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

  The first few hours of the night were always the hardest for her. She sat still in the darkness and waited to hear banging on the front doors downstairs. Waited for the loud, tumultuous crashing of windows, signaling that the ghouls had found them. Then there would be the unmistakable boom of shotguns.

  But none of those things happened.

  Instead, she sat for an hour before she felt tired and lay back down, telling herself she wouldn’t go to sleep, because Will was still out there, and she had to stay awake in case he needed her. She glanced over at the shotgun in the corner again. At the pouch full of shells on the nightstand.

  Lara passed the time by looking around her. It was such a girl’s room. Whereas the room with the stranger had sports posters, this one was covered end to end in pink, frilly things. There was a big dresser with a mirror and makeup and combs of a dozen varieties, all perfectly arranged in a row. Not a kid’s room, but a teenage girl’s. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. Almost a woman, but not quite. There were no pictures. Did the room’s owner take them with her when the family fled?

  She closed her eyes.

  Just for a bit. A few minutes, then she would sit back up, in case Will needed her outside.

  Just a few minutes…

  *

  SHE WOKE UP sometime after midnight. She wasn’t sure if it was closer to one in the morning, because she had taken off her watch and laid it on the nightstand.

  She heard movement and opened her eyes and saw a figure walking around the bed.

  “It’s just me,” Will whispered in the darkness.

  She sat up and watched him put down his shotgun, shrug off the vest, and unclasp the gun belt. There was just enough moonlight filtering in through the barricaded window behind her that she could make out his shape. He was moving much slower than normal, which was the telltale sign he was tired and sleep-deprived.

  “I fell asleep,” she said, rubbing at her eyes and feeling a little sheepish.

  “I can see that.”

  “Everything’s good?”

  He sat down at the foot of the bed and pulled off his boots. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

  “Did you check on the girls?”

  “I did. They’re sound asleep.”

  “I’ve been meaning to check on the stranger, too.”

  “I already did. He’s fine.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Like he’s going to see tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  She smiled. “Didn’t you promise me something earlier, too?”

  He looked over, and she saw a brief smile crease his lips. “You need sleep more than you do sex, lady.”

  “I need you more.”

  She held out her hands. Will took them and climbed into bed with her, then immediately sought out her mouth in the darkness.

  She didn’t sleep again for another hour.

  CHAPTER 6

  JOSH

  PROS AND CONS: What were they?

  Pros: He was still alive. And so was Gaby.

  Cons: They might not stay that way for very long. At least, not him. Gaby might last longer, but she might end up praying she were dead, too.

  Conclusion: They were in deep shit.

  Josh concluded that the slimy asshole with the white hair, Folger, was in charge. Or as in charge as five other guys with guns could ever allow one man to be. As Josh watched them interact throughout the day, it was obvious that while Folger considered himself the boss, the others didn’t really see it that way. Folger just happened to be the guy leading them at the moment.

  He had woken in Gaby’s lap and known they were in trouble. It was less that he was in trouble, and more that Gaby was in trouble. His life was at stake, and they could kill him at any moment, but that was just death. He was afraid to die, of course. Josh wasn’t some gung-ho dumbass who though he was invincible. But he was afraid more for what they would do to Gaby once he was dead.

  Like it or not, she had chosen him to protect her.

  I’m the guy…

  That was clear when she gave him Matt’s gun. It was his job now to rise to the occasion, and Josh didn’t want to let her down. More than death, he feared failure with Gaby’s life at stake.

  At the moment, there was a humming pain all over his face. He didn’t know how bad he looked until he saw the expression on Gaby’s face when he opened his eyes.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Liar.”

  “Your face is a little bruised. He hit you with his gun. I think your nose is broken.”

  I feel like half my face is broken.

  That had been an hour ago.

  It took a while, but he was finally able to fight past the pain and get his bearings. They were inside a semitrailer, sitting on a thick rug, though it took him a moment to realize it was actually just carpeting, probably pulled from someone’s house and repurposed. The trailer was wide and long—Josh estimated it was anywhere from fifty to sixty feet long—and about ten feet high (maybe a little higher). It was about ten feet wide from side to side. Josh had seen semitrailers being hauled around Texas all his life, but they had never looked that big to him. Now that he was sitting inside one, he realized how wrong he had been. It actually looked roomy.

  His captors had transformed the interior of the semitrailer to be livable…ish. Besides the carpeting, there were small, Army-type cots along the sides, six in all, held in place by metal cables soldered to the wall. They could be folded up when not in use, like metal hammocks. There were boxes of supplies stacked all the way up to the ceiling in front and to the right of them, and a big rack with guns near the cots.

  Not that Josh or Gaby could have gotten to the guns even if they wanted to. They were locked inside a cage like animals. The cage was barely three feet long and stretched all the way up to the ceiling, and from one side of the semitrailer to the other. It was padlocked, with the key hanging from a hook next to the gun rack. Josh guessed it was about ten feet away.

  Too far. Way too far…

  And they weren’t alone in the cage.

