The Spears of Laconia

CHAPTER 11 GABY

After watching Mercer’s people working like assembly line robots for the better part of the day, the sudden absence of all activity inside the hangar was unnatural, like the prelude to something bad. Really, really bad.

“How screwed are we?” Nate asked. “From one to ten?”

“Around fifteen,” Danny said.

“I said one to ten.”

“Ten. And five more.”

Nate sighed and looked to Gaby for help. She managed a smile, if just barely.

The mood had gotten noticeably gloomier since Erin came back to the office, opened the door, then said to them, “The first one who steps outside before we close the hangar doors gets shot. Don’t test me.”

No one tested her, but they did stand at the open windows — her, Nate, and Danny, with Mason and the other four crowding behind them — and watched Erin and the two that had been guarding the office climb into the back of the Ford truck waiting outside. The soldiers then crouched and took aim at them while two others swung the heavy doors closed with a loud bang! The sound of locks snapping into place, followed by heavy chains sliding into position, left no doubt what was happening and that any semblance of optimism she might have had was all for naught because they were being locked inside the hangar.

They scrambled out of the office like escaped prisoners when they heard the vehicle fading into the background, Mason and his men making the door before she, Nate, or Danny could.

“Get it open!” Mason shouted.

Gaby could have told them it wasn’t going to work. That was the point of holding them back, after all. But she didn’t bother and instead watched the uniformed men sweating against the large twin doors, grunting like wild animals. They seemed to get louder with every passing second that the doors didn’t budge.

“Spread out,” Mason said when they finally gave up on the front doors. “Look for another way out of here. Cover every inch. We don’t wanna still be here when night falls, boys! Not in this condition!”

One of the men found a back door, but it also wouldn’t open for him. He started kicking it, then threw his shoulder into the steel frame, and when that didn’t work, he began pacing in front of it like a cornered animal. Two others, including the biggest among them (“Lucas” was written on his name tag) joined the first and tried their luck. Lucas had to be over six-eight, with a massive frame and a neck that was probably bigger than one of her thighs, and while his hands made the door lever look like a toy, he only ended up breaking the latch loose. There was clearly something even stronger than Lucas on the other side.

Mason had been watching them straining and cursing, and when Lucas tossed the broken off lever away with disgust, he said, “Look for something we can use to pry the doors open. Find anything.”

“Never say die,” Danny said, watching Mason’s people racing around the hangar. “You almost gotta respect them.”

She, Danny, and Nate didn’t bother joining in the collaborators’ search because they knew better. They had watched Mercer’s people clean out everything in the place before leaving. They had left absolutely nothing behind. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. They had left them behind. The question was: Why?

“Come on; let’s see what we can see,” Danny said, and began jogging up one of the catwalks that led to the windows over the front doors. He reached the top and looked out, then rasped his knuckles on the glass.

“No go?” she asked.

“Thicker than Nate’s head and twice as bright.”

“Hey, I kick ass on standardized tests,” Nate said.

“But it’s the burglar bars on the other side that’s the problem,” Danny continued.

“What’s out there?” Mason called from below.

“I’m not your fucking secretary,” Danny said back down.

Mason smirked before hurrying over, then climbed up the other catwalk across from them. A couple of his men followed. They left the other two below, including Lucas, still trying in vain to open the single back door, though that had become more difficult now without the lever.

The platform she was moving on wasn’t nearly as long or wide as it had looked from below; the whole thing was about four feet wide and just long enough to cover both high windows. There were eight windows in all inside the hangar — four up front, two in the back, and finally one more on each side.

“They planned this out,” Nate was saying.

“What?” she said.

“This,” he said, gesturing at the catwalks. “There’s no telling how long they’ve been using this place, collecting the silver from the surrounding towns, getting it ready for today.”

“I got the feeling Mercer had FOBs all across the state,” Danny said.

“FOB?” she asked.

“Forward operating bases,” Nate said. “It would explain going through the effort to put the bars outside and the catwalks. Just in case they were discovered.” He shook his head. “A lot of planning went into today. A lot…”

“If you want, I’ll let Mercer know you want to be best buds with him,” Danny said. “Share dips and chips over Sunday football and all that good All-American whoopee do.”

“I’m just saying, the level of planning…” Nate said, but let the rest trail off.

Four hundred dead men, women, and children, she thought, the smell of smoke and blood still fresh in her mind and, she swore, on her clothes. Where there was numbness when she walked across T29, there was now anger. At Mercer, at Erin, at all the people following him.

She turned back to the window and looked past the burglar bars. Mercer’s people had abandoned the airfield, leaving behind a few vehicles parked outside the cluster of administrative buildings across the field from them. The shift from activity to stillness was startling, and she kept waiting for someone to come outside, but no one did.

Gaby refocused on the empty landing strip that stretched beyond her peripheral vision, on the buildings at the end, and then beyond them at the insurmountable walls of trees that surrounded the place. It reminded her of the airport outside her own small town, one of those places you wouldn’t even know existed unless you were from the area. Most of the planes that landed here were probably small private aircraft. She thought she could see still-wet fuel stains along the pavement, but that could just be the dwindling sunlight playing tricks with her eyes.

“Gaby, look,” Nate said.

She followed his gaze upward. The sky. It was darkening.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“An hour, give or take,” Danny said.

“How long is give or take?”

“Thirty minutes-ish.”

“You said this was part of the plan, that Mercer always intended to leave someone behind in here.”

Danny nodded. “He didn’t spill all the details, but that’s what I gathered, yeah.”

“Christ,” Nate said next to her. His voice had dropped noticeably, though it wouldn’t have taken much for Mason and the others to hear, given the echoey nature of the hangar. “They used the airfield as an FOB, but they always intended to abandon it after today. It wouldn’t have taken much to track the hog and whatever else he’s got running or flying around out there back to this place.”

“We’re bait,” Gaby said.

“Well, they were,” Danny said, nodding across at Mason and his two comrades. “We just got unlucky.”

“What are the chances this entire airfield is booby-trapped?” Nate asked.

“Lots and lots.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Shouldn’t have asked, then.”

“I can’t seem to learn that lesson,” Nate sighed.

She looked across at Mason as he peered out the windows. If he’d heard them talking, he was doing a good job not reacting to it. One of the collaborators on the platform with him had punched the windowpane so hard that it cracked (but didn’t break) and left his hand a bloody mess.

Idiot, she thought, watching the man struggle to stanch the bleeding with his shirt.

The collaborator was doing a piss-poor job of it, and she wondered how long it would take him to bleed to death when she heard a noise that hadn’t been there before. With everyone moving around, talking, and Mason’s people raising hell against unyielding metal, she had missed the low rumbling until now. It vibrated along the length of the hangar and traveled across her hand that was pressed against the windowsill.

“Guys, listen,” she said.

Nate and Danny went very still and listened.

“What is that, some kind of generator?” Nate asked.

“I think so,” she nodded. “It’s coming from outside.”

They looked through the windows again, this time searching closer to the building instead of scanning the fields surrounding it. Whatever it was, it had to be close enough that the tremors could be felt. And Nate was right; it did sound like a generator. But why would Mercer’s people leave something like that behind? A generator, and especially the gas running it, was worth its weight in gold these days.

“It has to be nearby,” she said.

“Can’t see it,” Nate said, standing up on tiptoe and trying to look down directly below them. “You?”

“No.”

“Why would they leave a generator behind?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced at Danny. “What’s going to happen when night falls?”

“Bad things, would be my guess,” Danny said.

“You should have left with them.”

He sighed. “Don’t rub it in.”

“Carly’s going to be so pissed when she finds out what you did.”

“Don’t worry; whenever she gets mad at me, I just double down on the oral sex.”

“I shouldn’t be hearing this.”

“TMI?”

“Just a little bit,” Gaby said, managing to smile back at him.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said.

She looked over. “What?”

“Lights,” he said, pointing up. “They’ve been above us this entire time.”

Gaby leaned against the window and looked up. She hadn’t seen them before because there was still too much light outside, but now that it had gotten darker, they were harder to miss.

There were LED floodlights positioned above their windows. Not just theirs, but Mason’s and the ones behind them as well, though those were harder to spot from their platform.

“The generator,” she said. “That must be what it’s for.”

“They’re going to use us as bait, all right,” Nate said. “We’re going to be the only building lit up like a Christmas tree for miles out here. If Mason’s pals didn’t already know we’re here, they’re not going to be able to miss us come nightfall.”

“Like moths to the flame,” Danny said quietly. “I hate it when I’m right.”

Gaby didn’t know what the hangar’s twin doors were made of, but it was apparently strong enough material that kicking them only produced dull thudding sounds, though that didn’t stop the collaborators from raining blow after blow against them anyway. When all that effort left two of them limping, they turned their attention to the rest of the building. Lucas, meanwhile, hadn’t given up trying to break his way through the back door. He had made some impressive dents, but for the most part, the door remained unimpressed.

She stayed on the platform next to the front windows with Nate and Danny and watched Mason directing his soldiers below them. In between the constant banging, the wails of frustration, the slight hum of the generator outside, and Mason urging the others to attack harder and faster, was the distinctive tick-tick-tick of Danny’s watch. Like a time bomb, letting her know that the end was coming.

“Like moths to the flame,” Danny had said, because in less than an hour the entire airfield would be submerged in darkness…except for their building. If the collaborators and their ghoul allies had an ounce of brain, they would have traced the attacks back here. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were already out there, biding their time. Surely they could already see the lights. And they could afford to wait for nightfall, too. Unlike her, Danny, and Nate.

Mason, hands on his hips, glanced up at them. “You wanna come down here and do your part?”

“And what part would that be?” Danny asked. “The kicking or the crying? I’m not very good at either.”

“Whatever strikes your fancy, smartass.”

“I’m familiar with the ass part, but not so much the first. Just ask my girlfriend. But you boys go right ahead and keep at it.” Then he pointed and said, “I can see a little crack over there. Try ramming that thick skull of yours, maybe that’ll do the trick.”

Mason grunted, while around him the others had stopped to rest. Even Lucas seemed to have given up on the back door. He was bent slightly over, sweat dripping from his face.

“Shut it down, boys,” Mason said. “It’s going to be dark soon; might as well save your strength for tomorrow.”

The others gave him a confused look.

“If we can’t get out, nothing can get in, either,” Mason continued. Then he glanced up at her and Danny. “Of course, if people in the right uniforms show up tonight, that’s another story.”

“You willing to bet your life on your friends not shooting on sight?” Danny asked. “After the day they’ve had out there?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess so.”

One of the collaborators had walked over to stand next to Mason. The man was wiping at sweat along his forehead with the back of his hand, and she recognized him as the idiot who had gashed his fist on the window earlier. His right hand was swaddled in a piece of his shirt and she noticed he had a bit of a paunch, because apparently they ate pretty well in the towns.

The man had dark eyes, and they zeroed in on her. “Why don’t you come on down here, little girl,” he said. “When our friends show up, I’ll put in a good word for you. Of course, you’ll have to be nice to me first.”

“Patterson, shut up,” Mason said.

“Fuck off,” Patterson snapped back.

Apparently someone’s not as in charge as he thinks, Gaby thought, staring back at Patterson. If the man expected her to be flustered by his comments, he was mistaken. She’d faced worse, and she would survive him, too.

Nate, leaning against the railing next to her, tensed at Patterson’s comments, but before she could calm him, Mason spoke first.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mason was saying, smiling at her with something that she could almost believe was actual sympathy. “He hasn’t gotten laid in a while, that’s all.”

“Man, I’m getting really sick of your mouth,” Patterson said, whirling on Mason. The fingers of his left hand clenched into a balled fist. She wondered if he was left-handed or if that was because he had ruined his right on the window earlier. “You’re not in charge anymore. You stopped calling the shots when you got us caught.”

“Is that right?” Mason said, turning to face Patterson.

Patterson wasn’t exactly a tall man. She guessed he was five-ten, though face-to-face (chin to forehead?) with the five-three Mason, he might as well be a giant. She felt almost sorry for Mason. Almost.

“You fucking little midget,” Patterson said, spittle flying out of his mouth. Gaby wondered how long he had been keeping that in. “I’m sick of listening to you telling us what to do. In fact, I’m sick of your face.”

“Hey, you know how difficult it is to find moisturizer out here?”

Patterson wasn’t deterred. “I don’t even know who put you in charge. As far as I can tell, you’re just a little runt from Louisiana.”

“I’m from Texas, chum. I just happened to be in Louisiana until a few weeks ago.”

“Who gives a shit. I didn’t ask for your résumé.”

Mason chuckled. “What exactly are you’re trying to say, Patterson?”

The other three hadn’t butted in. They stood back and watched, maybe just a little bit curious to see what would happen next. She got the impression that, like Patterson, they didn’t particularly care very much for Mason’s leadership abilities, either.

Patterson leaned in until his face was a mere half a foot from Mason’s, lording his height over the smaller man. “What I’m trying to say is, you need to shut the fuck up and let us do what we have to do.”

“Which would be?”

Patterson’s eyes shot back up to her. “I’ve been watching that piece of ass all day. You can have her friends. You like guys, right, Mason?” He didn’t wait for Mason to answer and glanced over at Lucas and the other two. “What about you guys? You with me? Lucas?”

The other two turned to Lucas, as if seeking permission. Maybe because Lucas could break all of them against his knees like twigs, if he wanted to. But the big man didn’t say anything, and Gaby couldn’t have begun to guess what was going through his head at this very moment.

Patterson apparently had just as much trouble, because he said, “Lucas, come on. You with me? We can do this. You and me. You can have the girl first. I’m not against sloppy seconds.”

Next to her, Nate tensed even further, and she heard Danny whisper softly, “Don’t. It’ll be over soon.”

She looked over at Danny, but he was staring at Mason. She didn’t know why she was so calm despite what they were saying about doing to her, as if she wasn’t there listening to all of it. Maybe it was because in order to get to her, they had to come up the catwalk. She had higher ground and Nate at her side. Even better, she had Danny. The Gaby from a year ago would have been terrified, but she hadn’t been that Gaby in a long time now.

Three against five. I still like those odds.

“Come on, Lucas,” Patterson was saying, sounding dangerously close to pleading. “You and me, man. You with me, or what?”

“Son,” Mason said, directing everything — his eyes, his words, his full attention — at Patterson as if no one else existed inside the hangar, “you need to shut it down now, before it’s too late.”

“Son?” Patterson looked back at Mason. “I’m not your son, ass—” Patterson said, but he never got to finish.

Mason moved so fast Gaby had trouble following him. One moment he was standing face-to-face with Patterson, then a second later the taller man was on the slick hangar floor as a thick arc of blood sprayed through the air. Mason had what looked like a small knife clenched in his right fist, and it took her a few seconds to realize it was a small, rusted over piece of metal barely longer than her forefinger. Blood dripped from the object in Mason’s hand as he stood over Patterson’s twitching form.

Patterson wasn’t dead, though he might have wished he were. His legs moved in jerky motions as he clutched his neck, bright red squirts of blood forcing their way between his fingers. Mason must have struck an artery, which would explain the large amount of blood pumping out of Patterson at the moment.

Mason seemed to sigh — or, at least, he made a loud show of it — before looking back at the remaining three collaborators. “Anyone else want to undermine my authority?”

“Nah,” Lucas said.

The other two didn’t say anything, and their eyes remained fixed on Patterson’s thrashing form.

“Now then,” Mason said, slipping the makeshift knife into one of his pockets, then settling his dark beady eyes on Nate, Gaby, and Danny on the platform above him. “I suggest we all calm the fuck down and enjoy the show. What do you think, soldier boy?”

“I think your leadership style leaves a lot to be desired,” Danny said.

Mason grinned. “It gets the job done.”

“Patterson would disagree.”

“Yeah, well…” Mason looked down at Patterson, whose wide-open eyes stared back up accusingly at him. “I think he was originally from Oklahoma, and I never really had much use for Sooners.”

It should have been dark inside the hangar, but the combination of very bright (too bright) LED floodlights outside the windows and moonlight were enough for them to see each other with. She had no trouble seeing Patterson resting where he had fallen, almost directly below them. His eyes were still wide open, but there were no signs of life behind them.

She sneaked a glance at Mason and one of the collaborators leaning against their windows. Despite everything Mason had said about “people in the right uniforms” showing up, she could see the doubt on his face and in the anxious way he peered outside.

If Mason was concerned, Danny was the exact opposite. He was leaning against the window on the other side of Nate with something that almost looked like a ghost of a smile on his lips. The sight of it confused and annoyed her.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked over. “Hmm?”

“You’re smiling like an idiot.”

“Was I?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “I was just trying to remember how many times Willie boy and me have been in situations just like this one.”

“How many times?”

“Too many to count. In the Stan, during Harris County SWAT, then later, when things really got weird…” That smile again. “We always got through it, though. He’d come up with a plan and I’d carry it out to perfection, if I do say so myself. That’s what they used to call me in college, you know. Perfection Danny.”

“The two of you ever been in a situation this bad?” Nate asked.

“Worse,” Danny said.

“Worse?” Nate said doubtfully.

“We had a bad habit of getting up creeks without paddles. The shit we got into, and got out of…” He shook his head, smiling at the darkness outside.

It was the first time she could recall Danny talking about Will like he would never come back. In the weeks after Song Island, after Danny had recovered from his wound, she had kept a close watch on him. They all did — her, Carly, Lara, even Maddie and Blaine. In so many ways, the fact that Lara had the rest of them to worry about allowed her to better deal with Will’s absence. Danny, on the other hand, had to wake up to hear the bad news.

Now, as she watched Danny staring out the window, as quiet and thoughtful as she had ever seen him, she couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind at the moment. They had never really talked about the loss of Will, but she knew it weighed heavily on him. Not just the huge empty space Will had left behind, but all the responsibilities Danny had had to take up as a result of it.

She didn’t expect Danny to start spilling his guts now, and he didn’t disappoint her. Instead of pushing him to do something he would never do, she looked out the window at the encroaching darkness, at the undecipherable walls of trees that surrounded the entire airfield.

Christ, it was dark out there, and getting darker with every passing minute.

Clanging metal as Mason rushed down the catwalk, leaving the other collaborator behind on the platform. Mason disappeared into the office with Lucas and the fourth man. She could hear them talking quietly inside, making plans.

“What are they talking about in there?” Nate asked, looking back at the office on the other side of the building.

“Nothing good,” she said.

“We better keep an eye on them. Him, too,” Nate said, nodding at the lone collaborator on the platform across from them.

If the man heard them, he didn’t react to it.

She nodded, when something suddenly moved in the corner of her right eye, and she turned back to the window and peered past the bars toward the small group of darkened buildings across the airfield.

“Danny,” she hissed.

Danny glanced over. “What?”

“Movement,” she said, taking a step to her left until she was no longer exposed in front of the window.

Danny did the same on his side. “Where?”

“The buildings.”

“Ghouls?” Nate asked, hugging the wall behind her.

“I don’t think so. They didn’t move like ghouls.”

“Mason’s BFFs,” Danny said, narrowing his eyes. “They’re in the fields. Stealthy bastards must have been picking their way toward us for the last few minutes under the cover of darkness.”

“How many?” Nate asked.

Danny looked over at her. “A dozen?”

“Sounds right,” she nodded.

Nate looked back down at the office, where Mason and the others were still inside. He turned back to her and was about to say something when the collaborator Mason had left behind on the platform across from them bellowed out, “Mason! We got company!”

Mason, Lucas, and the fourth man rushed outside, but only Mason ran up the catwalk stairs, his boots clanging loudly.

She turned back around to her window and focused on the grassy fields that flanked the long landing strip. There were a dozen figures that she could see, some crouching, others lying on their stomachs, their black uniforms making them nearly invisible.

“You see that?” Danny said.

“What?” Nate said.

“They’re wearing gas masks.”

She saw it: moonlight glinting off the lens of a gas mask covering one of the men’s faces. She could only see the one man because he had raised himself up to his knees and was aiming a rifle at the hangar.

It had been a while since she had run across collaborators in gas masks, and the sight of the kneeling man outside made her shiver slightly. She would never forget Mercy Hospital in Louisiana as long as she lived, because it was where she had killed her first man. She didn’t remember what the man looked like, only the shape of the breathing apparatus covering his face and the dark shape of his eyes behind the clear lens. In some ways, the fact that she couldn’t see all of his face when she killed him made it easier to deal with. The lack of detail meant the nightmares were less vivid.

“Looks like your time’s about up,” Mason said from across the hangar. He was grinning stupidly at them. “Those are our boys out there. Better hope—”

Crack! as a bullet drilled through the windowpane half an inch above Mason’s head and pinged! off the back wall before ricocheting and embedding into the smooth floor a mere two feet from Patterson’s dead body.

“Fuck me!” Mason shouted as he ducked on the platform.

The other collaborator mirrored Mason’s action, throwing his arms over his head as if that would protect him from a bullet. Luckily they were both under the windowsill, so the shooter couldn’t see them.

