Purge of Babylon (Book 7): The Spears of Laconia Read online

  Gaby waited to hear more, but there was just the continuous thump-thump of the truck’s tires going up and down the unpaved road under them. Each time they hit a hole or had to go over a bump, Gaby’s head lifted slightly, only to slam back down against the cold (and dirty) truck bed. She tried to time the rise and falls but could never get it right and gave up after half a dozen failed attempts.

  They must have been moving through a wooded area, because the temperature dropped noticeably despite the combined sweating of her, Nate, Danny, and their two guards. High tree canopies, enough to block out the sun in this part of the countryside, embraced her in cool shadows.

  She did her best to keep track of time, but it was difficult without her eyes. Besides, her ears were filled with nothing but the thump-thump of the tires. It could have been a few hours or less than that since they were captured. The warmth of the sun against one side of her face kept her calm, the usual dread of incoming nightfall staved off momentarily. She hadn’t realized how much living on the Trident this last month had dulled her survival instincts until she set foot back on land earlier this week. That mess in Hellion was proof of that.

  We got soft…and this is what happens when you get soft.

  She was angry at herself, at how she had handled the ambush on the road, and how close to dying she had been in that ditch if it hadn’t been for Nate’s fast thinking. She despised the feeling of helplessness, something she had tried to beat out of her ever since losing Josh to the collaborators and realized the only person she could afford to depend on was herself.

  You would have been so disappointed in me, Will. At least you weren’t here to see me screw up so badly.

  She was still trying to come to terms with her failures when the vehicle began to noticeably slow down. A little later, the sharp squeal and slightly burning aroma of well-worn tires braking wafted into her realm of smell.

  Footsteps as the two men in the back maneuvered around her, Danny, and Nate on their way to the back. The loud clank! of the tailgate being unlatched, followed by the bang! as it slammed down. A stream of voices, vehicles in motion, the extra body odor of a lot of people perspiring in the sun despite the cool air, and the clicks and clacks of…what was that? Metal? Trinkets?

  Bullets. She was listening to the sound of bullets being moved around in crates. Not just that, but they were making them, too. The evidence was in the thick taste of smelting metal in the air. The question was: Were they making silver bullets?

  Rough hands grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around before they began dragging her backward like a slab of meat. Then there was just empty air and for a moment she thought she was going to fall, but the same pair of hands maintained their grip and turned her around again.

  “Feet down,” a gruff voice said. Not the same man she had heard earlier on the radio.

  Gaby lowered her feet, touching nothing for the longest time until—there, solid ground. Dirt, not concrete.

  The same pair of hands pulled her slightly forward, off the open tailgate, and stood her up. “Don’t move and you won’t fall,” the man said.

  She stood still and listened to more clinking and clacking going on all around her. There were a lot of people squeezed into a small area, and every single one of them seemed to be in constant motion.

  A man next to her grunted, then a familiar voice said, “Are we there yet?”

  Danny.

  She almost smiled, but didn’t. There was no telling who was watching and how they would react.

  “Where are we?” someone else said. Nate.

  “Shut up,” the voice from the radio said. “You’ll speak when spoken to. Got it?”

  “Can you run that by me again?” Danny said.

  The whump! of something hitting flesh.

  Danny’s voice again, but this time sounding like he had his teeth clenched in pain, “So that’s a no?”

  “Smartass,” the gruff voice said. Then, “Where does he want them?”

  “He’s in the hangar,” another voice said. “Take them over.”

  “On foot?”

  “We need the truck for transportation. Besides, you need to lose some weight anyway. The walk’ll do you good.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The other voice laughed.

  A hand grabbed Gaby’s right arm and held her steady as someone else cut the zip tie around her ankles. The same hand then pushed her forward. She took that as a sign they wanted her to walk, so she did. Hopefully she didn’t run into something, like one of the many vehicles moving around her.

  Her escort walked slightly behind her. A woman. Gaby could tell even with blindfolds on, because there was no mistaking the sudden difference in bodily smell between the guys who had brought her here and the one who taken over.

  “This would be easier if I could see,” Gaby said, picking her way over uneven dirt floor, the rising heat of the sun beating down on her.

  “No talking,” her escort said. Gaby was right; it was a woman.

  “You have a name?” she asked anyway.

  There was no response.

  “Are we at an airport?” Gaby asked.

  Still no response.

  “Not the most talkative bunch,” Danny said somewhere to her right.

  “You okay?” Nate said from her left.

  “I’m fine, dear; don’t worry about me,” Danny said.

  “Gaby,” Nate said.

  She smiled before realizing he couldn’t see through his own blindfold. “I’m okay. You?”

  “Trying not to trip. And a little sore all over.”

  “That’s what she said,” Danny said.

  “Shut up and keep walking straight,” Gaby’s female escort snapped. She was sure the woman wasn’t alone, though her companions were keeping their distance.

  After about thirty seconds of walking silently across what felt like an open field, the woman finally said, “How did you know?” just as Gaby felt the ground under her switch from soft dirt to hard concrete.