  There was a woman inside with them. She was blonde and tall and wore a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. She kept to herself, staying to one side of the cage while Josh and Gaby sat on the other. She had a bruised right eye, and her lips were cracked. She stared at Josh like a cornered animal, ready to fight them, their captors—anyone. He didn’t want to think about what Folger and the others had done to her.

  “Does she have a name?” Josh asked Gaby.

  He said it just low enough so the woman couldn’t hear, but of course they were so closely packed into the cage she probably heard anyway.

  “She wouldn’t say,” Gaby said. “I asked her a couple of times, but she hasn’t said a word.”

  The woman stared back across at them and said nothing.

  They’ve hurt her. The way they’ll hurt Gaby…

  Over the last three hours, Josh had seen the men coming and going, their presence signaled by loud clanging of shoes against the lowered ramp at the end of the semitrailer. They left the back doors open because there was no point in closing them with Josh and the others locked in the cage. And in the day, it was probably too hot to keep them closed.

  He counted six in all, including Folger. There was Del, the big guy with no neck. Then there was Betts, the one with the ugly scar who had been left behind to watch them. The other three were a medium-height guy with a dark complexion, a short man named Hiller, and finally Manley, who had cat-like eyes with slivers of yellow that made Josh shiver just a little bit whenever he caught a glimpse of the man. The others never failed to look back at Gaby, greedily drinking her in. Except for Manley. The man didn’t look back at her, and for some reason that unnerved Josh even more. You didn’t ignore a girl like Gaby. And if you did, you were up to no good.

  They had left him his watch, a plain, ten-dollar Citizen that kept decent time. Right n
ow it was 4:04 P.M.

  At 4:30 P.M., Betts came over with three potatoes and tossed them into the cage. “Eat up. There ain’t more coming.”

  Josh noticed that Betts had a radio clipped to his hip. The man turned and left without another word.

  He was famished and grabbed the closest potato. It was baked and hot, and he almost dropped it. Gaby picked up hers, while the woman just looked at the remaining potato, then watched Josh and Gaby break off chunks of theirs and feast on them. Apparently this was enough to satisfy her that the potatoes weren’t poisoned, and she picked up the third and final one and devoured the potato in only a few minutes, skin and all.

  Josh sat back against the cold metal wall of the semitrailer and listened to his stomach rumbling. Gaby glanced over and almost giggled. Josh smiled back at her.

  “We’ll be all right,” he said.

  She nodded, but he didn’t think she believed him.

  “I’ll get us out of here,” Josh said.

  He was surprised by how certain he sounded, and realized he meant it. She had put her faith in him, and letting her down, letting these men do things to her, would shatter that trust. He couldn’t allow it. He wouldn’t allow it.

  He wondered how he was going to keep his promise, though.

  Yeah, that’s the tricky part…

  *

  HE FIGURED OUT how he was going to do it—save Gaby, and hopefully himself, too—when he saw how Betts was looking at her when he returned to the semitrailer a few minutes after bringing over the potatoes. Betts swapped out his sweat-drenched T-shirt for a fresh one from a box of clothes stacked in one of the crates. Betts didn’t just show interest in Gaby, it was primal lust.

  After Betts left, Josh said, “Do you trust me, Gaby?”

  She looked at him, confused by the question. “Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”

  “I can get us out of here, but I need you to trust me.”

  “What are you going to do?” She looked frightened and he felt bad for drawing it out, but he had to be sure.

  “You just have to trust me,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” she said, even though he could hear her voice trembling slightly as she said it. “I trust you, Josh. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have given you Matt’s gun. What are you thinking?”

  The other woman was listening, though trying not to make it too obvious.

  Josh looked at Gaby carefully. She was still wearing the white cotton undershirt underneath the plaid long-sleeved shirt, along with the khaki shorts and pink sneakers. He thought it was amusing that even at the end of the world, girls still went for pink if there was a choice.

  Gaby saw the way he was looking at her and frowned. “Stop staring, Josh, you’re freaking me out.”

  “When Betts comes back, can you take off the shirt?”

  “What? Why?” She looked almost offended by the suggestion.

  “I promise, he’s not going to do anything to you. I’ll make sure of that.”

  She stared at him, and he thought he knew what she was thinking: “Can you actually make good on that promise, Josh?”

  He thought he could. Or maybe it was just bravado talking, a vain attempt to delude himself into thinking he could do something he had never done before in his life. It was going to be physical and tough, and he might get the shit kicked out of him. It was, essentially, something he had always avoided throughout his life.

  But he couldn’t avoid it now, not if he was going to get Gaby out of here.

  Josh looked back at her, summoning all the confidence in the world and pushing it onto his face. “I promise. He’s not going to do anything. But I think this is the only way we’re going to get out of here. We have to do it now, before the others come back.”

  She didn’t answer him right away, but after a while—twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds, he wasn’t sure—she finally nodded. “Okay. Now?”

  “Not yet. When he comes back. He has to see you taking it off.”

  “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “He will.”

  She gave him another long, reluctant look, but then finally nodded. “You better be right about this.”

  “I am.”

  God, I hope I am.

