The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) Read online

  After that, well…

  “It’s dirty down here,” Blaine said through the radio, “but so far no signs of the eighth guy. But I can see why he’d be down here, though. This place is a maze. There are nooks and crannies and places I don’t even have names for.”

  “A lot of places to hide?”

  “Too many. We’d need more time and manpower to look everywhere. And if he knows the place as well as Keo thinks he does, then he’ll know where to hide from us. Or move around without being seen or heard.”

  She didn’t know what she had expected. That the eighth guy would voluntarily give himself up after hiding out all night? She was hoping, maybe, but she always knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  Of course not. Because that would have been too easy.

  “Okay,” she said into the radio. “Finish searching what you can, then get back up here. Once you’re outside, seal the engine room. If he’s down there, we’ll just have to be satisfied with locking him in.”

  “What about the engine?”

  “What about it?”

  “What if he sabotages it?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t that what people usually do in the movies? To keep us from launching a nuke or shooting someone important? Or, in this case, using the boat?”

  Sabotage? She hadn’t thought of that.

  So what else hadn’t she thought about?

  “Or he could just do enough damage so we can’t use it, but he can fix it later,” Blaine said.

  “Blaine, you’re overthinking it.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” she said, doing her best to sound confident. Did it work? Was she just fooling herself? She added, “Finish up and get up here. Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it.”

  “You’re the boss,” Blaine said.

  So everyone keeps reminding me. God help us all.

  She clipped the radio back to her hip. Maybe the eighth guy didn’t even exist, and Gage was playing games with them. Or maybe the man didn’t know how to count. Either way, she didn’t like the mere prospect of having someone running around on the boat who could hurt one of her people. Not that she could do anything about it at the moment. At least, not without more manpower.

  Below her, Maddie was looking up in her direction. “I always wanted my own personal yacht!” she shouted.

  “What were you going to name it?” Lara called down.

  “Jaxon. With an x.”

  “Ex-boyfriend?”

  “I wish. He didn’t know I existed.”

  “Well, now you have a yacht. That’ll teach him.”

  Maddie laughed, then went back to cinching the craft into place.

  Lara looked down at her watch. It was almost ten.

  Will had called two hours ago. He wouldn’t call again for another few hours, until he was almost at the island. She had wanted to ask him to make it three contacts instead of their usual two, just for today, but had decided against it. Will had other things to worry about out there, like men in uniforms with assault rifles. The less she put on his plate, the more energy he could devote to actually surviving. God knew that was difficult enough on an island that didn’t move, but to be constantly hounded and chased out there in the open…

  Hurry home, Will.

  She glanced over at the shoreline in the distance. She couldn’t quite see the burned-down marina or the two-story house with the naked eye, but if she squinted long and hard enough, just maybe…

  Her radio squawked, and Carly’s voice came through. She sounded anxious and even slightly out of breath. “Lara, come in.”

  She answered as fast as she could. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I guess you can’t hear it,” Carly said. “Boat motors. They’re coming toward us from the north.”

  “Did you say ‘motors’? Plural?”

  “Yeah. Benny says he can see two of them right now.” She paused, then added, “Benny says there are men in camo army uniforms on both of them.”

  Already? In the daylight?

  She pressed the transmit lever again, said, “Keo, did you hear that?”

  “I’m on my way to the Tower now,” Keo said.

  He was back at the hotel, having returned earlier to get out of last night’s damp clothes and escort Gage over to Zoe in order to get his wound treated. She might have entertained the idea of killing the “captain” earlier, but now that she accepted how valuable he could be, they had to keep him alive, even if he only had one good leg left. She only needed what was inside his head, anyway.

  “Blaine, Roy,” Lara said into the radio.

  “Where do you want us?” Blaine answered.

  “Stay on the boat and guard the yacht.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Then, “Maddie, get the boat ready.”

  “Readying,” Maddie said, already climbing onto the bass fishing boat tied to the back of the Trident below her.

  Lara hustled down the rung of stairs. She hadn’t set foot on the lower deck for more than a few seconds when her radio squawked again.

  “Lara,” Carly said through the radio.

  “Where are they now?” she asked.

  “Still at the same spot. But remember when I said there were two boats?”

  “Yes…”

  “They just got friends,” Carly said. “There are four of them now.”

  Are they really attacking? In the daylight?

  Maybe I was wrong about them. About what they would do. What they could do.

  What else was I wrong about?

  *

  Four boats. If they had two men in each one, that was eight soldiers. That was the best-case scenario, anyway. It was more likely there would be more than just two per vessel. Like four. She remembered that night when Karen’s people tried to retake the island. There had been around four per boat then.

  The worst-case scenario had sixteen heavily-armed men sent to kill them.

  In the daylight? she thought again.

