But Keo couldn’t figure it out. Had the voice sounded familiar?
No, it didn’t.
At least, he didn’t think so. Just thinking about it was driving him crazy and wasn’t getting him anywhere close to the answer.
Keo decided to focus on what he knew for sure, and that was Claire. She was still breathing, which was good. Her arms and cheeks were bruised, and he wasn’t sure when that had happened. Maybe when they crashed into a few boulders while being thrashed about the water as they were swept downstream. What mattered was that she was alive.
He left Claire on the ground and stood up, then looked around them.
They were surrounded by trees. A lot of trees. Big and tall and small and thick and not-so-thick ones. Animals moved along branches and scurried across the ground among the bushes and overgrown grass. It wasn’t nearly dark enough, despite the high canopies, for Keo to be worried about the possibility of ghouls in the area. That would change when nightfall came, but that wasn’t going to be for a while. Heck, his problem now was getting to nightfall alive.
At least he still had his MP5SD, which he’d clutched to as he fought the water and hung onto Claire. It was wet, but the Germans knew how to build guns, and Keo was pretty sure the weapon would still work once it dried out.
Pretty sure.
Just in case, he unslung the weapon and ejected the magazine, then let as much water drip from it as possible.
Less desirable was the absence of his holstered sidearm. He didn’t remember losing it, but that wasn’t a surprise. He’d been so focused on maintaining his grip on both Claire and the submachine gun that he could have lost his entire wardrobe and might not have realized it until now.
The knife on his left hip, on the other hand, remained in its sheath. The silver-coated blade would come in handy if he stumbled across ghouls.
But again, he’d worry about that if he managed to make it to nightfall.
Captain Optimism, pal, remember?
Yeah, he remembered, but he was also being pragmatic. It wasn’t like unicorns were going to shoot out of his butt if he wished for it hard enough.
No, it was going to take more than—
Snap!
A twig, breaking in half behind him.
Keo turned, the MP5SD rising to take aim, the thoughts Don’t jam. Don’t you fucking jam on me, you German piece of shit! running through his mind even as he settled one eye over the weapon’s iron sights.
Snap!
Straight ahead. An incoming presence.
Snap! Snap!
Running now!
Keo took a quick step to the right and slid behind the wide trunk of a bulging tree. He pressed against its gnarled barks just as a figure burst through a large bush and into the small clearing where Keo had laid Claire down.
It was a man.
No, not a man.
A boy.
It was Steven. Harvey’s kid.
How the hell did he find us?
The teen dropped to his knees as soon as he spotted Claire, the MP5K he’d been carrying falling down on a pile of brown leaves next to her. Steven hovered over Claire, his hands rubbing at her cheeks. His blond hair was covered in sweat and he was breathing hard. Not because of Claire’s state, but the fact he’d been running to get here. That also explained why his shirt was matted to his back with sweat.
“Claire,” Steven said. “Claire!”
He wasn’t quite shouting, but it was close. Too close.
Keo didn’t need that right now. He didn’t know if Steven was alone or if he was just the point man of a search party, but he couldn’t take the chance. Not that he thought the latter was a real possibility. Steven wasn’t exactly someone you’d put ahead of a posse. From everything Keo had seen and heard about him, the teen’s entire existence was owed to his father’s rank in Shaker Town.
“Claire, wake up,” Steven was saying. “Wake up, please!”
Yeah, like that’s going to help, Keo thought even as he stepped away from the tree. He made plenty of noise doing so. Enough that Steven heard and glanced backward over his shoulder.
The kid’s eyes widened at the sight of Keo, and Keo fully expected him to reach for the MP5 on the ground next to him.
Except he didn’t.
Instead, Steven said, “Can you help her? Can you help her?”
Keo couldn’t help but feel a little amused. The kid was in love. Keo could see it on his face and in his wide eyes. The thought of Claire never waking up again terrified the teenager to the core.
“She’s fine,” Keo said.
“But she’s not breathing.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
He snatched up Steven’s submachine gun and slung it. Nice. He preferred the longer MP5SD to its shorter cousin any day of the week, but you could never go wrong with having two of Heckler & Koch’s finest at your disposal.
Keo couldn’t see anything that looked like a knife or sidearm on Steven. Or a pouch for extra ammo. Had the kid run out into the woods with just the MP5K?
“What are you doing here?” Keo asked him.
“Helping her,” Steven said.
“She’s fine.”
“She doesn’t look fine. Are you sure she’s okay?”
“She swallowed a lot of water. She’ll snap out of it soon.”
I hope, he thought about adding, but didn’t.
He said instead, “Answer the question. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for her,” Steven said.
Keo glanced from Claire’s peacefully unconscious form—if he didn’t know better he might think she was dead—and to the kid.
Then Keo remembered what Claire had told him before.
“Steven told me,” she’d said about what had transpired at Roy’s. “Last night, after he came home.”
She hadn’t elaborated on their relationship, but the fact that Steven “came home” meant they were either living together or were very, very familiar. It didn’t take a genius to figure out everything from there. Not that Keo didn’t already suspect it days ago.
