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

  After Will and Danny came back from their early scouting run, they left again with Josh in tow. That left Lara with Carly, Gaby, and the girls. The time away from the men always gave her other things to do, like keep up with hygiene. She and Carly had amassed an impressive crate with nothing but feminine products over the months, something Gaby gleefully attacked, having gone without most of them for so long.

  Gaby was brushing her teeth with a battery-powered electric toothbrush in the basement bathroom when Lara found her. They had cleaned as much of the bathroom as they could—or as much as humanly possible. Even if they left the church tomorrow, at least they could enjoy the bathroom now. Lara and Carly had learned to carve out as much of the old world as they could, even if it was just for a few days—or in some cases, a few hours. You had to make do with the simple pleasures, or else the long days and nights wouldn’t be worth it.

  “Are you and Josh having sex?” Lara asked Gaby.

  The teenager almost choked on the toothbrush, eliciting a smile from Lara.

  Gaby quickly washed and rinsed out the toothpaste into the sink with bottled water. Lara thought her cheeks were flushed red. “God, no.”

  “Oh, I thought… Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.” Something else occurred to her, and she asked, hesitantly, “You’re not…?”

  Gaby giggled. “No, I’m not that, either.”

  “Josh?”

  “I don’t know. You think?”

  “Well, if you’re not having sex with him, then I’m guessing probably.”

  Gaby leaned against the sink and seemed to think about it. “We never talked about it. It never occurred to me to even think of him in that way. I always just thought of him as more of a little brother.”

  “He’s not that little, Gaby.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “I know he likes me. That’s obvious. I just don’t know how I feel about him, you know, in that way.”

  “You wanna know what he thinks?”

  She laughed. “He’s a guy, Lara. I know what he thinks.”

  Lara smiled, too. She could imagine how popular Gaby had been back in high school. The tall and athletic frame, the better-than-average breasts, and the long blonde hair. She must have driven the boys crazy and made the girls nuts.

  “Just in case,” Lara said. She took out a small white-and-blue box from her back pocket and handed it to Gaby.

  “The patch?” Gaby said, taking the box.

  “Just in case. It’s easier to use than the Pill, and stopping everything to pull out a condom might not be very romantic.”

  The Ortho Evra Patch, otherwise known to women everywhere as “the patch,” was a contraceptive device placed on the body that released estrogen and progestin. It did one thing and did it well—it prevented unwanted pregnancies. Lara and Carly had been using it for a while now, because the patch was more efficient than the Pill, which required daily dosage and didn’t last quite as long. One patch was good for an entire week, and you didn’t need it for the fourth week during your period. They usually found them by the packs in drug stores, probably because, Lara guessed, contraceptives weren’t in high demand at the end of the world.

  “Were you sexually active before?” she asked the teenager.

  “A few guys,” Gaby said. “I wasn’t a slut or anything.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. God, I hope you didn’t think I meant it that way.”

  “It’s cool,” Gaby said. She opened the box and pulled out the two-inch, peach-pink squares. “My mom got me the Pill when I was sixteen.”

  “So, you haven’t had sex since…?”

  “Just once. With Matt, and it was only the one time when I was on my period.”

  Lara knew about Matt, a young man who had traveled with Gaby and Josh after The Purge. He was gone—turned, according to Josh, when one of the ghouls bit him.

  “That was smart,” Lara said. “Waiting for your period.”

  “I’m not as airheaded as people think.”

  “You never struck me as being an airhead, Gaby.”

  “No?”

  “You’ve survived eight months in…this. I think you’re anything but an airhead.”

  “Thanks.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easier to let people think that about me. When people think you’re not very bright, they don’t expect a lot from you.” She grinned. “And I can get away with more.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “Shhh,” Gaby said, putting a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  Gaby tucked the box into her back pocket. “You think I should? With Josh?”

  “I don’t know the two of you well enough to say either way. What do you think? Do you like him?”

  “I do. I just never thought of him in that way. How did it work out for you and Will?”

  “It took a while.”

  “How long?”

  “About three months. Things were a little hazy back then.”

  “Josh and I have been hiding together for eight months. He’s a really good guy.” She smiled, and Lara could tell she genuinely liked Josh. “And he hasn’t tried anything. Ever. Which is really cool of him.”

  “He does look like a good guy.”

  “He is.”

  “Besides, it’s slim pickings out there.”

  “Yeah, getting slimmer every day.” Gaby made a face. “Then again, it’s easy for you and Carly to say. Your men are hot.”

  Lara laughed. “They are, aren’t they?”

  “What about Will?” Gaby said, grinning mischievously. “Wanna share him?”

  “I bet I know what his answer would be if I asked him.”

  “Men.”

  “Yeah, men,” Lara smiled back.

  Gaby was about to respond when they both heard a loud bang from above them—from the church.

  “Stay here!” Lara shouted.

  Gaby stared back at her, frozen in place.

  Lara was already running. She snatched up the Remington leaning against the bottom of the stairs without ever breaking stride. She climbed the stairs, taking the steps two—then somehow, three—at a time, when she heard screaming (Elise!) and what sounded like male voices, shouting. She couldn’t make out the words, but as she took the last step and burst out onto the chancel, she braced herself for the worst case scenario.

