The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (13 page)

They’re making silver bullets, which means they know about the silver.

There was no panic—no angry voices or barking orders—and people got to work gathering up the spilled items and putting them back into other containers. More than a few of them, she noticed, looked too young to be wearing military uniforms of any sort.

A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his tan pants hanging loosely off a slim waist, picked up a crate from the far wall and grunted his way over to a truck. The teenager’s shirt collar was green and featured the same white sun emblem that was on the collars of the men who had captured her on the road. Those men, she remembered, had red collars. Like the other workers inside the warehouse at the moment, the boy wasn’t armed.

When one of the trucks had filled up, someone slammed the tailgate closed. The truck roared to life, then drove out of the hangar. As soon as it was out, another Army truck began backing into position.

Gaby took the opportunity to look behind her at a steady stream of vehicles moving like busy bees around the airfield. She couldn’t see the entirety of the place from her angle, but what she could see told her she was dealing with a very organized group of people who clearly knew what they were doing.

The presence of the sun eased her mind a bit, but she badly wished she knew the exact time. Besides taking their weapons, radios, and gun belts, their captors had also taken their watches. She hated not knowing how many hours she had before nightfall, especially out here. Things were so much simpler back on the
Trident,
where nightfall didn’t arrive with the same kind of crawling dread.

She turned back around when a voice said, “Did you find any uniforms on them?”

A lone figure broke off from the group of people in front of her. He had been there this entire time, she realized, with his back to them as he shuffled items between the back of the building and the trucks. The man pulled off work gloves and wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand as he walked over. He wore the same tan uniform as the others, along with the Texas patch over his right breast, and the only thing that stood out about him was the black collar with the white sun emblem in the center.

Red, green, and now black.

The man was in his late fifties and stood eye-to-eye with Danny, but there was something imposing about him that had nothing to do with his height or size. It was in the way he carried himself, the stern, almost paternal look in his eyes. His name tag read: “Mercer.”

“No, sir,” the gruff voice answered from somewhere behind her. “We searched the truck. Or what was left of it. Cole got a little trigger-happy and blasted the thing before we could take them into custody.”

Mercer nodded, then looked at all three of them one at a time. He casually put his gloves into his back pocket before finally asking, “Who’s in charge?”

“I guess that would be me,” Danny said.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Danny, but my mother calls me Daniel. You can call me that, too, but I’ll have to insist on at least fifteen years of child-rearing first.”

The older man trained soft brown eyes on Danny. Anyone else might have turned weak in the knees under that gaze, but most people weren’t Danny, who had survived too many things the last few months—and the years before the world ended—to be affected. Even so, Gaby thought Danny might have actually just…stood a bit straighter?

Mercer finally turned those same calm eyes on her before moving on to Nate a few seconds later. He must not have found anything interesting about them, because he ended up back on Danny. “What unit were you in, son?”

“Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning,” Danny said.

“Fort Benning is an excellent producer of Rangers.”

“They did the best they could with what they had.”

“And your friends?”

“She’s Gaby, and he’s Nathaniel.”

“Just Nate,” Nate said.

Mercer didn’t acknowledge either her or Nate. He saw them, but he didn’t
see
them. She didn’t know whether she should feel a little annoyed, or glad. Did she really want Mercer to “see” her? Maybe not…

Around them, the activity continued, even as another truck backed inside, the
beep-beep-beep
of its warning signal loud in the confines of the hangar. The piles of items at the back wall were already much smaller than the last time she looked.

“You were at T29,” Mercer was saying.

“T29?” Danny said.

“The town we attacked earlier today. What were you doing there?”

“Four hundred…”
Morris had said. Gaby thought she could still taste the smoke and blood on the tip of her tongue.

“Saw your hog swooping in for the kill and decided to go see what all the fuss was about,” Danny said. “That’s the full extent of us being there.”

