Purge of Babylon (Book 7): The Spears of Laconia Page 5

  It took much longer to reach the stairwell than he would have liked. Either the floor had widened sometime last night, or they were moving very, very slowly. The feel of sunlight through the (Still intact, so that’s a good sign) windows to their right made him breathe just a little bit easier with every step.

  The tiled floor showed signs of the dirt they had tracked in here last night and the cubicles they had run past still looked in one piece this morning. More importantly, he couldn’t smell them in the air. Even a floor this large wouldn’t have been able to hide the creatures’ stench, especially if there was more than one of them around, and there had definitely been more than one of them around last night.

  So far, so good.

  Keo couldn’t help it and grinned to himself.

  Famous last words there, pal.

  They remained silent (or at least they didn’t talk, but it was hard to stay completely quiet; their boots’ soles squeaked every so often against the dust-caked floor) during the trek until they finally arrived at the stairwell door.

  Keo glanced back at Jordan, standing behind him pulling security. She looked over her shoulder, saw him, and nodded. Just a week of running around out here with her and they were already working like an (almost) well-oiled machine. In another month, he’d probably know what her sweat tasted like.

  He turned back and pressed one ear against the warm stairwell door.

  Five seconds…

  Ten…

  Nothing.

  There was just stillness on the other side.

  He looked back at Jordan, and she mouthed, “Anything?”

  He shook his head before turning back around to the door. This time he put one hand on the doorknob, finding courage in the streams of sunlight splashing all the way across the floor and over half the door. It was surprisingly warm inside the building at the moment, but that could have just been thanks to his thick winter clothing.

  “Go,” Ol’ Blue Eyes had hissed at him last night inside the stairwell.

  “Go where?” Keo had responded.

  “Down!” he had shouted.

  And that was where he and Jordan had gone. They went down the stairs, expecting ghouls to appear from below at any moment. He kept waiting and waiting, but black eyes and the terrifying noise of stampeding bare feet never filled the enclosed space around them. There were only his and Jordan’s labored breathing and their pounding boots all the way down to—

  The third floor. He didn’t know why he had chosen it. Maybe he didn’t trust his luck to last for thirty more feet. Or maybe he instinctively knew there wasn’t anything good waiting for them in the lobby. Certainly no escape from the building. If there were already ghouls inside, then there would be even more outside. A hell of a lot more. Every single creature that had been sniffing their trail for the last week ever since Santa Marie Island would be converging on the single building as soon as Jordan fired that first shot.

  “We’ll meet again!” the blue-eyed ghoul had shouted. Or hissed. Though Keo sometimes thought the creature was making an effort to sound more human—

  A nervous tap on his shoulder.

  He glanced back at Jordan, who gave him a quizzical look.

  “Ready?” he mouthed.

  She retreated a few steps to give him room, then aimed her M4 at the door. Finally, she nodded. Keo took a long, solid breath, then made sure the sun was still splashing across the door. You could never be too careful when it came to sunlight these days.

  Now.

  He pulled the door open and swung it all the way to the side while he took three quick steps backward.

  In the five seconds it took the door to fully open, hit the spring doorstop on the wall, and swing back in the other direction, a dozen ghouls piled inside the enclosed space in front of him had untangled their elongated limbs. He wasn’t sure if he saw surprise in their black eyes or heard squeals of delight, but he definitely smelled the acidic burn of vaporizing flesh as the sun hit them.

  He fired into the door anyway—it was mostly just instinct, the need to shoot when presented with a target—and put a three-round burst into the center mass of the writhing blob of flesh. A round hit bone and ricocheted into another creature trying to come unglued from the mass around it. Ghouls shrieked as spilt black blood turn gray, then white, and limbs clattered to the hard concrete landing. The frontal half of a head vanished before his eyes—

  The door closed back up with a solid click!

  “Jesus Christ,” Jordan breathed next to him.

  “Yeah,” Keo said. He wrinkled his nose at the stinging smell in the air and began breathing through his mouth. “I guess we’re not going in there.”

  “Our supplies, they’re on the twentieth floor, Keo.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The radio’s up there, too.”

  “I know.”

  “It took us forever to find that thing.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Goddammit,” Jordan said, and pursed her lips in frustration.

  They took another couple of steps back from the door, just far enough to escape the gagging stench in the air, but still close enough to hear the movements from the other side. The sudden shift from deathly stillness to frantic activity seemed to be coming not just from in front of them, but also from below and above them, as if the entire building had come alive.

  Despite the comforting feel of the sun against his back, Keo shivered unwittingly anyway. He never liked being this close to the undead things, and he didn’t think he would ever get used to it. He hoped he never got used to it, because the day that happened would also mean he was no longer operating at full readiness, and that was dangerous.

  “Come on,” he said, and led her away.

  They walked silently through two rows of cubicles, drawn irresistibly to the sunlight pouring in through the glass curtain wall on the other side of the floor.

  “I guess it was too much to expect them to all follow Frank out of the building,” Keo said.

  “‘Frank’?” Jordan said.

  “Ol’ Blue Eyes.”

