Purge of Babylon (Book 7): The Spears of Laconia Page 13

  He slept just beyond the reach of sunlight, though he could feel the heat even down here. Rays like knives, stabbing down at him, poking and prodding, always looking to connect, to slash and rend until he was just bones. Useless bleach-white bones.

  There had been too many hands, too many feet, and too many teeth. They had hurt him, pushed him to the brink, but he had survived their onslaught the only way he knew how—by fighting, by clawing, by willing himself through the drowning sea. He didn’t know any other way but to fight.

  It didn’t used to take this long to heal, but then he had never been hurt like this before. These days, the wounds closed a little slower, the breaks mended more deliberately, and the blood took longer to replenish. One of these days, he wouldn’t be able to heal at all, to regenerate all his losses, but that day was still far off.

  His eyes snapped open, the dirt like sandpaper against his eyeballs. Something was happening. Something was…approaching.

  A foot of earth separated him from sunlight. The heat called to him, even stronger than Mabry’s voice inside his head. As he lay there, resting in a tomb of his own making, the damp soil around him trembled as if coming alive. The walls shook, as did the patch of ground under and over him.

  Had they found him? Had one of his defenses failed without him knowing it? Did Mabry know where he was and had sent his forces?

  No, that was impossible. It was still daylight. He could feel it, like a lover calling to him. And he wanted to give in, wanted to embrace it like he once had, but knowing he couldn’t because doing so—

  No, not ghouls.

  Something else. Something…bigger.

  It emerged from the city on wheels, close enough to his resting place that he could smell its leaked fluids as it lumbered. But it wasn’t flesh and bone. No. This was an animal made of metal. Hard, grinding metal.

  He knew instantly what it was. Sometimes it was difficult to remember details from his past life, but this wasn’t one of those moments. He easily dug out the information from when he still wore a uniform, carried guns, climbed mountains, and took lives.

  A tank. It was a tank.

  *

  THE GROUND SHOOK, passing from the many particles of dirt that sheathed him. It came from a distance—from where the waves crashed against sand, beyond the city, and where the tank had gone.

  Nightfall. He knew without having to see the darkness. The shift in temperature against his skin, the cold that seeped through the earth and folded over him on all sides like a blanket, were evidence enough.

  Earlier, he had felt the multiple tremors as they emerged from their nests, growing in intensity as they neared his position. There were hundreds. Thousands. They passed overhead, oblivious to his presence. It wasn’t him they were after. No. It was the machine. The thing that had appeared earlier. The tank.

  They were summoned, called forth by the blue eyes. “Take it,” the blue eyes said. “Peel them from their metal skin.”

  Another crack of thunder.

  No, not thunder. A gun firing.

  A cannon.

  The tank.

  The squeal of black-eyed creatures erupted inside his mind, surging across the connection that bonded him to the brood, to Mabry and the others. Their deaths were like sledgehammers, pounding against the sides of his skull. What he felt, Mabry could surely feel, too. Even more so.

  He almost smiled against the dirt at the thought of Mabry hurting, feeling every death, every shriek of pain. If he concentrated enough, he could almost smell the sting of burning flesh as the black eyes vanished against the blast.

  And yet they continued climbing out of the darkness and flowed like an unstoppable tide toward the beach. They were wary of the water, but the enemy had stopped just beyond the tides. Even so, the taste of ocean water lingered against their senses, terrorizing them with their possibilities.

  “Take it,” the voices said. “They’ve already done too much damage. Stop them now. Here. Show them this world is ours.”

  The voices belonged to the blue eyes. The ones leading the charge—directing the attack. They stood back, willing the black eyes forward like every officer he had ever known. Safe from the grinder and brave in their safety. He despised them, but was also cautious around them. They could sense him, just as he could them. He had to walk lightly, skirt around the edge, and never reveal himself.

  It had begun while he was asleep, healing the cuts and gashes along his arms and legs and face. His concentration, his mental wall, always slipped when he was at his weakest, like he was at the moment. But Mabry hadn’t found him yet. No, this wasn’t about him. The creatures had not come here for him. They had come for the men inside the tank.

  “They did it,” the voices said. “They’re trying to take our food from us. We’ll show them they should have stayed hidden.”

  Another boom, followed by more screams of pain inside his head. The tank fired again and again, and each time the ground shook as if threatening to come apart. The continuous howls of black eyes accompanied the smell of singed flesh, and clouds of pulverized bone turned the darkness gray. He saw and sniffed the carnage through the senses of the creatures that were converging on the beach, driven forward by the relentless voices in their heads.

  “Forward,” the voices commanded. “Take the machine! Take it now!”

  Amid the chaos, he became aware of a new sound. No, not new, but old. A strange noise he hadn’t heard in some time. Music. It was music coming from the tank. From…speakers?

  A house came apart, its foundations splintering against a stray cannon round, the smell of burning wood and disintegrating concrete, along with brick and mortar pluming in the air. Black eyes raced through them, unhindered by the wanton destruction.

  Then something else. A new smell filling his senses. Not just wood burning, but searing flesh accompanying the cries of pain.