  She saw, in the blink of an eye, the girls and Carly, hiding behind one of the pews in the center of the nave. The girls were stricken with terror, an image that seared itself into Lara’s soul. Carly didn’t have her shotgun, her Remington leaning against a pew well beyond her reach. Hearing Lara coming up from the basement, Carly looked up, and the other woman pointed desperately to her left, at the hallway that led to the side door and connected to the parking lot.

  Lara turned just as a man emerged out of the connecting hallway, his head appearing from behind a post with a round knob at the top. He was tall and thin, with a large shock of white hair, and he was aiming an AK-47 assault rifle in Carly’s direction.

  The man with white hair shouted, “Stay down! Don’t do anything stupid!”

  Lara racked the shotgun, the loud sound drawing the man’s attention. He turned and saw her and dived back into the hallway just as Lara fired, obliterating the post and cratering the wall in the spot where the man had stood just a second ago.

  She heard but didn’t see the man shout, “Fuck!”

  Lara quickly grabbed the doors to the basement and looked down and saw Gaby at the bottom of the steps. “Stay inside!” Lara shouted, and slammed both doors shut. Without the extra lumber Will and Danny had put on the doors last night, the doors were easy to swing.

  She looked up as a second man—tall, with a thick neck and bald head—ran out of the hallway. He also had an AK-47, and he spun and saw her and opened fire, and Lara leaped to the floor as the podium in front of her splintered into a thousand pieces. She scrambled up and ran for cover, thin slivers of wood whipping around her like bullets.r />
  I’ll never make it. I’ll never make it!

  She threw herself forward, diving headfirst into the choir section, landing on the back of her neck. Lara swore she had snapped her spine, but when she could still scramble back up to a sitting position behind the thick wooded wall that separated the choir from the chancel, she realized she was still in one piece. Barely.

  She had two seconds to rejoice before the man began firing again, bullets chopping through the panel. Lara lunged flat against the floor, her face pressed into the dust-covered carpet as the man kept firing and firing, stitching the barrier above her in a ragged line, probably hoping to hit her if she had begun crawling away. She hadn’t, but he didn’t know that.

  Lara grabbed the radio from her hip and shouted into it, hoping someone could hear her over the vicious sound of assault rifle fire and shearing wood: “Will! We’re under attack! Two men with assault rifles!”

  “We’re coming,” Will said through the radio, in that calm voice of his that both soothed and annoyed her. “ETA ten minutes.”

  Then she heard, in the background of the radio, Danny’s voice: “Five minutes.”

  “Five minutes,” Will repeated. “Hold on, we’re coming.”

  “Hurry!”

  Lara dropped the radio as the last bullet punched through the wooded panel behind her. She heard clacking sounds and knew they were reloading.

  Five minutes?

  Then she heard gunshots, and to her amazement, knew they were from a Glock handgun, coming from the other side of the church. The old Lara would never have known something like that. But the new Lara, who had spent hours and days and weeks learning to shoot with Carly and Will and Danny, knew what a Glock sounded like.

  Carly!

  She heard the AK-47s firing back, and suddenly the Glock stopped shooting. Lara thought she could even hear the sound of wood crumbling under the unrelenting assault, and even through that, screaming.

  The girls!

  Lara took a breath and stood up and saw, in a heartbeat, the two men: the man with white hair and with the one with the bald head—standing near the base of the chancel, calmly firing into the nave, their bullets smashing into the pews Carly and the girls were hiding behind. Lara saw flashes of clothes and hair—Elise and Vera, on the floor, hands thrown over their heads, screaming at the top of their lungs as wood splintered around them.

  Stay brave, girls, stay brave.

  The man closest to her, the bald one, must have sensed her, and he began turning around. Lara shot him from ten yards away and watched the top portion of his body, including his face, turn into a bloody red pulp.

  The man with the white hair spun around and opened fire. Lara had to drop back behind the choir section, what was left of the wooded panel barrier exploding into chunks around her, pelting her hair and clothes and arms with sharp, stinging wooden spikes. Lara clutched the shotgun, refusing to let go, sliding the fore end back and forward to load another shell into the chamber.

  Five minutes, Will? You’ve got to be kidding me!

  She heard the Glock shooting again, interrupting the seemingly never-ending volley of AK-47 fire. Then the man with white hair shouted, “God, shit!” and he stopped firing, but the Glock kept shooting.

  Lara peered through a big hole blasted in the wooden paneling and saw the man with white hair running away, dragging one leg behind him. He was bleeding, blood gushing out of his right leg from a gunshot wound. It looked bad.

  Must have hit an artery.

  The man was dodging bullets and moving and trying to reload his AK-47 at the same time. Sections of the hallway around him were being chipped away by nonstop gunfire from the nave. He looked as if he was in shock, and she almost felt sorry for him. He finally gave up on the rifle and tossed it away, then lunged into the hallway, leaving a thick trail of blood behind him.

  Lara pushed herself up from the floor, shaking loose pieces of wood from her hair, and stood up slowly, cautiously. She saw Carly across the nave, shooting after the man with white hair. Carly had stepped out from behind the pew and was unloading shot after shot after shot, looking as calm as Lara had ever seen her.

