The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 5 LARA

Will considered continuing on to Lancing, a city farther down the road, before stopping for the day, but eventually they decided to pull off Route 69, turning into the driveway of a sprawling estate on the side of the road. It was an impressive house and looked relatively new, with a huge surrounding yard filled with something they had seen plenty of recently — an overgrown lawn that in a year or two would probably end up covering half of the house. They went up a concrete driveway, and Lara saw an attached two-car garage.

She looked back at the man they had picked up, literally, from the road, just to make sure he was still alive. She hadn’t been sure he would even survive the short trip, but he had. The man looked back at her through a mask of pain.

“Man’s got something to live for,” Will had said when they carried him off the road.

She had done the best she could with his wounds, but she didn’t give him much of a chance. The man had, after all, been shot three times and was lying on the road for God knew how long. Fortunately, there was only one bullet still in him — in the right shoulder, about half an inch from shattering his humerus bone, which would have completely taken away the use of his right arm. He was lucky, or as lucky as any man could be with three bullet holes in him.

“Will says you’ve got something to live for,” Lara said to the man.

He looked back at her, and she could tell he wanted to respond, but he couldn’t. His lips quivered and he blinked once, twice, but even that seemed to take a lot out of him.

“Don’t try to speak,” she told him. “We’re going to stop for the day and I’m going to sew you back up. You’ve already survived this long, stay with me for a few more hours and I promise, you’ll live through the night. Do you understand?”

He moved his head. Yes.

Tough guy. Let’s see if he’s tough enough to last the night…

Lara waited outside the house with Carly, both of them armed with shotguns. It wasn’t just for show. They were trained on the weapons — had been ever since the ghouls had laid siege to Harold Campbell’s facility in Starch. During the first few days of training, she had gone to sleep with throbbing pain in her shoulders, which wasn’t too bad since every other part of her body from the waist up was also aching. If she thought the Glock had a kick, the shotgun was like getting body-slammed by a mule.

Slowly but surely she had gotten used to it, and though she still felt it every time they did target practice, the ear-shattering blast didn’t surprise her anymore and she was able to hit her target. Most of the time, anyway. That was the point of a shotgun. It had spreading power, which made it invaluable in close-quarters battles.

Lara and Carly stood watch at the trucks, with the girls still inside Danny’s Ranger. The man from the road was in the black Ranger, unconscious in the back seat. Lara kept her eyes on the road behind them, a good fifty yards away. The house was big, and she could see at least three bedrooms from the front. She guessed there were probably more inside. Five, maybe six in all.

She glanced down at her watch: 2:11 p.m.

Will and Danny had gone inside ten minutes ago, and she considered it a good sign that they hadn’t fired a single shot. It never took them more than twenty minutes to clear a building, depending on how many rooms they were confronted with.

Lara found herself staring at two Labrador dog statues perched on their hind legs, standing guard at the front doors like dutiful sentries.

“Cute dogs,” Carly said. “If I ever get a house, I’d like one of those. Or maybe one of those weiner dogs. What do you call them?”

“Chihuahuas? I don’t know my dogs.”

“Sounds right.”

“Not much of guard dogs, though.”

“Danny with a shotgun should make up for that.”

Lara smiled at the image of Danny standing permanently outside a house with a shotgun, boyish blond hair fluttering in the breeze. “Now that’s an image.”

“I know, right?” Carly looked over at the black Ranger. “Has he said anything yet? Like his name?”

“He’s trying.”

“Danny said he was shot three times.”

“He was.”

“How do you survive being shot three times?”

“Determination. Guts. A reason to keep living…”

“Who do you think Sandra is?”

“Probably a girlfriend. Or a wife. Someone he met on the road after The Purge, maybe. There’s a lot of that going on.”

Carly chuckled. “Tell me about it.”

Lara’s radio, resting on the hood of the black Ford Ranger, squawked and they heard Danny’s voice: “All clear. And I call the master bedroom.”

“That’s my man,” Carly said.

She was close. The house had five bedrooms — one on the first floor and four more, including the master bedroom, on the second floor. Will and Danny carried the wounded man inside, putting him into one of the smaller rooms on the second floor before heading back downstairs to move the trucks into the parking garage next door.