  For some reason, she found herself hoping sixteen was the right number. Sixteen men, as menacing as that sounded, was preferable to twenty, or thirty, or God help them, forty or more. If Kate really wanted the island and to kill every living thing on it, she had plenty of collaborators willing to help her achieve that end. All those soldiers out there (like Josh) running around rounding up survivors who hadn’t capitulated to the ghouls yet was proof of that.

  But still…sixteen?

  She was jogging up the pier, having hopped out of the boat even before Maddie finished sidling alongside it. Lara was amazed how comfortable she had become with moving while carrying a full arsenal strapped to her body. The gun belt didn’t even feel heavy anymore, and she hardly noticed the M4 thumping against her back. She had even become used to the weight of the ammo pouches, the handgun, and the knife on her left hip.

  Look at me, ma. All armed and a lot of men to kill.

  She unclipped her radio and keyed it as she leaped off the pier and landed on the cobblestone pathway that wound its way from the beach to the hotel grounds beyond the wall of trees in front of her. “Talk to me, guys.”

  “Four boats, two men each,” Keo said through the radio.

  Two men per boat? That didn’t make any sense.

  Why so few? And why in the daylight?

  “Small boats?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Keo said.

  She couldn’t tell if he was just as confused as she was. It was hard enough to hear nuance over the radio, but Keo, like Will, had a bad habit of not giving away his thoughts, even up close and personal. And she knew Will. As much as she had put her trust and the lives of her people in Keo’s hands, she had to constantly remind herself that he was still a stranger.

  “It doesn’t look like this is an attack run,” Keo added.

  “So what are they doing?”

  “Watching us back with binoculars.�
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  A scouting mission? Was that it? Was that all this was?

  “How far?” she asked.

  “About half a kilometer.”

  “Can you take a shot?”

  “You mean you want me to shoot them?” he asked, almost…was that befuddlement?

  “Yes,” she said, racing between the trees.

  She was momentarily alarmed by the sudden dip in temperature as she jogged up the cobblestone pathway. The island had cooled down noticeably in the last few days, but with the plentiful shade provided by the towering walls of trees to both sides of her at the moment, she felt as if she was running through a pristine valley.

  “Um, no,” Keo was saying through the radio.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I can’t make the shot. Who do you think I am, an ex-Army Ranger?”

  She sighed. “Never mind. Just keep an eye on them for now.”

  “Now that, I can do.”

  Bonnie was on the front patio of the hotel waiting for her when she emerged out of the woods. The ex-model had her rifle and looked like she had just woken up, which was probably not too far from the truth. Bonnie was tired, but then, they were all getting by with less sleep these days. It was just another privilege of surviving in a post-Purge world.

  Adapt or perish, right, Will?

  “I heard on the radio,” Bonnie said. “Where do you want me?”

  “Stay in the hotel,” Lara said as she jogged past Bonnie. “The girls. Watch the girls!”

  Bonnie nodded before heading back into the hotel.

  It took Lara another few minutes to finally reach the Tower, a tall structure—a combination lighthouse and radio tower—on the northeastern edge of the island. It stood next to a cliff overlooking Beaufont Lake and was tall enough at forty meters to give them a perfect view of the entire island and the surrounding lake and its shorelines. Will called it a perfect sniper’s perch, and she supposed that was true. Unfortunately for her, there was no one on the island at the moment who was good enough with a rifle to actually make use of it. Still, it served other purposes, like an early warning device in case of an attack.

  Or boats of undetermined motives approaching, like now.

  What the hell are they doing out there? If this isn’t an attack, then what is it?

  She climbed the cast-iron metal staircase up the three floors and was laboring badly by the time she poked her head through the third floor’s opening. The Tower’s second and third floors had four windows in each direction, and Keo was standing at the north one, now peering out with binoculars. He had changed into dry cargo pants and a sweater and had that German submachine gun slung over his back. For the life of her, she didn’t understand why he didn’t switch to an M4, which had a much better range.

  Even as she thought that, Lara almost laughed at herself. When did she get so comfortable with all of this that she was seriously considering telling a man like Keo what made for a better weapon? A year ago, she had thought every gun had a safety and didn’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine.

  She had managed to regain some of her composure and wasn’t nearly hyperventilating as much when she stepped through the door. “Where’s Benny?”

  Carly looked back at her from the south window. “Keo sent him down to the northwest cliff in case they had managed to sneak someone closer when we weren’t watching.”

  “Did they?”

  “The kid hasn’t seen anything,” Keo said.

  “Benny’s still hurt.”

  “He’s fine enough.” He handed his binoculars to her as she walked over. “North. That means they came from the same staging area I told you about.”

  “The same one you’ve hit twice now.”

  “That’s the one.” He smirked. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed by their refusal to abandon that place. A part of me feels just slighted enough to go back there and hit them a third time.”

  “Hey, you shoot the grenade launcher, and I’ll drive,” Carly said.

  “I thought you were leaving soon,” Lara said to him.

  “That’s still the plan,” Keo said. “But I had a few minutes to kill.”

