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

  His eyes eventually fell to her right hand, hanging loosely at her side, next to the holstered Glock. She didn’t have her rifle because she rarely carried it around these days. She should have been hesitant to stand this close to him, with only eight (nine?) feet of space separating them. They were near enough that she could smell the odor emanating from his skin. Bonnie had told her that Gage rarely bathed in the ocean when he was above deck, and they theorized that he was afraid they’d drive off and leave him floating in the ocean. She had to admit, she’d thought about doing just that—or something like it—on more than one occasion.

  Bonnie’s heavy, booted footsteps echoed from the open door behind her. The ex-model was somewhere further up the corridor, close enough that Lara knew she could hear everything being said. They always had at least one person outside Gage’s door, just in case.

  You taught me that, Will. ‘Just in case…’

  “So, what now?” Gage asked. “You’re just going to throw me away? Like trash? I did everything you asked.”

  The answer should have come easily. She had spent more than one sleepless night thinking about it, and each time the outcome was the same: She couldn’t trust Gage. The man standing in front of her might be wearing shabby and stained clothes, and smelling slightly of urine and a lot of sweat, but she could see it in his eyes. Gage had been thinking about this moment, too, imagining what he would do when it finally came. She wondered if he ever managed to convince himself things might work out in his favor, or if he always knew this was the inevitable conclusion.

  He had to know, didn’t he? Maybe…

  “Well?” he said, sounding annoyed by her silence. “What happens to me now, Lara?”

  “Now you leave,” she said.

  “Leave? Just like that?”

  “I’m going to give you one of the inflatable boats and enough fuel to reach land, if you drive straight toward it. What you do when you get there is up to you.”

  “A boat and some fuel?” He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he could divine her true intentions if he found the right angle. “That’s it?”

  “And some food and water to last a few days. After that, you’re on your own.”

  “What about weapons?”

  “No weapons.”

  “You can’t do that to me.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation. I’m telling you what’s going to happen, and you’re going to accept it because there is no Door B or Door C. There is just this door.” She glanced at her watch. “Your boat will be ready in one hour. Make the most of the time you have left and pack up.”

  “I need guns!”

  She shook her head, amazed at how calm she was. Her voice hadn’t risen noticeably and her body, along with the hand hovering beside the Glock, remained perfectly steady. She wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible as she walked the length of the boat and climbed down to the lower deck, then moved through the engine room and toward his cabin. She remembered the look on Bonnie’s face as she walked past the other woman, who could barely look her in the eyes. Like everyone, Bonnie had been dreading this moment, too.

  But for whatever reason, Lara didn’t feel the sudden surge of adrenaline or pangs of guilt. There was just…calmness, because she knew exactly why she was doing this and why there were no other options. It just had to be done.

  “No guns,” she said. “At least not from us. What you find out there is up to you. All I’m giving you is a boat, fuel, and some food and water.”

  “You can’t do this…”

  “It’s happening.”

  “No…”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Don’t I?” he said, peering at her, his head still cocked at an odd angle.

  “No,” she said. “You can take what I give you and make the best of it, or you can take your chances.” She finally moved her hand, placing her palm over the butt of her sidearm. “It’s up to you.”

  He didn’t say anything and simply glared at her for a few seconds. He didn’t move, though she thought he wanted to. Desperately wanted to.

  But he didn’t move.

  “I’ll send Bonnie back down here to get you in one hour,” she said. “Be ready.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Lara,” he said.

  She ignored him and continued walking to the door. “One hour.”

  “Lara!” he shouted, the sound of her name like a knife.

  That time she stopped and turned back around just in time to see him lunging at her.

  Oh, goddammit, she thought, realizing just how badly she had read the situation. She wasn’t prepared for this. Not when she thought it was all over.

  Gage had lost a lot of weight since she first met him, and although he still limped noticeably on one leg despite the brace, it didn’t seem to slow him down one bit at the moment. She wasn’t ready for his speed or the bloodshot eyes coming right at her. He didn’t so much as cross the small space between them as he launched himself, his body like a living spring that had been coiled, waiting to explode in this one single moment.

  And there was something else—a streak of sunlight shining through the open window, reflecting across the flat surface of an object, long and sharp, in his right hand, his fingers gripped tightly around its cloth-covered base. Some kind of knife, maybe a piece of metal he had pried loose somewhere. Whatever it was, he had been hiding it on him when she entered, but he was showing it to her now as he streaked across the room right at her.

  Lara lifted her left arm instinctively, not even realizing what she was doing until the shiv sliced into her flesh. There should have been pain—a lot of it, given how forceful Gage had struck, the blow’s impact magnified by his forward momentum—except there was just a stinging sensation, as if her body didn’t truly grasp what was happening and her mind couldn’t interpret the true meaning behind the stream of blood arcing through the air.