Keo concentrated on Steven now. He’d come here looking for Claire. Who else was looking for her? For them?
“Stay with her,” Keo said just before he hurried off.
He’d told the kid to stay with her on purpose, expecting it to work better than just a curt Stay here. After all, the kid had come searching for Claire. For all Keo knew, she’d popped the kid’s cherry.
Damn, girl. You really got him around your little fingers, huh?
Not that he blamed Steven too much. Claire was an attractive girl. Keo wouldn’t want to admit something like that out loud; he’d known her when she was just a little kid, and to him she still was, even though she wasn’t really.
He walked quickly for about fifty meters before stopping and going into a crouch among the high grass, many of which went all the way up to his chest. Keo listened for sounds of people in the woods with him. Noises created by human boots had a way of standing out against the furry legs of animals on branches or the wings of birds in the air.
Nothing.
He didn’t hear anything out there but his own slightly heavy breathing.
How was that possible? Had Steven managed to find them when no other Shaker could? Was the kid that good? Or just lucky? Or—
Screaming, coming from behind him.
A woman’s scream.
Claire.
Keo got up, the words, Fuck, fuck, fuck! flashing across his head as he raced back through the heavy foliage.
He shouldn’t have left the kids alone.
Goddammit, why had he left the kids alone?
More screaming. This time it was male.
The kid. Steven.
Swell. As if he wasn’t feeling bad enough.
Keo ran faster, making way too much noise for his liking, and just hoping that the double screaming of Claire and Steven—and they were really going at
it now; back and forth, back and forth, as if they were competing or something—would mask his movements. That was probably too much wishful thinking on his part.
He was halfway back to the small clearing when he glimpsed the first guy, who was wearing, of all things, a fur hat with a raccoon’s striped tail draped down the back. The guy was standing next to the same large tree Keo had been hiding behind earlier. Davy Crockett must have heard Keo coming, because he started to turn around. Sunlight filtering through the tree crowns above glinted off the barrel of the FAL assault rifle in his hands.
Keo squeezed off a burst from 10 meters. Half his rounds embedded in the tree trunk, but enough of them found their target.
Davy Crockett disappeared into the overgrown grass just as Keo made a quick left in case the dead man had companions (What were the chances he didn’t? About zero to none, most likely.) and they converged on the sound of Keo’s weapons fire. The MP5SD had a suppressor, but that only lowered the sounds of his shots, not muffled them completely.
He was right. Davy Crockett did have friends, and they appeared to Keo’s right, moving around the same big tree and into the open. Two men, both as big as houses, and making just as much noise. They had no clue where Keo was, and he didn’t give them a chance to find out.
He fired two bursts in their direction, and they were still dropping when he reached the edge of the small clearing, fully expecting more men waiting for him. He’d fired enough bullets that he thought he might have to switch to the MP5K just to be safe.
Except he didn’t have to.
There was a fourth guy, but he was on the ground and Claire was on top of him, smashing a rock into his face. Or what was left of the guy’s face. It was already a bloody mess, though that didn’t seem to satisfy Claire, because she kept striking him over and over, and over.
Steven stood nearby, watching Claire with a mixture of horror and—
No, that was pretty much all horror.
Keo scanned the area and quickly figured out where the Shakers had come from. The beach.
He took off in that direction, stopping at the tree lines and peeking out. There was an inflatable boat on the sand, along with four rowing paddles lying haphazardly inside it. The boat hadn’t been pulled all the way up and looked in danger of being swept back into the water by the active currents.
Four paddles. Four dead Shakers. (Or three dead Shakers and one soon-to-be-dead Shaker, anyway.)
Keo jogged back to the small clearing.
Claire had come to her senses and climbed off the dead man, who may or may not have had a mustache. Keo couldn’t tell. She had also picked up an AR-15 from the ground and was wiping dirt off it. She was breathing hard, the adrenaline clearly still coursing through every part of her as she looked up and over as Keo reappeared.
“How’d they find us?” she asked.
“Boat,” Keo said. “I forgot to hide our tracks on the beach.”
“You forgot?”
Keo shrugged. “I was a little busy dragging your unconscious body in here. You’re welcome.”
Claire smirked at him before turning to Steven. In a voice that was surprisingly tender, she asked, “Are you okay?”
The kid nodded. Keo wasn’t sure if he could even talk at the moment. Or look away from the dead Shaker with the no-longer-there face.
Keo crouched next to that same man and unbuckled his gun belt, doing his very best not to stare at the missing face or get any of the man’s blood on his fingers. “Grab what you can off the other three, and let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Claire asked.
“Anywhere but here.”
“On foot?”
“You want me to carry you?”
“I mean, why don’t we take their boat. It’s not like they need it anymore.”
Ouch. That’s cold.
He said, “You do realize that the river just goes in a circle, right? That sooner or later we’d just end up back where we started?”
“Oh, right,” Claire said.
Keo stood up, slipping the belt around his waist. “By the way, I call dibs on the raccoon hat.”
Twenty-Six
“What’s with you and cocks?”
