The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (9 page)

The air around them was thick with a red, black, and white cloud coming from a nearby apartment building. Gaby was glad for the handkerchief over her mouth, something the soldier didn’t have. Then again, choking on pulverized concrete and brick was the least of the injured woman’s concerns at the moment.

“Gaby?” Nate said as he jogged over to her.

“She’s injured,” Gaby said.

Nate peered down at Morris, holding his own piece of cloth to his mouth.

“What are you looking at?” the woman said.

Nate pulled back. “She’s not going to make it.”

“Says you,” Morris said.

“I got her,” Gaby said. “Keep looking for other survivors.”

Nate nodded and walked off.

“Mohawk boy’s not wrong; I can’t move,” Morris said, turning dull brown eyes back to Gaby. She sounded surprisingly nonchalant, as if they were old friends wasting away a lazy Sunday. “I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel anything down there.”

“What happened?” Gaby asked.

Morris blinked up at her, trying to see through blood that had covered up a part of her right eye. “You don’t know?”

Gaby shook her head. “Why did it attack you?”

“I would tell you if I knew, but I don’t. Did I mention my legs are probably broken?”

Gaby nodded. She waited for the woman to continue, but Morris looked like she had lost interest in the conversation. She let her head loll to one side and stared down the street at nothing in particular. The only sound, other than Gaby’s still quickening heartbeat, was Nate’s boots moving among the ruins on the other side of the street.

“Four hundred people,” Morris said quietly.

“Four hundred?” Gaby repeated.

Morris nodded. Or tilted her head slightly up, then down, in something that resembled a nodding motion.

“Here?” Gaby said. “In this place?”

“Four hundred people,” Morris said again. Her lips quivered, as if she was going to say something else, but instead she just closed her eyes…and stopped breathing.

Gaby stared at the woman in silence for a moment. A part of her thought Morris might be playacting, but that wasn’t true because ten, then fifteen seconds later, and Morris’s chest still hadn’t moved again.

“What did she say?” Nate asked, coming back over.

“Four hundred,” Gaby said.

“Four hundred?”

Gaby slung her rifle and looked around them at the toppled buildings, at the visible body parts. “They were inside when the plane hit.”

“Someone probably ordered them into the buildings,” Nate said. “They would have been able to hear it coming for miles.” He shook his head. “They would have been better off making a run for it; they were sitting ducks inside those buildings.” He wiped at some soot underneath his chin. “She said 400?”

Gaby nodded.

“Christ,” Nate said. “This isn’t right. Whoever did this—whoever ordered this…” He shook his head again. “This isn’t right.”

She didn’t know how to reply, didn’t know if anything she said would be even remotely enough, so she turned around and maneuvered past Morris and her mount instead.

“Come on,” she said, “there might be more survivors up the street.”

Nate followed, their boots
crunching
broken glass and concrete chunks as they stepped through puddles of blood.

And they hadn’t even hit the halfway mark through town yet…

*

“When it finished
with the town, it did an extra gun run along a country road that runs parallel to a creek,” Danny said. “There are more bodies out there.”

“Survivors?” Nate asked.

“Maybe a half dozen vehicles made it through.”

“Thank God.”

Danny glanced down at his watch. “We should avoid the state highway from now on. Skip around using the smaller roads until we hit US59, then pick our way north to Starch. It’ll take longer, but better late than dead.”

“How many?” Gaby asked.

“How many what?”

“How many got caught out there? That didn’t get away?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

Danny didn’t answer her.

“How many, Danny?” she pressed.

“It doesn’t matter, Gaby,” he said again. For a brief moment, he reminded her so much of Will, who could end a conversation with just a few words and the right inflection in his voice. “Let’s get going,” Danny continued. “I want to be in Starch by noon. Nate, it’s your turn at the reins.”

Nate nodded and slipped into the truck behind the steering wheel while she took a moment to look back one last time at the town. The clouds of black and gray smoke still loitered above it, as if they would never leave. From a distance, the carnage looked almost poetic, but she knew better; there was nothing artful about the bloodbath below those dull colors.

“Gaby,” Danny said behind her. “We gotta go.”

She turned around and climbed into the backseat as Nate fired up the engine, then maneuvered across the empty lanes toward the feeder road exit to get them off the highway. Danny was right: What had earlier been clear sailing to Starch—there was no such thing as traffic out here, far from the nearest big city—was now a wide-open potential kill zone.

Gaby leaned back against her seat, feeling impossibly drained by the long walk from one end of the destroyed town to the other. She closed her eyes and placed her cheek against the door, the interior of the truck swamped by the cold weather. In front of her, Nate’s Mohawk battled against the breeze, a sight that made her smile despite everything she had seen the last few hours.

“They don’t miss,” Danny had said as they approached the town, all the while listening to the series of chaotic explosions that were so loud even the road had trembled under their truck. “The Avengers are straight-on Gatling guns; they’re right in front of the cockpit so the pilots have to see exactly what they’re shooting at. And they hardly ever miss.”

“Four hundred…”

Gaby replayed Morris’s words in her head, heard again the anger and something that sounded almost like disbelief in the woman’s voice. She saw again the sadness and regret in Morris’s eyes as she stared off, as if she could see something down the street that wasn’t just ruins and body parts and blood. Four hundred people, except for however many had been in those “half dozen” vehicles that had managed to escape along the creek.

She opened her eyes when Nate said from the front seat, “What are we dealing with here?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Danny said.

“That Warthog. Where would something like that come from?”

