Road to Babylon (Book 9): The Ranch Read online

  The Ranch

  Copyright © 2019 by Sam Sisavath

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC

  www.roadtobabylon.com

  Edited by Jennifer Jensen, Wendy Chan, and Grace Kastens

  Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design

  Contents

  Books in the Road to Babylon Series

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  About The Ranch

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Books in the Road to Babylon Series

  Glory Box

  Bombtrack

  Rooster

  Devil’s Haircut

  Black

  The Distance

  Hollow

  Daybreak

  The Ranch

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  The Purge of Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

  The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

  The Gates of Byzantium

  The Stones of Angkor

  The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)

  The Fires of Atlantis

  The Ashes of Pompeii

  The Isles of Elysium

  The Spears of Laconia

  The Horns of Avalon

  The Bones of Valhalla

  Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)

  The After the Purge Post-Apocalyptic Series

  Requiem

  Tokens

  Requiem

  Mist City

  Run or Fight

  The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series

  Hunter/Prey

  Saint/Sinner

  Finders/Keepers

  Savior/Corruptor

  The Red Sky Conspiracy Series

  Most Wanted

  The Devil You Know

  About The Ranch

  PROTECT THE HOMESTEAD, WHATEVER THE COSTS.

  Keo thought he’d killed it: a blue-eyed ghoul with a particularly sadistic streak unlike anything he has ever faced before. This creature enjoys toying with its victims, creating terrifying scenarios to keep the game going, just before it delivers the fatal blow.

  After their initial confrontation outside of Paxton, the ghoul has returned, very much alive and stronger than ever. This time, it’s also brought along friends. A lot of friends.

  But Keo won’t have to face the creature alone. He has Lara and Bunker to watch his back, and together they’re not just going to lie down and play dead. If the ghoul wants a fight, then it’ll get one.

  Keo isn’t in the mood to play games. He’s defending not just the ranch, but also his family. It’ll be a fight to the end, and there will be no round three.

  It’s time to make the donuts.

  Prelude

  2 Months Ago

  Lara sat up in bed to the faint and just-barely audible beats of horse hooves and a voice calling out from the night. She might not have even heard them if she hadn’t been wide awake, her thoughts too focused on (and worried about) Keo for her to get a good night’s sleep. It helped that they were in a deathly quiet part of the country, and she could have heard anything that interrupted the by-now very familiar ebb and flow of nature’s sounds.

  There was no way to see who it was, or how many there were, because the property was awash in moonlight. That was the point of being out here, after all: to avoid unnecessary contact as much as possible. Even the main house shut down all its lights by the time they went to bed. The only people who should have known they were out here were, well, the people who already knew they were out here.

  Keo was one of those people.

  Dammit, Keo, I told you no meandering, mister!

  She was on her feet and grabbing the rifle off the wall before she’d fully slipped on the jacket over her sleeping wardrobe. Boots came next, followed by her gun belt, hanging off a notch on the wall. Lara had been out here for too long to ignore the importance of having your weapons close by. She’d made that mistake once, when she thought she could escape with Keo, but not again.

  By the time Lara was outside her bedroom on the second floor, she could already hear Bunker moving through the main house below her. That meant he’d already beaten her down there because his room, like hers and Keo’s, was also upstairs.

  She rushed downstairs, thankful she wasn’t late enough in her pregnancy that she couldn’t move swiftly when she needed to, like now. Bunker was already at one of the windows flanking the main entrance into the house.

  “What did you hear?” she asked.

  “Same thing you did, I’m guessing,” Bunker said. He was swapping the scope on his M4 rifle with a night vision counterpart out of a utility bag on the floor next to him. “Go back to your room.”

  “Like hell,” Lara said, striding across the big room.

  “Lara…”

  “Don’t start with me.”

  Bunker sighed and might have rolled his eyes, but the room was too dark—there were only a couple of dimmed night-lights along the floors, including the back hallway, but nothing that would be readily obvious from outside the house—for her to be sure.

  “So what did you hear?” Bunker asked.

  “A horse,” Lara said.

  “That’s it?”

  “And someone shouting. You?”

  “Same.”

  She settled calmly at the other window, across the front double doors from Bunker, and pulled open the steel plates over her window to get a ground-floor look at what was out there. There wasn’t a lot of moonlight to see, and the ranch grounds appeared particularly doused in darkness tonight. They could have fixed that by leaving the outside lights on, but that would have been a mistake. Even now, years after The Battle of Houston, and The Walk Out that followed it, you still had to be very careful treading around at night. Only idiots drew attention to themselves, especially when they were living in a stationary target like the ranch.

