The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (5 page)

What about around the world?

The sight of pregnant women had also ceased to become a novelty. She watched them from her window with a mixture of sadness and pity. Did they know what they were getting into? Of course they did. Josh had told them. Or whoever ran this place when Josh wasn’t here. She didn’t think Josh was actually responsible for the day-to-day operations. He was like an overseer, coming and going as needed.

The sun was already fading over the rooftops across the street. She didn’t need a watch or a clock to tell her that it was almost six. It would be dark in less than thirty minutes. Sometimes sooner, when you least expected it.

Night is not our friend. Not anymore.

She glanced back when the doorknob behind her jingled and Mac pushed the door open. He looked in cautiously, as if expecting her to be lying in wait for him. Gaby almost grinned at his reluctance.

“Dinner, your highness,” Mac said, with just enough of a smirk to get across his disdain for her.

A young girl who Gaby had never seen before squeezed her way past Mac. Gaby’s entire world in L15 up to this point had revolved around Josh coming in the afternoons and evenings, and Mac standing outside her door in the day and Lance at night. The girl brought a newness that stirred curiosity and suspicion in Gaby.

And who might you be, little girl?

She wore a white sundress and had short black hair cut to complement a round face. She looked all of thirteen, with big brown eyes that gave her a rare vibe of innocence, something that was in short supply these days.

She smiled at Gaby. “I brought you dinner.”

“Thank you,” Gaby said.

The girl was carrying a brown plastic tray with a red apple, a baked potato in aluminum foil,
(Potatoes again?
she thought, just as her stomach growled
)
, and two pieces of bread with something that looked like ham placed with care between them.

“Where should I put it?” the girl asked her.

“Put it anywhere,” Mac said impatiently behind her.

“But I don’t want it to get dirty.”

“Just put it anywhere, for God’s sake.”

“On the bed’s fine,” Gaby said.

She smiled at the girl and got a pleasant response. “Are you sure?” the girl asked. “Peter would kill me if he saw food on my bed.”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

That elicited another bright smile. The girl walked over to the bed and put the tray down over the duvet. She stepped back and seemed to hesitate for a moment.

“Get on with it,” Mac said behind her.

“I’ll come back later—for the tray—when you’re done,” the girl said. There was something about the way she looked at Gaby—a strange, almost anxiousness in her voice—that made Gaby even more curious.

“Okay,” Gaby nodded when the girl didn’t say anything else.

“Come on,” Mac said. “I don’t have all day.”

The girl hurried back to the door. Mac held it open for her then slammed it shut after them and immediately pushed the deadbolt into place on the other side.

Gaby stared at the door after them.

What was that about?

S
he sat on her bed
, eating everything on the tray. She devoured the potato skins and apple core and crumbs from the two slices of bread. Homemade bread. She could tell. Her mom couldn’t make bread to save her life, but her friend Anna’s mom could. The ham was delicious and fresh. They weren’t from a frozen package like on the island. She guessed the townspeople got it from the same pigs as the strips of bacon Josh was boasting about earlier.

She thought about the girl as she ate and watched nightfall blanket the world outside her window. She had gotten used to leaving it open. The sight of candles and flickering lanterns from the buildings around her brought a sense of normalcy she didn’t realize she had missed until now.

But it was the girl in the white sundress that stayed at the forefront of her mind. The kid had wanted to say something, but the presence of Mac had discouraged it. What was going on behind those big eyes?

It was pitch-dark outside when she finished her meal and found herself back at the window, looking past the buildings and at the woods beyond. L15 was ringed by woods. Dark and natural, their trees teeming with things she couldn’t see. Things other than the animals on the branches, the birds perched among the crowns. Things that were moving on the ground, restless…

Ghouls.

She shivered involuntarily. They were out there right now. Somewhere. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel their presence beyond the town limits. The people around her could, too. That was why L15 shut down well before nightfall, why everyone—despite the arrangement, despite the promised safety—still operated under the assumption it wasn’t safe to wander outside in the dark.

How many were out there right now, in the woods? Hundreds? Thousands? Easily thousands. The creatures always seemed to know where people congregated. And there were a hell of a lot of people here, right now, in these buildings around her. What was keeping them from coming in one of these days?

Or maybe the better question was,
who
was holding them back…

T
he girl
with the round face and the big eyes came back five minutes later, still wearing the sundress, while Gaby was at the window. Mac did his usual look-inside-first move before letting the girl in. Then he stayed behind at the open door, watching Gaby like a hawk. He was so consumed with her that he didn’t pay any attention to the girl.

