The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (44 page)

They’re enjoying every second of it.

The loud banging continued for a while along with Harrison’s voice. “Please! For God’s sake, open the door! You have to let me in!”

Like hell,
Gaby thought, when the banging suddenly stopped.

Harrison reappeared outside her window for a moment before whirling around, expecting an attack at any second. So did she. They were both surprised that none came. Harrison turned and fled up the yard. Then he stopped, seemed to be trying to get his bearings, before taking off again, this time running alongside the house and disappearing.

The creatures hadn’t moved. They simply watched him go. Waiting.

For what?

“There he goes,” Danny said.

“Are they just going to let him go?” Gaby asked.

He shook his head, and in a voice that was odd for Danny, he said solemnly, “No.”

The first ghoul to move was the one perched on the shack. It leaped off the building and darted off in the same direction that Harrison had gone. Then a second one took off, followed quickly by a third, until all four had vanished from the yard.

There was just silence again.

“What are they going to do to him?” she whispered.

Danny shook his head and didn’t answer.

A minute passed, and she was only aware of her shallow breathing.

Five minutes…

She looked across at Danny again, hoping to find some answers from his expression. There weren’t any. He was waiting and listening like her. Maybe he knew something more, but he didn’t say it. She was going to click her PTT and ask Will when a scream pierced the night air.

Harrison.

It was shrill and loud and seemed to go on and on and on.

She had never heard that kind of scream in her life. It wasn’t just that he was in pain. There was mortal terror in every second of it.

And my God, did it seem to keep going, and going…

She had difficulty reconciling that voice with the hardened man who had beaten Peter half to death (or if he hadn’t done it himself, had ordered it), then later tossed Donna out of the car to die on the highway. She wanted not to feel sorry for him, but she did anyway.

Gaby didn’t know how to interpret her feelings. Was it weakness? He was her enemy. She shouldn’t care what was happening to him. Or was it strength? Was courage being able to feel empathy even for your enemy? She didn’t know. She only knew that no one, not even Harrison, deserved what was happening out there at this moment.

No one…

She looked back at the girls huddled in the corner. Annie had placed her hands over Milly’s ears and the girl looked half-asleep in her lap. But it was Claire’s eyes that Gaby saw. The thirteen-year-old’s face was placid, unmoved by Harrison’s cries.

Click.
“Gaby,” Will said in her ear. “I need you back at the stairs.”

“On my way,” she said, and walked quickly across the room.

She was glad to leave the window, because the further she moved away from it, the harder it was to hear Harrison’s continued screams. Until finally she was back in the hallway, and she couldn’t hear the dying man anymore.

Lance looked over at her. “They’re doing it again, aren’t they? Like last time. Back at our house. They’re doing it again...”

She didn’t reply. Instead, Gaby sat numbly back down at the head of the stairs, then flicked the fire selector on her M4 from semi-automatic to burst fire. She longed for her own weapon, or at least something with full-auto capability. At least she had silver bullets in her rifle again, so there was that.

“Remember: shoot them in the head,”
Will had said.

Right. Shoot them in the head.

Easy enough…

T
he next two
hours ticked by in silence, inside and outside the farmhouse. The lack of noise—or any sounds at all—was nerve-wracking.

Blue-eyed ghouls.

She could have lived the rest of her life without seeing them in person.

Not just one, but four.

Four!

She shivered again in the semidarkness and looked quickly to see if Lance had noticed. She shouldn’t have bothered. Lance had dozed off, the AR-15 positioned awkwardly across his lap. She thought about taking the rifle away from him. The last thing she wanted was for him to wake up suddenly and start shooting. And the barrel was pointed right at her, too…

The neon hand of her watch ticked to 10:16 p.m.

Not even close to sunrise. When did the sun come out last time? Around seven?

All we have to do is survive nine more hours.

Oh, that’s it?

The
clicking
noise in her right ear made her jump slightly. “What’s the word, daddy bird?” Danny said through the comm.

“Jack shit,” Will said.

“How long does it take to eat Harrison? The guy was kind of thick around the ankles. An hour? Two?”

“Oh, nice.”

“What? Too soon?”

“Way too soon.”

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t like we really knew the guy. You know what they say about gingers.”

Tap.

Gaby’s eyes darted up to the ceiling.

Tap tap.

She reached down and squeezed the Push-to-Talk switch connected to her radio. “I hear something.”