There was a fenced-in section at the back of the house, with two trucks parked in the dirt and a third with lumber stuffed in the back. The ground was flattened and trees chopped down to make room for whatever grand plans the family never got to put into action. For once, they didn’t find any blood or signs of struggle inside the house. The front door was unlocked and the windows intact. There were also no cars in the garage. It all pointed to the family abandoning the house in a hurry.

Like she always did whenever they took over someone’s house for the night, Lara wondered where the family had gone. Were they still alive? Maybe they were even on Song Island in Beaufont Lake. Wouldn’t that be something?

Lara and the girls brought in their personal carry-ons first, stuffed with clothes and personal items. The big plastic crates with the emergency rations came next. After that, they lugged in the thick, heavy bags of guns and ammo.

And finally, they brought in the four portable fans they carried with them everywhere, dividing them up between rooms on the second floor. The fans were the only things keeping the Texas summer at bay and made whatever room they were bedding down in for the night mercifully breathable. All four ten-inch oscillating fans ran on a ridiculous eight D cell batteries and could, conceivably, work continuously for forty straight hours. Fortunately the D cells, like all of the batteries they carried, were rechargeable using solar-powered adapters. Even with the fans, it was still always too hot, but that was Texas.

Lara left Elise with Carly and Vera and found her medical bag. It was a black bag filled with medical supplies and reminded her of old movies where small-town doctors went from house to house.

A simpler time, when creatures from the darkness didn’t try to eat you.

She went to check up on the wounded man upstairs. He hadn’t moved from the bed where they had deposited him earlier. He was still dangerously pale, and his eyes opened and closed intermittently, as if he were afraid to fall asleep.

It was a small room, and she guessed it was for one of the family’s children. A teenage boy, from the looks of the Call of Duty and gaming posters along the walls. A baseball bat lay among a pile of sports toys in one corner and discarded clothes in another. Tidiness hadn’t been the kid’s modus operandi.

She put her medical bag on a chair close by. Before they had left the facility, she had stocked up on everything she thought she would need for a portable MASH unit. The items in the bag were just a small sampling — her emergency supplies. The rest were in the trucks Will and Danny had hidden inside the garage.

She pulled out a syringe and a bottle of morphine and leaned over the man. “Can you hear me?”

His eyes darted, seeking out her voice. Finally locating her, he managed to nod — or as much as he could.

Yes.

“This is morphine,” she said, showing him the syringe.

His eyes widened in alarm.

“You need this,” Lara said, “or you’re going to die when I pull the bullet out of your shoulder. And it has to come out, you understand?”

Yes.

“Good. Is Sandra your wife?”

No.

“Girlfriend?”

Yes.

“Did someone take her? The same people who shot you?”

Yes.

“How many were there? More than one?”

Yes.

“More than five?”

Yes.

“Do you know where they went?”

No.

“Okay. Enough with the twenty questions for now. You’re going to see Sandra again, but you need to trust me first. Understand?”

He looked uncertainly at her.

“If we’d wanted to kill you, we would’ve left you on the road, don’t you think?”

He paused.

Then: Yes.

“Don’t fight the morphine. You’ve fought enough, and it’s got you this far. You don’t need to keep fighting. I’ll keep you alive, but you’ll have to let me. And that means taking the morphine and sleeping through the day. Agreed?”

Yes.

“Good.”

She gave him the shot and watched him slowly drift off.

Lara took out a small portable IV bag and looked for a place to put it. She saw a framed picture of a good-looking teenager, about twelve or thirteen, posing in a baseball uniform with one knee on a baseball field, holding the same baseball bat she saw on the floor. Lara removed the photo and looped the IV bag over the hook in the wall, then attached the other end to the man’s arm.

Carly came in while she was getting the man’s shoulder ready to extract the bullet. “You need a hand?”

“If you’re not too busy.”

“I had some shopping on tap, but what the hell, digging a bullet out of some stranger we picked up on the road should be fun, too.”

“You’re all heart.”

