The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (5 page)

“See you soon,” Lara said.

Gaby hurried off, jogging down the steps and running across the lawn, afraid that if she hesitated for even a second, she might change her mind and convince herself that she wasn’t ready for this.

She passed Blaine and Maddie, bracing against the onslaught of swirling wind. The whine of the helicopter’s turbine engine was already deafening even before she got close. Will opened the back door for her and she slipped inside. He slammed the door shut, then climbed into the cockpit’s passenger seat.

Will held up an aqua and black headset and motioned for her to put hers on. She grabbed a pair off the seat next to her. Will’s voice came through loud and clear. “We good?”

She nodded back. “We’re good.”

Will turned to Jen. “How far to Lafayette by air?”

“Eighty miles, so call it an hour, give or take,” Jen said. “I like to take the scenic route whenever I can, in case I run across survivors below.”

“How many survivors have you found over the last year?”

“Exactly thirteen.”

“Lucky thirteen.”

“Lucky for them, I showed up.”

The helicopter lifted into the air, gaining speed and altitude with each passing second. Gaby looked out her window, saw Carly outside the front patio with Lara and the kids leaning against the railing around them. It wasn’t until she saw the girls waving good-bye that the realization she was leaving the island for the first time since arriving here with Josh and the others three months ago finally struck her.

“How are you for fuel?” Will was asking Jen up front.

“There’s enough to get us to Lafayette and back, if necessary. Don’t sweat it.”

“Sweating things is what I do.”

“Is that how you landed the hot doctor?”

“That, and my charming personality.”

“Is that what she told you?”

Will chuckled.

Gaby became slowly aware of an insistent
clicking
noise. It took a few seconds to track it down to the ammo cans on the floor next to her, shaking from the vibrations that coursed through every inch of the helicopter. The rectangular boxes were dull green with handles on top, and the bullets inside were trembling against the sides, the metallic
click-click-click
sounding disconcertingly like a bomb’s timer.

Jen pointed the helicopter northeast, and Gaby watched Song Island slowly fade behind them.

*

Somewhere between Beaufont
Lake and Lafayette, Gaby drifted off to sleep. When she opened her eyes, the first thing that flickered across her mind was—

Josh.

How long had it been since she thought of him?

Too long…

Josh is dead. Move on, girl.

She pushed him out of her mind and sat up in the backseat. In front of her, Will and Jen were talking, their voices coming through the headset that had slipped down to her neck while she slept. She pulled it back up over her ears.

“The city’s almost completely empty,” Jen was saying. “I flew this chopper over every inch of it before I started expanding out into the countryside. I was sure there would be survivors at Lake Charles. If anyone can survive the end of the world, it’s got to be gamblers, right?”

“Where do you land this thing in the city?” Will asked.

“I’ve been landing and taking off from the hospital rooftop. Every time I leave it up there overnight, I’m always dead certain the next morning I’ll find it in a hundred pieces, that they—the ghouls—would sabotage it. But they never did. I don’t know why.”

“It’s a good question.”

“You don’t have any theories?”

“Not really. They used a car against us once. They lifted it up and crashed it into a brick wall.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

Gaby had heard that story before. Will and Lara had lost a couple of people they were traveling with that night.

We’ve all lost people.

She thought about everyone she had lost over the last year. Her parents, her friends, her neighbors…

Josh…

“What was he in the Army?” Will was asking in the cockpit.

“Mike was a lieutenant,” Jen said. “You?”

“Corporal.”

She grinned over at him. “So what was it, a general lack of ambition? You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be happy pulling down a corporal paycheck for the rest of his life.”

“I didn’t see the point. I left the Army after my enlistment was up, joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Danny and I were working SWAT when all of this happened.”

“Damn, Will, I didn’t know I was flying a badass soldier-slash-ex-SWAT commando around. I’m practically trembling with excitement.”

Will smiled. “You want an autograph?”

“Will you sign my breasts?”

“Are they big enough?”

“Wouldn’t you like to find out.”

*

Lafayette, Louisiana, according
to Jen, was a city of 112,000 people. Dull, gray concrete highways had replaced open prairie below the swiftly moving helicopter, and she glimpsed large buildings and skyscrapers in the distance. Marble and glass curtain walls, something she hadn’t seen in a while, glinted underneath the sun’s glare.

Jen reached forward and hit some switches along her helicopter’s dashboard—they all looked the same to Gaby—before speaking into her headset. “Mercy Hospital, this is Jen, I’m on approach. Anyone manning the radio over there? Over.”

There was static through Gaby’s headset for a few seconds, before a male voice answered: “We hear you loud and clear, Jen. Welcome back. We thought you’d abandoned us for good this time. Over.”

“No such luck, Mercy Hospital. I’m ten minutes out. Over.”