Gaby and Nate remained where they were, hidden from view next to their window.

Danny, similarly unexposed, was chuckling. “Looks like they didn’t get your memo, Mason. You didn’t send it by carrier pigeon, did you? Birds are so unreliable these days.”

“Shit!” Mason said to no one in particular. He scooted along the platform before sliding up against the wall, where he could stay out of view.

“The fuck they shot at us for?” the other man asked as he did the same thing, sliding up along the side of the other window.

“Why don’t you go out there and ask them, Hendricks,” Mason said.

The man named Hendricks seemed to think about it before leaning slightly toward the window and shouting out, “Hey, don’t shoot—”

Crack! as a second bullet drilled through the windowpane a foot from Hendricks’s face and pinged! off the back of the hangar before burying itself into the floor like the first shot.

Hendricks jerked his head away from the window and shouted, “Fuck!”

Lucas and the fourth man were hugging the wall below them, apparently unsure whether to stay where they were or to make a run for the back office. She would have stayed in the safety of the room because ricocheting bullets didn’t care what uniforms you were wearing, or if you wore one at all.

“I don’t think they know their friends are in here,” Nate said, grinning at her.

“Either that, or they don’t care,” she said.

“My guess is they’re not taking any chances,” Danny said. Then, louder so Mason and the others could hear, “In fact, if I were them, I’d take this hangar out from a distance. Safer that way. Hey, Mason, you boys carrying RPGs these days?”

Mason glared over at him but didn’t answer.

Gaby peered out the window again, keeping as far back as possible while still seeing out — somewhat, anyway. Her angle was limited and she was very aware of how brightly lit her window was at this very moment, giving the shooters clear-as-day targets to aim at.

“See anything?” Nate asked behind her.

She shook her head. “Not a whole lot.”

“Can’t see shit on this side, either,” Danny said.

She couldn’t see forward, where she had spotted the collaborator in the gas mask, but she could see off to the side just fine. The problem was the endless wall of trees that stared back at her. There was nothing out there—

Oh God, she thought, and said breathlessly, “Danny, the trees. The trees.”

She didn’t need lights or night vision to see them as they poured out of the woods surrounding the airfield; there were so many that she swore the building around her was trembling against the stampede of bare feet.

“How many?” Nate whispered behind her.

“Too many,” she whispered back.

“What’s out there?” Mason shouted over to them. “What are you seeing?”

She didn’t answer him. Neither did Danny.

Their lack of response only made Mason angrier, and he shouted again, “Hey, fucktards, what’s out there?”

Gaby was braced against the wall when it started to shudder, the vibrations causing her body to move with it. It wasn’t like when she felt the creatures coming out of the trees. No, this was stronger, more intense. Before she could properly register it, the entire hangar was rumbling as if it was going to come apart at the seams—

Danny whirled away from the window and screamed at them, “Down! Get the fuck down!”

She dropped to the platform on instinct, just as pieces of the windows began to spiderweb, and she heard the sound that she knew would haunt her nightmares for as long as she lived, however long that might be.

It came from above, like a great beast unleashing its rage upon the world.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

CHAPTER 12 KEO

Well, I’ve had better nights.

And that was before the tankers fired up the music. They were blaring heavy metal, and the drums and guitars were just loud enough to drown out the soothing waves of the ocean just beyond the beach.

I’ve had a lot better nights.

After the speakers came to life, the cannon fire began. Again and again and again. Each time it let loose, the ground shook. He waited for them to run out of shells. Surely they didn’t have a full load, did they?

But that wasn’t all they had on them. He remembered glimpsing the gun turrets from a distance and knowing they had been modified, but not how or why. In his wildest dreams, he wouldn’t have guessed someone would come up with the bright idea to rig a flamethrower to a sixty-ton war machine. It was a tad overkill, if someone were to ask him.

The unmistakable whiff of burning flesh made its way through the trapdoor above him soon after the cannon fire began. At first, he thought it might have been barbecue cooking. Well, he wasn’t too far off the mark; it just wasn’t the kind of searing meat he usually preferred. It simultaneously sounded, felt, and smelled like the world was having one big party and coming to a glorious, bloody end.

Keo had been to a lot of bad places, seen a lot of bad things, and had even done some of them (okay, maybe most of them), but he had to admit, what was happening above him now was entirely new. Then again, it could just be his present circumstance making things look much worse than they really were.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

“Jesus, how many times have they fired that thing?” Jordan said next to him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Guess.”

“Do I have to?”

“It’ll help pass the time.”

“How so?”

“Just guess.”

On cue, another thoom! rang out, and the enclosed space trembled. Keo imagined a slew of ghouls disintegrating against the explosion somewhere out there. Closer to home, a piece of dirt that had been clinging to a section of the wall for God knew how long fell loose and landed on his hand. He flicked it away.

“What was that?” Jordan asked, alarmed.

“Nothing; just a piece of dirt.”

“Stop that. I have enough dirt on this side and under my ass, I don’t need some of yours, too.”

“Sorry.”

They were in the (coffin) rectangular space under the storage building that he had discovered earlier. It wasn’t nearly as roomy as he had promised Jordan, though there was enough space for both of them to lie down, even if they couldn’t twitch their arms or legs, or blow at a piece of dirt without it landing on one other.

Not that Keo minded too much. If he had to be sealed off from the world in a literal hole in the ground with anyone, at least Jordan smelled better than most. Not that she had done anything special, but women, even ones covered in dirt and grime as she was at the moment, with a week’s worth of sweat to boot, was still preferable to the best-smelling guy he’d ever had the misfortune to lie down next to. Besides, it felt good to give his legs a long rest.

As far as he could tell, the house above them was still standing, though he couldn’t say the same for the others around it. The possibility of losing the building wasn’t the problem; it was being trapped under its pile of rubble that made him nervous. Keo had come to accept the possibility of death in a variety of ways, and buried alive was far, far down the list.

Shoulda made a run for it. Hell, shoulda done a lot of things, pal.

“Well?” Jordan said.

“Well what?”

“I asked you a question. How many times have they fired that thing? About twenty?”

“Ten?”

“Can’t be…”

“Around ten.”

“It has to be more.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you even trying?”

“Of course.”

She sighed, her breath warm against his left ear. He could feel her body heat, hear the soft rustling of clothes as she moved her legs and arms from time to time. She got more restless each time the tank fired and a cloud of dust shook loose from the oak door a foot from their faces. The floor under them was cold and wet and hard, like sleeping on the world’s worst, most painful mattress.

“What the hell is that, anyway?” she asked.

“What?”

“That music…”

“‘War Pigs.’”

“What did you call me?”

He grinned. “It’s a song called ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath.”

“Oh.” Then, “I didn’t know you were into heavy metal.”

“I’m not, but I knew this guy who was. Got himself killed in Mogadishu a few years back. RPG pierced the car we were riding in and gutted him.”

“Gutted him? I thought rockets were supposed to explode.”

“This one didn’t. It sliced through the door and got him in the stomach. Missed the client by a foot. The poor bastard was muttering ‘God’ for three straight days after that. After a while, I wanted to kill him.”

“That must have been awful.”

“Why? He lived.”

“No, I meant your friend.”

“Oh. Yeah. It was pretty ugly.”

“Were you good friends?”

“Nah. Truth is, I didn’t really like him that much.”

“Why not?”

“His taste in music sucked.”

“Oh sure, why not hate a guy because you disagree with his taste in music.”

“Glad you approve.”

She made a sound that might have been a snort. “So these people you used to work for…”

“What about them?”

“They have a name?”

“Yes.”

When he didn’t elaborate, she said, “What was it?”

“You wouldn’t know them. They don’t show up in the Yellow Pages.”

She chuckled.

“What?” he said.

“Phone books. I remember when everyone had one. Then the Internet happened. I guess we’re going to have to go back to phone books now, huh?”

“We’re going to need working phones first.”

“Yeah, there’s that. Well, one problem at a time.”

Another thoom!, and the ground around them shook again, the shockwave lingering a bit longer this time. He listened to another house toppling somewhere in the background.

Shit, they’re landing closer and closer.

“What exactly are they doing out there?” Jordan asked, sounding simultaneously angry and scared.

“Making a hell of a mess, would be my guess.”

“What if it really is the U.S. Army? What if they’re finally fighting back?”

“What they’re doing up there isn’t fighting back.”

“I don’t understand…”

“There’s no point in blowing up a beach full of ghouls,” he said. “If you wanted to kill the bastards, you could go around firebombing buildings and taking out all the places they use as nests during the day. Break a lot of windows, bust down all the doors you can find — all that fun vandalism stuff we used to do back when we were kids.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay, that I used to do when I was a kid. Eventually, you’d have to accept that there’s no point in killing them.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that. The more we kill, the less of them there are.”

“You really think so?”

“The question is, why don’t you?”

“Because there are millions of them out there, Jordan. Maybe billions. You can kill a hundred of them, even thousands a day, and you wouldn’t make a dent. It also won’t get you any closer to winning this war. You’d just get every blue eyes in the area sicced on you. Ones like Frank, except less friendly. Anyone running around out there shelling beaches doesn’t understand what they’re facing.”

“Which is?”

“That we’re living behind enemy lines. The entire planet’s occupied territory. The last thing you want to be doing out there is drawing attention to yourself if you don’t have to.”

He expected an argument, but she was very quiet for a long time.

“I forget that you’ve been out there longer and seen more than I have,” she said finally. “Even when I was at T18, then running around in the woods with Tobias, I was never really out there. What else do you know?”

“Just that the ones behind all this had it planned out from the very beginning. Frank said as much. He said he could hear them talking, hear voices of the ones in charge. They knew what they were doing from day one. The blood farms, the hospitals, the military response…”

“Did he say what happened to the Army? What about the Navy?”

“He said they weren’t around anymore.”

“That’s it?”

“We didn’t really get into details. He’s mostly a man of few words. Anyway, if they were still out there, don’t you think they would have shown themselves by now?”

“Yeah, there’s that…”

“Besides, I learned long ago not to put your faith in Uncle Sam’s boys. They’re overrated and will only disappoint you in the end.”

“Sounds personal. Daddy issues?”

“Maybe a tad.”

“Anyway, when did you guys have these conversations? And where was I during them?”

“Usually asleep.”

“You could have woken me. Maybe I had some questions for him, too.”

He chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“The thought of you and Frank, talking. You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Maybe you don’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How you are around him. You’re…stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“Tense.”

“I didn’t…” She stopped short, then said, “Do you think he noticed?”

Oh, he noticed all right, Keo thought, but said, “Probably not.”

Jordan went silent after that. He couldn’t see her face, so he didn’t know if she was replaying all those nights when they were with Frank and how she had acted (unknowingly, as it turned out) around him. Or maybe she was doing what he was doing and trying to time the aftershocks after each cannon impact and grimacing when they sounded just a little bit closer than the last time.

“Are you missing T18 yet?” he asked.

She sighed. “Maybe a little bit. Why?”

“Sometimes I think the people in the towns are the smart ones. At least they get to sleep in their own beds, with a stomach full of food, and not just kidney beans.”

“I thought you like kidney beans.”

“I don’t like them that much.”

Another bout of silence, with just Ozzy Osbourne somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor. The speakers must have taken a hit, because Ozzy’s voice had become strained and at times incomprehensible.

“So, Black Sabbath, huh?” Jordan said after a while.

“Yup. Black Sabbath.”

“They must have that damn song on an endless loop.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Speakers.”

“Uh huh.”

“These tanks come with speakers?”

“Probably custom add-ons.”

“It’s not bad. The song. Not sure I’d like to listen to it 500 times in a row, but hey, whatever floats their boat.” She paused for a moment, then, “What happens if they hit the house above us?”

“Probably nothing good.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“It’ll fall down and bury us. We’d survive for a few days while trying to open the door, but eventually we’d give up when it won’t budge because of all the rubble on top of it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Then we’d both die of thirst in a few days. Unless you start eating me, or I start eating you. We could probably live off each other’s meat and blood for a few extra days or weeks, if you can keep it all down.”

“Very vivid; thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another thoom!

Keo squeezed his eyes shut against a particularly thick cloud of dust floating down over his face from the door above them. He coughed, and so did Jordan next to him.

“That one was pretty close,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“The closest one yet.”

“Yup.”

“Not good.”

“Nope.”

“What are the chances we can make the beach if we climb out right now?”

“Depends…”

“On?”

“How many of the bloodsuckers are around the house right now that will notice us when we poke our heads out.”

“How many, you think?”

“A few hundred?”

“Sounds manageable.”

“Or maybe a few thousand.”

“That, not so much.” She sighed. “You wanna risk it?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

The cannon fire, the smell of burning flesh, and Ozzy’s waning voice filled the temporary silence inside the room. He tried to pick out the crashing ocean waves in the background, but it was a lost cause through the thick walls. At least they had their thermal clothing, which kept the cool temperature at bay. The only real issue at the moment was the chances of being buried alive down here.

Don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.

Yeah, that’s it. Let’s go with that.

“Keo,” Jordan whispered.

“What?”

“Is that smell what I think it is?”

“Yeah.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah.”

“If you say ‘yeah’ one more time, I’m going to punch you in the balls.”

“Sounds painful,” he said.

“I don’t know what Gillian sees in you.”

“Must be my charming personality.”

“What personality?”

“Man, you’re really going for the low blows tonight, aren’t you?”

She chuckled, just as the tank loosed another round, the resulting thoom! causing his teeth to chatter for a few seconds afterward.

“That was a close one,” Jordan said.

“The one before that was closer.”

“Was it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Not good.”

“Nope.”

“I’m going to die down here, aren’t I?”

“Think positive.”

“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…”

CHAPTER 13 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.

“Hey, ugly!” Danny shouted.

The thing froze in place, appearing more confused than afraid (Was it still even capable of fear?), and turned in Danny’s direction. It hadn’t gotten its head completely around when Danny struck it in its hollowed chest with a piece of the window frame that had come loose during the creature’s entry. The wood was weak and it cracked into kindling on impact, but it did manage to send the bloodsucker sprawling to the floor. The blow and fall dislodged one of the pieces of glass jutting from its head, though that still left plenty more fragments in place.

Gaby had no illusions the ghoul would stay down for longer than a few seconds, and she was proven right. It quickly untangled its limbs like a snake and was already rising when she saw more black shapes falling out of the sky behind it. They dropped seemingly from nowhere, crashing into the piles of rubble before finally flopping to the floor on the other side of the office windows.

“Well, this ain’t good,” Danny said.

“What now?” Nate shouted from behind them.

“Get back.”

“And then?” she asked.

“I dunno. Make it up as we go, I guess.”

“Good plan,” Nate said.

“You got a better idea? I’m all ears,” Danny said.

“Not right now.”

“All right, then.”

Somewhere behind her, Mason had stood up in his own private little corner, his makeshift knife clenched tightly in one hand and his eyes glued on the broken windows even as the ghouls stood up and moved toward the office. She wondered if Mason knew for certain that his uniform wouldn’t save him, or if he was erring on the side of caution by hanging back to see what would happen next.

Two of the creatures were attempting to squirm through the broken window, slicing themselves on the jagged glass, but of course that didn’t slow them down for even a second. Thick black blood sprayed the walls and floor, but they didn’t stop until they had flopped inside, leaving space for the other two to follow them in. They hadn’t bothered with the door or with the other unbroken window.

Path of least resistance, she thought, before saying, “Danny?”

He glanced back at her and grinned again. He was still clutching the window frame, though it was mostly a handful of skinny twigs now. Gaby didn’t know why, but she grinned back at him. Was this what it was like for him and Will in all those times they found themselves fighting for their lives? An exchange of stupid jokes and cocky grins? Because they expected to survive, even if they didn’t know how exactly?

Except she didn’t really feel as if everything was going to be okay this time, because something very important was missing: Will.

“Think of something,” Nate said.

“Thinking!” Danny shouted back.

“Think faster!”

“That doesn’t help!”

She heard a gasp (Oh God, was that me?) when one of the creatures lunged at them. Its bones clacked as it moved, clearly with some difficulty. She didn’t have to look far to see why: one of its legs was damaged, maybe from the fall into the hangar.

Before she could react, Danny had moved in front of her and was choking up on the remains of his weapon when something she had never seen before or thought would ever happen in her lifetime, did.

Something blindsided the attacking creature and sent it sprawling to the floor. It slid across the room before finally crashing into the side wall. It was locked with something, before she realized that that “something” was another ghoul. They were fighting.

She couldn’t tell the ghouls apart — they all looked the same, little more than thin layers of black skin and dangerously sharp bones — and there was a moment when the world seemed to stop except for the two creatures struggling on the floor. Gaby stared because she didn’t know what else to do. Nate and Danny looked just as perplexed next to her, as were the other three ghouls already inside the office with them.

Jesus, what’s happening?

One of the creatures had managed to get the upper hand and was straddling the other one. It wrapped bony fingers around the other’s throat, pinning it to the floor. Then, with its other hand, it jerked the ghoul’s arm from its socket with a sickening crunch.

“Oh, Christ,” Nate said, sounding as if he might vomit.

But Nate didn’t, though his voice did have an unforeseen effect: it snapped the other three ghouls out of their stupor, and their eyes abandoned the two struggling on the floor to refocus on her, Nate, and Danny. One of them opened its mouth, and bloody saliva dripped to the floor.

“Eyes forward, kids!” Danny said.

“Mason, the knife!” Nate shouted.

She looked back at Mason, standing in the corner with his “knife” held in front of him like a sword and not the finger-sized weapon that it really was. If he understood what Nate wanted, he didn’t respond.

“Mason, give me your fucking knife if you’re not going to use it!” Nate shouted.

“Forget him!” Danny said. “Stick together!”

The ghouls moved almost as one toward them, but they hadn’t taken more than a few steps when something hit a creature in the head. It took Gaby half a second to realize it was an arm. Someone — no, some thing—was using a ghoul arm like a baseball bat—

The same creature that had broadsided the first one and knocked it to the floor. It was up and swinging the arm, striking down the first ghoul before turning its attention on the other two. Bones broke and flesh twumped!, and another one of the ghouls fell to the floor. The third one spun and lunged at its attacker and the two of them spilled into a corner next to the window, vanishing into a part of the office where moonlight couldn’t reach, though she could just barely make out limbs flailing in the darkness.

She was still trying to come to grips with what had happened when one of the fallen ghouls started to get back up.

No, no, no!

She ran right at it — heard Nate shout her name — and kicked out and caught the creature in the head as it was picking itself from the floor. Despite wearing heavy combat boots, her leg shook with the impact as the monster lifted up into the air as if levitating — and for a moment she thought its head might pop loose like in the cartoons — before it fell back down to earth a few feet away.

Instead of giving it time to pick itself up again, Gaby lunged forward and stomped down on its head with her boot, hearing rather than feeling the skull underneath crunching. Thick gobs of black coagulated blood splashed the floor and parts of her pant legs. The stench of tainted blood filled her nostrils as she took a step back, but she pushed it away and kicked the creature in the chest, sending it skidding across the office, where it crumpled against the wall under the windows.

She turned, her chest heaving, looking for Nate and Danny in the semidarkness of the office. For some reason, it seemed to have gotten harder to see in the last few seconds despite the plentiful moonlight coming freely through the now mostly-roofless hangar, bright streams of light reflecting off metal beams and steel sheets strewn around them.

She finally located Nate in the back. He hadn’t moved and was staring at her with his mouth slightly agape.

A flash of movement, and she whirled around, ready to fight, only to see Danny shoving the remains of his window frame into another one of the creature’s eyes before grabbing it by one leg and swinging it into the wall, again and again and again, leaving bloody patches against the wallpaper each time. Finally, when there didn’t seem to be any blood left in the skinny thing, he flung it across the room with a loud, tired grunt.

Danny stumbled back, out of breath, and watched as the remains of the ghoul tried to get back up. “Oh, fuck me. That didn’t really work, did it?”

Because they don’t die, remember? It doesn’t matter if you cut off their limbs or their heads. They don’t die. As long as there’s blood flowing through them, they don’t die.

“Any suggestions?” Danny asked.

She was too busy watching the creature she had fought pick itself up from the floor, even though it didn’t have a head anymore, to answer him. There was just a big lump hanging off long, stringy neck muscles like an unused hoodie, clumps of blood slurping free with every movement.

Danny’s ghoul had given up trying to stand, and despite a crushed skull, it began crawling toward him, spindly arms dragging its remains forward one pull at a time. Two broken legs, twisted into impossible angles, twitched behind it.

“Jesus, I think I’m going to throw up,” Nate said behind them. But like the last time, he didn’t.

“Back, back,” Danny said.

She backpedaled, the ghoul blood sticking to one of her boots making a clumping sound with every step. She winced each time, but managed to keep moving, when—

There was a ringing crack! from the darkened corner next to the window where the two ghouls had disappeared earlier.

She turned, as did Nate and Danny, and even Mason still hiding in his corner somewhere to her right. The collaborator stuck the knife out in front of him, as if that would be enough to ward off any ghoul that decided to zero in on him.