As Lara worked on the man, she could hear Will and Danny moving around the house, pulling doors out of hinges and nailing them against windows in the rooms around them. She closed out the sounds of hammering and concentrated on prying the bullet out of the man’s shoulder. It moved grudgingly, but after fighting with it for a couple of minutes, she pulled it free and dropped it onto a plastic plate Carly had brought up from the kitchen.

“Souvenir?” Carly smiled.

“My guess is he’ll want to forget what happened as soon as possible.”

“Did he ever tell you who Sandra was?”

“Girlfriend.”

“Must be true love for him to hold on this long.” Carly tossed the plate into a nearby trash bin. “Ah, romance. It lives, Lara, it lives.”

Lara smiled back at the younger woman. Sometimes she forgot Carly was just twenty, that she had been a teenager — albeit one that was nineteen going on thirty — when they had first met.

“You and Danny are like an old married couple,” Lara said.

Carly feigned hurt. “Who you calling old?”

“Danny.”

“Good save, doc.”

“Hey, I didn’t go to three years of medical school for nothing, you know.”

“Hah!” Carly said.

They had four more hours before nightfall, but it always seemed like the hours went by quickly when they decided to shut down for the day. There was no basement, so they settled for reinforcing the windows and doors of the house. They had done it before, survived in a barricaded house, though Lara knew Will always preferred the constricted, one-way access of an underground basement.

“We’re close to the main road, but far from any city, so it’s a good chance they’ll pass us right by,” Will said.

“Shouldn’t they be in front of us by now?” she asked. “The ghouls that were hunting us, I mean.”

“They might backtrack when they realize they’ve passed us by.”

“Would they do that?”

“Dead, not stupid, remember?”

“Dead, not stupid,” was Will’s motto for the ghouls. Everything Will did — or didn’t do — was with that in mind. And he was right. Everything she knew about the ghouls confirmed their intelligence. More dangerously, they were organized. As far as they knew, there were two types of ghouls — the foot soldiers and the leaders. Or commanders, as Will liked to call them.

The blue-eyed ghouls…

There used to be only one blue-eyed ghoul that they knew of, and it had hunted them from Houston all the way to Starch. It was eventually joined by another blue-eyed ghoul, and although Will never saw her, Lara was certain it was Kate.

Kate.

It had been a while since Lara had thought of her. Kate was Will’s former lover, the two of them having found each other at the beginning of The Purge. According to Will, Kate was a pillar of strength. That all changed when Luke, a young man Kate had looked after, died just before they reached Starch. Kate was never the same after that. She became withdrawn, and eventually disturbed, opening Harold Campbell’s facility to the siege that had killed so many people and forced them to abandon what had, up to that point, been a sanctuary from the darkness.

Lara didn’t like bringing up Kate. Not that she thought Will still had feelings for the other woman. Whether she had turned into a blue-eyed ghoul or not, Kate was gone now, and there was no point in lingering over her.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Lara spent the remaining four hours of sunlight tending to the wounded stranger in the room and seeing to Elise’s needs. The eight-year-old girl had become self-sufficient, and she didn’t need anything that Carly couldn’t provide. Still, Lara felt obligated to do her part, since she was the one who had brought Elise to them in the first place.

She heard Danny pouring bottles of water on himself in one of the second-floor bathrooms as she walked past. He might have been singing, too. Badly. She smiled and jogged down the stairs to the first floor.

Will sat at a table in the foyer with one of the ammo bags opened in front of him. He was feeding shotgun shells with a white “X” marked on the outside into their four Remington 870 shotguns, having already unloaded the regular shells. The shells with “X”s were loaded with silver buckshot, their go-to ammo for nighttime. He was sweating from the heat, wiping at his drenched forehead every now and then with a paper towel. They had found a whole bundle of Brawny in the kitchen pantry.

“How’s your patient?” he asked.

“I got the bullet out, and his other wounds aren’t too bad. The side GSW was a through-and-through, which is the good news. The bad news is, it’s the one wound that will give him the most trouble for days to come. Assuming he survives tonight.”

“That’s not the kind of guy who gives up easily.”

She looked around her at the first floor. All the windows in the house, along with the front and back doors, were boarded up with doors pulled from closets, bathrooms, and the bedroom on the first floor. Even the second-floor windows were boarded up, because Lara knew from experience that the ghouls could climb. Will and Danny were careful to nail the barriers over the curtains so that anyone passing by on the outside wouldn’t know the windows were barricaded. Of course, if they decided to come in for a closer look, that was another story.

