The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (2 page)

Another stick of jerky, followed by crunching and swallowing.

He looked down at the silhouetted forms racing back and forth below. They were free to roam and explore, to search every hole for him. But, like him, they would soon have to seek shelter, because the sun would be here.

How long had it been since he’d seen the sun? Months. It had been months, even though it felt like centuries.

“You miss it, don’t you?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“You ever tempted to just say ‘Fuck it,’ and stepping into the light, so to speak?”

Tempted? Yes. It was worse in the early days, like an itch he couldn’t scratch, a siren’s call beckoning him to let it all go, to let
her
go. But he couldn’t. He had failed to keep his promises, but he could still save her, even if it meant prolonging this miserable existence.

“Whatever it takes,”
he had said,
“whatever happens, you won’t have to face another night alone.”

“No,” he hissed.

“I don’t believe you,” the man said.

“Believe what you want.”

“Gee, thanks, I’ll do that.”

Another
click
as the woman came out to join them. He had smelled her when she was still in the stairwell and heard her soft, careful footsteps from five floors down. Her heartbeat accelerated slightly under her winter clothing as she emerged into the open night, but he knew it wasn’t the cold air—it was the sight of him.

It was why he wore the trench coat when he was around them, with the hoodie covering most of his face, only his eyes peering out from under the frayed brim. It seemed to work with the man, but then the man was an odd one. Weeks later, and the woman was still trying to get used to being around him.

“Did they show up yet?” she whispered to the man. He didn’t know why she was whispering. Up here, the black eyes wouldn’t be able to hear them anyway.

“Don’t know,” the man said.

“He can’t see the ocean from here?”

“Apparently he can’t see that far.”

“Hunh.”

“What I said.”

“What about our other friends?”

“I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon, but they’re definitely tracking us.”

“How?”

“Haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do.”

“That might take a while.”

“Goes without saying.”

The man snorted. “Anything going on downstairs?”

“I didn’t hear anything. We locked all the doors, right?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure we did.”

“You’re always so comforting, Keo.”

“I try.”

The woman leaned over the edge, her short blonde hair moving against the breeze. “Jesus, look at them. If they find us in here…”

“That’s it, positive thoughts,” the man said.

She sighed. “We should have made a run for the beach. They don’t like the water, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“We should have made a run for the beach,” she repeated.

“Lara and the
Trident
aren’t here yet. We’d just end up waiting for them down there anyway. At least here we have a lot of floors between us and them.”

The woman glanced over at him, brown eyes focusing as if she could make out his face behind the hoodie. “How many?” she asked.

“Too many,” he hissed.

“Can you be more specific?”

“No.”

“But you can see them down there.”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes…”

The man chuckled. “Chatterbox, this guy.”

*

The man and
woman had names, but it was easier to think of them as just
the man
and
the woman.
They were somewhere on the twentieth floor above him, their voices reaching down through the vibrations that traveled along the steel and concrete and glass of the building. Though he couldn’t hear every single word they spoke, he could hear just enough.

“…going to get us killed,” the woman was saying.

“Relax,” the man said.

“‘Relax’?” She might have laughed, but that kind of nuance was lost on its way down the stairwell. “We’re inside a building with a blue-eyed ghoul, Keo. And you want me to
relax?
”

“You don’t have to be here. Tobias—”

“Screw Tobias.”

“I thought you said there was nothing between the two of you?”

Silence. Then, two seconds later, the woman said, “You’re an asshole.”

The man laughed softly. “So that’s a no?”

“I told you, there was never anything between us.”

“All that time…”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“All that time alone, looking for us. Did you ever…?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you. Even with that ugly scar, there are still plenty of desperate women out there.”

“Ouch,” he said.

This time he was sure she did laugh. “No offense.”

“Oh sure, why should I take offense to that?”

The woman answered, but he had already gotten up and slipped out of the stairwell and into the darkened lobby before her words reached him. He sat inside the shadows, feeling at home among the forgotten relics of an old world.

A stubborn pool of moonlight managed to filter in through the glass walls across from him, the sidewalks and streets on the other side dull and gray. He wasn’t worried about being exposed, because the black eyes had no special ability or heightened senses. But the creatures did have eyes and some measure of intelligence, enough that they could recognize the disturbances in their surroundings.

Dead, not stupid,
someone once called them.

Who had said that? He couldn’t remember, but it would come to him eventually. It always did, usually when he least expected it.

Flickers of movement as a dozen of the creatures emerged out of the darkness and moved up the sidewalk. He expected them to keep going past the building, because surely they hadn’t left any clues to their presence outside, had they? He was sure of it, but then one of the black eyes stopped and cocked its head. He realized it was just glaring at its own reflection in the glass wall.

He was relieved, until the skeletal thing moved forward and grabbed the handle of one of the twin glass doors and tried pulling it instead of continuing on its way. The door didn’t budge. Its black eyes looked confused for a moment, and then it tried pulling a few more times.

If it had stopped, that might have been the end of it, except the damn thing seemed suddenly determined to get inside. Its activity attracted the attention of the others, and a second—then a third—of the ghouls stopped and grabbed the other handle and began pulling at it, too.

