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

  CHAPTER 19

  BLAINE

  THEY HADN’T BEEN in a city as big as Beaumont since they had abandoned Dallas, so it felt a little odd to be driving up a highway that was suddenly stuffed with cars, giving him flashbacks of afternoon rush-hour traffic. Except there were no horns, no fumes, and none of the grinding sounds of machinery inching forward every few seconds.

  There were vehicles in their path when they approached the outskirts of the city, but it only got worse as they continued on. Whenever the highway seemed to thin out and become passable, another huge block of cars appeared to prove him wrong.

  After a while, Sandra began stopping more than she was moving. Finally, she simply stopped and parked next to an overturned Ford truck and a red Camaro buried in its exposed belly.

  She sat back, then let out a frustrated sigh. “It’s not going to get any better, is it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Blaine said. “Want me to drive?”

  “You can’t even walk.”

  “I can walk fine.”

  “Oh yeah? Get out and show me.”

  “Not now, it’s too hot outside.”

  “Right.” Then she smiled at him. “Besides, I like this. Driving you around. It’s liberating. I just wish the damn road would cooperate.”

  Blaine wondered if Will and the others had encountered the same thing, and how they got around it. You could go around the city, but that would add a lot of time to the schedule. Maybe even a day. No. Sticking to the highway, or near it, was the shortest route.

  “What time is it?” Sandra asked.

  He glanced down at his watch. “Three fourteen.”

  They had made pretty good time since Lancing. The highways between towns and cities were always easy to travel, and it wasn’t until you hit the towns that things got complicated.

  “Look,” Sandra said, pointing.

  Blaine looked at where she was pointing, saw a Burger King to their right, in front of a big sprawling group of buildings. A mall, with a Sortys department store taking up most of the space on this side of the structure. The parking lot was almost entirely empty.

  He searched out a sign and found one near the street that read: “Willowstone Mall.”

  “Is this really the time to go shopping?” Blaine said.

  She rolled her eyes. “No, not the mall. In front of it.”

  She pointed again, and following her a second time, he saw a Cavender’s Boot City store near the feeder road. It was in front of the mall and squeezed between a Best Buy and a Petsmart. Cavender’s sold cowboy boots and hats and general Western wear. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place he visited regularly.

  “I need new boots,” Sandra said. “This pair’s getting a little worn around the heels.”

  He looked down at his own sneakers. They were dirty and worn around the edges. They were blue once, but were mostly white now, the colors faded from heavy use.

  “Let’s go shopping,” he said.

  *

  THEY PULLED INTO the Cavender’s and parked between a beat-up brown Toyota truck and a white Ford F-150. The storefront windows were intact, and there was enough sunlight that he could see racks of jeans, boots, hats, and belt buckles. There were a lot of belt buckles.

  Yee haw.

  The second he climbed out of the Silverado, Blaine flinched with pain. He stopped for a second and looked down, expecting to see blood on his shirt, and was relieved when he didn’t. Still, there was no mistaking where the pain was coming from. He felt like sitting down to catch his breath, but Sandra might be watching, so he forced himself forward, toward the front door of the Cavender’s instead.

  “You think any of those jeans will fit me?” he asked.

  He was at the doors, reaching for the handle, when he stopped. He saw Sandra’s reflection in the store’s glass door, and she wasn’t alone.

  Sandra stood frozen next to the truck, with some kind of alien standing behind her. No, not an alien. It was a man wearing some type of black gas mask, with a large, elongated clear lens and two small breathing filters jutting out from the sides like shorn tusks. He was wearing some kind of gray hazmat suit. Not the big, bulky kind, but the thin, tactical types he had seen soldiers wearing on the news. The suit was light enough for the man to wear a gun belt with a holster. The Browning automatic that should have been in the holster was instead pressed up against Sandra’s temple.