“You killed them,” Gaby said. She didn’t realize she had spoken until the words blurted out, drawing Mercer’s eyes to her. There was something about those eyes that made her want to take a step back, and it took all of her willpower to remain perfectly still. Maybe the rising anger and the still-fresh memories of Morris’s town helped. “There were 400 people in that town. Men, women, and children.”

“And pregnant women,” Nate said. “You murdered pregnant women, for God’s sake.”

“It’s war,” Mercer said. “People die in wars.”

“There were
pregnant women
in that town!” Nate shouted, his words booming in the hangar, so loud that they even managed to pierce through the
beep-beep-beep
of another Army truck backing inside.

The soldiers working behind Mercer stopped and looked over. A few of them even glanced at Mercer for some kind of response.

Mercer didn’t respond right away, and instead stared back at Nate as if waiting for his fury to burn out. Gaby thought he was going to have a long wait, because she had never seen Nate so angry before—his face was almost red and his nostrils flared, and suddenly that Mohawk looked threatening instead of funny.

“Collateral damage,” Mercer said finally.

“That’s it?” Nate said. “That’s all you have to say?”

“That’s all that needs to be said.” And just like that, he dismissed Nate and focused on Danny. “Let’s talk, soldier.”

“Why not? Not like I have a hot date or anything,” Danny said.

The older man walked off and Danny turned and followed, but not before giving her a slight nod that she would have missed entirely if she hadn’t been looking for it.

“Be cool,”
that nod said.

Mercer had climbed into the front passenger seat of a Jeep waiting outside the hangar. Danny took a seat in the back as the vehicle drove off through some kind of private airfield with a small cluster of administrative buildings all the way on the other side. That was also where most of the vehicles and people not in the hangar were congregated, and where, she guessed, they had been dropped off earlier.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said next to her, gritting his teeth.

Gaby took his hand and squeezed. He looked over and pursed his lips, but she could still see the anger on his face. It was the very first time she had ever seen him so angry and though it probably shouldn’t have, it made her like him even more.

“Come on,” Erin said, turning and leading them through the hangar.

While blindfolded, Gaby had thought Erin was in her thirties based entirely on her voice, but she was actually younger—late twenties, and tall. Gaby was used to being one of the taller girls in most rooms, but Erin towered over her at about five-ten, with long dark hair in a ponytail and light hazel eyes. She had a slightly Eurasian look about her, but her accent was all Texan.

The soldier with the gruff voice, Louis, followed behind them. He was in his thirties, balding, and squat. He had a rifle slung over his back and always kept a good distance, as if afraid she or Nate would try something. Maybe she might have done exactly that before she saw all the manpower Mercer had assembled around them.

They were led to an office in the back right corner. It was the only room in the entire structure and two more soldiers stood guard with M4 rifles. Like Erin and Louis, they had red collars on top of their uniforms. That, she realized, was what distinguished them from the worker bees in the place.

Red collars for the warriors and green for support? Was that how it worked? Then what were the ones with black collars, like Mercer? Maybe those were the commanders, the ones who called the shots. That would also make them the ones who were, ultimately, the most responsible for butchering the 400 people in Morris’s town.

Erin walked on ahead of them to one of the two open windows, looked in, and said, “All the way to the back.” She waited for whoever was inside to obey, then walked to the door and opened it. There was no lock, but Gaby guessed they didn’t really need it with the two guards outside.

“What happens now?” Gaby asked.

“Once he decides what to do with you, you’ll be the first to know,” Erin said. “Until then, you’re to sit tight.”

“Once who decides?” Nate asked.

“Mercer,” Erin said.

“Is he your commanding officer?”

“Something like that.”

“Need to know, Erin, shit,” Louis said.

Erin took out a box cutter from her pocket and sliced the zip ties from around Gaby’s and Nate’s wrists.

“Thanks,” Gaby said.

Erin ignored her, said, “Inside.”