  “Know what?” Gaby said.

  “That we’re at an airfield.”

  “Someone said to take us to the hangar.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s going on? Are you guys making bullets?”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  “I thought we were talking,” Gaby said.

  “You thought wrong,” the woman said.

  “That’s what they used to call me in college,” Danny chimed in. “Thought Wrong Danny. Wanna know why?”

  “No,” the woman said.

  “Sure you do.”

  “I have a gun that says I don’t.”

  “Well, since it’s my personal motto that the gun is always right, I’ll save the explanation for later.”

  “You do that,” their guard said.

  They walked on for another five minutes, until the loud chatter of people, machines, and vehicles began to fade behind them. She wasn’t sure how far the paved ground went, but it seemed to stretch on endlessly. She was trying to remember how far they had walked when the ground began to vibrate and a loud rush of air hit her with such surprising force she started to fall over, and would have, if a pair of hands didn’t grab her from behind first.

  “Easy there,” the woman said.

  Gaby found her footing again and turned her head in a vain attempt to follow the object’s trajectory. “What was that?”

  “One of the Warthogs coming in for a landing. It’s on the other side of the runway, but they pack quite a punch.”

  Jesus, did she just say ‘one of the Warthogs’? Gaby thought, before saying out loud, trying to keep her voice as steady as possible, “How many of them do you have?”

  “Need to know, Erin,” a familiar male gruff voice said from behind them.

  “I’m not an idiot, Louis,” the woman, Erin, said. Then, with a push against Gaby’s back that seemed to indicate the friendly chatter was over, “We’re almost there. Keep straight.”

  *

 
BRIGHT SUNLIGHT FLOODED the wide hangar through a series of high windows along all four sides. The arched roof looked overly tall, though the fact she’d just had her blindfolds removed for the first time in a long time might have had a little something to do with her inability to properly judge dimensions at the moment.

  Catwalks extended from the bottom of the structure all the way to the windows, ending in platforms that looked big enough for a dozen or so men to keep an eye out on the surrounding area. There were metal bars over the windows, which, like the walkways, appeared to have been tacked on very recently. They definitely didn’t look as if they were part of the building’s original blueprints.

  The floor was coated in some kind of shiny material that reflected her face, along with everyone else standing around her, including Danny to her right and Nate to her left. She didn’t know if they were flanking her on purpose, or if that was just how they had been escorted inside. Not that she minded. She liked having them there at her sides, though she would never say it out loud.

  They had been led across an airfield and into a hangar, but there were no planes inside. Instead, the cavernous space had been converted into some kind of storage warehouse, with a small army of people in tan uniforms loading a pair of green Army trucks with plastic moving boxes, wooden crates, and metal containers. A woman with a long ponytail (That’s definitely not Army regulation) handed luggage over to a man crouched at the back of one of the trucks, and Gaby heard more of the clicks and clacks of loose items moving around inside.

  There were just as many sneakers as there were combat boots squeaking against the glossy floor as the flurry of people went about their business. More boxes, along with garbage bags and just about anything that could have been used as containers, lined the far wall of the building, waiting to be loaded. Duct tape, ropes, and strips of cloth hid the contents, though one of the boxes was slightly see-through, and Gaby was trying to peek at the objects on the other side—

  A loud crash! made her look away.

  One of the soldiers in the trucks had missed a handoff, and a gray plastic box had broken against the floor. Candleholders, pens, and silverware were rolling around. They were all silver. Every single one of them.

  They’re making silver bullets, which means they know about the silver.

  There was no panic—no angry voices or barking orders—and people got to work gathering up the spilled items and putting them back into other containers. More than a few of them, she noticed, looked too young to be wearing military uniforms of any sort.

  A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his tan pants hanging loosely off a slim waist, picked up a crate from the far wall and grunted his way over to a truck. The teenager’s shirt collar was green and featured the same white sun emblem that was on the collars of the men who had captured her on the road. Those men, she remembered, had red collars. Like the other workers inside the warehouse at the moment, the boy wasn’t armed.

  When one of the trucks had filled up, someone slammed the tailgate closed. The truck roared to life, then drove out of the hangar. As soon as it was out, another Army truck began backing into position.

  Gaby took the opportunity to look behind her at a steady stream of vehicles moving like busy bees around the airfield. She couldn’t see the entirety of the place from her angle, but what she could see told her she was dealing with a very organized group of people who clearly knew what they were doing.

  The presence of the sun eased her mind a bit, but she badly wished she knew the exact time. Besides taking their weapons, radios, and gun belts, their captors had also taken their watches. She hated not knowing how many hours she had before nightfall, especially out here. Things were so much simpler back on the Trident, where nightfall didn’t arrive with the same kind of crawling dread.

  She turned back around when a voice said, “Did you find any uniforms on them?”

  A lone figure broke off from the group of people in front of her. He had been there this entire time, she realized, with his back to them as he shuffled items between the back of the building and the trucks. The man pulled off work gloves and wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand as he walked over. He wore the same tan uniform as the others, along with the Texas patch over his right breast, and the only thing that stood out about him was the black collar with the white sun emblem in the center.