The creature stepped out of the shadows, blood dripping from gashes along its cheeks and body. There was a hole the size of her fist in its chest, where a steady flow of black liquid trickled out. She couldn’t tell if it was the same one that had, for whatever reason, attacked the others. One emaciated thing was the same as another. Right?

The ghoul looked back at her for a moment, as if those obsidian eyes were trying to remember her, to carve her image into its mind. (If it even had a mind anymore.)

“Dead, not stupid,” Will always said.

She looked down and saw that the creature was holding the other ghoul’s head in its hand, its fingers digging into the empty eye sockets.

She didn’t know how long she and the creature stared at one another. A second might have passed, or maybe a minute, before Nate’s voice pulled her back from the other side of the planet.

“Gaby, be careful,” Nate said, stepping between her and the ghoul.

“What the hell’s it doing now?” Danny said, but he hadn’t gotten “now” out when the ghoul looked away from her and threw the head it had been holding out the window.

Then it disappeared back into the corner before returning a few seconds later, dragging the headless ghoul it had been struggling with out with it. They watched it toss the twitching body out the window, knocking loose blood-smeared glass shards that had managed to cling to the frames.

The other two ghouls that were slowly, pitifully making their way across the office had stopped for a brief moment and turned to look at the creature that had attacked them. Or maybe “look” wasn’t the right word, because you needed eyes to look, and heads that were still in one piece, didn’t you?

The third ghoul ignored the other two, finding nothing that resembled a threat from them apparently, and walked to the window and climbed out, then began crawling up the side of the rubble.

“What the fuck,” a voice said behind them.

She looked back at Mason, staring after the creature.

“It’s got the right idea,” Danny said, looking back at the other two ghouls that had begun, once again, to gradually slink their way toward them one painfully slow inch at a time. Whatever dangers they might have presented a few minutes ago had evaporated into something pathetic and sad.

“Yeah,” she said, the single word coming out of her as almost a breathless whisper.

Danny moved first, and Gaby followed.

“Guys?” Nate said behind them.

They went after the ghoul that had managed to rise back up on its mangled legs first. The creature reached for her, but she ducked its clawing hands and grabbed it around the top half of its arms while Danny took the other side. They carried it toward the window and threw it out before they even reached their destination. Their aim was off by a few inches, and the ghoul crashed into one side of the window but managed to collapse outside in a hail of bones and bleeding flesh anyway.

“One down,” Danny said.

When she glanced back, Nate was moving around a crawling ghoul. It was trying to grope at his legs, but he kept sidestepping it. He could have moved in slow motion and the creature wouldn’t have been able to get him, it was that slow.

“Legs,” Danny said.

They grabbed the thing by its legs, keeping away from its impossibly sharp-looking fingers, and dragged it to the window. The creature reeked from every pore, and she had to breathe through her mouth. From the look on his face, Nate was again on the verge of vomiting. The thing weighed almost nothing, like a mannequin. This time, they threw it through the window without hitting the frames.

“Last one,” Danny said.

It was trying to crawl out of the corner. It had no choice, because it was missing one of its arms and its legs were both broken. But there was nothing wrong with its eyes, and they shifted from Nate to Gaby and back again. Nate was closer so it zeroed in on him, not that it was going to reach him anytime soon.

She walked calmly over and grabbed it by a leg, Nate taking the other one, and they dragged the creature toward the window. It flailed with its remaining arm and somehow managed to turn over onto its back. If she looked hard enough, she could almost see something that might have been anger behind its hollowed eyes.

“I got it,” Nate said, and Gaby let go when they reached the window.

Nate lifted it off the floor by one leg, as if it were a bag of flour, and flung it through the window. It landed with a crunch outside among the other three. They were all still “alive” out there, trying to crawl back to the windows, inch by inch, irresistibly drawn to her, Nate, and Danny.

No, not them, but to the blood in their veins.

“Should we…?” Nate said.

“What?” Danny said.

“Go out there and stop them?”

“There’s no point,” Danny said. “The sun will be out long before they reach us.”

Gaby suddenly remembered they weren’t alone in the office and glanced over at Mason. He had sat back down in the corner, blood-smeared arms hanging off his bent knees. She couldn’t see the knife anywhere, but she didn’t believe for a second that he didn’t have it hidden somewhere on him, within easy reach. He looked shell-shocked, and she wondered if she had the same expression on her face.

“What?” he said, his eyes meeting hers.

“You saw it,” she said. “What the other one did.”

He didn’t say anything and seemed to be waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said, “And?”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated.

“Yeah, why?” Danny said.

“How the fuck should I know,” Mason said.

“Because you’re one of them, asshole,” Nate said.

“Fuck you, kid. I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

“Never?” Danny said doubtfully.

“I’ve seen a lot of things, but…” He shook his head. “What I just saw… What that thing just did… I’ve never seen that before. You can believe it or not, I don’t really give a shit.”

Gaby stared at him. Mason was an opportunist, a liar, and a killer, but she believed every word he had just said.

“Where’d you get the shank?” Danny asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Mason said.

“Better keep an eye on it, short stack; someone might take it from you before the night’s out.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

Danny smirked and turned back to the windows. She did, too, and watched the creatures as they continued their interminably slow crawl toward the office. They were bleeding from multiple wounds and stumps as they moved, but that was difficult to see against their black skin. It was easier to make out the gray dust clinging to their gaping wounds and fresh, thick pools of blood that dotted the remains of the hangar floor.

“Hear that?” Danny asked.

“What?” Nate said. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

She hadn’t noticed it until now, but it was deathly silent outside the building and in the airfield around them. She couldn’t remember when it had happened. She kept waiting to hear the sound of warplanes coming back, followed by the sight of gray metal flashing above them, but there was just the clear moonlit night sky visible through the large hole in the roof.

“It’s stopped,” she said. “Outside. It’s stopped.”

Danny nodded. “Hard to believe, but as bad as it was in here, someone just got royally fucked out there.”

“You’re right, that is hard to believe,” Nate said.

Gaby looked over at Mason again and caught him staring back at her.

“Truce,” he said.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said.

Mason laughed. It was a loud roaring laugh, as if he had been keeping it in forever and only now got the chance to finally unleash it. Either that, or the man had lost his marbles. After the events of the night, she wouldn’t have blamed him for going off the deep end. She still wasn’t entirely sure she had seen what she had seen, either — except Danny and Nate had witnessed it, too, so it had to have been real.

Didn’t it?

CHAPTER 14 FRANK

He was between vessels when Mabry discovered his presence among the hordes fleeing the airfield. He knew it was only a matter of time; he couldn’t hope to hide forever among the throng, especially after exposing himself inside the hangar.

“She always did say you were a fast learner.”

There was something that sounded dangerously like pride in the voice, but it might have just been another trick. He pushed it aside and continued on when hands suddenly seized his arms and wrestled him to the ground. Fingers tightened around his ankles and wrists, and a pair of black eyes glared down at him.

“There you are,” the creature said inside his head.

It didn’t come from the ghoul — this frail thing straddling his waist as the others held him down. No, it came from somewhere else. Mabry. He was inside the creature’s body, using it as a ventriloquist would his puppet, like he had done back in the hangar when he saved Danny and Gaby.

“I told you, you couldn’t hide forever.”

He let go of the physical body and slid back into the river of fractured thoughts and chaotic memories. He had learned to project his mind long ago, but it was easy to lose his way if he wasn’t careful. Distance still eluded him, and the farther he traveled, the harder it was to maintain control.

He leapfrogged from one consciousness to another, letting himself be carried with the flow instead of fighting it. So many images, so many sounds, so many jumbled thoughts that, once upon a time, were capable of so much more. Those days were long gone, usurped by this new existence. They were just shells of what they used to be, suits to be worn and discarded. He didn’t feel pity for them because they were beyond caring.

“Where are you going?”

The voice pecked away at the edges of his mind, prodding and always trying to lure him back into the open. He didn’t bite and concentrated on the mission at hand.

They were out there somewhere — the men who had dropped the bombs and left behind the explosions. Men with warplanes. A new player. Maybe a new ally…

“You’re grasping at straws.”

He could feel them getting closer. The blue eyes. It forced him to keep moving, grabbing and abandoning bodies at will now, trying to stay one step ahead of them. The first time had been difficult, but everything became easier with practice—

Flames licked at his face and charred bodies blocked his path. His vision was flooded with severed limbs and decapitated heads and sheets of flesh stripped from bones.

Death from above, as a gray metal beast split the air above him, leaving behind fire and splatters of thick black clumps of blood that covered the trees and ground, making for treacherous footing. The creature he was wearing was missing an arm, but there was nothing wrong with its legs.

He pursued the warplane along with the rest of the brood. It would have to come down sooner or later, and when it did, he would find out who was behind this. He couldn’t let go now, or he might never be able to find his way back here. He pushed on through the sea of destruction, determined to reach the other side.

“Where is he?” the voices asked. “He’s close by. Find him—There!”

They were converging, skating burning brushes, when he released the ghoul and surfed the currents and found another one—

Where? How far had he gone this time? He’d discovered the limitations of what he could do during his many trial runs. The farther he projected himself, the more control he surrendered. Mabry didn’t have this problem, which was how he could be everywhere and nowhere at once.

He was still somewhere in the woods, the feel of heat licking at his skin, causing an involuntary whimper to escape his scarred lips. The creature put up a futile attempt at resistance, but he pushed it down and turned around and darted even further into the woods, hoping to skirt around the blue eyes. They were out there, searching, trying to locate him again.

The crackling of burning trees filled his nostrils, and flames stabbed at him from the sides. Every one of the creature’s senses was overwhelmed by the thick, putrid aroma of searing flesh, including its own. He skipped over warm patches of blood and crunched bones as all around him, ghouls fled the fire. The scream of the machines shredding the night sky, raining down death and destruction at will.

A tree tumbled, crushing two flailing forms underneath its gnarled trunk. He jumped and followed the others through the scorching fire, the familiar sensation of pain reminding him of what he used to be, even as heat enclosed around his feet, ripping at skin, and traveled up his legs.

He released, returning into the ocean of voices and jumbled thoughts. What once was, what little remained. A surprising burst of sadness for all that they’d lost, all they could never get back. All he could never retrieve.

And Mabry’s voice, calling to him, always.

“It’s time to give up this rebellion. It’s time to embrace who you are. All you have to do is stop running. Stop fighting. You can’t win. You never could.”

There, a ghoul perched on a tree, watching as two of its brethren were engulfed in fire, their screams flooding its mind. He seized it, then made the creature stand up and jump down, then turn, directing it toward the edge of the burning woods. Figures fled to the left and right of him, others already moving much, much farther up ahead. And still so many more behind him.

A heavy thrumming in the air and the ground shook, and he glanced up while in mid-jump as the shimmering gray metal object, made almost shiny by the fire below it, sliced through the air high above the tree canopies. The warplane had a name, but it escaped him at the moment. An animal of some sort.

The plane loosed its cargo and the earth cracked open, the trees collapsing in waves. The sound of hundreds of ghouls screaming in pain all at the same time overwhelmed his mind, and he lost his footing. He went headfirst into some brush and came out the other side, his joints clacking as he struggled to rise.

Too much. It was too much. He couldn’t fight it, couldn’t push it aside—

A wall of flames embraced him, the pain almost instantly unbearable, and he had no choice but to—

It was gone. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pick his way through the voices a second time and find the ones pursuing the plane. The problem was distance and control. The farther he projected, the less he had. It was a problem Mabry didn’t have. But then, he wasn’t Mabry. None of them were. There was only one, and there would only always be the one.

He opened his eyes to earth and darkness. Home. At least for tonight.

The silence beyond his makeshift tomb was broken only occasionally by the surf meeting the beach in the distance, bringing with it the smell of ocean water, at once reassuring and terrifying. The madness in the fields behind him was over; the blue eyes had sounded the retreat. The war machine had ceased its cannon fire, and there was just the blessed serenity of undisturbed night again.

How long before sunrise? He wasn’t sure, but there was enough time to do what he needed to do, even if his body was still weak. He shouldn’t have been tired, but he was. It wasn’t a physical pain — not the kind that left his muscles sore and tendons tight and flesh beat up. It was a mental fatigue, a strain that was hard to account for but was there, present in the throbbing against his skull and the blurring in his vision. Jumping between bodies was always draining, and this time he had stayed longer than he usually did, or wanted.

It was a risk, but it couldn’t be helped. Danny and Gaby needed him. There had been two others in the hangar with them. Men whose faces were familiar, but their names eluded him at the moment. They were back there, in the part of his memory where he kept the things that didn’t matter, that he could afford to forget.

Danny and Gaby mattered, though. What were they doing out there? They had almost died. Would have, if he hadn’t intervened.

What were they doing out there?

But there were no answers to be found down here in the darkness, so he dug and crawled, and pulled and pushed, until he was free. He straightened and gratefully let the darkness embrace him. He was somewhere between the buildings and the water, in a patch of unspectacular ground with nothing to mark his current presence or eventual leave.

He slid through the wind, the torn fabric of the trench coat the only sound as he raced across the outskirts of the city, leaving the taunting scent of the ocean far behind. Topography was difficult to gauge when he was wearing bodies, but he had glimpsed enough of the burning woods to get a general direction. Somewhere out there, the plane would have to eventually come back down.

They were out at night, like they always were, and he avoided them by using the shadows. There were shadows within shadows, if you knew where to look. With patience and experience, he had learned to anticipate the shifting of the darkness, always managing to stay one step ahead of the black eyes.

He moved further inland, always aware of the gradual rise in temperature against his skin, the promise of sunrise like a hand from the past reaching out to take hold of him. So he ran faster, aware that he was abandoning Keo and the woman, and leaving behind his need to see her again.

But he had to, because out there, somewhere, was an army. And if he could find it, take control of it, wield it against Mabry…

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said.

Maybe, maybe…

He didn’t get tired easily these days, so he was able to slip and dodge and dart through buildings, alleyways, and wide-open fields. He bided his time when he needed to and called forth speed when it served him. He lost count of how many empty houses he had passed, the endless empty stretches of roads covered by never-ending clusters of vehicles. He would have avoided the cities entirely if he could, but that required too much time, and he had little to waste.

The sounds of the warplanes from the past echoed inside his head as he ran. Another time, another place. A lot of sand and blood and fire…

He pulled himself back to the present as a horde of black eyes stampeded across a flat and empty field. There, the red walls and angled roofs of a barn. The front alley doors were sealed tight, so he ignored them and jumped instead, grabbing the awning and swinging himself up and over and through an open loft door.

He landed in old bales of hay and watched the creatures racing by under the moonlight. A few hundred, which could only mean a search party. How many more were out there right now, scouring the land for him? Did Mabry know he was nearby? Had he allowed the walls in his mind to slip—

Click!

A small figure, partially shrouded in shadows, stood between two molding bales of hay. Fragile hands trembled as they held onto a silver-chromed revolver that was pointed at him, pale lips parting and closing involuntarily, a small heartbeat rapidly increasing every half second as she exposed herself.

He looked past the dirty pants and sweater and recognized a stick-thin form underneath. Malnourished, the stink of urine and fecal matter oozing from every inch of her, making her nearly impossible to distinguish from the natural decay of the barn.

A second figure, smaller than the first, peeked out from the back. A boy, shaggy hair covered in dirt and straws; like the older one, he had the stink of the building all over him. The two of them were a sorry sight, and he felt something that might have been pity even as the silver that made up the weapon tickled the back of his brain.

“Shoot it!” the boy whispered.

“Shhh!” the girl said. “Stay back like I told you!”

But the boy didn’t go back. Instead, he clutched a rusted steak knife almost as big as his entire arm in both hands. The sharp edge was dull but the metal gleamed in the darkness anyway, dangerous enough for a normal human being, but not to him at the moment. Not at this distance, anyway.

The girl cocked her head, staring at him from across the loft, trying to get a good look at him through the remains of the hoodie over his head. She had dark brown eyes, and they were drawn irresistibly to the pulsating blue of his own. He looked away, back out the doors as the last of the ghouls disappeared into the moonlight.

Crunch-crunch as the girl took a step, then another one, toward him. Perhaps to get a better look at his face, or to make an easier shot. Sweat trailed down her temple despite the cold night air. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and he smelled fresh packed dirt around her toes. The small, barely noticeable squeeze as her finger tightened, tightened against the trigger.

Could she make the shot? Unlikely, given how badly she was shaking, but all it would take was one lucky round. Of course, he could avoid it easily. All he had to do was snap her neck—

No. Not that way.

He stared back at the girl. “Don’t,” he hissed.

Confusion swept across her dirty face. Long, stringy brown hair drooped over her eyes, and the gun continued to tremble slightly in her hands.

In the back, the boy leaned out of the shadows, dull knife ready.

“They’ll hear you,” he said to the girl, “and come back. Do you understand?”

Her eyes darted to the loft opening, then back to him. Did she believe him? Maybe. Was that why she and the boy were hiding? Had they seen the ghouls streaming across the fields earlier, even before he did? Or was this their home? Did they live here in the barn?

“Understand?” he asked.

Finally, she nodded, and he sensed hesitation as the gun lowered. Not much, just half an inch, but it was enough. Even better, her finger eased back on the trigger.

“Good,” he said.

“What are you, mister?” the girl asked, cocking her head, still trying to get a better look at him under the hoodie.

When he didn’t respond, the girl said, “Mister? Are you…?”

“Hide,” he said.

“Emmy?” the little boy whispered from the back of the loft. “What’s happening?”

“Shhh!” Emmy snapped back at him.

She was turned around facing the boy when he leaped outside, landed on the ground, and ran off. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop the girl’s voice from echoing over and over inside his head.

“What are you, mister?” she had asked.

He slipped into a patch of woods and skirted around a pair of dead cities, racing against the night, trying to outdistance the coming morning. Never tiring, never sweating, never slowing down.

Out there, somewhere, someone was bringing the war to Mabry’s doorsteps. Someone who wasn’t afraid, who had a plan. Someone with planes and bombs, and maybe even an army at his disposal.

He pushed through the brush and emerged out onto the side of a highway next to a town still filled with the smell of death and destruction, of gunpowder and explosive residue. The streets were once filled with bodies, but they had been taken away; the ones buried under rubble had also been dug up.

He ran across the remains of homes and buildings, and all the while, the girl’s voice echoed in his head:

“What are you, mister?”

He smelled the sweat under their clothes before he even heard or saw them: two soldiers perched in a pair of trees wearing black clothing and black paint over their faces. Almost invisible against the night. Almost. They cradled weapons attached with long suppressors in case they needed to fire them.

And something else. He had detected a trace of it earlier, but wasn’t sure. Now, closer, he was certain.

Silver bullets.

Their weapons’ magazines were loaded with silver bullets. He tasted the bitter metal against the tip of his tongue and swallowed it down, then made no sounds as he moved under them. They never saw him — never heard or smelled or felt him. The woods hid his presence, the heat and cold emanating from his pores indistinguishable against the chilly air.

He picked up the familiar scent of fresh gasoline that he had been tracking for the last hour. They had abandoned the roads and picked their way here, where he found the barely day-old tire tracks in the ground. The vehicles were hidden now, their engines cold and undetectable against the pulse of the night. They had picked wisely, hiding in a part of the world that humans had abandoned years ago and the black eyes had stopped searching months earlier.

Except it was nearly impossible for his heightened senses to ignore the combined heat radiating from their bodies. They were pressed against each other, finding strength and comfort in accidental contacts, the quickening heartbeats of so many people crammed into a couple of old abandoned buildings like jackhammers.

He sniffed the men on the rooftops. Multiple snipers, gripping recently oiled machine guns. A couple were dozing off, but more than enough were still awake, jacked up with the help of chemicals.

Again, the metallic taste of silver bullets bit against his tongue.

They had so much silver. Not just on them, but also inside the buildings, in the crates piled in the backs of their vehicles. They were well-organized, well-prepared. Was he really looking at an army?

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said.

Maybe, maybe…

He looked back into the woods. He could still smell them, the two brave souls watching the perimeter behind him.

Maybe they would have some answers.

The older of the two men almost managed to pull the trigger in time. Almost. There was a second of hesitation — which was all he needed to grab the younger man’s weapon — and he pulled, sending the soldier flailing to the ground below.

Before the older man could lift his rifle to fire, he leaped across the open space and smashed the man’s head into the tree trunk. The resulting crunch! caused him a second of remorse, but he pushed it aside as the body disappeared into a bush below.

He leaped down soundlessly and stalked toward the first man, who was scrambling for his holstered sidearm but finding it slippery. There was no suppressor on the gun, but the man either didn’t notice or was too frightened to think of the consequences.

He batted the gun away just as the man managed to lift it, and the weapon disappeared into the grass. He’d heard the crack as the soldier’s wrist broke, and before the man could open his mouth to scream, he placed a hand over it. Pale gray eyes flew wide, but pain or not, the man had enough remaining sense of self-preservation to reach down with his other hand for the handle of his sheathed knife.

