The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (64 page)

That was last night. This morning, they were alive. Most of them, anyway.

Gaby and Josh, armed with shotguns and radios, stayed behind in the Tower. As soon as the sun rose, they could see everything for miles from the windows. The south and east directions gave them a clear line of sight of the lake’s shorelines, including the marina and the two-story house. The Tower, as Will had predicted, made for a brilliant sniper’s perch.

Now all he needed to do was turn Gaby into a shooter…

The others had begun clearing bones out of the hotel and the grounds around it. The light bones were easy to pick up, stack in wheelbarrows, and roll away. They gathered the remains of the dead in a pile along the north side of the island, next to the cliff.

Will and Danny reached the power station and stepped over the trampled hurricane fencing, still half-buried in the dirt. The big gray building hadn’t been touched, but there was a clear path from where the front gate used to be to the small shack. As he got closer, Will noticed it wasn’t really a shack. It was a stand-alone brick building with a steel door that opened inward, revealing very little on the other side. He thought he could hear rustling wind through the opening, though most of it was lost in the loud, rumbling hum of the generator next door.

Will turned on the flashlight duct-taped to the side of the Benelli shotgun and aimed it at the door. Four pairs of charcoal eyes stared back at him before quickly shrinking back into the darkness, trying to escape the probing light.

“Hellooooo, nurse,” Danny said.

They were squeezed inside the building, just beyond the reach of sunlight, simultaneously salivating at the sight of them and morbidly afraid of the brightness splayed across the open metal door. It was hard to tell how many of them were actually in there. Will guessed the building had a flight of stairs that angled downward and under the island. Where the stairs went after that, and where the ghouls came from, were questions that played themselves over and over in his head. The only way to find out was to go into the shack—or find where the tunnel ended, which had to be somewhere on land, along the western cove. Neither option was particularly viable at the moment.

Will walked around the shack to get a better look at what he was dealing with. It wasn’t any bigger than anything he would have found in someone’s backyard. The front was about two meters wide, the length around three and a half. It was concrete from top to bottom, with a flat, unremarkable roof and a metal door.

When he circled all the way back to the front, he took a quick step toward the door and fired with the Benelli. Regular buckshot ripped through a ghoul standing defiantly in front of him. The creature was thrown back by the impact, half of its side shorn off, revealing bone and flesh underneath. It picked itself up and glared at him, gaunt cheeks flickering in the flashlight beam.

“I don’t think it likes you,” Danny said.

Will fired again, taking off the top half of the creature’s head, where its brain would have been if it still had one. The creature stumbled back into the wall of ghouls crowding behind it before picking itself up and looking back at him through its remaining right eye.

“You got any silver on you?” Will asked.

“Just the knife. You wanna reach in there and stab it?”

“Not particularly.” He tried to get a better look at the interior of the shack, but he couldn’t see anything past the squirming black mass of prune flesh. “Basement?”

“Has to be, right?”

“Must be a big-ass basement. How many came out of it last night? A thousand?”

“Don’t exaggerate. A few hundred, at the most.”

“Looked like a lot more than a few hundred to me.”

“Okay, maybe just a shade under a thousand.”

“So where are they coming from? A tunnel at the end of the basement? Connected to the shore? That would explain where Karen went.”

“What do I look like, an island tunnel expert?”

Will took a step back. “How many you think are in there now?”

“Lots.”

“Not very scientific.”

“Bunches.”

“Better.”

“I found my C4 in the Tower’s basement this morning while I was poking around.”

“How many were left?”

“Bundles.”

“That a lot?”

“Better than bundle. See, the plural?”

Will smirked. “So you wanna blow it up, is that what you’re telling me?”

Danny shrugged. “That would seal the tunnel, wouldn’t it? Cave it in on itself?”

“Well, there’s a problem with that. We don’t know how far or deep the tunnel goes. What if we rupture it, but don’t cave it in completely? Water’s gotta go somewhere once they get inside the tunnel. Like up here on the island.”

“So, no C4, then?”

“We’ll save them for later. I didn’t get farther than the stairs where he stacked our stuff last night. What else did you find down there?”

“There was a pretty sweet tritium ACOG scope in a case. Four-by-thirty-two.”

“Nice.”

“Ol’ Tom’s got some expensive gun habits. I’m mounting it on my rifle.”

“You’re definitely getting sentry duty.”

“Figures.”

“What else did you find?”

“That place is huge. Like a friggin’ pawnshop. Who knows what’s down there? Another ACOG, maybe, if we’re lucky. Maybe a bazooka or a tank, possibly even Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Tom’s been collecting for a while…”

“Yeah. Tom was a real hoarder. A back-stabbing, hoarding piece of crap.” He looked back at the door. “So we can’t blow it up. How do we seal it, keep those pesky buggers from coming out later tonight? This door might not hold forever. Remember that sorry incident with the car back at the bank? That was pretty out-of-the-box thinking for a bunch of undead prune faces.”

Will thought about it. “I have an idea, but we need to close the door first.”

“Sounds simple enough. Not.”

“Can you reach the door?”

Danny studied the angles for a moment, then shook his head. “Not before they’re all over me.”

