The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (6 page)

“Why didn’t the sharks finish it off?” Benny asked.

“Contrary to what you see on TV, humans aren’t very high on a shark’s menu. There are a lot more manageable and easier-to-digest prey in the ocean. Imagine trying to eat a whole cow when there are burgers all around you.”

“Which still leaves us with a lot of questions,” Maddie said. “What happened to the poor sap, who was he, and where did he come from?”

“Well, Sunport’s the closest city,” Benny said.

“It didn’t come from Sunport,” Maddie said. “Blaine said it was moving with the currents from farther out.”

“It couldn’t have come from very far,” Zoe said. “When he was shot, he sank, then the gas raised him back up to the surface and the waves finally brought him to us.”

“A ship, maybe?” Maddie said. “We always wondered who else was out here besides us. I mean, it’s a big ocean. There’s got to be more people, right? Before us, there was Gage and his friends.”

“Maybe it’s the Navy,” Benny said. He sounded almost hopeful. “He really does look like some kind of commando. Maybe the U.S. Navy is still out there somewhere.”

“For some reason, he doesn’t look military to me,” Maddie said.

“Then maybe he’s from those Bengal Islands that Keo talked about. He said there were a lot of people there.”

“The clothes he’s wearing, the gunshots…” Maddie shook her head. “It had to have been one hell of a gunfight.”

“I still think it’s the military,” Benny said. “Blaine and I talked about it a lot, about what happened to all the Navy ships that were caught out here when everything went down. The aircraft carriers, battleships and destroyers, all those guys. They had to have gone somewhere.”

“It’s been a year,” Maddie said. “If they’re still out there, we would have heard from them by now, don’t you think?”

“What about the one in Colorado?” Zoe asked. “Carly said there was a colonel hiding in a mountain somewhere.”

“Beecher,” Maddie nodded. “We made contact with him on the radio.”

“What did he say about the rest of the military?”

“He knew as much as we did. Which wasn’t very much.”

There was a moment of silence until the others looked over at her. Maybe they finally realized she hadn’t said anything in a while.

“What’s the next play, boss?” Maddie asked. “It might be worth it to find out where this guy came from.”

“Maybe not,” Zoe said. “People with guns, wearing combat gear, running around out here shooting each other?” The doctor shook her head. “I’m not sure those are the kinds of people we’d necessarily want to cross paths with. Not now. Not after Song Island.”

“Doc’s got a good point,” Benny said.

They were still looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

What would Will do?

“Can you learn anything else from him?” she finally asked Zoe.

The older woman shook her head. “I don’t see the point. We know how he died. GSWs. Anything else he can tell us would be in his pockets.”

“Already went through them,” Maddie said. “Empty.”

“All right,” Lara said. “Throw him back into the ocean. Wherever he came from, however he got here, or what happened to him, let the Gulf keep his secrets. We have other things to worry about.”

*

She was in
the captain’s cabin, looking at the same old heavily annotated map of the Gulf of Mexico spread out on a table, that she had been using since they boarded the
Trident
back on Song Island. She had circled Sunport, twenty miles in front of them at the moment, and Port Arthur, where Danny, Gaby, and Nate had made land a few days ago. If it hadn’t been Keo who had called, she would never have strayed far from Port Arthur. Just the idea of leaving the expedition behind to come south made her feel sick to her stomach.

This better be important, Keo.

If
he was even still alive out there. The last time she had talked to him, he had given her the impression he and his companions were barely a step ahead of their pursuers. What if they had finally run out of luck?

She glanced at her watch. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but the silence from Keo nagged at her. Unlike Danny, who had already radioed in from some town called Wilden an hour ago, it was all quiet from the Keo front. The man was unpredictable and prone to rash decisions, but then again a lot of those questionable choices he’d made had been in her favor, so maybe she should be grateful—

A knock on the cabin door interrupted her thoughts.

“Come in,” she said.

Bonnie stepped inside in loose-fitting cargo pants and an olive thermal sweater, looking more like a soldier than even Benny or Blaine. Lara was still amazed by the transformation Bonnie had gone through since they first met on Song Island. Then again, she could probably say the same thing about all of them, including herself, though the others didn’t quite look at home with an M4 slung over their backs and a gun belt hanging off their hips. Bonnie did, and even managed to pull off the short haircut.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I heard Keo still hasn’t called yet,” Bonnie said.

“Not yet.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Bonnie walked over and leaned against the table, then stared down at the map even though Lara could tell it wasn’t her chicken scratch notes that were on the ex-model’s mind at the moment.

“What is it, Bonnie?” she asked.

“Carrie’s worried about him,” Bonnie said.

“Keo can handle himself. I’m more worried about the others.”

“The—what do you call it?”

“Expedition.”

“Right. The expedition. Are they okay?”

“Alive and well. I talked to Danny earlier.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“How’s everyone doing? I know I haven’t been moving through the decks as much as before.”

“Everyone’s good, doing their part. Don’t worry about us. You already have a lot on your mind.”

“So no secret meetings about overthrowing my rule?”

Bonnie chuckled. “Not since two weeks ago. You’re safe for at least another few days.”

“Good to hear.” She walked over to her small fridge in the corner and came back with two cold water bottles, handing one to Bonnie. “So why did you really come here?”

“That obvious, huh?”

Lara shrugged.

“It’s Gage,” Bonnie said.

Of course it would be Gage. She knew the man would come back to haunt her eventually. She had been dreading it, but at the same time knowing it was inevitable, that the sooner she dealt with it the easier she would be able to sleep at night.

Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.

“What about him?” Lara asked.

“After Carrie asked me to come see you about Keo, she told me that when she took Gage his breakfast this morning, she left his room with a bad feeling.”

“What did she say exactly?”

Bonnie paused for a moment. Then, “She couldn’t put it into words, just that he didn’t seem right. Like he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She left as soon as she could, but she hasn’t been able to shake it.”

She sighed.

Gage. The
Trident
’s former captain.

What would Will do?

“He’s been down there for a while,” Bonnie continued. “Long enough that I think he’s figured out by now we don’t need him to run the yacht anymore.”

She nodded, remembering the look on the man’s face when she took him off the bridge and gave the helm to Blaine.
He knows,
she remembered thinking at the time
. His usefulness has come to an end, and he knows.

“What are you doing to do?” Bonnie asked. There was a slight wavering in her voice, as if she was afraid to hear the answer.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lara said.

KEO

Another fine mess
you’ve got yourself into. Shoulda taken the easy way out when you had the chance, pal. And you had a
lot
of chances, didn’t you?

Live and learn…maybe.

He expected ghouls in the shadows, but the floor was empty when he took his first tentative step outside the janitor’s closet at the end of the hallway, silver bullet-loaded M4 in front of him and one eye fixed behind the weapon’s red dot sight. The trigger felt good against his finger, and the warmth of morning sunlight was like a comforting embrace. The pain in his leg—the result of a bullet hole—had resurfaced thanks to last night’s mad dash; running for your life, apparently, didn’t contribute to the healing process.

Jordan moved quietly behind him, watching his six. They weren’t quite moving in stacking formation, but he could feel the fabric of her sweaty clothes every time she turned too quickly to sweep an open door or one of the (too many) hallways to their left and right. He was doing the same, watching and listening for signs of something to shoot, watching for things that didn’t belong, and doing his very best to shut out her persistent haggard breathing.

It took much longer to reach the stairwell than he would have liked. Either the floor had widened sometime last night, or they were moving very, very slowly. The feel of sunlight through the
(Still intact, so that’s a good sign)
windows to their right made him breathe just a little bit easier with every step.

The tiled floor showed signs of the dirt they had tracked in here last night and the cubicles they had run past still looked in one piece this morning. More importantly, he couldn’t smell them in the air. Even a floor this large wouldn’t have been able to hide the creatures’ stench, especially if there was more than one of them around, and there had definitely been more than one of them around last night.

So far, so good.

Keo couldn’t help it and grinned to himself.

Famous last words there, pal.

They remained silent (or at least they didn’t talk, but it was hard to stay completely quiet; their boots’ soles squeaked every so often against the dust-caked floor) during the trek until they finally arrived at the stairwell door.

Keo glanced back at Jordan, standing behind him pulling security. She looked over her shoulder, saw him, and nodded. Just a week of running around out here with her and they were already working like an (almost) well-oiled machine. In another month, he’d probably know what her sweat tasted like.

He turned back and pressed one ear against the warm stairwell door.

Five seconds…

Ten…

Nothing.

There was just stillness on the other side.

He looked back at Jordan, and she mouthed,
“Anything?”

He shook his head before turning back around to the door. This time he put one hand on the doorknob, finding courage in the streams of sunlight splashing all the way across the floor and over half the door. It was surprisingly warm inside the building at the moment, but that could have just been thanks to his thick winter clothing.

“Go,”
Ol’ Blue Eyes had hissed at him last night inside the stairwell.

“Go where?”
Keo had responded.

“Down!”
he had shouted.

And that was where he and Jordan had gone. They went down the stairs, expecting ghouls to appear from below at any moment. He kept waiting and waiting, but black eyes and the terrifying noise of stampeding bare feet never filled the enclosed space around them. There were only his and Jordan’s labored breathing and their pounding boots all the way down to—

The third floor. He didn’t know why he had chosen it. Maybe he didn’t trust his luck to last for thirty more feet. Or maybe he instinctively knew there wasn’t anything good waiting for them in the lobby. Certainly no escape from the building. If there were already ghouls inside, then there would be even more outside. A hell of a lot more. Every single creature that had been sniffing their trail for the last week ever since Santa Marie Island would be converging on the single building as soon as Jordan fired that first shot.

“We’ll meet again!”
the blue-eyed ghoul had shouted. Or hissed. Though Keo sometimes thought the creature was making an effort to sound more human—

A nervous tap on his shoulder.

He glanced back at Jordan, who gave him a quizzical look.

“Ready?”
he mouthed.

She retreated a few steps to give him room, then aimed her M4 at the door. Finally, she nodded. Keo took a long, solid breath, then made sure the sun was still splashing across the door. You could never be too careful when it came to sunlight these days.

Now.

He pulled the door open and swung it all the way to the side while he took three quick steps backward.

In the five seconds it took the door to fully open, hit the spring doorstop on the wall, and swing back in the other direction, a dozen ghouls piled inside the enclosed space in front of him had untangled their elongated limbs. He wasn’t sure if he saw surprise in their black eyes or heard squeals of delight, but he definitely smelled the acidic burn of vaporizing flesh as the sun hit them.

He fired into the door anyway—it was mostly just instinct, the need to shoot when presented with a target—and put a three-round burst into the center mass of the writhing blob of flesh. A round hit bone and ricocheted into another creature trying to come unglued from the mass around it. Ghouls shrieked as spilt black blood turn gray, then white, and limbs
clattered
to the hard concrete landing. The frontal half of a head vanished before his eyes—