The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (8 page)

Once past the Sunport city limits, they found themselves flanked by heavy industry to their left and almost entirely undeveloped land to their right, with small streams snaking around wetlands. Although they’d passed plenty of homes and subdivisions on their way into town, there was very little of that out here. It took a while, but eventually Keo managed to steal glimpses of sunlight dancing off the surface of water in the distance.

The Gulf of Mexico awaited. And, if he was lucky, the
Trident
was anchored somewhere out there, close enough that they would be able to see him. Because, of course, he’d been very lucky these last few days.

Riiiiiight.

The highway gave way to small roads and the occasional motels, while palm trees replaced power poles. They slowed when they reached a two-story blue building advertising seafood and beach rental supplies that had a couple of trucks in the parking lot. They checked both vehicles but came up empty.

They cautiously entered the building—a combo restaurant and general store—and checked every shadowy corner and crevice, and under every table and counter. There was no familiar smell of ghoul occupancy, but you couldn’t always count on that kind of tell. They found rotting food in the kitchen but struck gold with a 12-count case of unopened water bottles in a back closet. Keo scrounged up a faded gym bag from one of the pantries that he then stuffed with eight of the bottles while Jordan found plastic bags and carried the remaining four in them.

Assured they weren’t going to die of thirst—which would have sucked, with all that undrinkable ocean saltwater mocking them—they continued to the beach. It took another two hours before Keo finally saw welcoming white sand. He was surprised to see cars parked on the dunes, but otherwise no signs of another living soul for miles. Keo ended up wasting about half a minute watching a crab navigating around the points of his boots.

“Food,” Jordan smiled.

“Give him a break; the guy’s just trying to get home.”

“When did you get so soft?”

He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now.”

When the crab was finally on its way, Keo slumped down on the sand and sighed with relief. The long walk from Sunport hadn’t done his healing wounds any favors, but he was an old hand at pushing through lingering pain. He unlaced his boots, pulled off his socks and stuck both feet into the warm, mushy beach floor. There were no palm trees in any direction, which was odd because they had passed rows of them on the road over.

Jordan sat down next to him and began massaging her toes. She opened one of the warm water bottles and finished it off before flinging it toward a trash barrel nearby, but the wind caught it before it even had a chance to hit its mark.

“Don’t mess with Texas,” Keo said.

“Huh?” she said.

“Isn’t that the state motto?”

“Texas can sue me.”

“I hear tort reform’s a big thing down here.”

The beach stretched for miles to both sides of them, with the only buildings he could see sprinkled in the distance to his left. Their right was almost entirely barren except for a couple of abandoned vehicles parked dangerously close to the water. If he just stared forward, he could almost fool himself into thinking that civilization didn’t exist at all out here.

Keo leaned back on his elbows and soaked in the sun, watching the endless waves of ocean foam attempting to reach up the beach about thirty meters in front of him. Blue skies hovered over the Gulf of Mexico, and there were few clouds to obscure the scenery. It was a hell of a sight, and he wouldn’t have minded a house out here for summer vacations.

“What do you think those trucks were doing out here?” Jordan said after a while.

“Sightseeing?”

“You think it’s worth taking the time to search them?”

“Be my guest.”

“Maybe later.”

Keo closed his eyes and listened to her breathing softly next to him. Jordan was sticky with sweat, but he thought she smelled just fine against the fresh ocean breeze.

“I can’t help but notice that I don’t see a luxury yacht anchored anywhere out there,” Jordan said. “How about you? You see a boat out there, Keo? Maybe it’s me. My parents had cataracts. Maybe I’m getting them, too.”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t see them.”

“So we’re screwed.”

“Even if they’re out there, we couldn’t see them anyway. We agreed they’d anchor twenty miles out to stay out of view. I was supposed to radio them when we reached the beach so they could swing by and pick us up.”

“Ah,” she said, almost wistfully, “the best-laid plans and blah blah blah.”

“It’s not all bad.”

“No?”

“We’re the only two souls on a beach, staring at a glorious sky and listening to waves crashing. I could think of worse places to be right now.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you serious? This last week could have been for nothing, especially if Frank’s dead.”

Keo sat up and brushed sand off his elbows. “Jordan…”

“What?”

He reached into the gym bag and took out two bottles of water, opening them and handing one to her. “Salute,” he said, holding up his.

She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway and bumped his bottle with hers. “A tall glass and some ice would be nice.”

“How about a bottle of red wine while we’re at it?”

“Cabernet?”

“Of course.”

“Now you’re talking.”

He took a long drink before lying back down. He buried the bottle halfway into the sand next to him, then closed his eyes again. The warmth of the sun against his face was like a soothing pair of massaging hands, and Keo let himself embrace it. If he was going to die out here, right now, he could think of worse ways to go.

“Hey,” Jordan said after a while.

He didn’t open his eyes, but said, “Hmm?”

“What do you think Gillian’s doing right now, back in T18?”

Fucking Jay,
he thought, and said, “I don’t know. Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Jordan…”

“What?”

“Shut up and enjoy the beach,” he said, letting his body sink deeper into the soft sand underneath him.

After a while, all he could hear was the
sloshing
waves in front of him and the soft, comforting sound of Jordan’s breathing next to him.

GABY

It was a
small town on the outskirts of Cleveland, Texas, hidden away from prying eyes, or anyone who might have been traveling along US59. Once upon a time it’d had a name, but it had since been given a letter and a number and been resettled with survivors—men, women, and children who had accepted that the world was no longer a safe place, that surviving was better than fighting.

