The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (62 page)

The mirror attached to the baton exploded, showering Will with glass fragments. He dropped the baton with a curse, then reached down and pulled out a thin shard of glass sticking out of his right arm. He flicked it away, ignoring the little trickle of blood.

The problem was the guy who had just fired that last shot. He remembered the man from the camp. The one with the bolt-action hunting rifle, equipped with the big scope. The guy just shot a mirror that was only three inches in diameter from fifty meters. Big riflescope or not, that was pretty damn impressive.

“Nice mirror!” a voice shouted. It was male, deep, and it sounded familiar. “Where’d you get that? Archers? Nice place to shop. We were gonna hit it later ourselves, stock up and whatnot.”

Will didn’t answer. Instead, he listened to the man’s booming voice rattle down the length of the highway, before it eventually died in the breeze.

“He sends his regards!” the man shouted. “Your old buddy! Josh!”

Josh?

“He wanted to be here himself,” the man continued, “but he had other business. He told me you’d be coming back in this direction sooner or later. Of course, we thought you’d be coming by car, not bicycles. That really threw us for a loop, let me tell you!”

He had heard that voice before, over the radio.

“Kellerson?” Will shouted.

“Bingo!” the man shouted back.

Sonofabitch.

He looked back at Zoe. Her face was pale, but she wasn’t trembling nearly quite as much as before. She stared back at him with sunken eyes and seemed to be breathing fine, though that might have just been a combination of adrenaline and pills.

“We’ll be fine,” Will said. “Trust me, okay?”

“Okay,” she nodded back.

He couldn’t tell if she actually believed the lie or if she was humoring him. It was impossible to read anything in her face at the moment. He wondered if he had looked that spaced out after getting shot a few days ago.

“Hey, you still alive back there?” Kellerson shouted. “It goes without saying, we can do this all day. Got supplies and more ammo than we know what to do with them. And night ain’t your friend, but then you probably already know that, don’t you?”

Will scooted back toward Zoe and felt her pulse. Weak, but it was still there.

“You’re doing good,” he smiled at her. “I’ll be back, okay?”

She didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if she couldn’t, or if she didn’t want to. He could almost feel her drifting away, leaving her body.

“Hey, Will!” Kellerson shouted. “Josh told us you were a badass ex-Army Ranger. I gotta say, I’m unimpressed, man!”

Even before Kellerson finished the word “man,” Will was darting across the highway. There were only two meters between the Bronco and a large Suburban minivan in the next lane. It was a quick dash, with only the two mountain bikes in his way. Will had to leap over them, raising his profile higher than he wanted.

He heard a gunshot and a bullet
zipped
past his head, almost taking his ear off.

And he saw something else in the half-second he was in the air—a man in a hazmat suit on the other side of the concrete barrier that separated the south and northbound lanes. The man had apparently been making his trek down the highway for a while and was only ten meters from Will’s position when Will spotted him.

The man froze, looking like a kid caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Will landed behind the minivan and snapped off a quick shot in the man’s direction. He managed to hit the man in the right shoulder and watched him spin and drop, disappearing behind the concrete barrier.

Will ducked his head just as the minivan’s windshields exploded, and glass poured down on top of and around him. Bullets that didn’t pelt the Suburban’s sides—the
ping ping ping!
going into metal like chimes—dug lengthy grooves across the highway floor.

He leaned out from behind the Suburban and glanced at where he had last seen the man in the northbound lane. He saw a thick head of blond hair bobbing along the barrier, fleeing back up the highway. Will considered taking a shot to finish the man off, but that would have involved leaning almost completely out from behind the minivan, and he had a feeling the guy with the hunting rifle was waiting patiently back there at the station wagon for a shot. Throughout the torrent of gunfire, Will had heard the familiar rattles of M4 carbines, but not a single shot from a bolt-action rifle. The man was just waiting for him to make a mistake.

Then the gunfire stopped, and there was just the heavy silence of a dead city again.

That, too, didn’t last.

