The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival (Purge of Babylon, Book 1) Read online

  THE PURGE OF BABYLON

  A Novel of Survival

  Sam Sisavath

  The Purge of Babylon

  Copyright © 2013 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 Mary McCauley, Samantha Gordon, and Wendy Chan

  To my parents, for persevering.

  One night. That was all it took.

  Creatures that once lived in the shadows, hidden from humankind, have risen, spreading like a plague across the globe over the course of a single night. Their numbers growing exponentially through infection, these seemingly unkillable creatures have swallowed up whole cities and collapsed unprepared governments.

  Survivors call it The Purge.

  Against all odds, a disparate group of survivors has emerged from that blood-soaked night that devastated the planet and reduced humanity to an endangered species. Among the survivors are two ex-Army Rangers, a businesswoman, and a third-year medical student. But surviving The Purge was one thing—staying alive is another matter entirely.

  Hope exists in the countryside, in the form of a self-sustaining underground facility designed to withstand any calamity. But in order to reach its safety, the survivors must travel hundreds of treacherous miles, with the night—and the creatures that dwell within it—always at their backs.

  The rules are simple: stay out of the dark, load up on silver bullets, and whatever you do, stay alive.

  The road to salvation has begun …

  BOOK ONE

  ‡

  THE PURGE

  CHAPTER 1

  WILL

  It was sweaty and stuffy, and death likely awaited them beyond the door at the end of the staircase, so of course Danny was making with the jokes.

  “A couple is out celebrating their ten year anniversary. Things haven’t been going well, but the night starts off great, and the wife can’t believe how attentive her husband is. He orders the best wine and the most expensive food. She thinks, ‘I’ve never been happier!’ Then the husband hands her a note and says, ‘Sweetheart, I wrote you this letter because I couldn’t bring myself to say it.’ She takes the letter, but before she can read it, the husband starts gagging on some lamb. She throws the letter into her purse and yells, ‘Help! Help! My husband is choking!’ But help doesn’t come fast enough, and the husband keels over. At the funeral, the wife throws herself at the casket, screaming, ‘Why? Oh why? It was all going so well!’ Then suddenly she remembers! ‘Wait, my husband left me this letter and wanted me to read it!’ So she whips out the letter and begins to read. ‘Dearest wife,’ it says, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m sleeping with your sister and I want a divorce.’”

  “Old joke,” Will said. “You told that one already.”

  “Bullshit. I came up with it this morning.”

  “You’re repeating yourself and you don’t even know it. That’s a sign of dementia.”

  “I got your dementia right here,” Danny said, grabbing his crotch.

  Four heavily armed bodies up the line, Marker glanced back and scowled. “Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to hear what Command’s saying.”

  An earbud wire dangled from Marker’s right ear, connected to a throat mic and a Motorola radio clipped to the front lapel of his urban assault vest. Everyone squeezed into the stairwell at that moment was wearing the same rig.

  Will and Danny said simultaneously, “Sorry, sir.”

  Danny’s sandy blond hair was matted to his forehead by sweat and dirt, blue eyes glinting with mischief when he shot Will a quick grin. To Will, looking at Danny was like looking into a funhouse mirror and seeing his exact opposite. The fact that they were friends was a mystery to most people, including Will himself.

  Danny whispered, “Still better than the Stan, right? No sand in the crack.”

  Will grinned back. Compared to trudging around in the scorching mountains of Afghanistan in Uncle Sam’s Army, working SWAT with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department was a cakewalk. It was a lot of downtime and training occasionally broken up by a nutcase locked in a house or a junkie with a knife stumbling around someone’s backyard in the middle of the night, usually buck naked. Most of their time was spent writing tickets or sitting in patrol cars underneath highways, watching increasingly strange porn on Danny’s iPad.

  At the moment they were stacked eight men long inside the hot stairwell, and no one had moved more than a few inches at a time in the last ten minutes. Marker, all 250 pounds and fifty grizzled years of him—and every single year of it readily apparent on his grimacing face—was up front, sweating through his goggles.

  Will glanced down at his watch, if only to break the monotony of staring up at Marker’s back: 5:04 p.m.

  It was November—a hot November, even by Houston standards—but that didn’t matter inside a stairwell covered with the refuse of thousands of people that used to call this place home.

  It smells like it, too.

  Will could feel his goggles starting to fog up and had to swipe at the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt.

  Marker finally looked back at Peeks, standing directly behind him, and nodded. “All right, just got word from Command. We have a green light.”

  “Fucking finally,” Peeks grunted, and wiped at a thick sheet of sweat dripping down his goggles.

  “Everyone, get into position,” Marker said.

  Peeks slung his Remington 870 tactical shotgun over his back and unlatched the sledgehammer from his left shoulder. At thirty-five, Peeks was square shaped and solidly built, with a robust chest and legs that looked like tree trunks. He had six years on Will and Danny but was a foot shorter than both of them. Peeks looked like a Hobbit next to Marker’s six-three frame, though what Peeks lacked in height, he made up for in width.

