The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (35 page)

The man had a thick red beard and was wearing some kind of camo uniform. He glared up at Will with dark, bloodshot eyes, grimacing in pain, but looking, miraculously enough, still in one piece.

“How many lives you got?” Will asked.

“Seven, give or take,” the guy said.

Will grinned back at him, and looking up at the billboard, saw the rifle still up there. “You forgot your rifle.”

“You wanna go get it for me?” the guy said.

“Well, since you asked so nicely…”

Gaby and Nate had run over. They were out of breath, though he guessed it was less from the short jog and more from the adrenaline.

“Friend of yours?” Gaby asked.

“Not quite,” Will said.

“Who is he?” Nate asked. “And why was he trying to kill you? Us?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. He looked back down at the man. “He’s either one of Kellerson’s, or some random asshole that likes shooting people for fun. So which one is it?”

The sniper said nothing.

“Kellerson?” Nate said.

“He’s in charge of the collaborators I told you about,” Gaby said. “The ones that attacked Mercy Hospital.”

“Look around for his vehicle,” Will said. “It should be around here somewhere.”

“What about you?” Gaby asked.

Will looked up at the billboard. “Watch him for me. He was using an ACOG, and it’s still up there.”

“Sweet,” Gaby said.

*

It was sweet,
until he climbed all the way up and saw the M4 carbine with a big piece of metal sticking out of its side. There was another, smaller piece sticking out of the front lens of the scope mounted on top of it.

The sniper was sitting on the curb with his hands draped over his knees when Will climbed back down. Gaby stood in front of him, almost daring him to try something. He was smarter than he looked, though, and didn’t.

“Where’s the ACOG?” Gaby asked.

“It’s broken. Along with the rifle.”

“Of course. Why should we get any luck, right?”

“Did you find his vehicle?”

“Behind the school. Nate’s bringing it over now.” She looked at the man. “You killed a lot of people back at Mercy Hospital.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” the man said. “I was downstairs in front of the building the whole time.”

“So you are one of Kellerson’s men,” Will said.

“I’ll talk to the girl over here—I’ve always been partial to blondes—but you can kiss my ass.”

“Did you find out where Kellerson went?” Gaby asked Will.

“I bet my friend here knows,” Will said. Then he shifted his attention over to her. “What are you doing here, Gaby?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, staring back at him defiantly.

“You know what I’m doing here.”

“Asked and answered, then.”

“I left before you came back for a reason.”

“I know. You tried to ditch me. That wasn’t very nice.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“And where should I be?”

“Back on Song Island.”

“Benny’s taking the others there. He doesn’t need me to ride shotgun.”

He sighed.

“Look,” she said, showing no signs of giving in, “I can’t just let you chase after Kellerson and those kids by yourself. Besides, that dick killed Amy and Jen. I liked them, Will. I liked them a lot, and I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

They heard a car coming and looked over as a white truck appeared from behind the auto body shop, driving through the grass before easing onto the road. Nate was behind the wheel.

“I know your story,” Will said. “What’s his? He voluntarily left his group to come chasing me, too?”

Gaby actually blushed a bit. “I guess he likes me.”

“And that’s the only reason he came?”

“He’s a guy, Will,” she said, as if that should explain everything.

He smiled. He guessed it did. “What about Benny?”

“What about Benny?”

“I thought you liked him.”

“Give me a break. It’s the end of the world. I get to pick whoever the hell I want to hang around with. Even if that someone is your dumb, suicidal ass.”

“Fair enough.”

“Besides,” Gaby said, “I figured, with the three of us, there’s a better chance you’ll come home alive, and I won’t have to explain to Lara why I let you run off to get yourself killed. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He didn’t, because she wasn’t wrong.

Three against Kellerson was better odds. It still wasn’t
great
odds, but it was a hell of a lot better than it had been an hour ago when he rode out of Lafayette.

LARA

She overslept and
woke up with a hangover. It wasn’t quite the pounding-in-your-brain type of hangover she had endured a couple of times in college, when she couldn’t pull herself away from a party fast enough. Lara was always good at either resisting or dodging peer pressure entirely, but there were only so many times you could tell your friends you didn’t want to drink with them before they took it personally.

She sat up in bed and grimaced at the sunlight splashing rudely across her face. She had slept in her clothes, but had somehow managed to kick off one shoe during the night. Not soon enough, as it turned out, because the bedsheets were covered with crumbs of dirt and dried mud.

She stumbled to her feet and into the bathroom for a hot shower, spending the full five minutes to gather herself. Afterward, Lara dressed in fresh cargo pants and a long-sleeve shirt, then grabbed her gun belt. All the while, she stepped over pieces of the broken radio and closet door she hadn’t gotten to yesterday.

