The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (46 page)

“Will,” Gaby said. “What happened to the others? The black-eyed ones?”

“They’re still out there,” Will said. “There’s a lot of them.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Maybe thousands.”

“Why haven’t they…?”

She didn’t finish her question, because by then she was standing beside Will and looking out the hole in the wall. There was something else there in the middle of the jagged opening. It was a decapitated head impaled on a long, thin piece of broken wood. The head was hairless and the smooth skin gleamed in the moonlight. When she looked back at the dead creature behind her, she was able to put two and two together.

“Where…?” she whispered.

“Outside,” Will said. He wasn’t whispering, she realized.

She looked out the house and into the yard again. Will was right. The ghouls hadn’t gone anywhere. They were still outside.

All of them.

She could only see the first few hundred through the opening. The rest were hidden in the darkness beyond the power of even the moon to reveal. Not just in the yard, but around the house. The sides, the back, and well into the fields, too.

Her heart pounded at the sight of the creatures amassed outside. Their eyes, always creepy even when there was just one of them, were unfathomably terrifying with so many gathered at one spot. They looked like uncertain children, tentative and afraid. At first she thought they were looking at Will, but she was mistaken. They were staring at the head he had placed in the middle of the hole in the wall, which looked like the crooked mouth of a cave opening.

There was, she knew with great certainty, absolutely nothing to stop the thousands of undead things out there from coming into the house at any moment. Even silver bullets would only kill so many before the rest overwhelmed them in an unstoppable tidal wave of black death. And then what? They could head up the stairs, but against that many, they would never survive the night. She didn’t have to look down at her watch to know that they had hours—
hours
—to go before sunrise.

But the creatures weren’t attacking. They stayed where they were, swaying slightly against each other, a mass of squirming black flesh, almost indistinguishable against the night. There was something odd about the way they looked at the head, with a mixture of fear and awe and something she hadn’t really seen from them before.

It was indecision. They didn’t know what to do.

“Will,” Gaby whispered. “How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t,” Will said. “But the blue-eyed ones control them. I just didn’t know to what extent.” He paused, then, “There were two more…”

“They’re upstairs. Dead.”

“Good.” Will pulled out his cross-knife and handed it to her, the silver gleaming brilliantly against a stray stream of moonlight. “Bring them down here. Just the heads.”

I
t was stickier
than she had expected, and the smell made her want to retch every few seconds. She was no stranger to blood these days, but this wasn’t really blood. At least, not anymore. It was like washing her hands in tar, and she wondered if she would ever be able to clean them off—really,
really
clean them off—after tonight.

Cutting the heads hadn’t been easy with one hand. Her left was still effectively useless (though she didn’t tell Will that), but she found that pressing down on the creatures’ chests with one knee and slicing with her right hand was good enough. It took a lot of work, but thank God it hadn’t been as difficult to saw through bone as she had anticipated.

The black blood dripped from her fingers as she stood next to Claire and watched Will prop up the two heads on two separate objects sticking up from the floor. With the first makeshift spike, Will had broken a hole in the floorboards with the heel of his boot, then rammed the piece of wood into the dirt ground and set the head on top. He did a similar thing now with the two new heads she had brought down, using a lamp for one, shoving the exposed neck into the spot where the lightbulb was supposed to go, then setting it down on the ground. He used a rifle he had picked up from the floor for the other one.

If she thought the sight of the three decapitated heads side by side was disturbing, she felt better at how uncomfortable, how
frightened
the black-eyed ghouls looked outside where they continued to amass in the hundreds and thousands.

Claire stood next to her, both of them keeping a safe distance behind Will. He hadn’t moved, so they hadn’t, either. She wasn’t sure how long they stood on the first floor, in the darkness, waiting for something to happen.

But the ghouls never came in. They remained outside for the rest of the night and through the early morning hours. As far as she could tell, they barely moved at all and continued to huddle against one another, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, peering in at the three severed heads, as if transfixed.

Around midnight, Will ordered her and Claire upstairs.

Annie was asleep in the corner, on the floor, with Milly snoring in her lap. Danny had (somehow) stood up and was peering out the window through the slots. He was using his rifle as a crutch and had wrapped pieces of lumber around his broken right leg with duct tape. He drank water and kept in constant contact with Will downstairs through their radios. Like Will and her, he had lost his earbuds during the chaos, but both of them had managed to keep their radios in one piece.

Gaby wanted to pick up Milly and put her on the bed, but she didn’t have nearly enough feeling in her left arm to lift her own hand, much less carry the girl. So she sat on the bed with Claire instead and listened to the thirteen-year-old gradually fall asleep, until eventually she was snoring in tune with Milly and Annie. Claire was still clutching the shotgun against her chest as if it were a childhood teddy bear.

She stayed awake throughout the night and morning, watching Danny as he stood, unmoving, by the window. Every now and then, he asked her to take out some food from his pack and they ate. It didn’t occur to her until much later that he could hardly move.

“You okay?” she asked as he chewed on some stale jerky.

“Sure,” he said, giving her a smile.