The A-10, or Warthog, as Danny called it, had been thorough. If it had left survivors behind, she couldn’t see them from the hillside where she was crouched alongside Danny and Nate. The buildings that once lined an unnamed main street had been reduced to rubble, the result of the 30mm cannon she had heard belching out something that sounded like a creature from a monster movie. What the plane’s Gatling gun hadn’t obliterated, the air-to-surface missiles underneath its wings had taken care of. There were four large craters spread across the length of the resettlement from south to north, and thick plumes of smoke hovered above it like storm clouds.

Gaby thought about those old World War II documentaries her dad used to love watching, remembered marveling at the unreal sight of cities buried under the remains of buildings that once stood so proud. Despite all that property damage, she never saw the bodies, or the real carnage. Maybe her dad never allowed her to see the grisly footage or it had been edited out. The raw details had always remained hidden, but she couldn’t ignore them now.

She could see the bodies from the hillside—or, at least, parts of them. The arms and legs of victims jutting unceremoniously out of rubble as shredded clothing clung to jagged piles of brick and mortar. Skeletal shells of what used to be buildings somehow managed to remain upright, though it was difficult to tell what they used to be. Pockets of fire dotted the landscape, as if marking where the town began and ended. The air was thick with sulfur and she found herself breathing through her mouth to keep from gagging, despite the fact she was still far enough away that she shouldn’t have been affected by the smell.

Next to her, Nate and Danny had gone very quiet and still. Except for the occasional wind howling through the carcass of buildings below them, there was almost no other noise except for her shallow breathing and slightly accelerated heartbeat.

“We should go,” Nate said. He sounded almost breathless. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“He’s got a point,” Danny said. “That hog might come back. Or it might have friends.”

“Christ, how much armament does one of those things carry, anyway?”

“Depends on its objective. There’s a reason it was so goddamn effective in the Stan.”

Gaby stood up. She didn’t know what she was going to do until it was already too late to stop. Her joints popped as she moved, but she ignored them and gripped the M4 tightly in front of her.

“Gaby, wait,” Nate said.

“There might be survivors,” she said, and hurried down the hill.

“There’s nothing down there, Gaby. Not anymore.”

She kept going, her boots fighting for purchase against the sloping hillside, until Nate’s voice was lost against the scraping noises. Or maybe she had just effectively shut him out as she hopped the last few feet; it helped that her heartbeat had gone from slightly raised to hammering out of control against her chest.

*

“There might be
survivors,”
she had said, knowing what a terrible lie that was even as the words tumbled out of her mouth.

Reaching the beginning of the town just confirmed it. Nothing could have survived what she was looking at. The gun runs, as Danny called them, had been incredibly efficient. The Warthogs were effective at their jobs, he said, which was why they were so good at providing close-quarter air support. That was their specialty, after all.

She stepped around the craters that pockmarked the main street that ran through town, the curvatures of the unnatural holes still darkened with wet blood. The 30mm rounds that hadn’t landed on the buildings had instead dug gaping holes in the pavements and reduced the sidewalks into disorganized slabs. A sea of broken glass and small concrete chunks
crunched
under her boots with every step. Gaby held a handkerchief over her mouth to keep out the choking sting of smoke and blood.

The bodies were almost all hidden under the remains of buildings, charred wooden frames, and structural steel beams. The sight of an exposed belly, the pregnant mother’s head missing, inside what used to be a bakery, almost made her retch. She kept moving, pushing on, resisting the urge to look back at the body, telling herself the woman (and the child inside her) would still be dead if she looked a second or third time.

Her eyes stung and she fought back tears, too afraid of what would come out if she failed to suppress the emotions. The prospect of Danny and Nate seeing her break down was enough, and she pushed on. She couldn’t allow the men to see her be reduced to the Gaby from a year ago, the little girl who had to rely on Matt and Josh to keep her safe. That girl was long, long gone.

“Gaby.” Nate’s voice from behind her. “Wait up.”

She started to turn back when something emerged from behind a dead horse in front of her. Gaby tensed, raising the M4. She stopped when she saw bristling brown and white hair as a cat darted across the street. Its coat of fur was singed black, and there were parts of the animal that had been burned off, exposing flaring red skin underneath.

“What the hell was that?” Nate said.

“Cat,” she said.

“Jesus, I thought it was a giant rat or something.”

Gaby looked after the animal for a moment before turning back to the horse. Or at the figure trapped underneath it…still moving.

“I got a live one!” she shouted, before jogging forward with her carbine at the ready.

The earbud in her right ear
clicked,
and she heard Nate’s voice: “Danny, we got survivors.”

“How many?” Danny asked through the earbud.

“Just one so far,” Nate said.

“Be careful. It could be a trap.”

“Will do.”

But it wasn’t a trap, Gaby found, when she stopped next to the horse and its rider, a woman in a North Face jacket open to reveal a black uniform underneath. There was a patch of Texas on the jacket’s right shoulder and a name tag that read “Morris.” One half of her face was covered in blood, the wetness matting short black hair to her skin, and she was busy trying to push the horse off her. Even if the dead animal were still alive to obey—there was a hole from a large caliber round in the belly of Morris’s mount—Gaby doubted the woman would have found freedom to her liking: There was a large pool of blood under her, which she might not even have noticed yet.

The soldier finally gave up and instead locked eyes with Gaby. Then she sighed and lay back, letting both hands drop to her sides. She hadn’t tried reaching for her holstered weapon, which was the only reason Gaby hadn’t shot her yet. Pieces of an M4 rifle were sprinkled liberally among what looked like the remains of a wooden toy train set.