  Blaine spun, drawing his Glock. The sudden, quick movement made him grimace as pain shot through him like some pissed-off demon from Hell. He pushed away the pain and concentrated on taking aim at the man standing behind Sandra instead. He couldn’t see the face clearly through the gas mask, but he could see dark, small black eyes. The man was at least half a foot shorter than Sandra, and the sight of him holding her at gunpoint struck Blaine as absurd.

  “Put the gun down or I put a bullet through her brain,” the man said. His voice sounded hollow behind the gas mask, but there was no mistaking the menace.

  Blaine didn’t lower his gun. He wasn’t stupid enough to think doing so would magically free Sandra. And maybe Sandra knew it, too, because she looked right back at him. He saw fear in her eyes, but also grim determination. The guy had snuck up on Sandra before she had even had the chance to slam the truck’s driver-side door shut.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Blaine said.

  “You wanna get her killed? Is that it?” the man asked.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Blaine said again.

  “Tough guy, huh?”

  “You expect me to believe you’ll let her go if I put this gun down?”

  The guy might have grinned. It was hard to tell, because Blaine couldn’t see the man’s mouth. His eyes did seem to narrow, in the way eyes did when people were grinning.

  “I guess you’re smarter than you look,” the guy said.

  “No one’s ever accused me of that before.”

  The guy chuckled. “Not like you have a choice, though.”

  “I got a gun, I got a choice.”

  “You think so?”

  “You hurt her and I hurt you. Simple as that.”

  “You’re right. It is as simple as that. The problem with that is, though?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I got friends and you don’t.”

  This time Blaine heard them, except it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t take his gun away from the guy standing behind Sandra anyway. If he had, he knew the guy would end it right there and shoot him dead. Instead, Blaine let two more men come up on both sides of him, fighting every instinct to turn around to confront at least one of them.

  He risked a quick glance left, then right—less than a second each time, but just long enough to see they were both wearing the same hazmat suits and holding M4 rifles pointing at him. They had come from around the corners of the Cavender’s, moving surprisingly cat-like for guys in chemical suits.

  Had they been waiting there this whole time? Probably. Just like the guy behind Sandra had been waiting to sneak up on them. Hell, they probably saw the Silverado coming from a mile away. God knew they were the only car still running in the city for miles all around. He couldn’t imagine the noises they must have made moving along the highway.

  “Here’s the plan,” the guy behind Sandra said. “I’m going to count to five. If you don’t drop your gun, they’re going to start shooting. Oh, and just in case you’re thinking of taking that shot anyway?”

  The guy moved until he was completely hidden behind Sandra’s bigger frame. And because he was shorter than her, he didn’t have to bend at the knees. Blaine thought that was kind of absurd, too.

  “Go ahead,” the guy said, like a ventriloquist speaking through Sandra. “Shoot back and you’ll hit her. I’m guessing you don’t want to do that. Not to this fine piece of ass, am I right?”

  Blaine saw Sandra’s reaction, and this time it was all fear. The moment had passed, they both realized. They were royally fucked.

  �
�One,” the guy said.

  He didn’t get “two” out before Blaine lowered himself to the ground in a crouch, then laid the gun down carefully, feeling the barrels of the two M4 rifles tracking him every step of the way.

  “All right,” Blaine said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  “Good boy,” the guy said, coming back out from behind Sandra.

  The man to Blaine’s right hurried forward and kicked Blaine’s gun away, while the one to his left grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him up, then threw him into the Cavender’s glass door. Blaine felt balls of flame raining down on him, but did his best to stamp out any sounds before they could leave his lips.

  “Be careful!” Sandra shouted behind him. “He’s already hurt!”

  The man who had thrown Blaine into the glass door looked back at Sandra. “Where?” he asked. Blaine heard a thick country accent.

  “He was shot in the side,” Sandra said.

  “Which side?”

  “The right side.”

  “Good to know,” the guy said, then he turned back around and punched Blaine in the right side, directly over the duct tape.

  Blaine felt blinding pain and lost control of his feet and went down like a sack of meat and bones, quivering in a pile on the scorching hot concrete walkway.