“Get it and let’s go,” Mac said.

The girl hurried inside and picked up the tray, glanced briefly at Gaby—sideways, so Mac couldn’t see their brief exchange
(Okay, now what was
that
about?)
—before leaving again without a word.

“Sleep tight,” Mac said. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite, princess.”

“Can I ask you something, Mac?” Gaby said.

That caught him by surprise. He hesitated, then said guardedly, “What?”

“Have you lived it down yet?”

“Lived what down?”

“Almost getting your head bashed in by a girl with an end table.”

He grunted. “Yeah, you keep bringing that up, princess. Like I keep telling you, one of these days your boyfriend might not be in charge anymore. Those things out there? Those bloodsuckers? They’ve been known to change their minds.”

Mac gave her a big grin, one that was intended to scare her.

It didn’t work. “Josh thinks you’re a pussy. He told me himself. Can’t stand you. Says you don’t bathe.”

His face turned slightly pale even in the semidarkness of her room, and he was about to respond when he apparently decided against it and left without a word instead. Gaby sighed when she heard the deadbolt snapping into place. She didn’t think very highly of Mac, but the man was damn good about always locking her inside.

The girl had left without a word while she was talking with Mac. Gaby cursed herself. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the kid instead of wasting her time with—

Then she saw it. A piece of folded paper, tucked underneath the duvet near where the tray had been.

She hurried across the room, suddenly terrified Mac might choose tonight, of all nights, to come back in for a last-minute check before turning the shift over to Lance. She picked up the paper and walked toward the door on tiptoes, making as little noise as possible, and leaned against the wall and listened.

Mac, moving around, the
creak
of his heavy combat boots against the floorboards.

Gaby unfolded the note. It was a small piece of what looked to be from a sheet of 8.5x11 piece of writing paper. There was writing on it in black pen, the letters drafted in fine, almost elegant cursive letters. Which meant the girl didn’t write it. Gaby had known plenty of girls at thirteen—herself included—and none ever had this kind of penmanship.

She scanned the letters, her eyes widening with every line she read:

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you? Destroy this when done.”

Gaby re-read the note again just to be sure her desperate mind hadn’t accidentally (purposefully?) “rewritten” the note for its own purposes:

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you? Destroy this when done.”

No. It was still the same.

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you?”

Gaby folded the note back up until it was barely the size of her thumb, then slipped it into her mouth and swallowed.

S
he woke
up sometime in the middle of the night to the sound of footsteps outside her door. They were too quiet, someone walking on tiptoes, to be Lance. So quiet, in fact, that she only heard it because she had been sitting on the bed waiting for it, or something like it, for the last few hours.

The second floor was partially lit by a portable LED lantern hanging from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the hallway, between her door and the staircase on the other side. It was rechargeable, and she had seen Mac taking it down to recharge every morning when he showed up for his shift.

There was definitely a figure moving against the hallway light now, visible as elongated shadows through the slit under the door. The figure stopped, shifted
(crouched?)
, then the sound of paper sliding across the floor.

Gaby climbed out of bed and raced toward the door just as the figure stood up and turned to go. “Wait,” Gaby said, whispering just loudly enough to be heard. She snatched up the paper—the same size as the other one—and pocketed it. “Don’t go.”

The shadow turned, then someone pressed against the door. A soft, familiar voice whispered, “You’re awake.”

Gaby smiled. It was the girl in the sundress. “What’s your name?”

“Milly.”

“Milly, who sent you—”

“I have to go,” Milly said, cutting her off. “He’s coming back.”

“Wait—”

But Milly was gone, the barely audible
tap-tap
of bare feet against the hallway floor, before a door opened and closed softly seconds later. Gaby was certain Milly had disappeared into a room somewhere further down the hallway, which meant she lived in the building and was one of the many unseen neighbors that came and went every day.

A few seconds later, loud footsteps—like thunder compared to Milly’s—climbed up the stairs and moved across the hallway.

Lance.

She got up and tiptoed back to her bed, lay down, and pulled the duvet over her chest and under her chin as the footsteps got closer. Lance moved with all the grace of a bear wearing combat boots.

Gaby closed her eyes when she heard the metal scraping—the familiar noise of the deadbolt sliding free. The door opened a crack and dimmed LED lights flooded into the room. She imagined, but didn’t open her eyes to see, Lance’s familiar hulking frame in the doorway, making sure she hadn’t escaped while he was gone.

A few seconds later, the door closed and the
click-chank
of the deadbolt once again locked her in.

