The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) (18 page)

“No,” Will said, looking Natasha in the eyes, because this version of him that he was trying to sell had nothing to hide. “After we left the farmhouse, we ran across a couple of the soldiers in trucks. We managed to overpower them and take their vehicles. We were trying to escape when they ambushed us.”

“How many more of you are out there?” she asked.

“Four.”

“Christ, how many did you fit into that minivan?” Leo asked, with just a hint of amusement.

“We didn’t just come in one vehicle.”

“Why did you burn down the farmhouse?” Natasha asked. She was still staring at him, trying to read him, maybe catch him in a lie. Sunlight streamed through the windows to their right and splashed across her hardened face.

“After they attacked us, we thought there were some left in the basement in the morning,” Will said. “We couldn’t stay there anymore, so we burned the house down in hopes of getting some of them, too.”

It wasn’t a total lie. All of it was true, except for the part where he inserted himself into Lance’s role.

“You’re talking about
them
, them,” Leo said. “The creatures.”

Will nodded.

“Did you get them?” the older man asked. He sounded almost hopeful. “Did it work?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “We never opened the basement door to check.”

Eureka,
he thought when he saw Natasha casually slide her finger out of the trigger guard of her M4. She probably didn’t even know she had done it—an unconscious act that told him she had stopped seeing him as the immediate danger he once was.

Or, at least, he hoped he was reading her reaction correctly. He had to remind himself that he was treading on very dangerous ground here. One wrong lie, one creative story that couldn’t be collaborated by evidence or what they already knew, and he’d never make it to Song Island.

Like walking a tightrope fifty stories up…while getting shot at.

Will sat back against the dirty wall, took out the bottle of meds, and downed two more, leaving just three lonely white pills at the bottom. He had been surviving on mostly adrenaline and sweat these last few days that the old wounds throughout his body had begun to fade into the background. He just had to worry about the ones still held together by stitches, especially the one in his side. That, more than anything, was his primary concern.

“What’s that?” Natasha asked.

“Painkillers,” Will said.

“You hurt?”

“You’re not?”

She almost smiled. Almost.

“Who isn’t, these days,” he said.

“Dead people,” she said.

Leo chuckled. “Hallelujah.”

The older man was sitting to Will’s left and rummaging through a school backpack. Will had been hoping one of them had picked up his tactical pack, along with all the silver ammo inside, but it was gone. Either Mason had thrown it into his own inventory, or it was lost somewhere in all the rubble back in the Palermo.

There were also no signs of his M4A1, which really hurt. From Afghanistan to Harris County to the end of the world, only to lose it at a lousy gas station in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t ask them about it, either, because that would mean he was a guy who knew guns, and the Will he was trying to sell right now was a civvy through and through.

“Here,” Leo said, and tossed him another refilled bottle of water along with a vacuum-sealed bag with strips of jerky inside. “Eat up; it might be a long wait.”

“Thanks,” Will said. He pried the bag open and devoured the jerky. It tasted like deer meat. “You made this?”

“None of that store-bought junk. I’ve been hunting since I was twelve and learned to make my own jerky when I was thirteen.”

“Where did you even find deer?”

“They’re around, if you look hard enough. Not easy by any means, but there are a few still running around out there in the woods. Of course, turns out surviving the bloodsuckers is easier than dodging me.”

“He’s really proud of his jerky,” Natasha said. She unzipped her own pack and took out a similar bag, then produced another long strip of jerky. “He should be. It’s better than the crap we hoarded after everything fell apart.”

“And that’s the closest you’ll come to getting a compliment out of Nat, kid,” Leo said.

Will smiled, then, “How long are you guys going to stay here?”

Leo and Natasha exchanged a brief look.

They have no idea. They’re just making it up as they go. Swell.

“Maybe an hour,” Leo said with a shrug. “If they send more over, we’ll deal with them the same way we dealt with the others. Too bad we already used up the frag grenade.”

“Whose bright idea was that?”

Leo grinned at him. “One guess.”

Natasha. Of course.

“I expected the damn gas station to go up like a Roman candle,” Leo said. “I guess it’s a good thing for you that Nat doesn’t throw like a girl. You should have seen that fastball vanish into the Palermo.
Boom.
If it had landed over the storage tanks under the pumps, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

“No kidding. Where’d you get your hands on something like that?”

“From the same meatheads we took the truck from. The stuff these guys are carrying around, all those M4s and MGs. They must have hit a fort or something. Who knows what else they have stashed around the state.”

Will glanced down at his watch again.

“You in a hurry?” Natasha asked. The edge had crept back into her voice.

“Yes,” Will said, meeting her suspicious gaze.

Sell it. She expects you to run from her glare. So don’t.

“My friends got away, and I need to find them again,” Will said. “We came here together, survived all this as a group. You guys seem okay, don’t get me wrong, but these are my people. I need to catch up to them.”

He must have sold it well enough, because Natasha nodded. “They went up the interstate. West.”

So they really had been close enough to witness the ambush. Where the hell had they been hiding during the whole thing? The sunburned grass in the fields around them wasn’t exactly a sniper’s dream. There were thicker woods further up the highway, but there wasn’t much of that over here, where the businesses were concentrated.

