The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (61 page)

Gaby and Carly had shotguns, and the two women guarded the windows around them. He was feeling pretty useless sitting next to the open door in case Will or Danny needed anything. The continuous banging against the door below didn’t help.

“Hey, kid,” Danny said below him. “Nice throw for a computer nerd. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Josh gave him an embarrassed grin. “I’m not a computer nerd.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of. Nerds rule the world. Well, used to, anyway. We all know who rules the world now, don’t we?”

“Ghouls?”

“No, guys with shotguns.”

There was a thunderous boom behind Josh that made him jump. He looked back at Carly, who was leaning out one of the windows. She racked her shotgun and fired down the side of the Tower a second time.

“What’s going on?” Will asked from below.

“I don’t know,” Josh said.

“They’re trying to climb the walls,” Carly shouted.

Will stood up and walked to one of the second-floor windows. He glanced out, then Josh saw him fire two shots down the side of the Tower.

“They’re climbing the walls?” Danny asked.

“Yeah, they’re climbing the walls,” Will said.

“How the hell they doing that?”

“They’re standing on top of one another. Like pyramids.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I gotta see this.” Danny walked over to another window and looked down. “Wow. They’re climbing the walls.”

Danny fired down the side of the Tower with his shotgun. He paused, then racked and fired a second time.

“Did that stop them?” Josh asked. He couldn’t see anything from his position.

“No, but it’s slowing them down,” Danny said. “Hard to climb with a face full of buckshot, silver or no.” He stuck his shotgun out the window and fired two more times. “Come on, I got all day.”

“We don’t need all day,” Will said. “We only need two hours.”

Will was right. Josh didn’t have his watch, but his instinctive internal clock told him it was going to be sunup soon. All they had to do was wait a little longer.

Behind him, Carly fired down the side of the Tower again, and then Gaby did the same thing on her side. Carly had the south side, Gaby the north, while Will and Danny took the east and west windows. Between the four of them, they had all four sides of the Tower covered.

It went like that throughout the night.

Will and Danny fired, then stopped. Then Gaby and Carly fired while Will and Danny reloaded below them. When they were done, Will and Danny went back to shooting, and Gaby and Carly reloaded.

Somehow, despite the tumultuous crash of shotgun blasts all around and below them, Sienna managed to fall asleep against Lara’s shoulder. Lara was wide awake, though Josh could tell she was struggling to stay that way. Sarah had already fallen asleep nearby, her daughter still lying with her head in her mother’s lap.

Josh’s eyelids started to become heavy, and after a while he stood up and paced the floor to keep his feet moving and his blood flowing.

Gaby held the shotgun out to him. “Your turn. My arms are about to fall off.”

Josh took the shotgun gratefully and went to the window and looked down.

He thought he was prepared for the sight of ghouls below them, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There were so many of them that he couldn’t see the grass anymore. They stretched across the hotel grounds, and there weren’t nearly enough lights to illuminate them all. They moved around restlessly, climbing over each other to be the next creature at the bottom of the pyramids amassed around the base of the Tower. And they were climbing, using each other as stepping stones.

But they never got very far up the side of the Tower—at least not far enough to grab onto the windows on the second floor—before a shotgun blast tore through the closest ghoul. The force of the blasts knocked it free from the squirming, living pyramid and sent it tumbling back down.

But each time that happened, another ghoul was there to take its place.

Josh fired straight down the side of the Tower. Some of the buckshot scraped against the building’s side, tearing off chunks of concrete, but most found their target. He watched a ghoul’s face disappear, revealing a deformed but polished skull underneath, and the ghoul lost its footing and dropped ten yards into the pile below. Then the ghoul got back up and started climbing again, scarred bones glaring up at Josh from under sheared flesh.

Josh worked the slide of the shotgun and fired again, knocking another handful of ghouls free from the swaying hill of black flesh. Like the last ones, these picked themselves up and got back in line to climb as if nothing had happened.

“Ammo,” Gaby said, and passed him a handful of shells.

He loaded the shotgun, stopping momentarily to look up at Gaby, smiling at him. He smiled back.

Then she picked up another shotgun and leaned out the window and fired down at the ghouls below. The giddiness with which she did it made him grin.

Who would have thought? He and Gaby, at the end of the world, standing on the third floor of a lighthouse, shooting ghouls in the face while trying to wait out the night.

Suck on that, mofos!

BLAINE

Blaine heard them
moving all around him. Something was different tonight. They sounded more active, and their footsteps were heavier somehow. The ghouls were always amazingly light on their feet, a result of their dwindling muscles and the fact that they were mostly skin and bones because that was all they needed.

And the blood. They needed the blood most of all.

But tonight was different, and looking across the employee lounge at Maddie, sitting on the dirty orange couch in her hazmat suit, the gas mask in her lap, trying not to fall asleep, he could tell she knew it, too. Even mute Bobby, leaning a few inches from the fridge pushed against the door, seemed aware of it also.

The room was pitch-dark, with only a few strands of moonlight finding their way through the high window. They sat silently in the Sortys employee lounge and listened. Blaine listened without interest. He was still numbed, still empty. Still trying to decide whether it was even worth it to keep going without Sandra.