  “You gave him a name? When did that happen?”

  “Guy saved my life twice. The least I could do was call him something other than ‘it’.”

  “Why Frank?”

  “You know, because of what he is…was.”

  Jordan looked blankly at him.

  “Mary Shelley?” Keo said.

  “Oh.” Then, “Not quite human anymore, but not quite…the other thing, either.” She flashed him an approving smile. “Clever. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  He shrugged. “It comes and goes.”

  “Frank,” Jordan repeated. “I could think of worse names, I guess. It’s definitely better than Keo.”

  “Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”

  “You’re a tough guy, you can take it.”

  “Still, everyone’s got their limits, Jordan.”

  She snorted, then glanced up at the ceiling. “What did he say to you last night? When we were on the twentieth floor?”

  “‘We’ll meet again.’”

  “‘We’ll meet again’?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That sounds…” She shivered instead of finishing.

  “Yeah,” Keo said. “Still freaks me out a little, thinking about that promise.”

  They finally reached the other side of the floor, where the windows were still in place, the creatures having somehow climbed all the way up to the twentieth floor while bypassing the rest. He guessed the brick-and-mortar walls outside had just enough handholds for things that didn’t care about falling. He remembered the surreal sight of them last night, plummeting out of the sky, arms and legs flailing, as he and Jordan raced through the floor in search of someplace to hide.

  “You think he’s dead?” Jordan asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s survived before. T18, the island…”

  “There were a hell of a lot more of them here last night, K
eo.”

  “He has a knack for surviving. It wouldn’t surprise me if he found a way out of here while we were hiding in the janitor’s closet.”

  Keo pressed against a section of the dust-covered window and peered down at the sidewalks and streets below. Downtown Sunport was as quiet and still this morning as when they had reached its city limits yesterday evening.

  He could see bones on the ground below—arms and legs, most of them still attached to the skeletal remains of ghouls that hadn’t been able to crawl their way out of the path of the rising sun after free-falling down the side of the building last night. The fall might not have killed them, but it had pulverized and shattered limbs, making escape difficult.

  Jordan was staring back at the stairwell door across the floor. “How are we getting down?”

  “We’ll improvise,” he said, and began backpedaling.

  “What—” Jordan said, before realizing what he was doing, and hurried backward after him. “Geez, would it kill you to give me a heads up?”

  “Heads up,” he said.

  She smirked. “Jackass.”

  Keo stopped about ten meters from the wall and stitched one of the windows with a three-round burst. He stopped firing and they listened to glass falling and shattering against the sidewalk below, the sound echoing across the city for a few seconds afterward. Cold wind flooded inside through the newly made hole, and Keo welcomed the fresh air into his lungs.

  “Now what?” Jordan asked.

  “Ladies first,” he said.

  *

  THREE FLOORS WERE better than twenty and were easily manageable once they pulled apart curtains from some of the offices and tied them together into a makeshift rope. He lowered Jordan down first, then followed.

  The sidewalk was covered in bones, and the still-strong smell of vaporized blood and flesh stung his nostrils while he was coming down. It was worse once he reached the pavement, and he had to pull his shirt over his nose to stave off most of the stench. Jordan had already done likewise while waiting for him.

  “How would we know if he made it or not?” she asked, her voice muffled through her shirt.

  Keo walked into the middle of the street, maneuvering around a pair of stalled vehicles, including one with a caved-in roof from when a creature had fallen down on top of it, and looked up. He found the twentieth floor easily enough, thanks to the line of broken windows stretching from one end of the building to the other.

  He tried to put himself in Frank’s shoes (bare feet?). Frank wasn’t limited by what a human body could do. Keo had seen that for himself three times now. The guy could take a beating, and the things he did defied the laws of physics. Hell, it defied the laws of nature.

  The last time Keo had seen him, Frank was on the twentieth floor. Keo hadn’t understood what he was doing until he was squeezed into the janitor’s closet with Jordan, listening and waiting for an attack that never came.

  It was Frank; it had always been Frank. They wanted him and Frank knew that, which was why he hadn’t followed them down. He gave the creatures what they wanted instead of leading them to Keo and Jordan. Himself.

  That’s three times now you’ve saved my life.

  Dammit. How do you even begin to repay someone who has saved your life not one, two, but three times? Keo wasn’t entirely sure he was looking forward to finding out the answer to that question.

  “What are you looking at?” Jordan said behind him.

  Keo eyeballed the twentieth floor, then turned and looked at the building facing it from across the street. The opposite structure was almost entirely all black marble but shorter at just fifteen stories.

  Then he saw it and couldn’t help but grin.

  “What?” Jordan said. “What are you grinning at like an idiot?”

  “He fell short,” Keo said.

  “Who?”

  “Frank.” Keo pointed at a lone broken window on the fourteenth floor of the black marble building. “He was aiming for the rooftop but he had too far of a jump, and his trajectory dipped before he reached it. He’s fast—and shit, can he jump—but apparently even he has his limitations.”