“There are three Air Force bases in Texas that I know of for certain, probably more I haven’t heard of or been to. That A-10 could have come from any number of places. It’s not like Uncle Sam’s still around to keep them under lock and key. Frankly, I’m surprised this is the first time we’ve seen one of those things since Happy Times went bye-bye.”

“So why didn’t you and Will ever go looking for one? Or hell, maybe something more up-to-date, like an Apache?”

“Can you fly an Apache, kid?”

“Well, no…”

“Yeah, neither could we. There could be a fleet of AC-130s sitting around just waiting for us, and we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with them ’cause we don’t know our cockpits from our cockheads. Why do you think a commercial pilot makes more money than the guy who digs ditches?”

“Sorry, stupid question.”

“There are no stupid questions, just stupid people that ask them.”

Nate grunted before slowing down the F-150 and turning, taking them even further away from the highway. They were headed north now and soon would have to turn back west so they wouldn’t pass Starch by completely. The longer route, but the safer one, especially with that Warthog still up there, somewhere…

“Those people back there,” Nate was saying. “They didn’t deserve that. Even if they were collaborating with the ghouls.”

“No one deserves that,” Danny said.

“What are you going to tell Lara?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Are
you going to tell her?”

Danny didn’t answer right away. Gaby found herself waiting anxiously for the answer, too.

“I don’t know,” Danny finally said. “I’ll decide when we contact them again, hopefully from the warmth and comfort of Harold Campbell’s facility this time.”

Gaby didn’t have the strength to join their conversation, and instead closed her eyes again and leaned tighter against the door. Winter was already here, but in Texas it was sometimes difficult to tell. Christmas was somewhere over the horizon, and with it another New Year’s Eve where no one would be celebrating, or singing
Auld Lang Syne.
Maybe the cold would help wash away the smell of smoke and blood that still clung to her hair and skin and every inch of her clothing. God, she needed a bath in the worst—

“Fuck, shit!” Danny shouted from the front seat.

Her eyes flew open and she sat up straight, was about to say something when she saw it—sunlight reflecting off the gray of its wings as it streaked toward them from the other side of the small feeder road.

“Out!” Danny shouted.
“Get the fuck out and find cover now!”

She wasn’t even certain if the truck was still moving or if it had stopped when Danny threw open his passenger side door and leaped out. She reached for her own door handle with one hand, the other grabbing her rifle leaning against the seat. The door was opening and she was almost out when she remembered her pack and all the equipment—

“Gaby!” Danny’s voice, from the other side of the vehicle, booming in her ears. “Move your ass!”

She moved her ass, flinging the door wide open and throwing the rest of her out, one hand clutching her rifle.

Never lose your rifle. Never lose your rifle!

She stumbled and fell, saw the highway floor rushing up at a million miles an hour, and had to stick out both hands to stop her fall. She lost her grip on the M4 in the process and cursed herself
(What would Will say?)
when the road began trembling as if it was getting ready to split open.

She couldn’t help herself and turned her head and looked up, wondering idly if the Warthog streaking toward them right now was the same one that had laid waste to Morris’s town—

“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, piercing through her idiotic thoughts, as he snatched her up from the road with one strong hand.

Gaby fumbled with her footing, groping the air for her carbine lying just out of her reach on the road.

No, no, no! Never lose your rifle! Never lose your rifle!

Before she could break free from Nate’s grip to retrieve her weapon—he was much stronger than she remembered, his arms clutching to her in a viselike grip—they were both falling backward off the road and into a ditch.

She was flailing through empty air, trying to get her bearings, when she heard the terrible
brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt
of the A-10 as its primary weapon, the 30mm cannon, started spinning—

She landed in the bottom of the ditch, eating a mouthful of grass and dirt as she did so. Before she could spit out the earthly contents, the road behind her came apart and her bones shook violently. The Warthog swooped over them and she looked up, somehow seeing past the blades of grass covering her face.

The sight was almost magnificent—a gray metal eagle, its fixed wings spread wide and proud, flying much lower than any plane should. She expected to see bombs or missiles, but there weren’t any. Then she remembered: Of course it wasn’t carrying any spare armaments, because it had spent everything on the town. On those poor people.

“Four hundred…”

“Gaby, move it!” Nate shouted, pulling her up from the ditch floor.

She struggled to do just that, hating herself for reverting back to the eighteen-year-old girl she thought she had buried a year ago under Will and Danny’s tutelage. The refined Gaby, who had survived Dunbar and the farmhouse and the assault on Song Island, was nowhere to be found as she stumbled into the cold side of the ditch to keep herself upright.

Standing now, she could see the remains of the F-150 in front of her. It was a flaming wreck in the middle of the cratered road, its twisted metal frame little more than a barely recognizable shell of its former self.

No, no,
she thought, because everything was in there. The gas cans, the supplies, the boxes of silver ammo…

Crack!
as a piece of dirt and grass spit into the air less than a foot in front of her face as a bullet chopped into the ground.

Gaby looked up the road as sunlight gleamed off the hood of a black truck racing toward them. Erratic figures clung to the back, one of them aiming at her behind a rifle resting on the roof of the cab.

No, not one truck.
Two.

Then the ground began shaking again as the Warthog swooped over them one more time, the wake of its passing nearly throwing her off her already wobbly feet. Nate, next to her, had to grab onto the ditch wall to keep upright. Her first instincts were to duck, as if that would save her from the plane’s weapons.

The A-10 hadn’t gone very far before it started turning. The sight of it, getting ready to come back for yet another pass, did something unexplainable to her. Gaby felt rising anger at the plane’s presence, the arrogance of the man—and she thought it
had
to be a man—inside the cockpit at this very moment.