The silver coating on the blade made his skin crawl, but he ignored it and grabbed the soldier’s hand as he lifted the knife and twisted — not too hard this time, just enough to force the man to let go of the weapon. The figure underneath him thrashed, terror washing over his painted face. Unlike the girl at the loft, the soldier could see him clearly for what he was — the icy blue of his eyes under the hoodie, the impossible cold and heat that oozed from every pore of his flesh.

“Shhh,” he hissed, putting one finger to his lips.

The soldier went still, the horror in his eyes giving way to confusion.

“Don’t scream,” he hissed.

The smell of urine leaked through the man’s thermal clothing, but the soldier might not even realized what he had done.

“Scream, and you’ll die,” he hissed. “Scream, and the others will die. You’ll bring death on them. The others, like me, in the woods around you. Do you understand?”

The soldier was no fool and he understood, going perfectly still as a result. But the gray eyes continued to stare, unable to pull away from the dark face hiding underneath the frayed fabric of the hoodie.

He removed his hand.

“What are you?” the soldier said, the three words coming out in a breathless whisper that formed clouds of mist between them.

“Shhh,” he said, staring back at the man under him. “This might hurt a little, but I have to know.”

“Know what?” the soldier said, fear flickering back across his face.

“Everything,” he said, placing one hand on the soldier’s forehead and leaning in closer.

Mercer.

The man’s name was Mercer. He was responsible for the ambush at the airfield, a single day that was months in the planning.

Images of warplanes streaking across the sky and over clear blue waters. An endless expanse of ocean that made his skin quiver at the sight. People cheering. Children in overalls…fishing?

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Men in uniforms training for hours, days, weeks, and months. Firing hundreds — thousands? — of bullets. That’s okay, because bullets are plentiful. You can always make more — or pick them up.

A voice on the radio resulting in a new kind of bullet. Silver bullets.

Where did they get all the silver?

Everywhere. From homes. Buildings. Piles of silver being smelted down.

Someone spray painting a white sun emblem onto the side of a vehicle. A tan-colored tank.

No. Tanks.

Another place, another time. A new mission. Watching bombs being attached to fixed wings. Then those same bombs dropping in the distance. The ground rumbling. Burning trees. Excited reports of hundreds dead over the radio. Thousands?

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

A city on the ocean. Another one underground. Gray walls and mazes of metal pipes, yellow tubing, and machinery.

Civilians. Soldiers. Uniforms. Guns. Ammo.

Flocks of birds? Bird soup…

Pull back, pull back…

Mercer. Concentrate on Mercer.

There. Fifties. Imposing, but just a man. A very dangerous man in control of an army.

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

More images of people, places, and things, but none of them involving Mercer. He had to know more about Mercer. Can he be trusted? Does he pose any danger to her?

No, no. He’d lost his way.

Find it. Have to find it again.

There…

A boy on his tenth birthday blowing out a candle in a backyard as people cheered. (No.) A brand new bike falling, a boy crying. (No!) A nervous first kiss in the back of a car. (Pull back! Pull back!)

No, too far back. He’d lost his way.

No, no, no…

Blood trickled out of the soldier’s nose, somehow finding its way to the corners of his mouth. Gray eyes stared accusingly up at him, the blackened face frozen in a mask of shock, confusion, and pain.

He stood up from the lifeless body and stared for a moment. A flash of guilt, and then it was gone. He wasn’t sure if that should have disturbed him. He had felt the same way — and passed it over just as quickly — with the older man in the tree. He couldn’t help but think he should have been more disturbed by how easily he killed them.

Shouldn’t he?

He might have lingered on the conflicting emotions if not for the encroaching sunrise against his back. It wouldn’t be long now. Maybe an hour. Maybe less. He could already feel the heat pressing against his skin, urging him to move on, to forget about the dead.

He fled through the woods, replaying the soldier’s memories in his head. The man hadn’t been privy to much, but he had known enough. Snippets of important things, events, and speeches that he had been around to see and hear.

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Mercer’s words, a clear signal that today was just the beginning, that the worst was yet to come.

He had sought out an army, hoping to find allies to use against Mabry. But all he had found instead was…what, exactly? Another enemy? Or something worse? Was there something worse than Mabry?

Maybe. One way or another, the answer would come.

It always did, eventually.

CHAPTER 15 KEO

Bleached white bones crunched under his boots, and the acidic smell of burnt flesh lingered in the early morning sun, threatening to suffocate him if he so much as let down his guard. It was only bearable because of the size small T-shirt he had found in the storage shed covering the lower half of his face, and though that made breathing difficult, it was preferable to the alternative.

He was making steady progress toward the M1 Abrams tank that had, sometime during the chaos, ended up in the fields about 200 meters from where it had started on the road. He wouldn’t be surprised if the thing had simply run out of fuel, given how active it had been last night.

It sat unmoving under the bright sun now, jagged pieces of white bones wedged between its tracked wheels, bony fingers clutched around sections of the 120mm cannon and limbs jutting out along the crevices of the turret. A couple of ghouls had managed to wedge themselves into the loader’s armor gun shield, for all the good that had done.

Further visual evidence of last night’s carnage could be found all across the fields around him. The craters of 120mm impacts dotted the landscape, and the crumpled heaps of destroyed homes made him question if he had emerged out of the storage box into a landfill instead of a beachside neighborhood. Miraculously, the house with the red roof that he and Jordan had hidden underneath had been spared. Maybe his luck was looking up after all.

Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, pal.

He stepped through the carcass of a white house with Trex decking, then wound his way through the remains of the living room and out the back, into a crater about a meter deep, before climbing back up among blackened grass. The tank was frozen about fifty meters in front of him, sunlight glinting off its desert tan hide and the shattered remains of bones draped over it.

He slipped out from behind the leftovers of another house and jogged across charred grass, doing his best to skip around as many skeletal remains as possible, though he might as well be trying to avoid the ground for all the good that did. It was impossible not to crunch or snap an arm or a limb or a deformed skull as he made his way toward his objective. After a while, he just gave up trying. If the tankers heard him coming through all that armor, then so be it.

Forty meters to the Abrams, and Keo was finally able to make out the words “Eat Me” along the length of the 120mm cannon, while “Get Off Me Bro” was spray painted across the armor tiles that covered the track wheels. A white circle with triangle-shaped objects coming out of it was prominently displayed at the front of the tank. After a second glance, he concluded the emblem was supposed to be a sun, and the “triangles” its rays. He had seen a lot of U.S. Army insignias, and that was definitely not one of them.

Thirty meters later, Keo was able to identify some kind of modified flamethrower welded in place of a machine gun inside the loader’s gun shield on top of the turret. An M240 was mounted on the second station, but he didn’t remember machine gun fire from last night. He could, though, recall in great detail the thick smell of barbecuing meat.

Keo changed up his approach and began moving sideways so he could take the remaining distance from the rear. He felt a flood of relief not having that smoothbore cannon pointing right at him — or anywhere close to him, for that matter. He knew it was stupid; chances were, they had blown all their load last night. Still, the sight of that thing staring right at him…

With just five meters left to go, Keo was feeling good about making it to the tank undiscovered. That was, until the loud grinding of metal filled the air. He dived to the ground and rolled to his right until he was covered in the shadow of the M1’s turret. Keo pulled down the shirt and took in a deep breath, his first unhindered one since he had stepped out of the storage shack. Thank God for the constant waves of fresh air coming from the ocean nearby, otherwise he might have choked on the stench.

There were impossibly white skeletal remains all around him, a shattered skull directly two inches from his head, and his rifle was resting on a pile of white and gray ash. He did his very best to ignore something pricking at his legs through the fabric of his pants. Probably a broken hand, or fingers…

A loud clang!, followed by a figure with a shaved head raising himself out of the commander’s hatch of the tank. The man was wearing a tan shirt and pants, and the same sun emblem was embroidered across a red collar, but nothing to indicate rank. The shirt had a white patch of the Lone Star State in the front, with scribbling inside it, but Keo was at the wrong angle to read the letters. It was a military uniform of some sort, but not one he was familiar with. But then, BDUs came in all shapes and sizes, and maybe this was a new variation for a new world?

The possibility that Jordan might have been right, that maybe he was looking at remnants of the U.S. Army, made him question what he was doing out in the fields hiding from them. The last thing he wanted was to start popping U.S. soldiers.

Keo took his hand off the M4, then reached down and drew the Glock. His fingers brushed against something sharp hidden among the grass, and something else was poking at his stomach and had been for the last few seconds, but he managed to ignore it, too, even though he had a pretty good idea what it was.

The soldier (?) had climbed out of the tank and was stretching. When he was done, he opened a canteen and took a long drink from it while glancing around at the fields. “Jesus Christ,” the man said. He tossed the canteen back into the open hatch, then dug out a white silk handkerchief and pressed it against his mouth.

Keo heard a second voice, this one coming from inside the tank, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“We made a hell of a mess,” the man standing on top of the Abrams said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Got a whole fuck lot of them, boys.” He lowered the handkerchief and let out a satisfied sigh. “Who’s got mop-up duty—” the man continued, but he stopped in mid-sentence because he had been turning when he said it, and—

Keo pushed himself up from the ground at the same time the man’s eyes locked onto him. He got his knees under him, then held out his left hand, the palm outward, while his right kept the Glock pointed down at the ground.

“Wait,” Keo said.

The man stared at him, mouth partially agape. His right hand was holding the cloth, and while he wore a gun belt, the sidearm was on his right side, which meant he was right-handed.

“Don’t—” Keo said, when the man dropped the handkerchief and reached for his holstered weapon.

Keo shot the man in the chest.

The soldier fell, slamming into the turret before sliding off it, the white silk cloth fluttering in the air after him.

Keo jumped up to his feet and ran toward the Abrams, thinking, Fuck, fuck, fuck with every step.

“What if it really is the U.S. Army? What if they’re finally fighting back?” Jordan had said last night.

Then I’m screwed, Jordan, Keo thought as he grabbed the closest handhold on the vehicle, his feet searching for anything to use as a stepping stone, finding them, then flinging himself up and over the turret.

He made the top of the tank just as a head poked out of the same commander’s hatch. The man had short spiky hair and was whirling around, the back of his head initially facing Keo. When the soldier finally completed his turn, the man’s eyes widened at the sight of Keo perched behind him. Keo might have held his fire, except the soldier had a gun in his hand and was swinging it around.

Sonofabitch, Keo thought, and shot the tanker between the eyes. The man’s head snapped back before it dropped and slid through the hatch.

Keo scrambled over the turret and reached the opening and looked through it, seeing a third figure below. The man had one hand cradling his dead comrade and the other stretching up with a Sig Sauer. Keo jerked his head back as the man fired — a thunderous boom! as the gunshot exploded in the confines of the tank — and the round zipped past his head, so close he swore he could feel the trail blazed by the bullet.

Instead of leaning back toward the hatch, Keo held out his hand, gun pointed down, and fired two times into the Abrams. Before he even knew if he had hit his target or not, Keo lunged forward and jumped through the round door feetfirst and—

— landed with a wet thud against the stomach of the man with the spiky hair, his momentum sending both him and the tanker with the Sig Sauer sprawling across the metal floor. Keo didn’t have to shoot the third man again because he was already dead — there was a single hole in his chest.

Keo lost his balance as soon as he touched down somewhere in the turret basket and hit his ass on cold, hard metal. Thankfully he was facing the right direction and immediately saw the fourth soldier up front, reclining back in the driver seat underneath the main gun. The man was turning his head and reaching for his sidearm, still in its holster draped over his seat, at the same time.

“Think about it!” Keo shouted, his voice thundering inside the vehicle.

The man did and stopped moving altogether. While his body was frozen in mid-turn, his eyes were free to dart to his two dead comrades before returning to Keo. He was covered in sweat despite wearing only a white undershirt and khaki shorts, similar dress to the third man Keo had shot. A pile of tan-colored uniforms hung from handholds around them.

“Shit,” the guy said.

“Yeah,” Keo said.

“U.S. Army?” Keo asked.

The soldier, who said his name was Gregson, shook his head.

“Collaborator?”

“Hell no,” Gregson said, looking almost insulted.

“Guess not,” Jordan said.

She stood next to Keo, holding another T-shirt from the storage shed over her mouth. Keo hadn’t needed his since hauling Gregson out of the tank. He wasn’t entirely sure what that said about his sense of smell that he could “get used” to his current environment.

Gregson sat on the ground with his back against the wheels of the Abrams. He had looked older when Keo first saw him inside the cramped space of the tank, but under the morning sun he was a man in his mid-twenties, with light blue eyes and dirty brown hair. His arms, covered in sleeves of tattoos, were draped over his knees. If he ever had any thoughts about escaping, he let it go when he saw the uniformed body on the ground with the hole in its chest.

“So if you’re not U.S. Army and you’re not collaborators, who are you?” Keo asked.

Gregson didn’t answer right away, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he should say anything to them. Keo could have told him that only delusional idiots tried to withstand interrogation. Sooner or later, you broke. Everyone did. Which was precisely why his old organization never bothered to rescue captured operatives.

“The way I see it, we’re on the same side,” Keo continued.

That elicited a snort from Gregson. “Was that before or after you killed my friends?”

“I had no choice. You should thank me for having the self-control not to shoot you back there.”

Gregson seemed to think about that before finally saying, “I guess.”

“So, let’s start at the beginning. Who are you, and what were you doing running around out here last night, shooting up the beach?”

“I was following orders.”

“Whose?”

“Mercer’s.”

“Never heard of him.” He turned to Jordan: “You?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“So, who’s Mercer?” Keo asked Gregson.

“He’s a great man,” Gregson said. “That’s all you need to know.”

“And this great man told you to come down here and empty 120mm shells on an innocent beach?”

“Not exactly.”

“So what, exactly?”

Gregson hesitated.

Keo sighed and drew his sidearm. “I’ve tried to do this the easy way, but you’re just wasting my time now.”

“I thought you said we were on the same side,” Gregson said quickly.

“Not if you keep making me ask twice. I hate having to ask twice.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

“Yeah, all right.” Then, after Keo had holstered his sidearm: “We overshot our mark yesterday, ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes. Then we saw the beach and thought, what the hell. We couldn’t link back up with our forces anyway, so we figured we’d go out with a bang. Worst-case scenario, we were prepared to drive right into the ocean a la Thelma and Louise.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Keo said.

“The movie?”

Keo shook his head.

“I’ve heard of it,” Jordan said.

“Good?” Keo asked.

She shrugged. “It was an oldie. I liked the car, though.”

“I guess that’s all that counts,” he chuckled before turning back to Gregson. “Where are the rest of your forces?”

“Sorry, can’t do,” Gregson smiled back. “Need-to-know, and you don’t need to know. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not telling you shit about that.”

“Tough guy.”

“When it comes to that? Fuck yeah, tough enough.”

Keo nodded. He believed the man. “So what were you doing out here yesterday? Can’t hurt to tell us that, right?”

Gregson thought about that for a moment too, before nodding. “We were doing our part.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“Take out one of the towns.”

“The collaborator towns?”

“What other kinds are there?”

Keo exchanged a glance with Jordan, and he could tell she was thinking the exact same thing: Gillian. T18.

He turned back to Gregson. “What do you mean, ‘take out’ one of the towns?”

“What do you think I meant?” Gregson said. He reached back and banged on the tank. “This thing’s designed to do one thing, and it ain’t making pies.”

“You shelled it? The town?”

“We flattened the fuck out of it, yeah.”

“And the people in it?” Jordan asked.

Gregson shrugged.

“What the hell does that mean?” she said, a noticeable warning edge creeping into her voice.

“We destroyed it,” Gregson said. “Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”

“What were you running from?” Keo asked.

“Technicals and rocket launchers. I mean, our armor could have survived a lot, but there were a lot of them, and who knows what else they had. Besides, our orders were to hit and run, then link back up with the rest of our forces. Failing that…well, it’s been a while since we saw the beach. We knew they’d follow us here. Didn’t think they’d send the skin meats, though.”

“Skin meats?”

“Those ghouls. That’s what some of us call them.”

Keo raised an eyebrow. “You also call them ghouls?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Where’d you get the name from?”

Gregson looked confused; either that, or he had another piece of information he thought was need-to-know. “It’s just a name. Who cares?”

“Just curious,” Keo said.

“How many people did you kill in the town?” Jordan asked.

Gregson didn’t answer her.

“How many?” she asked again.

“I don’t know; we didn’t exactly get close enough to count,” Gregson said. “A lot, I guess. I just drove. The others did the shooting. The mission was to leave just enough behind.”

“‘Just enough’ for what?” Keo asked.

“So they can tell the others what happened.”

“You want them to know. The other collaborators, in the other towns.”

“Yeah,” Gregson nodded. “To let everyone know there’s something worse than the ghouls out here. Us. We killed just enough to make our point.”

“Hundreds?” Jordan said. “Did you kill hundreds?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Because they’re the enemy,” Gregson said. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us. If you’re against us, then you’re the enemy, and the enemy doesn’t deserve mercy. This is war, lady. We’re trying to take back the planet.” He looked to Keo. “You should understand that. How long have you been fighting these assholes out here?”

“You sonofabitch,” Jordan said. “There are women and children in those towns!”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” Jordan was almost screaming at him now. “What the hell does that mean?”

Gregson craned his head toward her, shouting back, “Bullshit, that’s what that means! They stopped being women and children the moment they agreed to become food for the skin meats! They’re just targets now!”

“You bastard…”

“Fuck off!”

Jordan reached for her gun as Gregson scrambled up from the ground, the two of them moving almost simultaneously. Keo beat them both to the punch by hitting Gregson in the side of the face with the stock of his M4, sending the tank driver collapsing back to the ground.

“Don’t,” Keo said, putting one hand over Jordan’s arm as she aimed her Glock at Gregson.

“Why the hell not?” Jordan asked, almost spitting the words out.

Why the hell not? Keo thought, realizing he didn’t really have a good answer for her. He had been worried he had just killed three U.S. Army soldiers earlier, but that turned out not to be the case. Gregson and his friends were something else entirely. Something that was either bad news or very bad news. He still hadn’t decided yet.

He pushed Jordan’s gun hand down. She resisted at first — he could see the defiance in her eyes, how badly she wanted to pull the trigger — but eventually relented.

“Why not?” she asked again, staring back at him. “You heard what he did. He killed God knows how many people back there. There are pregnant women and children in all those towns, Keo. He slaughtered pregnant women.”

“They were the enemy,” Gregson said softly. He had pushed himself back up to a sitting position against the tank and was wiping his bloody mouth with his shirt. “They made their choice, now they have to pay for it. This is just the beginning. If you thought yesterday was bloody, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He grinned at them; it was a grotesque sight with his teeth covered in blood. “Mercer’s got plans. Big plans.”

“What was it called?” Keo asked him.

“What?” Gregson said.

“The town you were assigned to attack.”

“T-something. Benoit knew the exact name, but one town sounds the same as all the others to me. T-this, T-that.”

“Was it T18?”

Gregson shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Benoit.” He glanced over at the first uniformed body Keo had shot. The man lay on his stomach among the blackened grass a few meters away, the back of his bald head reflecting the bright sun. “Oh, I guess you can’t.”

“I guess not,” Keo said.

He drew his Glock a second time and shot Gregson in the right thigh.

“Shit!” Gregson shouted, falling sideways to the ground while clutching his leg. “What’d you do that for?”

Keo ignored him and looked at Jordan. She was staring at Gregson, the hate from a few seconds ago mostly gone from her face, replaced by something that looked almost like sympathy.

“Why didn’t you let me shoot him?” she asked quietly.

“You’re a good person, Jordan,” Keo said. “I’m not.”

Gregson wasn’t lying about the tank being out of fuel. It was bone dry. They had also burned through their entire armory yesterday, including the flamethrower, and were just left with small arms. Keo salvaged four AR-15 rifles and a can of ammo with 5.56 rounds, which would go a long way in backing up his M4’s dwindling magazine, though he was more grateful to find MREs and water bottles tucked inside two storage compartments. There was a pile of civilian clothes in the back, but they were splattered with blood from the two tankers Keo had shot through the hatch.

He collected the rifles and stuffed the water and food into a couple of tactical backpacks when he saw the edge of a brown paper sticking out of a pants pocket on one of the dead man. Keo tugged it out, then unfolded it.

It was a map of Texas, with black markers circling towns around the southeast part of the state. Not the big cities like Sunport or Galveston, or even Houston, but the smaller, surrounding ones. There were red X’s over some of them — about a dozen in all — but the rest were just circled.

“Shit,” he said under his breath when he recognized one of the towns that had been circled.

Wilmont. Or, as he had come to know it the last few weeks, T18.

Gillian. Pregnant Gillian.

He had left her behind with Jay because there was no other choice, and after the week he’d been through, he was convinced it was the right decision. But now…

Keo put everything down and concentrated on the map. One of the places with an X over it was marked as T22, and it was somewhere on the other side of Sunport.

What was that Gregson had said?