“Sorry, kid, I tried to hold it in,” Danny said.

“No, above us.”

“What was it?” Will asked.

“Footsteps. I think.”

She looked across the hallway and saw Danny, still stationed at the window, craning his head upward toward the ceiling.

Tap tap.

“I hear it,” Danny said.

“Ignore it,” Will said. “They’re just probing the roof, looking for a weak spot.”

“What if they find it?” she asked.

“Then we’re shit out of luck with a fist full of ham sandwiches,” Danny said.

Gaby listened intently to the noise above her when it suddenly stopped.

She breathed a little easier.

They’re probing. That’s all. They’re just probing for weaknesses.

“Gaby,” Will said in her ear.

“Yes…”

“Stay where you are. You’re in the perfect spot right now. And wake Lance up.”

She smiled. “How’d you know?”

“He’s not one of us.”

Gaby felt a flush of pride.
“One of us.”
Her, Danny, and Will. The three of them. In this post-Purge world, it meant the world for him to include her.

She turned to Lance and put her hand on his shoulder, giving it a slight nudge.

He opened his eyes and snapped awake, looking around before locating her through his groggy haze. “What’s happening?”

“You were asleep.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his eyes, then wrapped his hands back around his rifle as if it were his lifeline. The barrel was still pointed at her…

Gaby turned back to the stairs. Or the pitch blackness at the other end. She could really see only the first half dozen or so steps, with the rest hidden in the shadows.

“Heads up,” Danny said in her ear.

“I see it,” Will said.

Gaby glanced to her left, past Lance and into the open bedroom door at Danny. He had taken a step away from the window and had lifted his M4A1 slightly.

“Danny,” Gaby said out loud. “What’s happening?”

“They’re back,” he said through her earbud.

“The blue-eyed ones?”

“Ol’ blue eyes. Maybe they want to serenade us. Sing us to death.” Then he added, his voice rising noticeably, “Shit.”

“What is it?” Will said through the comm.

“I only see two of them.”

“Find the other two—”

Something that sounded like an explosion rang out, drowning out Will’s voice. Gaby moved on instinct, diving further up the hallway, away from the stairs, just as the first pieces of rubble came tumbling down from above her.

The roof.
It was caving in on them.

“Lance!” she shouted.

He was struggling to his feet, legs wobbly from sitting too long, and hadn’t straightened all the way up before the roof crashed down on top of him. He let out something that sounded like a scream
(A squeal?)
before he was pummeled by falling slate tiles. One of them broke over Lance’s head and he stumbled, somehow managing to brace himself against the wall, as more roofing material flooded down on top of him one by one by one.

Then it came down.

It.

One of the creatures. It fell down from the sky like some archangel, minus the wings and halo and good intentions, landing in a crouch next to Lance. It straightened up, its body impossibly long, spindly arms and legs extending in what little light was available in the second-floor hallway.

Glowing blue eyes searched her out, and finding her, zeroed in.

It was gripping something long and shiny in one of its hands. Moonlight glinted off the smooth surface of a sledgehammer.

“Gaby!” Will shouted in her ear.

She was too busy scrambling back up to her feet to respond. She didn’t think and didn’t waste a second. She simply reacted, lifting the M4 and pulling the trigger. The carbine bucked in her hands and the sound of the three-round burst in the close confines of the hallway was like three powerful thunder strikes, one after another.

Her aim was true, and she hit it with all three rounds in the chest.

But it didn’t go down.

It didn’t go down.

Instead, it looked back at her and grinned before tossing the sledgehammer away. Then it took a step forward.
Pow!
A bullet hit the creature from behind. That same bullet punched through flesh and
zipped
past her head before disappearing into the wall behind her.
Slurping
noises as thick, coagulated black blood burst out of the fresh hole in the thing’s neck and splashed with a sickening
plop
against the floor.

“Gaby, get down!” Danny shouted from the other side of the hallway.

Her mind was reeling, the sight of the creature still standing after she had put three silver bullets into its chest making it hard for her to think straight.

“Remember: shoot them in the head,”
Will had said.

Shoot them in the head!

The creature wasn’t looking at her anymore. It was already turning and bounding up the hallway toward Danny, who was firing, having switched to full-auto. Bullets pierced the creature’s body and embedded into walls as Danny tried to track its constantly moving and shifting form. It was
dodging
his gunfire. How was that even possible? Were they really that
fast?

