Requiem (After The Purge, Book 1) Read online

  Requiem

  After The Purge, Book One

  Sam Sisavath

  Requiem

  Copyright © 2017 by Sam Sisavath

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC

  www.roadtobabylon.com

  Edited by Jennifer Jensen & Wendy Chan

  Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design

  Contents

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  The World Was Not Ready

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  A Word From the Author

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  The Purge of Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

  The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

  The Gates of Byzantium

  The Stones of Angkor

  The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)

  The Fires of Atlantis

  The Ashes of Pompeii

  The Isles of Elysium

  The Spears of Laconia

  The Horns of Avalon

  The Bones of Valhalla

  Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)

  The Road to Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

  Glory Box

  Bombtrack

  Rooster

  The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series

  Hunter/Prey

  Saint/Sinner

  Finders/Keepers

  The Red Sky Conspiracy Series

  Most Wanted

  The Devil You Know

  Huge thanks go out to George and Susan for their invaluable insights. Thank you!

  The World Was Not Ready

  Six years ago, the world was plunged into darkness.

  Five years ago, it got a second chance.

  Now the fight for what’s left begins…

  They Called It The Purge…

  History books call it The Purge, and it altered the course of human history. A breed of seemingly unkillable creatures that once lurked in the shadows of mankind’s past finally revealed themselves. Driven by an insatiable lust for human blood, these monsters—dubbed “ghouls” by some—consumed the globe in one bloody, awful night. Their numbers growing exponentially through infection, they felled the unprepared governments of the world with hardly any resistance.

  In the yearlong nightmare that followed, survivors were turned into chattel for the generations of ghouls to come. Most chose to cooperate, but a brave few fought back, and thanks to their sacrifice, the ghouls were defeated and driven back into the darkness.

  The End was Just the Beginning…

  Humanity was given a second chance, but the world post-Purge will never be the same. The cities have been abandoned, technology is limited, law and order is nonexistent, and survivors live off the land in small, isolated communities in the countryside. Nightfall is no longer the harbinger of doom it once was, but the night will never be completely terror-free. Though vastly smaller in number and weaker than they’ve ever been, the ghoul menace lingers.

  But the monsters are now the hunted. Men and women who suffered unimaginable horrors under the yearlong Purge roam the land, seeking out the creatures wherever they hide. They call themselves slayers. They are skilled, dangerous, and they have scores to settle.

  Two Strangers on a Dangerous Road…

  Wash is a young slayer scouring what’s left of America in search of one very specific ghoul. He will find it even if he has to brave hell itself to do so. Ana is a woman who is not what she seems—cunning, smart, and far more capable than she lets on. Forced into an alliance, the two strangers must learn to trust one another if they are to accomplish their goals—defeat the monsters, both inhuman and human, and get out alive.

  One

  The monsters were taking their time tonight, so there was nothing for Wash to do but wait. That was fine. He was used to waiting.

  His breathing was slowed, his heartbeat barely audible to his own ears, and small, thin clouds formed in front of him. Aside from the nightlife around him, there was just the very faint tick-tick-tick-tick of the automatic on his left wrist to keep him company. Most people couldn’t detect the different beats unless they held the wristwatch right up to their ear, but Wash knew them like a second heartbeat. There were exactly four ticks per second. No more, no less.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick…

  Wash waited because this was the easiest path to town, and the monsters always chose the straightest and fastest route. Just like they had the previous three nights, according to his intel. They were base creatures that way, as complicated as a cockroach—and just as persistent and fearful of the light. They hid from the sun, moved in the darkness, and survived to feed. Their existence was simplicity itself. If he weren’t here to kill them (again), he might have even admired them.

  But instead of undead things, the girl showed up.

  What the hell?

  She was about to die but didn’t seem to recognize it. Wash did, because he could smell the blood in the air. He’d sniffed it too many times before not to recognize it instantly. He wasn’t the only one who knew she was out here. They knew, too. And they didn’t have to see her, either. They could smell her. They could hear the blood in her veins.

  Except there was a hitch: The girl wasn’t afraid. He saw the fearlessness in the fluid way she moved, gliding through bushes and ducking under low-hanging branches. There was no panic, nothing to indicate she had entered the dark woods unwillingly.

  She should have been afraid, though. Only an idiot strayed from the sanctuary and protection of the towns and wandered alone into the dark woods in the middle of the night. Even now, years after The Walk Out, there were still ghouls out here. Wash knew for a fact there were at least a few of them in the area with him right now.