“We destroyed it. Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”

So what did that mean for T18, which was missing an X? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Or maybe as far as Gregson’s crew knew, T18 wasn’t their concern because it was someone else’s job.

A lot of maybes, and most of them bad.

So what else is new?

Footsteps, just before Jordan’s head appeared in the opening above him. “Find anything useful?”

“Just one,” he said, and handed the map up to her.

Jordan sat on the turret, put the map in her lap, and looked at it for a moment. “What am I looking at? What do the X’s stand for?”

“Targets.”

“Oh.” She paused for a moment, then, “They have T18 circled, but not X’ed out.” She looked down through the opening at him. “Gillian.”

“Yeah,” he said, and climbed up with the rifles and backpacks.

He settled on the turret and glanced around him. The difference between the charred fields and the white sand of the beach on the other side was startling. Keo collected his thoughts and considered his options.

He had guns, ammo, and now, extra food and water. He could see himself spending a few more months down here in peace. Even if Lara never showed up with the Trident—and there was no reason for them to, without further contact from him — he could be satisfied. Even more so, if Jordan decided to stay behind, too.

It wouldn’t be such a bad life — or however long he had left. Not bad at all.

“What about Gillian?” Jordan asked, bringing him back. “What if T18 is next on the list?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Keo, we have to go back for her. She’s our friend.”

“I tried that, Jordan. We both tried that. Remember?”

“Things are different now. There are tanks rampaging through towns. Gillian doesn’t know that. She stayed because she thought her baby would be safer in T18. Well, it’s not. Not anymore.”

It’s not my problem, he thought, but didn’t say it.

“Keo,” Jordan said.

“She’s still safer with Jay,” he said. “Especially now that the towns know they’re being hit. They’ll take more precautions, put up proper defenses. Protecting their doctors will be top priority.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“It’s what I would do, and I’m just a shooter. The guys running these places are smarter than me. You saw the setup they had back there. It’s like that everywhere.”

Jordan didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if she had given up trying to convince him. She looked past him instead, at the ocean on the other side of the burnt field. Wind blew her short blonde hair into her eyes, and she had to brush it aside.

They sat in silence for the longest time, but of course, it didn’t last.

“So when you are going back for her?” Jordan finally asked.

He sighed, staring out at the impossibly blue Gulf of Mexico. “As soon as I find a working vehicle.”

He didn’t see it, but he thought he could feel her smiling triumphantly behind him.

“Shut up,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t the world’s biggest idiot (maybe just Texas’s), when a small black dot appeared against the water’s surface in the distance. He stared at it for a moment, wondering if he was seeing things, but that couldn’t have been it, because the object was definitely getting bigger…as it got closer.

“Is that…?” Jordan said.

“Yeah,” he nodded, reaching for a rifle. “That’s a boat heading this way.”

CHAPTER 16 LARA

“You look like shit, Keo,” Maddie said. “I mean, no offense, but compared to when we last saw you, it looked like you got caught in a combine.”

“He was definitely handsomer the last time we saw him,” Bonnie chimed in.

“I don’t know, scars give a man character.”

“Yeah? Then Keo went and got himself a big ass load of character.”

Keo smirked at the two women. “Nice to see you guys, too. Especially you, Bonnie.”

Bonnie rolled her eyes at him. “Give it a rest. I gave you plenty of chances when you were on the Trident.”

“What can I say. I’m an idiot.”

“Won’t get any arguments from me.”

Bonnie glanced past Keo to the woman standing on the road behind him. She was holding a rifle, with another one slung over her back, and looked as if she was waiting for some kind of signal that everything was okay. Keo did that now, turning and waving, then slung his own weapon. The woman nodded back but didn’t come over.

“Is that her?” Bonnie asked. “The one you kept turning me down for?”

“That’s Jordan,” Keo said. “Things didn’t work out with Gillian. Long story.”

“Must be.”

“What did happen to your face?” Lara asked.

“That’s part of the long story.”

“I guess we’re going to be here awhile,” Maddie said. She looked over at Lara. “Where do you want us, boss?”

“Stay close,” Lara said. When Maddie had started back toward the boat they had arrived ashore in, she said to Bonnie, “Keo’s friend has the right idea. We don’t want anyone sneaking up on us. Coming here was risky enough; let’s not push our luck.”

Bonnie nodded, then said to Keo, “Don’t be a stranger,” before heading up the beach with her M4.

Lara noticed that the ex-model walked a bit wobbly at first and was slowly adjusting with every step. The result of living on the Trident for so long, she thought; they had all become used to the boat’s movements. She wondered if she looked that odd. Maddie, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems re-familiarizing herself with walking on land.

She glanced around them again, unable to fully shake the paranoia. The place had looked deserted when they were on approach, but after last night, she wasn’t willing to just accept anything at face value. These days, ambushes were easy to come by and harder to spot from a distance, and God knew you could hear a motor coming for miles if you had ears.

“Yachting accident?” Keo asked, looking at her bandaged arm.

“Something like that.”

With Bonnie now watching the road, Keo’s friend walked down the beach toward them. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, and younger than Lara by at least a few years.

The woman stuck out her hand. “You must be Lara. Keo has told me a lot about you.”

Lara shook her hand. “All good, I hope.”

“Eh.”

They exchanged a brief, easy smile.

“We were afraid you might have left when I didn’t radio in yesterday,” Keo said.

“I should have, especially after the fireworks show last night. You wanna fill me in on what happened? I guess I should have known you would be right in the middle of it.”

“Long story.”

“Of course it is.”

“Where’s the tugboat?”

“It’s out there somewhere.”

“Who’s captaining it?”

“Blaine.”

“What happened to el capitan?”

“He’s been dealt with.”

“Hunh.”

“Yeah.”

He fixed her with a long look. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed or disturbed. Keo had never been particularly easy to read, and the weeks they’d spent on the Trident together hadn’t helped her understand him any better. Then again, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a lot on her mind at the time. Or still did.

“Didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.

“He didn’t give me much of a choice.” Then, because she didn’t want him to ask any more questions about Gage, “So, where is it? The last time I saw one in person, it was in a museum and I was ten.”

“You know about that?”

“Impossible not to. Woke me up from this,” she said, holding up her left arm.

“This way.” Keo turned around, and with Jordan, led her up the beach.

“Was it them?” Lara asked.

“Depends on who you mean by ‘them,’” Keo said.

“The U.S. Army.”

“Then no.”

“Dammit.”

“You were hoping, too?” Jordan asked, looking back at her.

Lara nodded and told her about Beecher, a colonel who was in charge of a few thousand soldiers and civilians somewhere in Colorado. “That’s the only remnants of the U.S. Army I know of, and I got the sense they were barely surviving up there.”

“What about the Navy?”

“We haven’t run across them the entire time we’ve been in the Gulf.”

She saw the disappointment on Jordan’s face before the other woman turned back around as they stepped onto the road. Bonnie had moved further inland, her M4 cradled alertly in front of her, watching the other direction. Lara thought she could see some kind of domed buildings blinking in the distance.

She looked back at Keo. “You wanna tell me what was so important I had to drop everything and meet you down here?”

“I wanted you to meet someone,” Keo said. “But he’s not here right now. We got separated two nights ago.”

“Who was it?”

“Let’s call him Frank.”

Lara caught Jordan sneaking a look at Keo and saw him shaking his head back in reply. Both movements had been very slight and were hardly noticeable — except they were walking right in front of her, and she was staring at them.

Now what was that about?

“Why did you want me to meet him?” she asked instead.

“He had information about the ghouls,” Keo said.

“Like what?”

“How they operate, their chain of command, all the nitty-gritty stuff.” Then, he added, almost as an afterthought, “He also said he knew how to beat them.”

She perked up. “How?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t say? How does he not say, and how do you not force him to tell you something like that, Keo?”

Keo hesitated, and she thought he was picking his words very carefully when he said, “It’s complicated, but he would only talk to you.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keo…”

“I don’t know, Lara. Frank’s not the most talkative type. You can ask him all the questions you want when you meet him.”

They were moving through the field beyond the beach now, tall brown grass slapping at her legs. She thought she could smell something burning, like someone had left a stove on, but it was mostly obfuscated by the breeze coming from the nearby ocean.

“Tell me something,” Lara said.

“If I can…” Keo said.

“Do you trust this guy?”

“I do,” he said without hesitation.

“Why?”

“He saved my life. Three times now.”

“Mine, too,” Jordan said.

“What is he, some kind of collaborator?” Lara asked.

“Sort of,” Keo said.

“Sort of?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“That seems to be a common theme with you today.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “Trust me when I say this wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. Things…got complicated.”

She had more questions — so many more questions — but the sight of the grass around them turning from brown and green to almost entirely charred black, with large swaths that had been burned completely away leaving behind only blackened dirt, caught her by surprise. The air had also begun to shift noticeably from bearable to almost suffocating.

“Here,” Keo said, holding out a small T-shirt to her.

She took it gratefully and pushed it against her mouth and nose. In front of her, Jordan did the same thing with another shirt, but Keo seemed to be fine with the air. Maybe he had just gotten used to it, though she couldn’t understand how.

She forgot about everything else when she saw the tank sitting in the fields in front of them. It was so out of place and impossible to miss, especially the cannon jutting out from it. The tan-colored vehicle was surrounded by large swaths of charred earth and what looked like the carcasses of two-story houses that had been toppled like dominoes, except for a few that still, somehow, remained standing. She almost lost her balance when a crater that shouldn’t be there popped up in front of her.

“Watch your step,” Keo said.

She thought he was talking about the craters until she heard the crunch. Lara looked down at the remains of an arm — the radius was missing, but half of the ulna was still intact — as it crumbled under her boot. The fingers were all there, but the thumb had been blown off. She stepped over it, then around a small pile of bones — then another. They were scattered everywhere amongst the scorched ground, their numbers increasing exponentially the closer she got to the tank. Every step she took produced a loud crunch that made her wince.

The carnage was spread out, as if the battle had dragged from one side of the field to the other, leaving death everywhere. There was no blood, but she didn’t expect to find any because the ghouls bled a different kind of blood that evaporated against sunlight. Even though she couldn’t smell most of the acidic stench that still lingered in the air thanks to Keo’s T-shirt, she could smell enough that she wished she were already on the Trident again, or at least back on the beach.

She focused on the tank instead, hoping that would take her mind off everything else. “How many tanks?”

“Just the one,” Keo said.

“And you’re sure it’s not U.S. Army?”

“It may have belonged to Uncle Sam once upon a time, but not anymore.”

The crack of a bone snapping under her boots made her flinch, but she willed herself not to look down.

“Did you find out who they were?” she asked.

Keo pointed at a twenty-something man sitting against the tank’s wheels. He was only wearing an undershirt and khaki shorts, and one of his thighs was bandaged. His face was pale under the bright sun, and he didn’t look like he could keep his eyes open as he watched them approach.

“His name’s Gregson,” Keo said. “Had to kill the rest of his crew.”

“‘Had to?’” she said.

“One of them went for their gun and, well, shit went downhill from there.”

“Doesn’t it always with you?”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

Gregson blinked up at her as they stopped in front of him. He looked paler and much weaker up close, and there was a thick clump of blood underneath him. Lara had seen enough people bleeding to last a lifetime and knew without a doubt this man wasn’t going to survive the day unless someone treated his wound.

“What’s with you and shooting people in the leg?” she asked Keo.

“I’m developing bad habits,” he said. “Used to be I’d just shoot them in the head.” He said to Gregson, “Tell her what you told us. Everything, including what you were using this bad boy for.” He banged on the tank, producing dull thuds. “Don’t leave out any details.”

“I need medical attention,” Gregson said. His voice was weak and his lips were cracked.

“You’ll get it after we go over it again,” Keo said.

Gregson squinted at Keo, as if trying to gauge his trustworthiness.

Good luck with that, she wanted to tell him. She had known Keo longer, and even she couldn’t tell if he had meant what he just promised.

“We had a mission…” Gregson began.

She listened to Gregson talking in a slow, almost uninterested drawl. He spoke in such a matter-of-fact monotone that she had to remind herself she was standing in the middle of a warzone surrounded by the bones of ghouls and not in a park somewhere discussing the weather.

Jesus Christ. What’s going on out here?

When he was done, Gregson lowered his head and stared down at the ground. That was, if his eyes were even still open, which she couldn’t tell for sure. He seemed to have so little energy left after talking that he might have even forgotten to demand that medical attention Keo had promised.

She looked over at Keo, standing on top of the tank behind Gregson, looking back in the direction of the domed buildings she had glimpsed earlier. Jordan was turned the other way, back toward the beach with the shirt pressed against half of her face. They had heard Gregson’s story already and might not even have noticed he had stopped talking.

“How many towns have they attacked so far?” she asked Keo.

He shrugged. “Apparently they were at it all day yesterday. That was the plan. Shock and awe. Hit hard and hit fast, before the collaborators could mount a proper defense. Sounds like they’ve been planning it for months.”

He took a folded map out of his pocket and tossed it down to her. She opened it and stared at the circled locations. There were dozens of them.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“The circles are collaborator towns in Texas.”

“I didn’t know there were so many…”

“I don’t think that’s all of them, just the ones Mercer’s people know about. Scouted in advance of yesterday.”

There had to be at least two, possibly closer to three, dozen circles in all, and all of them concentrated in the southeast. Did that mean there weren’t more in other parts of the state, or were these the only ones Mercer’s people had “scouted”? Each one was marked with a T, followed by a number. About a dozen of the towns had large red X’s scratched across them. One in particular was somewhere between the towns of Hellion and Starch.

Oh, dammit.

“I was at T18 last week,” Jordan said, walking over. She pulled the shirt down just long enough to talk. “Gillian’s there.”

“Your Gillian?” Lara asked Keo.

He nodded. “Long story.”

“Of course it is,” she said. Then, “I’ve never been to any of these places, but from what I hear, there are supposed to be a lot of people in these towns.”

“Hundreds, sometimes thousands,” Keo said.

“T18 had around 4,000 the last time I was there,” Jordan said. “A lot of the women are pregnant.”

“Enemies of the state,” Gregson said. His voice came out of nowhere and he still looked (and sounded) sapped of energy. “Take them out, and you starve the enemy.”

“‘Starve the enemy’?” Lara repeated.

“He means killing the collaborators,” Keo said. “They’re trying to take away what the ghouls prize most — the people in those towns.”

“It’s barbaric,” Jordan said. She stared daggers at Gregson, daring him to challenge her, but he’d already looked back down at the ground. “I would rather die than give blood to those things, but slaughtering them …” She shook her head. “The man who came up with that plan should be hung for war crimes.”

“They’re the enemy,” Gregson muttered to himself. “You’re with us, or you’re against us…”

“Apparently that’s the slogan,” Keo said. There wasn’t any trace of humor in his voice, and he was looking out at the ocean across the charred field. “By the way, where’s the Ranger? I expected to see him make the trip, not you.”

“I sent him, Gaby, and Nate to Starch,” she said. “That was a few days ago, before you got in touch. We’re supposed to be in Port Arthur now, waiting to pick them back up.”

“What’s in Starch?” Jordan asked.

“An underground facility built by a man named Harold Campbell. We sealed it months ago before we left for Louisiana. It has supplies, ammo, guns, and something else Will and I have always talked about retrieving, just in case.”

“Must be important for you to send them back out here,” Keo said.

I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure, she thought, but nodded and said, “Lights.”

“Lights?”

“UV lights.”

Keo looked confused, maybe even doubtful. “Lara, you can go into any store and trip over all the UV lights you can carry. You didn’t have to send the ex-Ranger and the girl to Starch for that.”

“Those lights aren’t like the ones in Starch,” she said.

“They work,” Lara said. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Ghouls turn to ash against them, the way they do against sunlight.”

“That’s a hell of a weapon,” Keo said.

“It is,” she nodded.

“And you’re only trying to retrieve these lights now?”

“We didn’t need them before. We had the island.”

“And now?”

“After you left, we talked about needing an extra layer of security, just in case. I don’t know what Harold Campbell’s people did to those lights — or what they’re actually made of — but we haven’t been able to replicate them. Danny, Gaby, and I had a long talk, and we decided sending an expedition to Starch was worth the risk. If I knew there was even a remote possibility they would be walking into the middle of a warzone…” She shook her head. “Shit, Keo, if anything happens to them…”

“You didn’t know,” Keo said. “Neither did we, until last night. It’s a big state, Lara.”

“I know,” she said, and looked past him at Bonnie, standing guard on the road with Jordan. The two women looked like they were in the middle of a conversation. She was grateful for the cool wind whipping in from the Gulf of Mexico, because they kept her from smelling the lingering fumes from the fields.

“What now?” Keo asked.

“My primary concern is keeping the Trident and everyone on it safe. And that’s what I’m going to do while we head back to Port Arthur to wait for Danny to make contact.”

“How long has it been?”

“Yesterday morning. His last position was outside a town called Hellion. Close enough to Starch that the next time he radioed in, I expected him to be doing it from inside Harold Campbell’s facility.”

“Did you say Hellion and Starch?”

She nodded somberly. “I saw them on the map.”

“He could have gone around it. The Ranger’s resourceful, bad jokes notwithstanding. And the girl’s good.”

“Gaby.”

“Yeah, her. I’m not sure about the kid with the Mohawk, though.”

She managed a smile. “He’s a good kid.”

“Yeah, but that haircut…”

“I know.”

She looked off into the ocean, in the direction where she knew Blaine and the Trident were waiting for them right now. She couldn’t see the yacht from here, which made her feel relieved. The last thing she needed was to have to fight off collaborators on the ocean, too.

“We’re dealing with a Ranger here,” Keo was saying. “I’ve crossed a few of them in my time, so don’t press the panic button just yet. At least not for another day, and maybe not even then.”

She wanted badly to agree with him, but the doubts made that impossible.

Would you have done it, Will? Or would you have been satisfied with staying on the Trident?

God, where are you when I need you most?

“What about Gillian and T18?” she asked. “How are you going to handle that one?”

“It’s tricky.”

“When is it not tricky with you?”

He grunted before glancing back at Jordan, on the road behind them with Bonnie. The two women still looked like they were in the middle of conversation.

“You got extra room for her?” he asked.

“If you’re not coming, I have a feeling she won’t, either.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

Lara gave him an almost pitying look. “For a smart guy, you can be amazingly dense at times, Keo.”

“When are people going to stop overestimating me? I keep telling everyone I’m just a guy with a gun.”

“Right,” she smiled. “You’re just a guy with a gun.”

CHAPTER 17 GABY

“How many, you think?” Nate asked.

She shook her head. “It’s hard to tell. God knows how many more are buried underneath all that.”

“It looks worse than I thought it would be.”

“It’s kind of what I expected.”

“Really?”

“Mostly.”

“I guess you have a better imagination than me.”

“Well, this looks familiar,” Danny said, climbing up the rubble behind them. He walked the short distance over and crouched next to her and looked out at the airfield. “Plan Z,” he said quietly.

“What?” she said.

“Just thinking out loud. Don’t mind me.”

She followed his gaze back out to the world beyond the hangar. Or what was left of it. If she didn’t already know she was looking at an airfield, she wouldn’t have been able to guess from the remains. The ground had taken a lot of punishment, the slabs of asphalt and concrete that made up the runway scattered across the surrounding area. The group of administrative buildings on the other side was practically invisible against the widespread destruction.

Bleached white bones poked out of the discombobulated green, brown, and gray of the obliterated field like furless prairie dogs playing hide and seek with the sun. Dead (again?) ghouls. So many that she could have started counting and never finished before nightfall, and those were just the ones she could see from her perch. How many more were hidden underneath all that loosened earth and man-made material? What about behind them right now? Or among the scorched trees that flanked the airfield?

“Cluster bombs,” Danny had said when Nate told him about the small parachutes he’d seen falling from the sky last night.

There was just enough wind to disperse most of the lingering stench of vaporized ghoul flesh, otherwise it would have been unbearable against so much unnatural death. Even so, she pulled her shirt up over half of her face, Danny and Nate doing the same next to her. Her eyes stung, a combination of the acrid smell of the dead and the scorched foliage from the woods around them.

They were crouched on a section of the hangar’s front wall that was still standing, the top half blown off by one of the blasts from last night. Pieces of the caved-in roof provided a ladder of sorts, with just enough hand and footholds to crawl up its length. The only thing left now was to hop the ten feet down to the sturdy ground below, where most of the bombs had fallen short. Or maybe the pilots had hit exactly what they were supposed to and the hangar wasn’t one of them.

Pilots. Because there was more than one plane last night. How many? Maybe it didn’t matter. One or two, or ten of those Warthogs would still have changed everything. The bloody mess at T29 was proof of that.

“Well?” a voice said from behind them, from inside the hangar. “What’s the verdict?”

Gaby looked back and down at Mason, standing at the bottom of the incline they had climbed up earlier, shielding his eyes in their direction. The sun glinted off the bloodied weapon in his right hand; his way of warning them that he was ready should they try anything.