She sat up, took out the note, and unwrapped it.

It was the same black ink written in the same careful cursive handwriting:

“First light. Be ready. Destroy this note.”

Gaby re-read the note again, making sure she didn’t miss anything, before folding it back up and swallowing it.

She looked over at the window and the darkness outside.

“First light”
was sunrise. The
“Be ready”
part was obvious.

What wasn’t clear was what they were planning. She didn’t believe Milly was acting on her own, and the careful handwriting proved it. So Milly was working with someone. Who? Maybe her father. Or a brother. Maybe just a friend. Gaby was no expert, but the handwriting looked like a man’s. Then again, for all she knew, it really could just have been little Milly. Was that possible?

She lay back down and closed her eyes. If there was some kind of escape being planned for tomorrow, she had to be ready. And that meant getting as much sleep as possible now so she would be alert for tomorrow.

“First light…”

A
n hour later
, she was still awake.

An hour after that, she gave up trying to sleep altogether.

Gaby climbed out of bed and did push-ups on the floor. She had been keeping up her strength ever since she first opened her eyes in L15, knowing that eventually the time would come when she would need it, so the sudden burst of physical activity wasn’t anything new to her body.

She did thirty push-ups, then threw in fifty sit-ups, hoping to tire herself out enough to get the sleep she needed. When that still didn’t work, she shadowboxed in the dark, careful to stay away from the window where someone outside could see her.

She didn’t stop until she was covered in sweat and her body was sore all over.

When she lay down on the bed for the second time, she had no trouble falling asleep.

“First light. Be ready...”

“
W
e go in
, hit the bars, deflower the virgins, and we’re outta there with no one the wiser,” Danny said. “Easy peasy.”

“What about the guys with guns?” Will asked.

“Weekend warriors. We’ll be nice and give them a couple of rounds’ head start. But that’s as far as I’m willing to bend over for these bozos.” He glanced back at Kellerson. “What do you think? That strike you as fair?”

Kellerson stared blankly back at him. He couldn’t have said a word even if he wanted to, not with a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His hands, resting limply in his lap, were bound at the wrists. The pinky and ring finger of his left hand were missing, and blood was seeping through the fresh gauze Will had put on the man this morning. Kellerson was quickly becoming more trouble than he was worth.

“Not much of a conversationalist, huh?” Danny said.

“He’s shy,” Will said. “Cut him some slack.”

“‘Cut him’?” Danny snorted.

Will smiled. “No pun intended.”

“What pun? Oh, you meant those missing fingers of his?”

They were hidden in the woods, looking out from cover at what used to be a small town called Downer Plateau. There was a good kilometer of open clearing and small roads between them and the town, now referred to by the collaborators as simply L15. Behind them, hidden by trees for at least another three kilometers, was Interstate 49, the primary road through this part of Louisiana.

L15—or what parts of it he could see—had been a good-sized place once upon a time. Big enough for thousands of people to call it home. It was connected to the interstate by a state highway, and from what he could see most of the buildings were concentrated around a central main street. The place gave off an old-fashioned vibe, which was exactly what the ghouls and their human collaborators were going for.

“We think it’s because they want us to start over,”
someone had once told him.
“A fresh start. The cities are filled with reminders of the old world. Our achievements, our art, our evolution as human beings. Out here, surrounded by farmland, woods… It’s like going back to our roots. No power, no electricity... It’s easier to believe the last two centuries never happened.”

It wasn’t a bad place, if you were looking to start all over without actually beginning from scratch. The people moving around the streets were there willingly. Children poked their heads out of apartment windows, and every now and then he heard the
clop-clop
of horseshoes on roads meant for cars. The last collaborator town he had been this close to had armed men on rooftops and walking the streets. But there was a noticeable lack of anything resembling “the enemy” at L15.

He looked back at Kellerson again, leaning lifelessly against a tree. The man’s face was white, his eyes hollow, and Will kept expecting him to bolt any second, but losing two fingers must have taken all the fight out of him. That, and he just didn’t look like he had the strength to stand up, much less think he might be able to outrun them.

“L15,” Will said to Kellerson. “That means there are fourteen more towns just like this one?”

Kellerson nodded and mumbled something behind the duct tape.

“How far does the number go? Twenty? Higher?”

Another nod.

“Thirty?”

Kellerson seemed to think about it, then shrugged.

“You don’t know for sure.”

Nod.

“I guess you were right,” Danny said. “Little buggers have been busy while we were twiddling our thumbs back on the beach and drinking piña coladas.”

