The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 21 LARA

She hadn’t thought she would see another one, or maybe she had just been hoping she wouldn’t see another one. But there it was, lying on the floor of the clinic with two bullet holes in its back.

A man in a hazmat suit.

Another man in a hazmat suit.

This suit looked different from the ones she had encountered with Will and Danny in Dansby, Texas, all those months ago, but Will said it was the same type of suit. Level B, he called it. Not the big, bulky Level A with its own breathing apparatus. Back in Dansby, they had encountered ten men in Level B hazmat suits, determined to keep their loyalties to their ghoul masters. Here, there was just one. Or at least, just one they could see. Lara couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“It must be nearby,” Will said.

“Do we even wanna find it?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” Lara said. “If we know it’s around here somewhere, we have to look for it.”

They were talking about a blood farm, the same kind they had found in Dansby. Men, women, and children harvested by the ghouls to supply them with a never-ending flow of fresh blood. Because the ghouls couldn’t watch over the “farms” in the daytime, they needed human collaborators to do the job. That was where these men in hazmat suits came in. They wore the suits to distinguish themselves from other humans, to let the ghouls know they were part of the team. Lara had learned all this from a young collaborator named Kevin.

“And then what?” Will asked her.

“What does that mean?”

He was looking at her carefully, in that calm, non-argumentative way that was, nonetheless, argumentative. It sometimes annoyed the hell out of her.

“We can’t take them with us, Lara,” he said. “You know that. What happened the last time we stumbled across one of these farms?”

“We freed one of them.”

“No, we got lucky. We still don’t know how they put those people in a coma. Or if it’s even a coma. Even you didn’t know, and you’re the doctor.”

Third-year medical student, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

“We need to stay on course, keep going,” Will continued.

“They could be around here,” she insisted. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands. This city is thousands of times bigger than Dansby.”

“Even more reason not to try to find them.”

“See no evil, hear no evil, is that it?”

“In this case, yes.”

She was flustered. It had been a while since she had thought of Will as someone who wasn’t always and completely on her side. She felt that now, and it was a terrible, hollow feeling. The worst part was, he was so damn cold and detached about it.

“Danny?” she said. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s right,” Danny said, almost apologetically. “Carly, the girls, you, and those teenagers. We don’t have the ability to save any more people. Hell, we don’t even have the space. Once we get everyone to Song Island, and it turns out to be the safe haven we hope it is, then we can come back here. It’s not like they’ll be going anywhere, right?”

She was suddenly annoyed with both of them, but especially with Will. But most of all, she hated knowing they were both right. They had the others to look after. The girls. Josh and Gaby. One of these men had almost killed Josh.

But knowing and accepting were different animals. She felt guilty and angry at the same time, and the feeling made her skin crawl.

“Lara,” Will said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She wanted to shake it off, but she willed herself not to. “This is my call. Okay?”

She looked at him. His call. He was doing it again, taking the burden of the hard decisions, putting it on himself. Because he could handle it. Because he was Will, ex-Army Ranger, ex-SWAT commando, and there was nothing he couldn’t handle.

But she knew better. She saw him at night, when he wasn’t so sure, so steely-eyed, when they made love and he sighed against her like any other man, not the Superman everyone else had come to rely on. She remembered when he had confessed that he was afraid, back in Lancing.

“That scares me,” he had said, “because it means whatever happens, wherever we go, it might not be enough to protect you.”

Protect me. He does everything to protect me.

“What about him?” she asked, looking down at the dead man on the floor.

“I think it’s a bit too late for him, Doc,” Danny said.

“Let’s go,” Will said, “before more of them show up. A city this size has got to have a pretty big blood farm, and it must take more than one asshole to watch over it.”

The others were waiting outside. The trucks were gassed up, and their supplies were back where they belonged. Carly was outside the truck, the girls peering out of a window over her shoulder, the air conditioner blasting away at their hair.

“How many?” Carly asked.

“Just the one,” Danny said.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Where there’s one, there’re usually more. And they must have heard the gunshots, but they didn’t show up, so…” He shrugged. “Maybe they’re scared and know we’re bad men with guns.”