She picked up a new radio from the nightstand and debated whether to call Danny, who would already have been in the Tower since five this morning. With Blaine still in the Infirmary, Carly had pitched in, taking over Blaine’s shift in the evenings. Soon Lara would have to start assigning Bonnie, Roy, and the others their own duties. But that could wait, maybe until after Will got back.

If he’s still alive…

She had overslept her eight o’clock shift on the beach, which meant Roy had either failed to wake her up or had decided not to. If it was the former, she had cause to be worried; she needed people she could trust to do what they promised. But if it was the latter, and he purposely didn’t wake her because he thought she needed the extra sleep, then she would have to thank him.

*

She found Bonnie
in the kitchen, helping Sarah and Jo fix breakfast for everyone.

Breakfast, unlike lunch and dinner, didn’t involve fish. There were plenty of freeze-dried breakfast items in the freezer, enough to feed, according to Sarah, an army for a few years. That was an exaggeration, but not far from the truth. There were stacks of frozen biscuits, sausage patties, bacon strips, pancake batter, waffles, oatmeal, French toast sticks, popcorn chicken, and a hundred other items she didn’t even know came in frozen form. Sarah had begun to catalog everything—something that was never done when Karen ran the island—and was still going through the shelves three months later.

“Where’s Roy?” she asked them.

“He went to bed about two hours ago,” Bonnie said. “I found him snoring on top of the boat shack this morning. Poor guy, he wanted to stay up there until you came to relieve him. I put Gwen in his place with the binoculars, if that’s okay.”

She nodded. “That’s fine. The beach is just a precaution, anyway. She has a radio?”

“Danny assigned everyone radios this morning.”

“Why didn’t anyone wake me?”

Sarah gave her a sympathetic smile. “Everyone agreed you needed the extra sleep. Besides, Carly and Danny are around. Nothing happened, and you got your rest. Everything’s fine, Lara.”

Lara smiled. “So, Roy was snoring on top of the shack?”

“More like snorting,” Jo said, and the girls laughed.

Lara left the kitchen, imagining Roy with his boyish blond hair snoring on the roof of the boat shack in the morning hours.

She made her way across the hotel grounds, watching and enjoying the sight of Lucy and Kylie giving themselves a tour of the island. Derek, the teenage boy who had let West out of his makeshift jail cell yesterday, was with the girls, along with the younger boy, Logan. When they saw her, they waved—all except Derek, who looked away, whether out of anger or embarrassment, she had no idea.

Adapt or perish, kid.

She crossed over to the Tower and climbed the spiral staircase, the sound of her boots
click-clacking
against the cast iron metal. She was halfway up the second floor staircase when she heard voices floating through the open door above her.

Danny, talking to a second, muffled voice.

The radio.

She hurried up the last dozen steps and burst onto the third floor. Danny was leaning over the ham radio at the table.

“Will?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Someone else, but here’s a kicker—it came through our emergency frequency.”

“Then it has to be Will and Gaby.”

“That’s what I figured.” He turned back to the radio, pressed the transmit lever. “The boss just showed up. You’ll want to talk to her.”

Lara took the microphone from him. “How long ago?” she asked him.

“A few minutes.”

She turned to the mic and pressed the lever. “This is Lara. Who am I talking to?”

“My name’s Benny,” a male voice said.

“Benny, how did you get this frequency?”

“Will gave it to me.”

Will. Oh thank God.

“Is he okay?” she asked, somehow managing not to scream the question through the radio. Not that it stopped her heart from racing noticeably inside her chest.

“Last time I saw him,” Benny said.

“He’s not with you?”

“No.”

“What about Gaby?”

“She went to find Will.”

“What does that mean, Benny?”

“Will sent her to find a ham radio, but before she came back, he took off. Gaby decided to go after him, and Nate went with her.”

“Who’s Nate?”

“The guy leading this group I’m with now.”

“Wait, you’re not all from Mercy Hospital?”

“No.” He paused for a moment. “The hospital was attacked. Most of the people there are dead. I think I might be the only survivor.”

Lara exchanged a worried look with Danny. This explained so much. Why Will was out of contact, and who the man with the deep voice was that had answered when she called Jen’s helicopter yesterday.

“They killed everyone?” she asked.

“I think so, yeah,” Benny said. Then he added, “Except for the children.”

“What about the children?”

“They took them,” Benny said. “The ones Will called collaborators. That’s where Will went. To get the children back.”

*

Of course
Will
would try to get the children back. Will was practical to a fault, but there was a streak of righteous decency in him that she admired and loved. So
of course
he would decide to go on a fool’s errand to save children he had never met, whose names he probably didn’t even know. Because there was a chance he could succeed, and a chance was good enough for Will.

If you get killed, I’m going to kick your ass, Will.