The Fires of Atlantis (Purge of Babylon, Book 4) (21 page)

Will hurried inside and turned, waiting for Danny to dart in before he slammed the door shut. He turned the metal lever and heard the lock sliding into place a split-second before the ghouls crashed into it from the other side.

The impact staggered Will for a moment, but the door held.

They smashed into it again and again, the
thoom-thoom-thoom!
ear-splitting at such close proximity. The metal door and the surrounding brick wall shook and trembled with every impact, but they, too, held.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will turned around. Danny was already facing the stairs behind them with his rifle aimed down into the darkness.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will stepped up beside him. “Anything?”

“I saw movement,” Danny said. He wasn’t quite whispering, but it was close.

Will could hear his own heartbeat racing in his chest, and Danny’s next to him, despite the nonstop banging coming from behind them.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

“How many?” Will whispered.

“More than one.”

“Human?”

“I couldn’t tell ya.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

There was a
click
and a bright LED flashlight beam sliced through the darkness and down the stairs, illuminating a dirty concrete floor. Danny moved his flashlight left then right, up and down, until the round beam washed over the barrel of a rifle pointing up at them.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

The figure standing behind the weapon was a woman in civilian clothes, and she wasn’t alone. Two other forms flanked her, both men, both armed. One of them, a familiar-looking lanky teenager, had an M40A3 rifle pointed up at Will’s chest. The second man was peering behind the iron sights of an M4, and Will couldn’t help but notice that the man’s forefinger was trembling slightly against the trigger.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

“This brings back memories,” Danny said.

“Good ones?” Will said.

“Not so much.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will saw additional movement out of the corners of his eyes, figures
(not ghouls)
emerging from the darkness to their left and right. Two more on his side and a third on Danny’s. Assault rifles. Slacks and T-shirts.

Dunbar’s locals.

“This is how it’s gonna go down,” the woman said. “The two of you put down your weapons and step back, and we won’t shoot you down like dogs.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

“
A
re we there yet
?” Lorelei asked for the fifth time in the last three hours.

“Not yet,” Keo said.

“How long have we been walking?”

“Not long enough.”

“It feels like it’s been days since we stopped. Can we stop and rest again?”

“We’ve already stopped three times.”

“Yeah, but the last time was so long ago.”

“It was thirty minutes ago.”

“That’s pretty long.”

“We’re almost there.”

“That’s what you said two hours ago. Carrie, can we stop and rest a bit?”

“One more hour, okay?” Carrie said.

Lorelei groaned but said, “Okay.”

It took them most of the morning and parts of the afternoon, but after hours of walking and listening to Lorelei complaining, they finally reached the bridge he had seen on the map. The brown water below was part of a river, one of many that connected to Beaufont Lake, which would take him to Song Island. After that was the Gulf of Mexico and, if he was lucky, Santa Marie Island and Gillian.

Because you’ve been really lucky so far. Yeah, right.

Two lanes and fifty meters long, the bridge looked old and cracked. There were no helpful marinas (or boats inside them), but someone had put a trailer park next to the shoreline on their right, while the left had been converted for warehouses. A couple of wooden planks partially submerged in water was the closest thing to a dock he could find.

Keo glanced down at his watch: 1:16 p.m.

They had made better time than he thought, which was a miracle given that Lorelei was hungry every other hour. They had also spent time raiding a few convenience stores along the way, replenishing what little supplies they were carrying. Other than that, he was frankly surprised they had gotten this far in just half a day.

According to the map, there were lakeside homesteads five kilometers on the other side of the bridge. And where there were homes by a lake, there were boats attached to docks. That was the theory, anyway, one formed before he found out the ghouls’ human flunkies had been sinking boats up and down the lake. It all made sense. No wonder they sent two trucks and four men to scout the marina yesterday. A boat suddenly showing up, when they had been systematically sinking every one they crossed paths with, was a major anomaly in their world.

Still, all he needed was to find one boat, preferably a sailboat where he didn’t have to scout for fuel to run an outboard motor. What were the chances of that happening? Who the hell knew, but it beat walking the rest of the way to Texas…

As they crossed the bridge, the heat seemed to double down on them. Lorelei was drinking from another bottle of water, her third since this morning, but Keo didn’t bring it up. Lorelei eating or drinking meant the teenager was not complaining about something (her favorite topic being why they couldn’t find a working vehicle when there were so many just sitting around), or asking him to rest for a bit.

“What about those homes?” Carrie said, looking at the rows of trailers parked to their right. “Should we look for supplies in those?”

“No,” Keo said.

“You don’t think there might be anything worth salvaging? There’s an awful lot of them.”

