The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 7 BLAINE

He opened his eyes to sunlight, with cool air blowing in his face. He was grateful he could still breathe and, more importantly, that he was somehow still alive, even after those people had found him on the road bleeding like a stuck pig. He assumed he probably looked like a stuck pig. A stuck Mexican (half-Mexican) pig, anyway. It was probably not the prettiest sight they had ever seen, and it was a miracle they didn’t just get back in their cars and drive off. In his experience, guys like him didn’t get picked up at the side of the road, especially when they were bleeding from three bullet holes.

He was lying on a bed — a soft, cushy bed that was too short — and he could feel the heels of his feet pressing against the wooden footboard. A fan rested on a dresser, blowing mercifully cool air against him, and for an instant, just an instant, Blaine thought he had woken up from a nightmare, that none of the last eight months had been real. But then he couldn’t find the fan’s electrical cord and realized it was a battery-powered portable fan.

Sandra would love one of those.

He heard sounds to his right and turned his head. The doctor lady was rifling through a big black bag. For some reason, she looked much younger today than when he had first seen her. She was probably in her twenties, which made him wonder if she really was a doctor. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, and from the back she could almost pass for Sandra. When she turned around, he saw crystal-blue eyes instead of green.

Sandra!

Blaine sat up quickly and regretted it right away. His entire body protested, like someone had shot him all over again. He let out an audible grunt and suddenly the woman was there, pushing him back down on the bed.

“Stop it, stop, you’re going to open your stitches,” she said, sounding almost annoyed with him. “If that happens, you’re going to start bleeding all over again, and this time I’m not sewing you back up, do you understand?”

Blaine sighed and lay back down. He didn’t have the strength to fight her. Instead, he stared up at the ceiling at a poster of Nolan Ryan in his prime, prepping for a pitch on the mound in a Texas Rangers uniform. His father used to love the Rangers, though for some reason he was never entirely sold on the Cowboys.

“I’m not dead,” he said. His voice was hoarse and his mouth dry.

“No, you’re not.” She looked amused. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Blaine.”

“Do you remember my name?”

Blaine tried to remember. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

“You were in and out all day, makes sense you wouldn’t remember much of it. It’s Lara.”

“Where am I, Lara?”

“A house. We made camp here yesterday so I could take the bullet out of your shoulder. Why didn’t they kill you?”

“What?”

“The men who shot you. You said there were more than five of them.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Why didn’t they kill you? Why did they just leave you on the road like that?”

Blaine remembered the man with the white hair, Folger, telling the others, “What’s the point? Look at him. He’s not going anywhere. If he makes it to tonight, then what?”

Big mistake, asshole.

“I guess they didn’t want to waste any more bullets on me,” he said.

Lara looked at him for a moment, then, apparently satisfied he was telling the truth, she nodded. She walked back to her black bag and finished putting what looked like tweezers and a sewing kit back inside.

Blaine sat up again, this time slowly. There was bandaging around his shoulder, and he was almost entirely nude except for his boxers, which were stained with blood and sweat. He smelled, too. Lara had also stitched up and bandaged the bullet hole in his left thigh and the one in his right side, where most of the pain was coming from at the moment. Simply breathing hurt.

“Thank you,” Blaine said.

“You should thank Will. He almost ran you over. We don’t see a lot of bodies on the road, but then you probably know that.”

He nodded. The creatures didn’t leave bodies behind. They were efficient that way.

“I will,” he said. “Thank him, I mean.”

“The men who shot you. Did they take Sandra?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

He told her about meeting Folger and his people on the road the day before. The flat tire that had slowed them down. About Deeks dying, then Sandra taking off for the trees while he tried to distract the men.

“She’s fast,” he added. “She used to run track in college. But I don’t know if she made it.” He shook his head. “There were a lot of them…”

“We didn’t find anyone out there but you and the other man, Deeks.”

“Did you search the woods?”

