The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (63 page)

“At least two, I think.” She looked back at Bobby. “How many did you see, Bobby?”

He shrugged and put up two fingers. Then shrugged again.

“He’s not sure,” Maddie translated. She looked back at Blaine, saw the look on his face. “What is it?”

“They were in a hurry,” he said.

“And?”

“There’s no reason to be moving that fast.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re still a good five hours away from sundown. It’s not going to take more than an hour max to reach Song Island. There’s no traffic on the road, at least not out here. So what’s the hurry?”

She seemed to think about it, but didn’t have any answers for him.

Behind them, Bobby popped another BBQ-flavored Pringle into his mouth and crunched loudly.

*

“It should be
ahead of us,” Maddie said, consulting the map in her lap.

“How far?”

“There should be a right bend in about a mile. Route 27 keeps going around the lake’s western cove for another two miles.”

“Anything about a marina?”

“No, but there should be one or two before the two miles are up.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because coves make for good fishing spots. I’d be surprised if there weren’t at least two launches around here.”

“If you say so.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m more concerned about those trucks,” Blaine said.

He was unable to forget about the trucks. Three trucks, with at least two men in each one. The farther he went down south, the more convinced he was they were headed to Beaufont Lake. But it was the way they were traveling—fast, with purpose—that stuck with him. Even though he had only seen them from a distance, something in the way they drove didn’t seemed right for survivors looking for safety. It was too aggressive.

It was hard to explain, and there was always a chance he was being overly paranoid. Then again, if only he had been more paranoid about entering Beaumont, taken precautions, maybe Sandra would still be here…

The right turn Maddie had predicted came up, and Blaine slowed down and took it without any problems.

“There,” Maddie said, pointing.

Blaine slowed down some more, heard Bobby moving excitedly behind them. Bobby made so little noise that whenever Blaine did hear him, it always startled him just a little bit until he realized who it was. He didn’t think he would ever get used to having someone around him who didn’t speak.

Maddie pointed at a faded sign along the side of the road. The only thing Blaine could make out was the word “marina,” and he didn’t have to wait long before the marina itself appeared in the distance. He glimpsed the tip of a gazebo and the sun sparkling off the aluminum roof of a garage-like building.

Blaine stopped the Jeep about fifty yards away, putting the vehicle into park along the side of the road out of sheer habit.

“Why are we stopping so far away?” Maddie asked.

“Just to be safe.”

“The trucks?”

“Yeah.”

The trucks. If they were heading for Song Island—and he was fully convinced they were—then they would have seen the marina and pulled in. Unfortunately, fifty yards was too far away to pick out the three trucks from the dozen or so vehicles at the marina at the moment.

Behind them, Bobby stood up and peered through a pair of binoculars.

“See anything?” Blaine asked.

Bobby handed him the binoculars and pointed forward. Blaine stood up in the driver’s seat and peered through them.

The gazebo to the left of the marina, a storage garage farther in. None of the vehicles looked like the ones he had seen passing the Shell earlier. There was an inlet next to the marina, and on the other side, a sprawling, white two-story house surrounded by hurricane fencing. He couldn’t see signs of movement around the property, but it was hard to tell from this distance.

“Anything?” Maddie asked.

“House across from the marina,” Blaine said.

He handed her the binoculars. She stood up and looked for herself, and after a moment, lowered them. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Neither do I. And that’s the problem. There are no other places for those three trucks to have stopped but here. At least, if they want to get to Song Island.”

“You’re assuming they were headed there.”

“What else is down here?”

She looked around at the emptiness for a moment. “Maybe they already took a boat to Song Island. I saw a boathouse on the property.”

“Can you see the island?”

“I see a patch of dirt,” she said, peering through the binoculars again. “Way, way in the distance. And something that looks like a lighthouse, but I can’t be sure.” She lowered the binoculars. “So what do we do now? There aren’t any boats at the marina, and there might be people at the house who may not be friendly. This has gotten a lot more complicated.”

Blaine glanced at his watch. They were pushing up against five in the evening. They had, at best, just over three hours of sunlight left.

Suddenly there was the loud
crack
of gunfire in the distance.

A second shot followed, then a third. Not a burst, or a three-shot burst, but carefully squeezed-off shots. They came from the water, though Blaine couldn’t tell from which direction, or how far away.

Then the loud rattle of return fire, like fireworks, rolling across the lake surface for a good five seconds. More than one assault rifle firing, unloading on something. That, or someone was wasting a lot of bullets answering the first three shots.

They heard the
crack
of another gunshot, then a fifth and sixth shot followed.

Then there was silence.

They waited to hear something else—more returning fire—but whatever had happened seemed to have run its course. The quiet settled back over the lake as if nothing had happened.

“That’s not a good sign, right?” Maddie said. It wasn’t a question. “Gunfire from Song Island. If that is Song Island out there.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what to think.”

“What about your friends? You think they’re on the island right now?”

“They must have arrived a full day ahead of us, so it’s possible.” Then he heard something else. It was a grinding sound, gradually growing in intensity. “You hear that? What is that?”

