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

  There was no decision here. There was only the one choice in front of her. It was obvious.

  Wasn’t it?

  She told herself her experiences with the Sunday brothers had nothing to do with this. No, she wasn’t punishing West and Brody because of what the Sundays had done to her all those months ago…

  When her mind slipped—and it did, every now and then—she found herself reliving the days inside that cabin hidden in the woods. The Sundays. Life with the Sundays. They had kept her chained to the floor, and she could still smell the desperation, along with the filthy dress they forced her to wear because she wasn’t deserving of decent clothing. She could still feel the cold, merciless bite of the metal collar around her ankle…

  May you forever burn in hell, John Sunday. You and your brothers.

  *

  The gunshot woke her up. It split the calm, serene night air like lightning, shooting across the island and through every room and hallway of the hotel.

  Lara was on her feet before the gunshot even finished its echo. She snatched up her Glock from the nightstand and scanned the room to make sure there was no one inside. She calmed her breathing, put the gun back down, and grabbed her pants and shirt and pulled them on, then spent more precious seconds struggling to shove her feet into socks and sneakers.

  Footsteps raced across her door, then Danny’s voice: “Lara!”

  “I’m coming!” she shouted back.

  The footsteps faded as Danny raced up the hallway. She listened to the direction he was heading.

  North.

  That meant the back of the building, which meant—

  The Tower.

  Then two more gunshots, this time coming in quick succession.

  Shotguns.

  Lara glanced at her alarm clock: 2:14 a.m.

  Blaine.

  Maddie had the night shift in the Tower, but Blaine would have already relieved her at midnight. He would be there now.

  Lara threw her gun belt around her waist, slipped the Glock into the holster, then snatched up the Benelli M4 shotgun from the corner and ran for the door.

  Carly was in the hallway in pajamas and a cotton T-shirt, standing just outside the girls’ room with a Glock in her right hand. “Danny just went.”

  “Stay with the girls!” she shouted, and ran up Hallway A, following in Danny’s footsteps.

  She burst out of the hotel’s back door, the cool air sending a thrill through her body. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline.

  She ran as fast as she could, making a straight line for the Tower.

  She was halfway there when she saw the door into the lighthouse had been thrown open, bright lights spilling out across the grass. She caught movement from the corner of her eye and looked up at the windows on the second and third floor, glimpsed movement along the second floor, just before Danny appeared in one of the openings.

  He was scanning the hotel grounds when he spotted her. “Lara! Get down!”

  “What?” she got out, just before a shot shattered the night air around her. She felt something fast zip past her head.

  She threw herself to the ground so awkwardly that she lost the shotgun halfway down. It landed in the grass a few feet from her. Lara scrambled forward, snatching it back up and turning toward where she thought the shot had come from.

  She heard two shots coming from behind her and looked back at Danny, who was firing from the second-floor window with his M4A1. She tried to follow where he was shooting, but even with the bright LED lights all around them, there were still too many patches of darkness where anyone could be hiding.

  Lara scrambled to her feet and raced toward the Tower, even as Danny fired two more shots. The hidden shooter answered Danny’s shots with two of his own, and chunks of the Tower’s second-floor window—where Danny was standing—filled the air.

  Danny stepped back a bit, but undeterred, kept returning fire.

  When she was almost at the Tower, she stopped short at the sight of blood on the grass outside the door. There was more blood inside, a jagged line running along the floor and continued up the spiral staircase. She darted inside then hurried up the steps, listening to Danny shooting from above her.

  She stuck her head carefully through the second-floor opening. Danny was still at the window, peering out with his rifle. “Danny, what’s happening?”

  “Third floor, Lara,” Danny said. “Blaine’s hurt.”

  She climbed up onto the floor, then hurried over to the second set of cast iron staircases.

  “Watch for the blood,” Danny added, just as a shot dislodged a section of the window frame above his head. Danny took another step backward, before returning fire.

  “Whose blood?” Lara asked.

  “I don’t know, a lot of bleeding going on up there.” Danny fired again. “I have him pinned down behind one of the palm trees.”

  “Who’s out there?”

  “One of the cowboys. West. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Hard to tell who’s up there with Blaine.”

  “Danny, what—”

  “Upstairs, Lara,” he said, cutting her off. “Blaine’s kinda bleeding to death.”

  Lara hurried up the staircase, almost slipping on the fresh blood that covered the steps. She grabbed on to the railing to keep her balance, and pushed on toward the opening.

  When she stepped up onto the third floor, she was greeted by another thick pool of blood right away. It was coming from a body. Brody. Or what was left of Brody. A shotgun blast had taken his head almost clean off, spraying chunks of it against the wall. A knife lay nearby, very close to his open hand. It looked like one of the knives from the hotel’s kitchen.

  Blaine sat on the floor across from Brody’s lifeless body. There was another knife sticking out of Blaine’s left side, and he was pressing his hand over the wound, his Remington shotgun resting in his lap. Three spent shotgun shells formed a kind of semicircle around him.

  “Hey, doc,” Blaine said. His face was covered in sweat despite the chilly night air. “Sorry about this. You must be sick and tired of keeping me from bleeding to death by now.”