“Climb up and find out for yourself,” Danny said.

“No thanks,” Mason said. “I’m going to let you go out there first, then I’ll follow later. Go our separate ways after that. No muss, no fuss.”

“What about your friends?”

“What about them? After last night, they can go fuck themselves. And as far as I’m concerned, the three of you never existed.” His eyes fell on her when he added, “Especially you. No offense, but you’re some bad luck, kid. Josh figured that out too late, unfortunately for him.”

She gritted her teeth at the comment but managed to stop herself from responding. There was no point. Mason wasn’t worth wasting her breath on.

Danny, next to her, snorted. “And they say friendship among thieves gets a bad rap.” He nodded to her and Nate. “Let’s find out if anything survived last night’s jamboree. Also, I don’t wanna be walking around with just our sticks and berries to throw if his friends come back looking for him.”

“We’ll be lucky if we can find a bullet in all that,” Nate said.

“How are we getting down?” Gaby asked.

“Jump,” Danny said.

“Jump?”

“Just pretend you’re a really big bunny,” Danny said, before taking a step toward the edge and, saluting them, jumped down.

“Anything?” Gaby asked as she rolled a two-by-two chunk of concrete off a rifle stock, only to find the pulverized rest on the other side.

Twisted metal rebar stuck out of the blocks, sharp edges scraping against her palms. She let go and moved on. The last thing she needed right now was to get gashed in the arms or legs because she wasn’t paying attention.

“Dick Butkus,” Danny said from a few yards away. He turned over a piece of landing strip and finding nothing useful, straightened up with a heavy grunt. “Less than dick. Right now, I’d settle for a tiny bit of dick.” Then, he added quickly, “Don’t tell Carly I said that.”

Despite everything, she managed a small smile anyway.

They had been moving steadily up the airfield, hoping to find something they could use as a weapon, always wary of the remains of the buildings up ahead. An hour and a lot of physical labor later, they still had nothing to show for it, and hour two was creeping up on them fast. Nate, having spread out to their right side, had come up just as empty-handed.

Gaby spent almost as much time not falling into holes that hadn’t been there yesterday as she did trying not to roll rubble onto her feet or leg. Thank God she was still wearing boots, pants, and a long-sleeve shirt, or all the gathered dust from last night’s explosive booby traps and concentrated bombing would have covered her from head to toe. Even so, she still had to keep her shirt over most of her face to spare her senses from not just the stench of evaporated ghoul flesh, but other harmful elements still clinging to the air.

A saying of her father’s came to mind — as much as he hated his office job, at least he wasn’t “digging ditches.” She felt like she was digging ditches right now…with her bare hands.

There, something on the ground.

She crouched next to a gun barrel jutting out between a skeletal chest and a block of half-buried concrete. It wasn’t much, but it was about a foot long and heavy enough to make a decent blunting weapon. She pulled it out and put it into her back pocket and continued on.

The closer they got to the buildings, the more pieces of guns and shredded black uniforms they stumbled across. Most of the collaborators from last night had stayed behind at the structures, but not all of them. Not that it mattered. Out here or over there, they were still sitting ducks when the Warthogs swooped in. She tried to imagine the terror of hearing that awful bellowing noise. Did they even know what it was? It was strange to say, but she would have preferred not to know.

“Are we going to talk about it?” she said after a while.

“Talk about what?” Danny said.

“You know what. Last night. That creature… It protected us, Danny.”

“Was that what it was doing?”

“Wasn’t it?”

He shrugged and tossed away the broken remains of a rifle’s magazine he had picked up. “Maybe it was greedy, wanted us all for itself.”

“You know that’s bullshit,” she said, stepping over a terribly deformed head buried in the rubble, wide-open blue eyes staring up at her. She didn’t know where the rest of the man’s body was, or if it was even still attached to him underneath his asphalt tomb.

“Do I?” Danny said.

“It saved us, Danny.”

“I have no idea what happened last night. Willie boy was always the brains of the operation. If he was here, he’d probably have come up with a dozen theories for you by now. Unfortunately for us, I’m less theory-inclined. Or capable.”

“So you didn’t spend all of last night and most of this morning replaying what happened in your mind?”

“I didn’t say that. But I am telling you I didn’t come up with anything that even remotely makes any lick of sense.” He glanced over. “You?”

“Same.”

“So there you go. What’s that old saying about keeping your trap shut if you don’t know anything?”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“Touché,” Danny said. He glanced over at Nate, who had expanded his area further to their right. “Found any gold in them thar hills, Nate-o-rama?”

Nate looked over and shook his head.

“Guess the grass ain’t any greener on the other side,” Danny said. Then, a few seconds later, “Hey-yo.” He bent down and picked something up from the ground. “Eureka.”

He turned a knife over in his hand. It was a Ka-Bar and it looked mostly intact, though the grip and a part of the serrated section was blackened by fire.

“Lucky you,” Gaby said.

“Mommy did always say I had the bestest luck. You know what they used to call me in college?”

“Lucky Danny?”

“Best Luck Danny. Now that I think about it, Lucky Danny would have been preferable.” He grinned and slipped the knife into his back pocket, then rubbed his hands together. “Now, let’s see what we can do about getting Lucky Danny an M4. Big money, big money…”

“What time is it?” Nate asked.

“Time for you to get your own damn watch,” Danny said.

“I had one, but some assholes took it.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Danny glanced down at his watch. “Two hours till noon. That hot date’s going to have to wait.”

“Shhh, Gaby’s here.”

Gaby ignored them and said, “I didn’t know we’ve been searching for that long.”

“Long enough for Mason to finally poke his head out of the ground and see what all the fuss is about,” Danny said, looking back across the airfield at the hangar on the other side.

It was the only structure still standing (if barely) and was hard to miss. Mason was crouched on the same spot she and the others had been earlier this morning. She waited for him to move, but he didn’t; he seemed content to sit up there like some gargoyle, biding his time.

“Are we really just going to let him go?” Nate asked. He shielded his eyes as he looked back at Mason.

“You want to take him out?” Danny asked.

“We could take him. Shank or not.”

She glanced over at Nate, surprised to hear him making the suggestion and not Danny. Nate was always the idealist, the easygoing guy who turned the other cheek when he could. It was one of the reasons why she liked him, because a part of her was afraid she had gone too far over the edge. Nate, in so many ways, balanced her out.

It was T29, she thought. It had affected her, but it had altered Nate even more.

“Fuck him, he’s not worth the trouble,” Danny said. “One or a dozen more collaborators running around out here won’t make any difference, but we do need to get the hell gone before more show up with something other than a knife the size of their dicks in their hands.”

Gaby stood up from the remaining half of a large oak desk she had been resting on. It stuck out of the ground from what she assumed was the main administrative building, surrounded by charred furniture and toppled walls, some with holes larger than her fists in them. Her boots had been resting on a deflated tire, the rest of the vehicle hidden somewhere in the rubble.

“Where do we go from here?” Nate asked.

“Starch,” Danny said. “We still have a mission to accomplish.”

“How far off course are we?” she asked.

“Sixty miles. More or less.”

She sighed. “Sixty miles, more or less, is a lot of walking, Danny.”

“It’ll be good exercise,” he said before pulling his shirt back up over his mouth and nose. “Come on; let’s split this joint. All this death and destruction is really bringing me down.”

She followed him and Nate, stepping over a small section of still-standing wall and around a half-burned American flag jutting out from a pile of bricks. A blood-smeared arm, its owner invisible somewhere underneath the stack, waved to her as she passed.

Gaby shot another glance across the field and at the hangar. Mason, still on the wall, little more than a stick figure in the distance. She wondered if he was watching them back, waiting for them to disappear before making his move.

“Hey,” Nate said from in front of her.

She looked over as he took a charred but still-in-one-piece bottle of water out of a pants pocket and held it out to her. There was some water sloshing around inside, just enough to make her lips suddenly wet.

Gaby took it gratefully. “Nice find.”

“Don’t tell Danny,” he smiled.

“Don’t tell Danny what?” Danny said from further in front of them.

“That your jokes suck,” Nate said.

“Hey, I don’t take critique from people with monkey haircuts.”

They followed Danny out of the ruins and toward a winding road. The trees flanking it were scorched and blackened, their leaves stripped bare from last night’s fire blast. The entrance looked almost foreboding, like a mouth with teeth waiting to swallow her up.

Gaby took out the gun barrel from her back pocket and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

She should have been afraid of the dark parts of the woods, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t explain why, exactly, but maybe it had a little something to do with how Mercer’s people had so thoroughly devastated the area that there was still gray ash lingering over the two-lane road as they walked over it.

She stopped fearing the woods and concentrated on other potential dangers instead. They were flanked by guardrails, and a sign they had passed a few minutes back confirmed they had been in Larkin Airport. There was no housing in the area, just miles of woods as far as she could tell. She hadn’t seen anything that indicated the presence of the town of Larkin itself, but if the airport was here, it stood to reason the town couldn’t be further down the road.

There was a lot of shade, which made the December weather even chillier than it had been in the airfield, where they were standing directly under the sun without protection. She hadn’t realized how many extra layers the assault vest had given her until she didn’t have it anymore. Minus her equipment and weapons, she felt naked and exposed, though the sounds of birds chirping among the trees helped to alleviate some of her wariness.

“You know where we’re going, right?” Nate asked after a while.

Danny, walking about ten yards in front of them, nodded. “Mercer showed me his map. Starch is west.”

“But we’re going east.”

“I noticed that. We’ll look for a vehicle inside Larkin, re-gear as best we can, and then start west.”

“Ah.”

“Is that approval I hear?”

“Eh,” Nate shrugged.

“Tough road,” Danny said.

Gaby smiled. Danny and Nate bickering like an old married couple helped convince her they weren’t screwed, that they could still make it out of Texas alive. She hadn’t realized how much she missed having the constant moving waves of the Gulf of Mexico under her until they were gone. Of course, there was also the food, the company, and the safety of the Trident. She missed all those things even more—

“Car!” Danny hissed in front of them, just before he darted right.

Gaby didn’t know why, but she went left. She hopped the guardrail and slipped behind the trunk of a large tree, Nate doing the same with another tree two feet over. She had been afraid he had gone right with Danny and was glad to see him hugging the trunk next to her.

She looked across the road at Danny, nearly invisible behind another gnarled tree on the other side.

“Someone asked for a ride?” Nate whispered.

It was a beat-up red pickup truck. A Chevy, by the emblem on the front grill. Like the vehicle itself, the engine had seen a lot of wear and tear, and Gaby got the impression getting it started was half the battle, and keeping it running was the other. She spotted a figure behind the wheel, wearing a cap, but the man was still too far up the road for her to make out any details.

The truck was slow, moving at barely twenty miles per hour. She couldn’t tell if that was because the Chevy couldn’t go any faster or if the driver wasn’t certain his vehicle could handle any more speed. Either way, it seemed to take the truck forever to rumble up the road toward them. She realized now that they could have taken their time hiding and would still not have been spotted.

“Damn, that thing’s slow,” Nate whispered. “I think I can get out and push it down here faster.”

“Give it a try,” she smiled back.

“Nah, I don’t feel like getting run over.”

“It’s moving way too slow to run anyone over.”

“Yeah, but why take the chance? This tree is so nice and comfy…”

Eventually the pickup finally reached them, and as it was passing them by, she looked into the front passenger door at the side profile of the driver. He was leaning into the steering wheel, concentrating on the road ahead. She knew now why Danny had gone right — so he would be closer to the driver side.

Ping! as something struck the other side of the truck.

The driver instinctively jammed on the brake, and even as the tires squealed against the road, Gaby caught a flash of movement as Danny bounded over the guardrail behind the vehicle and leaped into the truck bed. Gaby didn’t even know Danny had the ability to move that fast. Where the hell had he been hiding that kind of speed all this time?

Before she knew what she was doing, Gaby had slipped out from behind the tree and was running back to the road.

“Gaby!” Nate hissed behind her, somehow managing to shout and whisper at the same time.

She didn’t stop, because she couldn’t. Danny was out there, exposed.

She leaped over the guardrail, and, ducking to lower her profile, ran toward the passenger-side door just as the driver climbed out on the other side, his door creaking loudly as he pried it open. Gaby caught a glimpse of a rifle over the top of the cab, and the driver, visible from the neck down through the windows, was already turning toward the back where Danny was.

“Hey!” she shouted.

The driver seemed to freeze momentarily, as if unsure of where to point his weapon. It was just enough of a distraction for Danny to jump out of the truck bed, the vehicle dipping and rising slightly as he did so.

A loud bang! as the driver fired, and Gaby thought, Oh no, oh no, and raced around the front hood and to the other side—

The driver was on the road, the rifle still clutched in his right hand but pointed away from Danny, who was straddling the man’s chest. Danny had the sharp edge of his fire-kissed Ka-Bar pressed up against the truck driver’s exposed skin. The man was gasping, the round eyes underneath the cap’s brim impossibly wide.

It was a girl.

She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with long auburn hair spilling out from under the weathered cap. She was grimacing up at Danny, simultaneously trying not to swallow for fear of the knife pressed against her throat and wanting desperately to swing the rifle up and shoot him.

“Gaby,” Danny said.

She hurried over and reached for the rifle, making the girl’s eyes flicker over to her in alarm while her fingers tightened on the weapon.

“Oh, come on,” Danny said, almost exasperated. “I hate to be chauvinistic about this, but I’m clearly on top here.”

The driver sighed, and Gaby wrestled the weapon from her. She stepped back and glanced up and down the road, listening for signs of another vehicle. There had been hundreds of collaborators at the airfield last night, all of them buried under the rubble this morning. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more still in the area that could have heard the girl’s gunshot.

“Oh shit, you’re bleeding,” Nate said as he rounded the back of the truck.

Gaby thought he was talking to her, but no, it was Danny. Blood dripped from the bottom of his right ear, where the bullet had creased him.

Danny wiped at the scratch. “You shot me.”

“You threw something at my car!” the girl shouted back.

“It was just a rock. Relax.”

Gaby noticed a large dent in the driver-side door.

“A couple swings with a hammer, and it’s good as new,” Danny said. “You got insurance, right?”

“You can’t take my truck!” the girl shouted (too loudly).

“Afraid I can, and I must.”

“You can’t!”

“Yes, I can.” Danny stood up, taking the knife away with him. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

The girl didn’t answer him. She stood up, stumbling a bit and cradling her left arm. Her elbow was scraped and bloodied, and she kept looking back at the vehicle.

“What’s inside?” Gaby asked.

The girl gave her a quick, scared glance. Gaby wondered if she ever looked that young, even before the world ended.

“We’re going to take the truck,” Gaby said. “If you have something in there that you want to keep, speak up now.”

“Aren’t you generous,” Danny said.

“We’re already taking her truck; might as well let her keep whatever we don’t need.”

“We should hurry up and go, guys,” Nate said, walking over to them. “No telling who might have heard that gunshot.”

“Alice,” the girl said.

“Alice?” Danny repeated.

“Alice, come out,” the girl said. She wasn’t talking to them.

Danny backed up as the driver-side passenger door opened and a small figure scrambled out in jeans and boots. Both articles of clothing looked about a couple of sizes too large for her, but they were cinched in place by a belt. She had big brown eyes and looked nervously from Danny to Gaby before running over and grabbing the bigger girl around the waist.

“Well, damn,” Danny sighed.

CHAPTER 18 KEO

“You think she bought it?” Jordan asked, watching the boat as it faded into the distance. In a few seconds, they wouldn’t be able to tell there were three heavily-armed women in a tender out there in the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.

You should be on that boat too, pal. So why aren’t you?

“Bought what?” he said.

“About Frank.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But not the whole truth.”

He shrugged. “Close enough.”

“I thought she’d, I don’t know, press you more on him.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind, and when you’ve been through as much as she has, you learn to prioritize. The better question is, why aren’t you on that boat with Lara heading back to the Trident?”

“Are we going through this again?”

She sounded exasperated, though he couldn’t understand why. He had offered her a chance at probably the best thing that was going to come around in a long time — space on the Trident, out there somewhere, safe from all this madness — and she’d turned it down.

Just like you did. So who’s the bigger idiot?

Probably a tie…

“Gillian’s my friend,” Jordan said. “I have a lot of friends back in T18. I’m not going to stand by and watch them get massacred by Mercer. Not if I can do something about it.”

“I’m just going back for Gillian and no one else, Jordan.”

“There’s nothing that says we have to stay tied at the hips when we get there. You go do your thing, and I’ll do mine.” She turned around and began walking up the beach, back to the road. “You coming?”

He sighed, then turned to follow her. “What about Tobias?”

“What about him?”

“You know where he is right now?”

“The backup location. He should still be there, unless something’s happened.” She glanced back at him. “You want to ask him for help,” she added. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “Unless he’s still licking his wounds, then we could use a few more guns. Or a dozen.”

“So it’s ‘we’ now?”

“If you insist on sticking around, we should at least do this together. Strength in numbers, and all that. Will he help?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will. I can’t see him sitting by and letting Mercer’s people run a tank through T18. Not after everything he—we—went through to save them.”

“We’ll need a vehicle. Can’t walk all the way back to League City. Well, we can, but I’d prefer not to.”

“Too bad the tank’s out of fuel. Maybe you can push it and I’ll steer.”

“What am I, the Hulk?”

“I thought you didn’t read comic books.”

“I don’t, but everyone knows the Hulk. Big green guy with ripped short-shorts.”

“Close,” she chuckled. “Anyway, if you don’t wanna push me, maybe you can carry me. Let me ride piggyback.”

“Only if we take turns.”

She gave him a brief smile, and he returned it.

“I like this better,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“When you’re not being an asshole.”

“When was I ever an asshole?”

“About half the time you open your mouth.”

He snorted and got another grin from her.

“You really think he’s still out there?” Jordan asked as they stepped up onto the road. She didn’t have to say who “he” was. “Tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know.”

“You sounded pretty confident with Lara. I almost believed you.”

“I guess I’m getting better at lying.”

“How was it supposed to work, anyway? You were just going to introduce Frank to her? ‘Hey, Lara, this is Frank. Frank, this is Lara. You kids chat.’ And what, she wouldn’t ask any of the obvious questions, like why she’s talking to a ghoul?”

“Funny, that’s what I asked him the last time we were together in Sunport.”

“What did he say?”

Keo shrugged. “I got the sense he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or if he had, he didn’t feel like telling me.”

There were two trucks, both Ford F-150s, which at this point Keo was sure was as ubiquitous to Texas as dickheads with guns trying to kill him. The vehicles were white and tan, both covered in dirt and mud, looking well-used. They were moving on large tires that chewed up the highway at a steady pace toward the beach.

He was expecting some kind of military hardware on display, but no, there were just two guys in the back of each truck, with two more inside. He couldn’t make out faces at this distance, even looking through a pair of binoculars he’d gotten from Gregson’s tank, but he could see just enough to know they were wearing black long-sleeve uniforms.

Collaborators.

He lay flat on his stomach in the fields, ten meters from the road. This part of the beach still had tall, swaying grass that was untouched by the tank’s flamethrower. Somewhere on the other side of the two-lane road was Jordan, waiting for his signal.

“Full-auto,” he said into the radio now, not bothering to whisper because the trucks were still too far away to overhear. The radios, like the binoculars and the spare ammo he had on him, were salvaged from the tank.

“Spray and pray?” Jordan said through the radio. He thought he detected a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Hopefully throw a little aiming in there, too. I’ll take the first truck, and you concentrate on the second one. Shoot anything that moves.”

She didn’t answer that time.

“Jordan,” he said. “Shoot anything that moves. We only need one working vehicle. Take out the two in the back first. Don’t stop shooting until they both go down. Then focus on the ones inside. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

“Jordan…”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Keo,” she said, sounding slightly annoyed. “I was outside T18, running around with Tobias for months before you showed up. I can handle this.”

“I know you can,” he said, hoping it was at least convincing.

The collaborators charging toward him now had already seen the Abrams parked out there under the sun behind him. It was hard to miss, surrounded by barren earth charred black by fire. The trucks hadn’t left the road yet, so he guessed they were approaching the situation with caution, maybe a little bit afraid that cannon was still operational. Playing back what Gregson had said in his mind, Keo wondered if these incoming threats were part of the group that had fought with the tank yesterday and were just now showing up to finish what their ghoul allies had failed to do last night.

“We overshot our mark yesterday,” Gregson had said, “ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes.”

He lowered the binoculars and laid it next to his pack, which had begun to tremble slightly as the vehicles neared. The four in the truck beds were peeking over the cabs, but they clearly only had eyes for the tank parked out there in the field, which was exactly what he was hoping for.

He picked up the M4 and focused on the first truck — the white one — as it sped toward him.

Fifty meters…

Forty…

He could make out the two figures inside the cab now. Both men — one had a bright red beard and the other looked bald.

Thirty meters…

The two in the back looked nervous. Both men. Twenties. The lack of a machine gun mounted in front of them did wonders for Keo’s confidence. The last thing he wanted was to go head-to-head with a technical.

