The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) Read online

  THE STONES OF ANGKOR

  (Book 3 in the Babylon Series)

  Sam Sisavath

  The Stones of Angkor

  Copyright © 2014 by Sam Sisavath

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by Road to Babylon Media

  Visit www.roadtobabylon.com for news, updates, and announcements

  Edited by Jennifer Jensen (w/ Samantha Gordon & Wendy Chan)

  Author’s Note

  If you’re reading The Stones of Angkor before you’ve read the two previous books, The Purge of Babylon and The Gates of Byzantium, you will most likely be lost. No, seriously, I mean it, you should read those two books first. No lie.

  Books in the Purge of Babylon Series (in order)

  The Purge of Babylon

  The Gates of Byzantium

  The Stones of Angkor

  To all the brave souls who took a chance on a nobody and picked up The Purge of Babylon, then did it again with The Gates of Byzantium. This is all your fault. Thank you.

  The war for survival continues.

  The fight for Song Island is over. Despite suffering losses, Will and his group have claimed the island as their own and achieved the safe haven they’ve longed for since The Purge.

  Months later, Will makes contact with another group of survivors, and travels to their base in hopes of striking an alliance and gathering much-needed medical supplies. Instead, he finds himself in the middle of another bloody battle.

  With Will gone, Lara must take up a leadership position on the island, and is immediately confronted with a difficult choice. It’s a lot of pressure for a third-year medical student, especially when her decisions may cost lives.

  Meanwhile, the ghouls have launched yet another startling new phase of their master plan, forcing Will to venture deep behind enemy lines to collect valuable intelligence. What he discovers will change everything.

  Where The Purge begins, and the Gates hold, the Stones will crumble…

  BOOK ONE

  ‡

  ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

  CHAPTER 1

  WILL

  It was dark and dank in the tunnel, and his face was sticky with dirt and sweat, so of course Danny was making with the jokes.

  “It’s been ages since Old Man Tom’s gotten laid. His wife isn’t interested in sex anymore, so one day Old Man Tom goes to the barn and starts looking around. He spots a very nice-looking gelding with white spots and a great coat of brown fur—”

  “What’s a gelding?” Will asked.

  “What?”

  “What’s a gelding? Do I need to know what that is in order to get this joke?”

  “It’s a horse.”

  “Then why didn’t you just say ‘horse’?”

  “’Cause it’s a gelding. Now, you want me to finish this joke or not?”

  “Wait, are you saying I have that option? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Danny said something, but Will couldn’t hear it over the shotgun blast, the ear-splitting noise magnified in the tight confines of the tunnel. For the briefest of seconds, bright red and yellow fire lit up the darkness, revealing the skeletal forms of three ghouls, black-prune skin rippling as they lunged at him—just before the silver buckshot vaporized flesh from bone.

  Will racked the shotgun and fired again as three more poured out of the blackness, only to disappear in a shower of buckshot. He racked and waited…but nothing else moved, except for the clumps of flesh splattered against the curved walls.

  Smart. They’re attacking three at a time now.

  “Sorry about that,” Will said. “You were saying?”

  “What happened?” Danny asked.

  “A little housecleaning.”

  “Still? What the hell are they doing down there?”

  “I’ll be sure to ask the next one I run across.”

  Will stepped over the bodies sprawled on the wet concrete floor. His boots crunched bone, and thick, oozing liquid clung to the soles. He breathed through his mouth to avoid taking in the acrid stench.

  The tunnel was huge, running underneath Beaufont Lake and emerging out of the Power Station on Song Island. At its lowest point, the construction reached thirty meters to the bottom of the lake. The partially round structure was twenty meters in diameter, with a flat bottom big enough for two simultaneous lanes of traffic. Condensation dripped from the high ceiling, and drops of water dangled from broken lights evenly spaced out for maximum coverage. The drip-drip-drip had been a constant ever since they’d stepped inside. Steel pipes and conduits snaked along the sides.

  The tunnel extended just over one full kilometer underneath the lake, and it wasn’t until they were three-fourths of the way through that it split up into two paths—one continuing forward and the other diverging left. Except the one that went left ended at a solid concrete wall after about ten meters. They were close enough to the island that Will guessed the unfinished portion—probably designed for the customers—led to the resort hotel, while the workers continued on to end of the line and the Power Station directly above it.

  Blaine moved loudly behind him—which was to say, Blaine moved the way only he knew how. The big man was armed with the same Remington 870 tactical shotgun, the shells loaded with silver buckshot. Silver was the only thing that could kill the ghouls. The only other thing, anyway. The sun was more lethal, but it was hard to walk around with the sun in your holster. The rifles over their backs were backups, because Will never liked to venture far without the M4A1. Lara insisted it was superstition. He called it habit.

  “How many does that make?” Blaine asked, his voice echoing slightly in Will’s right ear.