  You go, girl.

  Elise and Vera were still hiding behind the pew—or what was left of it—their bodies pressed against the floor. They had stopped screaming. A dozen or more of the pews around them were shredded with bullets. It was a miracle all three were still alive.

  Carly finally stopped shooting, but only because her magazine was empty. She slapped in a fresh one and jerked back the slide. She glanced down the hall, but there must not have been any targets, because she finally looked over as Lara climbed out of the choir section, shotgun aimed at the hallway.

  “Are you okay?” Carly shouted across at her.

  “I’m okay,” Lara shouted back.

  There was debris all over the floor, and she felt pieces of the altar and podium crunching under her boots.

  “Lara, you’re bleeding!” Carly shouted.

  “What?”

  Lara looked down at herself, but couldn’t find any blood. She looked higher, at her chest, shoulders—until she felt small drips of wetness against her left arm. There were thin rivulets of blood washing down her arm, all the way to her fingertips. She was surprised she was bleeding, because she didn’t feel any pain at all.

  When did that happen?

  She had apparently been bleeding for a while, leaving behind a thin trail of blood all the way from the choir section. She sat down heavily on the carpeted floor and laid the shotgun down next to her, within easy reach in case the man with white hair came back. Her vision blurred a bit, but she managed to look away from her bloodied fingers and over to the man lying awkwardly on the steps in front of her. She remembered he was bald and had a large, meaty neck, but she wouldn’t have known all those things now because there was just a big splotchy red mess where his head used to be.

  So that’s what a shotgun blast at close range does to the human body.

  She became aware of Carly crouching next to her, holding her up because she had lain down at some point. “Oh shit, you’re such a bleeder, Lara,” Carly said, her voice somewhere between panic and laughter.

  “It’s okay,” Lara heard herself say. “Bullet went clean through, I think. You just have to clean the wound and wrap it up and I’ll be fine. It’s okay,” she said again, unable to take her eyes away from the dead man in front of her.

  Two. That’s two people I’ve killed now.

  There was loud popping gunfire from outside the building, and she instinctively reached for the shotgun. But she couldn’t find it. Someone must have taken it. Or had she left it somewhere else?

  She opened her mouth to tell Carly that she couldn’t find her weapon, that the man with white hair was coming back and Carly had to be ready to fight him off again, but nothing came out. Instead, she felt extremely tired, and despite her best efforts, Lara closed her eyes and lost consciousness.

  *

  WILL WAS SMILING down at her when she opened her eyes. There was a throbbing in her left arm, a mixture of pain and an itch she desperately longed to scratch.

  I thought getting shot would hurt a bit more.

  “Five minutes,” Will said. “You couldn’t have waited five minutes?”

  She smiled up at him. “What happened to the other guy? The one with the white hair?”

  “He met us in the parking lot.”

  “And…?”

  “And that was it.”

  “Oh.”

  “How does it feel?” he asked.

  “How does what feel?”

  “To get shot.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve never been shot before.”

  “But you’ve been to war.”

  “I have.”

  “And you’ve never been shot?”

  “Never. I guess I’ve just been really lucky.”

  “Good for you.” She tried to sit up, and her entire body exploded with sensati
ons she didn’t think were possible and never ever wanted to feel again.

  Oh, so there’s the pain.

  Will helped her lean back against the basement wall. Someone had cut away her shirt’s left sleeve and wrapped the wound with gauze tape, and she was wearing a makeshift sling using materials from two different-colored shirts.

  “You did this?” she asked.

  “I cleaned it, sutured the wound, and wrapped you back up,” he smiled. “I’m no third-year medical student, but I think I did all right.”

  “You did fine as long as I’m not bleeding to death.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “But did you have to mutilate my shirt, too? Do you know how hard it is to find good shirts in the post-apocalypse?”

  “Sorry.” He sat on the floor next to her, hands over his knees, watching her closely.

  He wants to make sure I’m fine.

  “I want a new shirt,” she said.

  “I’ll take you shopping once we get to Beaumont.”

  “When are we going to Beaumont?”

  “As soon as you can stand up.”

  “I thought we were staying here for a while.”

  “Lancing’s run its course. Too much bad mojo here.”

  “‘Bad mojo?’” She flashed him an amused grin. “First it’s cavorting at a park in psychic dreams with your ex-girlfriend, now it’s bad mojo? My, have we changed.”

  He laughed. “I can be pretty open-minded when given the chance. Besides, we all took a vote, and we decided to skedaddle, as Danny would say.”

  “I didn’t get a vote.”

  “I voted for you.”

  “How kind of you. Should I ask what I-slash-we voted for?”

  “You could, but it’s my constitutional right as an American not to tell you.”

  He was still watching her very closely, with that very serious look that told her he wasn’t going to be deterred.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I know. The bullet went clean through. You’ll be tap-dancing in a few days.”

  “I don’t know how to tap dance.”

  “You’ll be learning how to tap dance in a few days.”

  “Sounds good.” She sighed, then looked back at him, matching his serious gaze. “What is it?”