The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (31 page)

“Car!”
Danny hissed in front of them, just before he darted right.

Gaby didn’t know why, but she went left. She hopped the guardrail and slipped behind the trunk of a large tree, Nate doing the same with another tree two feet over. She had been afraid he had gone right with Danny and was glad to see him hugging the trunk next to her.

She looked across the road at Danny, nearly invisible behind another gnarled tree on the other side.

“Someone asked for a ride?” Nate whispered.

It was a beat-up red pickup truck. A Chevy, by the emblem on the front grill. Like the vehicle itself, the engine had seen a lot of wear and tear, and Gaby got the impression getting it started was half the battle, and keeping it running was the other. She spotted a figure behind the wheel, wearing a cap, but the man was still too far up the road for her to make out any details.

The truck was slow, moving at barely twenty miles per hour. She couldn’t tell if that was because the Chevy couldn’t go any faster or if the driver wasn’t certain his vehicle could handle any more speed. Either way, it seemed to take the truck forever to rumble up the road toward them. She realized now that they could have taken their time hiding and would still not have been spotted.

“Damn, that thing’s slow,” Nate whispered. “I think I can get out and push it down here faster.”

“Give it a try,” she smiled back.

“Nah, I don’t feel like getting run over.”

“It’s moving way too slow to run anyone over.”

“Yeah, but why take the chance? This tree is so nice and comfy…”

Eventually the pickup finally reached them, and as it was passing them by, she looked into the front passenger door at the side profile of the driver. He was leaning into the steering wheel, concentrating on the road ahead. She knew now why Danny had gone right—so he would be closer to the driver side.

Ping!
as something struck the other side of the truck.

The driver instinctively jammed on the brake, and even as the tires squealed against the road, Gaby caught a flash of movement as Danny bounded over the guardrail behind the vehicle and leaped into the truck bed. Gaby didn’t even know Danny had the ability to move that fast. Where the hell had he been hiding that kind of speed all this time?

Before she knew what she was doing, Gaby had slipped out from behind the tree and was running back to the road.

“Gaby!” Nate hissed behind her, somehow managing to shout and whisper at the same time.

She didn’t stop, because she couldn’t. Danny was out there, exposed.

She leaped over the guardrail, and, ducking to lower her profile, ran toward the passenger-side door just as the driver climbed out on the other side, his door creaking loudly as he pried it open. Gaby caught a glimpse of a rifle over the top of the cab, and the driver, visible from the neck down through the windows, was already turning toward the back where Danny was.

“Hey!” she shouted.

The driver seemed to freeze momentarily, as if unsure of where to point his weapon. It was just enough of a distraction for Danny to jump out of the truck bed, the vehicle dipping and rising slightly as he did so.

A loud
bang!
as the driver fired, and Gaby thought,
Oh no, oh no,
and raced around the front hood and to the other side—

The driver was on the road, the rifle still clutched in his right hand but pointed away from Danny, who was straddling the man’s chest. Danny had the sharp edge of his fire-kissed Ka-Bar pressed up against the truck driver’s exposed skin. The man was gasping, the round eyes underneath the cap’s brim impossibly wide.

It was a girl.

She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with long auburn hair spilling out from under the weathered cap. She was grimacing up at Danny, simultaneously trying not to swallow for fear of the knife pressed against her throat and wanting desperately to swing the rifle up and shoot him.

“Gaby,” Danny said.

She hurried over and reached for the rifle, making the girl’s eyes flicker over to her in alarm while her fingers tightened on the weapon.

“Oh, come on,” Danny said, almost exasperated. “I hate to be chauvinistic about this, but I’m clearly on top here.”

The driver sighed, and Gaby wrestled the weapon from her. She stepped back and glanced up and down the road, listening for signs of another vehicle. There had been hundreds of collaborators at the airfield last night, all of them buried under the rubble this morning. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more still in the area that could have heard the girl’s gunshot.

“Oh shit, you’re bleeding,” Nate said as he rounded the back of the truck.

Gaby thought he was talking to her, but no, it was Danny. Blood dripped from the bottom of his right ear, where the bullet had creased him.

Danny wiped at the scratch. “You shot me.”

“You threw something at my car!” the girl shouted back.

“It was just a rock. Relax.”

Gaby noticed a large dent in the driver-side door.

“A couple swings with a hammer, and it’s good as new,” Danny said. “You got insurance, right?”

“You can’t take my truck!” the girl shouted (too loudly).

“Afraid I can, and I must.”

“You can’t!”

“Yes, I can.” Danny stood up, taking the knife away with him. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

The girl didn’t answer him. She stood up, stumbling a bit and cradling her left arm. Her elbow was scraped and bloodied, and she kept looking back at the vehicle.

“What’s inside?” Gaby asked.

The girl gave her a quick, scared glance. Gaby wondered if she ever looked that young, even before the world ended.

“We’re going to take the truck,” Gaby said. “If you have something in there that you want to keep, speak up now.”

“Aren’t you generous,” Danny said.

“We’re already taking her truck; might as well let her keep whatever we don’t need.”

“We should hurry up and go, guys,” Nate said, walking over to them. “No telling who might have heard that gunshot.”

“Alice,” the girl said.

“Alice?” Danny repeated.

“Alice, come out,” the girl said. She wasn’t talking to them.

