The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (22 page)

“The power of positive thinking?”

“Something like that.”

“Hey, Keo,” she said.

“What?”

“Did you ever think you were going to die under someone’s storage shed?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Definitely not under someone’s storage shed.”

“You must have lived one hell of a life before all of this.”

“It was a wild ride, yeah.”

“Can I confess something?”

“Go for it.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing we never met until now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I would have totally fallen for you. I mean, head over heels. Sex on floors, and all that good stuff.”

“Nice.”

She laughed. “But then you’d break my heart, and I’d spend the next few years screwing every guy I meet in an attempt to forget you.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“Yeah. It’s a good thing we didn’t meet before all of this.”

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “It’s a good thing…”

GABY

The earth exploded,
splitting open up and down the airfield, and then it started spitting dirt and concrete and flesh and bone against the hangar. The windows shattered against the concussive force, a few thousand pieces spraying inward in the hundreds of seconds afterward, the continuous
pek-pek-pek
of glass falling like machine-gun fire.

Gaby looked up in time to see Hendricks, the collaborator on the platform across the front doors from her, making the mistake of staying upright as the chaos began. He was still staring, slack-jawed, when a massive chunk of the landing strip smashed through the window, snapping the iron bars as if they were candy. Hendricks realized his mistake too late, and the piece of concrete pummeled him as he attempted to turn and flee. He sailed across the room and fell, landing in a grotesque pile not far from Patterson’s body.

Mason, on the same platform as Hendricks, proved to be smarter. He was already pressed into the metal grates when Hendricks was struck. The collaborator glanced up and they locked eyes for a moment, and he might have actually even grinned at her.

She mouthed back a curse when another series of explosions tore through the world and the entire building
thrummed
in the aftermath of what sounded like a dozen bombs going off at once. The glass on the other side of the hangar shattered, pelting Lucas and the other collaborator as they made a run for the office in the back. Lucas caught a flying shard the size of Gaby’s arm in the thigh, the sharp, bloody point jutting out the front. The big man roared, so loud that she could actually hear him over the end of the world.

Gaby watched Lucas grab the chunk of glass sticking out behind him, and she wanted to shout at him to
Stop, you idiot, you’re only going to make it worse,
but she didn’t. Not that Lucas would have heard her over the maelstrom of destruction outside the hangar walls anyway. Lucas somehow managed to get a firm grip with both hands despite having to twist around at the waist, and began pulling. Blood gushed and Lucas let out another monstrous roar, but this time it was entirely lost against the nightmarish
brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt
of an A-10 unleashing death from above.

She stared at Lucas, unable to look away, when hands grabbed her right arm and a familiar voice shouted very close to her ear, “Come on; we gotta get down from here before this whole building collapses!”

It was Danny, dragging her up to her feet, having to do almost all the work because she was still stunned by the sight of Lucas stumbling around below her, obscenely spraying blood onto the floor. She finally came to her senses and struggled to her feet even as Danny began pulling her toward the catwalk.

“Nate!” she shouted.

Nate was picking himself up behind her, grabbing at the railing for support as another massive explosion
boomed!
through the fields outside. “Go!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

She turned and followed Danny as he hopped down the steps two, then three at a time. She thought she was going to trip at least a dozen times on the way down, but somehow—miraculously—managed to maintain her balance all the way—

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

Her whole body shivered at the sound, as if the devil itself was touching her on the shoulders. It was indescribable, at once terrorizing and innocuous. But she knew it was far from innocent. She had seen what a Thunderbolt’s cannon could do.

T29. Four hundred souls.

“Go go go!” Nate shouted from behind her, the
clang-clang-clang
of his boots breaking through her useless thoughts.

As the last few catwalk steps rushed up at her, a piece of the room disappeared, and something fast and large hit the floor in front of her and dug a gaping hole as it burrowed deep. A stray round, she realized, from an A-10’s 30mm cannon. Even as she processed that information, a second and third round punched through one of the thick front doors as if it were little more than papier-mâché. Seeing it do that, with so little effort, made her grimace at what it could do to the human body.

She jumped the last few feet and landed in a crouch next to Patterson’s body, her boots splashing in a pool of his drying blood. A few hours ago that might have made her queasy, but at the moment all she could think about was,
Run run run!

Danny was already racing across the hangar toward the office at the far end. She wanted to ask him what was the point, because those walls weren’t going to stand up against the Warthog’s main gun if it decided to strafe them again. Certainly it wouldn’t do a hell lot of good if the building itself came tumbling down—

“Help me!” someone shrieked, and Gaby spun around in time to see Lucas leaning against the back wall, one meaty hand clutching his thigh. Small streams of blood poured between his fingers and his face was impossibly pale.

“Gaby!” Nate, coming up fast behind her, grabbed her arm.
“Go go go!”

He pulled her toward the office, but she couldn’t stop looking back at Lucas. The other collaborator who had been with him had disappeared, was maybe lost somewhere in the rubble—

A thunderous
boom!
, just before Lucas disappeared as a piece of the building crashed down from above, burying the big man in a few hundred pieces of what used to be the roof. Cold air swamped inside, but she was too busy being terrified to feel it at the moment.

“Gaby, come on!” Nate shouted, pulling her forward.

It won’t do any good,
she thought.
The office won’t do any good. Why can’t you guys see that?
But she was too busy stumbling, trying to keep up with Nate as he pulled her toward the office by the hand as if she were a lost child.

Danny was already at the door, holding it open with one hand. “Come on, lovebirds! Suck face later!”

She was halfway to Danny when a flurry of movement made her glance to her right just as Mason nearly cannonballed down the catwalk stairs, clinging to the railing as the building trembled with every explosion—

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

The sound caused Gaby’s legs to weaken, and she wobbled as she lunged through the open office door and kept going. Her forward momentum carried her all the way to the far wall, and she had to stick out both hands to keep from smashing into the ugly peeling paint.