“Nothing we couldn’t do without. Besides, we have enough on hand to get to Song Island. You still want to go there, don’t you?”

“Of course.” She gave him that earnest look again. “And thank you, Keo. For taking us there. I know you didn’t have to. You could have left us behind at the marina too, but you didn’t. I mean it. Thank you for bringing us along. Lorelei thanks you too, when she’s not stuffing herself.”

Lorelei smiled and nodded, but for once didn’t say anything. She actually blushed a bit before taking another drink of water.

“We’re not there yet,” Keo said.

“But we soon will be,” Carrie said. “Even if there’s no one there now, the fish in the lake aren’t going anywhere. We could stay there, Keo. If the creatures can’t cross the water, we could stay there indefinitely.”

“You think you can survive on an island by yourself? Just you and Lorelei?”

“You can learn to do a lot of things when you don’t have a choice.” She paused, then said, “Besides, it’s better than out here. And you could always stay with us…”

“I can’t.”

“I know. Texas.”

Galveston,
he thought, but nodded instead. “Yeah.”

“What’s her name? Gillian?”

He nodded.

“She must be some woman.”

“She is.”

“I bet.”

“Hey, how much further, guys?” Lorelei said behind them.

Keo pulled out a plastic bottle of peanut butter. He had been saving it since yesterday’s raid at a Kwik-e-Stop convenience store. Keo held it out to Lorelei. “Here, have some of this.”

“Oh wow, peanut butter,” Lorelei said, taking the bottle. “I haven’t had this in ages. Thanks, Keo!”

“Here’s a spoon.” He handed her a titanium spork from one of his cargo pant pockets. “Wash it when you’re done. Thoroughly.”

“I will!” Lorelei drifted back a bit as she enthusiastically twisted open the peanut butter lid and dug in, sighing with pleasure at the smell.

“Is that peanut butter still good?” Carrie asked him with some concern.

“Should be good for up to a year.”

“You’ve been saving that up, haven’t you?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

H
e heard
the roar of outboard motors from a kilometer away, prompting him to dart out of the small two-lane road and into the sparse grouping of trees on the other side of the ditch to his left. There was nothing on the right except undeveloped land, dried marsh, and a never-ending sentry of ancient power poles.

Route 410 was a long stretch of asphalt that ran through the countryside until it finally ended at the shoreline of Beaufont Lake, which was currently hidden in front of them though he thought he could smell the lake water already, and the air seemed a lot cooler than before.

They continued forward alongside the road, using the trees for as much cover as they would provide, which wasn’t very much at all. Every minute brought them closer to the loud motor, which was as anomalous a sound as you could get these days.

Keo saw doubt in Carrie’s face whenever he looked back. She was scared, and he guessed she had every reason to be after what she had been through. The idea was to stay clear of people—especially ones that were making so much noise—not walk right to them, which was exactly what they were doing now. Even Lorelei had gone completely silent, only occasionally picking at her nearly empty bottle of peanut butter.

After about twenty minutes of slowly walking toward the sound, they came across a group of old homes. That forced them to traverse one overgrown lawn after another, as well as skirting wooden fences with peeling paint. Most of the houses had boats in their backyards and some in the front, though the vessels didn’t look as if they could still stay afloat on the water, much less sail. Keo took mental notes of the houses they passed. There was a two-story yellow monstrosity that looked like a good last-minute option in case they needed a place to hide—or fight—from.

He glanced at his watch: 3:21 p.m.

He smelled the familiar scent of fresh lake water before glimpsing the sparkling surface of Beaufont Lake moments later, visible even in the distance thanks to the clear day. Where housing was sparse and individualized this far back from the shoreline, the ones that crowded the more expensive lakeside properties were large and inviting, with private wooden docks with boats tied to them.

Boats.

Say, brother, can you spare one of those?

The outboard motors they had heard before had begun to fade and were now moving south down the lake. There were men standing around on one of the docks, and Keo glimpsed figures moving inside a two-story red house at the end of the street. Two Jeeps were parked in the driveway, and a man with an M4 stood on a boat launch watching birds flying in a V-shape pattern high above him.

Keo counted six men in all, wearing camo uniforms similar to the ones he had killed back at the Lake Dulcet marina. And these six were just the ones he could see from his position, about a hundred meters from the shoreline.

Carrie and Lorelei leaned out from the corner of the house, and Carrie’s face turned noticeably paler at the sight of the uniforms. “Soldiers. They’re from the towns.”

“Do they all wear uniforms?” Keo asked.

“The ones I’ve seen recently, including those that tracked us down.”