“Outboard motors,” Maddie said. “Boats.”

*

It didn’t take
the boats long to reach the shore, but by then Blaine had moved the Jeep out of the road and into the side of the ditch. The Jeep wasn’t completely hidden, at least not from anyone with eyes traveling along the road. From a distance, it had a chance of going unseen, though that was probably a stretch, too.

They crouched along the edge of the ditch, watching with binoculars as the boats—there were two—chugged down the inlet between the marina and the house, then turned left and headed toward the boathouse on the property. Blaine saw four men in one boat and four more in the other. He couldn’t make out faces, but it wasn’t hard to see they were all heavily armed.

“One of them’s hurt,” Maddie said beside him.

“Which one?” Blaine asked.

“First boat.”

Blaine looked again and saw that she was right. One of the men was sitting down, slightly slumped over, holding his shoulder.

“The second boat’s motor is damaged,” Maddie said.

“How can you tell?”

“It’s coughing up smoke. Too much smoke.”

Blaine saw that, too, though he didn’t know what a damaged boat motor looked like. She was right, though, the motor on the second boat was definitely putting out more smoke than the first one.

The boats pulled up to the boathouse, which had three slots, the third slot empty. A man appeared from the side of the binoculars’ field of view and guided the boats in. The men climbed out, two of them helping the injured one up.

“Make that two injured,” Maddie said.

“Which one?”

“Second boat. Looks like his right leg.”

Blaine focused on the second boat as the men climbed onto the dock. And yes, one of them was limping badly. One of the limping man’s comrades reached over and helped him up the wooden deck. They left the boathouse, arguing and gesturing wildly. He followed them to the two-story house as far as he could, glimpsing trucks parked in front of the house, and was sure one of them was the Silverado from earlier. Another vehicle might have been the blue Tundra.

“That’s a lot of firepower,” Maddie said. “You think they were attacking the island?”

“If they were, it didn’t go well.” Blaine lowered his binoculars. “I only heard six shots in all, not counting the loud free-for-all in the middle. What about you?”

“Six.”

“What about you, Bobby?”

Bobby held up one hand and one finger on his second hand.

“So six shots in all,” Blaine said. “That’s not a lot. But it might be enough for a pair of Army Rangers to put the hurt on a couple of boats trying to land on their beach. The question is, why are they even attacking the island? What’s going on over there?”

“So you think your friends took the island?” Maddie asked.

“I think they’re on it, yeah. I’ve seen them shoot. They wouldn’t need more than six shots to repel an attack by boat. Even a couple of boats with four guys apiece.”

“Are they that good?”

“They’re really well-prepared, and they know what they’re doing.”

They settled back down into the ditch.

Maddie wiped at a bead of sweat along her forehead. “So what now? We can’t just stay here forever. Sooner or later it’s going to get dark, and we’re going to need shelter.”

He didn’t have any good answers for her. They could attack the house from the front, but he flashed back to the gunfight at the mall. What happened that day was forever etched into his brain. He reminded himself that he, Maddie, Bobby, and Sandra could barely take on two men they had the drop on. Which made it unlikely they were going to take on at least eight heavily armed people in a two-story house, even if two of them were already hurting. That still left six.

Six too many…

Blaine glanced down at his watch: 4:16 
p.m.

“Well?” Maddie said, watching his face carefully. “Should we attack the house?”

“That wouldn’t be a very good idea,” a voice said behind them.

Blaine shot up and spun around—and found himself staring into the barrel of an assault rifle.

WILL

Morning brought salvation
and sent the ghouls back to their point of origin. It wasn’t hard to figure out where that was. All they had to do was follow the jagged lines of white bones scattered across the island, the flesh seared off completely by the sun’s rays. The unnatural mist of evaporated, tainted flesh and ghoul blood lingered in the air long afterward. Thank God for the wind that appeared out of the north to help drive the smell away.

The sight of so many dead ghouls in one place took Will back to the bank outside of Cleveland, Texas, all those many months ago. That was the day he had lost Kate. He didn’t know it until much later, but that was when she had started to slip away. His failure to notice cost them Harold Campbell’s facility and forced them on this journey to Song Island. Maybe, in the long run, it would all work out.

If they could hold the island…

Less than thirty minutes after sunup, Will and Danny emerged from the Tower. Instead of a cobblestone pathway, they followed the bones from the eastern cliff back to the power station in the west. They bypassed the hotel. There wasn’t anything in there they hadn’t already seen last night. The dead would be gone, including Al, Jake, Debra and her son, and Berg. Will didn’t know if Berg had ever made it out of the zip ties before the ghouls had invaded the hotel, and he didn’t particularly care.

He did care just a little bit about the others, especially Al, whose screams were one of the last things Will had heard before the cook had vanished under a sea of swarming creatures. He hadn’t seen what happened to Debra or her son Kyle, though he had seen Jake swinging a golf club when the ghouls had entered through the windows around them. He remembered grabbing Sienna and dragging her away. She had fought him, trying to get back to Jake, and Will had been half a second from letting her go when she had decided to finally stop fighting and run.