The Gates of Byzantium (The Babylon Series, Book 2) Read online

  But the bloodsucker kept coming, and coming…

  Josh finally spotted the prying bar. It had slid underneath the metal shelf. He dived to the floor and stuck his hand underneath and grabbed the bar and pulled it out. He was back on his feet again, turning, just in time to see Matt letting out another wild scream as the bloodsucker clamped down on his left arm with its teeth and blood splattered again. Thick, bright red blood.

  Matt’s.

  Matt, in a fit of rage, dropped the bat and grabbed the creature and pried the undead thing off his left hand with impossible brute strength.

  My God, he’s strong.

  The bloodsucker stumbled back and obscenely licked the corners of its mouth with a long, reptilian tongue. Most of its lower jaw was covered in blood.

  “Fucker!” Matt shouted, and scrambled for his bat.

  The bloodsucker looked back at him with dead, pale eyes and kept licking at the blood coating its mouth. It wasn’t paying attention to Josh at all, and Josh took the moment to rush forward and thwack! got the bloodsucker in the back of the head. The blow sent it stumbling to the floor. Josh thought he might have even heard the creature’s skull breaking into a million pieces when he landed the blow, but when the bloodsucker lifted its head and looked back at him, utter annoyance on its face, Josh wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “Fucker!” Matt screamed again, attacking, swinging a mighty blow that caught the creature in the face.

  The Herculean strike obliterated the creature’s nose—or what was left of it, which wasn’t very much. The bloodsucker stumbled backward, dazed by the blow, reminding Josh of a drunk. It eventually lost its footing and tumbled to the floor as its feet came undone underneath it. It wasn’t dead, but it was hurt. It was still trying to get back up when Matt stood over it and began smashing the bat down into its face.

  Over and over and over again, all the while shouting, “Fucker! You fucker!”

  Josh was suddenly very sick as he watched Matt turn the bloodsucker’s head into squishy pulp, a puddle of thick black blood (God, that looks like Jell-O) that now coated every inch of the aluminum baseball bat. And Matt was still swinging, still raining blows down on what was left of the head, even though there wasn’t much left of the head at all.

  Josh thought about telling Matt to stop, that the bloodsucker was dead, but that wasn’t true. Even with its head bashed in and nothing left but something that resembled ground beef, the creature’s arms and legs were still moving. Then the creature’s hands groped at Matt’s legs.

  Matt felt the tugging and finally seemed to snap out of his momentary insanity. He stopped swinging and staggered back, pulling himself free from the bony hands. The creature was already starting to stand up again, and Josh and Matt found themselves staring, wide-eyed, more shocked than afraid at the moment, as the bloodsucker pulled itself back up to its feet. It did this, even as lumps of flesh and blood and what was left of its head flopped down to the floor around it in thick, disgustingly messy clumps of flesh and bone and muscle.

  “Matt,” Josh heard himself say. “I think we should go.”

  Matt looked over at him and Josh thought Matt was going to scream “No!”, that he wanted to finish this, but instead Josh saw fear in Matt’s eyes. “Yeah,” Matt said, and stumbled toward the open door.

  Josh hurried after him and they staggered their way back into the bright store, back to safety.

  Matt was out of breath, his chest heaving. Josh’s heart was pounding at a thousand beats a second, and he didn’t think he remembered how to breathe. They didn’t bother to pick up Matt’s backpack, stuffed with bags of chips and unopened beef jerky sticks. They also stepped over a plastic bag filled with warm Gatorade and water bottles, its contents spilled out on the floor.

  Josh didn’t know why, but he looked back, and saw the bloodsucker—or what was left of it—standing just inside the darkness of the back room, “looking” after them. Though of course it couldn’t really look anymore. Its eyes were gone, along with its entire face, now pooled on the floor behind it in a puddle. Pieces of skin and what remained of its head hung grotesquely behind its body like a hoodie, something it could pick up and pull back on.