Danny had rinsed blood off his face with water, leaving behind a gash along his cheek and another one across his temple that he had treated. Those new wounds, along with his broken nose, ruined the California surfer good looks. But scars, she knew, would heal. It was the ones you couldn’t see that lingered.

“You did good, kid,” Danny said after a while.

“Thanks.”

“Not just tonight. The last few weeks, too, to hear Willie boy tell it.”

“I did okay.”

“Don’t be so modest. We did so good with you, I told the guy downstairs we should open a school. Willie and Danny’s School of Asskicking. What do you think? If you refer a friend, you get a free ammo can filled with silver bullets as bounty.”

She smiled. “Sign me up.”

“I’ll do that. Now, go to sleep,” Danny said. “I’ll wake you in an hour for your turn at the window.”

She didn’t argue. She simply didn’t have the strength.

Gaby lay down on the bed next to Claire’s snoring form. She didn’t think it would happen, but as soon as she closed her eyes
(Just for a little bit)
,
she was asleep.

D
anny was still standing
by the window when she opened her eyes and struggled up on the bed.

“Danny,” she said. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“You feel that?” he asked.

She did. The warmth inside the room. The brightness of the walls. The bloody stains on the floorboards looking more ghastly somehow in the morning light. And the small remnants of blood that Danny had failed to clean off his face during the night.

Morning!

“We made it,” she said softly, afraid that if she said it too loud it might jinx it.

Danny nodded. “Told you.”

She looked down at Claire, who had crawled over to sleep in her lap sometime during the night. Annie and Milly were both snoring on the floor in the corner, Milly curled up in a fetal position. The girl looked cold despite the sun that highlighted her dirty round face.

“So what now?” she asked.

“We go home,” Danny said.

“Can we?”

“I don’t see why not.”

She carefully untangled herself from Claire, then climbed off the bed and walked across the room to the window. She looked out at the empty front yard. The grass was trampled and there were signs everywhere that hundreds
(thousands)
of ghouls had been down there last night. The trucks, she saw with some relief, were still where she had last seen them, and they looked to be in the same condition.

“Will?” she asked.

“Still giving head downstairs.”

She smiled, then peered out across the farm at the highway in the near distance. She expected to see trucks—or technicals, as Will and Danny called them—staring back at her, waiting to finish the job, but they were gone, too.

“The soldiers?” she said.

“They made like bananas and split sometime around sunrise,” Danny said. “My guess is, they realized we had a secret weapon—” he glanced at Claire’s snoring form on the bed “—and decided not to risk it. What is she, twenty?”

“Thirteen.”

“The hell you say.”

“Uh huh.”

“Damn. That girl saved my life last night.”

“How did she manage that?”

“When Frankly Dead Sinatra came through the door, she was the one who distracted it long enough so it didn’t rip my heart out when it had the chance. Hit it with that shotgun of hers, like she was swinging a mallet at a county fair. I guess she didn’t want to risk shooting it for fear of hitting me. Thank God. Have you ever been shotgunned?”

“No.”

“Take my word for it, kid; you’re gonna want to avoid it if you can.”

“I saw her outside in the hallway. She saved my life, too.”

“Technically, you owe me since I’m the one who told her to run.” He looked over at Annie and Milly. “I told them, too, but they weren’t quite as good at following orders. Anyway, when ol’ Blue Eyes was distracted, I managed to judo it and got on top and did my thing with the knife.” He mimed it for her. “I feel sorry for it, actually. It never stood a chance.”

“I didn’t know you knew judo,” she said.

“I didn’t tell you? Judo and me go way back. She still calls me every time she’s in town. She loves to wrestle, oh boy, does she ever.”

Gaby couldn’t help but laugh. Even her left arm didn’t seem to be hurting quite as much as when she had first opened her eyes a few minutes ago. Well, that wasn’t quite true, but she figured as long as she told herself that, the pain was manageable.

Mostly, anyway.

T
hey didn’t
like seeing him around, and though they did their best to hide it, it was never really good enough. Sometimes he wondered if they were trying at all, or if their hatred for him managed to seep through anyway despite their best efforts. Not that it mattered. Their opinions didn’t have any effect on him either way.

He had been
chosen.
It was something they would never understand.

“Something’s happening over there,” Travis said. “Turner says there’s a lot of shooting. He could hear it from half a mile away.”

“On the island?” Josh asked.

“Yeah.”

“What did he say was happening?”

“He’s not close enough to know for sure, but he says it sounds like a gun battle, and it’s been going on for the last thirty minutes.”

Josh liked being out here, in the open at night. It was such a luxury after so many months of hiding in smelly basements and other people’s houses, and he took advantage of it whenever he could.

This is the privilege of the chosen. Freedom.

He leaned against the patio railing on the second floor of the red house overlooking Beaufont Lake. A pair of men in uniforms walked along the docks, and there were more on the other docks up and down the shoreline. Just over thirty men in all. Josh had arrived before nightfall with twenty soldiers to augment the twenty or so already here. Except when he showed up, there were only twelve left. Eight were dead.

“They hit us,”
Travis had said.
“They had a grenade launcher.”