He was right. The ghouls were less than a meter inside the open door frame, about the same length it would take to reach in and grasp the lever. Then there was the extra second or two to actually swing the door. More than enough time for a creature to latch onto an extended arm. The only positive was the key, still stuck in a lock four inches above the lever. Of course, in order to lock the door, they would have to close it first.

“We need to close that door,” Will said again.

“Do we?”

“Yes.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Danny said.

*

Sarah was the
one who told them about the concrete mix and unused concrete blocks stored in one of the unfinished rooms of the hotel.

“We never could figure out what to do with them,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t like anyone had ever built anything before. Though I guess Tom had, when he was younger. Can we use them? I mean, if we can’t destroy them, or push them back, what if we just sealed them inside the shack?”

They found the Quikrete concrete mix bags where Sarah said they would be. There were enough blocks stacked on top of one another in a row to put together a small house. All the building equipment was also in the same room.

Will called Josh down from the Tower to help carry everything over to the power station. It took them two hours of trudging back and forth, hauling bags of easy-to-mix and block after block of concrete, before they were even ready to start. It was almost ten in the morning when they were finally able to break their first bag of Quikrete over the mixer, pour water inside with a hose, and create usable mortar. Both Will and Danny had worked construction before, and Will had done his share of mixing and slapping mortar on concrete blocks with trowels when he used to work with his father in the summers.

Lara took a break from bone duty, as the others had begun calling it, and came over with food and cold bottles of water, something they couldn’t get enough of. You could only drink so much warm water before the taste of something cold was like a miracle drug.

“So we’re just going to cover it up?” Lara said, staring at the darkness inside the open shack door, at the unblinking eyes peering back out at her. She shivered a bit.

“That’s the plan,” Will said.

“They can’t break through?”

“Probably not.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“Mostly not.”

“So you’re Danny now, is that it?” She smirked at him. “Bad jokes and all?”

“I’m right here,” Danny said.

“It’ll hold,” Will said, doing his best to sound convincing.

The truth was, he didn’t know if it would actually hold. Or if it proved effective now, how long that would last. The ghouls had proven themselves to be resourceful creatures, and they had unlimited numbers and time on their hands.

Dead, not stupid.

Lara nodded, but looked only partially convinced. “We’re almost done clearing out the bones. I can’t believe they all came out of that one building. Do you think Karen is one of those things staring at us right now?”

“I think she knew she’d survive,” Will said. “It explains the hazmat suit.”

“Like Kevin…”

“Yeah.”

“Then that means there’s a tunnel down there. She would need a way off the island. Plus a way for these things to reach the island without having to swim. And if they need the tunnel, that means the water really does keep them back.”

“Looks that way.”

“Well, at least the island’s safe. Sort of.” Lara shivered again. “Hurry up. I hate the idea of that door open like that, with those things inside.”

She left them, clutching her shotgun as she went.

Will looked over at Danny. “Ready?”

Danny grunted. “No.”

“Good.”

Will picked up the shotgun and took two quick steps toward the open door and fired. The buckshot ripped the faces off the two closest ghouls and they stumbled back into the others behind them. Even before the rest of the creatures had a chance to respond, Will fired again and kept firing until he had emptied the entire weapon. Each blast shoved the creatures back little by little. It wasn’t much, but it was just
enough.

As soon as Will fired his last shot, he stepped aside as Danny lunged forward and grabbed the door by the lever. The closest ghoul started forward, but before it could get close, Danny slammed the door shut and held on. Almost immediately, ghouls crashed into the door on the other side, banging relentlessly against the steel. The lever moved under Danny’s grip, but he held on while Will grabbed the key, turned it, and heard the deadbolt latching into place.

They both stepped back and listened to the ghouls continue to rain blows against the door.

Danny sucked in a big breath. “Let’s not do that again. Ever.”

“It’s all in the wrists,” Will said, pocketing the key.

“That’s what she said,” Danny grinned.

It took them the rest of the morning to put up a concrete wall directly over the steel door, covering up the entire front of the shack just to be safe. By the time they were done, they were covered in flakes of concrete and rivers of sweat. Will didn’t know what smelled worse—the state he was in this morning, or the way he had been last night while he was running with ghoul flesh and blood stuck to his face.

At ten minutes past noon, they tossed the trowels to the ground and gave the shack a long look.

“You think it’ll hold?” Danny asked.

“They’d need a tank to get through that,” Will said.

“Need I remind you about that unfortunate incident with a car?”

“I doubt that tunnel’s big enough for a car.”

They paused for a moment.

“Has to be a tunnel down there, right?” Danny said.

“Has to be,” Will said.

“Which means it comes out on the other side, on land.”

“Sounds logical.”

“We should find out where that is and close it up like a virgin’s legs.”

“We should, yeah. But not yet. This should hold for a while.”

“You got a hot date I don’t know about?”

Will was about to answer when his radio, sitting on one of the unused concrete blocks, squawked and they heard Gaby’s voice: “Will, Danny, I see movement on land.”

Will snatched up the radio. “Where?”

“At the marina.”

“Cars?”

“Trucks. More than one.”

“Stay with them.”

“Will do.”

They picked up their shotguns and gun belts and began jogging back toward the hotel.

“And here I thought it was going to be a quiet morning,” Danny said.

*