  Jordan stared at the single broken window on the fourteenth floor of the building across the street. “Are you saying he leapt from our building to that one? Keo, that’s—”

  “Impossible?” Keo smiled. “Jordan, we’ve been walking around with a blue-eyed ghoul for the last week, trying to stay one step ahead of collaborators and undead things. ‘Impossible’ shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary anymore.”

  *

  KEO WASN’T SURPRISED to find ghouls inside the lobby of the marble building. He could see them moving around in the shadowed parts through the windows, and he spent just as much time wondering how many were inside as he did ignoring the lingering smell of dead things in the streets around him.

  “So I guess that’s out of the question,” Jordan said, standing next to him.

  “Guess so.”

  “What now?”

  “How are you for ammo?”

  She tapped the ammo pouches around her waist, then sighed.

  “That much, huh?” he said.

  “One more for the M4, and two for the Glock. You?”

  “Same.”

  She sneaked a look over her shoulder, back at the taller building they’d just climbed down from. “Our supplies are still up there, along with the radio.”

  “The operative phrase being ‘up there.’”

  “Maybe we can climb. Those things did.”

  “And a lot of them went splat.”

  “Good point.” She returned her gaze to the lobby in front of them. “You think he’s in there somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. He had all night to fight his way out. He might not even be in the city anymore.”

  “You really believe that?”

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “Keo?”

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “How many were at Santa Marie Island? Two hundred tops? Last night was an entire city’s worth. That’s…a lot.”

  “This thing, the one he calls Mabry,” Jordan said quietly, as if afraid the creature might hear her if she said the name too loudly. “It’s behind this. It wants him.”

  Keo nodded. He didn’t like saying the name any more than she did. Hell, he didn’t even want to think it. The fact that Frank was uncomfortable saying the name out loud said it all.

  If it can scare him…

  He looked down the street, past the stalled vehicles and year-old trash left unattended by a city that had once been crowded with people. He could almost sniff the ocean water from here.

  “They might be out there,” Jordan said. “Your friends.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working vehicle, so we won’t have to walk the entire way.”

  Keo chuckled as they started up the street.

  “What?” Jordan said. “One of us has to stay positive.”

  “You’re doing a good job of it.”

  “Oh, shut up. It’s your fault I’m here in the first place.”

  “Hey, you didn’t have to tag along.”

  “Right, like I had much of a choice after T18 and Santa Marie Island.”

  “There was always Tobias.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I should have left with Tobias…”

  *

  SUNPORT, TEXAS, WAS an oil-based industry town, which meant groupings of oil refineries dotted the landscape as Keo and Jordan left the downtown area behind and took FM 1495 toward the beach. They had been walking ever since Santa Marie Island, picking their way south along the coastline. It had been a real pain in the ass with his gimpy leg, but eventually the wound became numbed enough on day three (or was it day four?) that he could walk without grimacing.

  The sight (and sounds) of so many collaborators along the roads had slowed their progress, and traveling by night hadn’t been a good idea since the world ended
. But just because he was used to walking didn’t mean he wouldn’t trade it all for a working vehicle at the first opportunity.

  Once past the Sunport city limits, they found themselves flanked by heavy industry to their left and almost entirely undeveloped land to their right, with small streams snaking around wetlands. Although they’d passed plenty of homes and subdivisions on their way into town, there was very little of that out here. It took a while, but eventually Keo managed to steal glimpses of sunlight dancing off the surface of water in the distance.

  The Gulf of Mexico awaited. And, if he was lucky, the Trident was anchored somewhere out there, close enough that they would be able to see him. Because, of course, he’d been very lucky these last few days.

  Riiiiiight.

  The highway gave way to small roads and the occasional motels, while palm trees replaced power poles. They slowed when they reached a two-story blue building advertising seafood and beach rental supplies that had a couple of trucks in the parking lot. They checked both vehicles but came up empty.

  They cautiously entered the building—a combo restaurant and general store—and checked every shadowy corner and crevice, and under every table and counter. There was no familiar smell of ghoul occupancy, but you couldn’t always count on that kind of tell. They found rotting food in the kitchen but struck gold with a 12-count case of unopened water bottles in a back closet. Keo scrounged up a faded gym bag from one of the pantries that he then stuffed with eight of the bottles while Jordan found plastic bags and carried the remaining four in them.

  Assured they weren’t going to die of thirst—which would have sucked, with all that undrinkable ocean saltwater mocking them—they continued to the beach. It took another two hours before Keo finally saw welcoming white sand. He was surprised to see cars parked on the dunes, but otherwise no signs of another living soul for miles. Keo ended up wasting about half a minute watching a crab navigating around the points of his boots.

  “Food,” Jordan smiled.

  “Give him a break; the guy’s just trying to get home.”

  “When did you get so soft?”

  He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now.”

  When the crab was finally on its way, Keo slumped down on the sand and sighed with relief. The long walk from Sunport hadn’t done his healing wounds any favors, but he was an old hand at pushing through lingering pain. He unlaced his boots, pulled off his socks and stuck both feet into the warm, mushy beach floor. There were no palm trees in any direction, which was odd because they had passed rows of them on the road over.