The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) (40 page)

Will snorted at Rick, then smiled at Millard. “What did you do?”

“What?” Millard said.

“You must have done something to piss Mason off.”

“I didn’t—” He paused, then seemed to think about it. “I had no choice.”

“What did you do?” Will asked again.

“Don’t tell him,” Rick said.

Millard ignored him, said, “Back at Route 13. When those people from Dunbar attacked us. There were too many of them, and they had a machine gun. I…ran.”

“Mason doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who forgives something like that,” Will said. “No wonder he sent you here.”

Almost there,
Will thought when he saw the conflicted look on Millard’s face.
Just a little more…

“Stop talking to him,” Rick said. “He’s just filling your head with lies. I should have left him bleeding on the floor instead of saving his life.”

“What were Mason’s orders?” Millard asked Rick.

The question caught Rick by surprise. “What?”

“What were Mason’s orders?” Millard repeated, his voice growing slightly in volume, almost threatening. “He didn’t tell me. He just said to stay here with you. But he never told me how to reach him in the morning.”

“I told you, we’re supposed to meet up with him at Lake Charles tomorrow,” Rick said, looking noticeably more irritated by the second.

There was a flicker of movement outside the window. It was the ghouls. They seemed to be reacting to the growing agitation inside the store. It was just a slight tremor that rumbled across the field of black pruned flesh. Will wouldn’t have noticed it at all if they hadn’t been so still just seconds ago.

“We’re just supposed to stay here and wait for her to come get him,” Rick was saying.

“That’s it?” Millard said.

“That’s it. Just sit tight and it’ll be over soon.”

“Nice story,” Will said. “A bald-faced lie, but I’ll give you points for trying. Then again, you might actually believe it, which is pretty sad if you ask me.”

Rick looked back to him. “No one asked you, dead man.”

“If I’m the dead man, why are the two of you ready to piss your pants? Maybe it’s because you know I’m right. Mason’s gone. He may or may not be at Lake Charles, but he sure as hell doesn’t expect you to link back up with him in the morning. The rest of your unit is gone. They left you behind. Face it.”

“You don’t know a damn—” Rick said, but he never got the chance to finish because there was a loud
bang!
from the back of the store and Rick collapsed to the floor in a pile.

The gunshot was still echoing off the walls, causing the windows to vibrate slightly, when a voice said, “Move and you’re dead.”

Millard stood shaking over Rick’s crumpled form, desperately trying to control his breathing. He looked wide-eyed, as if he’d just run a marathon and was not quite sure if he should sit down and rest or have a heart attack. His right hand had also begun to inch toward his holstered sidearm—

Bang!

Millard dropped and laid still.

“Christ,” Will said.

“That’s two you owe me,” the voice said as its owner stepped out of the shadowed back part of the gas station.

She had looked better, but then she could probably say the same thing about him. There was a gash along her left temple that had left thick clumps of blood along the side of her face, and she moved with a noticeable limp. Other than that, it was still the same woman who was a trigger pull away from shooting him dead when they had first met back at the Palermo along Route 13.

Natasha lowered the M4 rifle and smirked at him. “That’s some silver tongue on you. I thought for sure you had them convinced.”

“Almost,” Will said.

“Listening to you back here, it occurred to me everything you might have told Leo and the others was bullshit, too.” She narrowed her eyes. “Well? Was it?”

“I needed to get to Song Island.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“Not everything. The part about the ghouls avoiding bodies of water is true. I’ve been on that island for three months and they never once crossed it.”

“Not once?” she said doubtfully.

“Not once.” He turned back to Rick’s and Millard’s still bodies. “Nice shot.”

“I’ve had practice.”

She walked over and took out a knife. The sharp edge gleamed in the moonlight and Will waited for her to strike.

Natasha snorted. “Relax. If I wanted to kill you, I would have just shot you.”

She sliced his hands free, then did the same to his legs.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Can you even stand? You look like shit.”

“I can stand.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Will stood up, even as every joint in his body popped and creaked. He had been sitting for so long that he didn’t realize just how much his entire body still ached and throbbed from the events of the last twenty-four hours. Just moving his arms to rub his wrists to get the blood flowing again made him wince. He couldn’t tell how bad his hands had been shredded by the highway underneath the gauze, and frankly he didn’t want to know. Every time he touched something, there was a painful jolt.

I should be dead.

How many times have I said that this week?

He sucked it up. None of it mattered because he was still far from his destination.

Song Island.

Lara.

Gotta get back home.

“Motherfucker,” Natasha whispered.

She was staring out the store windows at the ghouls outside. The wall of dark flesh and gleaming black faces was stirring, moving slightly left and right and front and back. The eyes that peered back at them seemed to have grown with intensity since he last looked.

It had to have been the violence. They were reacting to the deaths of Millard and Rick. So what was still keeping them back? What was holding them in place?

Not what. Who.

Kate…

“I’ve never seen so many of them in one place,” Natasha said.

She had lowered her voice to almost a whisper for some reason. He wondered if she knew that the doors weren’t even locked, that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—keeping the monsters at bay this very moment.

Will hurried forward—grimacing, trying not to scream out with every step—and turned the locks on the doors before retreating quickly back into the darkness.

When he was in the moonlight, he had spotted his reflection in the glass door and was glad he had only seen himself for a split second. The sight of a dead man wearing bloodied clothes and covered in bandages, limping badly, wasn’t something he wanted to see again.