Danny backed up as the driver-side passenger door opened and a small figure scrambled out in jeans and boots. Both articles of clothing looked about a couple of sizes too large for her, but they were cinched in place by a belt. She had big brown eyes and looked nervously from Danny to Gaby before running over and grabbing the bigger girl around the waist.

“Well, damn,” Danny sighed.

KEO

“You think she
bought it?” Jordan asked, watching the boat as it faded into the distance. In a few seconds, they wouldn’t be able to tell there were three heavily-armed women in a tender out there in the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.

You should be on that boat too, pal. So why aren’t you?

“Bought what?” he said.

“About Frank.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But not the
whole
truth.”

He shrugged. “Close enough.”

“I thought she’d, I don’t know, press you more on him.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind, and when you’ve been through as much as she has, you learn to prioritize. The better question is, why aren’t you on that boat with Lara heading back to the
Trident?
”

“Are we going through this again?”

She sounded exasperated, though he couldn’t understand why. He had offered her a chance at probably the best thing that was going to come around in a long time—space on the
Trident
, out there somewhere, safe from all this madness—and she’d turned it down.

Just like you did. So who’s the bigger idiot?

Probably a tie…

“Gillian’s my friend,” Jordan said. “I have a lot of friends back in T18. I’m not going to stand by and watch them get massacred by Mercer. Not if I can do something about it.”

“I’m just going back for Gillian and no one else, Jordan.”

“There’s nothing that says we have to stay tied at the hips when we get there. You go do your thing, and I’ll do mine.” She turned around and began walking up the beach, back to the road. “You coming?”

He sighed, then turned to follow her. “What about Tobias?”

“What about him?”

“You know where he is right now?”

“The backup location. He should still be there, unless something’s happened.” She glanced back at him. “You want to ask him for help,” she added. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “Unless he’s still licking his wounds, then we could use a few more guns. Or a dozen.”

“So it’s ‘we’ now?”

“If you insist on sticking around, we should at least do this together. Strength in numbers, and all that. Will he help?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will. I can’t see him sitting by and letting Mercer’s people run a tank through T18. Not after everything he—
we
—went through to save them.”

“We’ll need a vehicle. Can’t walk all the way back to League City. Well, we can, but I’d prefer not to.”

“Too bad the tank’s out of fuel. Maybe you can push it and I’ll steer.”

“What am I, the Hulk?”

“I thought you didn’t read comic books.”

“I don’t, but everyone knows the Hulk. Big green guy with ripped short-shorts.”

“Close,” she chuckled. “Anyway, if you don’t wanna push me, maybe you can carry me. Let me ride piggyback.”

“Only if we take turns.”

She gave him a brief smile, and he returned it.

“I like this better,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“When you’re not being an asshole.”

“When was I ever an asshole?”

“About half the time you open your mouth.”

He snorted and got another grin from her.

“You really think he’s still out there?” Jordan asked as they stepped up onto the road. She didn’t have to say who “he” was. “Tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know.”

“You sounded pretty confident with Lara. I almost believed you.”

“I guess I’m getting better at lying.”

“How was it supposed to work, anyway? You were just going to introduce Frank to her? ‘Hey, Lara, this is Frank. Frank, this is Lara. You kids chat.’ And what, she wouldn’t ask any of the obvious questions, like why she’s talking to a ghoul?”

“Funny, that’s what I asked him the last time we were together in Sunport.”

“What did he say?”

Keo shrugged. “I got the sense he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or if he had, he didn’t feel like telling me.”

*

There were two
trucks, both Ford F-150s, which at this point Keo was sure was as ubiquitous to Texas as dickheads with guns trying to kill him. The vehicles were white and tan, both covered in dirt and mud, looking well-used. They were moving on large tires that chewed up the highway at a steady pace toward the beach.

He was expecting some kind of military hardware on display, but no, there were just two guys in the back of each truck, with two more inside. He couldn’t make out faces at this distance, even looking through a pair of binoculars he’d gotten from Gregson’s tank, but he could see just enough to know they were wearing black long-sleeve uniforms.

Collaborators.

He lay flat on his stomach in the fields, ten meters from the road. This part of the beach still had tall, swaying grass that was untouched by the tank’s flamethrower. Somewhere on the other side of the two-lane road was Jordan, waiting for his signal.

“Full-auto,” he said into the radio now, not bothering to whisper because the trucks were still too far away to overhear. The radios, like the binoculars and the spare ammo he had on him, were salvaged from the tank.

“Spray and pray?” Jordan said through the radio. He thought he detected a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Hopefully throw a little aiming in there, too. I’ll take the first truck, and you concentrate on the second one. Shoot anything that moves.”

She didn’t answer that time.

“Jordan,” he said. “Shoot anything that moves. We only need one working vehicle. Take out the two in the back first. Don’t stop shooting until they both go down. Then focus on the ones inside. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

“Jordan…”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Keo,” she said, sounding slightly annoyed. “I was outside T18, running around with Tobias for months before you showed up. I can handle this.”

“I know you can,” he said, hoping it was at least convincing.

The collaborators charging toward him now had already seen the Abrams parked out there under the sun behind him. It was hard to miss, surrounded by barren earth charred black by fire. The trucks hadn’t left the road yet, so he guessed they were approaching the situation with caution, maybe a little bit afraid that cannon was still operational. Playing back what Gregson had said in his mind, Keo wondered if these incoming threats were part of the group that had fought with the tank yesterday and were just now showing up to finish what their ghoul allies had failed to do last night.

“We overshot our mark yesterday,”
Gregson had said,
“ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes.”