  *

  THEY WERE IN the Sortys department store employee lounge, sitting on a plastic couch. Mason, the guy who had threatened to shoot Sandra in the head, straddled a chair in front of them, his chin resting on the backrest.

  Mason tore at a big stick of jalapeno-flavored beef jerky and devoured it in a few bites. He looked even shorter outside of the hazmat suit, with uncombed black hair just this side of greasy. He wore cargo pants, Army boots, a white T-shirt, and the same gun belt he had worn over the hazmat suit. When he grinned, Blaine saw a big gap where he was missing a front tooth. The guy was five-four, tops.

  The room they were in was bright, with an open window near the ceiling. Dust and paper were scattered along the floor, and an overflowing wastebasket sat in one corner.

  There was another guy in the small room with them. It was the same cowboy who had given Blaine a nice “hello” to the side with his fist. Blaine was still smarting from that, and he gave the cowboy a once-over with cold, hard eyes. The man was dressed almost identical to Mason, but instead of a white T-shirt, he had on a black one. Other than that, he looked like a taller, skinnier version of Mason, and Blaine thought he could probably break the guy over his knees.

  “Keep dreaming,” the cowboy said, smirking back at him.

  Mason snapped his fingers, directing Blaine’s eyes away from the cowboy and back over to him. “So, one more time. You don’t know the guys that came through earlier today?”

  “No,” Sandra said, her voice calm.

  That’s my girl.

  Mason looked over at Blaine. “And I don’t suppose you know them, either?”

  “No idea,” Blaine lied.

  “They were packing some pretty impressive firepower,” Mason said. “We thought about doing to them what we did to you, but there was something about those two guys, the way they held their weapons…” Mason shrugged and bit off another big piece of beef jerky. “Not worth the hassle. We’re just caretakers here, after all.”

  “Here” was the Willowstone Mall, the big, sprawling complex behind the Cavender’s Boot store. Mason and the cowboy had brought them over with the third man, whose name Blaine didn’t catch, and who had disappeared as soon as they were inside the dark, dank confines of the mall. They had walked through the Sortys department store, passing racks of unused clothes. At least they’ll never run out of things to wear, he remembered thinking.

  He had noticed right away there were no barricades against the windows or doors, and there were shadows everywhere—at least a good half of the store was untouched by sunlight. Mason and the others didn’t look disturbed by this shortcoming, though. At first Blaine thought it might have been the hazmat suits, giving them some kind of false confidence, but he quickly realized it was more than that. It wasn’t that Mason and the others thought they were safe in here. Blaine somehow felt that these men knew they were safe. How, he couldn’t fathom.

  “So,” Mason said, eyeballing Blaine again. “What are we going to do with the two of you? That’s the question.”

  “Why aren’t you scared?” Blaine asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Them.”

  Mason smiled. “We don’t have to be. We’re…partners.”

  “Partners?” Sandra said. “With them?”

  “They’re not as mindless as you think.”

  Blaine remembered what Will had told him about the ghouls: “Dead, not stupid.”

  His mind raced back to that night at the house, looking down from the pink bedroom window and seeing the blue-eyed ghoul below. A lone figure staring back up at him, eyes brimming with intelligence.

  “In fact, they’re pretty fucking smart,” Mason said. “How did you think they managed to pull this off? One night, that’s all it took.” He snapped his fingers. “That takes planning. Intelligence. Discipline. They have it in spades.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sandra said. “You’re ‘partners’ with them? How?”

  “Survivors might be a better word. We do something for them, and they let us live. It’s not a bad trade-off if you really think about it. What’s better—running around like you two, always trying to beat the night, or being able to live your life without worrying all the time that it’s about to get dark? I’ll take that trade-off any day.”

  “It’s not like you can kill the fuckers,” the cowboy said.

  They don’t know about silver.

  “Well, you can kill them with sunlight,” Mason said. “But that’s only half the day, and it’s not like you can holster or fire the sun whenever you want. Have you ever tried shooting these things?”