“Hey, Will!” Kellerson shouted. “You still alive back there?”

Will didn’t answer.

“Come on!” Kellerson continued. “Cat got your tongue? You know you’re not going anywhere. This is it, buddy! This is the end of the line! Make it easier on yourself and the blonde! Throw out your weapons and I’ll end it quick. Scout’s honor!”

Will glanced toward the highway barrier again, expecting another figure to rush up alongside it, having used Kellerson’s taunting as cover. The man was talking so much Will thought it had to be a trick, some kind of clever diversion.

But no, there was no one on the other side this time.

He’s just a loudmouth, after all.

“Will?” Kellerson shouted. “This is getting boring, man. I’m giving you till the count of five, then we’re coming. I got no time for this Alamo bullshit! You ready, buddy?
Five!”

Will looked back across the lane at Zoe. Her eyes were closed, and she looked on the verge of sliding off the Bronco’s back bumper at any second. After three solid seconds of staring, he couldn’t tell if she was still breathing.

He thought about how she had come back to rescue him when she didn’t have to…

“Four!”

He flicked the fire selector on the M4A1 to full-auto. If they tried to bull rush him, he could probably take three, maybe four if he was
really
lucky.

Captain fucking Optimism.

Not that he had much of a choice. He and Zoe were dead if he stayed still.

“Three!”

They had stopped firing, and he guessed they were getting ready to do exactly what Kellerson had promised—move on him. Of course, they weren’t going to make it easy to pick them off. They would probably do it slowly, moving between vehicles, keeping behind cover the entire time. Eventually, they would reach him. That was the problem.

Eventually
they would be right on top of him.

“Two!”

Will was going to stand up, take the fight to them, when he heard a series of gunshots—and this time the bullets weren’t coming
at
him or hitting the Suburban or scalping the highway around his vicinity. Instead, the gunfire sounded like they were coming from a handgun—a Glock—and they were hitting cars up the highway—
behind
the ambushers.

The hell—?

Will stood up behind the Suburban and peeked through the broken windows. The hazmat suits were returning fire on
someone else
further up the highway. The figure was wearing black and had ducked behind the highway barrier on the northbound lane after drawing their attention, and bullets were chopping into the thick concrete block in front of him, spraying the air with a fine white powder.

For a moment, he thought it was the blond who had tried to flank him earlier, but no, it couldn’t have been the same person. That guy was wearing a hazmat suit, while this one was dressed all in black. It looked like some kind of assault vest, too.

Then there was a single, very deliberate shot, and Will saw the man with the hunting rifle flinching as something hit him in the chest. He collapsed to the highway, disappearing behind the ’80s station wagon he had been using as cover.

A second player.

There was a second shot, and another man stood up, grabbing at his neck as blood gushed out between his fingers. A third shot knocked the man down for good.

Kellerson’s men were returning fire in the direction of the second gunman now. The man was leaning out from behind a white van with “Arnold’s Plumbing” stenciled across the side, along with a cartoon picture of a toilet with a smiley face. The shooter, also wearing dark black
(assault vest?)
, had slipped behind the van to dodge the return volley. Bullets stitched the side of the van and shattered windows.

Will quickly came out from behind the Suburban and moved steadily up the highway, using the distraction to his advantage. The phrase
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”
rushed across his mind.

He flicked the fire selector on the M4A1 back to semi-auto as he spotted the closest man in a hazmat suit to him, standing behind a Dodge Ram. The man was reloading his M4, desperately trying to jam the magazine in but having a difficult time lining it up. Will shot the man twice in the back and watched him disappear behind the truck.

Another man in a hazmat suit stood up from behind a brown Buick, directly in front of Will. The man was lifting his rifle and spinning around, but Will beat him to it and shot him once in the chest. The man staggered backward but didn’t go down. Will saw the familiar rectangular lump of a Kevlar vest over the man’s chest and shot him again, this time in the face.

