Purge of Babylon (Book 8): The Horns of Avalon Read online

  “Again.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When has it ever not been too many?” he said.

  It was a common refrain these days. There were always too many. In the daytime, in the nighttime, there were always too many. Too many dangerous men in the day and too many undead things at night.

  Too many. Always too many.

  “Are they tracking us?” Nate asked. He sounded run down from the last few days, even a little annoyed, but not scared. Or, at least, she couldn’t detect any fear in his voice. “They must be tracking us…”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “First Port Arthur, and now here…” He shook his head. “Gotta be, right?”

  “I don’t know, Nate.”

  “Gotta be,” he repeated, mostly to himself that time.

  She looked over at him lying against the edge of the rooftop next to her. The Mohawk was mostly gone, his hair grown in (out?) around the ridiculous stump in the middle. He had dirt on his cheeks and forehead but didn’t seem to notice it. The girl in her spent a moment being self-conscious about her own appearance, but the woman that had emerged easily dismissed the thought without much resistance.

  Nate lowered his binoculars and met her gaze. “But why would they be tracking us? For Mason? I thought he was just another grunt these days.”

  “I don’t think he was lying about that part. After Louisiana”—And Josh and that terrible night on Song Island—“he’s not what he used to be, and I know for a fact he wasn’t just another grunt back then.”

  “Makes no sense,” Nate said. “We’re not that important, especially with Mercer’s people running around blowing up people. The three of us should be at the very bottom of their to-do list.”

  She nodded because he was right. They weren’t important at all. What were three more people when the entire state was on high alert? The collaborators they’d (managed to avoid so far) run across in the last few days were on a war footing; they had their hands full with small teams of hit-and-run…what the hell were they? Rebels? Insurgents? Or maybe she should just think of them as Mercer’s killers, because that was exactly what they were.

  Even now, she hadn’t dismissed the possibility that either Mercer’s men or the collaborators had found Taylor and Alice at their cabin in the woods outside of Larkin. The place had been empty when they showed up to collect the sisters for the trip home like they had promised. The door was open and there were no signs of the girls. More baffling, there was no evidence of a struggle. The sisters had simply…vanished. Nate thought it had to be ghouls, that the girls’ luck had finally run out, but she wasn’t so sure. Mason, of course, said he didn’t know anything about it, but the man was a liar and it was hard to believe anything that came out of his mouth.

  In the end, they’d had to move on, with the sisters added to a long list of failures since returning to Texas.

  We should have stayed on the Trident. We should never have come back.

  We should never have come back…

  She focused on the present, on the here and now, and looked through her M4’s optic again, picking up the same man she’d had in her crosshairs before. He was still leaning against the metal guardrail with his back to her. He had brown hair and spent most of his time working on a thick piece of beef jerky he’d fished out of a see-through bag earlier. He hadn’t come alone; his friend had climbed up onto the hood of the Jeep parked between the two highway lanes and was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. They were both wearing black uniforms, and if she squinted, she could almost make out the Texas patch on their shoulders.

  What the hell are you guys doing here?

  Gallant, Texas, was a small town of about 3,200, surrounded by flat country land almost exactly halfway between Port Arthur and Galveston. The tiny city’s one major (only?) contribution was the slightly raised I-10 interstate road that joined it with Beaumont and Port Arthur to the east, Baytown to the west, and Galveston somewhere in the southwest.

  The soldiers were loitering on that highway right now, looking for…something. They hadn’t found this place by accident. She was almost certain of that. So what were they doing here? Could Nate be right? Could these men have been tracking them?

  What the hell are the two of you doing here?

  She laid the rifle on the rooftop and rolled over onto her back, blinking up at the sun. She didn’t have to look at her watch to know they still had hours to go before nightfall. Her body was in tune to her environment and had been since they began picking their way south from Starch, skirting potential ambushes along the way, only to find Port Arthur crawling with collaborators.

  “Hey,” Nate said.

  She glanced over. He was holding a small piece of white paper and handed it to her. It was half the size of a regular writing sheet and was blank on one side. She had to turn it over to see the familiar writing:

  JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

  WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

  THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

  THE WORDS WERE CLEARLY TYPED on the sheet using a machine, maybe even a computer printer. The idea that someone out there was printing out a bunch of propaganda flyers had been an interesting topic of discussion for a while, but after encountering more of them as they made their way southeast, it had become less interesting.

  “First and only one I’ve seen in Gallant so far,” Nate said. “Wondered where it came from.”

  “Probably from the same batch they dumped over Port Arthur,” she said. “It’d make sense for them to bypass the small cities for the bigger ones. Less wasteful that way.”

  “How many you think have picked a side? Or, I guess, a new side?”

  She shook her head. “Who knows? Maybe a lot, maybe very few, or maybe none.”

  “After all that bombing? I don’t know, Gaby. If I were in those towns and I saw what happened to the next town over…”

  The memories of what had happened to T29 were burned into her soul. She couldn’t forget what she had seen, and God did she want to so badly.

