Purge of Babylon (Book 7): The Spears of Laconia Read online

  “Did he say what happened to the Army? What about the Navy?”

  “He said they weren’t around anymore.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We didn’t really get into details. He’s mostly a man of few words. Anyway, if they were still out there, don’t you think they would have shown themselves by now?”

  “Yeah, there’s that…”

  “Besides, I learned long ago not to put your faith in Uncle Sam’s boys. They’re overrated and will only disappoint you in the end.”

  “Sounds personal. Daddy issues?”

  “Maybe a tad.”

  “Anyway, when did you guys have these conversations? And where was I during them?”

  “Usually asleep.”

  “You could have woken me. Maybe I had some questions for him, too.”

  He chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “The thought of you and Frank, talking. You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “Maybe you don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How you are around him. You’re…stiff.”

  “Stiff?”

  “Tense.”

  “I didn’t…” She stopped short, then said, “Do you think he noticed?”

  Oh, he noticed all right, Keo thought, but said, “Probably not.”

  Jordan went silent after that. He couldn’t see her face, so he didn’t know if she was replaying all those nights when they were with Frank and how she had acted (unknowingly, as it turned out) around him. Or maybe she was doing what he was doing and trying to time the aftershocks after each cannon impact and grimacing when they sounded just a little bit closer than the last time.

  “Are you missing T18 yet?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Maybe a little bit. Why?”

  “Sometimes I think the people in the towns are the smart ones. At least they get to sleep in their own beds, with a stomach full of food, and not just kidney beans.”

  “I thought you like kidney beans.”

  “I don’t like them that much.”

  Another bout of silence, with just Ozzy Osbourne somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor. The speakers must have taken a hit, because Ozzy’s voice had become strained and at times incomprehensible.

  “So, Black Sabbath, huh?” Jordan said after a while.

  “Yup. Black Sabbath.”

  “They must have that damn song on an endless loop.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “Speakers.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “These tanks come with speakers?”

  “Probably custom add-ons.”

  “It’s not bad. The song. Not sure I’d like to listen to it 500 times in a row, but hey, whatever floats their boat.” She paused for a moment, then, “What happens if they hit the house above us?”

  “Probably nothing good.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “It’ll fall down and bury us. We’d survive for a few days while trying to open the door, but eventually we’d give up when it won’t budge because of all the rubble on top of it.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Then we’d both die of thirst in a few days. Unless you start eating me, or I start eating you. We could probably live off each other’s meat and blood for a few extra days or weeks, if you can keep it all down.”

  “Very vivid; thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Another thoom!

  Keo squeezed his eyes shut against a particularly thick cloud of dust floating down over his face from the door above them. He coughed, and so did Jordan next to him.

  “That one was pretty close,” she said.

  “Uh huh.”

  “The closest one yet.”

  “Yup.”

  “Not good.”

  “Nope.”

  “What are the chances we can make the beach if we climb out right now?”

  “Depends…”

  “On?”

  “How many of the bloodsuckers are around the house right now that will notice us when we poke our heads out.”

  “How many, you think?”

  “A few hundred?”

  “Sounds manageable.”

  “Or maybe a few thousand.”

  “That, not so much.” She sighed. “You wanna risk it?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  The cannon fire, the smell of burning flesh, and Ozzy’s waning voice filled the temporary silence inside the room. He tried to pick out the crashing ocean waves in the background, but it was a lost cause through the thick walls. At least they had their thermal clothing, which kept the cool temperature at bay. The only real issue at the moment was the chances of being buried alive down here.

  Don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.

  Yeah, that’s it. Let’s go with that.

  “Keo,” Jordan whispered.

  “What?”

  “Is that smell what I think it is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you say ‘yeah’ one more time, I’m going to punch you in the balls.”

  “Sounds painful,” he said.

  “I don’t know what Gillian sees in you.”

  “Must be my charming personality.”

  “What personality?”

  “Man, you’re really going for the low blows tonight, aren’t you?”

  She chuckled, just as the tank loosed another round, the resulting thoom! causing his teeth to chatter for a few seconds afterward.

  “That was a close one,” Jordan said.

  “The one before that was closer.”

  “Was it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Not good.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m going to die down here, aren’t I?”

  “Think positive.”

  “The power of positive thinking?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Hey, Keo,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Did you ever think you were going to die under someone’s storage shed?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Definitely not under someone’s storage shed.”

  “You must have lived one hell of a life before all of this.”

  “It was a wild ride, yeah.”

  “Can I confess something?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing we never met until now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I would have totally fallen for you. I mean, head over heels. Sex on floors, and all that good stuff.”

  “Nice.”

  She laughed. “But then you’d break my heart, and I’d spend the next few years screwing every guy I meet in an attempt to forget you.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “Yeah. It’s a good thing we didn’t meet before all of this.”