  Lara made an effort to smile. She stepped over what was left of Brody’s body, moving toward Blaine. “What happened?”

  “They showed up and tried to get the drop on me. I managed to get one of them, but the other one split with the M4. Sorry, boss.”

  Two more shots rang out from below them.

  Lara crouched next to Blaine and put down her shotgun. She eased his hand away from the knife to get a better look. “I’m going to have to cut off a piece of your shirt to see how bad it is.”

  “Go for it,” Blaine said. He drew a big combat knife from a sheath along his hip and handed it to her hilt first.

  She took the knife and started cutting. “Tell me what happened.”

  “One of them showed up and made small talk. Then the second one comes up from behind and I saw the knife in his hand and I shot him. But the first one tries to stab me. Well, not try. He actually did stab me. Then he grabbed the M4 and took off. I tried picking him off when he was running down, but I missed. I’m a lousy shot. Always have been, even with a shotgun.”

  She looked back at Brody’s mostly decapitated body. “Brody would beg to differ.”

  “Lucky shot. He was close, and when he saw me catch him coming up the staircase, he sort of froze. I got real lucky tonight, doc.”

  “Why didn’t West shoot you if he had the M4?”

  “He was backing up when he tried, but I guess he was fumbling with the weapon, forgot all about the safety. What an amateur, as Will would probably say.”

  She smiled at that. Will would definitely have said that.

  “Then he took off,” Blaine continued. “I guess he thought he’d figure it out later.”

  They heard two more gunshots, this time coming from outside the Tower.

  “I guess he’s since figured it out,” Blaine said. “Is it bad, doc?”


  “Compared to when I first saw you? This is a cakewalk.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back. “I’m gonna go to sleep for a while, doc. Wake me up when it’s over, will ya?”

  *

  Blaine wasn’t entirely a bad shot. Besides blowing Brody’s head off, one of his other two shots had hit West, who bled all the way down to the first floor, and then kept on bleeding on his way out of the Tower. He had gotten halfway to the beach when Lara and Danny came out of the hotel. The M4 West had in his possession was equipped with the ACOG, which gave him an advantage over Danny during their back and forth exchange.

  Danny, wearing night-vision goggles, had tracked West away from the hotel. “He’s headed into the woods on the west side,” Danny said over the radio. “Bleeding like a stuck pig, from the looks of it.”

  “Be careful, babe,” Carly said through the radio.

  “Careful’s my middle name,” Danny said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I ran across this spunky redhead. She’s got me all kinds of messed up these days.”

  “I love you, too,” Carly said.

  Until they could find West, Lara ordered the hotel sealed. The doors were closed and windows locked. She gave Bonnie and Roy gun belts with Glocks and told them to stay inside until it was over. She considered confining everyone to their rooms but thought better of it. Instead, she put them all in the lobby for the night with Carly so they would know where everyone was at all times.

  Maddie had gone back to the Tower to keep overwatch. Will had drilled the importance of having constant overwatch in the Tower for so long, Lara wasn’t surprised how effortlessly everyone responded to taking turns up there.

  With the help of Bonnie and Roy, Lara carried Blaine back to the hotel manager’s office behind the kitchen, where she had converted the room into a makeshift infirmary a few months back. It was just big enough for a couple of beds they had liberated from some of the unused rooms, and she had added a cabinet to hold extra medical supplies. Afterward, Roy wandered back out into the lobby to be with the others.

  Bonnie didn’t leave right away, but stood by quietly as Lara stitched Blaine’s wound. The big man was asleep, snoring lightly under general anesthesia. He bled profusely when she had pulled out the knife, but thankfully the blade had missed his left kidney by half an inch.

  When she was finished, Lara tossed the surgical latex gloves into a bin and washed her hands in the sink.

  “I’m sorry,” Bonnie said behind her.

  Bonnie had been so quiet that Lara was actually surprised she was even still there. “For what?”

  “This is my fault, isn’t it?”

  “I asked, and you told me the truth, Bonnie. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Maybe I should have waited…”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. Danny had doubts about them from the very beginning. It’s a dangerous world out there, Bonnie. There are a lot of dangerous people. I—we’ve—encountered plenty of them since all of this began.”

  The Sundays…

  May you all burn in hell.

  Bonnie nodded. Lara couldn’t tell if she was convinced. She hadn’t known the woman long enough and there was an inherent sadness about Bonnie, despite the perfect everything, that told Lara the other woman had been through more than she was willing to share.

  Bonnie finally looked down at the Glock holstered on her right hip. “Can I tell you something?”

  “You’ve never used a gun before?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Kind of. Will and Danny can teach you, if you want.”

  “I’d like that. Thank you. Roy wouldn’t mind a lesson or two, either.”

  “I’ll ask them—”

  Two gunshots, in quick succession, interrupted her. It sounded far away, from the other side of the island.

  Lara snatched up the radio from the counter. “Danny, what’s happening?”

  “Found him,” Danny said through the radio. “I’m pursuing him through the woods now.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Will do.”

  Lara said to Bonnie, “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything,” Bonnie said.