“Either way, we’re not sticking around to find out,” Will said.

“I like that idea,” Carly nodded.

Danny climbed back into the Frontier with Carly, while Lara followed Will to the Ridgeline.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when it was just the two of them outside.

“Don’t be,” she said. “You’re looking out for us, doing what’s best. And you’re right. We can’t do anything for them anyway.”

She thought about Megan, a girl they had saved from the Dansby blood farm, only to lose track of her during the siege at the facility that very same night. Lara didn’t even know what happened to Megan, and in the months since, she had always wondered if bringing Megan back with them had been the right thing to do. It had felt like the right thing at the time, but Megan might think otherwise now. She would still be at the farm, yes, but she would still be alive.

Or some kind of “alive”…

“Still, I’m sorry,” Will said.

She gave him a pursed smile, her own way of apologizing. He brushed hair out of her eyes, a simple move that always made her feel like a teenager. “What about Gaby?”

“What about her?”

“I think one of us should talk to her. About what happened.”

“She’s a tough kid. She’ll be fine.”

“That’s it? She’s a tough kid so she’ll be fine?”

“I’ve seen people like Gaby before, Lara. She’ll be fine.”

Lara wasn’t convinced as they climbed back into the Ridgeline. Josh and Gaby were in the back, and Lara fought the urge to flinch at the sight of Josh’s face. His eyes were bruised and swollen, his left eye in particular puffed up to twice the size of his right. His nose was broken, with a small Band-Aid over the bridge. His lips were cut, but they had stopped bleeding. Although Lara was sure the teenager was in some pain, he looked more embarrassed than hurt.

Gaby, on the other hand, looked fine sitting next to Josh, handing him a bottle of water every other minute and fussing over him. Lara wondered if it was all a front. Maybe Gaby was going through some things inside her head that she couldn’t express in words. Lara remembered the first time she had killed someone. It still lingered with her, something she didn’t think would ever go away.

And this wasn’t even Gaby’s first time. They knew about Betts and how Gaby killed him so they could escape. Both times, Gaby was justified in what she did. Lara would have done the same in her place. Carly, Will, and Danny, too. But they were older, and they had seen more. Gaby was eighteen, but looking at her now, fussing over Josh, Lara couldn’t tell if that calmness was an act, a brave front, or the real thing.

Either way, that’s a tough girl. Maybe Will’s right.

“You guys ready?” Lara asked.

“Good to go,” Gaby said.

Josh gave her a thumbs-up. When he tried to talk, his words slurred, a combination of the pain medication she had given him and his bruises, so he had stopped trying.

Will started the Ridgeline and eased them back onto the feeder road, where they continued parallel to the highway. There was just enough space along the small roads that they could use them instead of braving the congestion, even though every other half mile meant driving up onto the sidewalks, sometimes even the lawns, before moving back to the streets.

It was slow going, but they were making steady progress. Lara was worried about the Frontier behind them. It was pulling the cargo trailer and had more trouble going up and down the sidewalks, so she kept in touch with Carly as much as possible.

“How’s it going back there?” she said into the radio.

“It’s going,” Carly answered. “I wish Danny was a better driver, though. It’s like being stuck in a car with an eighty-year-old man with arthritis who refuses to admit he has arthritis. It’s annoying.”

“I drive fine,” they heard Danny say through the radio. “In fact, I drive great. They used to call me Danny the Driver because I drove so well.”

Lara smiled. She could picture Carly rolling her eyes. “Let us know if you need to stop or if something happens.”

“Will do,” Carly said.

Will leaned over and said into the radio, “Stay frosty.”

“Oh, I’m frosty,” Danny said. “I’m so frosty, they used to call me Danny the Frosty Snowman.”

This time Lara actually rolled her eyes.

Using the map, they were able to abandon the feeder road system and start using smaller streets, eventually returning to the main highway when US 287 became I-10 and they began moving east instead of south. It was still slow going on the interstate until they broke through near the edge of town.