  “Yeah,” Blaine nodded.

  “I’ve shotgunned one in the face and the fucker just kept coming.”

  “I put a machete through the forehead of one and it didn’t even feel it,” the cowboy said. “You can’t fight that.”

  “That’s how they beat us, you know,” Mason said. “They’re unkillable. Well, maybe if you used a nuke, but who the hell knows even then?”

  It occurred to Blaine that Mason didn’t have to do this, sit here talking to them, trying to justify what he was doing. But he was.

  Why?

  “So what now?” Blaine asked.

  “Now, you decide what you want to do with the rest of your life,” Mason said.

  “Meaning?”

  “You have a choice. You can keep doing what you’ve been doing. Running from city to city, hiding in basements, praying they don’t find you tonight, or the night after that, or the week after that. Or you could do the smart thing and join the club. I got plenty of hazmat suits for two more.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “It’s that simple.”

  “Bullshit,” Sandra said.

  Blaine could tell Mason was surprised to hear that coming from her. Maybe they had expected him to say it, to be the dissenting voice, and not Sandra. He detected a slight tweak along the corner of Mason’s eyebrow that might have been amusement.

  “There’s more to it than you just ‘partnering’ with them,” Sandra continued. “What is it that you’re really doing for them?”

  Mason grinned. “Well, that’s a little hard to explain.”

  *

  HE DIDN’T EXPLAIN it. Instead, he showed them.

  Mason led them out of the Sortys employee lounge. The cowboy walked behind them with the M4. Blaine noticed the guy kept at least ten yards between them. Not that Blaine had any ideas about wrestling that rifle away. Even if he wasn’t hurt, even if each step didn’t make him wince just a little bit more, he couldn’t risk a fight now, with Sandra so close and Mason right in front of them.

  No, this wasn’t the time. Not yet. He had to wait fo
r the right moment, the right circumstances. It would come. It always came, sooner or later.

  As they passed the jewelry section of Sortys, Blaine noticed some of the glass counters had been smashed. Jewelry was scattered everywhere, some on the floor, crunching under his shoes. He imagined someone excitedly bashing the cases open, grabbing the expensive merchandise, and then having second thoughts. What the hell were you going to do with jewelry now?

  But then he saw it—silver. The pieces were under one of the still-intact glass displays. A fancy pen, a folded label under it boasting that it was 100% silver. A whole set of silverware—forks, spoons, and butter knives. Things no one looked at twice, but invaluable in the new world. Blaine made mental notes.

  They continued through the shoe area before exiting the opened gates where the department store connected to the rest of the mall. Their shoes squeaked against the dirty ceramic tile floor, the only noise in the entire place. The stores were open around them, basking in sunlight pouring down from the skylights.

  “There isn’t a single creature inside the mall during the day,” Mason said, up-front. “That’s the compromise. This place is all ours. It’s not a bad way to live, if you think about it. The mall has everything we need to survive. Food, shelter, entertainment.”

  “Entertainment?” Blaine said.

  “There are two gyms in the place. Basketball court, track, everything to keep busy. Plenty of non-perishable food to last years. Bottled water, soft drinks. Endless boxes of the stuff from around the world, just lying around. You can die an old man eating this stuff.” He chuckled. “I’m not saying you’d be a very healthy old man, but hey, you’d get to be old.”

  Mason led them up an escalator frozen in place.

  As he took the first step, Blaine thought, Steps. Awesome.

  He did his best to hide his discomfort as he took the steps one at a time, but he thought the cowboy might have picked up on it. When Mason and Sandra started to outpace him, Blaine forced himself to move faster.

  Two figures looked down at them from the second-floor railing. They were both wearing hazmat suits and carrying M4 rifles, and he could tell by their shapes that one of them was a woman. The hips were a dead giveaway. Their weapons looked new. In comparison, he remembered the scratches and dents on Will’s and Danny’s rifles.