  So why wasn’t the girl afraid?

  Wash couldn’t answer that question. At least, not yet. All he could do was watch her just as he had for the last ten seconds as she moved from the right side of his peripheral vision toward his left.

  He pegged her height at five-two or three, her weight at maybe one hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. Pale white skin stood out clear as day from the darkness around her, and she should have been wearing thicker clothing against the chilly night. The black leather jacket was too light for this time of year. It wasn’t freezing, but it was cold enough that the skin across Wash’s face tingled and the exposed parts of his body were slightly numb from lack of movement.

  A ponytail bounced behind her as she moved. Bright red hair and jeans and boots.

  Snap! as the girl stepped on a broken twig.

  The sound reverberated, ricocheting off the trees around them.

  Now you’ve done it…
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br />   Wash readied himself, flexing his fingers to get the blood flowing. His original plan was to wait for the monsters to reveal themselves, to make their way toward town like they had the previous three nights. Once he knew how many he was dealing with, then he could act accordingly.

  “Have a plan,” the Old Man always told him. “That’s what separates the living from the dead. Can you guess which one of them didn’t have a plan?”

  Of course, the Old Man never said anything about having your perfectly good plan ruined by a stupid girl in a black leather jacket traipsing around the woods in the middle of the night.

  What the hell is she doing out here?

  Snap! as the girl broke another twig.

  The sound hadn’t even had a chance to echo before it lunged out of the bush to the right of her.

  Here we go!

  It was a sickly-looking thing, pruned black flesh coating bones that had been deformed by the same sickness that made it what it was—undead, inhuman, a ghoul. It should have been difficult to spot against the deep dark night around it, but Wash’s eyes had already adjusted to the lack of light. And besides, he’d seen the damned things so many times he would recognize one with both eyes closed.

  He could smell it.

  For half a heartbeat Wash almost opened his mouth to scream out a warning, but he didn’t. The girl had stopped and turned to face the oncoming creature, and she was going to be dead in seconds. Screaming would have cost him two seconds—the act of opening his mouth, then forcing the warning out. Maybe three seconds—possibly even four. The girl didn’t have that much time.

  Instead, Wash reached down for the kukri strapped to his left thigh even as he leaped off the branch and plummeted to the ground below. Twenty feet would have broken a lot of people’s legs, but it was child’s play to him. He hit the soft earth with a loud crunch!, then was straightening up while catapulting himself forward—all in the same fluid motion. He’d done it before. Too many times to count.

  Wait, where’s the screaming?

  The question popped into his head even as he raced toward the startled figure. She stood twenty yards in front of him, turned in the direction of the nightcrawler as it charged. It was closer than Wash—

  —Ten yards—nine—eight—

  And there was no doubt it would reach her first. As fast as he was—and he was fast, he was damn fast—there was no way he would reach the girl in time to save her life. He felt sorry for her, but it was her fault for being out here all alone in the middle of the night. Everyone knew not to wander into the woods by yourself. What was she thinking?

  Then the girl was turning toward him, clearly responding to the sound of his boots pounding on the soft, damp forest ground. Her eyes flashed a brilliant shade of green even as they widened in—anger? Was she angry?

  At him?

  What the hell?

  He had expected fear at the sight of him running toward her with the kukri clutched in his hand. The kukri was a machete with an inwardly curved blade, over twenty inches long—fourteen of that razor-sharp steel—and was as menacing as it was effective. So why did she look pissed off instead of scared?

  What the hell is going on here? he thought even as he gained more ground.

  Fifteen yards—fourteen—thirteen—

  But he would still never reach her in time, because the monster was already within five yards—four—three—

  The girl spun away from Wash just as moonlight glinted off an object in her right hand.

  Where did that come from?

  It was a knife, sharp blade gleaming as it moved in a wide arc, slicing across the cold, chilly air from right to left in a dramatic diagonal slash that traveled from top to bottom.

  Wash was still trying to understand where the knife had come from when the lunging creature’s head detached from its bony shoulders.

  What…

  Dark black eyes widened in shock—or what someone who hadn’t been in Wash’s shoes hundreds of times would have mistaken for shock, anyway.

  …the…

  But it wasn’t, because shock was a human emotion and these monsters had lost that the moment they turned.

  …hell…

  The head plopped to the ground and rolled away even as the body it was once attached to simply lost all momentum and pitched forward, stick-thin arms waving wildly in the air as its legs gave out underneath it.