Keo took out a pair of binoculars from his pack and focused on a man moving up the street toward the red house. Like the others, this one also had a patch of Louisiana on his left shoulder and a star on the right side.

“What are they doing here?” Carrie asked. “Is there a town nearby?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “But from what you told me, there’s not a lot around here that could sustain a population of any size for any length of time. You’d need plentiful food, supplies, and most importantly, water.”

“There’s plenty of water in the lake.”

“Not safe drinking water. You’d have to constantly boil it to kill all the microscopic organisms unless you want the entire population getting sick. That takes too much time to do by hand, which is what they’d have to do since, from what you tell me, they don’t have electricity in these places.”

“No. It’s sort of like going back to the old west. Everything’s done by hand, though they do use propane and gas to cook sometimes and I’ve seen battery-powered lamps in some of the buildings.”

“But no big machinery to treat the water. Those need electricity.”

“The town I was in definitely didn’t have electricity.”

“A spring well would be ideal. But I don’t see anything like that around here.” He shook his head. “No, this looks a lot like a staging area to me.”

“Staging for what?”

“Good question.” He thought about it for a moment, then took out the map and scanned it. “According to the map, Song Island is about fifteen miles south from here...”

“So you think there
is
something on Song Island after all?”

“I don’t know. It would be nice to know what these assholes are doing here, though.”

Keo put the map away and pulled back around the corner, Carrie following suit. Lorelei had retreated halfway to the end and was now searching for something along the weeds at her feet. Keo was amazed how quickly she could switch from the girl he thought at first was a mute to the chatterbox who couldn’t shut up, and now back again.

“What now?” Carrie asked in a low voice.

Keo didn’t answer right away. Things had gotten complicated. Again. First losing Zachary and Shorty, then finding himself straddled with two civilians. Now, running afoul of heavily-armed men in uniforms. Whatever happened to the guy whose biggest worry was living up to the motto of “See the world. Kill some people. Make some money”?

Damn. I really have gone soft.

“Keo?” Carrie said. She was watching him closely. “What do we do now? Are we still going to Song Island?”

“We need a boat for that,” he said. “I’m not sure we’re going to find another one down the shoreline. If they really have been sinking boats up and down the state, they’d keep just what they need. The ones out there might be it.”

“They’re not just going to give us one—” She stopped herself. “Oh.” Then, “You’re crazy. There are too many of them.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

She stared at him in silence for a moment. “Are you being serious right now?”

A sharp
zip!
made him look back toward the corner.

Carrie opened her mouth to say something, but he quieted her with a finger to his lips. Behind her, Lorelei physically snapped her mouth closed, and her entire body started trembling noticeably.

Keo gripped the MP5SD and moved back over, then slowly leaned around the corner of the house. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t one of the “soldiers” standing with his back to them just three meters away, pissing into a dying garden. How the hell had the man crept up on them, unnoticed until now?

Sunlight bounced off the man’s smooth and completely bald head, and he was humming some pop song Keo vaguely remembered as being popular before radio stations stopped broadcasting entirely. He was swaying a five-ten body from left to right and spreading a generous stream of urine over the shriveled flowers at his feet.

Keo leaned back and reconnected with Carrie’s anxious eyes. He shook his head and slipped the submachine gun behind his back, then reached down and pulled the Ka-Bar knife out of the leather sheath strapped to his left hip.

Carrie tensed while Lorelei groped for her hand and held on.

The
crunch-crunch
of heavy boots on brittle grass sounded from around the corner. The noise was coming toward them, a realization that struck Keo a second before the man actually walked by while still zipping up his pants.

Either Lorelei or Carrie must have let out a gasp, because as soon as the man appeared next to them, he spun around, right hand abandoning his zipper and reaching for his holstered sidearm.

Keo lunged, and he didn’t have all that far to go before he could shove the very sharp point of the Ka-Bar upward. The knife pierced the man’s chin, slicing through a generous layer of fat, and kept going until it penetrated the bottom of the soldier’s mouth and sliced through his tongue. The seven-inch blade didn’t stop its momentum until the knife guard banged against skin.

Keo slipped behind the falling man, grabbing the pudgy figure around the waist. He caught the body as it went completely slack and lowered it to the ground before leaning the man against the wall of the house.

The girls had stepped back, Lorelei with her hands over her mouth to fight back a scream. Carrie looked stunned, but fine. At least, until Keo pulled the Ka-Bar out of the man’s head—“Lewis” was written on his nametag—and there was a surprisingly loud
slurp
as blood poured freely out of the skewered chin.

Carrie made a gurgling noise before throwing up into the grass.