Lara sat down across the table from Will. “He said Sandra is his girlfriend.”

“Did he say what happened to her?”

“He can only nod and shake his head, so I didn’t get much out of him. He should be able to talk tomorrow.” She smiled at him. “Would you stay alive after getting shot three times just to rescue me?”

“One bullet, definitely. Two bullets? I’d have to think about it. But three? I don’t know, that’s asking an awful lot.”

“My hero. I knew there was a reason I stuck around.”

“It wasn’t my charming disposition?”

“You’re not that charming.”

“Ouch.” He finished loading a second shotgun and laid it down, then picked up another one. “I have a better question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“If we met before all this — say, in a bar — would you have ever gone out with a bum like me?”

“Maybe.”

“Double ouch.”

“I don’t usually date military guys.”

“Have you ever dated military guys?”

“No. But,” she added quickly, “in my defense, no military guy has ever asked me out.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh huh.”

“Not even once? At a bar? A party? Or even at a good ol’ fashioned bus stop?”

“Nope. Not at a bar, not at a party, and not even at a good ol’ fashioned bus stop.”

“Lara,” Will said.

“What?”

“Will you go out with me?”

She laughed. “Let me think about it.”

Dusk started to settle in at 7:30 p.m., but it got dark much faster inside the house, thanks to the closed blinds, pulled curtains, and slabs of lumber positioned over the windows. There was too much risk of exposure to hang portable LED lamps, so they made do with moving carefully around in the darkness. They were used to it, and even the girls settled into their room without complaint. It helped that they were giddy about getting their own room, which had been a rarity in the last few months.

Danny and Carly took the master bedroom (Danny had called it, after all), while Will and Lara took the room next to the stranger’s. Vera and Elise’s room was to their right, the man’s room to their left, with the master bedroom across the hall. They had split up the four portable fans for the night.

Before settling down, Lara checked on the stranger again. His vitals had improved significantly since the last time she had checked. She made sure the boards over his window were sealed tight, with the curtains on the other side, and that the fan was angled to cover him from head to toe during the night. It was going to get very hot very soon.

She glanced down at her watch as she walked back to her room: 7:39 p.m.

It wouldn’t get really dark until 8:20 p.m. or so, and then they would be out.

Lara found Will in their room. He had stripped down to boxers and was pouring warm water from a couple of bottles over his head, all the water pooling on the carpet around him. The fan blew in a corner, covering as much of the room as possible by oscillating back and forth, barely making any noise at all.

She smiled at Will. “Great, you’ve gotten water all over their carpet. The family’s not going to be happy with you.”

“I’ll leave some money for the damages. Can’t be more than a few hundred bucks, right?”

“You know contractors. Add an extra hundred to what you expect to pay.”

“Hey, watch it, my dad was a contractor.”

“And I’m sure he was a lovely man — who probably gouged more than a few of his customers.”

He laughed. “Probably.”

“Did you save any for me?”

“Four bottles,” he said, indicating the extra bottles on a dresser behind them. “You want to use them in the bathroom?”

“Maybe later.”

Lara walked over and slipped her arms around his waist and kissed his back. He smelled of dirt, motor oil, and sweat. She inhaled his scent and ran her hands along his chest, then slipped them down the front of his boxers. Unsurprisingly, he responded instantly.

“Don’t start what you can’t finish, lady,” he said hoarsely.

“Is that a threat?”

He turned around and kissed her and then she was in his arms. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed. It was a girl’s bed, with thick, frilly pink blankets and sheets and fluffy pillows, but it was the biggest bed they had slept on in months, even during their stay at Harold Campbell’s facility. Most of the room seemed to be pink, though it was hard to tell in the semi-darkness.

She stared up at the ceiling, at phosphorescent stars that glowed in the dark, as he pulled off her shirt and kissed her neck and breasts, then kept moving southward. She let out a moan when he got to his intended destination.

She knew she smelled of the same dirt and sweat as he did, but he didn’t seem to mind so much, either.

