The Ashes of Pompeii (Purge of Babylon, Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the radio. “Everyone stay where you are. We’re just…interrogating the survivor.”
    “You sure?” Maddie asked.
    “Yes. Keep an eye out for the eighth guy.”
    “Will do.”
    “Well, that was fun,” Keo said.
    Lara stared at Gage, who peered back out at her from the corner of the room. When he saw her looking, he quickly glanced away. If he could have gotten up and run, he probably would have. But his days of running were over with that still-bleeding kneecap.
    “He can be useful,” Keo was saying.
    “How?” she asked.
    She hadn’t thought about putting Gage to use. The very idea of the man’s continued existence offended her at an almost primal level.
    “The yacht,” Keo said. “You’re going to need someone who knows his way around it.”
    “You know boats.”
    “I know boats, but I don’t know that ,” he said, pointing at the long console behind them. “He does.”
    “You also told me a boat this size needs a big crew to run it. All of his crew is dead, except for an eighth guy who may or may not exist. How is one man going to keep this thing afloat, even if he does know what all those buttons are for?”
    “We’re talking about a twenty-first-century luxury yacht here, Lara. It might break down eventually, but it’s still in good enough shape right now that you could use it to get to wherever you needed to go. I think that’s worth keeping him alive for a little while longer, don’t you?”
    Keo wasn’t wrong. She was already thinking about all the things she could do with a boat this size when she first saw it last night, and seeing it sitting on the lake under the morning sunlight had crystallized so many of those possibilities.
    Keep the island if you can, but if you can’t…
    Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, right, Will?
    Gage was still cowering in the corner, probably trying to figure out if he was going to live past the next few minutes. She could have reassured him, but Lara decided to let him keep wondering instead.
    Her radio squawked, breaking the silence, and Carly’s voice came through. “Lara, come in.” Carly was back on the island in the Tower with Benny, and Lara thought she sounded slightly anxious. “You still there, ol’ fearless leader?”
    “I’m here,” Lara said into the radio.
    “I have your boyfriend on the other radio,” Carly said. “Should I tell him you already found someone else?”
    *
    “We’ll get home,” Will said through the ham radio. “Whatever it takes. We’re not going to leave the island undefended for another day.”
    He sounded noticeably tired. She could only imagine it was the culmination of what he had gone through the last few weeks, coming through in his voice even if he didn’t mean for it to. So much of Will’s life was about making the right choices for the right reasons and internalizing most of it, and she hadn’t realized how draining all of that was until the last few weeks.
    How did you do it all these months, Will? How did you not break down?
    She was glad she was by herself on the Tower’s second floor. It was easier to talk to Will when no one else was around. She could let her guard down and for just a brief moment strip away the façade of leadership that they had given her, that she wasn’t certain she was capable of living up to.
    I feel like every choice I’m making is the wrong one. Why aren’t you back here with me now, Will? Why are you still out there?
    “It’s not undefended,” she said into the microphone. “I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re actually not nearly as incompetent as we seem.”
    He chuckled on the other end. “Yeah, but I have a couple of M240s that’ll come in real handy when they try to land on the beach next time.”
    “What’s an M240?”
    “It’s a machine gun. Spits out enough lead really fast to make things uncomfortable for an invading force. Put two on the beach and we’re all set. What do you think?”
    Machine guns. On the beach. It was