By 11:11 a.m., they left the city of Beaumont behind.

Not long after, they were driving through a thickly forested area, with towering trees on both sides of the highway. Will estimated they would cross the Texas-Louisiana border in about forty-five kilometers, or klicks as he put it.

“What’s that in miles?” Gaby asked.

Lara smiled. She was glad she wasn’t the only one having trouble with Will’s kilometers.

“Twenty-eight miles,” Will said. “Give or take.”

“You could have just said that in the first place,” Lara teased.

He gave her a mildly annoyed look, which made her grin. She liked needling him whenever the opportunity presented itself, because there were so few opportunities with Will.

“Road looks pretty clear,” he said, already moving past the topic. “It gets tricky once we’re across the state line. Beaufont Lake isn’t exactly easy to get to, and we’ll have to leave the interstate, take a small road farther down south. And from there, find a spot to launch to Song Island. Hopefully there will be a marina or two nearby that we can use.”

“Hopefully?” Gaby asked worriedly.

“There has to be,” Lara said. “How else did the people already on Song Island get to the island in the first place?”

“Makes sense,” Gaby said.

I hope so.

When they finally drove across the Texas-Louisiana border, Lara felt great relief. It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought they would ever actually get out of Texas alive, and the simple act of crossing an imaginary line on a map was like a great big weight lifting from her chest.

There was no celebration or fanfare in the truck as she watched Texas recede in her side mirror. Not that you could really tell where the Lone Star State ended and the Bayou State began. The sun-drenched stretch of interstate concrete looked the same here as it had for the last thirty miles.

The road ahead of them thinned out noticeably, and it became a rare thing to see cars on the road. Which made sense, since they were now moving through flat farming country. Sometimes they went for whole chunks of minutes without seeing another sign of civilization, though she caught sight of the occasional farmhouse or barn in the distance, swamped by overgrown grass, or a garden overcome by weeds.

After a while, the monotonous sight of vast farmland got the better of her, and, lulled by the cold air conditioner blasting away against the bright sun outside, her eyelids started getting heavy.

She didn’t remember when she closed her eyes, but when she opened them again, it was almost two hours later and the Ridgeline was exiting I-10, having slowed down almost to a crawl in order to maneuver around a big pile-up between a couple of trucks and a big rig in front of them.

She sat up in her seat, rubbing at her eyes. She saw buildings, stores, and gas stations around her again. “Where are we?”

“A town called Salvani in Beaufont Parish,” Will said.

She glanced up at the review mirror and saw Josh and Gaby sleeping in the back, Gaby’s head resting on Josh’s shoulder. They looked comfortable, like a couple.

“Will, you should have woken me up,” she said, slightly annoyed with him.

“Maybe next time.”

Lara heard stirring behind her as Josh and Gaby were woken by their voices. Josh stretched and yawned, while Gaby rubbed her eyes and looked out the window.

“Wow, civilization,” Gaby said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”

Lara caught sight of the reddish-tinted rooftops of a La Quinta to their right as Will took the feeder loop. He turned into the right exit, passing a Shell gas station, before turning onto Ruth Street. She glanced at her side mirror and saw Danny in the Frontier following closely behind.

“Waffles,” Gaby said longingly in the back seat. “It’s been ages since I’ve had waffles. I would absolutely kill for waffles right about now.”

Josh nodded in agreement, but apparently still didn’t trust himself to speak. He had become even more bruised and purple in the hours since his encounter with the man in the hazmat suit back in Beaumont. The swelling was worse, and it would probably take a day for everything to start going down.

They passed the Waffle House sign, letters spelling out the restaurant’s name in yellow square blocks hoisted high in the air. Passed a Conoco gas station, a Sonic fast food restaurant, and an Archer Sports and Outdoors warehouse. Lara glanced at a big billboard ad for teeth cleaning along the side of the road, and suddenly the stores and buildings gave way to homes and open, undeveloped land.

“Are we close?” Lara asked.

