The Gates of Byzantium (Purge of Babylon, Book 2) (49 page)

Cons: There were none. At least, none that he could see. It was hot on the island, but then it was hot everywhere. In Texas. In Louisiana. Where
wasn’t
it hot?

Conclusion: Sure, the world had essentially come to an end, but his life was looking pretty bright right about now.

Suck on that, mofos!

After he settled into his room, Josh spent the first few hours on the island exploring, careful to stick to the cobblestone paths that snaked everywhere. He had planned to invite Gaby along, but he could hear the shower running in her room next to his. His face still throbbed, and it felt good to be out in the sun. There was a nice breeze, and it soothed Josh’s bruises and seemed to help with the swelling around his eyes.

He had left his gun back in his room. There was something about the island, about the way the islanders walked around without guns—except for the big guy, Tom—that made it seem all right for Josh to do the same. If it was good enough for them…

While everyone stuck to the hotel and the air conditioning, Josh was irresistibly drawn to the Tower, about half a football field from the back of the hotel, perched on the eastern cliff. He stood next to the concrete base of the thick, conical structure, craning his neck to look up at the unfinished glass housing at the top. It was high up, and his neck hurt trying to take in the entire sight.

Josh pulled open the thick wooden door to the Tower. It was a lot heavier than it looked. Or maybe he just needed to work out more. Probably a little of both.

He stepped inside.

There wasn’t much of a first floor. There was a chair in a corner and another thick wooden door built into the concrete floor with a ring handle. The basement, he guessed. There was a bookcase with hardcover books, paperbacks, and stacks of yellowing magazines. A spiral cast-iron staircase wrapped around the wall of the Tower’s interior like a skeletal snake, gradually extending upward before ending at another wooden door in the first-floor ceiling.

Josh climbed the staircase and was out of breath by the time he reached the door at the end. He pushed at it, felt it giving way grudgingly, and had to put his shoulder into it just to push it all the way up. The damn thing was heavy, and he felt like one of those submariners pushing open the top hatch of the sub in order to step outside. He poked his head through the rectangular opening, not quite sure what to expect.

The second floor was smaller than the first, which made sense since the Tower contracted inward the higher it went up. There was another bookcase across the room, but what really caught his attention were the paintings along one side of the wall. A dog with something in its mouth, a big deer, and a guy peering out from behind some bushes. There was a cot with meticulously folded blankets and sheets. Another section of spiral staircase circled the wall, leading up to yet another thick door in another floor above him.

Josh climbed all the way up and walked to the window across the room. The breeze up here was definitely cooler. There were no curtains on the windows, which were really just big square holes in the wall. He wondered if there were supposed to be more—like window frames with glass, maybe.

Josh leaned out the window and looked around. He could see almost everything on the eastern side of Song Island, including the beach to the south. There was a solar-powered LED floodlight directly above him, hanging just below the windowsill of a third-floor window.

“Nice view, huh?” a voice said behind him.

Josh was startled and turned quickly, surprised to find Tom sitting on the other side of the floor, behind the open door. Tom had apparently been there the whole time, eating what looked like blueberries out of a Ziploc bag; his lips had turned purple from berry juice. The cheap fold-out chair under him looked as if it shouldn’t be able to support a man of his weight.

Tom looked pleased at Josh’s reaction. “Sorry, kid, didn’t mean to scare you. This is sort of my place.”

“I didn’t know anyone was up here,” Josh said.
And how the hell didn’t I see you sitting back there all this time?

“No worries.” Tom wiped his hands on his cargo shorts, smearing purple juice over the fabric. “Ugh. Now that’s going to stain.”

“Baking soda will get that out.”

“That right? Baking soda?”

“You can usually rub it out with a wet rag.”

“I think we have some baking soda in the kitchen,” Tom said, flicking at the stains on his pants. “Josh, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to your face?”

Josh flushed a bit. “I ran into this guy.”

“Did you at least give as good as you got?”

“Well, he’s dead, and I’m not, if that’s what you mean.”

Tom nodded approvingly. “That’s not a bad trade-off.” He grinned, showing juice-stained teeth. “You ever been in a lighthouse before?”

“First time. What’s up there?” Josh pointed at the third floor above them.

“More of this, but also where the radio message you heard gets sent out into the world. I guess they were planning to run their own radio station or something. Go on up. The view’s even better up there.”

Josh hesitated. “So you live here?”

“Here, there, everywhere. But I come here for the privacy. Not everyone likes to climb the stairs.”

Tom dug out another Ziploc bag filled with more blueberries and began popping them into his mouth. Josh didn’t know where he was hiding those bags.

“Got any questions, shoot,” Tom said.

“What’s with the door?” Josh asked.

Tom looked amused. Apparently he had wondered the same thing. “I guess the guy who designed the place was trying to do something new. It gives the Tower three separate, private floors, so it kinda works. What do you think?”

“The door’s a little heavy, but it looks pretty cool.”

“That’s what I said.” Another juice-stained grin. “What do you think of the island so far?”

“It’s more than we thought it would be. Which is good. It’s really good.”

“Wait till dinner. Al cooks a mean fish.”

“We’re all looking forward to it. We’ve been eating nothing but canned fruits and stale chips for the last eight months.”

Tom chuckled. “Yeah, I can see how fresh fish will taste really good after that.” Tom tossed the empty bag into a nearby trash bin. He stood up and glanced down at his stained pants. “I’m gonna go find that baking soda now. Stay as long as you like, kid.”

