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“You think someone painted their boat black as camouflage?” Carly asked.

Blaine shrugged. “That’s what I would do. Not exactly a lot of chances you’d run across another boat all the way out here. So what other reason would there be to paint a boat black?”

No one said anything for a while. Carly looked back out the bridge and Lara joined her.

After a while, Lara said, “Exactly how far are we from land, Blaine?”

“I’ve kept us steady at twenty miles out,” Blaine said. “No one should be able to spot us from the coastline. Especially at night with our lights manually shut off.”

“Damn, I wish Danny were here already,” Carly said, reflexively crossing her chest with her arms and rubbing her shoulders.

“Who’s got guard duty tonight?” Lara asked.

“Gwen,” Blaine said.

“Ask for volunteers to join her. I want to double all the sentries until otherwise noted. We’ll also need to post someone permanently at the back, too.”

“I’ll draw straws with whoever doesn’t volunteer to back up Gwen tonight,” Carly said.

“One last thing,” Lara said. “I want all the adults armed again, including Dwayne, even if they’re not on guard duty.”

“Dwayne too?” Blaine asked.

“He’s really good with that bolt-action rifle of his,” Carly said. “Scary good, for a thirteen-year-old.”

“I thought he was twelve,” Lara said.

“He turned thirteen three weeks ago, remember?”

No
, she thought, but said, “I guess I forgot.”

“Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

Lara nodded and gave her friend an appreciative nod.

“What about Claire?” Blaine asked. “Gaby’s been training her…”

Lara shook her head. “She’s not ready yet.”

“So it’s settled,” Carly said.

“I’ll bring my cot back up here and tighten the shift between me and Maddie,” Blaine said. “I’ll make sure someone’s always up here every hour of the day from now on.”

“Maybe bring two cots, one for Sarah,” Carly said. “You know, in case you guys want a little late-night boom-boom action.”

Blaine groaned. “Please don’t ever say ‘boom-boom action’ ever again.”

“Trouble in paradise?”

“Something like that.”

“You guys should do what I do. Send one of you out there. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or some crap like that.”

“You get that out of a Hallmark card?” Blaine asked.

Lara stepped closer to the windshield and could barely hear them going back and forth behind her as she looked out at the never-ending expanse of blue ocean outside. Her mind swam with all the potential hidden dangers she hadn’t seen—or even tried to look for—before. She had almost convinced herself there was no one out here but them, even though she knew better. There had been the dead body they had fished out of the water off Sunport, and later, that voice on the radio asking her to make contact.

They had been floating around the Gulf of Mexico for so long, safe and sound onboard the
Trident
that she had almost made herself believe they could be safe so long as they stayed far away from Texas. She should have known it wouldn’t last forever, and maybe she always did but had just done a very good job of deceiving herself.

The girls could be wrong. There might not have been another boat out there last night watching us.

Yeah, right…

3

GABY

T
HIS MUST BE
what God feels like.

The man’s head drifted slightly left, then right in her rifle’s ACOG scope. It had been a while since she found herself in possession of an optic that could shoot long distance, and this one had come courtesy of a dead man.

I can kill him right now. It would be so easy. Just squeeze the trigger…

She did it even as she thought it—tightened her forefinger around the cold steel. All it would take was a little more pressure. Just a little bit more. That was how easy it was to end a life. The Purge might have devastated the planet, but it hadn’t changed the way a gun could kill.

“How many?” Nate asked, his voice bringing her out of her own world.

She depressed the trigger and pulled slightly back from the eyepiece, if just to chase away the temptation. “Too many.”

“Again.”

“Uh huh.”

“When has it ever
not
been too many?” he said.

It was a common refrain these days. There were always too many. In the daytime, in the nighttime, there were always too many. Too many dangerous men in the day and too many undead things at night.

Too many. Always too many.

“Are they tracking us?” Nate asked. He sounded run down from the last few days, even a little annoyed, but not scared. Or, at least, she couldn’t detect any fear in his voice. “They must be tracking us…”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“First Port Arthur, and now here…” He shook his head. “Gotta be, right?”

“I don’t know, Nate.”

“Gotta be,” he repeated, mostly to himself that time.

She looked over at him lying against the edge of the rooftop next to her. The Mohawk was mostly gone, his hair grown in (out?) around the ridiculous stump in the middle. He had dirt on his cheeks and forehead but didn’t seem to notice it. The girl in her spent a moment being self-conscious about her own appearance, but the woman that had emerged easily dismissed the thought without much resistance.

Nate lowered his binoculars and met her gaze. “But why would they be tracking us? For Mason? I thought he was just another grunt these days.”

“I don’t think he was lying about that part. After Louisiana”—
And Josh and that terrible night on Song Island—
“he’s not what he used to be, and I know for a fact he wasn’t just another grunt back then.”

“Makes no sense,” Nate said. “We’re not that important, especially with Mercer’s people running around blowing up people. The three of us should be at the very bottom of their to-do list.”

She nodded because he was right. They weren’t important at all. What were three more people when the entire state was on high alert? The collaborators they’d (managed to avoid so far) run across in the last few days were on a war footing; they had their hands full with small teams of hit-and-run…what the hell were they? Rebels? Insurgents? Or maybe she should just think of them as Mercer’s killers, because that was exactly what they were.

Even now, she hadn’t dismissed the possibility that either Mercer’s men or the collaborators had found Taylor and Alice at their cabin in the woods outside of Larkin. The place had been empty when they showed up to collect the sisters for the trip home like they had promised. The door was open and there were no signs of the girls. More baffling, there was no evidence of a struggle. The sisters had simply…vanished. Nate thought it had to be ghouls, that the girls’ luck had finally run out, but she wasn’t so sure. Mason, of course, said he didn’t know anything about it, but the man was a liar and it was hard to believe anything that came out of his mouth.

