The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Read online

  “Absolutely,” Nate said. “Who knows? We might even beat you back to Port Arthur. You never know.”

  Danny rolled his eyes at them. “Give me a break. I was born at night, but not last night. I’m not going anywhere without you two dummies.”

  “Danny, don’t be stupid,” she said.

  “Have you been talking to Carly again?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Danny, you have to go. We’ll be on your heels by morning.”

  “Not gonna happen, so save your breath. Both Lara and Carly would kick my ass, and that’s not the kind of threesome I had in mind.” He glanced down at his watch. “Besides, if they were going to kill us, they would have done it already. They want to keep us alive.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Danny said. He glanced back at Mason and the collaborators again. “You’ve been awfully quiet. Got something to say?”

  “You should have taken the deal,” Mason said. “I would have.”

  “See, that’s the difference between you and me. I’m not an asshole.”

  “I’m a survivor.”

  “No, you’re an asshole. If I have to say it a third time, you’re going to find out what a Danny Knuckle Sandwich tastes like. Hint: It’s knuckle-licious.”

  Mason snorted but looked away.

  “Good boy,” Danny said, and turned back to the window. “Speaking of knuckle sandwiches…”

  A Jeep had parked outside the hangar and Erin, in the front passenger seat, climbed out. She walked through the building, past the half dozen people still loading up the final truck, and stopped on the other side of the window to look in at them.

  “He wants your answer,” she said to Danny.

  “The conditions still stand?” Danny asked.

  “I’m afraid so.” Her eyes met Gaby’s gaze for just a moment before returning to Danny. “What should I tell him?”

  “We’re like the Three Musketeers,” Danny said. “One cake for all, cake for everyone. Or something. I’m not very good with sayings.”

  Erin gave him a confused look.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Danny said.

  The woman nodded. “Good luck,” she said, and turned to leave.

  “Erin,” Gaby said.

  The older woman stopped and looked back at her.

  “Do you know what’s happening out there?” Gaby asked. “What your planes are doing? They’re slaughtering civilians. Men, women, and children. There were pregnant women in those towns. There were over 400 people in T29 alone.”

  Gaby was hoping for some kind of sign, an indication that all of this was new to Erin, but it wasn’t there.

  She knows. Jesus, she knows.

  Erin looked at Danny again. “If you change your mind in the next hour, tell the guards.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Danny said.

  “How do you live with yourself?” Nate asked her.

  Erin ignored him and turned around and walked back to the waiting Jeep. Gaby wasn’t sure, but she thought Erin was walking faster than she really had to.

  “She knows,” Nate said quietly.

  “They all know,” Danny said. “But they’re committed. Heart, soul, and ammo.”

  “What’s going to happen tonight?” Gaby asked.

  Danny glanced down at his watch. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I was hoping for a better answer.”

  “And I was hoping for a cheeseburger and some French fries the size of my wrists,” Danny said, “but we can’t always get what we want, kid.”

  10

  Frank

  “Why do you fight?”

  It was followed by a laugh, or something that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell nuance when his mind was filled with so many voices, so many thoughts, like trying to listen to a city of people talking all at once.

  “There is no victory waiting for you at the end of this.”

  A sigh of frustration, like a father growing impatient with a child. Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth. He was like a child, at least according to Mabry. They all were; he and the millions and billions out there that flowed from Mabry’s blood.

  “They’ll never accept you. She will never accept you. Can you blame her? You’re not the man you once were. You’re not even a man anymore.”

  He didn’t answer, because it was a trick. Like all the other times, the voice just wanted him to respond so he would reveal himself. Mabry knew he was connected, listening in, because there was no detaching himself from them. Oh, he could erect walls and build other mental defenses, but he could never, ever become separated. That was the strength of the brood, after all—the oneness.

  “You’re just making this difficult on yourself. Why can’t you see that?”

  Push it away, into the back of his mind, where the voice became smaller. He couldn’t shut it out, but he could ignore it to some degree, send it to the outer edges of his consciousness where it was still audible but less demanding. Instead, he focused on the here and now, on remaining perfectly still and quiet, and allowing his body to heal.

  He slept just beyond the reach of sunlight, though he could feel the heat even down here. Rays like knives, stabbing down at him, poking and prodding, always looking to connect, to slash and rend until he was just bones. Useless bleach-white bones.

  There had been too many hands, too many feet, and too many teeth. They had hurt him, pushed him to the brink, but he had survived their onslaught the only way he knew how—by fighting, by clawing, by willing himself through the drowning sea. He didn’t know any other way but to fight.

  It didn’t used to take this long to heal, but then he had never been hurt like this before. These days, the wounds closed a little slower, the breaks mended more deliberately, and the blood took longer to replenish. One of these days, he wouldn’t be able to heal at all, to regenerate all his losses, but that day was still far off.

  His eyes snapped open, the dirt like sandpaper against his eyeballs. Something was happening. Something was…approaching.

  A foot of earth separated him from sunlight. The heat called to him, even stronger than Mabry’s voice inside his head. As he lay there, resting in a tomb of his own making, the damp soil around him trembled as if coming alive. The walls shook, as did the patch of ground under and over him.

