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

  “You should see the other side of the safe door,” Sandra said. “There’s black blood and slabs of flesh and…other things all over it. They must have been smashing into it long after I dozed off.”

  “They were.”

  “I wonder why they stopped.”

  “Losing battle. They’re not stupid.”

  “I guess not. There are bones everywhere outside.”

  “A lot?”

  She nodded. “How’s the pain?” she asked, watching his face closely.

  “Managing. The pills help.”

  “Don’t take too many of them. You’ll get addicted.”

  “It’s either addiction or death, babe.”

  “Not while I’m around.” She took the painkillers from him before he could protest and put them away in her pocket. “From now on, you’ll only take what you need, not what you think you need.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  She grunted. “I already lost you once. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose you again to some damn pills.”

  *

  SANDRA DROVE THE Toyota while Blaine rested in the passenger seat. They had a quarter tank of gas left, more than enough to get to Lancing and either find a new vehicle or siphon gas from another car. Blaine knew from experience that eventually the gasoline left behind in vehicles and stored underneath the gas stations would either evaporate or become unusable, but that was still a few years off. If they were still driving around Texas looking for sanctuary in a few years, gas was probably going to be the least of their worries.

  Sandra turned left off the driveway and put them back onto US 287 heading south toward Lancing. “You still think they’ll still be there?” she asked.

  “Unless they left for some reason,” he said.

  Blaine glanced at his watch: 1:17 P.M.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  He told her, adding, “We slept through half the day.”

  “God, no wonder I feel so good. I haven’t slept that well since all of this began. Did you guys ever find out whose house that was?”

  “I don’t think we ever looked, no.”

  “Too bad. It would have been nice to know who to thank. I saw some of the pictures. They looked like a nice family.”

  He nodded. All the family portraits he had seen in the past eight months had looked like nice families. But wasn’t that the point of a family portrait? Everyone dresses up in their best clothes and makes believe for the camera?

  Blaine found that if he thought about other things besides the rippling pain coursing through his body, he was able to endure it. Or at least, that’s what he told himself as he turned toward the window, pretending to look out at the passing scenery, when he was really hiding his grimace from Sandra.

  *

  BY THE TIME they reached Lancing, there were no signs of Will and the others. They went to the municipal area and checked the courthouse first. He couldn’t find signs anyone had spent the night, which meant they had either left the city yesterday—which was unlikely, given how cautious Will was with the others’ lives—or they had found another place.

  It was either one or the other, but it wasn’t like Blaine could track them. Lancing was a town of 12,000 people, with enough businesses and residential subdivisions that it would take weeks to search every house and building. He was also well aware they had, at most, five hours before it was time to look for shelter.

  They spent the first hour driving around town, sticking mostly to the main roads, because that’s what they guessed the others would have done. Sandra drove slowly, taking her time. After a while, they had to stop for gas, but instead of siphoning from another vehicle, they traded up to a four-door Chevrolet Silverado instead. The fact that the key was sticking out of the driver’s side floor and the tank was still three-quarters full made picking the Silverado a no-brainer.

  Blaine swapped the car batteries, and they were rolling down the windows and continuing along Main Street a few minutes later. The Silverado had a dozen country music CDs stuffed into the driver’s sun visor, and Blaine slipped George Strait’s Greatest Hits into the CD player, then cranked up the volume in hopes of attracting attention.

  After a while, Sandra slowed down and stopped the Silverado in the middle of the street.

  Blaine reached over and turned the volume down on George. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we’re not going to find them,” she said with a slight frown. “At least, not like this. Not just driving around.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I told you, I heard gunshots.”

  “Maybe we should try that.”

  “Gunshots?”

  He shrugged. “What do we have to lose?”

  “What if there are other people in the city besides them?”

  He thought about that for a moment, then lifted the AR-15 from the floor. “It’s either that or keep driving around aimlessly until we reach the highway. Then what, drive back again?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Sandra turned off the Silverado’s engine and they climbed outside. Blaine blinked under the sun and wasn’t sure if the heat or the pain was more annoying. He called it a tie and fought the urge to beg Sandra for his bottle of pills.

  Sandra had the shotgun, and she climbed up into the back of the Silverado’s flat bed and fired off three rounds into the air. She waited, then fired the remaining four shells. As the final thunderous blast echoed across the cloudless sky, she was already—urgently, he saw—reloading.

  She climbed down the Silverado and stood in the street next to him. They didn’t hear anything in response to the shotgun blasts except the sound of the wind and the fluttering of birds’ wings in the air. Blaine thought he might have heard a car engine in the distance, but after listening, realized it was just one of the metallic flagpole latches banging away.

  Blaine drew his Glock and fired three shots into the air. He stopped, waited ten seconds, then fired three more shots. This time he waited a full minute before firing the rest of the magazine, spacing each shot off at ten-second intervals.

  He quickly reloaded. “If they’re still here, they would have heard those shots from the other side of town. Sound travels these days.”

  “Let’s give it some time,” she said. “It’s not like we have any other place to be.”

