“How many dickheads do they have watching that many people?” Danny asked.
Kellerson shrugged. “Anywhere from ten to twenty.”
“Ten to twenty for a few thousand?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “You telling a fib, Kellerson? Want Willie boy here to start working on those toes next?”
“He doesn’t get it, does he?” Kellerson said, looking at Will.
Will slapped the duct tape back over Kellerson’s mouth.
“Get what?” Danny said. “You BFFs have a joke you wanna share with me? Come on, I’m starting to feel like the third wheel here.”
“He means they don’t need a lot of guards,” Will said. “The people in these towns are here of their own free will. They don’t want to leave. My guess is, ten is more than enough, and twenty is overkill.”
“So what you’re saying is, when we finally get around to going in there guns blazing, they won’t be throwing their virginal daughters at us?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
Danny grunted. “Well, damn. I certainly signed up for the wrong road trip, didn’t I?”
They walked for another hour until they reached the spot where they had stashed the camouflage ATVs earlier — a small group of buildings about half a kilometer from I-49. It was a homestead connected to the highway by a spur road that hadn’t looked traveled even before The Purge. The house’s main building was a bungalow flanked by an empty garage. A long red barn, the paint badly chipped by neglect and weather, squatted in the back with a rusted-over tractor out front. The place was as out-of-the-way as they could find on short notice.
The ATVs were hidden inside the barn among the unused bales of hay and horseless stables. Walking the rest of the way to L15 had been necessary. Sound traveled these days, and the roar of all-terrain vehicles would have been obvious to even a deaf man.
There hadn’t been much of the bungalow to explore, and their biggest worry was the decayed sloping roof falling down on them. They found what they were looking for in the back of the house, hidden behind rotting twin doors that opened up into an underground cellar. There wasn’t much inside except for old tractor parts and stacks of cinder blocks under dust-covered tarps. They cleared out just enough space in one corner and dropped their bedrolls and supply packs.
Kellerson sat down in one corner on the dirt floor. Will let him eat a stick of beef jerky and gave him a bottle of water to wash it down with. When he was done, Will covered his mouth back up before he could say a word. The fight had gone out of Kellerson about the same time Will threatened to take the collaborator’s third finger.
They found a way to lock the doors by looping coiled steel cables around the handles and snapping a padlock in place. When that didn’t look like it would hold against a prolonged assault, they stacked the cinderblocks in front of the entrance, then threw the heavy tarps over them to make sure not a single inch of space could be seen from the other side. The creatures had proven themselves too smart at detecting people to take any chances.
If their luck did happen to run out, at least they had plenty of the right ammo to fend off an attack. Danny and Roy had left Song Island well prepared, and Will had taken all of Roy’s before they parted company this morning. Roy took the regular ammo because in the daytime, any ol’ bullet would do. Will and Danny carried two heavy bags and two tactical backpacks with them, stuffed with a combination of what Danny and Roy had brought and what they had salvaged from Kellerson’s dead crew. Dead men didn’t need beef jerky, bottled water, and spare ammo. The portable ham radio he had been using to communicate with Song Island was among the supplies.
Will looked down at his watch’s glow-in-the-dark hands: 5:34 p.m.
“You think she’s still alive in there?” Danny asked. He was chewing loudly on a stick of jerky.
“Gaby?”
“No, Yoko Ono. Yeah, Gaby.”
“She’s Gaby.”
“Yup. That’s her name, all right.”
“What I mean is, she’ll be fine. She’s a survivor. You should have seen her at the hospital.”
“Yeah?”
Will nodded. “Yeah.”
Soon, the only evidence that Danny was even leaning against the dirt wall next to him was the sound of chewing. Somewhere to his right, Kellerson was breathing deeply. How the man could make so much noise while only inhaling and exhaling through his nostrils was a mystery. Will had considered removing Kellerson’s duct tape to make it easier on him, but it never took long for the man’s crimes — those that Will knew for a fact, and likely more he didn’t even know about — to come up again, and it took all of Will’s strength not to execute him on the spot.
Night came, and they heard scurrying outside almost immediately. The soft patter of bare feet against hard ground vibrated through the dried dirt around them.
Will flicked the fire selector on his M4A1 rifle from semi-automatic to full-auto just in case.
“You nervous in the service, son?” Danny whispered somewhere in the darkness.
Will smiled.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your flimsy cellar doors down,” Danny whispered.
A soft click as Danny flicked at his carbine’s fire selector.
Will sat back against the cool dirt wall and groped his pack for the all-too-light bottle of painkillers. He shook out two Tramadol and popped them into his mouth, then swallowed without chewing. He pulled up his shirt and ran his palm over the stitching along his right side and considered it a good sign he didn’t feel any wetness. His left arm had numbed over since yesterday, and he hadn’t felt anything more than the occasional slight tingles coming from his left hip in a while. Either the pills were working, or he had become used to them.
What he wouldn’t give to have Lara look him over. The last thing he needed was an infection. Battlefield wound treatment was a crapshoot at best, but leaving them for days was just asking for it.
Of course, having Lara treat him meant going back home. Back to Song Island.
And he couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not while Gaby was still out there…
Around midnight he drifted off, waking up two hours later to let Danny sleep.
Each time Will woke up, he could hear Kellerson moving erratically in the darkness, possibly from a nightmare. Or it could be the bugs and hairy legs of spiders crawling up and down his body. Will felt them too, but they were small enough that he didn’t bother chasing them off. He did slap a few that wandered too close to his neck and face, squashing them against his palm, then wiping the leftover goop on the floor.
When he was awake, he listened to the occasional movements on the other side of the cellar doors, like rats scratching in the walls. He wasn’t surprised they were out there, though it did make him more than a little uncomfortable they were this close. There was no one in the house, and surely they must have already searched it a hundred times since The Purge, so why were they back?
But the creatures’ presence in the area didn’t surprise him at all. There were people nearby in L15. Humans that had given up liberty for salvation. Blood for safety.
“They’re not like you, Will,” Zoe had said to him once. “They’re not soldiers. They’re just trying to survive the end of the world the best they can.”
I would rather die first.
Danny woke up two hours later, and Will went back to sleep.
He felt the heat building inside the cellar with the morning, and small slivers of sunlight flitted through the barricade in front of him when he opened his eyes. Not much light, just enough to illuminate parts of the room.