  “Yeah,” he said wistfully. “It’s a good thing…”

  CHAPTER 13

  GABY

  THE EARTH EXPLODED, splitting open up and down the airfield, and then it started spitting dirt and concrete and flesh and bone against the hangar. The windows shattered against the concussive force, a few thousand pieces spraying inward in the hundreds of seconds afterward, the continuous pek-pek-pek of glass falling like machine-gun fire.

  Gaby looked up in time to see Hendricks, the collaborator on the platform across the front doors from her, making the mistake of staying upright as the chaos began. He was still staring, slack-jawed, when a massive chunk of the landing strip smashed through the window, snapping the iron bars as if they were candy. Hendricks realized his mistake too late, and the piece of concrete pummeled him as he attempted to turn and flee. He sailed across the room and fell, landing in a grotesque pile not far from Patterson’s body.

  Mason, on the same platfor
m as Hendricks, proved to be smarter. He was already pressed into the metal grates when Hendricks was struck. The collaborator glanced up and they locked eyes for a moment, and he might have actually even grinned at her.

  She mouthed back a curse when another series of explosions tore through the world and the entire building thrummed in the aftermath of what sounded like a dozen bombs going off at once. The glass on the other side of the hangar shattered, pelting Lucas and the other collaborator as they made a run for the office in the back. Lucas caught a flying shard the size of Gaby’s arm in the thigh, the sharp, bloody point jutting out the front. The big man roared, so loud that she could actually hear him over the end of the world.

  Gaby watched Lucas grab the chunk of glass sticking out behind him, and she wanted to shout at him to Stop, you idiot, you’re only going to make it worse, but she didn’t. Not that Lucas would have heard her over the maelstrom of destruction outside the hangar walls anyway. Lucas somehow managed to get a firm grip with both hands despite having to twist around at the waist, and began pulling. Blood gushed and Lucas let out another monstrous roar, but this time it was entirely lost against the nightmarish brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt of an A-10 unleashing death from above.

  She stared at Lucas, unable to look away, when hands grabbed her right arm and a familiar voice shouted very close to her ear, “Come on; we gotta get down from here before this whole building collapses!”

  It was Danny, dragging her up to her feet, having to do almost all the work because she was still stunned by the sight of Lucas stumbling around below her, obscenely spraying blood onto the floor. She finally came to her senses and struggled to her feet even as Danny began pulling her toward the catwalk.

  “Nate!” she shouted.

  Nate was picking himself up behind her, grabbing at the railing for support as another massive explosion boomed! through the fields outside. “Go!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

  She turned and followed Danny as he hopped down the steps two, then three at a time. She thought she was going to trip at least a dozen times on the way down, but somehow—miraculously—managed to maintain her balance all the way—

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

  Her whole body shivered at the sound, as if the devil itself was touching her on the shoulders. It was indescribable, at once terrorizing and innocuous. But she knew it was far from innocent. She had seen what a Thunderbolt’s cannon could do.

  T29. Four hundred souls.

  “Go go go!” Nate shouted from behind her, the clang-clang-clang of his boots breaking through her useless thoughts.

  As the last few catwalk steps rushed up at her, a piece of the room disappeared, and something fast and large hit the floor in front of her and dug a gaping hole as it burrowed deep. A stray round, she realized, from an A-10’s 30mm cannon. Even as she processed that information, a second and third round punched through one of the thick front doors as if it were little more than papier-mâché. Seeing it do that, with so little effort, made her grimace at what it could do to the human body.

  She jumped the last few feet and landed in a crouch next to Patterson’s body, her boots splashing in a pool of his drying blood. A few hours ago that might have made her queasy, but at the moment all she could think about was, Run run run!

  Danny was already racing across the hangar toward the office at the far end. She wanted to ask him what was the point, because those walls weren’t going to stand up against the Warthog’s main gun if it decided to strafe them again. Certainly it wouldn’t do a hell lot of good if the building itself came tumbling down—

  “Help me!” someone shrieked, and Gaby spun around in time to see Lucas leaning against the back wall, one meaty hand clutching his thigh. Small streams of blood poured between his fingers and his face was impossibly pale.

  “Gaby!” Nate, coming up fast behind her, grabbed her arm. “Go go go!”

  He pulled her toward the office, but she couldn’t stop looking back at Lucas. The other collaborator who had been with him had disappeared, was maybe lost somewhere in the rubble—

  A thunderous boom!, just before Lucas disappeared as a piece of the building crashed down from above, burying the big man in a few hundred pieces of what used to be the roof. Cold air swamped inside, but she was too busy being terrified to feel it at the moment.

  “Gaby, come on!” Nate shouted, pulling her forward.

