The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (13 page)

“Let’s go,” Josh said, moving through the semitrailer.

The damn thing seemed to go on forever. When they finally reached the opening, Josh stopped and held back his hand toward the women. They both stopped short and waited as he stepped down the ramp, just far enough to lean around the corner. He expected to see Folger or maybe Manley standing outside. God, he hoped Manley wasn’t out there—the guy scared the shit out of him. They all did, but Manley was the worst, with his reptile eyes.

But there was no one out there.

The semitrailer and the big rig that pulled it sat inside a wide and mostly empty parking lot under the baking sun. He recalled the layout of Lancing from the last two weeks he and Matt had spent looking for supplies. The parking lot was part of the city’s municipal area, with a courthouse, a city hall building, and a public library behind him. The street out front led toward North Main Street, where the city’s business area resided. That was probably where Folger and the rest were at the moment.

“Okay,” Josh said, and the women hurried down the ramp after him.

They weren’t that far from the house he, Gaby, and Matt had stayed in, and where Folger had caught them. It was about a block down to their right. The same house that a turned Matt probably still haunted. Or maybe Folger had gone down to the basement to kill Matt
(again).
If you could even kill them once they turned.

“Where are we going?” Gaby asked, when they were all in the parking lot.

Lancing was a decent-sized city with about 12,000 people. Homes were spread out, intermingled with businesses. Across the street in front of them was a row of private homes. More, mostly older ones, were spread out to their right, and he remembered a subdivision of newer models about a mile north.

“Josh?” Gaby said, sounding anxious when he didn’t answer right away. “Where are we going?”

“The business district’s that way,” Josh said, pointing to his left. “Folger and the others are probably there now. That’s where I’d be if I was raiding for supplies. We’ll go in the opposite direction. There are lots of new houses there. We can hide out in one of them.”

Josh began jogging up the street and the two women followed. He glanced at his watch: 6:25 
p.m.

“What about a car?” the woman said. She was keeping up with him just fine. In fact, she wasn’t breathing hard at all, while Josh and Gaby were already out of breath. “We can use it to get out of here.”

“It’ll be dark soon,” Josh said. “We’re better off staying here until morning.”

“But won’t they find us again?” Gaby asked.

“There are hundreds of homes here. The area we’re headed to has about a hundred of those in a thousand-foot square block. They’re not going to search all of them, not before nightfall. We can figure out what to do in the morning.”

That seemed to reassure them enough that neither Gaby nor the woman argued.

After a few minutes of walking, Josh led them across the street and through a wooded area where they couldn’t be spotted from the roads. He kept them on a straight path until they emerged into an open spot with two sprawling lodges to their right. Josh remembered debating with Matt about whether to try their luck inside the buildings just a few days ago.

Sorry, Matt.

They crossed the lodges’ big yards, brushing their way through its overgrown grass, and finally arrived at the subdivision. Homes were spread out from one end to the other, like identical toy buildings. He led them farther inside, passing two-story houses with dry concrete swimming pools in backyards and unmowed lawns that reminded him of jungles instead of a neighborhood.

“Look for a house with a basement,” Josh said.

It took them thirty-five minutes of running from home to home, peering through windows for signs there were creatures inside, all the while keeping an eye on the sky for nightfall and their ears open for any pursuing cars. Eventually, they found a home that met their needs. It had a basement they could access through the kitchen, and Josh saw solar panels winking on the roof.

He led the women into the house through the back door, their guns out. During their long walk over, Josh had discovered that Matt did have a box of bullets in the backpack, and he had reloaded the revolver. They entered the kitchen and almost jumped for joy when they reached the basement and he discovered the door wasn’t locked.

Josh pushed opened the door and peered inside. He did his best to keep his hands from shaking, though it was incredibly difficult. The lightbulbs were dead, of course, but there was enough light coming in from a window the size of a shoebox along the back wall that he could see about half of the basement.

“Stay here for a moment,” Josh said.

“Be careful,” Gaby said.