  The creature didn’t come out of the back room. It stayed in the shadows, beyond the open door, just beyond the reach of the stretching sunlight. Josh knew the creature would die if it stepped into the sun rays. He had seen it happen. Watching the bloodsuckers vaporize before his eyes in sunlight, leaving behind only piles of bones, had been almost as surreal as realizing that the world as he knew it was gone for good.

  Josh stared back at the creature, or as much as you could stare back at something that didn’t have eyes or a head anymore. It was a sight he would never forget, and it occupied his entire world, even with Matt wheezing next to him, bleeding all over the sidewalk as they stumbled out into the bright, sweltering Texas heat.

  “Oh God, oh God. It bit me, Josh, it fucking bit me!” Matt said. “Oh God, what’s going to happen, Josh? What’s going to happen to me?”

  CHAPTER 2

  BLAINE

  “THIS IS SOME kind of bullshit right here,” Deeks said.

  Blaine laughed and tried to blink away the sweat dripping into his eyes. It was hot, but hot meant day, and day was good. “You always say that.”

  “This time I’m right.”

  “You always say that, too.” Blaine finished cranking the jack until he had the Jeep high enough to pull out the blown tire. “Grab the spare, old man.”

  Deeks grunted and walked back to the Jeep, slinging the Mossberg shotgun over his shoulder. Blaine carried a similar Mossberg model, except his didn’t have the elaborate camouflage pattern of Deeks’s.

  Blaine pulled off the flat tire, careful to avoid the big metal chunk sticking out like a sword, sharp enough to cleave his flesh from his bone without effort. It looked like something from a car, probably shredded in some kind of high-speed accident. The tire blew almost immediately after running it over, and it was a miracle they didn’t careen off the road and into the ditch the way the steering wheel was fighting him.

  It was stupid, and all his fault. He was going too fast. Fifty miles per hour on a road filled with debris, cars, and God knew what else, was a stupid way to travel. He should have known better, but the road down here, far from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, opened up, and there were so few cars that he had let it lull him into a sense of security.

  He heard footsteps and looked over at Sandra, walking back toward them along the flat, empty road. She played with her blonde hair, cut short to combat the smothering Texas heat.

  She smiled at him, the sun glinting off deep green eyes. “Look at you staring. Like you’ve never seen a pair of tits before.”

  “You know I can’t help it.”

  “Of course not. That’s the point. Or points.” She put her hands on her hips and posed for him. She wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt that was probably a size too small. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Sandra said, clapping her hands for effect. “Vamos, amigos!”

  Blaine tossed her a crooked grin. Sandra was probably the whitest person he knew, but she liked to throw in some Español every now and then for his benefit. Not that she knew more than a few words.

  “We’d be done by now if this asshole would hurry up,” Blaine said.

  Deeks grunted and rolled the spare tire over, his face glistening with sweat. He stood back to catch his breath. Deeks was only about fifty years old, but those were hard, city years. His eyes drooped, and Blaine sometimes wondered how much longer the old man would last out here.

  “Where are we?” Sandra asked, looking around them.

  “About ten miles out of Lancing,” Blaine said.

  “What’s in Lancing?”

  “Hell if I know. We’ll grab whatever supplies we can, then keep on trucking down south.”

  “‘Keep on trucking?’”

  “What, you don’t think a Mexican knows what ‘keep on trucking’ means?�
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  “Half-Mexican,” she corrected him.

  He grinned. That was technically true, but he had the dark complexion, and one look at him and all anyone ever saw was “Mexican.” He never corrected them, because it didn’t matter. Blaine was always good about taking what God gave him and running with it. Like the end of the world. While people were getting turned and eaten, Blaine was surviving. He was good at that, too.

  “Correctamundo,” Blaine said.

  “That’s definitely not proper Spanish.”

  “Close enough.”

  Blaine was halfway to putting the lug nuts back into place over the spare tire when he felt the road underneath him tremble slightly. It came from behind them, back up the highway. Approaching vehicles.

  Blaine quickly spun the fifth lug nut into place and tossed the crank into the back of the Jeep, then unwound the jack. When all four of the Jeep’s tires were touching the asphalt road again, Blaine stood up and unslung the Mossberg.