  …is going…

  The creature fell in a pile of clacking bones next to the girl. It would have crashed right into her, except she had sidestepped as soon as she slashed with the knife.

  …on here?

  The way the nightcrawler had fallen—like a marionette with its strings snipped—told him that the girl’s knife was either made of or coated with silver. The metal was radioactive to ghouls, and it didn’t take much. All you needed was to make contact with their bloodstream and the monsters simply ceased to exist. Wash had seen them come at him without their heads, without limbs, even without half their bodies. But they couldn’t do any of those things if you stabbed, shot, or broke their skin and made contact with the bloodstream underneath with a silver weapon. That was the reason his bullets, as well as the kukri in his right hand, all had silver in them. He didn’t know how it worked, it just did.

  “You’re wasting your time thinking about it,” the Old Man used to always say. “It is what it is, kid. Silver kills the monsters, so we use silver. If dirt took them down, we’d be using dirt. Let the eggheads spend their time thinking about the whys. That’s not our job. Next!”

  Wash slowed down even as the girl whirled back around to face him.

  Those green eyes flashed in his direction again. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, asshat? You almost got me killed!”

  “What did you call me?” Wash asked.

  “You heard me.”

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “My job—” Wash was saying, when the air shifted around them.

  There they are. There’s the rest of them!

  He knew there’d be more than one out here tonight. He was expecting maybe two (the townspeople hadn’t been very clear about the numbers), but the stench was all wrong for just two nightcrawlers. It was too thick. Too heavy. Too much.

  They came out from behind the girl, except she didn’t see them because she was too busy facing him, the knife in her hand dripping with thick black blood. She gripped the handle tightly—ready to slash again.

  “Behind you!” he shouted.

  She spun around, the knife moving from her side to in front of her even as her legs changed into a fighting stance.

  She’s had training, he thought even as he broke off into a run.

  Her head turned, shocked to find him there—for the half a heartbeat he was there, anyway—before he was past her.

  Wash changed up his grip on the thermoplastic rubber handle of the machete in his right hand as he cranked into second gear. Then third.

  Faster, faster, faster!

  You could never run too fast when facing a ghoul. The faster, the better when there were more than one, like now.

  Time began to slow down like it always did when Wash knew that the next few seconds were going to determine if he lived or died, and he saw:

  There were three of them, emerging out of the darkness. It was a pack. They were small, like the first one, and moved low to the ground and almost on all fours, but not quite. “Knuckle draggers,” a slayer Wash had crossed paths with in Montana called them. They saw him and immediately lost all interest in the girl. It wasn’t that they thought he was less dangerous, an easier prey. No, it was simply that he had put himself closer to them. Put the blood pumping through his veins within easier reach.

  Their eyes—hollowed and black, like soulless pits overflowing with tar—focused on him, and they changed directions instantly. They were hairless and barefoot, fleshlike thin layers of film clinging to bodies that were
devoid of anything resembling muscle or tone. Sickly looking, forcing open mouths that revealed jagged and yellow and brown teeth with saliva dripping from them as they became rabid at the sight of him—at the presence of the untainted blood in him.

  Rays of moonlight splashed across their domed heads, falling over one of them in such a way that it put a glint into its eyes. For a split second, Wash almost thought it was human and wondered what it had been before its transformation. A man? A woman? Maybe even a child. All of that was gone now, replaced by this skin-and-bones childlike revenant.

  “Stop it,” he imagined the Old Man chastising him. “Whatever they once were, they’re not anymore. This is what they are now. This is the world. There is no going back. For them, or for us. Kill them all, and move on to the next one.”

  Wash lunged, slashing with the machete.

  Two

  He caught the first one across the face with the kukri, gashing it from temple to jawline, and popping one of its eyeballs at the same time. Blood splattered the front of his thermal sweater, but the viscous, dark liquid was mostly lost in the black of its fabric.

  One down...

  Instead of stopping or pausing for even a second, Wash pushed through the falling nightcrawler as the other two attacked.

  He felt sorry for them. He really did. They were pathetic things—thin and frail and twisted from the inside out—and the chest of the second one folded like papier-mâché when he punched his gloved left hand through it, the silver studs along the knuckles and finger joints raking its flesh with the ease of a knife through butter. He saw the lights go out of its eyes, whatever remnants of humanity doused in a blink, and the body simply sagged even as his hand exited its back.