“Where they headed, anyway?” Leo asked.

And there it is.

“Have you ever heard of Song Island?” Will asked.

*

They waited another
thirty minutes.

Then thirty minutes became an hour.

And no one showed up.

Meanwhile, the carrion birds had begun circling over the corpses left behind in the streets and parking lots of both the Palermo and the Chevron.

Ray, one of the two guys in the Valero across the street from them, jogged over, his lanky six-three frame like a scarecrow against the heavy afternoon sun. “We’re leaving,” he said as soon as he was inside the Domino’s. “They’re not coming.”

Then he left and ran up the street, toward the parked technical.

Leo stood up, brushing dust off his pants. “Come on,” he said to Will, “let’s see if you can convince the others about this Song Island. If we’re going, it’s gotta be as a group, or not at all.”

Will pulled himself up from the floor. He was glad to finally be up again. His side stung a bit, but stinging was better than bleeding, and a quick check told him he was still fine. For now, anyway.

“I can be pretty convincing,” Will said.

“You better hope so,” Natasha said.

There may or may not have been a warning in her voice, and before he could gauge which one was more likely, she had pushed open the doors and stepped out into the street, leaving him behind with Leo.

“What’s her deal?” Will asked.

“What do you mean?” Leo said.

“Back there, at the station. She shot that kid in cold blood.”

Leo frowned, which didn’t do anything for his already heavily lined face. “She lost her daughter two nights ago. The kid was waiting for her in the VFW hall in Dunbar when the soldiers attacked, and… Well, it didn’t end happily for her. For any of us. I guess that explains why we’re all out here trying to kill as many of the bastards as possible.”

Will nodded. He didn’t need Leo to give him the details. He knew what had happened in Dunbar two nights ago, because he had been there. Kate’s shock troops, Harrison’s people being slaughtered…

He walked outside with Leo. “What was she before all of this?”

“State trooper,” Leo said. “She actually busted me a couple of times for hunting out of season. I don’t think she ever had to draw her weapon before the world went to shit, though. Funny how things work out.”

“Yeah,” Will said, though the word “funny” wasn’t quite what he would have used.

*

“An island? Are
you fucking kidding me?”

“An island. You’re out of your mind.”

“The radio broadcast? I heard about that.”

“I say we keep going.”

“Maybe we should go back to Dunbar.”

“We have to find someplace else. Dunbar’s lost.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Let’s find more of these fuckers and kill as many as we can, before they get us.”

Because what remained of Dunbar’s fighters didn’t have anything resembling a leader, everyone spoke at the same time. Which made it difficult for Will to judge who was leaning toward his proposition and who was just shooting off at the mouth.

Natasha, though, had kept out of the fray. She leaned against the Ford’s hood and looked solemnly back down Route 13 through the underpass, as if she expected Mason’s soldiers to pop up at any moment. By the way she was holding her M4, he guessed she was hoping for exactly that.

“Shit, it’s not any more unbelievable than what’s happening now,” Leo was saying. “Look around you, boys. The impossible is possible. What makes this any less possible, considering everything we’ve been through? Have you forgotten about those blue-eyed fucks we all saw two nights ago?”

That seemed to quiet them.

I have a champion,
Will thought, fighting back a smile. He couldn’t have chosen a better person to argue for him, either. Leo was tall, big, older than the rest, and forceful when he talked so you couldn’t help but pay attention.

Leo turned to him now. “And it works. The bodies of water. Just the way the woman on the radio says it does?”

“She was right about the silver,” Will said.

“You’ve used silver on them?” Ray asked.

“We have. After we heard the radio message, we started sharpening silver crosses into weapons. All you have to do is stab them and they die. They actually
die.
”

Ray, Leo, and the others exchanged a look. All except Natasha. She was still focused on the underpass, oblivious to the conversation. Will thought she would at least react to his confirmation that silver worked on the ghouls, but no. Natasha was in her own world. Right now, he didn’t think anything besides the presence of Mason’s men could make her care.

“Dammit,” Ray said. “We heard that same broadcast days ago, but Harrison insisted it was all bullshit, so we never followed through on it. But you’re saying it works. You swear it?”

“I swear it,” Will said, “and I’ve used it.”

“So, silver bullets?” Leo said. Will could practically see the gears in the older man’s head turning. “We could do that. Make silver rounds. It’d be nice to finally be able to shoot and kill the fuckers for once.”

“Silver works, just like the woman on the radio said it would,” Will said. “If she’s right about that, she could be right about the bodies of water, too. All we’d have to do is get to Song Island. You guys are looking for a new place to stay. There it is.”

“I have a question,” Ray said. “How the hell are we going to survive on an island?”

“It has a hotel and solar-powered electricity.”

“And you know this how?”

“We didn’t all come from Mississippi. One of us was from here. He was born and raised around Beaufont Lake and he saw them building the hotel over the years, and he says it’s mostly finished. As for what you’d eat, that’s easy—the lake is filled with fish. When we heard the radio broadcast, it just made sense to retreat to Song Island.”

“Sounds like a fool thing to do,” another man, Greg, said. He was in his thirties, squat, and looked ridiculous next to the tall Ray.