Stupid question, because she could see it with her own eyes.

Danny’s silver rounds that did land were penetrating the creature’s body and continued on,
zip-zipping
up the narrow space like flies buzzing, slamming into the wall around her. She had to duck to keep from being hit by a stray bullet, and suddenly the prospect of dying by friendly fire was very real.

In a crouch, Gaby lifted her rifle and tried to get a bead on the creature as it fled away from her
(“Shoot them in the head!”)
. Before she could fire, she lost track of it as it disappeared into the room. It was suddenly on the floor and Danny was under it, fighting for his life, and she couldn’t make out where the creature ended and Danny began.

Instead, she reached down and pressed the PTT, and shouted, “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

Where the hell was Will? Couldn’t he hear what was happening up here? What was he doing down there? What—

There was a massive
BOOM!
and the entire house shook from its foundations all the way up to its ceiling, as if a bomb had gone off on the floor under her.

The first floor. Will.

What the hell was happening down there?

She started forward toward the stairs—

—when a second creature fell through the same hole the first one had made with the sledgehammer and landed in an elegant crouch in front of her. It made so little noise, and there was so little effort in its movements, that for a moment the sight of it straightening up, stretching its body like some twisted, deformed ballerina, startled Gaby to the core.

It had its back to her as it rose to its full height—it was at least a foot taller than her, maybe more—and turned around. Gaby became instantly mesmerized by its ethereal blue eyes. Like two impossibly bright orbs washing over the darkened hallway, reaching into her very soul.

It opened its mouth, revealing twisted and cracked brown and yellow teeth stained with oozing black liquid that looked, for some reason, as if they, too, were alive and wiggling.

“Wanna play?” it hissed, eyes glinting with mischief in the moonlight.

T
he darkness did
things to you these days. It lulled you into a strange state of numbness with its overwhelming silence, the unnatural sense of calm that seemed to pervade everything, while at the same time it made you dread all the things out there that you couldn’t see.

Inevitable. Night after night.

Are we just living on borrowed time? Is that all it is?

Tonight. Tomorrow night. The week after. The next month?

How long can we keep the island? How long can we keep fighting them before it becomes too much? Before the costs are too great?

How long…

He had to shake himself to rid his mind of those depressing thoughts. Being downstairs by himself didn’t help. The most he could do to keep busy was move from window to window, checking every corner of the front yard. He couldn’t really see the soldiers on the road from here, but he knew they were still out there, somewhere.

When they finally came, he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand. His senses were never more razor sharp as they were during the preamble to combat. He felt it now, the hyper awareness of his surroundings. Every sound, every flickering image, and every glowing blue eye.

As he watched them toying with Harrison, he realized just how different these creatures were. They were the same, but not—an entirely new breed of what he was familiar with. Radically different. More
dangerous.
This was why they had kept the other ghouls back in Dunbar. Because this was their show. Their sport. Harrison was a warm-up and now they were coming for the main event. He and the others inside the house.

So where were they now? What was taking them so long?

Will glanced back at the staircase behind him. It was too dark to make out much of anything on the first floor even with the slivers of moonlight filtering in through the barricades over the windows, one next to him and the other one on the other side of the door. He could just make out the stair landing—

There was a loud crash from above him, and the entire house shuddered.

He reached for his radio. “Gaby!”

He waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. Instead, he heard the
pop-pop-pop
of an M4 exploding from the second floor. Three-shot burst. Gaby’s rifle, because Danny still had his M4A1 and he would have either used single shots or gone full-auto.

Will abandoned the window as more gunfire erupted from the top of the stairs. In the packed confines of the house, the sounds were thunderous, but they couldn’t quite drown out the voice. Danny’s, shouting between gunshots. He wasn’t using the radio, either. That was a bad sign.

The first floor. Stay on the first floor! Don’t abandon—

Then Gaby’s voice, blasting through his earbud. “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

He was at the stairs, grabbing for the wooden globe on top of the newel, when shadowed movements flickered across the wall in front of him. Figures, moving outside one of the windows, their shapes casting across the room by moonlight.

He spun back around and saw the indistinguishable shapes moving on the other side of the window he had abandoned just seconds ago. As soon as he saw them, the silhouetted forms raced away again.

What—?

