The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (78 page)

“What was that?” someone shouted in Will’s ear. Blaine again. “What the hell was that?”

Will began running up the cobblestone road, back to the hotel grounds, back to the Tower.

Bobby, where the hell are you?

He saw them moving across the grounds of the hotel almost as soon as he burst out of the woods and into the clearing. They were fanning out. Dark figures, looking for targets. They were smart enough to keep away from the LED lampposts, and he saw one of them randomly shooting at the solar-powered lamps scattered about the area. There might have been five, maybe more. A couple were already circling the Tower, while one was trying to kick in the front door.

Will slung the shotgun as he ran, pulling the M4A1 free. He could still hear gunfire behind him, from the beach. Blaine and Maddie, still slugging it out.

My amateurs are better than your amateurs, Kate
.

He looked up at the Tower in the distance, his gut sinking. The initial explosion had sent most of the Tower’s roof down into the surrounding area around the base of the structure. The third-floor windows that he could see, amazingly enough, remained intact, along with the floodlights under them. Where there used to be a cap at the top, there was now only a jagged opening with smoke still rising lazily out of it as if it were a chimney.

His attention snapped back to the grounds around the Tower when he heard a series of gunshots. Rifles, then shotguns, firing back and forth. He looked up just in time to see sections around one of the Tower’s second-floor windows breaking free from a shotgun blast.

Will was halfway across the grounds when he caught sight of one of the attackers stepping into a pool of light. The man had on black face paint and was wearing a knit cap. Will shot the man in the back of the head from thirty meters away. The man crumpled into the grass as if he had simply been swallowed up.

A figure in front of Will turned and opened fire. Will saw flames stabbing out of the man’s weapon from forty meters away and felt bullets slashing past his head. Then something hit him in the left arm and for an instant he was tossed to one side.

He darted behind a big palm tree as the man kept firing. Tree bark shredded and bullets
zip-zip-zip
around him harmlessly. His left arm was bleeding and had gone numb, but he could still hold the rifle and shoot, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

When the man finally stopped shooting, Will stepped out from behind the tree and calmly shot him in the chest while he was struggling to reload.

Then he continued running toward the Tower.

He arrived in time to see a man armed with an M16 rifle feeding something into a tube attached to the bottom of the barrel. He recognized the M203 grenade launcher attached underneath the rifle. That was what had taken off the top of the Tower’s third floor.

Will glanced up and saw Lara appear in the second-floor window directly above the man loading the M203. The man saw her and took aim.

Will screamed, “No!”

That got the man’s attention. He looked over at Will, momentarily distracted, but quickly turned back to the window and fired. Will’s gut sank at the
ploompt!
sound as the M203 launched, and Will watched, horrified, as the grenade round smashed into the window frame just above Lara’s head—
then ricocheted back down.

It didn’t arm!

The M203 fired impact grenades that needed to travel a certain distance before they armed themselves. The third floor had been far enough, but not the second-floor window. When Will saw the grenade hit the top of the window frame above Lara’s head, sending her stumbling back in shock, he knew it hadn’t achieved the proper distance.

As the grenade fell back down to earth, Will watched the man who had fired it scrambling to get away. But the man had misjudged the trajectory of the grenade and was going in the wrong direction. When the grenade landed two meters in front of him, the man shouted out a curse that was quickly swallowed up by an explosion that ripped out a piece of the Tower’s base along with it. Any closer, and it would have punched a hole in the Tower itself.

He caught a glimpse of Lara, alive and well, looking out the same window at the remains of the man below her. He wanted to laugh and run to her, grab her, and kiss her.

Instead, he crouched in the darkness and scanned the area. He didn’t see anything. Or anyone. Where had they come from? Probably the west side of the island, past the power station. It was the lowest point on the island other than the beach in the south.

Will got up and moved toward the Tower. He was ten meters away when he almost stepped over a body in the grass. He crouched next to it and looked down at the young face.

Bobby.

There was a big bloody spot on his chest where he had been shot at close range. His M4 rifle lay nearby, along with a man with camouflage on his face and a bullet hole in his left cheek. Will imagined the kid heard the attackers coming and ran over to intercept.

He looked up at the realization that the gunfire behind him, from the beach, had stopped, and the island had become ghostly quiet.

He clicked his PTT. “Situation report.”

“Beach is cleared,” Blaine said in his right ear. “Maddie’s hurt.”

“How bad?”

“She’s been shot a couple of times. Thigh and arm. The arm looks like a flesh wound. She wants to know if anyone’s seen Bobby.”

“Tell her I’m sorry. Bobby’s dead.”

“Fuck.” Blaine was silent for a moment. Then, “What about the Tower? What was that explosion I heard?”

“One of the attackers had an M203 grenade launcher. He took out the roof. I’m checking on it now.”

Will jogged the final distance to the Tower. He looked up at the smoke still puffing out of the remains of the third floor. It didn’t look like the grenade had gotten inside the building itself, which would have been catastrophic.

He pressed the PTT again as he neared the Tower. “Lara, can you hear me? Lara.”

There was no reply.