Josh went down the stairs slowly, the gun in front of him. Suddenly he remembered how many bullets he had shot Matt with and how Matt had just kept coming, and the gun didn’t feel so good in his hand anymore. He sucked it up, though. Gaby and the woman were watching him. But especially Gaby. He had led them here; now he had to make sure it was safe, even if he had to use himself as bait.

I’m the guy, and this is my job.

I’m the guy…

He reached the bottom of the stairs, then walked to the center of the room and…waited.

He didn’t speak or move, but looked around him at the dark patches where sunlight couldn’t reach.

There was nothing. No movement. No sound.

God, please don’t let there be anything in here…

After about two minutes, Josh breathed a sigh of relief and looked back up at the women. “Okay, I think it’s safe.”

Gaby hurried down first while the woman closed the basement door and locked it. They used the light from the small window to navigate around the room, looking for things they could eat. Josh found an old case of bottled water covered with a thick coat of dust near the back. He tore the plastic wrapping and handed bottles out.

“Keep hydrated,” Josh said. “It’s fine now, but it’s going to get really hot down here when the sun comes back out tomorrow.”

The woman took the proffered bottle. “Sandra,” she said. “My name’s Sandra.”

“I’m Josh, and that’s Gaby.”

“Nice to meet you guys,” Sandra said.

They settled down on the floor with their bottles of water. Gaby sat down next to him and struggled to lift the bottle to her dried lips. Her hand, the one still covered in Betts’s dried blood, was shaking badly. After a while, she managed it, but some water splashed on her shirt, which was already peppered with specks of blood.

They couldn’t find a single thing to eat, not even to nibble on, and their stomachs began growling. No one said a word as the light outside faded and the basement turned pitch black. After a while, Josh couldn’t even see his own hands, much less Gaby sitting next to him. He couldn’t locate Sandra across the basement from them anymore, though he heard her breathing.

Sometime in the night, Josh felt a hand touch his in the darkness. The contact came out of nowhere and momentarily alarmed him, until he remembered she was sitting right next to him. Gaby twined her fingers with his and squeezed, and Josh felt his heart skip a beat.

“Josh,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” he whispered back.

“You did really good back there.”

“You, too.”

“You’re the guy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled in the darkness. Gaby’s hand, in his, felt good. More than that, it felt
right.

I’m the guy…

BLAINE

He opened his
eyes to sunlight, with cool air blowing in his face. He was grateful he could still breathe and, more importantly, that he was somehow still alive, even after those people had found him on the road bleeding like a stuck pig. He assumed he probably looked like a stuck pig. A stuck Mexican
(half-Mexican)
pig, anyway. It was probably not the prettiest sight they had ever seen, and it was a miracle they didn’t just get back in their cars and drive off. In his experience, guys like him didn’t get picked up at the side of the road, especially when they were bleeding from three bullet holes.

He was lying on a bed—a soft, cushy bed that was too short—and he could feel the heels of his feet pressing against the wooden footboard. A fan rested on a dresser, blowing mercifully cool air against him, and for an instant, just an instant, Blaine thought he had woken up from a nightmare, that none of the last eight months had been real. But then he couldn’t find the fan’s electrical cord and realized it was a battery-powered portable fan.

Sandra would love one of those.

He heard sounds to his right and turned his head. The doctor lady was rifling through a big black bag. For some reason, she looked much younger today than when he had first seen her. She was probably in her twenties, which made him wonder if she really was a doctor. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, and from the back she could almost pass for Sandra. When she turned around, he saw crystal-blue eyes instead of green.

Sandra!

Blaine sat up quickly and regretted it right away. His entire body protested, like someone had shot him all over again. He let out an audible grunt and suddenly the woman was there, pushing him back down on the bed.

“Stop it, stop, you’re going to open your stitches,” she said, sounding almost annoyed with him. “If that happens, you’re going to start bleeding all over again, and this time I’m not sewing you back up, do you understand?”