Twenty meters…

He smelled overworked tires and leaking fluid, both indications the vehicles had been on the road for some time now. He wondered how many other collaborators were running around out there, trying to deal with Mercer’s encroachment.

Ten meters!

Keo shoved every other thought away, popped up onto one knee, and looked through the red dot sight at the front windshield of the white truck. He pulled the trigger and stitched the glass from right to left, starting with the driver before picking up the front passenger, and didn’t stop shooting until the truck swerved as the man behind the steering wheel did exactly what Keo expected — he slammed on the brake instead of trying to drive through the gunfire.

The first F-150 was already skidding when Keo heard the pop-pop-pop of Jordan’s rifle from the other side of the road. Keo concentrated on his target as it came to a stop, presenting its backside to him — along with the two uniformed men scrambling around in the truck bed. They were picking themselves up, having tumbled off their feet sometime during the chaos.

Keo flicked his fire selector to semi-auto and shot the first soldier in the chest as he was rising, an AK-47 clutched clumsily in one hand. The man disappeared behind the closed tailgate, while the second one — younger than Keo had first thought; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen — was spinning around, face frozen in shock, just before Keo put two rounds into the largest part of him.

Meanwhile, the tan truck had done the exact same thing as the white one — its driver had hit the brakes when he saw the lead vehicle skidding in front of him. It always amazed Keo how poorly civilians reacted to being shot at.

He was already on his feet and racing through the grass, while at the same time angling his way back toward the highway. Jordan had continued firing, her rifle slamming round after round toward the second truck. Keo had a fresh magazine in his M4 before he was within sight of the driver, who was still alive and had spotted Keo as he stepped onto the road.

Keo put two fresh bullets into the windshield, directly over the spot where the driver was. The man twitched and must have stepped on the gas, because the truck lurched forward and barreled through the fields and kept going for a good thirty meters before finally slowing down on the other side.

He ignored the runaway truck and focused on the tan one still parked on the road in front of him. Fresh blood was splashed across the windshield, blocking his view of the passenger, but he could see the other driver just fine. The man had already opened his car door and was standing outside with his rifle, shooting over the truck bed at Jordan’s position.

Keo jogged up the road, and he was within thirty meters before the man finally heard his approach and turned around. Keo shot him through the open driver-side door window and watched the man drop to the pavement.

The man was still alive when Keo reached him, though he had dropped his rifle and was in the process of reaching for his sidearm. Keo shot him in the chest, and the man stopped moving.

“Jordan!” he shouted.

“I’m good!” she shouted back.

He hurried to the back and looked into the truck bed. There was just one body — a young woman with a blonde ponytail — lying on her back in a pool of blood, staring up at him. She was clutching her stomach with both hands, blood pumping through dirt-covered fingers as she struggled to keep breathing. For a moment he thought it was Gaby, but the cheekbones were too sharp and the nose a little too flat.

Another body lay on the highway behind the vehicle where it had fallen. A man in his thirties, his face pressed into the hot pavement.

“Clear!” Keo shouted.

Jordan picked herself up and jogged over. “You okay?” she asked.

“I’m good,” he said. “You?”

“I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Noted.”

When she reached the truck, Jordan looked into the back and saw the girl, and her face paled. Maybe this wasn’t her first rodeo, but seeing your victim up close was a different animal than shooting them from a distance while looking from behind a rifle.

“Check the other truck, just in case,” Keo said.

She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Instead, she gave the girl another look, then turned and hurried over to the white Ford parked in the grass halfway to the beach.

Keo turned back to the woman. She was still alive, if just barely. The bullet had hit her in the stomach and it didn’t matter how hard she held on; the blood wasn’t going to stop pouring out of her.

“Sorry,” Keo said, and slung his rifle and reached for his sidearm, but by the time he looked back up, the girl had stopped moving completely. She continued staring, wide-eyed, at the bright morning sun above her.

Keo put the handgun away and checked his watch: 10:16 A.M.

He glanced up the road, back at Sunport’s industrial buildings in the distance.

On the other side was T18…and Gillian.

“What about Gregson?” Jordan asked when they were back on the road in the tan Ford F-150, with the beach fading in the rearview mirror.

There was blood in the front passenger seat where Jordan had shot out the window the same time she killed the man next to it. To avoid sitting in the mess she had made, Jordan was in the backseat with the rest of their supplies, including the AR-15s he’d taken from the tank and everything they had managed to salvage from the other truck.

The driver of the vehicle had somehow managed to escape Jordan’s initial volley unscathed, until Keo killed him outside on the road, so Keo had the luxury of not sitting in someone’s blood as he drove. Not that he hadn’t done something like it before and had a feeling he’d have to do it again in the future.

“What about him?” Keo said.

“Even after everything he’s done, I don’t like the idea of leaving him out there.”

“You wanna go back and put him out of his misery?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“I don’t like leaving him out there, hurt.”

“He’s getting what he’s got coming.”

“A lot of people can say the same about you.”

“And they’d be right.”

She was watching him curiously in the rearview mirror. “You really believe that?”

“Yeah,” he said without hesitation.

“I don’t.”

“That’s because you’re a good and decent human being, Jordan.”

“When did that become a bad thing?”

“About the same time the world ended.”

She didn’t answer, and instead looked out her window at the outskirts of Sunport rolling by. He couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through her mind at the moment. Maybe it was still Gregson, or the girl she had shot. Maybe both. Or she could be wishing she had left with Lara, like he had told her to.

“Any idea who’s taken over T18 after Steve didn’t come back from Santa Marie Island?” he asked.

Jordan thought about it for a moment. Then, “A few people come to mind, but no one stands out. Steve had that place on a pretty tight leash. I would have said Jack, but he’s dead, too.”

“What’s the protocol when one of the leaders get taken out?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know how Steve got chosen in the first place.”

“Tobias never talked about it? Steve told me they used to be co-leaders.”

She shook her head. “He never did.”

“What about Gillian?”

“What about her?”

He grinned. “How do you think she’s going to react when I show back up there again?”

Jordan smiled back at him. “Gillian loves you, Keo.”

“She has a strange way of showing it.”

“Don’t blame her for what happened with Jay. We thought you were dead. It was worse for her. There were times when I didn’t think she’d make it. Not because she couldn’t physically, but because she didn’t want to.”

Keo didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet.

“In a lot of ways, that baby saved her life,” Jordan continued. “Don’t hate me, but she made the right decision. I don’t mean sleeping with Jay; I don’t know why she did that. I mean deciding to stay behind, even after you finally showed up.”

“I know,” he said.

And he did, which was why he was fully prepared to move on. The truth hurt, but it was undeniable. Gillian, in her current state, would have struggled to survive out here. Maybe if he had gotten her to the Trident, where Zoe could have helped with the pregnancy, but there was a lot of space between T18 and the Gulf of Mexico.

Besides, who was he kidding? Happy endings were for other people, not someone like him. He had come to accept that long ago, even though, for a short time there, he had almost managed to convince himself that he deserved one, too.

What an idiot. I guess we know better now, don’t we?

CHAPTER 19 LARA

“I can’t believe he didn’t come back with you,” Carly said, even before Lara had completely stepped inside the bridge of the Trident. “And after dragging our asses down here, too. You should have given him a swift kick in the balls for wasting our time.”

“He has his reasons,” Lara said.

“He always has his reasons. What were they this time?”

“He had someone with him named Frank that he wanted me to meet. Or this Frank wanted to meet me. I’m not sure which.”

“Frank?” Carly said. “What a stupid name. Sounds like an out of work porno actor.”

“You know a lot about that?” Blaine asked from his usual position behind the yacht’s controls.

“Hey, I had cable TV, just like everyone else. Scrambled, sure, but you can still see stuff if you look at it at just the right angles.”

“Makes sense to me,” Blaine said. He glanced back at Lara: “Maybe this Frank heard one of your radio messages and wanted to meet the woman behind it. Like it or not, you’re pretty popular these days.”

“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe that could even be remotely true. Nothing Keo had told her about this Frank made him sound like a “fan.” Besides, just the thought of someone out there going through all this trouble just to “meet” her was…unsettling.

What was that Keo had said about Frank?

“He had information about the ghouls. How they operate, their chain of command, all the nitty-gritty stuff. He also said he knew how to beat them.”

She looked at Carly and Blaine, then at the wide-open and calm ocean outside the windshield behind them. What good was Frank’s information to her, even if it was true? Or to Vera and Elise, and all the others onboard the Trident at the moment? She couldn’t think of a single thing.

We should have gone straight to the Bengal Islands, Will. You would have taken us there, wouldn’t you? You would have done the right thing. The smart thing. You always did.

“It’s a moot point anyway, because he wasn’t there,” Lara said. “They got separated two nights ago. Keo says he’s still alive, but I’m not sure he actually believes it.”

“So that’s why he didn’t radio in,” Carly said. “A lot of people are losing their radios these days…”

Lara put a hand on Carly’s arm and they exchanged a brief, private smile. It was a rare occasion to see Carly so somber, and Lara thought she needed the support, even if it was just a simple touch. God knew Carly had done so much more for her over the last few weeks.

“So what did happen over there last night?” Blaine asked. He was, thankfully, oblivious to the private moment taking place behind him. “If Keo was on that beach, that means he was either involved or he saw what went down.”

“A little of both,” Lara said.

“Why am I not surprised?” Carly said.

Lara told them about Gregson and Mercer, about the tank, the destruction it had caused including the scorched fields and the cemetery of bones, and what Gregson and Keo had told her was happening out there in the rest of Texas.

“Damn,” Carly said when Lara was done. “Sounds like a party I’m glad no one invited me to.” She might have even shivered a bit. “They have that kind of firepower?”

“I saw the tank with my own eyes,” Lara said. “I don’t have any reason to disbelieve this Gregson.”

“People lie, Lara.”

“I don’t think Gregson was lying. He didn’t have any reasons to at the time.”

“But they’re definitely not the U.S. Army?” Blaine asked.

“No,” Lara said. “Far from it. They’re dangerous. That’s why we should steer as far away from them as we can. And that means staying the hell away from the coast unless we absolutely have to.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“So what about Keo?” Carly asked. “He’s gone for good this time?”

“I think so, yeah,” Lara nodded.

“Too bad. Carrie was really looking forward to having him back onboard. You told her yet?”

“I didn’t see her on my way here, but Bonnie said she’d talk to her. Were they ever involved? Keo and Carrie?”

“I don’t think so. From what she’s told me, he was stuck on this Gillian chick twenty-four seven. But not anymore, I take it.”

“I guess it’s complicated.”

“It’s Keo, so why wouldn’t it be?”

“There was another woman on the beach with him. Her name was Jordan.”

“That guy works fast,” Blaine chuckled.

“Let the man have his distractions,” Carly said. “I’m a little — okay, a lot—annoyed with him for bringing us down here, but the guy’s done a lot for us. He deserves a little tail.”

Lara smiled, remembering how clueless Keo had been when she mentioned that Jordan probably wouldn’t be leaving with her. Then, later, when Jordan confirmed it, the numbers still didn’t seemed to have computed for Keo.

I guess he really is still stuck on Gillian, she remembered thinking.

“So what’s the order, boss?” Blaine asked.

“How are we for fuel?” Lara asked.

Blaine glanced down at the monitor in front of him. “I’m not gonna lie; we’re running low. We’ll be running on reserves soon, but it’s enough to get us back to Port Arthur and hit another one of the refueling depots on Gage’s list.”

Carly looked at Lara, and she was almost pleading. “Tell me we’re going back.”

“We are,” Lara said. To Blaine: “Pull up anchor and take us back.”

“Thank Jesus Lord,” Carly said, not even trying to hide the relief on her face.

“What about the fuel situation?” Blaine asked.

“One problem at a time,” Lara said.

Carly walked over and casually draped one arm over Blaine’s shoulder. “Boss lady’s spoken. Port Arthur or bust, el chauffeuro. Is that how you say chauffeur in Spanish?”

Blaine grunted. “Close enough.”

“Too bad about Keo,” Carly said as she walked Lara back to her cabin. “We could have really used him, especially now with stupid Danny still running around out there, refusing to pick up my phone calls.”

“He’ll be fine,” Lara said. “He’s got Gaby and Nate to watch his back.”

“Gaby, yes. Nate? I’m not so sure.”

“Is it the haircut?”

“What else? I gotta get Gaby to convince him to cut it. She could tell that boy to jump into the ocean and wrestle a shark, and he’d do it.”

“Guys will do anything for a pretty girl, I guess.”

“How do you think I’d been paying the bills before the world went kaput?”

“No details, please.”

“Your loss.”

They entered her cabin and Lara unclasped her gun belt and tossed it on the small bed, then went to a small fridge in the corner and took out a bottle of water. She walked over to her bed and sat down, opened the nightstand, and took out one of Zoe’s bottles. She shook out two of the painkillers and downed them with the water.

“Arm giving you trouble?” Carly asked.

“It’s manageable.”

“You sure?”

“It itches more than it hurts.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“The pills help.”

Carly caressed one side of her neck. “At least some dumb bitch didn’t shoot you in the neck.”

Lara smiled. “I was lucky. Gage could have done a lot more damage.”

“It’s funny,” Carly said.

“What’s that?”

“I think he actually thought we’d forget about all the shit he’d done, or was planning to do to the island.” Carly looked thoughtful while staring across the room at the window. “Funny the things people manage to convince themselves.”

“Danny will come back, Carly,” Lara said. “He’ll contact us when he gets the chance.”

“But…”

“But nothing.”

Carly narrowed her eyes at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“I told you everything.”

“No, you haven’t.” She didn’t take her eyes away. “Tell me, Lara. What did you learn out there that you’re not telling me now?”

Lara sighed. “Mercer.”

“What about him?”

“I told you his people are attacking the towns.”

Carly nodded.

“One of them was a place called T29,” Lara continued. “It’s between Hellion and Starch.”

“Hellion,” Carly said. “That’s where Danny and Gaby were the day before their last call-in. The place where they ran into some trouble.”

“Yeah.”

Carly paused, maybe processing the information, or maybe she already knew and was too afraid to know more.

“Tell me the rest,” her friend said anyway.

“There’s a chance the expedition might have run across T29 on their way to Starch. I don’t know. But it’s Danny…”

“Yeah, it’s Danny,” Carly said quietly.

“He’ll be fine, Carly.”

“I know,” the redhead said, smiling back at her. “Besides, he promised me he’d come back and he knows I’d kick his ass if he didn’t keep it.”

Lara gave her friend a pursed smile, wondering to herself how many times she had told herself that exact same thing about Will…

Her radio on the nightstand squawked sometime later. When she opened her eyes, it was still daylight and there were no signs of Carly, who had stayed behind for another hour to talk and who was still talking when the pills kicked in and Lara drifted off to sleep.

“Lara, you awake?” Blaine said through the radio.

She rolled over and snatched the radio, then pressed the transmit lever.

Is it Will? she wanted to say, but instead, the words that came out were, “Is it Danny?”

“No, sorry,” Blaine said.

Goddammit, Danny. First Will, now you. You goddamn Rangers.

“What’s going on?” she asked, sitting up on the bed. Her head was pounding and she made a mental note to talk to Zoe about switching meds to something less…torturous.

“We need you on the bridge.”

“Are we there already?”

“We’re not even close. There’s something else.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, and climbed out of bed, grimacing when she accidentally reached down to push up with her left arm without thinking.

She grabbed her gun belt and clasped it into place. With the radio in hand, she headed out into the hallway. Turned right and walked the short distance to the bridge on the other end.

The door was open and Carly and Blaine were already inside, surrounded by sunlight. She was surprised to see that it was still afternoon, which meant she hadn’t slept more than a few hours at the most.

Carly looked over. “Hey, sleepyhead.”

“Sorry about dozing off on you.”

“Eh, I liked talking to myself better anyway.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“Four hours, give or take.”

“You should have woken me sooner.”

“No point, until now.”

She looked out the front windshield, expecting to see something that didn’t belong, but there was just the familiar blue waters staring back at her. “What am I looking at?”

“Someone wants you,” Carly said, and pressed one of the many buttons along the curved boat console.

Lara didn’t know what the button did until she heard a young woman’s voice slowly rising through the bridge’s speakers. It was slightly distorted — until Carly pressed something else and the voice cleared up.

“The scanner picked it up about thirty minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Normally I wouldn’t bother with the radio, but it can get pretty lonely up here by myself.”

Lara focused on the voice. “Is she live?”

“Oh yeah,” Carly said. “Poor girl’s been saying the same thing over and over since I showed up.”

Carly pressed the same button a few more times and the volume increased, the voice becoming clearer:

“…goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”

There was a brief pause, then the woman (girl) continued, this time from the beginning:

“This message goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”

Carly turned down the volume until Lara could barely hear the voice. Not that she really needed to. The girl was simply reading the same three sentences over and over.

“How do you know I’m the ‘Lara’ she’s looking for?” Lara asked.

Carly rolled her eyes. “Is there more than one Lara spreading the news on the radio that no one told me about? It’s you, girl.”

“She’s been repeating the same message for thirty minutes?”

“She took a break about ten minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Then she changed channel and repeated it. I wonder where she got that idea.”

“Yeah, we’re trailblazers, all right,” Carly said. “All the young’uns are following in our footsteps.” Carly smiled at her. “You’re mucho popular these days, kiddo. The first celebrity in the apocalypse, if you will. First, some guy gets Keo to call us down here just for a meet and greet, now there are people actually calling you on the radio. I’m kinda jealous.”

“They’re pretty smart,” Blaine said. “Whoever the ‘we’ is with her. They know we’re still broadcasting, so we’re likely to also be monitoring the frequencies.”

“Good for her,” Carly said, “but we’re not going to answer, are we?”

“She says they need our help. Your help, Lara. Desperately, apparently. Do we just ignore that?”

“Yes,” Carly said. She looked at Blaine, then at Lara. “Guys, come on. Did we forget what happened with Song Island? What that Karen bitch almost did to us? We don’t answer strange calls over the radio.”

“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t know about Beecher,” Blaine said. “Or that kid in Japan. Those guys in New York, Alaska…on and on.”

“But none of those people wanted something from us.” She focused on Lara. “This is a very bad idea. You have to see that.”

“She’s got a point,” Lara said.

Blaine nodded. “I guess.”

“Don’t guess, know,” Carly said. “We need to go back to Port Arthur. We should never have left in the first place, but I’ll accept it, because it’s Keo and God knows we owe K-pop like crazy. But we have to go back now. Tell me we’re going to ignore this and go back for Danny and Gaby. That’s what Will would do. You know that, Lara. He’d take care of his own first.”

Lara pursed her lips into a half-smile. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who was asking herself What would Will do? a lot these days.

“Lara?” Carly said.

“We keep going to Port Arthur, as planned,” Lara said. “We’ll pick up Danny and Gaby, refuel and resupply, and then we head south to the Bengal Islands.”

“Thank you,” Carly said.

“I should have done it a month ago. I’m sorry I waited so long.”

“Hey, better late than never.” Carly sighed with relief and hugged her (maybe a bit too tightly, and Lara winced a bit from a jolt of pain along her left arm), and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she whispered back.

Despite the radio’s lowered volume, Lara could still hear the girl’s voice coming through the bridge’s speakers, talking to her, asking her to make contact, desperately seeking her help. She did her best to shut it out and concentrated on the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico outside the window instead.

Somewhere out there was Danny, Gaby, and Nate, waiting for her to come pick them up, hoping they hadn’t been abandoned. She was the one who had sent them out there, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave them behind.

Not again. Not again…

CHAPTER 20 GABY

The girl’s name was Taylor, and she was fifteen. Her sister, Alice, was eleven and reminded Gaby of Elise and Vera, but unlike those two, Alice was malnourished and her clothes hung off her body. Her big sister didn’t look any more well-fed, but that could have just been the large man’s overalls and bad haircut. Which was to say, she probably cut her own hair and Alice’s in the year since the end of the world.

If Alice hadn’t come out of the truck, Gaby was pretty sure she, Danny, and Nate would have been on the road to Starch by now. Or maybe they would have even reached the town already. It was only sixty miles to the west of them, after all. Though with the collaborators likely on high alert after yesterday, maybe she was being too generous.

Instead, they were somewhere in the woods surrounding Larkin, waiting in the living room of a small cottage as Taylor carried a pile of rifles out from a back room while Alice dragged a raggedy backpack along the wooden floor after her.

“Someone must have been real nice, because I think Christmas just came early,” Danny said.

“You’d be surprised what you can find out there, just sitting around,” Taylor said. “You can take whatever you want. I don’t even know how to use most of them, and I’m a little scared to even try.”

She laid the weapons down on the heavily chipped wooden kitchen counter, and Gaby, Nate, and Danny walked over and formed a semicircle around it.

“That thing’s bigger than you,” Danny said to Alice.

The girl grunted back at him. Danny grinned and took the backpack from her and opened it, then pulled out unopened boxes of bullets and three handguns — two automatics, including a Glock, and a six-shot revolver.