  Red, green, and now black.

  The man was in his late fifties and stood eye-to-eye with Danny, but there was something imposing about him that had nothing to do with his height or size. It was in the way he carried himself, the stern, almost paternal look in his eyes. His name tag read: “Mercer.”

  “No, sir,” the gruff voice answered from somewhere behind her. “We searched the truck. Or what was left of it. Cole got a little trigger-happy and blasted the thing before we could take them into custody.”

  Mercer nodded, then looked at all three of them one at a time. He casually put his gloves into his back pocket before finally asking, “Who’s in charge?”

  “I guess that would be me,” Danny said.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Danny, but my mother calls me Daniel. You can call me that, too, but I’ll have to insist on at least fifteen years of child-rearing first.”

  The older man trained soft brown eyes on Danny. Anyone else might have turned weak in the knees under that gaze, but most people weren’t Danny, who had survived too many things the last few months—and the years before the world ended—to be affected. Even so, Gaby thought Danny might have actually just…stood a bit straighter?

  Mercer finally turned those same calm eyes on her before moving on to Nate a few seconds later. He must not have found anything interesting about them, because he ended up back on Danny. “What unit were you in, son?”

  “Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning,” Danny said.

  “Fort Benning is an excellent producer of Rangers.”

  “They did the best they could with what they had.”

  “And your friends?”

  “She’s Gaby, and he’s Nathaniel.”

  “Just Nate,” Nate said.

  Mercer didn’t acknowledge either her or Nate. He saw them, but he didn’t see them. She didn’t know whether she should feel a little annoyed, or glad. Did she really want Mercer to “see” her? Maybe not…

  Around them, the activity continued, even as another truck backed inside, the beep-beep-beep of its warning signal loud in the confines of the hangar. The piles of items at the back wall were already much smaller than the last time she looked.

  “You were at T29,” Mercer was saying.

  “T29?” Danny said.

  “The town we attacked earlier today. What were you doing there?”

  “Four hundred…” Morris had said. Gaby thought she could still taste the smoke and blood on the tip of her tongue.

  “Saw your hog swooping in for the kill and decided to go see what all the fuss was about,” Danny said. “That’s the full extent of us being there.”

  “You killed them,” Gaby said. She didn’t realize she had spoken until the words blurted out, drawing Mercer’s eyes to her. There was something about those eyes that made her want to take a step back, and it took all of her willpower to remain perfectly still. Maybe the rising anger and the still-fresh memories of Morris’s town helped. “There were 400 people in that town. Men, women, and children.”

  “And pregnant women,” Nate said. “You murdered pregnant women, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s war,” Mercer said. “People die in wars.”

  “There were pregnant women in that town!” Nate shouted, his words booming in the hangar, so loud that they even managed to pierce through the beep-beep-beep of another Army truck backing inside.

  The soldiers working behind Mercer stopped and looked over. A few of them even glanced at Mercer for some kind of response.

  Mercer didn’t respond right away, and instead stared back at Na
te as if waiting for his fury to burn out. Gaby thought he was going to have a long wait, because she had never seen Nate so angry before—his face was almost red and his nostrils flared, and suddenly that Mohawk looked threatening instead of funny.

  “Collateral damage,” Mercer said finally.

  “That’s it?” Nate said. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “That’s all that needs to be said.” And just like that, he dismissed Nate and focused on Danny. “Let’s talk, soldier.”

  “Why not? Not like I have a hot date or anything,” Danny said.

  The older man walked off and Danny turned and followed, but not before giving her a slight nod that she would have missed entirely if she hadn’t been looking for it.

  “Be cool,” that nod said.

  Mercer had climbed into the front passenger seat of a Jeep waiting outside the hangar. Danny took a seat in the back as the vehicle drove off through some kind of private airfield with a small cluster of administrative buildings all the way on the other side. That was also where most of the vehicles and people not in the hangar were congregated, and where, she guessed, they had been dropped off earlier.

  “Sonofabitch,” Nate said next to her, gritting his teeth.

  Gaby took his hand and squeezed. He looked over and pursed his lips, but she could still see the anger on his face. It was the very first time she had ever seen him so angry and though it probably shouldn’t have, it made her like him even more.

  “Come on,” Erin said, turning and leading them through the hangar.

  While blindfolded, Gaby had thought Erin was in her thirties based entirely on her voice, but she was actually younger—late twenties, and tall. Gaby was used to being one of the taller girls in most rooms, but Erin towered over her at about five-ten, with long dark hair in a ponytail and light hazel eyes. She had a slightly Eurasian look about her, but her accent was all Texan.

  The soldier with the gruff voice, Louis, followed behind them. He was in his thirties, balding, and squat. He had a rifle slung over his back and always kept a good distance, as if afraid she or Nate would try something. Maybe she might have done exactly that before she saw all the manpower Mercer had assembled around them.