  Sandra leaned against the Silverado. Her hair was already sweaty and matted to her face. He reached over and flicked the strands away, and she smiled at him. He smiled back.

  They drank warm water and waited five minutes. Then five became ten, then twenty.

  “No one’s coming,” he said, after thirty minutes.

  “Let’s wait a little longer,” she said.

  Thirty minutes became an hour.

  “No one’s coming,” she said. “What now? If they’ve left the city, where would they go?”

  “South,” Blaine said, looking down Main Street. “They’re headed to Beaufont Lake in Louisiana. The easiest path there would be along US 287, then switch over to the I-10 and Highway 90 in Beaumont. From there, they’d probably take one of the smaller roads farther south to Beaufont Lake.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Will showed me a map, and that’s the quickest way to Song Island. If we keep going south on US 287 to Beaumont and they’re still on the I-10, we should be able to catch up to them before they take one of the smaller roads off the interstate.”

  “All that from a map you saw?”

  “You sound impressed.”

  “I thought guys were bad with directions.”

  “That’s a filthy stereotype.”

  She laughed. “Okay.”

  “One more thing,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need my pills.”

  “In an hour.”

  He groaned. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to an hour.”

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she said, and walked around the Silverado’s hood back to the
driver’s side.

  “I’m really hurting here, babe,” he said after her.

  “You’ll live.”

  “Babe, please,” he said, trying his best not to beg, though it was pretty damn close. “I need more pills.”

  She rolled her eyes. “God, if I knew getting shot would turn you into such a drama queen, I’d never have gone back for you.”

  “Wow,” he said, feigning hurt. “Just wow, babe. That’s harsh.”

  She laughed. “Get in, Meryl Streep.”

  *

  THEY DROVE DOWN Lancing’s Main Street for a few more minutes before the road became Highway 96 and, about a mile later, joined up with US 287/Route 69. Eventually, the businesses began to thin out and they were back in the countryside, passing thick patches of overgrown grass swaying in the hot sun on both sides of a series of never-ending rickety fences.

  “No cows,” Blaine said quietly, almost to himself.

  “What?” Sandra said.

  “No cows,” he repeated. “What happened to all the cows?”

  Sandra peered at the land around them. “You’re right. When did the cows start disappearing?”

  Blaine remembered seeing cows as recently as a few weeks ago, when they were entering Grime. There had been cows and horses grazing on the abundant grass. Once, he had seen a couple of riderless horses roaming the streets, the clack-clack of their hooves like loud gunshots moving up and down the roads. He had wondered where they were going. Were they looking for their owners?

  There were no cows or horses anymore. At least, none that he could see. There were no carcasses of the animals, either, which was even more disturbing.

  Where the hell are the animals?

  He hadn’t seen a dog or a cat in months, now that he really thought about it.

  Where have all the animals gone?

  They drove past a sign along the side of the road: “Beaumont, Texas 15 Miles.”

  Maybe Beaumont has the answers…

  CHAPTER 18

  WILL

  THEY REACHED THE outskirts of Beaumont, Texas, by two o’clock in the afternoon, which was better time than Will had expected, given they were stuck at thirty-five miles per hour on the road. There were a couple of reasons for that. The roads got more dangerous the closer they got to a major city—and Beaumont definitely qualified, with its 118,000 population within an eighty-five-square-mile radius. There was also more debris, leftovers from the days even before The Purge. The leftovers piled up, and wind and time added to the growing menace. There was also the cargo trailer to worry about, and losing that would have been calamitous.

  It was easy to tell when you were nearing a big city. The roads started to clog up with abandoned cars and personal items left behind, twisting and turning in the wind, bleached dry in the sun.

  During the trip, Lara would pick up the ham radio and turn it on, and they would listen to the same recorded message from Song Island. Will wondered if Lara was afraid the message would stop, and if it did, what that would mean. He wasn’t entirely sold on Song Island, but it seemed to give her and the others hope, and who was he to take that away from them.

  Hope was good. Hope kept you fighting. No one knew that more intimately than a soldier who had been in a war zone.

  As they neared Beaumont, Will began looking for possible safe harbors along the feeder roads. There were plenty of buildings, stores, homes, and brand-new subdivisions. But he couldn’t settle, not with the knowledge of what was chasing them.

  Kate, of all people…

  They were alongside Willowstone Mall, the city’s main shopping center, when the highway suddenly became impassable, and Will pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. There were simply too many vehicles in front of them now, and the big trucks weren’t going to be able to maneuver around the wall of metal, cast iron, aluminum, chrome, and rubber.

  Will grabbed the radio off the dashboard: “Danny, I think we’re stuck.”

  “We haven’t tried going over them yet,” Danny said through the radio.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

  “Oh come on, we won’t know until we try. The girls will love it.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  Gaby was leaning against her window, smiling at the familiar gathering of department stores that made up the Willowstone Mall to their right. “Wow, I’d kill to do some shopping right about now.”

  “You’d definitely have to kill a lot to do any shopping,” Josh said. “There are probably a gazillion of those bloodsuckers in there.”