“No. We didn’t know there was anyone to search for.”

“I don’t think she made it,” he said, shocked by how matter-of-fact he sounded. “If she had, and they left, she would have come back for me. But she didn’t. And she would have come back for me…”

Lara nodded, though Blaine wondered if she really believed him. He didn’t blame her for having doubts. He knew what he looked like. A big, hairy Mexican with bad teeth who didn’t smile very often, and even when he tried to smile, it always seemed to come out wrong. But if she only knew what Sandra looked like, he thought amusedly, she really wouldn’t believe him.

She dug out a small bottle from her black bag and handed it to him, along with a bottle of water. “Something for the pain.”

“What is it?”

“Vicodin.”

“I need to stay awake and alert,” he said, looking at the pill bottle.

“You don’t have a choice,” she said. “It’s either this or we’re going to be carrying you around all day, and let’s face it, no one’s looking forward to that. Once your pain lessens, I can give you something else to get by.”

He nodded reluctantly and took the bottle. He opened it and saw a dozen or so white pills inside.

“To start you off,” Lara said. “Take one now. And another one in an hour if you need it. No more than three a day. Understand?”

He shook one of the pills into his palm and washed it down with warm water that tasted better than anything he had ever drunk, and he ended up drinking the entire bottle.

“Drink up,” Lara said. “We have plenty more downstairs. You need to eat something so the Vicodin won’t be the only thing in your stomach.”

A man entered the room. It took Blaine a moment to put the face with the guy who had talked to him on the road yesterday. He was a few years younger than Blaine, with brown eyes and short black hair. Blaine only had to look at the way he was holding the assault rifle — some kind of M4 variant, though it looked heavily modified, with dents and scratches from heavy use — to realize he knew his way around guns.

“How’s the patient?” the guy asked Lara.

“As long as he doesn’t go running around, he should be fine,” she said. Then she looked over at Blaine. “Will, this is Blaine. Blaine, this is Will.”

Blaine exchanged a nod with Will. “You saved my life.”

“I almost ran you over. Lara is the one who saved your life.”

“Thank you, for everything. If I can do anything…”

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to fix a computer, would you?”

“A computer?” Blaine shook his head. “I barely know how to turn one on.”

“Yeah,” Will said, disappointed. “Me, too.”

He heard children laughing, which confused him.

There were two of them, and the way they talked and whispered to each other, like everything they said was their own private little secret, made him think they were actually closer than sisters. It was the kind of closeness only possible after you had seen what was lurking out there in the darkness.

Their names were Vera and Elise, and the young, pretty redhead who watched protectively over them was Carly. The other man in the group, Danny, had short blond hair and looked like a surfer, but didn’t talk or act like one. One look at him and Blaine knew that, just like with Will, he was ex-military. It was easy to see the difference between men like them and Folger.

When everyone was up, Carly and Lara prepared a big breakfast, using plates and silverware from the kitchen.

“We try to eat as big a breakfast as possible every morning,” Lara told him. “You never know when you might be forced to miss out on a meal later in the day.”

As Blaine stood at the foot of the stairs watching them get ready to eat, all he could think about was Sandra. He was certain Folger had found her in the woods, and that certainty was like a black hole in his gut.

Will came out of the garage next door with a big crate of supplies.

“Will,” Blaine said. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

Will nodded. “Give me a sec.” He walked over to the kitchen, put the crate down, then came back. “How are the stitches holding?”

“I’m not bleeding, which is a good sign, I guess.”

“Good. What did you want to talk about?”

“Outside?”

Blaine headed for the door, grimacing the whole time, and was glad Will couldn’t see his face. Walking was painful, but not nearly as painful as climbing down the stairs. He didn’t think those damn steps would ever end. His entire right side was so heavily bandaged he felt like a walking mummy — clumsy and awkward.