  Had they found him? Had one of his defenses failed without him knowing it? Did Mabry know where he was and had sent his forces?

  No, that was impossible. It was still daylight. He could feel it, like a lover calling to him. And he wanted to give in, wanted to embrace it like he once had, but knowing he couldn’t because doing so—

  No, not ghouls.

  Something else. Something…bigger.

  It emerged from the city on wheels, close enough to his resting place that he could smell its leaked fluids as it lumbered. But it wasn’t flesh and bone. No. This was an animal made of metal. Hard, grinding metal.

  He knew instantly what it was. Sometimes it was difficult to remember details from his past life, but this wasn’t one of those moments. He easily dug out the information from when he still wore a uniform, carried guns, climbed mountains, and took lives.

  A tank. It was a tank.

  The ground shook, passing from the many particles of dirt that sheathed him. It came from a distance—from where the waves crashed against sand, beyond the city, and where the tank had gone.

  Nightfall. He knew without having to see the darkness. The shift in temperature against his skin, the cold that seeped through the earth and folded over him on all sides like a blanket, were evidence enough.

  Earlier, he had felt the multiple tremors as they emerged from their nests, growing in intensity as they neared his position. There were hundreds. Thousands. They passed overhead, oblivious to his presence. It wasn’t him they were after. No. It was the machine. The thing that had appeared earlier. The tank.

  They were summoned, called forth by the blue
eyes. “Take it,” the blue eyes said. “Peel them from their metal skin.”

  Another crack of thunder.

  No, not thunder. A gun firing.

  A cannon.

  The tank.

  The squeal of black-eyed creatures erupted inside his mind, surging across the connection that bonded him to the brood, to Mabry and the others. Their deaths were like sledgehammers, pounding against the sides of his skull. What he felt, Mabry could surely feel, too. Even more so.

  He almost smiled against the dirt at the thought of Mabry hurting, feeling every death, every shriek of pain. If he concentrated enough, he could almost smell the sting of burning flesh as the black eyes vanished against the blast.

  And yet they continued climbing out of the darkness and flowed like an unstoppable tide toward the beach. They were wary of the water, but the enemy had stopped just beyond the tides. Even so, the taste of ocean water lingered against their senses, terrorizing them with their possibilities.

  “Take it,” the voices said. “They’ve already done too much damage. Stop them now. Here. Show them this world is ours.”

  The voices belonged to the blue eyes. The ones leading the charge—directing the attack. They stood back, willing the black eyes forward like every officer he had ever known. Safe from the grinder and brave in their safety. He despised them, but was also cautious around them. They could sense him, just as he could them. He had to walk lightly, skirt around the edge, and never reveal himself.

  It had begun while he was asleep, healing the cuts and gashes along his arms and legs and face. His concentration, his mental wall, always slipped when he was at his weakest, like he was at the moment. But Mabry hadn’t found him yet. No, this wasn’t about him. The creatures had not come here for him. They had come for the men inside the tank.

  “They did it,” the voices said. “They’re trying to take our food from us. We’ll show them they should have stayed hidden.”

  Another boom, followed by more screams of pain inside his head. The tank fired again and again, and each time the ground shook as if threatening to come apart. The continuous howls of black eyes accompanied the smell of singed flesh, and clouds of pulverized bone turned the darkness gray. He saw and sniffed the carnage through the senses of the creatures that were converging on the beach, driven forward by the relentless voices in their heads.

  “Forward,” the voices commanded. “Take the machine! Take it now!”

  Amid the chaos, he became aware of a new sound. No, not new, but old. A strange noise he hadn’t heard in some time. Music. It was music coming from the tank. From…speakers?

  A house came apart, its foundations splintering against a stray cannon round, the smell of burning wood and disintegrating concrete, along with brick and mortar pluming in the air. Black eyes raced through them, unhindered by the wanton destruction.

  Then something else. A new smell filling his senses. Not just wood burning, but searing flesh accompanying the cries of pain.

  Fire. There was sustained fire among the explosions.

  And yet they persisted, assaulting the armored shell of the machine from all sides and flailing against its unyielding skin. They clung onto the moving cannon, hoping to slow it down, their skeletal forms trembling as it let loose and split open another house. The ground shattered as the walls tumbled down and the ceiling collapsed inward, swallowing up a pair of black eyes that had been perched on the roof.

  Now was the time, while the black eyes were obsessed with the tank. They were relentless, pouring unlimited numbers against it. He couldn’t see the ground anymore, just a mass of squirming black flesh oozing toward the tan vehicle as it swiveled and fired, swiveled and fired. And all the while, the loud music blared from its speakers, like some unholy noise from the pits of hell designed to drive men mad.

  He detached his mind from his body and drifted freely through the layers of soft earth and grabbed the first consciousness that appeared. The creature was weak like all the rest, and he took control of its mind without any effort. They were just husks, vessels for Mabry and the blue eyes to command at will. It had taken him a lot of trial and error, but he was always good at adapting, finding an opening, and exploiting it.

