The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (21 page)

One of the
dead men was named Toby. It was the first name the voice on the other end of the radio Will had picked up said when he called over:

“Toby, give me a sitrep. Are they dead? What’s going on over there? Someone answer me, goddammit.”

“Who was that?” Will asked.

The collaborator wiped at strings of what looked like eggs and bread with the sleeve of his hazmat suit. The lower half of his face was covered with dry vomit. It smelled, and Will alternated between breathing through his nose and mouth. And he thought the dead ghouls were tough on the smell factories…

“Please, can I have some water?” the man asked. He looked on the verge of tears.

Mike shoved the barrel of his shotgun into the back of the man’s neck. “Answer the question.”

“Kellerson,” the man said. “His name’s Kellerson.”

“He’s in charge?” Will asked.

“Yeah.”

“How many of you are there?”

The man didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be counting. “Sixteen,” he said finally.

“Counting you and the other three on the streets?”

“Yeah.”

“So there are twelve left at the hospital,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” the man said.

“What’s your name?” Will asked.

“Jones,” the man said.

They were a block away from the ambush site, inside a Subway sandwich shop. The building was tiny and easy to miss, but it gave them a perfect view of the streets while staying out of sight. Jones sat in a booth, hands on the tabletop. Mike kept vigil behind the nervous man, while Will stood slightly to his right, so he could see the street at the same time.

“How did you get into the hospital?” Mike asked.

“We climbed up,” Jones said.

“How?”

“Through the ventilation shaft.”

“Bullshit. We checked. The shafts are too small for anything to climb through. Even those bloodsuckers.”

“No, not the main ventilation system,” Jones said. “There’s an older one that’s been out of service that Kellerson found on a blueprint of the place. It goes straight up along the north side, then loops around the roof. It comes out of a sealed grate in the rooftop stairwell. The guys who went up there had to remove the grate, but since there was no one inside the stairwell, I guess it wasn’t too hard. From there, they were supposed to open the other stairwell door and let the others in.”

Mike’s face had grown paler. The idea that he had missed something so vital, that had now come back to take the lives of his people, was playing havoc with his mind. Will felt sorry for the guy. Eleven months, and they hadn’t realized there wasn’t one, but two ventilation systems. Mike was the leader. What had just happened at the hospital, ultimately, was on him.

“What’s the plan?” Will asked Jones. “For the floor. Are they going to kill everyone?”

Jones didn’t look anxious to answer.

Mike shoved his shotgun against Jones’s neck again. “Answer the man.”

“Just the adults,” Jones said. “They want the kids.”

“‘They’?” Mike asked, though Will thought the former officer already knew the answer before Jones even replied.

“Yeah, them,” Jones said.
“Them.”

“Why do they want the kids?” Will asked.

“I don’t know.”

“For the blood?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“What else would they want the kids for if not for their blood?”

Jones looked hesitant. “I heard stories…”

“Go on.”

“The creatures, they have a plan. It involves the kids. I don’t know any more than that. Just that they’re concentrating on the kids now, for some reason.”

“What about the adults?” Will asked.

“They’re too hard to control. The kids are…easier.”

Will glanced briefly at Mike, expecting him to pick up the interrogation, but Mike’s mind wasn’t there at the moment. It was up the street, back at the hospital.

“Where were you taking the kids?” Will asked Jones.

“I don’t know. That’s Kellerson’s job. He knows all the details.” Then he added, quickly, “I’m just a grunt, okay?”

“Are they on the tenth floor now? The bloodsuckers?”

“No, it’s still too bright. They don’t like to risk the sunlight, and the guys don’t like having them run around. It’s…creepy. They won’t flood the floor until nightfall. We were supposed to be gone by then.”

Mike glanced reflexively down at his watch. Will didn’t have to. It was noon outside. He had been fleeing the dark long enough that he could tell the hour from the feel of the warmth against his skin.

“What do you mean by ‘adults’?” Will asked.

“What?” Jones said, not comprehending.

“How old.”

