The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (22 page)

“All I know is we can’t stay in here forever,” Gaby said. She looked down at her watch again. “If we’re still here when it gets dark, we’re never leaving. Not as ourselves, anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat a bullet than become one of those things.”

She looked back at their faces. Even the kid with the button nose seemed to grasp the gravity of what she was telling them. Or maybe not. For all she knew, he probably didn’t speak English.

“What’s your plan?” Jen finally asked.

“I think Will’s out there,” Gaby said. “Maybe with Mike and the others. The shooting we heard earlier, I think that was them.”

“We could wait for them,” Benny said. “Mike wouldn’t leave us.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Amy nodded certainly.

“And Will wouldn’t leave me, either,” Gaby said. “But they would be on a timetable just like we are. Will especially would know it’ll be too late if they don’t do something by nightfall. We have to let them know there are still people in here to help.”

“How do we do that?” Jen asked.

Good question…

*

She waited until
one in the afternoon before acting. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but spending the next six hours stuck in the bathroom, waiting for the inevitable nightfall, didn’t strike her as a very good plan. The old Gaby might not have been so assertive, but she hadn’t been her old self in a while, thank God.

Jen argued briefly, and Benny gave her a horrified look when she told them her plans. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to talk her out of it. She wasn’t sure if he was afraid she would get them caught, or if there was something more. The truth was probably somewhere in-between.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just wait for my signal.”

“What kind of signal?” Jen asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Hey, you got any bright ideas?”

“No…”

“So okay, then. Wait for my signal.”

Using the slivers in the doorframe, she looked into the nurses’ lounge and saw no one. She listened, and heard nothing. The men in hazmat suits were all wearing combat boots, and they weren’t shy about stomping back and forth. She could usually feel the ground vibrating slightly whenever they approached or walked past the lounge.

The bathroom door opened inward, so she had to move back a bit, bumping into Benny in the process. He struggled to give her space, and she swung the door open, revealing the dust-covered poster that had saved their lives. Gaby pushed the lower half of the glossy sheet forward, gently, and was thankful the top half was held in place by thumbtacks. It fluttered a bit as she slipped outside, and she heard the door instantly closing back up behind her.

She pushed the poster back into place, rubbing down the bottom edges as best she could until it stopped moving. She unslung her M4 and moved toward the open door, then leaned against the wall next to it.

She heard voices in the hallway and the loud crunch of footsteps moving around. There hadn’t been any additional gunfire since around noon, which meant the attackers had completely taken over the hospital. She tried not to think about how many people were already dead out there. She had seen four on the way to the lounge, and the look frozen on their faces said it all—they never saw it coming.

Gaby tried to picture the hospital’s layout in her head. They were in the north tower, and the rooftop access was to her right, around a couple of turns, then at the very end. There had to be men on the rooftop, so even if she could make her way up there, she had to expect an additional fight.

What the hell am I doing? Is this what Will would do?

She glanced back at the long window behind her, the parking lot visible below. She looked for a bit, but couldn’t detect any signs of movements. There had been a gun battle out there not all that long ago. Will and Mike, she was sure of it. Definitely Will. Sound traveled, and he would have heard the attack all the way at the Archers a couple of blocks away.

If only Mike had been smart enough to issue radios to his people…

Gaby turned back toward the door for a moment. From her angle, she only had a limited view of the hallway. The sounds of footsteps from earlier were gone, along with the voices. How many of them were still out there? It wouldn’t have taken very many to secure the floor. Mike’s people were shockingly unprepared, and most of them were women and children. As for the men, she only saw about a dozen that could have really put up a fight.

She moved to the window and put a palm on it. Thick glass, like in the patient rooms. Knocking on it produced a dull, thudding sound. No wonder the ghouls couldn’t get inside. It would have taken an entire magazine just to make a dent in it.

She peered out at the parking lot below, then along the streets, trying to catch sight of something she could use. Would Will be out there now? He had to be. If he knew the hospital was under attack, he would try to get back in, find out if she was still alive. She knew him. You didn’t eat and sleep on the same patch of dirt with someone in the woods for two weeks without a shower and not know how he would respond in a crisis.

Will wouldn’t leave me.

So where the hell is he…?

Unless he thought she was dead. Will might head back to the island if he believed that. Will wasn’t cold-blooded, but he was extremely practical. Maybe—

Gaby froze.

There!

She saw it near an alleyway to the left of the parking lot, across the street and between a couple of orange buildings. It looked like a reflection.

Sunlight glinting off metal?

No, not metal. Glass.

Gaby focused on the glinting object.

She was sure of it now. It wasn’t something natural, because the reflection wasn’t constant. It was there one second and gone the next. Then it was there for a good five seconds, then disappeared for two more, before flickering again. Like it was trying to get her attention.

Will?

A single gunshot echoed directly above her, from the rooftop. The reflection vanished as small pieces of the orange building flicked into the air.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who saw that.