Will followed him outside and they stood in the sun for a moment. Blaine looked over the tall blades of grass that covered the unmowed lawn, then at the empty and silent road beyond. The thought of Folger with his filthy hands on Sandra gnawed at him.

“I need to go,” Blaine said. “I appreciate what you and Lara did for me. And I’m going to repay you guys back when I can. But I need to go. Sandra is out there, and I need to find her.”

“You can barely walk,” Will said.

“Doesn’t matter. I still need to go. Sandra’s out there.”

“You even know where?”

“Up the road somewhere. I saw those trucks in the back of the house. I can take one of them if you can spare some gas.”

“Gas and cars aren’t the problem, Blaine. The fact that you can barely walk without grimacing in pain is. How many did you say there were? Six?”

“Maybe six, yeah.”

“Let’s assume for the moment you found them. And that’s a big ‘if.’ You think you can take on all six?”

“I…” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t stay here. I can’t sit down and have a big breakfast when I know she’s out there. What would you do if it was Lara?”

“I’d make sure I could actually do something about it instead of just rushing off to die.”

“Bullshit. You’d do what I’m doing now.”

Will picked up one of the ceramic Labrador dogs squatting in front of the house and walked across the lawn. He placed the animal about twenty yards away. The dog stood one foot wide and three feet tall, and it stared back at Blaine with its tongue sticking out of its mouth like it was waiting for a treat.

Will walked back, drew his sidearm — a Glock — and handed it to Blaine. “Eighteen meters, give or take. Can you hit it?”

“What will this prove?”

“Don’t you want to know you can at least shoot something once you run across Folger’s gang? Or do you plan on sneaking up and whacking them from behind with a hammer? All six of them?”

Blaine automatically reached for the Glock with his right hand before wincing in pain. He took the gun with his left hand instead and turned to face the ceramic guard dog. It looked a hell of a lot farther than twenty yards. He held up the Glock and took aim.

Will stood silently next to him.

Blaine fired — and missed the damn dog by a good five feet. The gun kicked too hard. No, that wasn’t true. The gun kicked the way it always did, but he wasn’t used to dealing with it with his left hand.

He heard Will’s radio squawk. Danny’s voice: “Don’t tell me, accidental discharge?”

“We’re good,” Will said.

“Roger that.”

“Again,” Will said, to Blaine.

Blaine squared up this time and took aim again, resisting the maddening urge to switch the gun over to his right hand.

He took careful aim and shot again.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“Empty the magazine,” Will said.

Blaine fired again, and again, and again.

After the last bullet burrowed its way into the dirt next to the dog, Blaine let the gun drop to his side. He was tired. Not from all the recoil, but from the effort, from the missing. From not even coming close.

He handed the gun back to Will and waited to be chastised. Instead, Will silently reloaded the Glock and holstered it.

“It’s too far,” Blaine said.

“Is it?”

“No one could hit—”

Will casually drew the Glock, turned slightly, and shot the dog’s head off its shoulder with the first shot. Then he holstered the gun again.

“Shit,” Blaine said.

“We’ll eat a big breakfast first,” Will said. “Then we’ll get in our trucks, and we’ll go see if we can track this Folger asshole down.”

Blaine nodded back mutely.

The big breakfast was canned corn, sweet peas, sausages, macaroni and cheese, and slices of SPAM. They finished it off with pineapple slices and a fruit salad.

Blaine felt stuffed just looking at the food and was able to eat only a little bit. The two girls more than made up for his lack of an appetite by devouring every canned product Carly opened and put in front of them. When Danny broke out some MREs for himself and Will, Blaine tried one for Chicken Pesto Pasta and managed to swallow half of it before his stomach started actively resisting him. He flushed it down with two bottles of warm water and instantly felt guilty about using up two for himself while everyone else seemed to be making do with one.

“Plenty to go around,” Danny said, seeing his reluctance. “Besides, when it rains, we just stick the bottles out and refill them.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Carly said. “The only good thing about the end of the world is there are unopened cases of bottled water everywhere. You can’t go into a store without kicking one over by accident.”