“Sarah. Danny. Gaby. Anyone in the Tower. Give me a situation report.”

Nothing.

Will reached the door and banged on it. There were more than twenty bullets embedded in the thick mahogany wood. But it had held.

“Open the door!” he shouted. “Whoever’s in there, if you can hear me, open the door!”

Mercifully, the door began to open, an inch at a time…

*

Blaine looked like
week-old shit under the morning sun. And frankly, so did he, if he were to look in a mirror. They were operating almost entirely on fumes and painkillers. Even so, Will’s body protested every movement, and he could only imagine how Blaine was feeling at the moment. The big man didn’t complain, though.

They glided swiftly across the lake in the same boat they had used yesterday. The Carver had proven itself sturdy, even with a dozen bullet holes in various parts of its frame, including five on the bottom that he had patched with caulk and spackling from the boat shack. Blaine steered from the middle while Will crouched at the bow with the M4A1, scanning the horizon for targets. He wanted to see someone, notice a head poking out from the ridgelines in front of him. He wanted to shoot something. Someone.

Anything, dammit.

The two-story house across from the marina looked dead and abandoned, even from a distance. Will scanned the yards and could find no one. The boathouse was empty—of people and boats. If there were people still at the house, they would be inside. They could certainly hear the Carver coming because Will hadn’t done anything to disguise their approach, with the outboard motor roaring in the still morning.

So where were they?

He didn’t believe for a second they had killed every single collaborator in last night’s attack. Twenty-five men, in all. The storming of the beach had been a diversion to keep them occupied as two other boats came along the west side and the men scaled the cliff. They had found ropes and hooks there this morning, the boats themselves drifting at anchor in the water. Three of the men who had tried to climb hadn’t made it. Two had fallen to their deaths against the rocks below and a third was floating nearby.

Twenty-five dead men…

Including Bobby.

Of everyone on the island, he and Blaine were the most mobile. The bullet wound in his left arm was easy to ignore with painkillers. He felt like sleeping for a week, but that wasn’t anything new. And like all the other times when he was tired and could barely walk, he soldiered through it. It wasn’t like he had any choice.

They went up the inlet, outboard motor piercing the clear morning air. Will expected to see the sun glinting off rifle barrels at any moment.

Any second now…

But it never happened.

He knew they were gone as soon as he jumped from the boat and set foot on the patch of land the house sat on. Blaine struggled with the boat for a moment but finally jumped out with a rope and tied it around a nearby tree.

They scanned the house. Will shot one of the windows just to let anyone inside know they were coming, then waited for a figure to appear so he could shoot it.

He saw no one.

“Gone?” Blaine asked, keeping his voice low.

Blaine gripped his M4, and like Will, he had a shotgun slung over his back. They had brought enough ammo with them to last a while in a stand-up firefight. Will was hoping he got to use all of it. Or most of it, at least.

“Let’s check the house,” Will said.

*

There was no
one in the house. The place looked heavily lived-in, and there was food in the kitchen and living room and cases of bottled water left on couches. Boxes of clothing, ammo, and guns lay scattered everywhere. The bedrooms were similarly used and abandoned.

There were trucks in the yard, parked in a kind of semi-circle, the grass around them trampled by heavy boots and bare feet. He saw a generator near the back of the house, and portable spotlights lined the yard.

They had been here last night. Gathering, waiting for the call to attack. And when the call came, they boarded their boats and charged.

A suicide run. Why would they do that?

Because they didn’t have a choice.

She was here. Kate. She sacrificed the collaborators to get to us.

“What now?” Blaine asked.

“Grab the ammo and guns from the house.”

Will siphoned gas out of the trucks into containers he found in the boathouse. When Blaine came back outside, Will handed him two of the containers.

“We’re going to burn the house?” Blaine asked.

“Yup.”

“Why not save it? In case we need it later?”

“We don’t need it. We have the island. The next time they come back, they should be as uncomfortable as possible.”

They doused the house with gas inside and out, added fuel to the boathouse and the big storage building across the yard, then lit a match and stood back and watched it all burn under the sun. The heat quickly became suffocating.

With the fire gutting the house behind them, Will and Blaine checked the garage in the marina. The crates they had left behind were still there, but they had been strafed with automatic gunfire. Perforated water bottles had leaked onto the ground.

“Anything we can salvage?” Blaine asked.

“Clothes, shoes…”

“Got holes in them.”

“Probably.”

They filled a crate with all the undamaged supplies they could find, then doused the garage with the remaining gas and lit it. For good measure, they burned down the gazebo, too.

Will noticed that the bodies were gone. The two men he had killed around the garage, and the three or so they had shot during the gunfight afterward.

Blaine noticed, too. “They took the bodies. They did that at the Willowstone Mall in Beaumont, too. Sandra’s body was gone the next morning. They can’t turn the dead, can they?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“So why did they take them?”

Will shook his head. Just another mystery to add to the pile of mysteries. Eight months had gone by, and they hardly knew anything about the creatures.

They walked to Blaine’s Jeep, parked in the ditch farther up the road. It wasn’t there anymore, though they did find a couple of silver candle holders lying in the grass nearby.