it, the real brains of the operation. Josh didn’t doubt that at all. Karen looked like the kind of woman who would barter and trade for what she needed, and survival was a hell of a need. So he didn’t like having her out there, running around in the dark. Who knew what she was up to?

Conclusion: It could be worse.

He was up on the third floor of the Tower, along with Gaby. Carly and the girls were below them on the second floor, with the girls still sound asleep on the cot Tom used as his bed. The second floor had been a mess when they had arrived, with a small pool of blood where Tom lay, a neat hole in his forehead. The real mess was on the wall, where his brain had splattered when Will had shot him.

Will had ordered them to toss Tom’s body out the window to save them the trouble of carrying it down the narrow spiral staircase. Josh thought he would feel a little queasy about just tossing Tom out the window, but he felt strangely okay with it as he watched the corpse tumble down the side of the Tower to land in a bush. Well, after it bounced off the bulging base of the Tower.

Instead of cleaning up the blood, they threw a towel over it and picked up the bookcase and tossed the books and Playboy magazines and board games back on the shelves. You could tell there had been a fight, but it wasn’t like Elise or Vera noticed as they snored. Carly, for her part, sat and watched them sleep with a shotgun leaning against the wall next to her. She looked too tired to care that someone had been shot in the room not all that long ago.

The radio broadcast that had lured them to Song Island came from a simple setup that looked like something he could have put together back in his bedroom in Ridley with parts from the local Radio Shack. A thirty-inch LED monitor sat in front of a tower hard drive and keyboard, with a broadcasting microphone hanging from a thin metal arm bracket. There was a pile of black cords under the table, hooked into multiple jacks along the wall. The monitor showed a program running over a Windows 7 desktop.

Microsoft. End of the world or bust.

Will radioed them right away, asking if they had seen Karen from the windows. They hadn’t.

“Keep an eye out and let me know if you see anything on or off the island,” Will said.

“Will do,” Josh said.

Gaby looked over at the computer setup, then grinned at him. “Didn’t you used to have something like this at home?”

“Something like this, yeah. Wait, when were you in my room?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, and gave him a mischievous wink.

Like on the second floor, there were four windows around them, spaced out to give them an excellent, all-encompassing view of the island and beyond. They were both armed with night-vision binoculars that were hanging from hooks along the wall when they arrived. Gaby was over on the south window, which faced the beach. She leaned the Remington shotgun against the wall next to her and tossed two ammo pouches filled with shells on the floor.

“Have you ever fired that shotgun before?” he asked.

“No,” Gaby said, “but it can’t be that hard. Just point and shoot, right?”

“I guess.”

“Danny says there’s supposed to be a big kick.”

She looked comfortable with the shotgun. He hadn’t even wanted to touch the thing. It looked dangerous, like it could go off in his hands by accident if he touched it the wrong way. The Glock, by comparison, looked innocuous.

Josh turned back to the west window and began scanning the trees in the distance with his binoculars. This side was mostly dark forest, with only the occasional glint of moonlight against the solar panels ringing the island.

“See anything?” he asked.

“Water,” Gaby said.

“I got more water on this side.”

“This is not a competition, Josh.”

“I win.”

She laughed.

He was thinking about how much he liked the sound of her laughter when he saw a strangely bright, colored figure darting through the trees in the pitch-darkness.

Karen.

*

“Ghouls,” Gaby said
breathlessly. “Oh my God, there are ghouls on the island.”

Josh didn’t believe her at first, because it was absurd. Wasn’t it? They had seen night fall, and there were no ghouls. Even if Song Island was a trap, he had seen night come with his own eyes and
there hadn’t been any ghouls
.

So why would there be ghouls now? It didn’t make any sense.

But there they were, flowing across the open grass, dark black shapes rendered clear as day in the fluorescent green neon of his night-vision binoculars.

Ghouls!

There were so many they swallowed up the ground underneath them, dark figures merging perfectly with the surrounding night. They crashed out of the power station and across the clearing and smashed into the wall of trees and seemed to stampede anything and everything in their path.