Nate locked eyes with Gaby, and though most of his anger had diffused during the walk over here, she could still see the spark of fury in his eyes. For a moment she thought he was going to do something stupid, just like she had almost done back on the road. She wanted to tell him not to, because even if they could get by Erin and Louis and the two guards, there was still Danny somewhere out there with Mercer, not to mention the literal army of soldiers between them.

But Nate didn’t try anything, and Gaby gratefully gave him a pursed smile as they entered the office together, side by side. Erin closed the door behind them, and one of the soldiers standing guard appeared on the other side of the closest window and glanced in. He didn’t look especially threatening, but the M4 in his hands was another matter.

It took a few seconds to notice the stink of too many people jammed into one room, though the smell would have probably been ten times worse if the windows weren’t open. There were five of them and they were huddled against the back wall a second ago, but were now spreading out again in order to give themselves—and each other—some leg room. There used to be furniture inside the office, including a large desk in the center, but they had all been removed, leaving behind just dust outlines.

“Fresh meat,” a voice chuckled from across the room.

Gaby tracked the source to a short man sitting in a corner, legs splayed in front of him as if he owned the space. He had black hair and dark eyes, and there was absolutely nothing trustworthy about him that she could find in the second or two their eyes locked. The man, like his companions, wore identical black uniforms with a patch of the state of Texas on their shoulders.

Collaborators.

The short man eyeballed Gaby up and down before breaking out into a grin. “And here I thought I’d seen the last of you. Small world.”

He looked familiar, even underneath the grime and speckles of dry blood that clung to his face, but she couldn’t quite place him.

She focused on his name tag instead.

It said: “Mason.”

KEO

After two hours
of sitting and lying on the sand, drinking warm water, and looking out at the endless expanse of ocean while waiting for something to show up, Jordan finally said, “I don’t think they’re out there.”

“The problem is, they could be here already,” Keo said, “and we wouldn’t know it. They won’t risk coming this close to shore in the daytime. Lara’s too smart for that.”

“We should have gone up for the radio.”

“We should have done a lot of things. Story of my life.”

“Sounds like a fun life.”

“It has its moments.” He blinked up at the sun. “I’m hungry.”

“Ditto.”

They got up, brushed the sand off their clothes, and headed up the beach in the direction of the row of houses they’d seen from a distance. Closer, they found a half dozen homes clustered around the same general area, partitioned off from the beach by rickety four-foot fences that wouldn’t have kept out the family of crabs Keo’d had to walk around while licking his lips at the prospect of crab meat later that night.

Finally, something good to look forward to.

He expected to find luxury beachfront properties, but the houses were old and covered in peeling paint, and he had a difficult time imagining them looking any better just a year ago when there were still owners around to maintain them. The buildings had no uniform designs but did share tall foundation stilts and wooden stairs that snaked up to second floors. In case the beach flooded, he guessed, though the idea of being trapped in one of these when the Gulf of Mexico decided to come ashore left him a little nervous.

Sun-bleached grass covered a wide field on the other side of the fence, the weeds going all the way up to their knees as they moved through them. A mangy dog that had been sleeping in the shade heard them coming and jogged off, looking annoyed by the human presence.

“Must be your smell,” Jordan said.

“Must be,” he said, “because we both know you smell like lilacs and roses.”

“You sweet talker, you.”

“Either that, or my nose is all stuffy.”

“Then you had to go and ruin it.”

“It’s what I do.”

“Try to do a little less of it.”

“And suppress my natural charms? Perish the thought.”

She smirked. “Try anyway.”

They checked out a wide squat house with a gray roof, accessing the second floor by creaking wooden stairs along its side. Keo was afraid the staircase might break under him as they ascended, but it remained improbably in one piece all the way to the unlocked front door.

He peeked inside at the empty living room. The windows were sans curtains, leaving a healthy amount of sunlight to splash across the dust-covered furniture. Everything was bright and gray and brown, and he didn’t have to sniff the air to know there wasn’t anything worth finding inside, including anything of the undead variety.