  The town, the sisters, all the failures of the last few days…

  She closed her eyes. “Can we not talk about this?”

  “You okay?”

  “Just a headache.”

  “You should take some of the meds we have in the first-aid kits.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what they’re there for, Gaby.”

  “They’re for emergencies. Besides, it always goes away.”

  “You sure?” he asked, and she could hear the concern in his voice.

  “I’ll be fine.” She opened her eyes and said, before he could argue the point, “We should head back.”

  She crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it, then turned around until she was lying on her stomach again. She picked up the rifle and began crawling backward away from the ledge. The distance between them and the highway was close enough (Shooting distance, at least with the ACOG) that she took every precaution. It only added a minute or so to their retreat anyway, and they had minutes to spare at the moment. Nate mirrored her crawl until they were almost on the other side, and only then did they stand up and take the ladder in the back down to the street below.

  They had walked over to their position on top of the Waffle House, so that meant walking back to where Danny and Mason were. The area they were in was oddly divided with the stores and restaurants to one side and almost exclusively traveling hotels and inns on the other. The tallest building in the entire place was a Comfort Inn and Suites. The rooftop above the hotel’s three stories would have given them a much better spying perch, but the idea of going through those floors just to get to that perfect spot spiked the hairs on the back of her neck even now.

  They wound their way through the streets and buildings using the businesses as cover whenever they could. Not that she expected to be spotted from the highway, but again, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks just to shave off a few seconds or minutes. So they took their
time and moved along, through, and behind a fast food joint, then a gas station, and a dozen other buildings.

  “Wanna get wasted?” Nate asked as they walked past one of the many brick and mortar stores. The sign outside was in gaudy neon, reading “Gallant Liquor Store.”

  Not very creative, she thought, looking in at the hundreds of bottles still sitting on display shelves. The store was remarkably undisturbed and she couldn’t find any signs of ghoul occupation—there were no blankets on the windows or blood smears. Unlike most places they had traveled through, it was rare to find evidence of a ghoul nest in Gallant. It was another reason they had decided to make camp here. That same disregard for the town by the monsters was also why it didn’t make any sense for the two collaborators to be lingering around it.

  What are you two doing here?

  “Let’s relive our college years,” Nate was saying.

  “I never went to college.”

  “Oh, right. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”

  “Are you saying I look old?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You’re lucky I already like you, or else…” She playfully put a hand on the butt of her sidearm.

  He raised both hands in surrender and began walking backward, grinning at her. “If you want, we can pretend we’re in school. I’ll be the big man on campus, and you’ll be my cheerleader girlfriend. I bet if we look hard enough we might even be able to find a cheerleader uniform somewhere in this place, maybe at the high school we passed earlier…”

  She shook her head but couldn’t help herself and smiled anyway. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you be my cheerleader boyfriend…”

  * * *

  THEY MADE their temporary base about a mile from the Waffle House inside the Gallant First Bank, one of the few buildings that had everything they needed in case they were forced to stay the night in town. Large white GFB letters were easily visible on the rooftop, welded to some kind of scaffolding. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but then it fit in with its surroundings, mostly department stores, restaurants, and she guessed the cream of the commercialism crop in Gallant. The bank had security bars over the windows and doors, and when they peeked inside, found it as pristine now as it had been a year ago.

  She saw Danny peeking out at them from behind blinders on one of the front windows as they approached, then a few seconds later one of the doors clicked opened before they even reached it.

  They slipped inside and Danny locked it back up. “What’s the word, birdies? Tell me you haven’t been giving each other disgusting hickeys out there while I was babysitting in here?”

  “A Jeep with two soldiers,” Nate said. “They showed up and parked on the I-10 around ten in the morning and haven’t moved since. We think they’re looking for something.”

  “Maybe us,” Gaby said.

  “Has to be, right?”

  “Did you go and ask them?” Danny asked.

  “Uh, no,” Nate said.

  “Maybe they’re just searching for property to rent or buy. Land’s pretty cheap these days, and property’s always a good investment. Always has been, always will be.”

  “We thought they might have been the same two we saw outside of Port Arthur yesterday,” Gaby said.

  “Were they?”

  She shook her head. “Same uniforms but different vehicle, and one of the two from yesterday was blond. These two both had dark hair.”

  “Dark-haired muchachos are seriously the worst.”

  “Self-loathing?” Nate asked.

  “Maybe a tad,” Danny said. Then, looking at her, “Why didn’t you just shoot them? I gave you that ACOG for a reason, you know.”

  “It was tempting…” Gaby said.

  “Next time when in doubt, shoot.”

  I almost did, she thought, and tossed her pack on the island counter in the lobby, knocking down a few deposit slips that had been left behind. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a bottle of water and took a drink.