  Will watched Peeks grip the twenty-pound sledgehammer in his two hands as if it were a toy, and idly wondered if Peeks ever tried that trick at home when his kids didn’t behave. Peeks’s two favorite pastimes were working out and bitching about his kids. Sometimes he would get creative and bitch about his kids while working out. And when he was really inspired, Peeks would throw the old lady in there, too.

  Will and Danny were in the middle, squeezed between Jenkins in front and Lambert behind them. They slipped the safeties off their M4A1 assault rifles, the barrels pointed low in the ready position. They exchanged a brief look and nod. Ten minutes inside a stuffy apartment stairwell was a breeze compared to some of their past call outs, which usually boiled down to ten hours of waiting followed by ten minutes of action—that is, if they were lucky.

  Marker, up front, opened the staircase door and started out first. Peeks was right behind him with the sledgehammer, Ross and Jenkins following, with Will and Danny behind them. Lambert kept pace behind Danny, with Hollins bringing up the rear.

  Standard stacking procedure
. They had done it hundreds of times.

  The Wilshire Apartments looked bigger on the outside, though the aesthetics were pretty much the same inside. It was twenty floors of 1950s brick-and-mortar low-income housing that should have been torn down decades ago, if anyone had cared enough to voice an opinion. The building had finally been condemned and abandoned in 2004, about thirty years too late if you asked Will.

  They were on the twentieth floor now; the march up the stairwell had been a royal pain in the ass. There was an elevator, but the building didn’t have power, so that was moot. The fact that they were wearing thirty pounds of equipment, weapons, and extra ammo didn’t help, either. And this was their lighter setup. Unlike most of their other call outs, the plan was to hit the place and leave. Wham, bam, thank you, but I won’t have time to make sweet lovin’ to your daughter today, ma’am.

  The twentieth floor hallway looked abandoned. The whole building gave off a graveyard vibe. But it was the smell that got his attention. It stung his nostrils and made his eyes water. This morning’s breakfast made a show of force and, looking back, Will saw Danny trying not to gag from the same stench.

  Danny mouthed at him, “What the fuck is that smell?”

  Will mouthed back, “Did you take a shower this morning?”

  “Your mom didn’t seem to mind.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Will grinned and looked back up front.

  Graffiti covered the walls and doors—what didn’t graffiti cover in this place?—and the floor was littered with garbage. All the doors showed signs of wear and tear and rotted wood damage. The wallpaper had ripped free years ago, and there were jagged, dangerous-looking cracks along the length of the ceiling above them.

  Damn thing’s going to fall right on our heads.

  You could always tell when someone was living in a place, and Will didn’t see any of those signs now. It took him a moment to realize that the refuse scattered around them wasn’t where the smell was coming from.

  What the hell is that smell?

  There was a lone window at the end of the hallway, but a dirty blanket, held in place by what looked like rusted nails, covered it up. Slivers of sunlight still managed to peek through, providing enough natural light for them to make out the hallway’s layout and avoid the more unsavory objects sticking out from the brown and stained carpeting, which itself looked miserably unhinged, as if someone had tried to rip it out but gave up halfway into the job.

  Will remembered seeing covered windows all along the apartment building’s twenty floors as they rolled up on the Wilshire. Someone had gone to a lot of work to cover up a building that was supposed to have been empty since 2004.

  Marker was setting the pace up front, his pump-action shotgun in front of him. They were approaching one of the very last apartments in the hallway, though one rotted door looked the same as the other. Intel had undesirables taking over the Wilshire, with the last apartment down the hall serving as a possible crack den. Where you found junkies, you found drug dealers. Junkies were customers, and customers paid. The problem with drug dealers was that they were territorial. Plus, they were usually armed. That was a bad combination.

  They quickly stacked up next to Apartment 2025, the last one in the hallway. Marker let his shotgun hang in front of him from a sling and pulled out a flash bang canister from one of his pouches. He nodded to Peeks, who slipped out of line and faced the door. Peeks spent a second settling his stance, then changed up his grip on the sledgehammer. He took a deep breath, threw Marker a nod, then shattered the doorknob of Apartment 2025 with one arching, massive overhead swing. The door seemed to crush in on itself, a combination of force from Peeks and the door’s rotting wood finally, mercifully, giving way after all these years.

  Peeks spun out of the way until his back was to the door. Marker tossed the flash bang into the apartment. They heard the loud, familiar pop!, saw a brief white flash flood out of the opened door, momentarily lighting up the semi-dark hallway.

  Then Marker was inside, shouting, “Police! Get down!”

  Ross and Jenkins disappeared through the door behind Marker. Peeks, the shotgun back in his hands and the sledgehammer back in its holster, was right behind them. Will and Danny started to follow Peeks inside when they heard a man scream.