The explosion (or was that
explosions?
) shredded the window, the barrier over it, and a large section of the house around them. Will dived to the floor as chunks of the wall and even the porch buzzed over and around his head, sharp pieces embedding into the floor inches from him. Debris rained down across the room and his ears were buzzing. He was sure he had gone temporarily deaf
(Please let it be temporary)
, though that couldn’t possibly be the case because he could still hear continuous gunfire from above him.

Grenades? Did they just use grenades on the wall?

Jesus Christ.

He looked up from the floor, expecting the entire house to come tumbling down on top of him at any second. But it didn’t. Somehow, by some miracle, the second floor remained where it was—above him—despite the jagged, gaping hole across the room looking out into the moonlit yard. Absurdly, the door next to it had remained intact, as had the repurposed lumber they nailed over it. Smoke from the explosion poured out of the house, and he became aware of the chilly night air for the first time in the last few hours.

He managed to scramble to his knees, glad he hadn’t lost the M4A1 during his swan dive. Pieces of wood and glass fell off his shoulders and back and head, and there may or may not have been a trickle
(or two or a dozen)
of blood flowing down his face. His ears were still ringing, which made the sight of two figures, both in camo uniforms and gas masks, stepping through the hole in the wall and moving against the lingering smoke look like monsters in a bad dream.

He couldn’t hear his carbine firing, but he could feel it bucking against his hands.

The first man slumped forward while the second one tried desperately to track him in the smoke. His vision was likely blocked by the limited view of the gas mask.

Sucks to be you.

Will put a bullet into the second man’s right eye. He stumbled awkwardly before collapsing into a pile.

Will struggled to his feet. His equilibrium was off and he swayed left, then right, then left again. The coughing fits didn’t help him adjust any quicker as he reached out with his free left hand, got a grip on something solid, and finally managed to steady himself.

Or as steady as he could get, anyway. The room had begun to spin and he considered falling back to the floor, where it would be so much easier to regain his senses. The world had looked pretty stable from down there, and he didn’t remember coughing nearly as much, either. Up here, though, the smoke was everywhere, and it was hard to just breathe.

The wall he was touching shook, but he had a hard time tracing where the vibrations were coming from. Behind him? Above? Maybe from outside the house. It could have been more steady gunfire from the second floor. Gaby and Danny were still up there. So were Lance and Annie and the two girls.

What’s happening up there?

He made to turn back toward the stairs to go find out when he saw the shadows shifting once again out of the corner of his eye. He spun back around just in time to see a pair of blue slits glowing in the swirling smoke.

They were coming—
launching
—at him.

Will reflexively struck out with the rifle, because lifting it and firing would have taken more time—a second, maybe two, that he didn’t have. The M4A1 vibrated on contact, both his arms shaking long after he had swung from right to left, his body turning with his momentum.

It didn’t fall very far and it was back up on its feet even before Will could right himself. It attacked again, springing like an animal on all fours, barreling into his chest and knocking him back. He groped for the wall but couldn’t find it and briefly had a feeling of being weightless as he was thrust through empty air before crashing back down to earth.

He was in the back hallway, past the stairs leading up to the second floor. The door was farther behind him, invisible in the darkness. For a moment, he waited for another blue-eyed ghoul to break its way through that side of the house—

Concentrate! Focus!

The creature climbed up the length of his body and he felt (impossibly) cold dead fingers wrapping around his throat, over the plastic band of the mic. A pair of glorious gems in the blackness bore down at him even as thin, pencil-like lips curled into a smile. It leaned down until its face—the deformed shape of the skull obvious behind smooth black flesh—was inches from his own.

Will stared up at it, fumbling with his fingers for the cross-knife in its sheath along his left hip, cursing himself for losing the rifle. He hadn’t even remembered when he had lost it. Hopefully it was still somewhere nearby.

The rifle.

Lara called it superstition, but he called it habit.

She’s probably right. I am superstitious about the damn thing. I should tell her that when I get back to the island.

I love you, Lara, please forgive me for dying.

He couldn’t breathe. How long had it been since he took his last (smoke-filled) breath? A second ago? Two seconds? Ten? An hour?

The creature’s fingers were tightening with every erratic heartbeat he managed, and he momentarily rejoiced at the touch of the cross-knife’s smooth handle.

The brain.

Go for the brain.

Will pulled the knife out and swung it upward in a wide arc—

—but the sharp point never reached its destination. The creature’s other hand had intercepted his swing well short of its intended target.

