The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (35 page)

“Mercer.”

“What about him?”

“This war of his.”

“What about it?”

“They’re killing people, Danny. Civilians. If it was just the soldiers, I wouldn’t care. But they’re being indiscriminate.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Danny said.

“Do we just look the other way?” she asked.

“You’re assuming we can do something about it.”

“Can’t we?”

“The three of us? Not a chance in hell. Mercer’s got an army. We just saw a small part of it back there at the airfield. He’s got moving pieces all across the state. The man has been planning this for months now. Hell, he might have been cooking it up since the night everything went to shit, for all I know. A guy like that…” Danny shook his head. “It’s going to take more than just the three of us to stop him.”

He was right, and the worst part was, she’d known for a while now, but knowing and accepting weren’t the same thing. The idea of not doing anything at all made her shift in her seat.

“We have to worry about the
Trident
right now,” Danny continued. “And the people on it. Carly, Vera and Elise, the others. What happens in Texas isn’t our problem. Mercer’s right about one thing: The people in those towns made their choice.”

“They didn’t ask to be bombed from the air,” she said.

“No, they didn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that. We’re outgunned six ways to Sunday.” He sighed, his voice growing more somber, and for a moment she could almost imagine Will talking, and not Danny. “We’ll get what we came for, and then we’ll go home. We’ll swing by on our way and get the sisters, and we’ll call that a victory. As for everything else, let God sort them out. It’s time he earned his pay, anyway.”

*

Starch, Texas, was
exactly how she had pictured it: a small town of a few thousand people (or it used to be, anyway) along a main highway, and no one would have realized it even existed if not for Lake Livingston somewhere behind it. That lake was why an eccentric millionaire had built an underground facility designed to withstand just about any calamity. To hear Lara tell it, the place had done exactly that, until one night when everything came undone.

After an hour of driving through barren streets, over railroad tracks, and down spur roads that never seemed to end, they finally hit the road to hell that would take them to the end of their journey—the reason they had come back to Texas in the first place.

She didn’t need to ask Danny what time it was; she could keep track of the sun by looking out her window. By her count, it was around 3:00. Soon, very soon, it would be dark again, but they had made good time and she was feeling buoyed by their progress.

Too bad the road to Harold Campbell’s facility was doing its damnedest to ruin her good mood. The massive walls of trees to the left and right of them didn’t help, either. They were so thick that Gaby couldn’t see past them, and they cast such an imposing shadow over everything she could almost believe they were driving through a tunnel instead of a country road.

The craters under them weren’t accidents of nature, but put there by Campbell to deter people from doing exactly what they were doing at the moment. After about ten minutes of struggling to hold onto her seat and not throwing up, she had to grudgingly admit that Campbell might have known what he was doing. After all, he had access to a helicopter and would never have had to use the road himself. She wasn’t so lucky.

If she thought there was a possibility Taylor’s truck might not survive the sixty-mile trip from Larkin to Starch, she was now almost certain it wouldn’t survive the three kilometer-long hike up this pothole-infested hell. Gaby swore she could hear pieces of the vehicle
crunching
and
clanging
off the undercarriage with every bump they hit.

“This is nuts!” she shouted.

“Which part of eccentric millionaire didn’t you understand?” Danny shouted back.

“Crazy assholes with money!” Nate shouted behind them.

“How much further”—she started to ask, when the road suddenly smoothed out and she could hear herself just fine again—“to go?”

“There. We’ve survived the Trip of Doom,” Danny said. “Which means the facility should be up ahead.”

“‘Should be’?”

“It’s definitely up ahead.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Nate said quietly from the backseat.

“Out the window, so you don’t get it on the upholstery,” Danny said. “This thing’s a classic, after all.”

“This thing’s a piece of junk,” Nate said.

“Same difference.”

She turned around in her seat and smiled at Nate. He returned it, looking boyish and handsome back there by himself, one hand holding his stomach and his Mohawk flopping too much to one side.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Good,” he said. “You?”

“Hanging in there.”

“I’m fine too, thanks for asking,” Danny said.

“You okay, Danny?” she asked.

“Great, thanks for asking,” he said.

She turned back around and picked her rifle up from the floor, then focused on the road ahead. “Almost there?”

“Almost there,” Danny said.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Almost
almost
there.”

Now that the road was even again and she wasn’t bouncing in her seat, it was easier to pay attention to the dancing shadows and overly chilly air around them. She wished she could see what was hiding in the woods to the left and right of the road, but it was just one continuous black wall. She thought she might have seen something moving inside—something
fast—
but Danny had picked up speed and they were past it before she could be sure.

“What’s wrong?” Nate said, leaning forward between the two front seats.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“I thought I saw something…”

“Where?”

“In the woods.”

He looked out his side window.

“Back down the road,” she said. Then, hoping it was at least convincing, “It was probably nothing.”

“Eyes forward, kids,” Danny said.

She looked out the front windshield as they came up to an opening—a wide field carved out of the woods. They passed what look like the remains of a front gate, with an old guard shack on Danny’s side. A wild jungle had grown since the last time anyone was here, and they had to stop the truck about twenty yards past the nonexistent gate.

Danny put the vehicle in park and leaned forward against the steering wheel. He had clearly seen something that disturbed him when he said, “Hunh.”

“What?” she said.

“Those weren’t here last time.”

She followed his gaze out the windshield and across the field.