  Will entered with the M4A1 swinging up to chest level, his right eye scanning for targets behind the sight mounted on top of the rifle. The brief period it usually took him to get used to seeing the world behind the myopic clear lens—with a bright red dot in the center—flashed by in one-tenth of a heartbeat.

  Will was almost a meter into the apartment, a half second through the doorway—scanning from left to right, controlling his breathing—when he heard the scream again. This time he had images to go with the sound.

  Marker was down, and something crouched over him. No, not over him, on top of him. A man. Maybe. A woman, possibly. Naked. Sinewy muscle moved in the darkness, more silhouetted shadow than actual shapes and forms.

  The room was dark. All the windows were covered like in the hallway, except there were no chances of sunlight in here.

  The thing had its mouth clamped over Marker’s throat, and it was tearing at the soft and vulnerable flesh. Will saw, almost in slow motion, blood squirting out of Marker in arching spurts, bright red against the suffocating darkness of the room. He swore he could smell Marker’s blood as it splashed against the filthy carpet, the scent horrid and fascinating even against the powerful stench that permeated every single inch of the building.

  The floor was thick with a liquid substance that stuck to Will’s boots when he moved, the plop-plop sound sending a disturbing image through his mind that forced him to waste another precious second to push aside.

  Ross and Jenkins began firing on the thing clawing at Marker’s face. They had their M4 assault rifles on semi-automatic, and while Ross put a bullet in the figure’s forehead, Jenkins fired into its chest. It seemed taken aback by the gunfire, but it didn’t go down.

  That’s impossible.

  He had killed men before. He knew what was supposed to happen when you shot someone in the head. They went down. It didn’t matter how big or small, male or female. They all went down. It was instantaneous. What you don’t do is shake off a bullet to the head from a distance of two meters. You don’t stumble and growl back at the person who just shot you.

  That doesn’t happen in real life.

  Behind him, Danny whispered, breathless, “Fuck me.”

  Will heard them before he actually saw them. Thin, hunched-over figures padding forward in the darkness on bare feet. Maybe they had always been there. He couldn’t be sure. Maybe they were coming out of the walls but, of course, that was impossible.

  Wasn’t it?

  They emerged out of the blackness around them. A wall of nude figures. Men and women. Maybe. They had no visible sex organs. He couldn’t tell their ages, because they didn’t seem to possess any of the things people use to tell each other apart, to stand out as unique individuals. They stood about the same height, dark and black pruned skin that was almost entirely hairless, yellow teeth stained black and brown, grotesque and jagged (Meth teeth), and their eyes…

  The eyes gave them away. Even in the darkness, he could see they had dark, solid black eyes. Like tar, the thick, gooey, smelly substance that his father used to work with when he fixed roofs for people who could afford to hire out basic jobs they’d rather not do themselves.

  These creatures had those—small oceans of black tar where eyes used to be.

  They were so thin he could see bone protruding out of skin. No, not skin, really. Like cheap Halloween costumes draped over bony shoulders and meatless bones. Their faces were freakishly gaunt, and cheekbones stuck out like carved pumpkins. He instantly flashed on late-night commercials of Third World children suffering from malnutrition and obese men with white beards begging for monthly donations.

  Then something fell on
top of Ross and drove him to the floor. Another one. Naked, smaller than the rest, maybe a child. It was hard to tell. They all looked small and frail and dangerously on the verge of collapsing underneath their own sickness. But this one had enough strength to tear out Ross’s throat in front of Will.

  “Back, back!” he screamed.

  Jenkins turned and made a run for the door when another one—a girl maybe—darted out of a dark corner and leaped on his back. Jenkins stumbled to the floor and quickly tried to get back up. The girl climbed up Jenkins’s back as if he were some kind of mountain to be conquered and bit into his shoulder blade between the straps of his tactical vest.

  Will saw blood spraying, and then Jenkins was screaming, too.

  To Will’s right, Peeks let out a wild, incoherent scream and began firing with his shotgun. The noise of each blast in the closed confines of the apartment was earsplitting, even with the ballistic helmet partially pulled over Will’s ears.

  He saw a bigger creature—the biggest so far, though it only went up to Peeks’s chest—stepping out of the shadow in front of Peeks. Peeks saw it, turned and fired, and half of the creature’s body, from waist to shoulder blade, disappeared in a shower of buckshot, and the creature was flung back by the force of the blast.

  Then it slowly got back up, even with one side of its body completely gone.

  That’s impossible.

  Will squeezed the trigger once, twice as a figure made a run for him, coming out of the corner to his right. Will caught it full in the chest with both shots. It flopped to the floor, looking more surprised than hurt.

  Then it was instantly back up on its feet.

  That’s fucking impossible.

  Will moved on instinct, flicking the M4A1’s fire selector to fully automatic and began firing into the room, the rifle’s thirty-round magazine emptying at a dizzying 700 rounds per minute.