  It won’t do any good, she thought. The office won’t do any good. Why can’t you guys see that? But she was too busy stumbling, trying to keep up with Nate as he pulled her toward the office by the hand as if she were a lost child.

  Danny was already at the door, holding it open with one hand. “Come on, lovebirds! Suck face later!”

  She was halfway to Danny when a flurry of movement made her glance to her right just as Mason nearly cannonballed down the catwalk stairs, clinging to the railing as the building trembled with every explosion—

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  The sound caused Gaby’s legs to weaken, and she wobbled as she lunged through the open office door and kept going. Her forward momentum carried her all the way to the far wall, and she had to stick out both hands to keep from smashing into the ugly peeling paint.

  Nate crashed against the wallpaper beside her, his blue eyes seeking hers out immediately. “You okay?”

  She nodded silently, too afraid of what might come out if she tried opening her mouth to speak. Her legs were still shaking, her arms trembling, and for some reason her teeth were chattering, even though she knew it wasn’t from the cold pouring into the building through the large gaping holes all over the hangar.

  “Fuck!” someone shouted at the same time a black form slid along the floor and slammed into the wall next to her in a heap. Mason.

  Gaby ignored him and looked back at Danny as he slammed the door shut (Yeah, that’s going to do it, Danny, that’s going to keep the building from falling on top of us), then hurried over to the windows and pushed one, then the other down.

  Danny even took the extra few seconds to flick the locks on both windows into place before stepping back. “Just in case,” he said, grinning at her and Nate.

  She managed to smile back, even though she didn’t know how or why.

  Danny flattened his back against the wall to her right at the same time they heard another plane (Or was it the same one? How many did Mercer have flying around out there tonight?) slashing by above them, even louder now that there was a giant hole (Holes?) in the roof.

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

  Pieces of the office ceiling tore free and fell around her feet just as the hangar let out a groan that seemed to be coming from every inch of its foundation.

  She became aware of something moving outside the windows and glanced over in time to see the last of Mason’s collaborators—the same one who had been with Lucas—running toward them, even as different sections of the roof continued to collapse around him. The man reached out a hand toward the windows—toward her—just before he was sucked under a cascade of beams and shiny metal. A cloud of dust flooded against the windows, covering the glass in sheets of metallic gray.

  Gaby wished she could have said she felt sorry for him, but that would have been a lie. He was the enemy; had been, for the last year or so of her life after The Purge. After losing so much—Will, Josh—and with so much more at risk, she didn’t have the strength to care what happened to a man whose name she didn’t even know.

  She looked up and saw the night sky, visible through the jagged opening where a large part of the roof used to be. It was a clear night with barely any clouds, and there was plenty of moonlight to see with. She marveled at the sight, feeling strangely calm, when the belly of a plane appeared and disappeared half a heartbeat later, and she braced herself for what she knew would come next.

  Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

  My God, that sound. That sound!

  “Well, this isn’t going well,” Danny said, his voice slightly m
ore haggard than she was used to hearing even in all the previous life-and-death situations they had found themselves in.

  A hand—Nate’s—wrapped around hers. She was startled by the sudden contact, but the warmth of his fingers, squeezing her numbed (and cold) ones, was a welcoming feeling. His face was covered in sweat and dirt and blood, and she thought about asking where the blood came from, but he looked okay, or at least unharmed, and his smile was convincing enough that she didn’t.

  They slid down the wall and sat on the floor, Danny doing the same to her right. Mason had scurried over to his own corner, his eyes darting to the ceiling as it continued to creak and groan against the continued onslaught outside. Maybe like her, he was waiting for it to break apart and come crashing down and put an end to everything. Maybe, she thought, that might be for the best…

  “Danny,” Nate said. “I saw parachutes. Outside, when one of the Warthogs made its pass.”

  Danny wiped at a small trickle of blood dripping from his hairline before cleaning his palm on his pants. “Cluster bombs. The A-10s are dropping them like leaking piñatas out there.”

  “Where the hell would they get something like that?”

  “Probably secured them the same time they did the planes. Why not, right? Everything’s just sitting around in hangars like this one. But, you know, still in one piece.”

  Gaby listened to them while focusing on the windows across the room. Even with the thick layer of crushed cement caking the glass panes, she could see enough to know the walls were still standing. A large swath of moonlight lit up the beams and bent steel sheets that had come tumbling down. Somewhere underneath all that was Lucas and the other guy. A part of her accepted that they both had it coming; they were sellouts to the human race, after all. And yet, there was the lingering old Gaby who felt sorry for them, who hoped they hadn’t suffered at the very end—

  Something fell out of the sky and bounced against a section of the fallen roof, then slipped and slid almost comically, bony arms and legs flailing out of control, before finally landing in a pile on the floor. There was so much moonlight that she had no problem at all seeing its pruned black skin and domed head as it straightened up and turned, sensing their presence. Sensing her presence.