  He pushed the creature aside, into the back of its own mind where it could still see and hear and smell but was little more than a voyeur now. Then he moved its legs, from walking to running, then full-on sprinting toward the beach.

  Faster. Faster!

  There, the war machine. It was still moving, its gun firing, walls of flame stabbing from its armored shell. Black eyes roared as fire engulfed them, eating flesh from bones and vaporizing the precious blood. Mabry’s blood. They fell, disappearing among the fields of scorched grass. Smoke rose from buildings, walls of loose ground filling the air with every thunderous explosion.

  He stood under darkness, a lone figure at the edge of the battlefield, and watched the horde of black eyes throwing themselves forward, drawn irresistibly to the squatting thing that refused to fall, or stop, or go silent. All this, while music blared from speakers attached to it, jumbled words filling the night sky, only occasionally broken by the bone-rattling boom of cannon fire.

  He remained in the background so the blue eyes wouldn’t sense him. They were preoccupied trying to find some way, some hidden angle or slit, to pry open the mechanical beast. They commanded the swarm to crawl over the spinning turret, howling with frustration and pain as blankets of fire enveloped their soldiers one by one by one…

  “Take it!” the voices shouted.

  But the machine would not be taken, and it continued to turn even as a few hundred living things clung to it. Its gears grinded on even as the sprockets and crevices became clogged with burnt flesh and bone and spraying blood. They pounded against the metal with balled fists, fingers attempting in vain to pull open heavy doors that wouldn’t budge. The ground groaned under the combined weight, threatening to sink them all.

  And the voices screamed: “Tear it apart! Inch by inch! Tear it apart!”

  A stream of flames licked across the blackness, torching swaying grass and thickets of flesh in its path. Then the boom of the main cannon, shattering eardrums and destroying everything in its path.

  The pointlessness of the scene, the pure carnage and death and destruction, depressed him, but he knew it wasn’t really him, because he didn’t care for these things. The pangs of sadness came from the creature he had shoved aside; its fear and fury were seeping into him. Husk though it may be, the creature still felt, at least inside its own mind.

  He backed away from the field as more endless numbers of black eyes streamed past him, charging into the breach, obeying the command of the blue eyes.

  “More!” they shouted. “More!” even as another two dozen disappeared in a hail of fire and earth.

  He retreated, leaving the battlefield behind, when a brightly lit building flashed across his mind’s eye. It was there and gone before he could fully grasp what he had seen.

  A building? Where? Lights? And why were the ghouls moving toward it?

  There was something else happening at another place, at the exact same time. The ghouls were busy fighting on two fronts tonight, and the blue eyes were at both places to direct the attacks, their voices slight echoes in the back of his mind because of distance.

  He abandoned the vessel he was occupying and let himself float along the stream that joined the brood, finding himself moving further and further away from the beach. Houses, basements, empty cities and rooftops flashed by eyes that didn’t belong to him. Tens of thousands of disjointed voices scrambled through his mind, but he pushed through them and searched for—

  There, the same building he had seen earlier.

  He focused on it, using the lights emanating from the structure as a beacon. Closer now, he began hiding within the consciousness of random black eyes, jumping between skins, hearing and seeing and feeling what they did, before moving on to the next one, and still the next one. Gathering intelligenc
e, processing what he could, and never staying still for too long.

  It had been difficult in the beginning, spying on the brood while remaining unseen. So many trials and errors and near misses. Mabry had almost caught him a half dozen times, but it was the blue eyes that were the most dangerous. There were too many of them, and they knew what he was doing. The black eyes were easier; they were just empty bodies to be taken, the way Mabry had done over the years, the centuries…

  But he had learned and adapted, because that was what he did. He adapted and didn’t perish. Was that one of his sayings? Or someone else’s? It didn’t matter. It would come to him eventually. It always did.

  He detached himself from another one of the creatures and weaved through the endless pair of eyes and ears, seeing and hearing glimpses of what he needed, but always moving forward, getting closer toward the building with the lights, because it was important. The blue eyes were there for a reason.

  “The building,” the voices said inside his mind. “Take the building.”

  There, at last.

  It was just as brightly lit as when he had glimpsed it the first time. No longer just a flash of light in the distance, but clear as day. He understood now why the blue eyes were so unsure of themselves.

  It shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have been this bright. Not here, not now, surrounded by black eyes watching from within the darkened woods that surrounded the place. Someone had made a mistake. Or had they?

  The confusion seeped through every one of the creatures, including the one he was hiding within at the moment.

  “Something’s wrong,” the voices said. “Something’s not right…”

  He jumped bodies until he finally found a black eye moving across an airfield toward the well-lit building. Men in uniforms with masked faces—collaborators—watched him pass. He could smell fear clinging to their pores.

  He wasn’t alone. Far from it. Black eyes streamed out of the trees around him and stampeded through overgrown fields of grass, then across smooth, paved roads. The stinging scent of jet fuel filled his nostrils, along with the lingering sweat of human bodies that had slaved in the area not long ago.