The radio in Josh’s hand squawked, and he heard Will’s voice shouting (but somehow calm, though Josh didn’t know how that was even
possible)
: “We’re taking them through the hotel to slow them down! Let anyone into the Tower who isn’t undead!”

“Roger that,” Josh said, though he wasn’t sure if what he actually said was
“Roger that”
or something else. He might have even babbled something unintelligible. It was hard to tell because his heart was pounding and his fingers were numb.

There are ghouls on the island!

Song Island isn’t safe!

He heard movement behind him and looked back and saw that Carly was standing behind them. When did she even come up here? Then she was moving across the room, snatching up the Remington shotgun Gaby had leaned against the wall. She picked up the pouches of ammo as well and walked back to them.

He watched helplessly as Carly took the radio out of his hand and replaced it with the shotgun and ammo, handing the radio to Gaby. “Gaby, you stay up here and keep in communication with Will and Danny. They might need a spotter. That’s you.” She looked over at him, eyes hard, in full command. “Josh, you come downstairs with me. Understand?”

He heard Gaby, surprisingly calm, reply, “Okay, go.”

Then he was moving, following Carly to the door in the floor and hurrying down the narrow spiral staircase to the second floor. The girls were up and sitting on the cot, rubbing at their eyes, looking disoriented.

“Stay up here, girls, and don’t move,” Carly said. “Don’t go near the windows. Don’t move from that cot. Understand?”

They nodded back and didn’t argue. Josh knew how they felt. At that moment, Carly sounded like the voice of God.

Carly snatched up her shotgun from the wall, then disappeared through the door. He heard her moving down the spiral staircase. “Josh, come on!”

He hurried after her. The new set of metal steps under him felt flimsy and undependable all of a sudden. Carly was in front, moving downward with purpose.

“Hurry, Josh,” Carly said between breaths.

He followed her down to the first floor, surprised he didn’t trip or fall to his death on the way down. He could barely feel his legs moving. It didn’t help that he could hear gunshots the whole time. Booming gunshots. Shotguns.

They’re getting closer, leading them right to us…

“Stay calm,” Carly said.

He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

She opened the heavy wooden door and stepped outside. Josh followed obediently, fumbling with the shotgun in his hands.

He knew how a shotgun worked. You pulled the slide back to load a shell into the chamber and you squeezed the trigger. It wasn’t all that hard. Even the dumbest person alive could pull it off. All you needed was the strength to work the slide—or whatever it was called—because the trigger was easy. He had fired a gun before. A shotgun wouldn’t really be that much harder, would it?

They stepped outside, into the night air. It had gotten more humid. How was that possible? It had felt almost chilly back on the third floor. Maybe it was the altitude?

The crash of gunshots snapped Josh back to the present. They were even closer now, coming from within the hotel, less than fifty yards from their position. When Josh looked in the direction of the building, he saw a dark figure emerge from the blackness.

A familiar voice, shouting at them, “Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!”

Sarah appeared in a circle of bright LED lights. She was holding Jenny in her arms, the girl clutching her mother’s neck, small face buried in Sarah’s chest. Sarah was running as fast as she could, but to Josh it looked like she was moving in quicksand. Why was she running so slowly? Didn’t she know what was
coming?

Josh didn’t remember exactly when he made the decision, but he was suddenly racing toward Sarah, the shotgun slung over his back, the big heavy barrel tapping him over and over again.

Sarah ran straight to him.

“Give her to me!” Josh shouted.

Sarah pried Jenny loose and handed the girl to him. Josh took her, could feel the girl wiggling in his arms, fighting, but he ignored her resistance and began racing back toward the Tower, Sarah running next to him. He was actually running faster than her, even with Jenny and the shotgun, and had to slow down for her to catch up. She was tired and out of breath, but she pushed forward until they finally reached Carly and the Tower.

“Where are the others?” Carly shouted at them.

“I don’t know!” Sarah shouted back.

“Get inside!”

Josh handed Jenny back to her mother and Sarah gave him a grateful nod before she disappeared into the Tower. Josh wished he were right behind her instead of standing out here in the dark. Even with the LED floodlights pouring down from the third-floor windows, he still felt like he was swimming blind.