  Will wore an earbud that was connected to a comm gear, with a throat mic and a radio Velcroed to his stripped-down assault vest. “Twenty?”

  “I thought it was more. Where are we now? Feels like we’ve been down here for a couple of days.”

  “We should be underneath the island by now.”

  “Like rats scurrying through the darkness,” Danny said in Will’s ear. “Foul-smelling, hairy, no-shower taking rats. I can smell you guys from up here.”

  “Really?” Will said.

  “No, not really.”

  They had been moving steadily through the pitch-black tunnel for the last two hours, navigating by night-vision goggles. It was slow going because there were more ghouls inside than Will had anticipated. Too many, in fact. He wondered what they were still doing down here. Waiting for the door on the island to reopen? That wasn’t going to happen. He and Danny had sealed the entrance with multiple thick layers of concrete months ago. Nothing was getting through that.

  And yet here they were, having dug their way through the rubble, only to wait…for what?

  Will and Blaine had left a ragged line of dead ghouls in their wake, all the way from the tunnel entrance. Or what was left of it after Danny’s C4 had collapsed it three months earlier. The creatures, undeterred, had begun digging their way back in the very first night after the demolition, moving the makeshift w
all of concrete piece by piece until they could slip back inside the dark and damp structure God knew how long ago. A month? Two months ago?

  What the hell are they doing down here?

  “You hear anything?” Will asked.

  “Nothing,” Blaine said. “Maybe that’s all of them.”

  Danny chuckled through their earbuds. “Captain Optimism, this guy.”

  “Maddie, give me a sitrep,” Will said.

  “Hot, sweaty, and oh yeah, hot,” Maddie said in his right ear. “How’s it going down there?”

  “Slow.”

  “Take your time. I love the heat. No, really.”

  “I don’t think she likes the heat,” Danny said. “I could be wrong, but I think that was sarcasm.”

  “You think?” Blaine said.

  “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

  They moved in the dark for another thirty minutes, anticipating more ghouls to jump out at them with every carefully plotted step. The ground was soft and muddy despite the concrete floor, a product of heavy condensation and dirt that the ghouls had tracked in while they were using the tunnel as their point of entry into the island.

  Eventually, the tunnel started to angle upward noticeably.

  “We’re close,” Will said.

  “You’re right; I can hear you guys from up here,” Danny said.

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. Man, you’re gullible. What’s that, the third time now?”

  “Nice,” Blaine chuckled.

  “We’re definitely going up, though,” Will said.

  “See you when I see you,” Danny said.

  It didn’t take long before the tunnel leveled out again. They continued along a flat surface for another five minutes before reaching a wide, circular room.

  Tap.

  Will froze.

  “What?” Blaine whispered from behind him.

  Tap, tap.

  Will watched it moving toward him. It was small and painfully thin, even more so than the ones he had been killing on his way here. He wondered how long it had been down here, waiting for something that never came. Flesh hung loosely from deformed bones, and it seemed to be sniffing him. Maybe it knew there was silver in the shotgun, or maybe it was just too smart to make a frontal attack.

  For a second, just a second, Will stared back at it through the night-vision goggles, wondering what was going through its mind, what it was seeing, and what (who) else was looking back at him through those dead, black eyes.

  “Shit,” Blaine said, stepping forward and shooting the ghoul from a meter away. The creature’s head was severed from its narrow shoulder blades, and it flopped to the floor as if it were a sack of meat.

  Blaine racked his shotgun. “What the hell was it doing back here all by itself?”

  Good question.

  Will continued into the room, stepping over the decapitated ghoul.

  The room looked about forty meters in diameter, with concrete floors covered in old, cracking, mud-caked footprints. The place had the feel of a staging area, like a supply warehouse without the supplies. That stark emptiness gave it a cavernous vibe, and Will couldn’t help but wonder how many had been down here that first night they spent on the island.

  Hundreds. Maybe thousands…

  On the far wall was the empty car of a freight elevator, and from its position, he guessed it led straight up to the generator building on the surface. And next to it, the first of many steps leading up.

  Will clicked the Push-to-Talk switch on his radio. “We’re underneath the Power Station. Looks like they never got around to finishing the elevators.”

  There were bodies in the room, though not as many as he had expected. Old, wrinkled skin draped over bones that looked bleach-white against the neon green glow of his night vision. He counted a dozen skeletons, give or take, in a jagged line toward the stairs. They had been here for a while.

  Blaine moved closer to get a better look. The hulking, six-two Blaine had a good three inches on Will, and looked like some kind of alien insect with the protruding lens of the night-vision goggles.

  Blaine craned his head to look up the stairs. “I see a door.”

  “That’ll be the shack.”