They were impossible to miss: a small cluster of vehicles, all yellow, sitting in the open. One had a scooper-type arm, and she was pretty sure another one was some kind of bulldozer. Grass had grown around their heavy tires, a clear indication they had been brought here and abandoned a while ago.

“Construction equipment,” Nate said, leaning between the two front seats again. “Looks like diggers.”

“Diggers?” she said.

“For digging.”

“Of course,” she said, feeling stupid.

“Which begs the question: What were they digging out here?”

Danny reached for his rifle, said, “Eyes wide, ears open, and weapons hot at all times, got it?” and climbed out.

She and Nate followed his example on the other side of the truck, their rifles gripped tightly in front of them. The grass was taller than it had looked from inside their vehicle, and if they had kept going, they might have become stuck in another twenty to thirty yards.

“Danny?” she said across the warm hood at him.

He was peering at the construction equipment, as if he could see something she and Nate couldn’t. “Stay frosty,” he said, before starting forward. “Shoot anything that moves that isn’t us.”

Gaby exchanged a quick look with Nate, who shrugged.

She flicked the safety off her AR-15 and followed Danny into the weeds. Grass slapped at her legs, prompting her to think about what things might be lurking inside all the unseen parts of the field at the moment. Not ghouls, of course; it was still daylight—

She glanced up instinctively at the still-high sun. Still time.

But not a lot.

Danny had stopped in front of them and was looking down at something.

“Danny,” she said. “What is it?”

He shook his head but didn’t say anything. She walked over and looked down at what he had been staring at.

It was a big, gaping rectangular hole in the ground, surrounded by obliterated gray and black chunks of something that, once upon a time, had been big enough to cover the opening. Now, there were only piles of the object scattered about the grass, some as small as her fist and others as big (if not bigger) than a desk.

She had noticed the difference under her boots a few yards back, where the soft dirt ended and the hard, even concrete floor began. The construction around the “door” was still intact, but everything else—anything standing more than a few feet above the ground—had been demolished months ago, leaving behind divots and giant clawlike markings that could only have been put there by one of the construction vehicles.

“Oh man, this isn’t good, is it?” Nate said, as he stopped next to her and looked down.

Like the two of them, she was transfixed by the hole in the ground. It was massive and framed by gray concrete walls. Sunlight illuminated some of the stairs leading down, but not enough, and most of what was on the bottom was lost in a thick pool of darkness. She could see the shape of some kind of lightbulb just beyond the light, but there was no telling how long it had been out.

Then the darkness
shifted and moved
, and all three of them took a quick step back and lifted their weapons instinctively.

“Whoa,” Nate breathed next to her.

“Don’t sweat it; they’re more scared of you than you are of them,” Danny said.

“You think?”

“Absolutely not.”

Danny lowered his rifle and wrinkled his nose, as if he had an itch he couldn’t get to. Then he turned and walked away, stopping about ten yards later. He stomped down on something buried in the ground, producing a loud metallic
clang!

“What is it?” Gaby asked.

“The titanium door that was supposed to be over that opening,” Danny said. “We were pretty sure it could withstand a nuke.” He looked in the direction of the construction equipment. “But why use a nuke when you could just pry it open with the right can openers.”

“Collaborators,” Nate said.

“Unless the ghouls have mastered driving a stick, then probably, yeah.”

“So we came all the way out here for nothing?” Nate asked, unable to hide his disappointment.

“It would appear so.” Danny sighed and let his rifle hang at his side. “I guess it was too much to hope the little bastards would leave the facility alone after we left. This’ll teach me to be optimistic.”

Gaby wasn’t entirely sure why she wasn’t more angry, or at least as visibly disappointed as Nate and Danny were. But she wasn’t. Maybe it was everything they had seen and been through since arriving back in Texas. The events of Hellion, T29, even Larkin. After all those things, coming here and finding Starch empty was…anti-climactic.

At least no one died here, unlike the 400 people in T29. Or the poor bastards in Hellion.

She walked over to Danny. “We should go. It’ll be dark soon.”

Danny nodded, then took a moment to look around at the clearing. “We cleaned out Starch pretty good when we were here. Spent a lot of time searching for silver in every nook and cranny.”

“Did you guys happen to stash some silver bullets in town?”

“Afraid not.”

“What about the facility?” Nate asked.

They looked back at him.

“What about it?” Danny said.

“Maybe if we can lure them out…”

Danny gave him an almost pitying look before grinning at Gaby, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it this time. “Captain Optimism, this guy,” Danny said. “Thinks we can lure them out into the open when there are probably a few thousand of them squeezed in there. This, with two hours until nightfall, and no way to close the door.”

“Guess not,” Nate said.

“Facility’s gone, along with everything inside it. We officially came all the way here for nothing. I’m sorry, kids. Maybe next time.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Gaby said. “We knew the risks when we volunteered.” She glanced at Nate, and he nodded and smiled back at her. “So the question is, what’s our next move?”

“It’s too late to go back to Larkin, so we’ll hole up in Starch,” Danny said. “I know Lara and Carly. Even without contact from us, they’ll wait at Port Arthur for as long as possible. They’re not going anywhere until someone shows them our dead bodies.”

“Ugh, not the best choice of words there,” Nate grunted.

“Sorry about that.”

“You’re certain of that?” she asked. “That they’ll wait for us?”

“Sure as Pauly Shore.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Damn kids,” Danny said, and started walking back to the truck. Under his breath, she heard him muttering, “Texas is really starting to
piss
me off.”