THE STONES OF ANGKOR
Sam Sisavath
To all the brave souls who took a chance on a nobody and picked up The Purge of Babylon, then did it again with The Gates of Byzantium. This is all your fault. Thank you.
BOOK ONE
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ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
CHAPTER 1
WILL
It was dark and dank in the tunnel, and his face was sticky with dirt and sweat, so of course Danny was making with the jokes.
“It’s been ages since Old Man Tom’s gotten laid. His wife isn’t interested in sex anymore, so one day Old Man Tom goes to the barn and starts looking around. He spots a very nice-looking gelding with white spots and a great coat of brown fur—”
“What’s a gelding?” Will asked.
“What?”
“What’s a gelding? Do I need to know what that is in order to get this joke?”
“It’s a horse.”
“Then why didn’t you just say ‘horse’?”
“’Cause it’s a gelding. Now, you want me to finish this joke or not?”
“Wait, are you saying I have that option? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Danny said something, but Will couldn’t hear it over the shotgun blast, the ear-splitting noise magnified in the tight confines of the tunnel. For the briefest of seconds, bright red and yellow fire lit up the darkness, revealing the skeletal forms of three ghouls, black-prune skin rippling as they lunged at him — just before the silver buckshot vaporized flesh from bone.
Will racked the shotgun and fired again as three more poured out of the blackness, only to disappear in a shower of buckshot. He racked and waited…but nothing else moved, except for the clumps of flesh splattered against the curved walls.
Smart. They’re attacking three at a time now.
“Sorry about that,” Will said. “You were saying?”
“What happened?” Danny asked.
“A little housecleaning.”
“Still? What the hell are they doing down there?”
“I’ll be sure to ask the next one I run across.”
Will stepped over the bodies sprawled on the wet concrete floor. His boots crunched bone, and thick, oozing liquid clung to the soles. He breathed through his mouth to avoid taking in the acrid stench.
The tunnel was huge, running underneath Beaufont Lake and emerging out of the Power Station on Song Island. At its lowest point, the construction reached thirty meters to the bottom of the lake. The partially round structure was twenty meters in diameter, with a flat bottom big enough for two simultaneous lanes of traffic. Condensation dripped from the high ceiling, and drops of water dangled from broken lights evenly spaced out for maximum coverage. The drip-drip-drip had been a constant ever since they’d stepped inside. Steel pipes and conduits snaked along the sides.
The tunnel extended just over one full kilometer underneath the lake, and it wasn’t until they were three-fourths of the way through that it split up into two paths — one continuing forward and the other diverging left. Except the one that went left ended at a solid concrete wall after about ten meters. They were close enough to the island that Will guessed the unfinished portion — probably designed for the customers — led to the resort hotel, while the workers continued on to the end of the line and the Power Station directly above it.
Blaine moved loudly behind him — which was to say, Blaine moved the way only he knew how. The big man was armed with the same Remington 870 tactical shotgun, the shells loaded with silver buckshot. Silver was the only thing that could kill the ghouls. The only other thing, anyway. The sun was more lethal, but it was hard to walk around with the sun in your holster. The rifles over their backs were backups, because Will never liked to venture far without the M4A1. Lara insisted it was superstition. He called it habit.
“How many does that make?” Blaine asked, his voice echoing slightly in Will’s right ear.
Will wore an earbud that was connected to a comm gear, with a throat mic and a radio Velcroed to his stripped-down assault vest. “Twenty?”
“I thought it was more. Where are we now? Feels like we’ve been down here for a couple of days.”
“We should be underneath the island by now.”
“Like rats scurrying through the darkness,” Danny said in Will’s ear. “Foul-smelling, hairy, no-shower taking rats. I can smell you guys from up here.”
“Really?” Will said.
“No, not really.”
They had been moving steadily through the pitch-black tunnel for the last two hours, navigating by night-vision goggles. It was slow going because there were more ghouls inside than Will had anticipated. Too many, in fact. He wondered what they were still doing down here. Waiting for the door on the island to reopen? That wasn’t going to happen. He and Danny had sealed the entrance with multiple thick layers of concrete months ago. Nothing was getting through that.
And yet here they were, having dug their way through the rubble, only to wait…for what?
Will and Blaine had left a ragged line of dead ghouls in their wake, all the way from the tunnel entrance. Or what was left of it after Danny’s C4 had collapsed it three months earlier. The creatures, undeterred, had begun digging their way back in the very first night after the demolition, moving the makeshift wall of concrete piece by piece until they could slip back inside the dark and damp structure God knew how long ago. A month? Two months ago?
What the hell are they doing down here?
“You hear anything?” Will asked.
“Nothing,” Blaine said. “Maybe that’s all of them.”
Danny chuckled through their earbuds. “Captain Optimism, this guy.”
“Maddie, give me a sitrep,” Will said.
“Hot, sweaty, and oh yeah, hot,” Maddie said in his right ear. “How’s it going down there?”
“Slow.”
“Take your time. I love the heat. No, really.”
“I don’t think she likes the heat,” Danny said. “I could be wrong, but I think that was sarcasm.”
“You think?” Blaine said.
“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
They moved in the dark for another thirty minutes, anticipating more ghouls to jump out at them with every carefully plotted step. The ground was soft and muddy despite the concrete floor, a product of heavy condensation and dirt that the ghouls had tracked in while they were using the tunnel as their point of entry into the island.
Eventually, the tunnel started to angle upward noticeably.
“We’re close,” Will said.
“You’re right; I can hear you guys from up here,” Danny said.
“Really?”
“No, not really. Man, you’re gullible. What’s that, the third time now?”
“Nice,” Blaine chuckled.
“We’re definitely going up, though,” Will said.
“See you when I see you,” Danny said.
It didn’t take long before the tunnel leveled out again. They continued along a flat surface for another five minutes before reaching a wide, circular room.
Tap.
Will froze.
“What?” Blaine whispered from behind him.
Tap, tap.
Will watched it moving toward him. It was small and painfully thin, even more so than the ones he had been killing on his way here. He wondered how long it had been down here, waiting for something that never came. Flesh hung loosely from deformed bones, and it seemed to be sniffing him. Maybe it knew there was silver in the shotgun, or maybe it was just too smart to make a frontal attack.