  Deeks glanced over. “What is it?”

  “Cars coming down the road,” Blaine said.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You can’t feel them?”

  “No.”

  “Damn, you’re old.”

  Deeks grunted back.

  “I hear them,” Sandra said.

  She walked over to stand beside Blaine. She was a foot shorter than him, even in boots that gave her an extra three or four inches. But then, most people were short next to Blaine. Sandra wore a gun holster with a .32 Smith and Wesson in it. She put her hand on the handle of the revolver now, her body stiffening noticeably, the way it always did when she was scared.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

  She looked over at him and tried to smile, but it came out badly.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said again.

  “What’s happening?” Deeks said, nervously unslinging his Mossberg.

  Three vehicles, little more than black dots, materialized out of thin air down the flat road behind them.

  Blaine quickly went over his options.

  They could take off now in the fixed Jeep, try to outrun them. But if they decided to pursue, then what? Sooner or later, they would have to stop and seek shelter for the night. That was the problem. Sooner or later, they always had to stop for the night…

  Blaine glanced at his watch: 4:16 P.M.

  They were cutting it too close. It was June, and summer in Texas meant 8:15 P.M. sunsets. That was four hours away. Usually that was more than enough time to look for shelter, but the flat tire had thrown his schedule out of whack.

  “Who are they?” Sandra asked.

  “I don’t know,” Blaine said.

  “What do we do?” Deeks asked anxiously.

  “Jeep’s fixed,” Sandra said. “Maybe we should go before they reach us?”

  Blaine shook his head. “They’ve already seen us. They’d just follow.”

  “So just stand here and say hi?”

  “Maybe they’re friendlies,” Deeks said.

  Like the last three groups we ran into? Blaine thought, but said instead, “Maybe. But grab the rifles anyway, just to be safe.”

  Deeks came back with two AR-15 assault rifles. He tossed one rifle and a spare magazine across the Jeep to Blaine. Blaine stuffed the extra mag into one of his cargo pants pockets.

  “Do you really think we’re going to need those?” Sandra asked.

  “Just to be safe,” Blaine said.

  “Never hurts to show them we have firepower, darling,” Deeks said.

  “I know, but still,” Sandra said. “It might give them the wrong impression.”

  “Deeks is right,” Blaine said. “Show of force.”

  Blaine watched the vehicles get larger as they drew closer. The road was a four-lane highway, flat and low to the ground. A thick wall of trees separated the north- and southbound lanes, and there was green wherever you looked, with woods to both the east and the west. It was a long, flat corridor, with the road extending north-south for miles.

  Out of the blue, Blaine caught a whiff of Sandra’s perfume settling in the air next to him. Chanel something that had been sitting around in an expensive mall in Kilgore. They had found a lot of useful stuff there, which was why both Sandra and Deeks had hated to leave.

  Blaine could make out a Jeep moving up the road. It looked similar to the one they were driving, moving at the front of what looked like a mini caravan. A GMC SUV and a Ford F-150 truck trailed the Jeep. Blaine would know those vehicles anywhere. Gas guzzlers. He hoped the people driving them at least had hand cranks for siphoning gas, because they probably had to do a lot of gassing up on a regular basis to keep those two monsters on the road.

  But he hadn’t seen anything yet. Coming up behind the first three vehicles was the towering cab of a big rig, pulling a large trailer behind it.

  Jesus, where do they find the diesel to run that monster?

  He felt Sandra tightening up next to him. He reached over and squeezed her hand. She smiled back, putting on a brave face he easily saw through. Sandra didn’t scare easy, but she was scared now.

  “It’ll be okay,” Blaine said. “Just follow my lead.”

  “Okay.”

  “Deeks,” Blaine called.

  The older man glanced back at him. “Yeah?”

  “Get back here.”

  Deeks had absent-mindedly wandered twenty yards up the road, and he quickly jogged back to the Jeep. By the time he reached them, he was huffing and puffing, his cheeks flushed red, sweat caking his forehead.