The ghouls were indifferent to his pain, and their activity went on for hours. It started as soon as darkness fell, and it didn’t stop. He heard footsteps throughout the early morning hours, racing across the rooftops, outside in the parking lot. But they never strayed into the hallway outside the lounge. Maybe they knew there was nothing for them there from their previous forays into the mall. Or maybe they were all assigned other duties. Blaine knew from experience the creatures weren’t stupid. Far from it. They were disciplined, and they did as they were told.

The blue-eyed ghoul
…

He didn’t care. They could come through the door. It didn’t make any difference to him.

After what seemed like hours of sitting in silence in the darkness, Maddie finally whispered across the room at him. “What are they doing?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know what she expected him to say. Blaine wasn’t even sure he could talk. Or if he wanted to.

“I’ve never seen this before,” she whispered. “They’ve never been this…active.”

Bobby pointed up at the ceiling. Maddie nodded.

“The second floor,” Maddie said. “He’s saying most of the activity is on the second floor. Where the sleepers are.” She shook her head again. “This is something new. I’ve never seen anything like this before in all the months I’ve been here.”

He didn’t care. His mind was elsewhere.

“If you love me—if you care about me—you’ll keep going,”
Sandra had said as she died in front of him.

But how could he keep going? Without her?

Blaine laid the Glock down on the floor next to him and leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“If you love me—if you care about me—you’ll keep going.”

Impossible. How could she tell him that? How could he keep going without her? All of this was
for
her. Blaine would have been happy to spend the rest of his life in someone’s dark basement, running from town to town. As long as she was with him.

He had wanted Song Island for her. What was the point of going there now?

Not without you, baby. Not without you…

Blaine closed his eyes. He didn’t even remember when he fell asleep, but he welcomed the darkness for the very first time in a long time.

*

When he opened
his eyes it was morning, and sunlight was splashed across the room. Blaine pulled himself up from the floor where he had slid during the night. His neck hurt and there was silence around him, reminding him how quiet it could be in the mornings when most of the planet was dead.

Like Sandra…

Maddie wasn’t on the sofa, and the fridge lay on its side. Bobby wasn’t anywhere in the room, either, and Blaine couldn’t find signs of a battle. The door was open, and it looked to be in good shape. The ghouls hadn’t attacked last night.

He sucked in air for a moment.

“If you love me—if you care about me—you’ll keep going.”

He looked down at the Glock in his hand. He didn’t remember when he had picked it up from the floor.

“Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop…”

He didn’t recall when he had started to lift the gun, but it was suddenly up to his chest when he heard footsteps and looked over as Maddie walked into the lounge.

She had her M4 rifle over one shoulder and a backpack over the other. She saw him and gave him a brief, awkward smile. “You’re up.”

Blaine consciously lowered the gun and glanced at his watch. Already 10:16 
a.m.
? He had slept through most of the morning. “You should have woken me.”

She shrugged. “You looked like you needed the rest. Besides, there wasn’t a lot to do.”

“The others…?”

“Gerry’s gone. Lenny, too.”

“What about Sandra?”

“I’m sorry. She’s gone, too.”

Of course they would take Sandra, too. Why would the world allow him to grieve properly?

She walked over to the couch and sat down. Her eyes went to the gun in his hand. “No signs of Mason, but I have Bobby on the roof just in case he comes back.”

“Is that safe?”

“Safer than all of us sitting in here where he can sneak up on us.”

Blaine looked down at the Glock in his hand. It looked foreign, and the feel of it against his palm was unnatural.

“Blaine,” Maddie said, “put the gun away.”

He looked up at her, momentarily taken aback by the hardness in her voice. What did she think he was going to do with the gun? Kill himself? He wasn’t going to kill himself.

Right?

Blaine slipped the Glock into its holster and sat back down on the floor. Maddie unzipped her backpack and took out a bottle of water and tossed it over to him. He took a big gulp and was halfway through when he started spilling some on his shirt and slowed down.

“So what now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” He set the bottle between his legs.

“I mean, what now? They’re gone, you know.”

“Lenny, Gerry, and Sandra, I know.”

“No, not just them. The others, too. All the sleepers on the second floor.”

Blaine gave her a surprised look.

“Yeah, all of them,” she nodded. “That was all the commotion last night. They were carrying away the sleepers en masse. There isn’t a single soul left up there. You’d think there might be one or two or a dozen that they would leave behind, who might have died; but no, they took them all.”

“
All
of them?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing about last night makes sense.”

“Where would they take the sleepers?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many were up there? Thousands?”

“At least.”

“That’s a lot of people to move in one night.”

“There were a hell of a
lot
of them last night, Blaine.”

He nodded. He had to remind himself this was their world now. They—he and her and Bobby—were the anomalies, running around trying to survive, to avoid being stamped out of existence. One nightfall at a time.

So this is what being a cockroach feels like.

“So what now?” Maddie asked again. “Do we follow your friends to Beaufont Lake?”

“Go to Song Island,”
Sandra had said.
“Take Maddie and Bobby. Go to Song Island and try to be happy. If you love me—if you care about me—you’ll keep going.”

“Blaine?”

He looked up at her. She was watching him closely. “What?”

“Do we follow your friends to Beaufont Lake?”

He thought about it. It was hard to concentrate on any one thing. He still felt numbed—not just physically, but mentally as well. “Will and the others would have reached the island by now.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“So we should go, too. Take what we can from here—the food, water, weapons, and clothing—and start off now.” She glanced at her watch. “We could be on the road by noon. If we push it, we can be in Louisiana and on our way to Song Island well before nightfall.”