  “Thanks.”

  He gave her a noncommittal shrug, then pointed again. “See them?”

  It was impossible to miss them with the binoculars. Even half a kilometer away, they looked clear as day drifting on the water. It wasn’t as if they were trying to hide. A couple of the men were standing and peering back at her with their own binoculars, while the rest seemed to be lounging about without a care in the world. All four boats were powered by outboard motors that were shut off, and the only sound was the crashing of waves against the rocky formations at the edges of the island outside the window.

  There were only two in each boat, and although they were heavily armed, the way they were just loitering around made them look like fishermen hanging out for the day. Of course, the fact that they were all heavily armed and wearing what looked like army uniforms said otherwise.

  “You’ve seen those before?” Lara asked. “The uniforms.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “They’re the same ones I’ve run across.”

  “But are they Army?”

  “As in US Army?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve been around grunts all my life. Those aren’t standard army issue. They’re assholes dressing up in costumes.”

  Carly chuckled behind them. “Damn, you and that silver tongue of yours, K-pop.”

  “I try,” he said. Then, “My guess? Whoever’s in charge already knows that you know they’re coming. Maybe he figures there’s no point in hiding it.”

  “Maybe it’s a she,” Carly said. “Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean you can be a sexist pig, Keo.”

  “My mistake. It could be an asshole chick calling the shots.”

  “Better.”

  “So what’s the point of this?” Lara asked, lowering the binoculars.

  “Maybe just intimidation,” he said.

  “That makes sense to you?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. I just do the shooting. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the psychology of why, how, and when.”

  Lara shook her head. “Well, I do spend a lot of time thinking about that, and none of this makes any sense to me.” She keyed her radio. “Benny, come in.”

  “Benny here,” the young man answered.

  “Are you seeing anything out there?”

  “Nothing. I’m halfway to the western half right now, but so far, I don’t see anything.”

  “How’s the leg?” she asked.

  Benny had come to them with a broken leg, and she hadn’t expected very much out of him as a result. But the young man had proven himself more than capable, and with the help of a custom leg brace designed by Stan, he was moving around again. To help maximize his abilities, she had given him jobs that didn’t require a lot of constant movement, such as standing watch on the shack at the beach or in the Tower.

  “It itches,” Benny was saying, “but I’m still mobile.”

  “Okay, keep looking. I need to make sure they’re not trying something.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Carly?” Lara said, looking across the room. “Anything along the shoreline?”

  “Not a thing,” Carly said. “If they’re out there, or planning something, they’re really being sneaky about it. Sneaky buggers, as Danny would say.”

  The not knowing gnawed at her. What the hell were they doing out there? Or was Keo right? Were they just trying to intimidate them? Maybe whoever was in charge didn’t even know these bozos had come here? Maybe they were trying to figure out what all the shooting last night was about? Did they know about the yacht yet?

  She had so many questions, and so few precious answers.

  To keep her mind off the growing frustration, Lara keyed the radio again. “Blaine, come in.”


  “Blaine here,” the big man answered.

  “Anything on your end?”

  “There’s nothing coming at us. It’s all quiet on this side.”

  “Okay.” She put the radio down and glanced at Keo. He was staring out the window at the men in the boats. They were mostly stick figures with the naked eye, but that didn’t seemed to deter him. “So?”

  “So?” he repeated.

  “You’re the expert. What happens now?”

  “I’m the expert?” he said, sounding amused.

  “Compared to the rest of us? Yes.”

  “They’re going to attack tonight, aren’t they?” Carly said behind them.

  Keo did that noncommittal shrug again.

  “What does that mean?” Carly said, echoing Lara’s own thoughts.

  “Pretty sure, yeah,” he finally said.

  Lara waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. She was about to press him on it when she heard the roar of outboard motors starting up. She looked through the binoculars as the four boats turned around and began moving away, back in the direction they had come.

  “They’re leaving,” she said.

  “They’ll be back tonight,” Keo said.

  She handed the binoculars back to him, catching his eyes as he took it. “We could use you tonight.”

  “Your boyfriend will be back by then.”

  Hopefully, but I’ve been living on hope for so long, maybe I’m just deluding myself this time, too, she thought, but said, “I know, but we could still use your help.”

  “I told you, army guys and me don’t get along.”

  “After what you’ve done for us, I’m pretty sure Will and Danny aren’t going to have any problems with you, Keo.”

  He didn’t reply right away. He hung the binoculars back up on the hook along the wall and looked across the room at Carly, who had also turned around and was watching him intently as well.

  He turned back to Lara. “Look, I respect what you guys are doing here, fighting for this island. But you know my feelings about it. Sooner or later, this place is going to fall and you’re going to lose people. It’s not worth it.”

  He stopped for a moment and seemed to be trying to gather his thoughts. Lara could tell talking things out wasn’t something Keo did on a daily basis and that this was all new territory for him.