  She lost her balance even as she was backpedaling and stumbled out the open door and into the hallway beyond. He was still coming, face contorted into an expression that was part anger and part triumph. He didn’t so much as follow her out as he stalked after her, (her) blood flitting off the object in his right hand with his every step.

  She was still off balance and stumbling blindly backward, trying desperately to exert some control over her legs, when her back slammed into the smooth metal wall of the hallway outside the room. There was pain that time, but also surprise at how much distance she had covered in such a short time between when Gage struck and now. The breath rushed out of her as she stabbed her right hand down to her hip, found the familiar grip of the Glock, and jerked the weapon up just as Gage raised his right hand and brought it back down a heartbeat later, aiming from right to left—

  Bang!

  The gunshot was like an explosion inside the close confines of steel and concrete that made up the lower deck. The Trident’s engine was still shut off, so there was nothing to dampen the noise; it was still echoing in her head like a jackhammer seconds later.

  Gage seemed to take one, then two, hesitant steps backward, his slashing right hand frozen in the air as if he had simply forgotten how or why it was up there in the first place. His fingers were so tightly clenched around the knife’s handle that they were almost as white as his paling face. Blood gushed from his stomach as he attempted to stanch it with his left hand, sticky wetness slipping through his fingers.

  “You—” he said, looking back at her.

  She shot him again, this time in the chest, before he could finish what he was about to say. The second gunshot sounded curiously softer than the first, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but then maybe her racing heartbeat, so loud that both her ears seemed to be thrumming, had something to do with that.

  Gage fell back through the open cabin door and slammed into the floor with a heavy thump!, followed a split second later by the clattering of the knife at his booted feet.

  The heavy pounding of footsteps came from
another part of the boat, then someone was shouting her name.

  She was still trying to figure out what was happening, or how she had ended up sitting in a pool of blood, when a voice gasped, “Jesus, Lara, Jesus,” followed by a sharp squawking noise and someone shouting Zoe’s name.

  “So that was your brilliant plan?” Carly asked. “You were going to West him? Girl, you should have talked to me about it first. I would have advised you to just shoot the fucker and throw him overboard. No muss, no fuss.”

  Lara looked up quizzically at her friend. She found it hard to focus on her face for some reason, so had to settle for Carly’s bright red hair as a marker.

  “What?” Carly said.

  “‘West him’?” Lara said, her voice hoarse. “What does that even mean?”

  “You remember West, don’t you? Yee-haw? You smashed his head in with a radio when he snuck into your room with a gun back at the hotel?”

  “Oh.”

  West. Jesus, she had forgotten all about West. He had come to Song Island with Bonnie and the others. There had been another man with him, but for the life of her, Lara couldn’t recall his name at the moment.

  “You really did forget,” Carly was saying. “Is this one of Danny and Will’s famous compartmentalization thingies?”

  “No, I just forgot about him.”

  “Really.”

  She nodded.

  “I wonder what happened to him,” Carly said. “You think he ever made it after you and Danny sent him out into the world with just his boxers and a pair of socks?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.”

  “Fair enough. He and his buddy did try to gut Blaine.”

  She glanced around the room. She was glad to see harsh sunlight coming in through a window to one side (Still daylight). Considering the unspectacular decorations along the walls and the slightly hard bed she was lying on at the moment, they had taken her back to her cabin.

  “He used a piece of his cot, in case you were wondering,” Carly said. “One of the frames, according to Maddie. He must have spent days sharpening that thing. I guess when you’re down there with just that hole to look out of, you need to find ways to fill your time. Like making shanks. What an asshole.”

  Lara looked down at her left hand, then lifted it as much as she could. It was covered in gauze, and the complete absence of pain was a surprise. In fact, she didn’t feel much of anything at all. A combination of painkillers and…something.

  “What did Zoe give me?” she asked.

  Carly shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. You’re the third-year medical student; you tell me.”

  “That was a long time ago. Feels like another lifetime…”

  “Anyway, you bled all over the place. Freaked all of us out. Imagine what we’d do without you to boss us around.”

  Lara managed a weak smile. “You would have gotten by.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  There was something on Carly’s face, a seriousness that Lara rarely saw, and it made her wonder just how close to death’s door she had been outside of Gage’s cabin. She remembered pain, a lot of screaming, and wetness…

  “I’m okay,” Lara said.

  “No, you’re not,” Carly said, “but you will be. We’ll see to that. So you need to get some rest and we’ll do our best to keep this floating barge running in the meantime. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not all dopes. Well, not completely.”

  “Danny?”

  “Still nothing from that idiot. But he’s got four more hours until nightfall, so I’m delaying panic time until then.”

  “What about Keo?”

  “Also nada.” She frowned. “That’s worrying, right? It’s noon, Lara. He should have radioed in by now. We did come all the way down here just to pick his sorry ass up.”

  She nodded. Or thought she did. Maybe a slight up and down motion.

  “Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly continued. “Or at least go closer to the coast, in case he lost his radio but is waiting for us on the beach or something.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “If we’re close enough to the beach to see him, then someone can see us, too.”