  The place was remarkably clean when they had found it, with no evidence of a fight or blood anywhere, and Nate theorized it was closed when the town succumbed to The Purge. Like most small cities around the state, the citizens probably knew something had happened when the big metropolitans like Houston and Dallas went dark. It would have been terrifying as they waited for the second night. She knew the feeling, having lived through it herself a year ago.

  There were still piles of money in the registers and safes when they looked around this morning, and the two offices in the back were in immaculate condition. She kept expecting someone to clock in for work whenever she glanced at the counters. There were plenty of lights coming through the closed blinds behind her to see with, but not enough to give their position away to someone passing by, like those two guys…

  Maybe Nate’s right. Maybe they are following us.

  But why?

  When she finished drinking and put the bottle away, she looked back at Danny. “Nate is convinced they’re tracking us.”

  “What do you think?” Danny asked her.

  “I don’t know, maybe. It’s just too much coincidence that they—or one of their friends—keep showing up wherever we go.”

  Danny nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked lost in thought, and whenever that happened, he always reminded her so much of Will. They looked nothing alike, of course, but when the usually jovial Danny went still, it was hard to shake the resemblance.

  “Where’s Mason?” Nate asked.

  “Dozing, the last time I saw him,” Danny said. “Being a hostage is hard work.”

  “I should go check on him.”

  “You think he’s going to try something?” she asked.

  Nate shrugged as he walked past her. “I just don’t like the idea of that guy being somewhere where at least one of us can’t see him at all times.”

  She watched him go into the back hallway, then open the door into one of the two offices and disappear inside. Gaby turned back to Danny, who had returned to looking out the blinders at the street outside.

  “Did you talk to the Trident yet?” she asked.

  “Still waiting to pick us up,” Danny said. “All we have to do is get to someplace where they can do exactly that, and then we’ll all be on the sundeck drinking piña coladas. Easy breezy.”

  “Easy breezy, huh?” she said doubtfully.

  “Have faith, Gabster. We’ll get there. Eventually.”

  She didn’t doubt they would get home—she just hoped they all made it, and in one piece.

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “You should. I’m never wrong.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, mostly never.” He glanced up the street in the direction she and Nate had come. “You said two?”

  “Two, yeah.”

  “But one vehicle?”

  “That I could see or hear.” When he didn’t ask or say anything, she continued: “What are you thinking?”

  “That if we want to get out of here before nightfall and those two hombres are still hanging around on the highway, then we might have a problem.”

  “Just one?”

  “Okay, one of many. The biggest one is the noise factor. As soon as we fire up our ride, they’ll know we’re here. Then they’ll radio their friends, and who knows how many of them are between us and the coastline. We might have to wait them out.”

  “How long?”

  “Hopefully they won’t make us wait too long. I’m not a very patient guy when piña coladas are at stake.”

  “How far is it between Gallant and the coast?”

  “Twenty-five miles, give or take. The problem isn’t the distance—it’s the not knowing how many guys with guns and bad intentions are waiting for us between here and there.”

  “Captain Optimism,” Gaby said.

  “That’s what Carly said when I told her about our present dilemma.”

  “They’ve been out there for a while. What’s their fuel situation?”

>   “I’ve been told that they’re dealing with it.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what I said.”

  She heard voices from the back of the bank and glanced over. Nate had left the office door open, and she could hear him talking with Mason but couldn’t quite make out the conversation.

  “What about Mason?” she asked.

  “What about him?” Danny said.

  “Does he know what’s waiting for us out there?”

  “His knowledge is getting more limited the farther south we get. He only knows what he knew before Starch. Everything after that is all Greek to him.”

  “Then why are we keeping him around?”

  Danny gave her an amused look. “You sick of him already?”

  “I’ve been sick of him since Starch, and I still don’t believe he doesn’t know anything about what happened to Alice and Taylor. I just don’t see any reason to keep dragging him along if he’s outlived his usefulness, Danny. ”

  “Wow, talk about breaking my heart,” a voice said behind her.

  She looked over at Mason coming out of the back hallway with Nate. The collaborator was still wearing the same black uniform they had captured him in back at Starch. His face was grimy with dirt and sweat—which ironically made him perfectly at home among them—and the only thing clean on him was the bandage around his right leg. He walked with a noticeable limp and a grimace, his reward for trying to kill them a few days ago.

  “After all we’ve been through, too,” Mason added.

  “Give me one reason why we should keep you around,” she said.

  “Because I’m still more valuable to you alive than dead. You can use me—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what the hell—as a hostage, if it becomes necessary. And yes, I do think it’s going to be necessary.”

  “Bullshit. You’re just trying to talk your way into staying alive. You’re not important to them. You never were.”

  “Then why have they been tracking you all the way from Starch?”

  There was just a ghost of a smile on his pale and cracked lips, probably because he knew a full-blown smile would have just pissed her off, and Mason, for all his faults—and the man had many of them—wasn’t stupid.