The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) (46 page)

“I have a feeling you didn’t have a lot of problems getting guys to do what you wanted in college, Jordan.”

She smiled at him. “You don’t have to kiss my ass anymore. You already got in my pants, remember?”

“It never hurts to lube up.”

“Sounds like the prelude to something painful.”

He chuckled. “We’ll see.”

“Promises, promises.”

She gave the machete the once-over, then put it through a few practice swings. In the sunlight, the blade was more rusted over than it had looked inside the building, but it was still a decent weapon. Even if that edge couldn’t cut as well as it used to, it was nevertheless going to hurt coming down on an arm or a leg.

“Not bad,” she said when she was done. “If I can’t kill someone with this thing, I can at least give them tetanus.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“So,” she said, fixing him with a serious look. He could tell she had been thinking about it ever since they woke up this morning, and even more since. “After everything we’ve seen—Gregson, those collaborators yesterday, that blue-eyed thing last night—what are the chances we’re going to even make it to Gillian alive, much less actually be in a position to save her when we get there?”

Good question,
he thought, and looked around at their surroundings.

It was the same now as the last time he had checked: A flat and open land, and somewhere out there was the highway. The problem wasn’t finding it—just follow the dirt road connected to the house. It was the very long road (and when you were moving on foot, everything took too long) between here and T18 that was going to be a problem.

Marcy and her collaborators were on high alert, if all the firepower he had seen yesterday was any indication. Besides the technicals, they were carrying around LAWs, no doubt as a response to Mercer’s tanks. What were the chances he and Jordan could make it to Tobias, and then Gillian, without ever running across another group of well-armed men with itchy trigger fingers?

You just walked right back into a warzone, pal. Congratulations.

He sighed out loud.

“I take it the chances are pretty piss poor,” Jordan said.

“I’ve been in worse situations,” he said. “Come on; let’s find the highway.”

“There are people with guns and rocket launchers on the highway, remember? Maybe we should stay out of the open as much as possible.”

“Look at you, being all tactical.”

She smirked. “I just don’t wanna get blown up again.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t very fun, was it?” He glanced in the direction of the highway. “I guess we start walking.”

“That’s your big plan?”

“We’ll figure it out between here and there, wherever ‘there’ ends up being for now.”

“I could have come up with that plan,” Jordan said.

“Yup,” he said, and started off.

Jordan followed behind him, and they didn’t say anything for a while. He was hoping it would stay that way, but of course he should have known better.

Less than thirty seconds later, Jordan said, “What are you going to tell Gillian?”

“About what?”

“You and me.
Is
there a you and me?”

“After last night, you still have to ask?”

“Yes.”

He stopped and looked back at her. “I gave up on Gillian a week ago.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes,” he lied.

He wasn’t entirely sure if she believed him, but she gave him a pursed smile anyway. “I should tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“I expect a promise ring.”

He chuckled. “Will you settle for my letterman jacket?”

“Depends. What did you letter in?”

“Pure badassness.”

“Impressive.”

He smiled and turned around and continued walking. She followed, picking up her pace until she was walking beside him stride for stride.

“It’s going to be a long walk,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working car on the road.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Of course. How do you think I finally landed you?” she said, and smiled at nothing in particular.

GABY

“I see two
vehicles,” Nate said. “How many do you see?”

“Two, too,” she said.

He chuckled.

“This isn’t funny, Nate. We’re probably going to die in the next few minutes.”

“Sorry.”

She was crouched beside one of the windows at the front of the hardware store watching the vehicles coming up the street. Nate mirrored her pose on the other side of the building, his breath fogging up the glass surface in front of him. She flexed her fingers around the pistol grip under the barrel of the M4 to keep it from going numb. The weapon had a red dot sight, which was more than good enough for daylight fighting. The dead collaborator she had taken it off had been carrying two extra magazines, and counting the two she already had for the AR-15, gave her a total of five. She’d had to make do with much less.

“Maybe they’ll pass us by,” Nate said.

“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe it for one second.

They were close enough that she could have heard him (and vice versa) even if he were whispering, which he wasn’t because he didn’t have to. The soldiers were still a good hundred yards down the street, and they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

She paid very close attention to the four figures moving on foot as they peeked into windows and kicked in doors on both sides of the street. The vehicles stopped each time they made entry, then resumed when they re-emerged. At this rate, she didn’t think they would reach her and Nate for another half an hour.

They don’t have to rush, because the night belongs to them. They can take all day if they want to.

There was a lone woman among the soldiers, and Gaby watched her breaking a window with the stock of her rifle before peeking inside. It wasn’t much of a search on her part, but she seemed satisfied with it and jogged over to rejoin the others. Gaby didn’t blame her for wanting to stick as close to the weaponized trucks as possible.

“Technicals,” Danny and Will called them. The ones she was looking at were blue and red, and both had machine guns mounted in the back, each one manned by a soldier. They weren’t wearing gas masks, but she could see the breathing apparatuses hanging from their belts as they moved about. She guessed they didn’t need them in daylight, without the ghouls around to mistake them for the enemy.

She was glad to be rid of the mask herself. It sat somewhere on the counter behind her now, along with the uniform of the dead man she had put on last night. All three of them had swapped back into their old clothes, though they had kept everything else, including the rifles, gun belts, and supply pouches. It was more than they’d had even after the trip to Taylor’s cottage outside of Larkin.

“We should have brought lunch,” Nate said.

“I never asked, but can you cook?”

“Hell no. What about you?”

“Why? Because I’m a woman I should know how to cook?”

“Well, yeah.”

She smirked, and he chuckled.

“They sure are taking their sweet time, though,” Nate said, focusing back on the street.

