The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (34 page)

If Alice hadn’t come out of the truck, Gaby was pretty sure she, Danny, and Nate would have been on the road to Starch by now. Or maybe they would have even reached the town already. It was only sixty miles to the west of them, after all. Though with the collaborators likely on high alert after yesterday, maybe she was being too generous.

Instead, they were somewhere in the woods surrounding Larkin, waiting in the living room of a small cottage as Taylor carried a pile of rifles out from a back room while Alice dragged a raggedy backpack along the wooden floor after her.

“Someone must have been real nice, because I think Christmas just came early,” Danny said.

“You’d be surprised what you can find out there, just sitting around,” Taylor said. “You can take whatever you want. I don’t even know how to use most of them, and I’m a little scared to even try.”

She laid the weapons down on the heavily chipped wooden kitchen counter, and Gaby, Nate, and Danny walked over and formed a semicircle around it.

“That thing’s bigger than you,” Danny said to Alice.

The girl grunted back at him. Danny grinned and took the backpack from her and opened it, then pulled out unopened boxes of bullets and three handguns—two automatics, including a Glock, and a six-shot revolver.

“God bless Texas,” Danny said, and laid the handguns down next to the pile. “Dig in, kids.”

“You don’t want to keep any of these?” Nate asked Taylor.

The teenager shook her head. “I already have the hunting rifle.”

“She won’t let me have one,” Alice frowned.

“You’re too young.”

“Not anymore.”

Taylor rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about this again.”

The younger sibling had a point, Gaby thought. They had all grown up fast these days. You had to, or you didn’t at all.

“Where’d you find them?” Nate asked.

“Mostly around town,” Taylor said. “We haven’t really strayed too far from Larkin. There are fish in the pond out back, so we’ve been able to keep going with the supplies we took from homes and stores nearby. There’s just the two of us, and we don’t really need a lot.”

“Last night must have been scary,” Gaby said.

Taylor nodded. “It was like listening to World War III out there. Every time those planes went by, it sounded like they were right on top of us.”

“They were flying low,” Danny said. “Warthogs do their best work at close range.”

“It helped that the collaborators didn’t show up with anti-aircraft guns,” Nate added. “I guess they didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“They do now. Which means we have to be more careful on the roads. They’re going to be shooting first and fuck the questions.” He glanced quickly at Alice. “I mean, forget the questions.”

Alice smiled back. “I’ve heard worse.”

“I bet you have.”

“Come on,” Taylor said, and the girls drifted over to the other side of the kitchen, where Taylor opened a can of pineapple for the younger girl using a manual can opener. Alice’s mouth was already watering before Taylor even got the lid all the way off.

In the year since The Purge, Gaby could see that the two sisters had made a decent life for themselves out here. The cottage itself was located in a wooded area with a small pond behind them. The girls had no idea how to fish twelve months ago, but Taylor had learned pretty fast.

“There’s no refrigeration, so we pretty much cook and eat them the same day after I catch them,” Taylor had explained.

Adapt or perish, right, Lara?

The cottage had faded yellow walls and dirt-covered floors, with two bedrooms in the back and a shack for supplies outside. It was out of the way, with no actual roads leading to its front doors, which was how the sisters had managed to avoid detection from both humans and ghouls. She hadn’t asked if this was their place or if they had just stumbled across it; the fact was, those things just didn’t matter anymore.

Gaby looked back at the weapons on the counter between her, Danny, and Nate. There were three hunting rifles, a pump-action shotgun, and two AR-15s in the pile. Danny snatched up one of the rifles—it was tanned and looked well-worn, with chips along the sides and stock. He pulled out the magazine, found it empty, and began reloading it with rounds from one of the ammo boxes.

Nate picked up the other rifle and offered it to her across the counter.

“And it’s not even my birthday,” she smiled at him.

“Just remember that when I actually forget your birthday,” Nate said.

“Charming.”

“Just trying to score bonus points for future screwups.”

“Oh, you said screw
ups
,” Danny said. “I thought you said something else.”

“Not in front of the kids,” Gaby smirked.

The rifle was matte black, and unlike the one Danny was turning over in his hands, hers looked almost new. It had a collapsible stock, which she thought was a nice touch. Both had simple red dot sights unlike the hunting rifles, which were equipped with very long scopes. They were good for long-distance shooting, but she’d learned to appreciate the semi-automatic capabilities of an AR. The ability to send a lot of rounds downrange in a short amount of time, she’d found, couldn’t be beat in a gunfight.

Gaby looked over at Taylor. “You’ve never used any of these?”

The girl shook her head. “Those things are too complicated. The one I have is easier. Just pull that thingie back and shoot.”

Gaby smiled. Was she ever that innocent when it came to weapons?

“So there wasn’t anything there?” Taylor asked. “Back at the airfield?”

“Just a lot of rubble,” Gaby said. “What were you hoping to find?”

“Anything useful. I thought about waiting a couple of days, but I guess I was too curious about last night.”

“You know what they say,” Danny said, “curiosity killed the kid in the cottage.”

“Now you tell me,” Taylor said.

Gaby liked the girl. She would have been pretty if she let her hair grow out; or, at least, stopped cutting it herself. The fact that Taylor had managed to keep her little sister alive out here all by herself made her even more impressive.

“We’ll be heading back this way when we’re done with our thing,” Gaby said. “If you want, we can pick you two up, take you back to the
Trident
with us.”

“You mean, and live on a boat?” Taylor said doubtfully.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact, it’s pretty great.”