  She leaned in closer and could pick up the clump-clump-clump of horse hooves again. It sounded louder than before, which made sense because the animal would have gotten closer since she first picked it up on the second floor, though it still sounded faded. So closer, but not too close, yet—

  Then, the voice. The same voice she’d heard earlier.

  Calling out from the darkness.

  Is that…? Lara thought.

  Bunker, peering through his rifle’s scope, pulled his head back slightly before glancing across the doorway at her. He echoed her thoughts with, “Is that…?”

  “My name,” Lara said, not quite believing what she was hearing. “Someone’s shouting my name out there.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “I don�
��t know.”

  “Hunh,” Bunker said as he looked through his scope again.

  Bunker’s weapon was designed to see in the dark, but Lara’s wasn’t. The rifle had a simple red dot optic on top and featured limited magnification. She could see some of the ranch property outside through it, but even that was difficult with so little light to work with.

  They didn’t have to wait long before a horse and its rider appeared out of the night, coming straight toward them.

  Keo?

  The human being perched on top of the animal was still too far for Lara to identify him. But she didn’t think it was Keo. The voice, even faint, hadn’t sounded like Keo’s. In fact, it hadn’t sounded male at all.

  “Lara!” the rider called out as they got closer.

  Not Keo, Lara thought, because that was clearly a woman’s voice.

  “Lara!” the rider shouted. “Don’t shoot! I’m looking for Lara!”

  “You recognize the voice now?” Bunker asked without pulling his eye away from his scope.

  “No,” Lara said.

  “Well, they definitely know you.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Just so we’re on the same page—that’s not Keo, right?”

  “No, it’s not Keo.”

  “That’s what I thought. Sounded way too girly for our boy.”

  Lara pulled back from her rifle and looked toward the double doors.

  The rider shouted again, “Lara! Don’t shoot!”

  “Gee, now why would she be afraid you’d shoot, just because she’s riding up on us in the middle of the night?” Bunker said in that tone Lara couldn’t decide was sarcasm or complete seriousness.

  Then, the words from the rider that changed everything: “Keo sent me!”

  “Keo?” Lara said. “Did she just say Keo?”

  “She definitely said Keo,” Bunker said.

  As if she could hear them, the rider shouted, “Keo’s in trouble! He needs help! Keo needs help!”

  Keo!

  Lara pulled her rifle out of the window’s murder hole and rushed to the doors.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Bunker asked, pulling back from his own rifle to glance over in her direction.

  “You heard her; Keo’s in trouble.”

  “It could be a trick. Let’s play this smart—” Bunker was saying before she finished pulling back the locks and threw the doors open. Then, when she was already halfway out the doors, “Lara! Wait! Goddammit, woman!”

  But she was already in the cold night air and running to intercept the rider, the woman’s words echoing in her head:

  “Keo’s in trouble! He needs help! Keo needs help!”

  Keo! Goddammit, mister, I told you no meandering! Didn’t I tell you no meandering?

  As the horse neared, Lara could make out more of the lone figure in the saddle. She was almost leaning down against the animal as it stormed across the ranch’s wide-open property toward her direction. The horse was a big black mare, and it was moving so fast Lara wondered if it’d been fleeing something.

  The woman was African-American and clinging to the horse rather than riding it. She looked injured, but Lara couldn’t tell how badly. She had plenty of strength to shout out Lara’s and Keo’s names, though.

  “Lara!” Bunker half-shouted and half-whispered from the safety of his murder hole behind her. “Get back in here, woman. Now!”

  She ignored him and ran to meet the horse halfway. When the rider saw her coming, she pulled up on the reins, and the big black mare slowed down until it came to a complete stop.

  “Where’s Keo?” Lara asked.

  “Back there,” the woman said. She tried to sit up in the saddle but was obviously having a difficult time of it. Lara was still too far away to know why. “He’s still back there. He needs your help.”

  “Where? Back where?”

  “Not far from here,” the woman said as she attempted to climb down from the horse. “He sent me. Told me to come to you. You’re Lara?”

  “Yes. I’m Lara.”

  “Then I found you—” she said before she gave up trying to carefully unmount the horse and simply slid off the saddle and slammed into the hard ground like a lifeless sack of potatoes.

  Lara rushed over to her, every instinct to take this cautiously vanishing at the thought of Keo out there, alone and hurt.