“Over sixteen, I guess. Basically, anyone with a gun. They don’t want anyone who resists. They just want the kids.”

Gaby turned nineteen today. And she’s certainly as hell going to resist.

“Is it over?” Will asked. “Did you kill all the adults? I don’t hear anymore shooting.”

“Last time I checked, there were a couple unaccounted for. They’re still looking for them.”

Gaby?

“Why are you doing this?” Mike asked. He had been so quiet for so long that his sudden voice made Jones jump a bit.

“What do you mean?” Jones asked, turning to look back at Mike.

“Why are you betraying your own kind?”

“I…” Jones’s mind seemed to be working overtime, probably trying to come up with an answer that would keep him alive. “To survive,” he said finally. “Isn’t that what we’re all just trying to do here? I’m just trying to survive like everyone else.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m not proud of it, but I don’t have a choice.”

“You had a choice,” Mike said. “You just chose the wrong one.”

Jones opened his mouth to answer, but thought better of it.

Mike looked at Will. “You wanna ask him anything else?”

“How many did you kill on the tenth floor?” Will asked Jones.

Jones shook his head. “Wasn’t my assignment. Me and the other three guys that chased you had the lobby. I didn’t even kill anyone.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

“I’m just following orders,” Jones said defensively.

“Now where have I heard that before?”

Jones didn’t answer. He looked away instead.

“Anything else?” Mike said.

Will shook his head. “I’m done.”

“Good,” Mike said, and blew Jones’s head off with the Mossberg from less than a foot away.

GABY

I just turned
nineteen, and I’ve already killed three men.

Happy birthday to me.

Eleven months ago, she was trying to decide who to let take her to the senior prom. After a lot of debate and conversations with friends, her choices had come down to two likely candidates—Trevor and Scott. They were both cute boys, and she knew Scott from tenth grade when they dated for half a year before calling it quits. Trevor was new in town, but he had the bluest eyes, and she had always been a sucker for blue eyes.

She wondered where Trevor was now. Maybe hiding in a basement. Or inside a building with friends. If he was lucky, he would have found some people to travel with. That was the only way to survive these days. You couldn’t do it on your own. She remembered those months when she stayed behind in whatever basement they had found while Josh and Matt went out to search for supplies.

Had she been scared back then? No, not really. Thinking back, she was never really scared. She just deferred to the boys because they were
boys
, and she was a
girl
. She didn’t know any better.

She felt like laughing as she thought about the Gaby from a few months ago.

She might have actually laughed, or made a noise, because Jen glanced over. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she whispered back. “Just thinking of an old joke.”

“Really? Now?”

They were squeezed inside a small, six-by-seven room in the back of the nurses’ lounge. It would have been pitch black if not for a few slivers of sunlight poking through the edges of the closed door. The lounge had a north side-facing window with raised blinds that looked out at the parking lot.

The room had once been a bathroom, judging by the big toilet in the back and a porcelain sink somewhere on her left, poking into her rib cage at the moment. The nurses had pushed a refrigerator over one side of the door and covered up the other half with a big poster boasting Mercy Hospital as one of the Top 50 Best Reviewed Hospitals in America. Mike’s people had discovered the room a while back, but never did anything with it. There wasn’t any point with so many rooms to choose from, and she guessed they never expected to need an emergency hideout.

Will would have put it to use ‘just in case.’

She wasn’t alone in the room. Besides Jen, there was Amy, who was the one who had remembered the room and led them here. It was only a couple of turns from where they had been when the attack began. Along the way they had run across Benny, running with the button-nosed boy Gaby had seen earlier, both of their eyes wide with fear.

Benny sat directly behind her now. Amy was in the back with the boy in her lap. The kid was strangely quiet, though he was clearly terrified, the large whites of his eyes staring back at her in the semidarkness. All four looked stunned and bewildered by what had happened. She didn’t blame them. The attack had been swift and brutal. The four of them were probably thinking of all the friends they had just lost. She knew how that felt, too.