  To make this work, he couldn’t be near her, so Josh got up and moved to the other end of the cage and told her to move closer to the center, directly in front of the door. She gave him another odd look, feeling like some kind of meat being dangled in front of a lion, no doubt, but she did as he asked anyway.

  The other woman continued to look on, while still pretending she wasn’t. Josh wondered what she would do when it went down. Would she leap to her feet to help, or stay still? His plan didn’t really count on her pitching in, but he wasn’t going to say no to it, either. She was a fighter. He knew that much just from looking at her. But would she fight when the time came? Maybe…

  He expected Gaby to start protesting at any moment, but she never did. Instead, she sat back against the wall and waited. It was disgusting and insulting to her, he knew, but it had to be this way. Josh knew intimately how men thought. He was one of the species, after all. Okay, maybe not a man yet, but almost a man. Man-ish. Still, he had been around enough of them to know what they said when there were no women around. He felt almost dirty knowing exactly what had been going through Betts’s mind the last time he had glanced over at Gaby.

  They waited, but Betts didn’t show up. Josh could hear him moving around outside, so he was still there and hadn’t left them. He made a lot of noise and didn’t seem to care if anyone heard. But he didn’t come back into the semitrailer.

  Josh glanced at his watch: 6:17 P.M.

  This had to happen soon. It would start getting dark around eight, and sundown would come a few minutes after that. Maybe 8:20 P.M., or close enough. The others would also be back by then. Folger didn’t look like a stupid man, and he would have taken the clock into consideration during their supply raids around town. They would definitely be back before eight o’clock. Much earlier than that, probably.

  Where the hell is Betts?

  Just when Josh didn’t think he would ever show, there was loud clanging from the ramps and Betts appeared, covered in sweat again. He stalked forward and went straight to the box where they kept their clothes.

  As Betts did that, Josh looked over at Gaby and caught her eye and nodded quickly. Gaby shrugged off the long-sleeved plaid shirt and left it lying next to her. Without his prompting this time, she sat up straighter, accentuating her chest underneath her cotton T-shirt, and stared forward as if she didn’t realize what she was doing.

  Josh tried to make himself as small as possible, shrinking into the corner of the cage. This was something he had mastered all his life—becoming less, even in a room filled with people. It wasn’t hard to do, you just had to commit. Josh committed now, and when he peeked quickly across the cage, he saw the other woman doing the same thing.

  She knows, and she’s playing along. I might have some help after all…

  Josh slipped his forearms over his head and looked down at the floor. There was dirt, strips of old clothes and grass, like they were sitting in a pig sty that had been re-used over and over again. Anyone who saw him would think he had drifted off into his own world; or better, had fallen asleep while curled up in a ball. Josh was using his ears to listen and his downcast eyes to catch shadows on the floor. It was a skill he had mastered over the years of middle school and high school, where eye contact with bullies was the same as challenging them to a fight he couldn’t possibly win.

  It didn’t take long. After a few seconds, Josh heard Betts walking toward the cage. Betts didn’t say a word but stood outside looking in for a moment. Josh could see Betts’s shadow falling through the bars, and he could imagine the tall, scarred man staring into the cage at Gaby, raping her with his eyes.

  Josh willed Gaby not to flinch, not to grab her shirt and pull it back on and run into a corner—anything to get away fro
m what must be Betts’s searing glare at the moment.

  Be brave, Gaby, be brave…

  Then he heard Betts walking—away from them!

  For a moment, Josh was certain Betts had seen through the trap, but then a few seconds later there was the jingling of keys and then Betts’s footsteps returning.

  Josh prepared himself. He estimated Betts had about twenty pounds on him. Whereas Josh knew he would have no chance against Manley or Del, or even the short Hiller, Betts was another matter. Betts was all height and no width. Tall people, Josh had found, were ungainly and tended to lose their balance easily, especially those who weren’t athletically gifted. Josh figured Betts was one of those people. Or at least, he hoped.

  If not…

  Josh heard the sound of the cage’s lock turning, turning, and then click. Then the door opening, and Betts’s footsteps getting closer, and Josh saw Betts’s entire shadow moving into the cage, toward Gaby.

  Be brave, Gaby, be brave…

  He was sure she would scream, or get up and run away. But she didn’t. He could see her body out of the corner of his right eye, the point of her pink shoes as she sat on the floor, back against the wall, her arms at her sides. Inviting. He couldn’t imagine how much courage it was taking her to just sit there and look back at a man who had things on his mind that would horrify most people if he ever said them out loud.

  That’s my girl. That’s my girl…

  Josh waited for the right moment. He saw Betts’s shadow fall over the point of Gaby’s left shoe and could hear the fabric of Betts’s jeans constricting as he bent down into a crouch, one foot extended in front of him. Then Josh saw another shadow—Betts’s hand, reaching forward, toward Gaby.

  And still Gaby didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t get up and try to escape.

  Now.

  He shot up from the corner like a rocket. Or at least, he liked to think he looked like a rocket, though in truth he probably looked more like a small bundle of clumsy hands and feet—or maybe a moderately sized boulder stumbling and fumbling its way forward. It didn’t matter how he looked or how convincing, it only mattered that he was moving.