In the end, they’d had to move on, with the sisters added to a long list of failures since returning to Texas.

We should have stayed on the
Trident
. We should never have come back.

We should never have come back…

She focused on the present, on the here and now, and looked through her M4’s optic again, picking up the same man she’d had in her crosshairs before. He was still leaning against the metal guardrail with his back to her. He had brown hair and spent most of his time working on a thick piece of beef jerky he’d fished out of a see-through bag earlier. He hadn’t come alone; his friend had climbed up onto the hood of the Jeep parked between the two highway lanes and was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. They were both wearing black uniforms, and if she squinted, she could almost make out the Texas patch on their shoulders.

What the hell are you guys doing here?

Gallant, Texas, was a small town of about 3,200, surrounded by flat country land almost exactly halfway between Port Arthur and Galveston. The tiny city’s one major
(only?)
contribution was the slightly raised I-10 interstate road that joined it with Beaumont and Port Arthur to the east, Baytown to the west, and Galveston somewhere in the southwest.

The soldiers were loitering on that highway right now, looking for…something. They hadn’t found this place by accident. She was almost certain of that. So what were they doing here? Could Nate be right? Could these men have been tracking them?

What the hell are the two of you
doing
here?

She laid the rifle on the rooftop and rolled over onto her back, blinking up at the sun. She didn’t have to look at her watch to know they still had hours to go before nightfall. Her body was in tune to her environment and had been since they began picking their way south from Starch, skirting potential ambushes along the way, only to find Port Arthur crawling with collaborators.

“Hey,” Nate said.

She glanced over. He was holding a small piece of white paper and handed it to her. It was half the size of a regular writing sheet and was blank on one side. She had to turn it over to see the familiar writing:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

T
HE WORDS WERE CLEARLY TYPED
on the sheet using a machine, maybe even a computer printer. The idea that someone out there was printing out a bunch of propaganda flyers had been an interesting topic of discussion for a while, but after encountering more of them as they made their way southeast, it had become less interesting.

“First and only one I’ve seen in Gallant so far,” Nate said. “Wondered where it came from.”

“Probably from the same batch they dumped over Port Arthur,” she said. “It’d make sense for them to bypass the small cities for the bigger ones. Less wasteful that way.”

“How many you think have picked a side? Or, I guess, a new side?”

She shook her head. “Who knows? Maybe a lot, maybe very few, or maybe none.”

“After all that bombing? I don’t know, Gaby. If I were in those towns and I saw what happened to the next town over…”

The memories of what had happened to T29 were burned into her soul. She couldn’t forget what she had seen, and God did she want to so badly.

The town, the sisters, all the failures of the last few days…

She closed her eyes. “Can we not talk about this?”

“You okay?”

“Just a headache.”

“You should take some of the meds we have in the first-aid kits.”

“No.”

“That’s what they’re there for, Gaby.”

“They’re for emergencies. Besides, it always goes away.”

“You sure?” he asked, and she could hear the concern in his voice.

“I’ll be fine.” She opened her eyes and said, before he could argue the point, “We should head back.”

She crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it, then turned around until she was lying on her stomach again. She picked up the rifle and began crawling backward away from the ledge. The distance between them and the highway was close enough
(Shooting distance, at least with the ACOG)
that she took every precaution. It only added a minute or so to their retreat anyway, and they had minutes to spare at the moment. Nate mirrored her crawl until they were almost on the other side, and only then did they stand up and take the ladder in the back down to the street below.

They had walked over to their position on top of the Waffle House, so that meant walking back to where Danny and Mason were. The area they were in was oddly divided with the stores and restaurants to one side and almost exclusively traveling hotels and inns on the other. The tallest building in the entire place was a Comfort Inn and Suites. The rooftop above the hotel’s three stories would have given them a much better spying perch, but the idea of going through those floors just to get to that perfect spot spiked the hairs on the back of her neck even now.

They wound their way through the streets and buildings using the businesses as cover whenever they could. Not that she expected to be spotted from the highway, but again, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks just to shave off a few seconds or minutes. So they took their time and moved along, through, and behind a fast food joint, then a gas station, and a dozen other buildings.

“Wanna get wasted?” Nate asked as they walked past one of the many brick and mortar stores. The sign outside was in gaudy neon, reading “Gallant Liquor Store.”

Not very creative
, she thought, looking in at the hundreds of bottles still sitting on display shelves. The store was remarkably undisturbed and she couldn’t find any signs of ghoul occupation—there were no blankets on the windows or blood smears. Unlike most places they had traveled through, it was rare to find evidence of a ghoul nest in Gallant. It was another reason they had decided to make camp here. That same disregard for the town by the monsters was also why it didn’t make any sense for the two collaborators to be lingering around it.

What are you two
doing
here?

“Let’s relive our college years,” Nate was saying.

“I never went to college.”

“Oh, right. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”

“Are you saying I look old?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re lucky I already like you, or else…” She playfully put a hand on the butt of her sidearm.

He raised both hands in surrender and began walking backward, grinning at her. “If you want, we can pretend we’re in school. I’ll be the big man on campus, and you’ll be my cheerleader girlfriend. I bet if we look hard enough we might even be able to find a cheerleader uniform somewhere in this place, maybe at the high school we passed earlier…”

She shook her head but couldn’t help herself and smiled anyway. “I have a better idea. Why don’t
you
be my cheerleader boyfriend…”