The loud sounds of heavy footsteps in the hallway snapped her back to the lounge.

Gaby hurried to the door and pushed against the wall. She glimpsed two figures in hazmat suits walking awkwardly across the open door. One of them was carrying a crate of canned food, while the other was lugging a familiar green ammo can.

That’s ours, asshole.

They passed by without bothering to look into the lounge.

She heard another man coming down the hallway trailing the first two, already fading as they got farther away. Her mind’s eye flashed back to the man in Beaumont and how he had worn his gas mask. She remembered only his eyes and the bridge of his nose, but no real details about his face because it was hard to see what he really looked like under the gas mask.

That’s it. That’s the way out of here.

Just as the third man reached the lounge, Gaby picked up a ceramic black mug—World’s Best Nurse was written on the side—from a nearby table and tossed it to the floor. The mug cracked, revealing stained black insides.

The man stopped in the hallway and stepped into the lounge, his rifle in front of him. Gaby watched him walk past her and noticed he was about her height. He moved carefully inside, before stopping when he saw the broken pieces of the mug on the floor.

He might have sensed her, but before he could turn, Gaby jammed the barrel of her M4 into the back of his neck. “Put the rifle on the floor.”

Her voice was amazingly steady.

Why aren’t I afraid? I should be afraid, right?

The man did as she ordered, bending slowly at the knees. He might even have been shaking a bit inside the suit. Gaby reached back with one hand and closed the door behind them.

“Benny,” she called. “Get out here.”

She heard the bathroom door opening, then the poster fluttered as Benny hurried out. “This is your plan?”

“This is it.”

“So now what?”

“Put your gun on him.”

Benny aimed his rifle at the man in the hazmat suit while Gaby freed his sidearm from a holster, then unsnapped the gas mask from his belt.

The man looked to be in his mid-thirties, with the kind of face that made her think he might have been an accountant in a past life. She knew the type. Her father was a taxman, and he’d had the same pudgy and pale complexion from working in an office for most of his life.

“I need your suit,” Gaby said.

*

This is stupid.

I’m an idiot.

This will never work.

I’m going to get killed.

God help me, I’m going to get killed.

Those were some of the thoughts that raced through her head as Gaby walked down the hallway in the hazmat suit. She was at least comforted by the fact that the suit’s original wearer wasn’t fat despite his slightly pudgy face, and the suit wasn’t too big for her. With the gun belt strapped around her waist and the M4 in her hands, she could almost pull it off.

Hopefully.

Benny gave her an ‘okay’ nod when she asked him how she looked, but she could tell by his eyes that he was scared. Not for himself, but for her. Which was both sweet and worrisome. Was he scared because he liked her and didn’t want her to get hurt? Or frightened because she didn’t look convincing in the suit?

She couldn’t tell how she looked, and frankly, she didn’t want to. She concentrated instead on how she felt, which was surprisingly calm. With the combat boots on, she wouldn’t necessarily look out of place. And the gas mask hid most of her face, if not the blonde ponytail.

They’re going to see the ponytail…

But not if she kept in front of them. It was hard enough to see the eyes of someone wearing a gas mask; maybe they wouldn’t notice what was behind her, either.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

I am so going to die.

She kept walking, because if she stopped for even a second she might change her mind and run back to the lounge. And then what? Hide in the old bathroom? Sure, that might work for a while…until nightfall. Then the ghouls would be all over the tenth floor, and the idea of being surrounded by those things, with just a fridge, a poster, and a flimsy door as protection made her skin crawl.

She made it halfway to her destination without meeting another person on the floor, though she saw plenty of bodies. Some of Mike’s soldiers, but a lot of the civilians, too. Men and women, some still in their teens. Blood smeared the walls and open doors, and the entire floor had the thick aura of abandonment and death.

She turned another corner and slowed down.

The rooftop access door was at the end of the hallway, and there was a man in a hazmat suit standing in front of it, eating from a can of beans, his gas mask hanging off his web belt. But it wasn’t the man that startled her. It was the door to the man’s right, the one that accessed the other nine floors of the hospital. The lumber that had been nailed across the door, keeping it barricaded, had been pried loose and was piled nearby on the floor.

The door was open.

She could see blackness inside the stairwell door, and it was…
moving.

Quickly, she checked the windows along the hallway. The blinds were pulled up and sunlight filtered in, illuminating large swaths of the tiled floor. That was why the ghouls hadn’t come out of the stairwell yet. Still too much sunlight. She wondered if the men in hazmat suits had left the windows uncovered intentionally.

Maybe they’re still human, after all.

She was halfway to the man when he finally looked up. He licked at brown stains around his lips, before saying, “What are you still doing up here?”

“Are we leaving already?” she asked.

My God, how is my voice so calm?

“You didn’t get the signal?” the man asked. “That’s what the radio’s for, genius.”