“Looks like it.”

Will glanced at his watch. 4:14 p.m.

Two hours before sunset. Even with the ATVs Kellerson and his men had been using (when they weren’t tooling around in their armored Humvees), it had taken him and Danny too long to travel from Lafayette, where they had parted company with Roy and Zoe earlier this morning. He couldn’t afford to let Zoe go yesterday after she had been shot, not until he was sure she wouldn’t die on Roy while they were en route. Zoe was a doctor, and those were more valuable than bullets these days.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” Will said.

“Of course it is,” Danny said. “If it didn’t, then this would just be another boring jaunt through the woods. And I forgot my jaunting pants at the island.”

“Shoulda packed appropriately.”

“Shoulda, coulda, but didn’ta.”

Will gestured at Kellerson, who pushed himself off the tree with some effort, turned around, and began marching back through the woods. There was enough light splashing through the trees around them that Will didn’t feel like he was walking through a nest of ghouls, something that you had to take into consideration these days, especially when you were close to an area filled with humans—or prey, to the creatures. They
crunched
dried leaves and
snapped
twigs under them, the noise swallowed up by birds perched along branches.

“You think he’s back there?” Danny asked. “Our little buddy Josh?”

“If she’s there, he’s probably there, too.”

“Kid’s got it bad. I remember the last time a girl had me so head over heels. Of course, it never occurred to me to sell out the human race for her affections. Then again, Dad always did say I lacked ambition.”

“If only he could see you now.”

“Yeah. Take that, Pops.”

They hadn’t gone more than a few minutes before Will heard it—felt it, really. He grabbed Kellerson and pushed him down onto one knee, while at the same time he and Danny went into a crouch and looked to their right through a small grouping of trees.

They were less than forty meters from the highway that connected the town to the interstate, and Will had previously spotted a couple of vehicles—both trucks—coming and going. At the moment, he caught a flash of red paint, then dull green. A pickup truck up front, followed by an Army five-ton transport, its thick tires kicking up clouds of dust in its wake.

“Haven’t seen those in a while,” Danny said. “My ass hurts just looking at them.”

Will reached over and peeled the duct tape half off Kellerson’s mouth. The man sighed with relief and sucked in a deep, fresh breath.

“Those five-tons,” Will said. “Are they always full when they show up at these places?”

“Yeah,” Kellerson nodded. He sounded hoarse, even though he had just drank some water a few hours ago. “The kid believes in efficiency, and he’s been organizing everyone into a military mindset. Thinks he’s a major or something.”

“The kid.” Josh.

You actually entrusted one of your operations to an eighteen-year-old kid, Kate? Really?

“How many does a town like L15 hold?” Will asked.

“Maybe two or three thousand,” Kellerson said.

“How many dickheads do they have watching that many people?” Danny asked.

Kellerson shrugged. “Anywhere from ten to twenty.”

“Ten to twenty for a few thousand?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “You telling a fib, Kellerson? Want Willie boy here to start working on those toes next?”

“He doesn’t get it, does he?” Kellerson said, looking at Will.

Will slapped the duct tape back over Kellerson’s mouth.

“Get what?” Danny said. “You BFFs have a joke you wanna share with me? Come on, I’m starting to feel like the third wheel here.”

“He means they don’t need a lot of guards,” Will said. “The people in these towns are here of their own free will. They don’t
want
to leave. My guess is, ten is more than enough, and twenty is overkill.”

“So what you’re saying is, when we finally get around to going in there guns blazing, they won’t be throwing their virginal daughters at us?”

“That’s an affirmative.”

Danny grunted. “Well, damn. I certainly signed up for the wrong road trip, didn’t I?”

T
hey walked
for another hour until they reached the spot where they had stashed the camouflage ATVs earlier—a small group of buildings about half a kilometer from I-49. It was a homestead connected to the highway by a spur road that hadn’t looked traveled even before The Purge. The house’s main building was a bungalow flanked by an empty garage. A long red barn, the paint badly chipped by neglect and weather, squatted in the back with a rusted-over tractor out front. The place was as out-of-the-way as they could find on short notice.

The ATVs were hidden inside the barn among the unused bales of hay and horseless stables. Walking the rest of the way to L15 had been necessary. Sound traveled these days, and the roar of all-terrain vehicles would have been obvious to even a deaf man.