  Fire. There was sustained fire among the explosions.

  And yet they persisted, assaulting the armored shell of the machine from all sides and flailing against its unyielding skin. They clung onto the moving cannon, hoping to slow it down, their skeletal forms trembling as it let loose and split open another house. The ground shattered as the walls tumbled down and the ceiling collapsed inward, swallowing up a pair of black eyes that had been perched on the roof.

  Now was the time, while the black eyes were obsessed with the tank. They were relentless, pouring unlimited numbers against it. He couldn’t see the ground anymore, just a mass of squirming black flesh oozing toward the tan vehicle as it swiveled and fired, swiveled and fired. And all the while, the loud music blared from its speakers, like some unholy noise from the pits of hell designed to drive men mad.

  He detached his mind from his body and drifted freely through the layers of soft earth and grabbed the first consciousness that appeared. The creature was weak like all the rest, and he took control of its mind without any effort. They were just husks, vessels for Mabry and the blue eyes to command at will. It had taken him a lot of trial and error, but he was always good at adapting, finding an opening, and exploiting it.

  He pushed the creature aside, into the back of its own mind where it could still see and hear and smell but was little more than a voyeur now. Then he moved its legs, from walking to running, then full-on sprinting toward the beach.

  Faster. Faster!

  There, the war machine. It was still moving, its gun firing, walls of flame stabbing from its armored shell. Black eyes roared as fire engulfed them, eating flesh from bones and vaporizing the precious blood. Mabry’s blood. They fell, disappearing among the fields of scorched grass. Smoke rose from buildings, walls of loose ground filling the air with every thunderous explosion.

  He stood under darkness, a lone figure at the edge of the battlefield, and watched the horde of black eyes throwing themselves forward, drawn irresistibly to the squatting thing that refused to fall, or stop, or go silent. All this, while music blared from speakers attached to it, jumbled words filling the
night sky, only occasionally broken by the bone-rattling boom of cannon fire.

  He remained in the background so the blue eyes wouldn’t sense him. They were preoccupied trying to find some way, some hidden angle or slit, to pry open the mechanical beast. They commanded the swarm to crawl over the spinning turret, howling with frustration and pain as blankets of fire enveloped their soldiers one by one by one…

  “Take it!” the voices shouted.

  But the machine would not be taken, and it continued to turn even as a few hundred living things clung to it. Its gears grinded on even as the sprockets and crevices became clogged with burnt flesh and bone and spraying blood. They pounded against the metal with balled fists, fingers attempting in vain to pull open heavy doors that wouldn’t budge. The ground groaned under the combined weight, threatening to sink them all.

  And the voices screamed: “Tear it apart! Inch by inch! Tear it apart!”

  A stream of flames licked across the blackness, torching swaying grass and thickets of flesh in its path. Then the boom of the main cannon, shattering eardrums and destroying everything in its path.

  The pointlessness of the scene, the pure carnage and death and destruction, depressed him, but he knew it wasn’t really him, because he didn’t care for these things. The pangs of sadness came from the creature he had shoved aside; its fear and fury were seeping into him. Husk though it may be, the creature still felt, at least inside its own mind.

  He backed away from the field as more endless numbers of black eyes streamed past him, charging into the breach, obeying the command of the blue eyes.

  “More!” they shouted. “More!” even as another two dozen disappeared in a hail of fire and earth.

  He retreated, leaving the battlefield behind, when a brightly lit building flashed across his mind’s eye. It was there and gone before he could fully grasp what he had seen.

  A building? Where? Lights? And why were the ghouls moving toward it?

  There was something else happening at another place, at the exact same time. The ghouls were busy fighting on two fronts tonight, and the blue eyes were at both places to direct the attacks, their voices slight echoes in the back of his mind because of distance.

  He abandoned the vessel he was occupying and let himself float along the stream that joined the brood, finding himself moving further and further away from the beach. Houses, basements, empty cities and rooftops flashed by eyes that didn’t belong to him. Tens of thousands of disjointed voices scrambled through his mind, but he pushed through them and searched for—

  There, the same building he had seen earlier.

  He focused on it, using the lights emanating from the structure as a beacon. Closer now, he began hiding within the consciousness of random black eyes, jumping between skins, hearing and seeing and feeling what they did, before moving on to the next one, and still the next one. Gathering intelligence, processing what he could, and never staying still for too long.

  It had been difficult in the beginning, spying on the brood while remaining unseen. So many trials and errors and near misses. Mabry had almost caught him a half dozen times, but it was the blue eyes that were the most dangerous. There were too many of them, and they knew what he was doing. The black eyes were easier; they were just empty bodies to be taken, the way Mabry had done over the years, the centuries…

  But he had learned and adapted, because that was what he did. He adapted and didn’t perish. Was that one of his sayings? Or someone else’s? It didn’t matter. It would come to him eventually. It always did.

  He detached himself from another one of the creatures and weaved through the endless pair of eyes and ears, seeing and hearing glimpses of what he needed, but always moving forward, getting closer toward the building with the lights, because it was important. The blue eyes were there for a reason.