“It’d be cool to live on the ocean,” Alice said wistfully between mouthfuls of pineapple.

Gaby’s mouth watered just looking at the syrup dripping down the girl’s chin. When was the last time she had some of that? It was probably before that mess at Mercy Hospital, back in Louisiana. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

“I’m just giving you the option,” she said to Taylor. “It’s up to you, but you don’t have to decide now.”

Taylor nodded. “We’ll think about it. When will you guys be back?”

Gaby glanced at Danny.

He shrugged. “As early as a day, as late as a week.”

“Basically, whenever,” Nate said.

“What I said.”

“Not really.”

“Close enough.”

“We don’t know for sure,” Gaby said, seeing the confusion on Taylor’s face. “But it shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“Is it safer out there?” Taylor asked.

“On the
Trident?
Yes. Out there, on the ocean, you don’t have worry about people—or other things—showing up at your front door.”

“Or bad men on the road trying to steal your ride,” Danny added.

“And that, too.”

Taylor didn’t say anything. Gaby could see the indecision on her face, that struggle between burgeoning hope and trying to stamp it down because hope was a hard thing to embrace these days. She’d learned that the hard way, too. There was a time when she hoped Will would finally contact them, to tell Lara that he was okay, and come back.

I should have known better. Even Will can’t survive out here by himself.

“When you come back, we’ll know for sure,” Taylor said. She sounded certain; either that, or she was putting on a very good front.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a ham radio, would you, kid?” Danny asked her.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s definitely
not
a radio made out of ham.”

“Is there a Radio Shack or electronic store in town?” Nate asked. “They might carry one.”

“I don’t really remember,” Taylor said. “There’s a couple of strip malls, but I don’t remember a place that sells just radios.”

“Should we look anyway?” Gaby asked Danny. “We need to let the
Trident
know we’re still alive. They must be crazy with worry right now.”

Danny shook his head. “Starch is sixty miles from here. We can get there in a few hours even using just the smaller roads. All we have to do is stay out of trouble until then.”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Nate said.

“Indeed it is, Nate-ometer. The facility will have everything we need. Best part: no poking around Hicksville, USA, for them.” He slung the AR-15 and looked back at Taylor. “This everything, kid?”

“That’s all I found,” Taylor said. “What, you want more?”

“Normally this would be enough, but after what we’ve seen? Hells yeah. I’ll take whatever else you got.”

“That’s it, sorry.”

“No grenades?”

“Grenades? Um, no.”

“Hey, couldn’t hurt to ask.” Danny started to go, but stopped and turned back to the counter and picked up the pump-action shotgun. “Just in case…”

*

With only sixty
miles between them and Starch, a mostly serviceable ride, and now armed, they felt good enough about their situation that they decided to eat first before taking off. They didn’t want to dig further into the sisters’ stash, so Danny and Nate spent a few minutes outside at the pond with a pair of fishing poles, catching a dozen fish in less than ten minutes. A year’s worth of spawning, with only the two girls to cut into the inventory, meant fish were attacking the plastic lures as soon as they hit the water.

Like shooting fish in a barrel,
she thought.

They were in the beat-up truck and back on the road by midday, with more than five hours left to reach Harold Campbell’s facility. More than enough time, unless they encountered obstacles along the road, which after yesterday was a very real possibility. It wasn’t just collaborators they had to worry about, though; it was Mercer’s men, too. Texas had become impossibly deadlier since the last time they set foot on it, something she didn’t think she would ever say a year ago.

We should have stayed on the
Trident.
I wonder if Lara is saying the same thing to herself right now?

“Tough kids,” Nate was saying from the backseat. “Did we ever ask them if that was their place?”

“No,” Gaby said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Nate was looking out the rear window, even though the cottage had long disappeared behind a wall of trees. Danny picked their way through the unpaved dirt trails, eventually locating a stretch of empty country road that, according to a sign, would take them away from Larkin and westward. The idea was to avoid the main highways completely.

As they headed back toward civilization, Gaby found herself listening for the telltale signs of approaching warplanes from above.

“Warthogs do their best work at close range,”
Danny had said.

She had seen that for herself yesterday, and just the memory of it made her shiver unwittingly. She hoped the men in the truck with her hadn’t noticed, and when neither one of them said anything—especially Nate behind her—she guessed she was safe.

Nate had one of the bolt-action hunting rifles in his lap, the backpack with the extra ammo next to him, and they each had one of the handguns. She had the Glock in her front waistband (what she wouldn’t have given for a tactical gun belt at the moment), Nate liked the Smith & Wesson revolver, while Danny had chosen the Sig Sauer. She wasn’t going to complain about the extra weapon or the spare magazines, but the fact was, if they had to rely on them today, it meant her hope of a smooth sailing to Starch had been dashed.

If the truck was visually unimpressive on the outside, it sounded worse inside. No wonder they had heard the vehicle coming back at the airport. The pickup made too much noise, and she swore the tires squeaked every time they found a pothole or went over something as minor as a hill of dirt, which given the countrified nature of the road, was often.

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, and neither did Nate or Danny. She didn’t know what was going through their minds at the moment, but she kept expecting uniformed men to come out of hiding in front of them, springing an ambush the way they had done to poor Taylor this morning. The only question was whether those men would be wearing tan or black uniforms. Either way, the thought made her grip the AR-15 just a little bit tighter, her right forefinger rubbing against the trigger.

After about half an hour of driving in silence, with nothing but the trees and woods for company and the wind whistling in their ears, Gaby finally said, “Are we going to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Danny said.