Blaine felt better, because she was right. He had found the same thing while traveling with Deeks and Sandra. Food went bad, but water always stayed the same. It had never occurred to him there were so many different varieties of spring water, and most of them tasted exactly the same. Warm.

After the big breakfast, they gathered up their supplies, including the portable fans from the rooms, while Will and Danny retrieved the trucks from the attached garage.

When Lara saw Blaine trying to help out with one of the carry-ons, she shot him a quick look and snapped, “Don’t even think about it. Go wait outside with the girls.”

Blaine sighed and went outside, where Elise and Vera were chasing each other around a group of trees nearby. Blaine watched them in silence for a moment, not quite sure what he was feeling. There was something so out of place about the girls that it took him a moment to realize it was because he hadn’t heard children’s laughter in almost a year, and he was still having a hard time processing it.

“They remind us of everything we’ve lost,” Lara said, coming out of the house behind him. “And what we stand to gain if we can find someplace where they’ll be safe.” She stood next to him, watching Vera and Elise, their heads barely visible in the field. “Things will never be the same, but maybe there’s a little bit of hope. They seem to think so.”

“Sandra thought so, too.”

“What’s she like?”

“Blonde. Tall. Green eyes. The most beautiful woman in the world.”

She smiled. “Hopefully I’ll get to meet her soon.”

That made him smile, too. “I would love for that to happen.”

Will and Danny pulled up in two Ford Ranger trucks, one black and one blue. Will climbed out of the black Ranger and waved him over.

Will pulled a map out of his vest pocket and spread it out on top of the Ranger’s hood. “We’re here,” he said, indicating a point on the map along US 287/Route 69. “This is where we found you.” He moved backward a little bit, then forward again. “Lancing’s up here, about twenty klicks from where we are now.”

“What’s a click?” Blaine asked.

“Kilometer. Klick. With a ‘k’.”

Lara, who was tossing a carry-on into the back of the Ranger, said, “You’ll get used to it. It’s always klicks and meters with these guys.”

“A klick is.62 miles,” Will said. “Twelve miles to Lancing, give or take. If this Folger isn’t a total moron, he would’ve looked for a place to bed down for the night — somewhere in Lancing.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s 8:17 a.m. You said he’s traveling with three vehicles?”

“Three vehicles and a big rig.”

“Big rigs are slow,” Danny said, leaning on the other side of the hood. “Even if they hike out of Lancing before we get there, they’ll be moving slow. The road’s too dangerous to go any faster.”

Blaine frowned.

It was my fault. The flat tire didn’t have to happen. I was going too fast. It’s all my fault Deeks is dead and Sandra is out there now.

Will folded the map and slipped it back into his vest pocket. “Let Lara take a look at your stitches one more time before we head off. In the meantime, I’ll give you something you can’t possibly miss with.”

“You got a bazooka?” Blaine asked wryly.

“No, but I have the next best thing.”

That “next best thing” was a 12-gauge shotgun with the barrels sawed down to half its original length and a pistol grip that made it ideal for holding and firing with one hand.

Blaine shot at one of the big trees that Elise and Vera had been running around earlier, and found that he could hit his target — as long as the tree was only five yards away. Beyond that, he might as well be throwing pebbles. With the shorter barrel, the shotgun just didn’t have the same range.

As for reloading, if he used his right arm as a wedge, he could open the shotgun, shake out the spent shells, and push in new ones. He tried it a couple of times just to make sure it was doable. Satisfied, he grabbed a pouch of shells that Danny offered and settled into the roomy back of the black Ford Ranger, where he had been lying, bleeding, just a day earlier.

“Forgive the blood,” Lara said. “Some guy was bleeding all over it yesterday.”

He grinned. “That dickhead, he left a real mess.”