Josh watched Tom come out from behind the door, then start down the stairs. He thought Tom was gone and started to turn back toward the window when the big man stuck his head back up through the opening.

“Hey,” Tom said. “That girl. The blonde. She taken?”

“You mean Gaby?”

“I don’t know, is that her name? She’s a looker, huh? I mean, the other girls, too, but that one. Wow.”

“Yeah,” Josh said, and thought,
Asshole
.

“How old is she? Seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Not that it matters,” Tom smiled. “It’s not like there are statutory rape laws anymore, am I right?”

*

After loitering around
the Tower for a few more minutes, mostly to make sure Tom was gone before he went back down the stairs, Josh continued his tour of the island.

He was still trying to shake off his encounter with Tom. It was unsettling, more so because the man didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with lusting after Gaby in front of him. In Josh’s experience, what guys said was usually the least objectionable thing about how they really thought.

What an asshole.

Josh pushed it out of his mind and continued along the cobblestone path.

The Kilbrew Hotel and Resorts was confined almost entirely to the east side of the island, with nearly the entire western half covered in thick vegetation and sprouting trees. Obviously the developers had plans for this half of the island, too, but had never gotten around to it. They weren’t really going to leave an entire half unclaimed, were they?

He walked aimlessly for a while, eventually stumbling across a big, gray concrete building. It was an ugly thing, two stories high, with long white poles sticking up along the flat roof like skinny metal limbs. The building was surrounded by hurricane fencing, including a padlocked front gate. Electrical coils extended out from the building, vanishing underground. There was a small, almost insignificant shack next to it with a steel door.

He could hear a persistent humming noise coming from inside the building, and knew right away that this was where the island got its power and where all those solar panels delivered the sunlight they stored all day to be processed into electricity. There was a big generator somewhere inside the building, doing all the work.

A sign read: “Power Station.”

Josh walked around the building, taking it all in, until his teeth started chattering from the noise. He found the cobblestone pathway again and followed it south, all the way back down to the beach, where hard rock gave way to soft, mushy sand.

He was about to return to the hotel when he saw Debra farther down the beach. She was pulling a casting net out of the water slowly. When he got closer, he saw that the net was full of fish.

“Wow, that’s a lot,” he shouted down the beach at her.

Debra gave him a big grin before plopping the net into a big, aluminum bucket. She jerked on the net and the fish fell out, sloshing and thrashing for their lives. Josh didn’t know his fish, but it looked like there were at least a dozen different species, most of them as big as his arm.

“This is nothing,” Debra said. “Wait until next year. I’m going to need two people just to pull this net out then. Used to be, this lake was full of fishermen, taking fish out of the water as fast as they could spawn. Now, you can’t throw a rock in there without conking a dozen fish on the head.”

Josh grinned at the image.

“Good for us,” Debra continued. “As long as you’re a fan of fish, anyway, because we’re never going to run out of them. Ever.”

Josh did like fish, though he wasn’t sure if he liked them that much. He supposed he would have to get used to it. Hell, it beat running around abandoned cities looking for canned goods, anyway.

He caught Debra sneaking a look at his face, but unlike Tom, she was too polite to come right out and say anything about it.

“Is it hard to throw that thing?” he asked, watching as she assembled pieces of the net along her right arm to cast again.

“Nah. It’s all in the arms. Here, I’ll show you.”

She walked back to the water’s edge and fluidly tossed the net out. It looked like a spreading spider-web, expanding before falling into the water and dipping underneath the surface.

“The trick is to give it time,” Debra said. “Usually you need to know your terrain when you’re casting. If you’re doing it from the shore and you know there are rocks or other things it could get snagged on nearby, you pull it up faster. Here, though, it’s pretty much just sand below, so I’m going to let it sink all the way to the bottom to get maximum coverage.”

She started to pull, and once again the net was teeming with fish.

“Voila,” Debra said. Instead of throwing the fish into the bucket with the others, Debra pulled a line and the net opened up. Right away, fish began making their escape back into the lake. “We already have more than enough for today, so these lucky suckers get a reprieve.”

“We can’t just put them all in the freezer for later?” he asked.

“Sure we can, but fish are always better fresh. Besides, they’re not going anywhere. As far as I know, the creatures don’t like seafood.” She hiked the net, now in a tight and neat bundle the size of his head, over her shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here. I was wondering how I was going to get all this fish back to the hotel. I usually don’t take this many back with me, but since we have a few extra mouths today, I wanted to make sure I got enough.”

Josh grabbed one side of the bucket as she took the other, and they headed up the beach toward the cobblestone pathway.

“What happened to your face?” she asked after a while. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Everyone’s asking, so why not?” He shrugged. “This guy in Beaumont decided I’d look better with a busted nose.”

“Ouch. Did you at least tattoo him back?”

“I didn’t, but Gaby did.”

“Which one is she?”

“The blonde.”

“Young one or older one?”

“Young one. She basically saved my life. Twice now.”

“She’s pretty.”

“Yes, she is.”

Debra grinned at him. “You and her…?”

“We’re just friends for now.”

“‘For now.’” Debra laughed. “Teenagers will be teenagers.”

Josh felt himself blushing a bit. “Where’s Kyle?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Probably in the lobby playing his games. He’s like you—not much of an outdoorsy type.”

“How do you know I’m not an outdoorsy type?”

She gave him a wry look.

He laughed. “Guilty.”

“I’ve been working out here all my life,” Debra said. “I started on fishing boats when I was fourteen, helping crews catch fish and crawdads and you name it, all up and down the Gulf.”

“How did you come to Song Island?”