  There was a steel door at the top of the stairs, slathered with dry skin and thick clumps of coagulated liquid. Will went up the steps first, skirting around still-gooey layers of flesh in his path. The stairs were wide, designed to accommodate more than one person at a time, but it got noticeably narrower the higher it went. A door gleamed against his night vision, even underneath the cake of dried blood.

  When he finally reached the top, he banged on the door as hard as he could. There were barely any echoes, just the dull thuds of flesh against unyielding steel.

  “Can you hear that?” he asked.

  “Barely,” Danny said in his ear. “Do it again.”

  Will banged his fists against the door a second time.

  “Okay,” Danny said. “Now do Camptown Races.”

  *

  They climbed out of the makeshift hole—a one-by-two meter-long jagged opening near the top—and slipped and slid their way down the loose pile of rubble. The tunnel entrance, or what remained of it, squatted along the eastern shore of Beaufont Lake and was little more than a wall of destroyed concrete. It would have looked like just another unfinished construction site—gray and uninteresting—if you didn’t know what was on the other side.

  He had been seeing the world through the night-vision goggles for so long that the sudden afternoon glare gave him an excruciating headache. The scorching late-September heat didn’t help, a reminder that there wasn’t much of a difference between Texas and Louisiana when it came to climate.

  Maddie was waiting for them with a baseball cap to keep the brightness out of her eyes. She seemed even smaller than usual against the expansive, barren landscape behind her. “What were they doing down there?”

  “Good question,” Will said.

  “It looked like they were waiting,” Blaine said.

  “Waiting for what?” Maddie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Will said, “they weren’t in a conversational mood. Come on, let’s get this thing sealed back up.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Maddie sighed.

  It took them two hours laboring in the heat until they could replace all the concrete slabs that the ghouls had removed from the rubble to regain entrance into the tunnel. It was heavy work, and they created an assembly line, passing pieces big and small between them, with Blaine tossing them up into the pile until they couldn’t see the opening anymore.

  “Will that hold?” Maddie asked later.

  “Not in this lifetime,” Will said. “But it’ll slow them down. When they get it open again, we’ll close it back up. Next time, we’ll just seal the fuckers in.”

  “The fun never ends,” Blaine said.

  “Sorry I couldn’t lend a hand,” Danny said in their ears, “but you know, island duty…and stuff.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Maddie grunted. “Rub it in, surfer boy.”

  “It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Blaine said, looking the tunnel over.

  He wasn’t wrong. The entrance, before Danny blew it up, was a large, wide open half-circle surrounded by a concrete bunker. There were no doors and it was big enough for a truck to drive through, and when they had first located it three months ago, they saw old tracks and faded footprints leading in and out. The land around it was flat and sun-bleached, with a few shacks scattered among the dead, brown grass. There were signs that a construction crew had once been here, including an abandoned Port-A-Potty lying on its side and a trailer with deflated tires. But there were no vehicles now, as if everyone had simply packed up and went home one day.

  Will glanced at his watch: 2:15 p.m.

  He clicked the PTT. “Gaby, we’re on our way back. Anything?”

  Will looked west, across the lake and at the easily identifiable long structure jutting out
of Song Island. The Tower. A combination lighthouse and radio tower, with windows along the second and third floors that offered a perfect view of the island and the surrounding shorelines to the east, north, and south. There was nothing in the west except water.

  “Lots of big, fat nothings,” Gaby said. “Well, except for you guys.”

  He couldn’t see Gaby, but knew she was on the third floor of the Tower right now, providing overwatch with her M4, probably peering through the ACOG—the Advanced Optical Combat Gunsight—riflescope at him at this very moment. The ACOG gave them long-distance shooting capability, something at which Gaby had proven surprisingly efficient.

  From shoo-in high school prom queen to military-trained sniper. I wonder where you put that on the college admissions form.

  “All quiet?” he asked.

  “Good to go,” Gaby said.

  Will looked back at Blaine and Maddie, both still catching their breath, all three of them standing in shirts and pants drenched in sweat.

  “We’ll keep an eye on it from the Tower,” Will said. “Until we can get it permanently sealed, this’ll have to do for now.”

  They headed back to the Jeep parked nearby. The land around them was flat but impossibly bumpy, with the nearest paved road, Route 27, a good five kilometers away. The Jeep made the trip bearable, if just barely.

  They were halfway to the vehicle when Will stopped suddenly.

  Blaine almost crashed into him. “What?”

  “Listen,” Will said.

  It was like the flutter of feathers in the air—a soft, teasing whup-whup-whup. Will knew what it was, because he had heard it often enough in Afghanistan. And he remembered that night on the island while waiting for the collaborators to attack the beach. It had come and gone, never to be seen again…until now.

  It was tiny, but that was only because it was still far away. The only reason he could even hear it at all was due to the stillness of the world around him. Sound traveled these days, especially the very odd, foreign noise of helicopter rotor blades whipping across the air.