“We’re almost there,” Will said. “Ruth Street becomes Route 27 and keeps going until we’re alongside Beaufont Lake. Sixty klicks, give or take.” He added quickly, “About forty miles.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“People actually live out here?” Gaby asked. “What do they do for fun?”

“People can get used to a lot of things when there aren’t any other options,” Lara said. “Adapt or perish.”

They were up to forty miles per hour now, traveling down a two-lane road with nothing but farmland and sun-bleached acres to one side — occasionally broken up with more dying, brown foliage — and a string of ancient-looking telephone poles on the other. She thought the poles made for a strangely poetic sight, stretching into what seemed like infinity in an almost perfect line.

She looked up at the wide-open sky. “How are we for time?”

“Three-fifteen,” Will said. “We’re doing good.”

After a while, Route 27 curved slightly left before straightening back out again. They drove in silence for another thirty minutes, and Lara started to see bayous below them whenever they drove over a bridge.

We’re getting closer…

She saw a big body of water to their left, on Will’s side of the truck. Josh and Gaby saw it, too, and they moved anxiously toward the driver’s side to look out their window.

Beaufont Lake was big and visible from Route 27, and it looked like it went on endlessly. The water had a nice blue tint to it, not the brown of the Texas lakes she was used to. Lara felt her heart quickening in her chest, the anticipation and exhilaration returning after lying dormant for so long.

“Beaufont Lake,” Gaby said, almost as if she couldn’t quite believe it.

They drove past a massive power station with huge, domed towers sparkling under the hot sun. Maybe a hydro power station, like the kind Harold Campbell built into his underground facility. It was right next to the lake, so that was a possibility. There were no signs of people, but the fencing and entrance gate looked intact. Lara wondered if there were people hiding in there. It was certainly big enough. She decided there probably weren’t. Sanctuary was only as good as the supplies you had, and she didn’t think anyone could survive with the supplies scattered around this mostly deserted area of the world.

They kept going, and for a while they didn’t see anything of note again. That was, until a small town rose out of the nothingness. There was a sign for a marina on the other side of a bridge they were crossing, reading, “Jackson-Miller Marina” in faded letters next to a turn. Will drove across the bridge, and Lara saw boats in the marina.

“We need boats, right?” Lara said.

“We’re still too far from Song Island to launch here,” Will said. “We need to get closer.”

“What if we don’t find another marina farther down?”

“There has to be one. If not, we’ll come back.”

Lara never caught a sign that introduced the small town they were driving through, and soon they were making a huge left turn before turning right a little bit later. They were going south again, still traveling on Route 27. The town disappeared behind them, and Jackson-Miller Marina along with it.

They drove for another thirty minutes, passing marshlands and swamps on both sides of them. Nothingness became the order of the day once more. Trees became rare sights, shade from the harsh glare of the sun even rarer still. She wondered how long she would last out here, on the road without a car.

Probably ten minutes…best-case scenario.

After a while, the road started to curve right, and Will slowed down to twenty miles per hour.

He picked up the radio from the dashboard. “Danny.”

Danny answered from the other end: “What’s the word?”

“We’re almost there. Slow down.”

“Roger that.”

Will put the radio back on the dashboard. “Start looking for a marina.”

“Which side?” Lara asked.

“It’ll be on my side. Look for buildings, warehouses, parked trucks. Any signs of civilization.”

“I haven’t seen signs of civilization for the last hour, Will.”

“There should be something here.”

“What if—” She didn’t finish, because she saw the sun glinting off metal rooftops up ahead on Will’s side of the road. “Buildings,” she said, somehow managing to keep herself from shouting it out.

“I see it,” Will nodded.

There were two buildings — a big garage and what looked like a gazebo in the middle of nowhere. As they got closer, Lara saw a wooden sign pointing into an asphalt parking lot. She tried to read the sign, but it was so badly scarred by time that she could only make out the word “Marina.” There were numbers, which she guessed was a phone number, or possibly hours of operation.

Will turned left into the parking lot.