“Are you shitting me?” Natasha said. She might have been hyperventilating a little bit. “Those doors were never locked?”

“They are now,” Will said.

“Jesus Christ,” she said breathlessly. She was still staring out the windows, unable to take her eyes away from the throng of creatures outside.

Will picked up Rick’s M4 and slung it, then rolled the man onto his back, careful to avoid the blood dribbling out the side of Rick’s head. He unclasped the gun belt with the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic in the hip holster and found a nylon sheath stuffed behind Rick’s waist. The knife inside was a tantō style model about a foot long with a seven-inch black stainless steel blade. It looked overly stylish and nothing he would have been caught dead carrying in combat or elsewhere, but you never knew when an extra weapon might come in handy.

“What are you doing back here, Natasha?” Will asked as he finished going through Rick’s pockets. “Not that I’m complaining.”

When he was done with Rick, he went through Millard’s belongings. The two men didn’t have any extra ammo on them besides the magazines already loaded in their rifles and sidearms.

“What else was I going to do?” Natasha said. She had walked back to him, but kept glancing over her shoulder and out the windows. “Figured I’d follow these assholes and kill as many of them as I could before they get me.”

“What happened?”

“You mean how did I survive?”

“Yeah.”

“I was thrown clear. Landed on the side of the highway in some thick grass. Thank God no one’s done any mowing for a year, otherwise they’d have spotted me. I woke up in time to see them hauling you away.”

“What about the others?”

She shook her head before looking behind her again.

“You limped all the way here?” he asked.

“We’re only half a mile from the crash site. I didn’t even know you were in here until I climbed in through the window in the back room just before nightfall.”

“So you heard everything.”

“Most of it. Was it true? What you said? Or were you just feeding them a line to try to turn them on each other?”

“What do you think?”

She grunted. “You’re such a fucking liar.”

“I’m just trying to get home.”

“Song Island.”

“Yeah.”

“So how are you going to get there now?” Another quick look at the ghouls behind her, before she added, “How are you going to get through that.”

Will didn’t answer her. He was too busy looking down at Rick and Millard.

No, not at the two dead men. More, specifically, at their uniforms.

“What?” Natasha said. “What are you looking at? You already took everything they have. What’s left?”

“Their uniforms,” Will said. He kneeled back down and began unbuttoning Rick’s shirt.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Because they leave the soldiers alone,” she said. Then, with something that almost sounded like hope in her voice for the first time since he’d met her, “You really think it’ll work?”

“Only one way to find out,” he said.

*

It didn’t take
them long to strip the two men down to their underwear. Rick was the smaller of the two, so Natasha took his uniform into the back room. Will pulled on Millard’s, grateful to shed his own bloodied clothes.

He didn’t realize just how bruised and purple and yellow he was until he was standing in his boxers. He quickly put the uniform on and cinched the gun belt in place, covering up the scars and bandages and everything else that reminded him he was probably not going to last very long in this condition. The painkillers he had popped earlier were starting to work, but what he wouldn’t give for a little bit more pep.

He told himself he’d get the help he desperately needed when he finally made it back home. Lara could treat him. Or Zoe, though he’d insist Lara do it.

Have to get home. Get back to Lara.

Have to get home at all costs…

Natasha came back out, still doing up the buttons on Rick’s shirt. “It kind of fits. For all the good it’ll do.”

“That’s it, think positive,” Will said.

Millard’s clothes actually fit him pretty well, and he shoved the sheathed knife behind his back.

“I’m being realistic,” Natasha said. “These two didn’t even know why the uniforms work. They just accepted it because that’s what they do; they’re followers. Look how fast the tall one was willing to buy your bullshit.”

They were adapting so they wouldn’t perish. It’s human nature.

“What’s in the back room?” he asked.

“Just some empty boxes. The window was unlocked, and it was just big enough for me to crawl through.”

Then Natasha went very quiet.

“What’s—” he started to ask.

She was staring past him and out the windows again, at the creatures gathered outside. Nothing had changed that he could see. There were still too many of them, overflowing out of the parking lot and onto the feeder road. No matter how hard or long he stared, it was impossible to make out the gray concrete of the I-10 in the background. Was it even still there?

“What’s happening?” Natasha asked. Her voice had dropped noticeably again.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“They don’t look different to you?”

He shook his head, then glanced back at her. Natasha had retreated until she was standing (almost leaning) against the far wall, now little more than a silhouette in the shadows. He didn’t know how, but he could actually see her terrified face in the darkness.

“I swear I saw them move,” she said.

“Move?”

“Yeah. They moved.”

“How?”

“I can’t explain—”

Bang!

He spun around, lifting the M4 just as the ghoul picked itself up from the concrete sidewalk. It had smashed itself, skull first, into one of the twin glass doors and left behind a crack about an inch long. The figure slowly straightened up, tar-like black eyes finding Will and focusing in, as if it knew—it
knew
—who he was.

“That can’t be good,” Natasha said breathlessly behind him.

Yeah, I think that’s the understatement of the century, Natasha.

Will took another step back, then another one, when a second ghoul raced forward and flung itself into the other glass door. It struck headfirst, like the other one, and instantly fell to the sidewalk before picking itself back up. Like the first one, it had left an inch-wide crack across the glass.

What the hell were they doing? They weren’t going to break through the doors. Most convenience stores had tempered glass designed to withstand this kind of brute force attack. It would take forever to shatter unless you had a pickup truck moving at full speed. And right now he didn’t see a vehicle—