  You promised me you wouldn’t meander, Keo. Get there, get what you need, and come back, remember?

  I hate it when you don’t keep your promises!

  She put down the rifle and crouched next to the woman. She was young—maybe late teens or early twenties—and she was bleeding badly. There was a knife—a KA-BAR from the looks of the handle—embedded in her shoulder. Blood dripped from the wound, and sheets of sweat covered the woman’s face. She had a dark complexion, but at the moment it was closer to ghostly white than black. There was a large backpack strapped behind her, and Lara instantly recognized the inguz rune emblazoned on the front.

  Keo…

  “What about Keo?” Lara said, lifting the woman’s head off the ground. “Is he okay? Is he alive?”

  The woman tried to shake her head even as her lips quivered. She was trying to say something, maybe even answer Lara’s questions, but the only sounds that came out between her cracked and bleeding lips were weak wheezing sounds. Her entire body was trembling, but she was a fighter. Lara could see that in her eyes.

  You sure know how to pick ’em, Keo.

  Lara took a longer look at the knife in the girl’s shoulder. It had gone in deep. Very, very deep. Almost to the hilt. She tried to imagine what kind of strength it would take to make the blade go so far in. She had done the right thing—the smart thing—by not trying to pull the knife out. The open gash alone might have caused her to bleed out. Either she knew that, or she hadn’t had the strength to try to dislodge it.

  Footsteps behind her as Bunker came outside the house. “Goddammit, woman, you need to do what I tell you for once.”

  “Shut up, and help me get her into the house,” Lara said.

  “Say what?”

  “She’s hurt.”

  “So? We don’t know who she is or where she came from. This smells like a trick.”

  “She knows where Keo is. She said he told her to come here and ask for me.”

  “Still smells like a trap.”

  “Get your ass over here, Bunker, and help me get her into the house!”

  “Okay, okay, geez.” Bunker hurried over. “Did she say where Keo went and got himself in trouble at?”

  Lara was about to answer when the young woman’s eyes flicked back open. “Paxton,” she whispered.

  “Paxton?” Lara said. “Who’s Paxton?”

  “Keo. He’s outside of Paxton…”

  Paxton?

  Then: Not someone. Some place.

  Lara glanced over at Bunker, crouching on the other side of the woman. “It’s a town? Paxton?”

  “Yeah. A nothing town about a half day’s ride north of here,” Bunker said. “Makes sense Keo would have had to go through it to reach Galveston and back.”

  “She says he’s in Paxton, and he’s in trouble.”

  “Of course he is,” the rancher said. “He wouldn’t be Keo if he wasn’t in trouble somewhere during what should have been a routine supply run, now would he?”

  “Help me get her into the house,” Lara said. “I need to get the knife out of her and treat her wound.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you think, genius? And then we’re going after Keo,” Lara said.

  They carried the young woman into the house, and while Lara tended to her wound, Bunker took care of the horse outside. After Lara had gotten the woman stabilized, she left her in one of the spare bedrooms and rejoined Bunker in the great room. The rancher was already gearing up and had an extra set of gear ready for her.

  Lara fought back the grin as she put on her vest. It covered up her growing belly just fine, and if no one
knew she was two months pregnant, they wouldn’t have figured it out by just looking at her.

  “Didn’t think you’d stay behind, so I’m not even gonna bother,” Bunker was saying.

  “Smart man.”

  Bunker snorted, then nodded toward the back hallway. “She gonna make it? That was a pretty big knife sticking out of her.”

  “She’s a fighter. I think she’ll make it.”

  “She got a name?”

  “Jackson.”

  “Like Michael Jackson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she sing, too?”

  “I didn’t ask for her resume, Bunker.”

  “She probably sings.”

  “You can find out when we come back with Keo.” Lara picked up the same rifle she’d used earlier in the night and slung it.

  “You sure this isn’t a trick?”

  “It’s not a trick.”

  “Wanna fill me in on how you know that?”

  “The backpack she was carrying. It had everything I needed. Everything Keo was supposed to go to Galveston to get for me.”

  “So the good ol’ boy got the job done after all.”

  “Keo always gets the job done. Sometimes it just takes a while.” She clipped her gun belt in place. “Can we reach this Paxton place by morning?”

  Bunker glanced down at his wristwatch and its glowing green hands. “With an hour or two left for waffles, if we’re so inclined.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re no fun,” Bunker said, following her outside the house.