  “Josh is right,” Lara said. “The ghouls are everywhere. They use the department stores as nests.”

  “Figures,” Gaby sighed.

  Lara looked over at Will. “If we can’t go around this traffic, where does that leave us?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Let’s get a better look outside.”

  Will climbed out of the Ridgeline while Danny walked over from the Frontier.

  “Monster trucks,” Danny said. “We need monster trucks. Then we could just go right over these suckers. I even came up with a name. The Danny-ator.”

  “The Danny-ator?”

  “Yeah, you know, like the Terminator. But with my name. Don’t steal it.”

  “Try and stop me.”

  Will climbed onto the hood of his Ridgeline and took a pair of binoculars from one of his pouches. The sea of cars stretched endlessly across all four lanes—two northbound and two southbound. The only positive was that the highway wasn’t elevated, so they would be able to break off and take the feeder roads whenever they needed to. But even the feeders were congested with vehicles.

  Lara climbed out behind them. “What do you see?”

  “Cars. Lots of cars,” Will said.

  “The man has a flair for understatement,” Danny said. “Monster trucks,” he said to Lara. “That’s the ticket.”

  “God help us,” Lara said.

  “That’s what Carly said when I told her. What’s the deal with you girls? No love for the monster trucks?”

  “No, just the thought of you behind the wheel of one, Danny.”

  “Hey, I’m an excellent driver.”

  “Whatever, Rain Man,” Lara said.

  Will climbed down from the hood of the Ridgeline as the others climbed out of the trucks and formed a mini-circle around him. They hadn’t been outside for more than a few minutes, and everyone was already sweating in the heat.

  “How are we going to get around that?” Carly asked, looking at the traffic.

  Will had to admit, it was an imposing sight, as if all of Beaumont had decided to leave at the same time. And maybe they had. Beaumont was a smaller city compared to Houston or Dallas, and the ghouls might have saved them for the second wave of attacks. That would have given the residents time to digest what was happening elsewhere—on TV, the radio, or the Net—before eventually deciding to converge on the highways in a mass exodus. He had seen it happen during hurricanes.

  Will glanced down at his watch: 2:26 P.M.

  “How are we for time?” Lara asked.

  “Six hours and counting before nightfall,” Will said. Thank God for Texas summers. “We have time.”

  “We’re not getting around that in six hours,” Danny said.

  Will shook his head. He would have preferred to pass Beaumont in a day and be well beyond the city limits by nightfall. He remembered how many threats they’d had to deal with in Houston. Beaumont had a fraction of Houston’s population, but 118,000 was still an impressive number of potential ghouls hiding in darkness, waiting for night. And that wasn’t counting how many Kate would bring with her.

  Kate. It had to be Kate, too.

  “We’ll use the feeders and look for a place to hole up for the night,” Will said.

  “What kind of places are we looking for?” Josh asked.

  “Small, defensible, and preferably not close to places like a mall. Keep an eye out.”

  They nodded and anxiously climbed back in
to the trucks, thankful to return to the air conditioners. Danny lingered behind until it was just the two of them on the highway.

  “Kate?” Danny asked.

  “Yeah,” Will nodded.

  “Psychic dreams. Jesus. What’s next? Undead creatures from the pits of Hell?”

  “That’ll be the day,” Will said.

  *

  HE GOT LUCKY and found what he was looking for a few miles up the highway. It was along the feeder road, inside a strip mall with an Exxon gas station up front and three other buildings flanking it. The place was surrounded by giant car lots selling new and used vehicles.

  “See it?” Will said into the radio.

  “I see it,” Danny said through the radio. “God bless Miguel. He was a piece of shit human being who insisted on shooting other people in the back, but at least he gave away valuable information freely.”

  Will led them off the feeder road and into the strip mall, passing the Exxon. They drove by a Discount Tire Shop and then an Auto Zone before turning a corner with a Budget Rent-a-Car. It was behind a small furniture store called Elmo’s, in an open parking lot with contents visible all the way from the elevated highway.

  “Are you kidding?” Lara said. “We’re spending the night in those things?”

  “Whoa,” Josh said, leaning between the front seats. “I never once thought about using those.”

  “What?” Gaby said. Then, “Oh, no, not those again.”

  Will stopped the Ridgeline in front of the first semitrailer, one of many lining a truck stop in the back of the plaza. The area took up nearly half of the concrete space, with one big building in a corner surrounded by at least fifty, possibly sixty, trailers resting on back tires and propped up by their landing gear. Their solid steel sides gleamed in the sun.

  They climbed out of the trucks.

  Will glanced over at Gaby. She looked pained. “You good?”

  She looked over and nodded. “If we have to, then we have to.”

  “Just this once.”

  She nodded again, trying to convince herself. “Okay.”

  Tough girl.

  “Spread out,” Will said, “and look for one that doesn’t have a lock on the doors. We’ll need two, preferably side by side. If you find one unlocked, be careful. You don’t know what might be hiding inside.”