  “The building,” the voices said inside his mind. “Take the building.”

  There, at last.

  It was just as brightly lit as when he had first glimpsed it the first time. No longer just a flash of light in the distance, but clear as day. He understood now why the blue eyes were so unsure of themselves.

  It shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have been this bright. Not here, not now, surrounded by black eyes watching from within the darkened woods that surrounded the place. Someone had made a mistake. Or had they?

  The confusion seeped through every one of the creatures, including the one he was hiding within at the moment.

  “Something’s wrong,” the voices said. “Something’s not right…”

  He jumped bodies until he finally found a black eye moving across an airfield toward the well-lit building. Men in uniforms with masked faces—collaborators—watched him pass. He could smell fear clinging to their pores.

  He wasn’t alone. Far from it. Black eyes streamed out of the trees around him and stampeded through overgrown fields of grass, then across smooth, paved roads. The stinging scent of jet fuel filled his nostrils, along with the lingering sweat of human bodies that had slaved in the area not long ago.

  “The building,” the voices said in unison inside his head. “They’re in the building.”

  He bounded across open space with his brethren, the hesitation giving way to confidence, their strength swelling with their numbers. It was why Mabry had waited so long, why they took the cities first.

  “They’ve miscalculated,” the voices said, the confusion from earlier replaced by resounding confidence. “We’ll take them alive. Learn their locations. Then we’ll show them why they should have stayed hidden.”

  Closer now, he spied normal eyes flitting across high windows along the walls of the building. The bright lights continued to pave his way, multiple sirens calling to him and the thousands of others to the left and right and behind him.

  He ran faster, willing the skinny legs under him to move faster.

  Faster and faster and faster!

  “Take it,” the voices shouted. “Take it!”

  Then something strange happened. The ground under him quaked, and the trees burst into flames. The screams of black eyes filled his mind, the smell of scorched flesh blanketing the air, and he stumbled and fell and was swallowed by the earth as it was torn asunder—

  He retreated through the legion of ghouls, jumping from one to another, seeking safety as the crack of thunder—no, explosions—screamed across the night sky, wild wind threatening to engulf him in their wake. The taste of metal crackled inside the creature’s mouth, what jagged teeth it had left chattering in the aftermath.

  There, a lone black-eyed ghoul had somehow managed to reach the outskirts of the blasts. It was almost at the building and was leaping when he forced himself into its mind. The creature struggled for an instant—just an instant—and he peered out through its eyes even as—

  He was falling!

  He reached out and snatched onto one of the metal bars fastened over a window and hung on. Figures were moving on the other side, scrambling around a metal catwalk.

  One of them stopped and turned.

  They locked eyes for an instant before the man raised two curious eyebrows, light blue eyes looking back out at him, short and damp sandy blond hair matted to his forehead.

  Danny.

  BOOK TWO

  ‡

  EASY PEASY COMPANY

  CHAPTER 11

  GABY

  AFTER WATCHING MERCER’S people working like assembly line robots for the better part of the day, the sudden absence of all activity inside the hangar was unnatural, like the prelude to something bad. Really, really bad.

  “How screwed are we?” Nate asked. “From one to ten?”

  “Around fifteen,” Danny said.

  “I said one to ten.”

  “Ten. And five more.”

  Nate sighed and looked to Gaby for help. She managed a smile, if just barely.

  The mood had gotten noticeably gloomier since Erin came back to the office, opened the door, then said to them, “The first one
who steps outside before we close the hangar doors gets shot. Don’t test me.”

  No one tested her, but they did stand at the open windows—her, Nate, and Danny, with Mason and the other four crowding behind them—and watched Erin and the two that had been guarding the office climb into the back of the Ford truck waiting outside. The soldiers then crouched and took aim at them while two others swung the heavy doors closed with a loud bang! The sound of locks snapping into place, followed by heavy chains sliding into position, left no doubt what was happening and that any semblance of optimism she might have had was all for naught because they were being locked inside the hangar.

  They scrambled out of the office like escaped prisoners when they heard the vehicle fading into the background, Mason and his men making the door before she, Nate, or Danny could.

  “Get it open!” Mason shouted.

  Gaby could have told them it wasn’t going to work. That was the point of holding them back, after all. But she didn’t bother and instead watched the uniformed men sweating against the large twin doors, grunting like wild animals. They seemed to get louder with every passing second that the doors didn’t budge.

  “Spread out,” Mason said when they finally gave up on the front doors. “Look for another way out of here. Cover every inch. We don’t wanna still be here when night falls, boys! Not in this condition!”

  One of the men found a back door, but it also wouldn’t open for him. He started kicking it, then threw his shoulder into the steel frame, and when that didn’t work, he began pacing in front of it like a cornered animal. Two others, including the biggest among them (“Lucas” was written on his name tag) joined the first and tried their luck. Lucas had to be over six-eight, with a massive frame and a neck that was probably bigger than one of her thighs, and while his hands made the door lever look like a toy, he only ended up breaking the latch loose. There was clearly something even stronger than Lucas on the other side.