  “Oh. Good point. I guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

  “Something like that. Besides, Keo can take care of himself.” She forced herself to focus on Carly’s face. “Tell Blaine not to expose us unnecessarily, understand?”

  Carly nodded. “You’re the boss, boss.”

  Lara saw something else on her friend’s face. It was something that had been there for a long time now, and that she had seen on the others’ faces as well. She knew this moment would come—had, in fact, expected it much earlier.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked.

  Carly looked hesitant, like someone preparing to pick her way through a minefield. “Maybe it’s time we finally talk about why we’re still hanging around the Gulf of Mexico, why you keep delaying going to the Bengal Islands.”

  Will…

  “We need to talk about it sooner or later,” Carly continued.

  Will... I waited for you. I waited days and weeks for you.

  Goddamn you. You promised me. You promised me.

  “But it can wait until you’re better,” Carly said. “Zoe and I will look in on you through the day, make sure you don’t try to sneak off on us. I don’t think we can afford to lose you, too.”

  The way we lost Will…

  Carly turned to go.

  “Carly…” she said when Carly was at the door. “When Danny and the others come back, we’ll go.”

  “Are you sure?” Carly asked.

  She nodded. Or tried to.

  Carly pursed her lips into a sympathetic smile. “I’ll let the others know.”

  “What about Gage?” she asked.

  “We tossed him overboard. Gage being a piece of shit human being and all, we thought it was about time he contributed to the world by feeding the fishes.”

  “Good,” she said, closing her eyes.

  Will’s voice echoing inside her head, the way it had ever since that last night on Song Island:

  “Whatever happens, keep moving forward. Don’t stop to look back. Keep moving forward, because that’s how we survive.”

  It was dark outside her window when she opened her eyes a second time. Alarm bells immediately went off and didn’t stop until she could hear the low howl of the wind outside, the gentle slapping of water against the Trident’s hull.

  Safe. Still safe.

  There was a wall clock, but she didn’t bother looking for it in the semidarkness. There was enough moonlight that she could make out the foot of her bed and a small figure huddled in the corner under a blanket.

  It took her a moment to piece together Elise’s round face, the girl’s head resting against the armchair, long hair draped across her oval-shaped face. She thought about calling to Elise, telling the girl to go back to the room she shared with Vera, where she wouldn’t have to twist herself into a pretzel to fit into a chair. But she saw the way Elise was sleeping, as peaceful as she had ever seen the girl, and decided against it.

  Lara was already on her back, so she didn’t have to do very much to look up at the shadows dancing across the ceiling. Instead of making her nervous, they soothed her nerves, and she didn’t move for the longest time. The drugs Zoe had given her prevented her from fully concentrating on any one thing, including all the rambling thoughts inside her head, for which she was grateful.

  A soft thoom from somewhere in the distance made her glance toward the door. She only heard it because everything else was so quiet. If she thought the nights on Song Island could be deathly still, out here among the waves it was even more pronounced.

  There it was again: thoom.

  A low rumbling, almost like thunder, coming from a distance. Except there were no hints of raindrops pelting the roof above her. The Trident had had to move
through two rainstorms in the last month, and she knew what rain sounded and felt like; this wasn’t it.

  She climbed out of bed, relieved Zoe hadn’t connected her to any of the field equipment she had set up to take care of their walking wounded. Danny had been Zoe’s first and (Thank God) only customer so far. Someone had put her into one of her cotton jogging pants and sweatshirts, which explained why her body was so warm despite the open window.

  Lara padded across the room, thankful her injury was confined to her left arm. How long had she been asleep? It was hard to gauge time by the darkness, especially with her head still swimming around in a medication-infused fog.

  She passed Elise’s sleeping form, the girl completely oblivious—

  Thoom.

  Definitely not thunder. Or rain. It wasn’t loud or ferocious enough to be gunshots on the boat. Or nearby, which would have meant a second boat. And they were still out in the ocean. Or were they? Had Blaine moved them closer to shore?

  “Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly had said, referring to Keo.

  The door opened before she even reached for it, and Bonnie’s tall frame blocked her path into the hallway. The other woman looked shocked to see Lara standing there, her left arm bent at the elbow, held tight against her chest.

  “You heard it, too?” Bonnie asked.

  Lara nodded. “What was it?”

  “Explosions.”

  “Explosions?”

  “From the beach. From Sunport.”

  Keo.

  “Where’s everyone?” she asked.

  Bonnie held up her radio. “On the bridge.”

  They turned right and went up the darkened hallway. Why was it so dark? Usually there were one or two LED lights set on dim along the corridors.

  Next to her, Bonnie looked like she wanted to wrap an arm around Lara’s waist to keep her upright, but Lara was moving just fine. That was the good news. The bad news was that she was starting to feel a slight tingle coming from her left arm, a clear indication the pain meds were losing their effectiveness.