Free The Spears of Laconia (Purge of Babylon, Book 7) by Sam Sisavath

woman in silence for a moment. A part of her thought Morris might be playacting, but that wasn’t true because ten, then fifteen seconds later, and Morris’s chest still hadn’t moved again.
    “What did she say?” Nate asked, coming back over.
    “Four hundred,” Gaby said.
    “Four hundred?”
    Gaby slung her rifle and looked around them at the toppled buildings, at the visible body parts. “They were inside when the plane hit.”
    “Someone probably ordered them into the buildings,” Nate said. “They would have been able to hear it coming for miles.” He shook his head. “They would have been better off making a run for it; they were sitting ducks inside those buildings.” He wiped at some soot underneath his chin. “She said 400?”
    Gaby nodded.
    “Christ,” Nate said. “This isn’t right. Whoever did this—whoever ordered this…” He shook his head again. “This isn’t right.”
    She didn’t know how to reply, didn’t know if anything she said would be even remotely enough, so she turned around and maneuvered past Morris and her mount instead.
    “Come on,” she said, “there might be more survivors up the street.”
    Nate followed, their boots crunching broken glass and concrete chunks as they stepped through puddles of blood.
    And they hadn’t even hit the halfway mark through town yet…
    *
    “When it finished with the town, it did an extra gun run along a country road that runs parallel to a creek,” Danny said. “There are more bodies out there.”
    “Survivors?” Nate asked.
    “Maybe a half dozen vehicles made it through.”
    “Thank God.”
    Danny glanced down at his watch. “We should avoid the state highway from now on. Skip around using the smaller roads until we hit US59, then pick our way north to Starch. It’ll take longer, but better late than dead.”
    “How many?” Gaby asked.
    “How many what?”
    “How many got caught out there? That didn’t get away?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Yes, it does.”
    Danny didn’t answer her.
    “How many, Danny?” she pressed.
    “It doesn’t matter, Gaby,” he said again. For a brief moment, he reminded her so much of Will, who could end a conversation with just a few words and the right inflection in his voice. “Let’s get going,” Danny continued. “I want to be in Starch by noon. Nate, it’s your turn at the reins.”
    Nate nodded and slipped into the truck behind the steering wheel while she took a moment to look back one last time at the town. The clouds of black and gray smoke still loitered above it, as if they would never leave. From a distance, the carnage looked almost poetic, but she knew better; there was nothing artful about the bloodbath below those dull colors.
    “Gaby,” Danny said behind her. “We gotta go.”
    She turned around and climbed into the backseat as Nate fired up the engine, then maneuvered across the empty lanes toward the feeder road exit to get them off the highway. Danny was right: What had earlier been clear sailing to Starch—there was no such thing as traffic out here, far from the nearest big city—was now a wide-open potential kill zone.
    Gaby leaned back against her seat, feeling impossibly drained by the long walk from one end of the destroyed town to the other. She closed her eyes and placed her cheek against the door, the interior of the truck swamped by the cold weather. In front of her, Nate’s Mohawk battled against the breeze, a sight that made her smile despite everything she had seen the last few hours.
    “They don’t miss,” Danny had said as they approached the town, all the while listening to the series of chaotic explosions that were so loud even the road had trembled under their truck. “The Avengers are straight-on Gatling guns; they’re right in front of the cockpit so the pilots have to see exactly what they’re shooting at. And they hardly ever miss.”
    “Four hundred…”
    Gaby replayed Morris’s words in her head, heard again the anger and