He untangled himself from her after about thirty minutes, and she watched him, just a dark silhouette, gathering up his clothes from the floor, then slipping the gun belt around his waist and pulling on his urban assault vest.

“What brought that on?” he asked, smiling at her.

“I was just thinking about Sandra.”

“Sandra?”

“The stranger’s girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“And I realized how happy I am.”

“Happy?” he said, amused.

“Happy,” she repeated. “Even now. At the end of the world. I’m happy here with you.”

“In here? This house that belongs to a family that’s probably dead?”

“Not here, here. But here. With you.”

“Ah.”

“This is where you say you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else, either.”

He leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else, either.”

She smiled. “I’ll go sit outside with you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a doctor and I’m a grunt. You start sitting on watch with me, the next thing you know, I’m obsolete. So you’re going to sleep and get some rest, and then later when Danny relieves me, I’ll come back and we’re going to do this all over again. Got it?”

She mock saluted him. “Yes, sir!”

“I’ll be right back.”

He kissed her again, then left the room.

Night came a few minutes later, though the room was pitch-dark even before then.

Lara was restless and got up and dressed in the darkness. She located her shotgun leaning in a corner nearby, with the ammo pouch on the nightstand next to it.

She sat on the bed and listened.

Birds chirped from the woods on the back of the property, and crickets added their own soundtrack from the overgrown lawn around the house. The rest of the world was silent, except for her steady breathing and the soft whirring of the fan at the foot of the bed. She wondered what Will would say if she picked up the shotgun and went outside to be with him despite his protests.

But she didn’t do that, because this was what Will did. She knew exactly where he was at the moment. He would be perched on the second floor, at the head of the stairs, waiting patiently in the darkness with his shotgun. There were no other ways for the ghouls to come if they made it through the doors and windows on the first floor. The staircase was what Will called a choke point — it was narrow and made it hard to push too many ghouls through at a time. The perfect spot to open fire with a shotgun loaded with silver buckshot.

The first few hours of the night were always the hardest for her. She sat still in the darkness and waited to hear banging on the front doors downstairs. Waited for the loud, tumultuous crashing of windows, signaling that the ghouls had found them. Then there would be the unmistakable boom of shotguns.

But none of those things happened.

Instead, she sat for an hour before she felt tired and lay back down, telling herself she wouldn’t go to sleep, because Will was still out there, and she had to stay awake in case he needed her. She glanced over at the shotgun in the corner again. At the pouch full of shells on the nightstand.

Lara passed the time by looking around her. It was such a girl’s room. Whereas the room with the stranger had sports posters, this one was covered end to end in pink, frilly things. There was a big dresser with a mirror and makeup and combs of a dozen varieties, all perfectly arranged in a row. Not a kid’s room, but a teenage girl’s. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. Almost a woman, but not quite. There were no pictures. Did the room’s owner take them with her when the family fled?

She closed her eyes.

Just for a bit. A few minutes, then she would sit back up, in case Will needed her outside.

Just a few minutes…

She woke up sometime after midnight. She wasn’t sure if it was closer to one in the morning, because she had taken off her watch and laid it on the nightstand.

She heard movement and opened her eyes and saw a figure walking around the bed.

“It’s just me,” Will whispered in the darkness.

She sat up and watched him put down his shotgun, shrug off the vest, and unclasp the gun belt. There was just enough moonlight filtering in through the barricaded window behind her that she could make out his shape. He was moving much slower than normal, which was the telltale sign he was tired and sleep-deprived.

“I fell asleep,” she said, rubbing at her eyes and feeling a little sheepish.

“I can see that.”

“Everything’s good?”

He sat down at the foot of the bed and pulled off his boots. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

“Did you check on the girls?”

“I did. They’re sound asleep.”

“I’ve been meaning to check on the stranger, too.”

“I already did. He’s fine.”

“How did he look?”

“Like he’s going to see tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s what I do.”

She smiled. “Didn’t you promise me something earlier, too?”

He looked over, and she saw a brief smile crease his lips. “You need sleep more than you do sex, lady.”

“I need you more.”

She held out her hands. Will took them and climbed into bed with her, then immediately sought out her mouth in the darkness.

She didn’t sleep again for another hour.