But the doors held, just as he knew they would.

Two others
clacked
their way along the length of the glass wall and peered inside. He didn’t move or react, because he knew they couldn’t see him. Not through the darkness, with just the barest of moonlight to illuminate their search. One smashed a right arm that was little more than a stump into its section of the window, producing a dull
thud
and little else.

He watched the creatures give up and move on, one by one, until there were just two left behind, still fighting with the doors. They were gaunt things, almost like deformed children with pruned flesh. They abandoned the doors and moved along the walls, angling their bodies in an effort to spy on the darkened corners inside the lobby.

A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, and he wondered if
he
looked like these twisted and blackened remnants of what once was. Besides the blue eyes, what really made him stand out? There wasn’t very much. The trench coat was just a façade, a vain attempt to hold onto a lie.

“You’re not who you once were, you know,”
the man had said earlier on the rooftop.
“What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”

The words stung because they were honest and true. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t a man at all.

He watched the creatures pressing themselves into the glass, smearing sections of it with thick, coagulated fluid that could be anything from blood to drool or pus. This was him now, and no amount of clothing would change that. How did he ever think he could convince her of anything? When they saw him, this was what they would see—a dark, blackened thing that had once been human, but was no longer.

“You’re not who you once were, you know…”

Of course he knew. He’d always known, but he had managed to delude himself anyway, told one lie after another until he believed it, because he wanted so badly to save her, to make up for all the failures of the past. Because Mabry had to be stopped, and he knew how—

It fell from the sky and splattered against the concrete walkway, the loud
crunch
audible even from inside the lobby. A wave of thick black blood sprayed a nearby section of the glass wall in the aftermath.

Before he could recognize what it was—a black-eyed ghoul falling from above and obliterating itself against the pavement—another, then another, then
still another
fell like raindrops. They smashed into the sidewalk and road one by one, covering more sections of the outside wall in blood and flesh and pulverized bone—

Ghouls. Falling.
From above.

The loud, unmistakable crash of breaking glass, followed by gleaming shards plummeting outside the building.

No, no. They were inside the building.
How did they get inside the building?

He raced along the length of the shadowed back wall and slipped into the stairwell, and went up. He was almost floating in the air, his bare feet barely touching the cold concrete steps. He once considered wearing shoes because that would have added to the façade, but shoes were cumbersome and he had come to rely on his speed. More than once, it had been the difference between life and
(re)
death.

He was rounding the third floor when—

Bang!
A gunshot from above, coming from the twentieth floor.

The taste of silver drenched his tongue all the way down here. Silver bullets. Either the man or the woman had fired. It didn’t matter who, because they had just alerted the entire city to their location, and they wouldn’t have done that unless they absolutely had to.

Sixth floor…

A short, startled scream. The woman.

Eighth floor…

The
pop-pop-pop
of automatic rifle fire began blasting through the building, and his skin rippled from head to toe as more silver was exposed to air.

Tenth floor…

He pushed harder as the shots came faster and louder. Every inch of him wanted to flee in the other direction, the growing proximity to silver nauseating. The metal wouldn’t kill him unless it struck his brain, but it still hurt everywhere else. A lot.

He pushed on.

Fifteenth floor…

The man was shouting, telling the woman to run, run,
run.

Sixteenth…

A constant stream of
pop-pop-pop
now. So much silver that he wanted to retch just to get it out of his system, but he couldn’t remember how.

Twentieth!

A loud
bang!
as the stairwell door flew open and the woman stumbled into it back-first, fire spitting back into the floor from the barrel of her rifle. She heard him, spun around, the brown of her eyes widening—

Recognition flashed across her face, and she spun back to the open doorway and continued firing into it. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “It’s here!”

“Fuck!” the man said as he stumbled into the stairwell, firing his entire magazine into the floor at full-auto. The man spun around, saw him, and shouted, “We’re fucked, pal!”

“Go,” he hissed.

“Go where?”

“Down.”

“Down?”

“Down!”
he shouted, grabbing the man by the jacket collar and jerking him down the steps. It took all of his self-control not to throw the man like a sack of useless flesh, because it would have been so, so easy.

The woman didn’t need any encouragement; she raced down the steps, and they locked eyes for half a heartbeat as she passed him.

“Go,” he hissed.

She went, reloading from a pouch around her waist as she did so.

“Come on!” the man shouted from below.

“Go!” he hissed.

The man gave him a confused look.

“We’ll meet again!” he shouted.

The man might have nodded, but by then he had turned around to face the open door and the twentieth floor beyond.

They had broken through the windows—or, at least, the ones who had survived the climb up the side of the buildings. How many others hadn’t made it up and were still falling, splattering one by one against the sidewalks below? The survivors were now crawling over their dead and toward him.

“There you are,”
the familiar voice said inside his head.

He grabbed the first black-eyed ghoul that reached him around the neck and smashed it into the wall, its frail bones crumbling under its skin like twigs. He felt no satisfaction in hearing the
crack
of its limbs, the
snap
of its neck. There might have even been some strange surge of sadness, but he passed that off to Mabry invading his mind, trying to slow him down with his words.