The five of them packed into the small bathroom was tight enough, but they also had to battle the bags of medical supplies for the limited space. Amy and Jen had wanted to leave them behind, but Gaby wouldn’t let them. She and Will had come all the way here for them, and she’d be damned if she was going to abandon them now. She liked to think Will would have done the same thing in her position.

“What now?” Benny whispered, leaning forward until the cold barrel of his AR-15 poked into Gaby’s back, causing her to wince a bit. “Sorry.”

For the longest time, they heard gunfire and screaming. When it was finally over, they heard sniffling and crying, and she knew without actually seeing that the men outside were taking the children. Amy told her there were eleven kids in the hospital, not counting the one with the button nose.

What are they doing with the children?

They weren’t shooting them; she was certain of that. They shot everyone else, though. The adults and some of the teenagers. She remembered the sight of Tom, Benny’s friend, lying around a corner with a bullet hole in his forehead. The men in hazmat suits hadn’t shown any mercy.

She saw and heard them entering the lounge twice in the last hour. They had looked around before moving on. The sight of the gas masks reminded her of Beaumont, but she did her best to push those memories into the past where they belonged and focused instead on the moment, the here and now, on trying to stay alive
today
.

One of the collaborators had actually walked over and opened the fridge, looked in at the bottles of warm water and Gatorade inside, before slamming it shut and leaving. He may or may not have taken a bottle with him. She had a limited view of the lounge through the small slivers in the uncovered parts of the doorframe.

Sometime between the start of the attack and when she heard the last gunshot, Gaby swore she could hear gunfire from above her, on the rooftop. It seemed to go on for a while, and she immediately thought,
Will and Mike are back. They’re firing on Will and Mike.

The fact that the gunfire went on for some time told her it hadn’t been a massacre, so that was a good sign.

Hopefully.

Then it was quiet. Very quiet.

Now, Gaby looked down at the glowing hands of her watch: 12:13 
p.m.

“We can’t stay here forever,” she whispered.

Jen nodded. “I know.”

“Why not?” Amy whispered behind them. “Why can’t we just wait them out? They have to leave eventually.”

“Not before they open the doors to the ghouls,” Gaby said. “By nightfall, this entire floor will be filled with them. You think they’re just going to lock everything back up when they go? That’s not how this works.”

Amy didn’t answer, and Benny seemed to be breathing a little harder than before.

“So what now?” Jen asked.

For some reason, the pilot’s eyes were focused on Gaby’s when she asked the question.

Seriously? I’m nineteen years old. Why are you looking at me?

But she knew why. Mike had let them down. Jen, Amy, Benny, and the kid. He hadn’t prepared them for this. It was only Amy’s quick thinking that had saved their lives. The hazmat suits were everywhere, in every hallway, and moving through all four towers of the hospital, looking for targets. Neither Jen nor Amy had any idea how they had gotten in.

They’re so unprepared. Will would never have let us be such easy prey.

“We have to get out of here,” Gaby said.

“How?” Benny whispered.

“The helicopter,” Gaby said. She looked at Jen. “You have the keys with you, right?”

“Keys?” Jen said.

“To the helicopter.”

Jen looked a bit confused. “It’s a Bell 407 model. It doesn’t have keys.”

“So how do you keep people from stealing it?”

“What, the helicopter?”

“Yeah.”

“Gaby, who would steal a helicopter? It’s not like stealing a car. You actually do need to know more than where the gas pedal is to fly one.”

“So if we get to the rooftop, you could just hop in and fly us out of here?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“How are you for fuel?”

“I’m down to eleven gallons.”

“Could you get more?”

“There’s a private airport about ten miles from here. It’s my primary refueling depot.”

Gaby nodded. “So we just need to get up to the roof.”

“Gee, that’s it?” Benny said.

She gave him an annoyed look, and Benny turned away. The nineteen-year-old girl in her felt bad for her quick-tempered reaction, but the survivor part of her, who had struggled to survive Will and Danny’s crucible on the island over the last three months, was glad he was embarrassed.