Oh, shit.

“We know,” it hissed at him. “Didn’t Kate tell you?” It was holding his hand up in the air with hardly any effort. “We know what happened with the others.
How
it happened. You didn’t think we’d let you get away with it twice, did you?”

He could hear its voice, which meant he hadn’t gone deaf after all. Thank God.

“Don’t worry,” the creature hissed. “It’s not going to end that easily for you, Will. Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you. Of course, she didn’t say anything about punishing you for what happened at Dunbar first.”

Its lips curled into a devilish grin.

He somehow found the strength to look away from its face to his own hand, suspended in the air, the cross-knife
(Go for the brain!)
frozen in place. It didn’t even look like the ghoul was exerting any effort at all. It was so strong. So fast and so strong. What chance did he have against an army of these things? What chance did Lara and the island have?

Lara. At least I got to talk to her one last time.

Please forgive me for dying.

His vision was faltering and the creature’s fingers were still tightening, and Will swore he could feel cold bones cutting into the skin around his throat. Was that even possible? Who the hell knew? He didn’t. Right now, all he could do was lie on the floor and wait to die, wait to be taken, wait to be given to Kate…

BOOM!

The hallway trembled, as if it had been hit by an earthquake.

The walls, the ceiling, and even the floor underneath him quaked in the aftermath of the shotgun blast at such close proximity.

Will’s eyes snapped open because he could breathe again.

Air!

The creature was still perched on top of him, but it had turned its head and was glaring at something behind it. Chunks of its shoulder and neck were gone, and blood arced out of the ruptured flesh and splattered the wall next to it in a grisly shower of thick, clumpy black blood.

Will looked past the ghoul and saw a small figure standing at the mouth of the hallway, holding a shotgun.

Claire. It was Claire. The little girl with the FNH semi-automatic shotgun.

How’d she get down here?

Claire fired again—the massive
BOOM!
lighting up the hallway a second time.

The blue-eyed ghoul’s head jerked backward as buckshot tore into its face, shards of shiny white skull shattering and imploding in the air. Meaty globs of foul-smelling flesh hit Will in the face before he could turn his head in time.

Then his left hand was free and Will wrestled it loose from the ghoul’s grip, even as the lifeless
(again)
body on top of him flopped sideways to the floor. The creature’s form was so much lighter now that Will found it difficult to understand how this almost feathery thing landing next to him was the same creature that had, just moments ago, smashed into him like a five-ton elephant.

He sucked in air like a drowning man, scrambling up from the floor, trying desperately to command his legs to work properly. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, or the throbbing pain. Despite what the creature had said about promising Kate
(What the hell did that even mean?)
, it sure didn’t seem to care that it was about to crush every bone in his throat.

Claire was standing in front of him, staring at the dead
(headless)
body resting in a thick pool of its own blood. She didn’t seemed to notice him as he finally got back on his feet and grabbed the wall to steady himself, the creature’s flesh and blood caking his face and clothes like a second layer of rotting skin.

Goddamn, it smells.

The continued loud clatter of gunfire from the second floor told him everything he needed to know—it wasn’t over. Far from it.

The gunfire snapped Claire out of it, and the girl rushed over and grabbed his waist with one hand—the other still clutching the shotgun—to keep him upright because, even though he didn’t realize it, he needed her help. She was a small, frail thing, but she gave herself up as a crutch so he could stand on wobbly feet.

“My rifle,” Will said, his voice coming out as a croak. “My rifle,” he said again, louder and clearer this time.

“I don’t know,” Claire said. Her own voice was strained but somehow still impossibly calm.

She’s going to make a great soldier…if we survive this.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked.

“They told me to run,” Claire said.

Gaby and Danny…

He clutched the knife in his left hand, thanking God he had held onto it all this time, and searched the darkness for his rifle, doing his best to squint through all the pockets of shadows. There were no traces of the carbine anywhere. Of course, there was so little light that it could have been right next to him, and if he didn’t step on it, he might never find—

Claire gasped.

Will looked up at a new pair of blue eyes piercing the darkened living room from the jagged hole in the wall. Its tall, elongated frame looked theatrical against the light of the moon splashing in behind it. Will couldn’t figure out if it really was that tall or if the angular shape of its body added to the preternatural deceit.

He reached down and pulled Claire’s arm away from him, pushing her back into the hallway. She went willingly.