Will drove, with Lara in the front passenger seat. Danny followed in the blue Ranger with Carly and the girls. They drove down the driveway and turned south back onto US 287/Route 69.

As they headed up the road, Blaine fought the urge to tell Will to drive faster. They were cruising between thirty-five and forty, and Blaine didn’t notice his right foot was pressed down hard against the floor, as if there were an imaginary gas pedal there, until it started to throb. He slowly relaxed his leg with some effort.

“What did they look like?” Will asked. “The men that attacked you.”

“I only saw one of them up close,” Blaine said. He conjured up Folger’s face in his mind’s eye. The thick white hair. The slimy smile. The low-tied gun holster. “I heard someone call him Folger. He had white hair.”

“White hair?” Lara said. “So he’s old?”

“No, not too old. Fifties, maybe. He just had a lot of white hair.”

“Four vehicles?” Will said.

“They took our newer Jeep. The one you saw on the road was theirs. They also had two trucks. A GMC and a Ford F-150. And a big rig pulling a semitrailer.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen a big rig moving around since all of this began. You can still find gas in cars, but diesel power is a pain in the ass.”

“I was surprised to see it, too.”

Outside the window, Blaine saw a sign flash by, reading: “Lancing 10 Miles.”

“Have you heard of Song Island?” Lara asked him.

“No,” Blaine said.

Lara picked up a ham radio from the floor and put it in her lap. She turned it on and played with the dial for a moment. “The girls were playing with it one day and they found this. It’s been broadcasting on the FEMA frequency every day, in a constant loop, since we found it.”

She placed the radio between the front seats and turned up the volume.

Blaine heard a female voice, soft and soothing through the speakers:

“…want you to know there is hope. There are survivors on Song Island. We have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness. If you are receiving this recorded message, we encourage you to make your way to us. I repeat: we have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness. Hello. If anyone can hear me out there…”

“FEMA?” Blaine said.

“Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Will said. “The people who show up when hurricanes make land or a tornado wipes out a town. The message doesn’t say specifically that it’s FEMA. We’re guessing it could be some ex-military types or maybe an ex-Fed who managed to establish a base on Song Island after The Purge.”

“Do you think it’s true? That the island is secure?”

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

“But is that possible?” Blaine insisted. The idea sounded absurd to him somehow. “I didn’t know the monsters — the ghouls — didn’t like water.”

“Neither did we,” Lara said. “Do you know about silver?”

“What about silver?”

“Have you tried shooting them?” Will asked.

“It just pisses them off.”

“Silver is their Kryptonite. It kills them on the spot. It’s the second-best weapon against them other than the sun, so half of our ammo has silver in it.”

“I’ve never heard about that. How does it work?”

“We don’t know, exactly,” Lara said. “But it’s fatal to them.”

“Look in your ammo pouch,” Will said.

Blaine picked up the pouch from the floor between his feet. He opened it and saw shotgun shells inside.

“See the ones with the white ‘X’ on them?” Will said.

Blaine sifted through the shells. For every regular shell inside the pouch, he found one with an “X” written in white marker on the side. “I see them.”

“The ones with the ‘X’ have silver-loaded buckshot. If we get separated, or you have to go your own way, load your weapon with the silver ammo at night. You can make your own silver bullets after that.”

Make my own bullets? How the hell do I do that?

“As for this Folger,” Will said, “any old shell will do.”

“Once we help you find Sandra, we’re continuing on to Song Island,” Lara said. “You’re welcome to come with us. You and Sandra both.”

“It sounds too good to be true,” Blaine said.

“That’s what we said. But what else is there?”

“That’s why there’s no hurry,” Will said. “If it’s as safe as they claim, it should still be there regardless of how fast we get there. If not…”

He nodded, understanding. “Sandra would love a place like that.”

Sandra, wait for me, baby, I’m coming as fast as I can…

Outside the window, they drove past another sign that read, “Lancing 8 Miles.”