There were two white trucks parked next to the gazebo, and the garage was bigger up close, and longer. At least a four-car garage. There were a half-dozen vehicles, mostly trucks, parked near the shores in orderly fashion. She expected to see trailer hitches with boats in the back, but there weren’t any. She did see boat ramps to their right.

Where are all the boats?

They parked and Lara climbed out, stretching her legs, grateful to finally be moving again. The pain in her left shoulder had mostly disappeared overnight, and what remained had continued to fade during the long drive, thanks to a combination of rest, water, and painkillers. She could move the arm easily enough without the sling, though she still felt some throbbing every now and then and did her best to keep as much pressure off it as possible.

Walking closer to the edge of the parking lot, she could see where the launches fed boats into a small, man-made inlet that continued south, connecting to the main body of Beaufont Lake. Directly across from the inlet, farther up the road, was the first livable spread she had seen for miles. It was a white, two-story house surrounded by hurricane fencing. A green boathouse stood out to its left, and she could just barely make out two boats hanging from the rafters. The house had a big, wide-open parking lot, though no garages; and farther back, a big gray, plain-looking building that was too long to be another house. Storage, she assumed.

“I wouldn’t mind a place like that,” Gaby said, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked across the inlet at the house.

“I guess we know where we’re staying if Song Island doesn’t pan out,” Lara said. “Speaking of which… Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Song Island.”

“Oh. I guess it’d be out there…?” Gaby pointed toward the large expanse of calm water, blinking against the sun. “Shouldn’t it be out there somewhere? It is an island, right?”

“Should be…”

Gaby drifted back to where Josh was standing, gazing off into the distance, probably looking for the mythical Song Island, too.

So where the hell is it?

The suddenly very real possibility that they might have come all this way for nothing made her chest tighten a bit. It took the sight of Carly, walking toward her with a big grin on her face, to get Lara to push those downbeat thoughts away.

“We made it,” Carly said. “I can’t believe we actually made it.”

Lara smiled back at her. “Never doubted it.”

“Never?”

“Okay, maybe once or twice.”

“I knew it.”

Carly laughed and wrapped Lara up in a big hug, slipping her arms around Lara’s waist instead of over her arms. Lara laughed, too, because she knew exactly what Carly was feeling. The road from Harold Campbell’s facility had felt, at times, never ending, with one roadblock after another. Doubts had begun to creep into her thoughts even if she had refused to acknowledge them until now.

Lara heard a fake clicking sound next to them and looked over at Danny, miming taking a picture of them with his fingers. “This is going into the Rolodex for tonight.”

“Way to ruin a great moment, babe,” Carly said.

Lara saw Will nearby, peering through a pair of binoculars at something in the distance. She walked over to him, trying to see what he was looking at. The sun was in her eyes, and she couldn’t see much except calm, glistening water under an empty sky.

“Do you see it?” she asked, unable to keep back the anxiousness in her voice.

He lowered the binoculars and handed them over to her. “Have a look.”

“Is it out there, Will? Song Island?”

“Just look.”

She took the binoculars from him, her hand shaking a bit. Will stood next to her as she held them up to her eyes and looked across the lake. “Where am I looking?” she asked, frustrated. “I don’t see anything.”

“Here,” Will said. He stood behind her and guided her slightly to the left. “There. See it?”

She saw it — a big structure rising out from the lake itself. It was tall and looked a bit like a pencil, getting smaller the higher it went, though it was barely discernible in the distance and was surrounded by water. There was something else, like a ring of children’s glitter sparkling under the sun, encircling the structure.

“It’s a lighthouse,” Will said behind her. “Doesn’t look completely finished, but I’m pretty sure that’s a radio antenna sticking out of it. That’s where the FEMA broadcasts are coming from.”

Lara realized, breathlessly, that the lighthouse wasn’t rising out of the water on its own. It was jutting up from a patch of land in the middle of the lake, previously obscured by the rippling heat against the surface of the water. Now that she was staring at it, the land seemed to sprout before her eyes, rising and rising until it presented itself to her in all its glory.

She caught her breath, afraid it would disappear like a mirage if she lowered the binoculars or looked away for even a second.

Song Island…