Nate crashed against the wallpaper beside her, his blue eyes seeking hers out immediately. “You okay?”

She nodded silently, too afraid of what might come out if she tried opening her mouth to speak. Her legs were still shaking, her arms trembling, and for some reason her teeth were chattering, even though she knew it wasn’t from the cold pouring into the building through the large gaping holes all over the hangar.

“Fuck!” someone shouted at the same time a black form slid along the floor and slammed into the wall next to her in a heap.
Mason.

Gaby ignored him and looked back at Danny as he slammed the door shut
(Yeah, that’s going to do it, Danny, that’s going to keep the building from falling on top of us)
, then hurried over to the windows and pushed one, then the other down.

Danny even took the extra few seconds to flick the locks on both windows into place before stepping back. “Just in case,” he said, grinning at her and Nate.

She managed to smile back, even though she didn’t know how or why.

Danny flattened his back against the wall to her right at the same time they heard another plane (Or was it the same one? How many did Mercer have flying around out there tonight?) slashing by above them, even louder now that there was a giant hole (Holes?) in the roof.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Pieces of the office ceiling tore free and fell around her feet just as the hangar let out a groan that seemed to be coming from every inch of its foundation.

She became aware of something moving outside the windows and glanced over in time to see the last of Mason’s collaborators—the same one who had been with Lucas—running toward them, even as different sections of the roof continued to collapse around him. The man reached out a hand toward the windows—toward
her—
just before he was sucked under a cascade of beams and shiny metal. A cloud of dust flooded against the windows, covering the glass in sheets of metallic gray.

Gaby wished she could have said she felt sorry for him, but that would have been a lie. He was the enemy; had been, for the last year or so of her life after The Purge. After losing so much—Will, Josh—and with so much more at risk, she didn’t have the strength to care what happened to a man whose name she didn’t even know.

She looked up and saw the night sky, visible through the jagged opening where a large part of the roof used to be. It was a clear night with barely any clouds, and there was plenty of moonlight to see with. She marveled at the sight, feeling strangely calm, when the belly of a plane appeared and disappeared half a heartbeat later, and she braced herself for what she knew would come next.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

My God, that sound.
That sound!

“Well, this isn’t going well,” Danny said, his voice slightly more haggard than she was used to hearing even in all the previous life-and-death situations they had found themselves in.

A hand—Nate’s—wrapped around hers. She was startled by the sudden contact, but the warmth of his fingers, squeezing her numbed (and cold) ones, was a welcoming feeling. His face was covered in sweat and dirt and blood, and she thought about asking where the blood came from, but he looked okay, or at least unharmed, and his smile was convincing enough that she didn’t.

They slid down the wall and sat on the floor, Danny doing the same to her right. Mason had scurried over to his own corner, his eyes darting to the ceiling as it continued to creak and groan against the continued onslaught outside. Maybe like her, he was waiting for it to break apart and come crashing down and put an end to everything. Maybe, she thought, that might be for the best…

“Danny,” Nate said. “I saw parachutes. Outside, when one of the Warthogs made its pass.”

Danny wiped at a small trickle of blood dripping from his hairline before cleaning his palm on his pants. “Cluster bombs. The A-10s are dropping them like leaking piñatas out there.”

“Where the hell would they get something like that?”

“Probably secured them the same time they did the planes. Why not, right? Everything’s just sitting around in hangars like this one. But, you know, still in one piece.”

Gaby listened to them while focusing on the windows across the room. Even with the thick layer of crushed cement caking the glass panes, she could see enough to know the walls were still standing. A large swath of moonlight lit up the beams and bent steel sheets that had come tumbling down. Somewhere underneath all that was Lucas and the other guy. A part of her accepted that they both had it coming; they were sellouts to the human race, after all. And yet, there was the lingering old Gaby who felt sorry for them, who hoped they hadn’t suffered at the very end—

Something fell out of the sky and bounced against a section of the fallen roof, then slipped and slid almost comically, bony arms and legs flailing out of control, before finally landing in a pile on the floor. There was so much moonlight that she had no problem at all seeing its pruned black skin and domed head as it straightened up and turned, sensing their presence. Sensing
her
presence.

The creature’s twin dark orbs focused in on her, and it had been so long since she had come face to face with one of the creatures that Gaby had forgotten how unnatural they looked, how emaciated and deformed. This one, in particular, gave the impression of a little child standing on rail-thin legs, its flesh like oily film wrapped around protruding bones.

Gaby scrambled to her feet at the same time as Nate and Danny. She didn’t have to say anything—they had seen the thing falling out of the sky like some sick gift from the heavens, too. She didn’t know about Mason, somewhere in his own corner of the office, and she didn’t particularly care.

Danny rushed forward first and had gotten halfway when the creature smashed itself into the other side of the window. It had used its head like a battering ram, and the glass cracked but somehow managed to remain intact. Everything would have been fine if the ghoul had stopped then, but of course it didn’t, and even as Danny hesitated after the initial strike, the creature struck again and again and
again.

“Danny!” she shouted, just before one of the windows shattered and glass sprayed inside the room.

Danny was almost at the window when he stopped and darted left to avoid the flying shards. The creature shoved itself through the opening and landed in a pile of limbs, pieces of glass jutting from its domed head like spikes.

Closer and without the window to limit her vision of it, the creature looked smaller, even unthreatening. That was, until it opened its mouth, showing off caverns of crooked sharp brown-and-yellow teeth. Thick clumps of saliva dripped from the corners of its mouth as it moved—
straight toward her.