She wasn’t at all concerned with the deliberate speed of the soldiers. It was those machine guns that made her wary. She had seen what kind of damage those things could do up close. Bonnie had become very good with the M240 they had onboard the
Trident,
and she’d seen the ex-model obliterating targets in the water with one pull of the trigger.

The soldiers were less than fifty yards when she said, “Get ready.”

“Danny?” Nate said.

“Soon.”

“When?”

“He didn’t say. But soon. Just be ready.”

Nate stood up, his body sliding against the wall next to the glass window, and stretched his legs. She did the same thing on her side, extending first her right leg, then her left. Her hands had numbed a bit while waiting, and she forced blood to circulate along the rest of her limbs now.

She zeroed in on the men inside the two vehicles. Only the blue one had another soldier in the front passenger seat besides the driver, and that man was talking into a radio. When he was done, he put it on the dashboard and said something to the man behind the steering wheel. The fact that she hadn’t heard the radio clipped to her hip squawk when the man was using his told her they had, smartly, switched channels after last night.

There were nine of them that she could see—“could see” being the operative phrase. Who knew how many more were further up the street or in other parts of Starch? How many were waiting on the outskirts of town right now, ready to swarm once these nine located their targets? How many were the collaborators committing to flushing them out? Or maybe the better question was, how many could they
afford
to commit, with Mercer’s people still running around out there?

Even if this was it, nine was still a lot for them to kill. For
her
to kill. And they’d have to do exactly that to get out of Starch alive. The
Trident
was waiting for them somewhere out there. They’d never leave until they had exhausted every effort to find them. Danny was right about that. She had seen how long Lara was willing to wait for Will; her friend would never just abandon them after a few days. A few weeks from now might be another story, though.

“Holy shit, is that…” Nate said from across the store.

She turned to him and was about to ask what “that” was when she heard it, too.

It was a slight
buzzing
sound that came out of nowhere and gradually increased, until she knew exactly where it was coming from: Outside, but more importantly,
from above.

Gaby glanced out at the street and saw the soldiers jumping up the sidewalks and seeking shelter against building storefronts. Their heads were upturned and following the object as it glided across the open skies. It was hard to miss, because it was the only unnatural thing up there.

It was a plane.

Round and fat and gray as it moved high above them.

Gaby’s first instincts were similar to the collaborators: Run and hide. She was already hiding, but how much cover would the hardware store provide when that plane started dropping bombs? Or, if it was anything like the Thunderbolts that had laid waste to T29 and the Larkin airfield, started its strafing runs? Anyone outside would be most vulnerable—

Danny.

He was out there, in the open, and was a sitting duck to any type of aerial bombardment. She looked anxiously up at the ceiling, wondering if he had come to the same conclusion as she had, and waited to hear him scrambling around up there, where he had taken up position ever since sunrise filled out Starch.

Except the plane didn’t shoot, even if it did seem to be dropping something out of its belly. White…something was falling in long, jagged lines down to earth from the craft. More than a few of them landed on the rooftops in front of her, some on the streets. One fluttered almost majestically to the sidewalk—

Crack!

The shot had come from above her, from the hardware store’s rooftop.

Danny!

She almost smiled. Of course the ex-Ranger would be the only one to realize the perfect opportunity to strike, while everyone (including her and Nate) were distracted by the appearance of the plane.

She focused back on the street just in time to see the soldier standing behind the machine gun on the blue technical collapse into the truck bed. The weapon he had been manning swiveled as he released it, the muzzle aiming harmlessly up at the cloudless sky.

“Now, Nate, now!” she shouted.

She stepped away from the wall and lifted the M4, lining up the red dot with the soldier standing in the back of the red truck. He was in the process of taking aim at the rooftop of the hardware store with his weapon and was crouching slightly to get a better angle.

Forty yards. Easy shot with a carbine.

She fired, the bullet smashing the window in front of her, and a split-second later the machine gunner disappear out of her scope.

Then Nate was firing to her left, unloading downrange with three-round bursts. Gaby blocked out his shots and zeroed in on the driver of the red truck. The man had slammed on the gas because the vehicle started lurching forward, picking up speed as it went. Her second bullet drilled through the windshield, spiderwebbing it, and—
missed!

Shit!

She scrambled to line up the sight, but before she could squeeze off a frantic make-up shot, the truck’s windshield spiderwebbed again, but this time directly in front of the driver. The man slumped forward into the steering wheel and a loud blaring sound—the horn—filled the air. She waited for the vehicle to stop, but instead it kept coming—
straight at her.

“Nate!” she shouted, trying to be heard over his three-round bursts. “Incoming!”

He pulled his eye away from his scope just in time to see the truck. She was already moving even before he did and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that Nate was too smart to stand there and gawk at the technical as it barreled its way up the street at them. She hoped, anyway.

She gripped her rifle with both hands as she swerved around the aisles until, finally, saw the counter at the back. She thought about grabbing the attic door and going up, but there wasn’t going to be enough time. She could already hear the loud roar of the truck’s engine (was it revving?) as it approached the front windows—

The massive
crash!
she had been waiting for, as the vehicle’s front fender took out the remainder of the glass curtain wall that she and Nate hadn’t already obliterated, along with the door. Her ears rang, even as she heard the continued
pop-pop-pop
of automatic gunfire coming from above her, from Danny as he continued raining fire on the soldiers in the street.

Now, now, now!

She dropped and slid the last few feet along the dirty floor, flinching at the gross image of leftover blood from last night that she was soaking up with her clothes like a sponge. Her slide was true, and she disappeared through the entrance of the back counter at the same time all hell broke loose behind her. Her forward momentum carried her past the counter and she tucked her body into a ball, the rifle clutched against her stomach, and careened into the wall with the back of her neck.