  “Go to the front of the Jeep,” Blaine said.

  Deeks nodded and hurried over to stand behind the hood of the Jeep.

  “Shouldn’t we get back there, too?” Sandra said.

  “You should. I’ll stay here. I don’t want to give them the impression we’re afraid of them.”

  “But we are.”

  “They don’t have to know that, babe.”

  Blaine listened to the sound of Sandra’s cowboy boots as she hurried back down the length of the Jeep. Blaine remained standing where he was, near the rear tire. He unslung the Mossberg and put it on top of the Jeep, making sure the handle was turned toward him for an easy grab. Shoot-outs weren’t something Blaine knew a lot about, but he wasn’t a total idiot.

  He spent the next few seconds checking the AR-15’s magazine. If the shit hit the fan, he would unload with the rifle, then switch over to the Mossberg as a last resort. He wasn’t exactly the best shot in the world, but the simple red dot sight on top of the rifle helped with accuracy. Mostly. If all else failed, he would make up in quantity what he lacked in quality.

  The three vehicles were fifty yards away now, and Blaine could just make out two men in the front seat of the Jeep. His initial instincts about the Jeep had been correct—it was an older, more beat-up model of theirs. Blaine looked past the Jeep at the GMC. The front windshield was tinted, and so was the F-150’s. He was sure there was more than one person in both trucks. Counting the two in the Jeep, that made at least six people.

  At least.

  The vehicles finally came to a stop forty yards up the road. First the Jeep, then the two trucks. The big rig was next, stopping behind the other three vehicles, its brakes squealing loudly, the highway groaning underneath its efforts. They turned off their engines, and Blaine saw the man in the passenger seat of the Jeep talking into a radio. Blaine was too far away to hear anything, but he could make out the man’s large shock of white hair.

  “Blaine?” Sandra said behind him. “Maybe you should come back here with us…”

  “I’ll be okay,” Blaine said. “Just stay calm and follow my lead.”

  The man with white hair stood up in the Jeep, waved over at them, then shouted, “Hello over there! You folks have car trouble?”

  “Not anymore!” Blaine shouted back.

  “I’m coming over,” the man said, and started to climb out of the Jeep.

  “Not necessary!”


  The man didn’t seem to have heard him. Or if he did, he didn’t care, because he climbed down to the road anyway.

  Shit.

  The man with white hair began walking toward him. He wore a sweat-stained white T-shirt, cargo pants, and a gun belt with the holster tied low around his right leg like some kind of gunfighter’s rig. Blaine thought that was amusing, but not enough that he cracked a smile. Instead, he scowled at the guy, hoping to intimidate him into stopping.

  It didn’t work, and the man with white hair kept coming.

  “Maybe he didn’t hear you?” Sandra asked nervously behind him.

  “He heard me,” Blaine said.

  “This is trouble right here, Blaine,” Deeks said.

  Tell me something I don’t know, old-timer.

  “That’s far enough,” Blaine shouted, even though he didn’t have to.

  The man stopped twenty yards away. Closer now, the white hair looked more pronounced, like a dye job. How could hair be that white? The man looked to be in his fifties, but it was hard to tell with all the white hair.

  “What’s with the hostility?” the man asked.

  “I don’t know you,” Blaine said.

  “And I don’t know you. But that’s no need for all this aggressive behavior.”

  “Sorry. But it’s a dangerous world out here.”

  “That’s true. Which is why we’re offering help. Nice Jeep, by the way.”

  “Yours don’t look so bad.”

  The guy looked back at his Jeep. “Not as nice as yours. Got a lot of wear and tear on it. You folks came out of Dallas?”

  “Around there, yeah.”

  “Us, too. Took a while to get down here. Looks like it’s the same for you guys. Dangerous out there, especially at night. But that’s why we’re together.” He indicated the mini-caravan behind him. “Safety in numbers.”

  “We’re doing just fine on our own.”

  “We have supplies. Maybe we can trade. I’m sure we have something you might need, and I’m sure you have something we might want.”