“The what?”
“Cocks.”
“What cock?”
“Those cocks,” she said, nodding at the MP5SD in his hands and the MP5K he had slung over his shoulder. “You sure love holding them in your hands.”
“Heckler & Koch,” Keo said, pronouncing the Koch as coke.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Heckler & Koch,” she said, except she pronounced it, again, as cock.
He suspected she was just fucking with him, so Keo didn’t keep the banter going. It wasn’t like he was going to win this one, and Keo didn’t like it when he was on the losing side. He was used to being the smartass and not the one on the receiving end.
Fortunately, Claire was already preoccupied with someone else. Namely, Steven. The kid walked alongside them. He was much taller than Claire physically, but she dwarfed him in every other way. And it had nothing to do with the FAL battle rifle in her hands, either. Claire was obviously the dominant force in this relationship. Whatever their “relationship” happened to be.
“You doing okay?” she was asking him now.
Steven nodded, but didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said much since they began their trek through the woods, getting farther away from the water where the Shakers had proven they had the advantage. In the thick of the Georgian woods, there were less chances they could be snuck up on like last time. At least, not without Keo hearing them coming first.
The wings of birds fluttered around them and squirrels raced by along massive branches overhead. Critters did the same on the ground, annoyed at their presence. But nothing popped up that they couldn’t handle with a bullet or two.
For now.
Keo was feeling a little chilly. It didn’t help that his clothes were soaked. If Claire was suffering similarly, she didn’t let it show as she reached over and took Steven’s hand and squeezed. That did it. The kid seemed to snap out of his reverie and looked over at her, before smiling.
She’s got him around her little fingers, all right. He’d probably run into a tree for her.
Keo said, “How’d you find us, Steven?”
The teenager glanced over as if Keo had just spoken to him in some foreign language he didn’t understand.
“Back there,” Keo said. “You were the first one to find us. How?”
“I followed her,” Steven said, nodding at Claire.
“You did what?” Claire said. Apparently she hadn’t realized that.
“I followed you,” Steven said. “When you left the house. To Dad’s house and then to the hotel. After that, I waited inside the woods watching you guys.”
Keo smiled at the thought of Steven outwitting Claire.
“You followed me?” Claire was saying to Steven. She’d let go of his hand, maybe because, like Keo, she was having a hard time believing him. Or maybe she just didn’t want to.
“After you left,” Steven said, nodding.
“I didn’t see you.”
“I know.”
“You actually followed me to your dad’s place without me seeing you?”
Steven gave her a smile that looked simultaneously proud and sad. “You’d be surprised how easily you can be invisible when everyone thinks you’re useless. You just become another face in the crowd. Sometimes not even that.”
Claire glanced over at Keo with an I can’t believe that happened expression on her face.
Keo suppressed a laugh, and said instead, “You saw us go into the water. From the hotel.”
Steven nodded. “Yes.”
Of course he did. How else would the kid have found them so quickly? Even before the Shakers did? He was out there and probably took off in pursuit as soon as he spotted Keo and Claire leaping from the hotel’s fifth-floor balcony.
“Where are we going now?” Steven was a
sking them.
“I’m not sure,” Claire said. She turned to Keo. “It’s a good question.”
“Arrowhead,” Keo said.
“Arrowhead?”
“I need a radio,” he said, but didn’t expand on it. He didn’t want Steven to know everything, even though he didn’t think the kid was a spy. Steven didn’t come here on behest of the other Shakers; he’d found them because he wanted to find Claire.
“You know where it is?” Claire asked.
“Yes,” Keo said.
“What if they don’t help us?”
“They will.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know the guy in charge.”
“Horatio?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you know Horatio?”
“It’s a long story,” Keo said.
They had taken two more steps when a familiar voice said, “Hey, Keo. You out there?”
They stopped and turned around, both Keo and Claire tightening their grips on their guns. Steven, for his part, looked around like a deer in the headlights.
“Don’t be shy, Keo,” the voice said.
The voice had come through the two-way portable radio Keo had clipped to his hip, that he had taken off Davy Crockett the same time he was grabbing the man’s raccoon hat. Out of the four Shakers, Davy Crockett had been the only one carrying a radio. Keo hadn’t bothered trying to contact Black Tide with it. They were too deep in the woods, and the closest Black Tider base was a long way off, well beyond the two-way’s reach.
But the fact that he was receiving a signal at all meant whoever was sending it was close by. That was what made Keo go down on one knee, the MP5SD immediately swinging in front of him.
Next to him, Claire did the same.
But not Steven.
Claire grabbed his arm and jerked him to the ground next to her.
Keo unclipped the radio, but didn’t answer it right away.
“I know you can hear me,” the voice said through the radio. “You couldn’t have gotten too far ahead.”
It was Mr. Mysterious. The same man from last night. The same asshole that knew Keo’s real identity, and who knew what else.
“I know where you’re going,” the man continued. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to pursue you. I can’t afford it. Good men are hard to find, and you already took too many of mine last night and this morning.”
Road To Babylon | Book 10 | 100 Deep Page 20