Two figures flashed across his peripheral vision, moving out from cars in front of him. The white-clad men raced across the lane toward the concrete barrier. One of them threw himself over it so fast he tripped and fell down on the other side. Someone shot the second man in the back before he could make the jump, and he stumbled and comically hit his forehead on the concrete divider, sliding down it face-first.

Will hurried out from behind the Buick and glanced over at the plumbing van, seeing a familiar face grinning back at him over the distance.

Sonofabitch.

Will returned the man’s grin, then jogged over to the barrier and leaped over it, landing on the other side. He moved up quickly toward the hazmat suit that had stumbled and fallen. There were fresh blood splatters along this side of the highway, most likely from the blond he had shot earlier.

He found a man in a hazmat suit lying on his back near the divider, still alive and holding on to his right arm, which was twisted at an odd, unnatural angle. One of the man’s knees was scraped and bloodied, and his M4 rifle lay forgotten at his feet. The man looked over as Will jogged toward him, and for a moment—just a moment—Will was sure he would reach for his weapon.

But he didn’t. Instead, the man lay still until Will was finally standing over him.

Will looked past the man and up the highway, and spotted another hazmat suit-clad figure lying on its stomach about ten meters farther up the northbound lane. The blond he had shot earlier. The poor bastard had apparently run into someone else who had finished him off.

Will turned his attention back to the man at his feet. He was in his forties, and in another time, another place, Will would have pegged him as a husband with two kids, a house in the suburbs, and a wife that constantly browbeat him about drinking or smoking too much. The guy looked completely average and plain.

“Kellerson?” Will said.

The man grinned up at him. “Shit, you cheated. You had reinforcements.”

“In my defense, I didn’t know they were coming.”

“That right?” Kellerson said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then, I guess that changes everything.” Kellerson sighed. “So what happens now?”

Will pulled a silver-chromed .45 Smith & Wesson revolver out of Kellerson’s holster. “Nice gun.”

“Thanks. I stole it.”

“I figured.”

“Then again, is it really stealing if it’s just lying there?”

“Probably not.”

Will heard footsteps and looked over at a blond in his mid-twenties coming toward him from the other side of the barrier. He was wearing a stripped-down black assault vest and throat mic rig, and was holding a Glock in his hand. He looked almost shell-shocked.

“You good?” Will asked.

The guy stared back at him, as if unsure how to respond. Finally, he nodded and said, “I think I’m okay.”

“Okay’s always good.”

“You must be Will,” he said.

“I must be. Got a name?”

“Roy.”

Will nodded at the dead blond. “You?”

“Yeah, he sort of just ran into me,” Roy said, almost embarrassed. “I got really lucky.”

“You’re one of the newbies that showed up on the island. You came with Bonnie and the others.”

“Yeah.”

“Nice work, Roy.”

“Thanks. I was just doing what Danny told me.”

Danny appeared, eating beef jerky out of an Oberto bag, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He looked as if he were on a casual stroll. “Well, well, well, look who I gone and stumbled across. You look like shit, buddy.”

“Good to see you, too,” Will said. “How’s Lara?”

“She’s miffed. But good. Bossing the whole island around while you were gone.”

“That’s my girl.”

“I keep telling her to move on, that she’s way too good for you. You never call, you never write, you never visit. You’re no damn good, I say. She could do so much better.”

“You’re a real pal, Danny.”

“My advice? Put on a cup before you step back onto Song Island.”

“Noted.”

Danny glanced down the highway. “I saw someone else with you back there. Wouldn’t happen to be Gaby, would it?”

“Gaby?” Will looked back at him. “Isn’t she back at the island? She left me days ago.”

“She didn’t show up. That’s why I’m out here. Lara sent me to come looking for you two idiots.”

Will frowned. “I don’t know where she is.”

“From what I can tell, she had major ghoul trouble at a pawnshop off the highway where she was staying. It looked like a hell of a fight. That’s where we were coming from when we heard your little spontaneous block party up here.”

Gaby.

Dammit. He was hoping at least one of them had made it back home.

“You found blood at the pawnshop?” Will asked.