The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (74 page)

She asked about Marcus.

“Danny killed him. The same night.”

Again, the slight nod that he couldn’t figure out.

Then she asked him about Sarah, about Berg, about the others.

He told her what he knew.

Then about the shack at the power station, the one connected to the tunnel with the ghouls inside. He told her about the concrete wall Will and Danny had put over the door.

Then, to his surprise, she smiled and said, “Ghouls? Will calls them ghouls?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess they just looked like ghouls to him.”

“It’s not a bad description, actually. I should probably start calling them that, too. Just not to their faces.” She smiled, almost as if she expected him to return it. When he didn’t, she continued. “Who is this Blaine guy?”

“I don’t really know. He’s just some guy we met in Lancing, Texas. Then he showed up here later.”

“And the two with him?”

“Maddie and Bobby.”

“Are they soldiers, too?”

“They didn’t look like soldiers. The guy is a mute.”

“What does that mean?”

“He doesn’t talk.”

“Doesn’t talk or can’t talk?”

“I don’t know for sure. Maddie just said he doesn’t talk.”

Karen nodded. “What about the women? Carly and Lara. How good are they with weapons?”

“They can shoot.”

“Anyone can shoot,” Karen said impatiently, like he was trying to pull one over her. “The question is, how
good
are they with weapons?”

He flashed back to last night, standing side by side with Carly as she calmly defended the Tower with a shotgun. He knew Lara had killed before. That man in the church back in Lancing, for one.

“They’re good with weapons,” he said.

“So that’s seven.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“But it’ll probably just be the five defending the beach. Lara and Carly will most likely be back in the Tower with the kids. Speaking of the Tower…Who is up there? The one shooting this afternoon?”

“Danny.”

“What does he have on that rifle? Some kind of high-magnification scope?”

“I don’t know. Will called it an ACOG.”

“What the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. Something Tom had in the basement. It lets him shoot farther and straighter.”

“Tom had a lot of things in that basement, most of which he didn’t know how to use.” She waved a dismissive hand. “So they have a sniper. Danny. Four at the beach, because Will knows that’s the only place for boats to land. He’ll commit everyone there. It’s the smart thing to do. The obvious thing to do.”

I should stop now…

“What did you come back for?” she asked. “What was in the garage in the marina that was so important?”

I shouldn’t tell her…

“Tools,” he said.

“Tools?” She gave him a sharp, suspicious look. “Tools for what?”

“For making bullets.”

“Bullets? There are plenty of bullets on the island, underneath the Tower.”

Don’t tell her…

“Silver bullets,” he said.

Shit.

“Silver bullets?” she repeated, narrowing her eyes at him, trying to decide if he was lying to her again.

“Yes.”

“Why does he need silver bullets?”

“The ghouls. Silver bullets kill them.”

Her eyes widened and her suspicion grew. “How do you know this?”

“I’ve seen it. Will discovered it months ago, when all of this started. He and Danny have been making silver bullets whenever they could ever since. They left the tools in the garage when we arrived because there was no room on the boat.”

Karen seemed to mull it over. She didn’t know about the silver, that much was obvious. Josh wondered if that affected how she looked at the ghouls. Would she still work for them if she knew she could actually
kill
them?

“Smart guys,” Karen said finally. “Too smart for a couple of jarheads.”

Jarheads are Marines
.
Will and Danny are soldiers. Even I know that
.

But he didn’t say it out loud. He was too busy trying to justify himself to the traitorous feelings washing over him like some sick, disgusting bile rising from the very pit of his stomach and forcing its way out of his mouth, onto his tongue. The taste was hideous and made him want to gag.

He watched Karen standing beside the window. She was looking off into a corner, and he could almost see her mind working, crunching the numbers. What was that Sarah had said about Karen? She was a politician; she bartered and made deals to save her own skin because that was who she was. She was the one who had struck the deal with the ghouls—with the blue-eyed ghoul in particular—to turn the island into a honey trap.

“All right,” Karen said after a while.

“So what happens now?”

“Now I take back my island.”

“What about me, I mean?”

“You stay here. I might have more questions for you if this doesn’t go well. It will,” she added quickly, “but you can never be too sure. I always like to have a backup plan. Like the tunnel at the power station. I was going to wait for the blue-eyed creature—the blue-eyed
ghoul
—to show up before I let them in. My big
ta-da!
moment, to prove to her that I could be trusted with bigger things.”

Jesus, she was using the island as a job application for a promotion. What a bitch.

“You guys spoiled that,” Karen said, with a slight frown. “But that’s all right. Nothing worth having ever comes without a little hard work.” She walked across the room, opened the door, but then stopped and looked back at him. “One last question. I’m really curious.”

“About what?”

“Sarah woke you guys up, right? She was the one who betrayed us?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, yes, she betrayed you, but she wasn’t the one who woke us up. I did. I woke up first, then I convinced Sarah to help us.”

Karen stared at him for a moment, again trying to gauge his trustworthiness. “You woke up first? How? No one’s ever woken up before.”

“I barely touched the wine during the feast.”

“Shit,” she said, and almost laughed. “I should have kept an eye on you. I told Marcus to pour you the Coke instead, that you’d probably never drunk wine in your life. But you looked older, and…” She shook her head. “Sonofabitch.”