  “Stay here with Blaine in case he wakes up and needs something. He should be sleeping for most of the day, but he’s stubborn, so you never know. After this is over, we’ll issue you and Roy radios. Until then, Carly will be outside in the lobby the entire time.” Lara picked up her Benelli and headed for the door, but stopped and looked back at Bonnie. “Hey.”

  Bonnie looked over.

  Lara gave her a pursed smile. “Don’t blame yourself. For any of it. You did what you had to in order to get here. What West and Brody did to Blaine wasn’t your fault. They made their own choices. Okay?”

  Bonnie nodded back. “Okay.”

  Lara hurried outside. “Danny,” she said into the radio.

  “Yeah,” Danny said. She thought he might be whispering.

  “I’m coming to you. Where are you exactly?”

  “About thirty meters directly behind the power station.”

  “How many is that in feet?”

  “Ninety-eight, give or take.”

  “Can you wait for me?”

  “Sure, why not,” Danny said. “The more the merrier. Bring pajamas. We’ll have a sleepover.”

  CHAPTER 9

  GABY

  Seeing the world through a small red dot mounted on top of an assault rifle wasn’t what Gaby expected to be doing a year after what was supposed to be her senior year in high school. Then again, she hadn’t expected the world to end, either, so it wasn’t as if she had control of anything anymore.

  The sight on top of her M4 was a squat black tube, about five and three-quarters inches long. It allowed her to acquire and fire on a target without too much preparation. It was only capable of two-times magnification, so she wasn’t going to hit anything long distance. She wasn’t nearly good enough to do that, even with the ACOG in the Tower, but she was getting there.

  One of these days…

  She lowered the carbine and looked down at the sprawling parking lot on the north side of the hospital. So many cars. Sometimes she found herself wondering what had happened to their owners.

  The two muscle-bound guys that came up to the rooftop with her this morning had wandered back downstairs to eat something. Benny and Tom had taken their place, and she could hear them moving around behind her, chatting about something pointless, when the sound of a gunshot from up the street exploded across the dead city.

  Benny and Tom quickly rushed over.

  “There they go,” Benny said. “I hope those silver bullets work.”

  “They work,” Gaby said.

  The three of them stood at the edge of the rooftop and listened as the first gunshot faded. Moments later, shotguns and the cracking of a rifle rolled across the distance, one after another. The shooting went on for a while. Five minutes. Then ten… It was continuous, and for a time felt like it would never end.

  Until, that is, it did stop.

  As the last shot disappeared across the city, Benny said, “Sounds like they’re done.”

  Gaby looked down at her watch. Will and the others had been gone for less than an hour.

  “What’s it like?” Tom asked her. “The island.”

  “There’s a beach on the south side,” she said. “It’s long, with white sands. It was hot when we arrived, but it’s cooled down with the weather.”

  “And you guys have a hotel?” Benny asked. “How many rooms?”

  “Fifty completed rooms. Fully furnished. But there’s plenty of space to build more.”

  “That’s more than enough for everyone here,” Tom said.

  “And a lot of fish, right?” Benny said eagerly.

  “A lot of fish,” she nodded.

  “I’ve always liked fish. My mom used to bake fish fillet with melted margarine, lemon juice, and paprika. You di
dn’t think a simple dish like that could taste so good…”

  “Did she ever bake fish sandwiches?” Tom asked.

  “Nah,” Benny said. “Good?”

  “You put it between some crusty French loaf and add mustard, lettuce, and tomatoes, and it’s probably the best thing you’ll ever eat. My dad used to make them with chives, but I can’t stand those. Cucumbers, now, that’s another story.”

  “Yeah, not a big fan of chives, either.”

  “You guys have mustard over there?” Tom asked her.

  “As long as you don’t mind frozen packages from the freezer,” she said.

  “Better than nothing,” Benny said.

  “Definitely better than spoiled ketchup,” Tom agreed.

  The two of them went on like that, talking about fish and what condiments went better with which type of dishes. Gaby sneaked a couple of looks over at Benny, not that he noticed. He reminded her a little bit of Josh. They didn’t look anything alike, but they were about the same age, and they both had that innocent, almost earnest quality about them.

  She still remembered that night with Josh. Their only night, as it had turned out.

  But Josh was dead, along with Matt and her parents. Her friends were probably long gone, too. People kept dying around her. Even Will might not make it back from the Archers raid. He was good, but he wasn’t invincible. None of them were. They had the island, but how long would that last? It wasn’t impossible that they could lose it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next month. The word “impossible” had ceased to have any meaning. Maybe it did, once, but not anymore.

  She had gone to sleep last night as an eighteen-year-old and woken up a nineteen-year-old. What were the chances she would see her twentieth birthday? Maybe it was the state of the hospital, the poor souls on the tenth floor under her, but Gaby had never felt so depressed and mortal in her life.

  She sneaked another look at Benny. He really was cute…

  *

  “So, really?” Benny said.

  “Yeah, why not?” Gaby said.

  “I don’t know. It’s just kind of fast.”

  “We might die today. Or tonight. Or the next day. Look around you, Benny. All we have is today, right now.” She shrugged. “Or I could go back up to the rooftop and bring Tom down here instead—”