Blaine sighed and lay back down. He didn’t have the strength to fight her. Instead, he stared up at the ceiling at a poster of Nolan Ryan in his prime, prepping for a pitch on the mound in a Texas Rangers uniform. His father used to love the Rangers, though for some reason he was never entirely sold on the Cowboys.

“I’m not dead,” he said. His voice was hoarse and his mouth dry.

“No, you’re not.” She looked amused. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Blaine.”

“Do you remember my name?”

Blaine tried to remember. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

“You were in and out all day, makes sense you wouldn’t remember much of it. It’s Lara.”

“Where am I, Lara?”

“A house. We made camp here yesterday so I could take the bullet out of your shoulder. Why didn’t they kill you?”

“What?”

“The men who shot you. You said there were more than five of them.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Why didn’t they kill you? Why did they just leave you on the road like that?”

Blaine remembered the man with the white hair, Folger, telling the others,
“What’s the point? Look at him. He’s not going anywhere. If he makes it to tonight, then what?”

Big mistake, asshole.

“I guess they didn’t want to waste any more bullets on me,” he said.

Lara looked at him for a moment, then, apparently satisfied he was telling the truth, she nodded. She walked back to her black bag and finished putting what looked like tweezers and a sewing kit back inside.

Blaine sat up again, this time slowly. There was bandaging around his shoulder, and he was almost entirely nude except for his boxers, which were stained with blood and sweat. He smelled, too. Lara had also stitched up and bandaged the bullet hole in his left thigh and the one in his right side, where most of the pain was coming from at the moment. Simply breathing hurt.

“Thank you,” Blaine said.

“You should thank Will. He almost ran you over. We don’t see a lot of bodies on the road, but then you probably know that.”

He nodded. The creatures didn’t leave bodies behind. They were efficient that way.

“I will,” he said. “Thank him, I mean.”

“The men who shot you. Did they take Sandra?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

He told her about meeting Folger and his people on the road the day before. The flat tire that had slowed them down. About Deeks dying, then Sandra taking off for the trees while he tried to distract the men.

“She’s fast,” he added. “She used to run track in college. But I don’t know if she made it.” He shook his head. “There were a lot of them…”

“We didn’t find anyone out there but you and the other man, Deeks.”

“Did you search the woods?”

“No. We didn’t know there was anyone to search for.”

“I don’t think she made it,” he said, shocked by how matter-of-fact he sounded. “If she had, and they left, she would have come back for me. But she didn’t. And she would have come back for me…”

Lara nodded, though Blaine wondered if she really believed him. He didn’t blame her for having doubts. He knew what he looked like. A big, hairy Mexican with bad teeth who didn’t smile very often, and even when he tried to smile, it always seemed to come out wrong. But if she only knew what Sandra looked like, he thought amusedly, she really wouldn’t believe him.

She dug out a small bottle from her black bag and handed it to him, along with a bottle of water. “Something for the pain.”

“What is it?”

“Vicodin.”

“I need to stay awake and alert,” he said, looking at the pill bottle.

“You don’t have a choice,” she said. “It’s either this or we’re going to be carrying you around all day, and let’s face it, no one’s looking forward to that. Once your pain lessens, I can give you something else to get by.”

He nodded reluctantly and took the bottle. He opened it and saw a dozen or so white pills inside.

“To start you off,” Lara said. “Take one now. And another one in an hour if you need it. No more than three a day. Understand?”

He shook one of the pills into his palm and washed it down with warm water that tasted better than anything he had ever drunk, and he ended up drinking the entire bottle.

“Drink up,” Lara said. “We have plenty more downstairs. You need to eat something so the Vicodin won’t be the only thing in your stomach.”

A man entered the room. It took Blaine a moment to put the face with the guy who had talked to him on the road yesterday. He was a few years younger than Blaine, with brown eyes and short black hair. Blaine only had to look at the way he was holding the assault rifle—some kind of M4 variant, though it looked heavily modified, with dents and scratches from heavy use—to realize he knew his way around guns.