Like she always did whenever they took over someone’s house for the night, Lara wondered where the family had gone. Were they still alive? Maybe they were even on Song Island in Beaufont Lake. Wouldn’t that be something?
Lara and the girls brought in their personal carry-ons first, stuffed with clothes and personal items. The big plastic crates with the emergency rations came next. After that, they lugged in the thick, heavy bags of guns and ammo.
And finally, they brought in the four portable fans they carried with them everywhere, dividing them up between rooms on the second floor. The fans were the only things keeping the Texas summer at bay and made whatever room they were bedding down in for the night mercifully breathable. All four ten-inch oscillating fans ran on a ridiculous eight D cell batteries and could, conceivably, work continuously for forty straight hours. Fortunately the D cells, like all of the batteries they carried, were rechargeable using solar-powered adapters. Even with the fans, it was still always too hot, but that was Texas.
Lara left Elise with Carly and Vera and found her medical bag. It was a black bag filled with medical supplies and reminded her of old movies where small-town doctors went from house to house.
A simpler time, when creatures from the darkness didn’t try to eat you.
She went to check up on the wounded man upstairs. He hadn’t moved from the bed where they had deposited him earlier. He was still dangerously pale, and his eyes opened and closed intermittently, as if he were afraid to fall asleep.
It was a small room, and she guessed it was for one of the family’s children. A teenage boy, from the looks of the Call of Duty and gaming posters along the walls. A baseball bat lay among a pile of sports toys in one corner and discarded clothes in another. Tidiness hadn’t been the kid’s modus operandi.
She put her medical bag on a chair close by. Before they had left the facility, she had stocked up on everything she thought she would need for a portable MASH unit. The items in the bag were just a small sampling — her emergency supplies. The rest were in the trucks Will and Danny had hidden inside the garage.
She pulled out a syringe and a bottle of morphine and leaned over the man. “Can you hear me?”
His eyes darted, seeking out her voice. Finally locating her, he managed to nod — or as much as he could.
Yes.
“This is morphine,” she said, showing him the syringe.
His eyes widened in alarm.
“You need this,” Lara said, “or you’re going to die when I pull the bullet out of your shoulder. And it has to come out, you understand?”
Yes.
“Good. Is Sandra your wife?”
No.
“Girlfriend?”
Yes.
“Did someone take her? The same people who shot you?”
Yes.
“How many were there? More than one?”
Yes.
“More than five?”
Yes.
“Do you know where they went?”
No.
“Okay. Enough with the twenty questions for now. You’re going to see Sandra again, but you need to trust me first. Understand?”
He looked uncertainly at her.
“If we’d wanted to kill you, we would’ve left you on the road, don’t you think?”
He paused.
Then: Yes.
“Don’t fight the morphine. You’ve fought enough, and it’s got you this far. You don’t need to keep fighting. I’ll keep you alive, but you’ll have to let me. And that means taking the morphine and sleeping through the day. Agreed?”
Yes.
“Good.”
She gave him the shot and watched him slowly drift off.
Lara took out a small portable IV bag and looked for a place to put it. She saw a framed picture of a good-looking teenager, about twelve or thirteen, posing in a baseball uniform with one knee on a baseball field, holding the same baseball bat she saw on the floor. Lara removed the photo and looped the IV bag over the hook in the wall, then attached the other end to the man’s arm.
Carly came in while she was getting the man’s shoulder ready to extract the bullet. “You need a hand?”
“If you’re not too busy.”
“I had some shopping on tap, but what the hell, digging a bullet out of some stranger we picked up on the road should be fun, too.”
“You’re all heart.”
As Lara worked on the man, she could hear Will and Danny moving around the house, pulling doors out of hinges and nailing them against windows in the rooms around them. She closed out the sounds of hammering and concentrated on prying the bullet out of the man’s shoulder. It moved grudgingly, but after fighting with it for a couple of minutes, she pulled it free and dropped it onto a plastic plate Carly had brought up from the kitchen.
“Souvenir?” Carly smiled.
“My guess is he’ll want to forget what happened as soon as possible.”
“Did he ever tell you who Sandra was?”
“Girlfriend.”
“Must be true love for him to hold on this long.” Carly tossed the plate into a nearby trash bin. “Ah, romance. It lives, Lara, it lives.”
Lara smiled back at the younger woman. Sometimes she forgot Carly was just twenty, that she had been a teenager — albeit one that was nineteen going on thirty — when they had first met.
“You and Danny are like an old married couple,” Lara said.
Carly feigned hurt. “Who you calling old?”
“Danny.”
“Good save, doc.”
“Hey, I didn’t go to three years of medical school for nothing, you know.”
“Hah!” Carly said.
They had four more hours before nightfall, but it always seemed like the hours went by quickly when they decided to shut down for the day. There was no basement, so they settled for reinforcing the windows and doors of the house. They had done it before, survived in a barricaded house, though Lara knew Will always preferred the constricted, one-way access of an underground basement.
“We’re close to the main road, but far from any city, so it’s a good chance they’ll pass us right by,” Will said.
“Shouldn’t they be in front of us by now?” she asked. “The ghouls that were hunting us, I mean.”
“They might backtrack when they realize they’ve passed us by.”
“Would they do that?”
“Dead, not stupid, remember?”
“Dead, not stupid,” was Will’s motto for the ghouls. Everything Will did — or didn’t do — was with that in mind. And he was right. Everything she knew about the ghouls confirmed their intelligence. More dangerously, they were organized. As far as they knew, there were two types of ghouls — the foot soldiers and the leaders. Or commanders, as Will liked to call them.
The blue-eyed ghouls…
There used to be only one blue-eyed ghoul that they knew of, and it had hunted them from Houston all the way to Starch. It was eventually joined by another blue-eyed ghoul, and although Will never saw her, Lara was certain it was Kate.
Kate.
It had been a while since Lara had thought of her. Kate was Will’s former lover, the two of them having found each other at the beginning of The Purge. According to Will, Kate was a pillar of strength. That all changed when Luke, a young man Kate had looked after, died just before they reached Starch. Kate was never the same after that. She became withdrawn, and eventually disturbed, opening Harold Campbell’s facility to the siege that had killed so many people and forced them to abandon what had, up to that point, been a sanctuary from the darkness.