“God bless Texas,” Danny said, and laid the handguns down next to the pile. “Dig in, kids.”

“You don’t want to keep any of these?” Nate asked Taylor.

The teenager shook her head. “I already have the hunting rifle.”

“She won’t let me have one,” Alice frowned.

“You’re too young.”

“Not anymore.”

Taylor rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about this again.”

The younger sibling had a point, Gaby thought. They had all grown up fast these days. You had to, or you didn’t at all.

“Where’d you find them?” Nate asked.

“Mostly around town,” Taylor said. “We haven’t really strayed too far from Larkin. There are fish in the pond out back, so we’ve been able to keep going with the supplies we took from homes and stores nearby. There’s just the two of us, and we don’t really need a lot.”

“Last night must have been scary,” Gaby said.

Taylor nodded. “It was like listening to World War III out there. Every time those planes went by, it sounded like they were right on top of us.”

“They were flying low,” Danny said. “Warthogs do their best work at close range.”

“It helped that the collaborators didn’t show up with anti-aircraft guns,” Nate added. “I guess they didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“They do now. Which means we have to be more careful on the roads. They’re going to be shooting first and fuck the questions.” He glanced quickly at Alice. “I mean, forget the questions.”

Alice smiled back. “I’ve heard worse.”

“I bet you have.”

“Come on,” Taylor said, and the girls drifted over to the other side of the kitchen, where Taylor opened a can of pineapple for the younger girl using a manual can opener. Alice’s mouth was already watering before Taylor even got the lid all the way off.

In the year since The Purge, Gaby could see that the two sisters had made a decent life for themselves out here. The cottage itself was located in a wooded area with a small pond behind them. The girls had no idea how to fish twelve months ago, but Taylor had learned pretty fast.

“There’s no refrigeration, so we pretty much cook and eat them the same day after I catch them,” Taylor had explained.

Adapt or perish, right, Lara?

The cottage had faded yellow walls and dirt-covered floors, with two bedrooms in the back and a shack for supplies outside. It was out of the way, with no actual roads leading to its front doors, which was how the sisters had managed to avoid detection from both humans and ghouls. She hadn’t asked if this was their place or if they had just stumbled across it; the fact was, those things just didn’t matter anymore.

Gaby looked back at the weapons on the counter between her, Danny, and Nate. There were three hunting rifles, a pump-action shotgun, and two AR-15s in the pile. Danny snatched up one of the rifles — it was tanned and looked well-worn, with chips along the sides and stock. He pulled out the magazine, found it empty, and began reloading it with rounds from one of the ammo boxes.

Nate picked up the other rifle and offered it to her across the counter.

“And it’s not even my birthday,” she smiled at him.

“Just remember that when I actually forget your birthday,” Nate said.

“Charming.”

“Just trying to score bonus points for future screwups.”

“Oh, you said screwups,” Danny said. “I thought you said something else.”

“Not in front of the kids,” Gaby smirked.

The rifle was matte black, and unlike the one Danny was turning over in his hands, hers looked almost new. It had a collapsible stock, which she thought was a nice touch. Both had simple red dot sights unlike the hunting rifles, which were equipped with very long scopes. They were good for long-distance shooting, but she’d learned to appreciate the semi-automatic capabilities of an AR. The ability to send a lot of rounds downrange in a short amount of time, she’d found, couldn’t be beat in a gunfight.

Gaby looked over at Taylor. “You’ve never used any of these?”

The girl shook her head. “Those things are too complicated. The one I have is easier. Just pull that thingie back and shoot.”

Gaby smiled. Was she ever that innocent when it came to weapons?

“So there wasn’t anything there?” Taylor asked. “Back at the airfield?”

“Just a lot of rubble,” Gaby said. “What were you hoping to find?”

“Anything useful. I thought about waiting a couple of days, but I guess I was too curious about last night.”

“You know what they say,” Danny said, “curiosity killed the kid in the cottage.”

“Now you tell me,” Taylor said.

Gaby liked the girl. She would have been pretty if she let her hair grow out; or, at least, stopped cutting it herself. The fact that Taylor had managed to keep her little sister alive out here all by herself made her even more impressive.

“We’ll be heading back this way when we’re done with our thing,” Gaby said. “If you want, we can pick you two up, take you back to the Trident with us.”

“You mean, and live on a boat?” Taylor said doubtfully.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact, it’s pretty great.”

“It’d be cool to live on the ocean,” Alice said wistfully between mouthfuls of pineapple.

Gaby’s mouth watered just looking at the syrup dripping down the girl’s chin. When was the last time she had some of that? It was probably before that mess at Mercy Hospital, back in Louisiana. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

“I’m just giving you the option,” she said to Taylor. “It’s up to you, but you don’t have to decide now.”

Taylor nodded. “We’ll think about it. When will you guys be back?”

Gaby glanced at Danny.

He shrugged. “As early as a day, as late as a week.”

“Basically, whenever,” Nate said.

“What I said.”

“Not really.”

“Close enough.”

“We don’t know for sure,” Gaby said, seeing the confusion on Taylor’s face. “But it shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“Is it safer out there?” Taylor asked.

“On the Trident? Yes. Out there, on the ocean, you don’t have worry about people — or other things — showing up at your front door.”

“Or bad men on the road trying to steal your ride,” Danny added.

“And that, too.”

Taylor didn’t say anything. Gaby could see the indecision on her face, that struggle between burgeoning hope and trying to stamp it down because hope was a hard thing to embrace these days. She’d learned that the hard way, too. There was a time when she hoped Will would finally contact them, to tell Lara that he was okay, and come back.

I should have known better. Even Will can’t survive out here by himself.

“When you come back, we’ll know for sure,” Taylor said. She sounded certain; either that, or she was putting on a very good front.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a ham radio, would you, kid?” Danny asked her.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s definitely not a radio made out of ham.”

“Is there a Radio Shack or electronic store in town?” Nate asked. “They might carry one.”

“I don’t really remember,” Taylor said. “There’s a couple of strip malls, but I don’t remember a place that sells just radios.”

“Should we look anyway?” Gaby asked Danny. “We need to let the Trident know we’re still alive. They must be crazy with worry right now.”

Danny shook his head. “Starch is sixty miles from here. We can get there in a few hours even using just the smaller roads. All we have to do is stay out of trouble until then.”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Nate said.

“Indeed it is, Nate-ometer. The facility will have everything we need. Best part: no poking around Hicksville, USA, for them.” He slung the AR-15 and looked back at Taylor. “This everything, kid?”

“That’s all I found,” Taylor said. “What, you want more?”

“Normally this would be enough, but after what we’ve seen? Hells yeah. I’ll take whatever else you got.”

“That’s it, sorry.”

“No grenades?”

“Grenades? Um, no.”

“Hey, couldn’t hurt to ask.” Danny started to go, but stopped and turned back to the counter and picked up the pump-action shotgun. “Just in case…”

With only sixty miles between them and Starch, a mostly serviceable ride, and now armed, they felt good enough about their situation that they decided to eat first before taking off. They didn’t want to dig further into the sisters’ stash, so Danny and Nate spent a few minutes outside at the pond with a pair of fishing poles, catching a dozen fish in less than ten minutes. A year’s worth of spawning, with only the two girls to cut into the inventory, meant fish were attacking the plastic lures as soon as they hit the water.

Like shooting fish in a barrel, she thought.

They were in the beat-up truck and back on the road by midday, with more than five hours left to reach Harold Campbell’s facility. More than enough time, unless they encountered obstacles along the road, which after yesterday was a very real possibility. It wasn’t just collaborators they had to worry about, though; it was Mercer’s men, too. Texas had become impossibly deadlier since the last time they set foot on it, something she didn’t think she would ever say a year ago.

We should have stayed on the Trident. I wonder if Lara is saying the same thing to herself right now?

“Tough kids,” Nate was saying from the backseat. “Did we ever ask them if that was their place?”

“No,” Gaby said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Nate was looking out the rear window, even though the cottage had long disappeared behind a wall of trees. Danny picked their way through the unpaved dirt trails, eventually locating a stretch of empty country road that, according to a sign, would take them away from Larkin and westward. The idea was to avoid the main highways completely.

As they headed back toward civilization, Gaby found herself listening for the telltale signs of approaching warplanes from above.

“Warthogs do their best work at close range,” Danny had said.

She had seen that for herself yesterday, and just the memory of it made her shiver unwittingly. She hoped the men in the truck with her hadn’t noticed, and when neither one of them said anything — especially Nate behind her — she guessed she was safe.

Nate had one of the bolt-action hunting rifles in his lap, the backpack with the extra ammo next to him, and they each had one of the handguns. She had the Glock in her front waistband (what she wouldn’t have given for a tactical gun belt at the moment), Nate liked the Smith & Wesson revolver, while Danny had chosen the Sig Sauer. She wasn’t going to complain about the extra weapon or the spare magazines, but the fact was, if they had to rely on them today, it meant her hope of a smooth sailing to Starch had been dashed.

If the truck was visually unimpressive on the outside, it sounded worse inside. No wonder they had heard the vehicle coming back at the airport. The pickup made too much noise, and she swore the tires squeaked every time they found a pothole or went over something as minor as a hill of dirt, which given the countrified nature of the road, was often.

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, and neither did Nate or Danny. She didn’t know what was going through their minds at the moment, but she kept expecting uniformed men to come out of hiding in front of them, springing an ambush the way they had done to poor Taylor this morning. The only question was whether those men would be wearing tan or black uniforms. Either way, the thought made her grip the AR-15 just a little bit tighter, her right forefinger rubbing against the trigger.

After about half an hour of driving in silence, with nothing but the trees and woods for company and the wind whistling in their ears, Gaby finally said, “Are we going to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Danny said.

“Mercer.”

“What about him?”

“This war of his.”

“What about it?”

“They’re killing people, Danny. Civilians. If it was just the soldiers, I wouldn’t care. But they’re being indiscriminate.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Danny said.

“Do we just look the other way?” she asked.

“You’re assuming we can do something about it.”

“Can’t we?”

“The three of us? Not a chance in hell. Mercer’s got an army. We just saw a small part of it back there at the airfield. He’s got moving pieces all across the state. The man has been planning this for months now. Hell, he might have been cooking it up since the night everything went to shit, for all I know. A guy like that…” Danny shook his head. “It’s going to take more than just the three of us to stop him.”

He was right, and the worst part was, she’d known for a while now, but knowing and accepting weren’t the same thing. The idea of not doing anything at all made her shift in her seat.

“We have to worry about the Trident right now,” Danny continued. “And the people on it. Carly, Vera and Elise, the others. What happens in Texas isn’t our problem. Mercer’s right about one thing: The people in those towns made their choice.”

“They didn’t ask to be bombed from the air,” she said.

“No, they didn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that. We’re outgunned six ways to Sunday.” He sighed, his voice growing more somber, and for a moment she could almost imagine Will talking, and not Danny. “We’ll get what we came for, and then we’ll go home. We’ll swing by on our way and get the sisters, and we’ll call that a victory. As for everything else, let God sort them out. It’s time he earned his pay, anyway.”

Starch, Texas, was exactly how she had pictured it: a small town of a few thousand people (or it used to be, anyway) along a main highway, and no one would have realized it even existed if not for Lake Livingston somewhere behind it. That lake was why an eccentric millionaire had built an underground facility designed to withstand just about any calamity. To hear Lara tell it, the place had done exactly that, until one night when everything came undone.

After an hour of driving through barren streets, over railroad tracks, and down spur roads that never seemed to end, they finally hit the road to hell that would take them to the end of their journey — the reason they had come back to Texas in the first place.

She didn’t need to ask Danny what time it was; she could keep track of the sun by looking out her window. By her count, it was around 3:00. Soon, very soon, it would be dark again, but they had made good time and she was feeling buoyed by their progress.

Too bad the road to Harold Campbell’s facility was doing its damnedest to ruin her good mood. The massive walls of trees to the left and right of them didn’t help, either. They were so thick that Gaby couldn’t see past them, and they cast such an imposing shadow over everything she could almost believe they were driving through a tunnel instead of a country road.

The craters under them weren’t accidents of nature, but put there by Campbell to deter people from doing exactly what they were doing at the moment. After about ten minutes of struggling to hold onto her seat and not throwing up, she had to grudgingly admit that Campbell might have known what he was doing. After all, he had access to a helicopter and would never have had to use the road himself. She wasn’t so lucky.

If she thought there was a possibility Taylor’s truck might not survive the sixty-mile trip from Larkin to Starch, she was now almost certain it wouldn’t survive the three kilometer-long hike up this pothole-infested hell. Gaby swore she could hear pieces of the vehicle crunching and clanging off the undercarriage with every bump they hit.

“This is nuts!” she shouted.

“Which part of eccentric millionaire didn’t you understand?” Danny shouted back.

“Crazy assholes with money!” Nate shouted behind them.

“How much further”—she started to ask, when the road suddenly smoothed out and she could hear herself just fine again—“to go?”

“There. We’ve survived the Trip of Doom,” Danny said. “Which means the facility should be up ahead.”

“‘Should be’?”

“It’s definitely up ahead.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Nate said quietly from the backseat.

“Out the window, so you don’t get it on the upholstery,” Danny said. “This thing’s a classic, after all.”

“This thing’s a piece of junk,” Nate said.

“Same difference.”

She turned around in her seat and smiled at Nate. He returned it, looking boyish and handsome back there by himself, one hand holding his stomach and his Mohawk flopping too much to one side.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Good,” he said. “You?”

“Hanging in there.”

“I’m fine too, thanks for asking,” Danny said.

“You okay, Danny?” she asked.

“Great, thanks for asking,” he said.

She turned back around and picked her rifle up from the floor, then focused on the road ahead. “Almost there?”

“Almost there,” Danny said.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Almost almost there.”

Now that the road was even again and she wasn’t bouncing in her seat, it was easier to pay attention to the dancing shadows and overly chilly air around them. She wished she could see what was hiding in the woods to the left and right of the road, but it was just one continuous black wall. She thought she might have seen something moving inside — something fast—but Danny had picked up speed and they were past it before she could be sure.

“What’s wrong?” Nate said, leaning forward between the two front seats.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“I thought I saw something…”

“Where?”

“In the woods.”

He looked out his side window.

“Back down the road,” she said. Then, hoping it was at least convincing, “It was probably nothing.”

“Eyes forward, kids,” Danny said.

She looked out the front windshield as they came up to an opening — a wide field carved out of the woods. They passed what look like the remains of a front gate, with an old guard shack on Danny’s side. A wild jungle had grown since the last time anyone was here, and they had to stop the truck about twenty yards past the nonexistent gate.

Danny put the vehicle in park and leaned forward against the steering wheel. He had clearly seen something that disturbed him when he said, “Hunh.”

“What?” she said.

“Those weren’t here last time.”

She followed his gaze out the windshield and across the field.

They were impossible to miss: a small cluster of vehicles, all yellow, sitting in the open. One had a scooper-type arm, and she was pretty sure another one was some kind of bulldozer. Grass had grown around their heavy tires, a clear indication they had been brought here and abandoned a while ago.

“Construction equipment,” Nate said, leaning between the two front seats again. “Looks like diggers.”

“Diggers?” she said.

“For digging.”

“Of course,” she said, feeling stupid.

“Which begs the question: What were they digging out here?”

Danny reached for his rifle, said, “Eyes wide, ears open, and weapons hot at all times, got it?” and climbed out.

She and Nate followed his example on the other side of the truck, their rifles gripped tightly in front of them. The grass was taller than it had looked from inside their vehicle, and if they had kept going, they might have become stuck in another twenty to thirty yards.

“Danny?” she said across the warm hood at him.

He was peering at the construction equipment, as if he could see something she and Nate couldn’t. “Stay frosty,” he said, before starting forward. “Shoot anything that moves that isn’t us.”

Gaby exchanged a quick look with Nate, who shrugged.

She flicked the safety off her AR-15 and followed Danny into the weeds. Grass slapped at her legs, prompting her to think about what things might be lurking inside all the unseen parts of the field at the moment. Not ghouls, of course; it was still daylight—

She glanced up instinctively at the still-high sun. Still time.

But not a lot.

Danny had stopped in front of them and was looking down at something.

“Danny,” she said. “What is it?”

He shook his head but didn’t say anything. She walked over and looked down at what he had been staring at.

It was a big, gaping rectangular hole in the ground, surrounded by obliterated gray and black chunks of something that, once upon a time, had been big enough to cover the opening. Now, there were only piles of the object scattered about the grass, some as small as her fist and others as big (if not bigger) than a desk.

She had noticed the difference under her boots a few yards back, where the soft dirt ended and the hard, even concrete floor began. The construction around the “door” was still intact, but everything else — anything standing more than a few feet above the ground — had been demolished months ago, leaving behind divots and giant clawlike markings that could only have been put there by one of the construction vehicles.

“Oh man, this isn’t good, is it?” Nate said, as he stopped next to her and looked down.

Like the two of them, she was transfixed by the hole in the ground. It was massive and framed by gray concrete walls. Sunlight illuminated some of the stairs leading down, but not enough, and most of what was on the bottom was lost in a thick pool of darkness. She could see the shape of some kind of lightbulb just beyond the light, but there was no telling how long it had been out.

Then the darkness shifted and moved, and all three of them took a quick step back and lifted their weapons instinctively.

“Whoa,” Nate breathed next to her.

“Don’t sweat it; they’re more scared of you than you are of them,” Danny said.

“You think?”

“Absolutely not.”

Danny lowered his rifle and wrinkled his nose, as if he had an itch he couldn’t get to. Then he turned and walked away, stopping about ten yards later. He stomped down on something buried in the ground, producing a loud metallic clang!

“What is it?” Gaby asked.

“The titanium door that was supposed to be over that opening,” Danny said. “We were pretty sure it could withstand a nuke.” He looked in the direction of the construction equipment. “But why use a nuke when you could just pry it open with the right can openers.”

“Collaborators,” Nate said.

“Unless the ghouls have mastered driving a stick, then probably, yeah.”

“So we came all the way out here for nothing?” Nate asked, unable to hide his disappointment.

“It would appear so.” Danny sighed and let his rifle hang at his side. “I guess it was too much to hope the little bastards would leave the facility alone after we left. This’ll teach me to be optimistic.”

Gaby wasn’t entirely sure why she wasn’t more angry, or at least as visibly disappointed as Nate and Danny were. But she wasn’t. Maybe it was everything they had seen and been through since arriving back in Texas. The events of Hellion, T29, even Larkin. After all those things, coming here and finding Starch empty was…anti-climactic.

At least no one died here, unlike the 400 people in T29. Or the poor bastards in Hellion.

She walked over to Danny. “We should go. It’ll be dark soon.”

Danny nodded, then took a moment to look around at the clearing. “We cleaned out Starch pretty good when we were here. Spent a lot of time searching for silver in every nook and cranny.”

“Did you guys happen to stash some silver bullets in town?”

“Afraid not.”

“What about the facility?” Nate asked.

They looked back at him.

“What about it?” Danny said.

“Maybe if we can lure them out…”

Danny gave him an almost pitying look before grinning at Gaby, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it this time. “Captain Optimism, this guy,” Danny said. “Thinks we can lure them out into the open when there are probably a few thousand of them squeezed in there. This, with two hours until nightfall, and no way to close the door.”

“Guess not,” Nate said.

“Facility’s gone, along with everything inside it. We officially came all the way here for nothing. I’m sorry, kids. Maybe next time.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Gaby said. “We knew the risks when we volunteered.” She glanced at Nate, and he nodded and smiled back at her. “So the question is, what’s our next move?”

“It’s too late to go back to Larkin, so we’ll hole up in Starch,” Danny said. “I know Lara and Carly. Even without contact from us, they’ll wait at Port Arthur for as long as possible. They’re not going anywhere until someone shows them our dead bodies.”

“Ugh, not the best choice of words there,” Nate grunted.

“Sorry about that.”

“You’re certain of that?” she asked. “That they’ll wait for us?”

“Sure as Pauly Shore.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Damn kids,” Danny said, and started walking back to the truck. Under his breath, she heard him muttering, “Texas is really starting to piss me off.”

Gaby and Nate turned and followed him in silence. She took a moment to glance up at the sun just to assure herself it was still up there. Was it her imagination, or did the sky look darker since the last time she—

Something flickered in the corner of her eye, some kind of figure, and she stopped and looked toward the woods across the clearing.

She saw trees — a lot of trees.

“What is it?” Nate asked. He had kept walking a few steps before realizing she had stopped and turned back around.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said quietly, as if afraid someone might overhear her.

“You saw something?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Like back at the road?”

Yes, she thought, but said instead, “It’s this place. It’s spooky.”

Nate gave her a reassuring smile. “Trident or bust, right?”

She smiled back. Or tried to, anyway. “Trident or bust.”

They walked the rest of the way to the truck, where Danny was already waiting for them.

Something moved in the corner of her left eye, but Gaby ignored it.

There’s nothing out there, she told herself. It’s just your imagination.