She turned back to the door.

“What about me?” he asked. “Do I just…sit here?”

“There’ll be someone outside. Try to escape and he has orders to shoot you dead. Got it?”

He nodded mutely.

“Good boy,” she said, and left, slamming the door behind her.

*

He managed to
get up and walk over to the window in his wet clothes. The pain seemed to be easing the more he moved, which was unexpected. Still, he unconsciously favored his left leg, but even when he put pressure on it, it didn’t really hurt that much. Josh couldn’t wrap his mind around that, but quickly decided he didn’t care enough to keep thinking about it.

He peered through the blinds at the men outside. They seemed to be waiting for something, sitting on open tail gates and leaning against trucks, talking quietly, almost nervously, among themselves. There were open cases of weapons around them and in the backs of the trucks. A dozen or so of the men seemed to be drinking beer. Warm beer, of course. The island probably had cold beers. But not out here. Out here, it was go warm or go home.

Thirty against seven.

They can’t win. How can they win against all those men with all those guns?

Josh looked up at the sky and right into the bright sun. What time was it? It had to be almost evening by now. He had left the island with Will in the afternoon, and God knew how long he had been asleep before Karen showed up.

The door opened behind him, and a short man with a bad haircut came in.

The man wore cargo jeans and Army boots. He had a gun belt and a rifle slung over his back. Despite that, he looked innocuous, especially since he was eating an apple when he gave Josh a bored look. “You hungry?”

“Yes,” Josh said quickly. He was famished. He hadn’t realized how famished until his stomach growled.

The man took another apple from a pouch around his waist and tossed it across the room. Josh clumsily caught it. “I found a whole tree on my way here. But don’t tell the others. They don’t know.”

“Thanks,” Josh said.

“I was the one who fished you out of the lake, you know,” the man said. He grinned at Josh, showing off a big gap where he was missing a front tooth. “Literally. There was this big pole—” he mimed it for Josh’s benefit “—with a hook at the end. I guess they used it to grab nets or some shit. I was never much of a fisherman. Never cared for the water, to be perfectly honest with you.”

“Thanks. For saving my life.”

“Sure. Happy to do it.”

“Was I…dead when you pulled me up? I don’t remember anything after I fell in.”

“Nah, you were still breathing. Mostly, anyway. I pumped on your chest a few times and you spat all the lake water out. Then you lost consciousness.”

“Thanks,” Josh said again.

“No biggie. Try the apple.”

Josh bit into the fruit. It was warm, but the juices tasted good just the same. He took another bite and savored the flavor.

“Not bad, right?” the man said. “I ate a dozen of them before I got to this place. The name’s Mason, by the way.”

“Josh.”

“Yeah, I know. The bitch told me.” Mason grinned at him. “Or, ahem, excuse me, Karen, as she likes to be called. But still a royal bitch, right?”

Josh grinned back. He couldn’t disagree with that assessment.

“Exactly,” Mason said. “I would totally still hit that, don’t get me wrong.”

Josh couldn’t imagine Mason “hitting” Karen. She had to have at least five inches on him. The last person who had “hit” it when it came to Karen was Tom, who had been a hulk of a man. Compared to Tom, Mason looked like someone’s kid trying to puff up his chest to look bigger than he really was.

But Josh didn’t say any of that out loud. The guy had given him an apple. Hell, he had even fished Josh out of the lake. That counted for something.

“She’s got a real mouth on her,” Mason was saying. “But hey, politicians, right? They can talk and talk and talk.”

“I guess.”

Mason turned to go. “Anyway, you stay in here. I’ll go outside and ‘guard’—” he made air quotes with his fingers “—you.”

“Thanks,” Josh said again. “For everything.”

“Don’t mention it, kid. Hey, we’re all in the same boat, right? Just trying to survive another day.”

Josh nodded. He couldn’t have put it better himself.

*

Josh finished off
the apple but continued to spend his time at the window, peering out, careful not to be seen, as the men continued to get ready in the front yard. It didn’t take a genius to know what they were getting ready for. They were going to attack the island, except this time there were more men and more guns, and they weren’t going to be chased away by Danny shooting at them from the Tower.

It was going to be a massacre. People would die. He just hoped Gaby wasn’t one of them.

Every now and then, he saw Karen outside, sending one of the men here and there. They seemed to listen to her. Karen was tall and imposing, sure, but there were men out there who looked rough and dangerous. There were some big ones with no necks who filled out their camo pants and hunting vests like they were born to them. But they all obeyed Karen just the same. He wondered why.

Josh had seen trucks arriving with boats. First just two, then three, then four. From his vantage point inside the kid’s room, he tracked them heading down the driveway and toward the boathouse at the back, where he lost sight of them.

He glanced up at the sky. It was still bright, but it looked like the heat was letting up. He didn’t have his watch with him, and the clock on the wall had died a while back. But if he had to guess, it was probably evening. Six or seven o’clock. That meant darkness wasn’t too far away.

So was that it, then? Was Karen’s big plan to attack the island at night? He supposed that was probably better than driving their boats right up to the beach in daylight. The last time they had tried that, Danny had shot them up. And he was just one man. Now Will was back there, and he had three more guns with him in Blaine, Maddie, and the mute guy, Bobby.