Josh hadn’t bothered to ask for details, because it didn’t matter. Thirty-two men wasn’t going to be enough to overwhelm Song Island. He was already hesitant to move on them with forty, but without Will and Danny, he thought it was doable.
Just women and children mostly,
he had thought.

“What should we do?” Travis asked now. He sounded nervous when he added, “What does
she
want us to do?”

Travis was in his thirties and could have passed for Josh’s dad. He used to be some kind of supervisor at a construction company and was used to giving orders, which made him ideal to take over this group, now that the guy who was supposed to lead them had gone and gotten himself dead earlier today. Caught in an explosion, according to Travis.

“She hasn’t told me yet,” Josh said.

“When was the last time you talked to her?”

“Earlier today, before I came here.”

“I thought they slept in the day?”

“They do.”

“So how…?”

“If she wants you to know, she’ll tell you,” Josh said, cutting the older man off. “Tell Turner to get as close as he can without being seen and find out what’s happening on the island.”

Travis nodded. Josh could tell he wanted to say something else, but Travis turned and went back into the house instead. The glass door opened and slid shut behind him. Like everyone these days, even though he was safe in the night, Travis couldn’t quite shake the nervousness and preferred to stay indoors when possible.

And for good reason, too. Josh could see them out there, skirting around the spotlights his men had set up around the perimeter. After two attacks in two days, Josh wasn’t going to take any chances. He had men all the way up the highway watching everything—

Josh smelled it before it even announced its presence. They gave off a scent that was different from the black-eyed ones. Travis probably couldn’t tell the difference, but he had never really been around these new breed of ghouls. Josh had. Too many times to count.

So he didn’t have to glance back at the tall, silhouetted figure standing in the shadows behind him, blue eyes glowing softly against the darkness.

“Why haven’t you taken the island yet?” the ghoul asked. Its voice, like all the other blue-eyed ones, came out as more of a soft hiss, almost like a lisp. It was male, though sometimes it was hard to tell, even for Josh. “It’s become a haven. A beacon of hope. It has to be taken at all costs.”

“We don’t have enough people,” Josh said. His voice was calm and steady. The trick was not to let them know you were afraid. “I’ve sent for more. They’re coming tomorrow, with additional supplies.”

“And you can take the island then…”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes,” Josh said. Did his voice just quiver a little bit? Of course not. He wasn’t afraid of them. He didn’t have to be. He was one of the chosen. “Where’s Kate? She usually gives me the orders herself.”

“She’s busy.”

“With what?”

“It’s none of your concern, meat.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“Don’t I?” It sounded amused that time.

Josh fought the urge to whirl around and face the creature. It was testing him, trying to see if it could get under his skin. But he wasn’t afraid. Why should he be? He was one of the chosen. He didn’t have to fear anymore.

“Tomorrow,” the creature said. “No more excuses. You’ll take the island tomorrow.”

“What about Gaby? Kate told me she’s still alive.”

“Don’t worry; we’ll save your precious lover for you.”

“Don’t hurt her.”

The creature might have snickered. “Just do your part, meat. We’ll bring your female to you, as promised.”

“I’ll take the island, don’t you worry,” Josh said. “What else—”

He stopped. He didn’t have to look back to know it was gone. He could feel
it in the way the air hung and the sudden loss of the familiar scent.

Josh refocused on the calm water of Beaufont Lake in front of him instead.

Pros and cons: What were they?

Pros: Gaby was alive. Thank God. She had escaped L15 and hadn’t perished inside the cave outside of town as reported by his men.
(Those idiots.)
She was stuck outside of Dunbar now. Trapped and surrounded and outmatched. But they wouldn’t harm her once they killed the others. Will and Danny, and some kids he didn’t know and didn’t care about. Gaby was all that mattered. Gaby had always been the only thing that mattered.

Cons: He would storm Song Island tomorrow once the replacements showed up. They had no shortage of manpower these days. All the civilians in the towns were volunteering by the dozens. It had to be the uniforms. Everyone was a sucker for uniforms. It was why he had come up with the military idea in the first place. Even Kate hadn’t thought of it. She and Mabry were already replicating his success in the other states and around the world. Soon, he’d join them in the global effort to domesticate the planet. But that was for later. For now, there was Song Island to deal with.

Conclusion: Gaby was alive and soon they would be reunited. He had failed to convince her before, but he couldn’t give up now. Gaby was too important. She was
everything.
Even if he had to lock her up for a month or a year. Sooner or later, she would come around. He just needed time. And to get that precious time, he would have to take Song Island and show Mabry he could do more than just think outside the box, that he could act—and do it successfully—too.

He was one of the chosen, after all.

One of these days, humanity would thank him. They would write books about him. Maybe he’d even get his own national holiday. Wouldn’t that be something?

Josh smiled into the darkness and looked south, where he imagined Song Island was.

Tomorrow. It would all be over tomorrow.

There would be violence. It was inevitable. Lara wouldn’t just let him land on the island. They would have to take it by force. Overwhelming force.

The white beaches were going to run red with blood.

So be it.