“Roger that. ETA ten minutes. Over.”

“Inform Mike I’m rolling in with two new people. They’re armed but not dangerous, so no one get ants in their pants. Over.”

“Will do,” the man said. “Mercy Hospital over and out.”

“You guys have problems with other survivors before?” Will asked.

“Here and there, but nothing we couldn’t handle,” Jen said. “We’ve never had to fight off a whole army of collaborators, though. Mike’s done a hell of a job keeping us going, but…” She paused.

“But?”

“I don’t know. We’re not soldiers, you know? There are a couple of soldiers at the hospital. Mike and a couple of his guys, but the rest of us are just civilians. If there was a fight like the kind you guys had to deal with…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Sounds like you’ve been lucky so far.”

“So far, yeah,” Jen nodded.

*

As they neared
their destination, Jen veered the helicopter away from the I-10 Highway and angled south, until they came up on a large group of buildings—a baseball field, a football stadium, and the roof of a large, domed structure. A dozen parking lots, with only sprinkles of cars, filled the rest of the open space. It looked as if they were flying over a college town.

On the other side of the sports facilities was Mercy Hospital, a ten-story brown and black building that looked as if it were molded from clay. Gaby wasn’t sure if the architect purposefully designed it to represent a cross when viewed from the air, but that was what Mercy Hospital looked like to her as they glided toward its rooftop. Four separate towers joined at the center, forming a squatting cross. It also looked a bit like a giant Tetris piece, waiting to be inserted into a larger puzzle.

“Welcome to Mercy Hospital,” Jen said. “People check in, but they don’t check out. Unless they have a helicopter. Which, happily, I do.”

Two figures appeared out of a building along one of the towers and jogged over to the center of the rooftop. Jen hovered above them for a moment before starting the helicopter’s descent.

“How many times have you landed on this roof?” Will asked.

“Too many times to count,” Jen said. “Easy as pie.”

“Are all rooftop landings easy as pie?”

“Just like driving a tank. You wanna learn? I bet a smart soldier like you could probably pick it up in no time.”

“Maybe on the next trip.”

There was a slight bump and rocking motion as the helicopter touched down.

Jen flicked at switches along the dashboard. “You’re welcome to keep your weapons. Just do us all a favor and try not to point them at anyone, okay?”

“As long as no one points their weapons at us first,” Will said.

“Fair enough. Oh, and one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

Jen looked back at Gaby. “There are a lot of guys down there. Teenagers, early twenties, mostly. Don’t be offended if they stare. They’re only human.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Gaby said.

“Don’t sweat it. Girl power, and all that.”

Gaby grinned back at her, then unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out. She was wearing combat boots, and loose but hard gravel crunched under the soles. The helicopter was winding down behind her, its engine the only sound for miles.

Jen waved the two guys over. They were both young, and their eyes went from Will to Gaby, where they stayed for much longer than necessary. She guessed they were in their early twenties, though neither one had shaved in a while, so it was hard to know for sure. One had a shotgun, while the other was cradling an AR-15 that looked brand new.

Jen snapped her fingers in front of them to get their attention. “Hey, boys, stop staring at our guest and grab the boxes from the helicopter.” Jen motioned to Will and Gaby. “Come on, I’ll take you to see Mike.”

They followed Jen to the access building on the north tower rooftop. The steel door was fortified on the other side with a second sheet of repurposed metal, possibly a tabletop with its legs sawed off.

“How often do they attack the door?” Will asked.

“They used to do it more often in the beginning,” Jen said, “but not so much these days.”

“But they’re still around. They know you’re here.”

“Oh, they know,” Jen said, and something about the way she said it made Gaby slightly nervous.

They stepped into the stairwell, their path illuminated by a single LED portable lamp hanging from a makeshift hook. Gaby leaned over the railing to get a look at the nine floors below them, but only saw a big slab of concrete instead.

“There’s only one rooftop access on the north tower,” Jen said. “And that’s only accessible from the tenth floor. The nine floors below that share a common stairwell, but you need to use a separate door to get up to the rooftop.”

“So you didn’t have to barricade the entire stairwell in order to keep using the rooftop,” Will said.

“Uh huh.”

Jen pushed open a second door, this one with no extra fortification. Two people standing guard on the other side glanced over as they emerged out of the stairwell. There was another door directly to their right, reinforced with thick slabs of wood.

“Guys, this is Will and Gaby,” Jen said. She indicated the redhead. “That’s Claire—” and pointed at the man, who was staring at Gaby “—and this slack-jawed idiot is Miles.”

Miles looked offended, but Claire chuckled and said, “Welcome to Mercy Hospital.”

“Benny and Tom are bringing some heavy stuff down,” Jen said. “You might want to leave the door open for them. And Miles, make yourself useful and give them a hand when they get down here.”