There hadn’t been much of the bungalow to explore, and their biggest worry was the decayed sloping roof falling down on them. They found what they were looking for in the back of the house, hidden behind rotting twin doors that opened up into an underground cellar. There wasn’t much inside except for old tractor parts and stacks of cinder blocks under dust-covered tarps. They cleared out just enough space in one corner and dropped their bedrolls and supply packs.

Kellerson sat down in one corner on the dirt floor. Will let him eat a stick of beef jerky and gave him a bottle of water to wash it down with. When he was done, Will covered his mouth back up before he could say a word. The fight had gone out of Kellerson about the same time Will threatened to take the collaborator’s third finger.

They found a way to lock the doors by looping coiled steel cables around the handles and snapping a padlock in place. When that didn’t look like it would hold against a prolonged assault, they stacked the cinderblocks in front of the entrance, then threw the heavy tarps over them to make sure not a single inch of space could be seen from the other side. The creatures had proven themselves too smart at detecting people to take any chances.

If their luck did happen to run out, at least they had plenty of the right ammo to fend off an attack. Danny and Roy had left Song Island well prepared, and Will had taken all of Roy’s before they parted company this morning. Roy took the regular ammo because in the daytime, any ol’ bullet would do. Will and Danny carried two heavy bags and two tactical backpacks with them, stuffed with a combination of what Danny and Roy had brought and what they had salvaged from Kellerson’s dead crew. Dead men didn’t need beef jerky, bottled water, and spare ammo. The portable ham radio he had been using to communicate with Song Island was among the supplies.

Will looked down at his watch’s glow-in-the-dark hands: 5:34 p.m.

“You think she’s still alive in there?” Danny asked. He was chewing loudly on a stick of jerky.

“Gaby?”

“No, Yoko Ono. Yeah, Gaby.”

“She’s Gaby.”

“Yup. That’s her name, all right.”

“What I mean is, she’ll be fine. She’s a survivor. You should have seen her at the hospital.”

“Yeah?”

Will nodded. “Yeah.”

Soon, the only evidence that Danny was even leaning against the dirt wall next to him was the sound of chewing. Somewhere to his right, Kellerson was breathing deeply. How the man could make so much noise while only inhaling and exhaling through his nostrils was a mystery. Will had considered removing Kellerson’s duct tape to make it easier on him, but it never took long for the man’s crimes—those that Will knew for a fact, and likely more he didn’t even know about—to come up again, and it took all of Will’s strength not to execute him on the spot.

Night came, and they heard scurrying outside almost immediately. The soft patter of bare feet against hard ground vibrated through the dried dirt around them.

Will flicked the fire selector on his M4A1 rifle from semi-automatic to full-auto just in case.

“You nervous in the service, son?” Danny whispered somewhere in the darkness.

Will smiled.

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your flimsy cellar doors down,” Danny whispered.

A soft
click
as Danny flicked at his carbine’s fire selector.

Will sat back against the cool dirt wall and groped his pack for the all-too-light bottle of painkillers. He shook out two Tramadol and popped them into his mouth, then swallowed without chewing. He pulled up his shirt and ran his palm over the stitching along his right side and considered it a good sign he didn’t feel any wetness. His left arm had numbed over since yesterday, and he hadn’t felt anything more than the occasional slight tingles coming from his left hip in a while. Either the pills were working, or he had become used to them.

What he wouldn’t give to have Lara look him over. The last thing he needed was an infection. Battlefield wound treatment was a crapshoot at best, but leaving them for days was just asking for it.

Of course, having Lara treat him meant going back home. Back to Song Island.

And he couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not while Gaby was still out there…

A
round midnight he drifted off
, waking up two hours later to let Danny sleep.

Each time Will woke up, he could hear Kellerson moving erratically in the darkness, possibly from a nightmare. Or it could be the bugs and hairy legs of spiders crawling up and down his body. Will felt them too, but they were small enough that he didn’t bother chasing them off. He did slap a few that wandered too close to his neck and face, squashing them against his palm, then wiping the leftover goop on the floor.

When he was awake, he listened to the occasional movements on the other side of the cellar doors, like rats scratching in the walls. He wasn’t surprised they were out there, though it did make him more than a little uncomfortable they were this close. There was no one in the house, and surely they must have already searched it a hundred times since The Purge, so why were they back?

But the creatures’ presence in the area didn’t surprise him at all. There were people nearby in L15. Humans that had given up liberty for salvation. Blood for safety.

“They’re not like you, Will,
” Zoe had said to him once.
“They’re not soldiers. They’re just trying to survive the end of the world the best they can.”

I would rather die first.

Danny woke up two hours later, and Will went back to sleep.