Road to Babylon (Book 9): The Ranch

by Sisavath, Sam

  The part of Thuy’s face that he could see contorted noticeably, as if she were struggling with her thoughts…and maybe something else, too.

  Keo locked eyes with Lara again. Her hands were at her sides, and she stood very still. There was concern on her face but still nothing that looked like terror.

  That’s my girl.

  The room wasn’t devoid of fear and terror, though. Those emotions were being taken up by Gummy and Wilson, still sitting quietly—almost as if they were too afraid to even breathe too loudly—on the couch nearby. The two sisters hadn’t moved at all and looked frozen in place.

  That was good. As long as they stayed where they were, they were out of harm’s way—and out of his line of fire.

  Keo focused on Thuy, still peering over one of Lara’s shoulders back at him. “What does it have on you?”

  Thuy didn’t answer him.

  “I know you don’t want to do this,” Keo continued. “I can see it on your face. So what does it have on you?”

  Lara must have quickly figured out what he was trying to do, and she jumped in with both feet. “We can help you, Thuy. Whatever it has on you, we can help you get out of it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Thuy said.

  “What don’t we understand? Tell us.”

  “It’s not me…”

  Keo didn’t understand her response, but apparently Lara did.

  “It has someone else,” she said. “Someone you care about. It’s holding them hostage, isn’t it? Is it one of the people you were traveling with? Is that it?”

  Thuy didn’t respond, but she also didn’t deny it, either.

  Lara seized on the opportunity (And Keo thought again, That’s my girl.). “We can help you get them back. We’ve done it before. We’ve beaten the Blue Eyes before.”

  “Beat them?” Thuy said, as if the concept was impossibly alien to her.

  “They can be beaten,” Lara said. “You just have to know how to go about it. We know how. We’ve done it before. Right, Keo?”

  “Too many times to count,” Keo said, even though that was just a bit of a white lie.

  Okay, so maybe it was a big lie. They’d defeated the Blue Eyes before, but he could count all those occasions on one hand.

  “It’s not easy, but it can be done,” Keo continued. “But you need to work with us to make it happen. You can start by giving Lara back her gun.”

  “I can’t…” Thuy said, but didn’t finish.

  “You have to trust somebody, sometime,” Lara said.

  “I can’t,” Thuy said again.

  “You can’t what?”

  “I can’t risk it!”

  Thuy snapped her eyes closed for a moment, and Keo almost fired. Almost. His finger was on the trigger and he was so close to pulling the trigger, but he didn’t. He was still too far—way across the room, with at least a good ten meters separating them—and the H&K submachine gun was not designed for pinpoint accuracy at that range.

  And it was Lara in the line of fire.

  It was Lara!

  If it had been anyone else, he might have taken his chances.

  But it wasn’t anyone else.

  It was Lara.

  And even if there was a 1 percent chance he could hurt her and the baby inside her…

  “I can’t risk it,” Thuy was saying, with more certainty than she’d shown in the last few minutes since their standoff began.

  Shit, we’re losing her, Keo thought.

  As if to confirm his suspicion, the Glock in Thuy’s hand waved slightly, erratically.

  Oh, shit…

  “Tell Bunker to open the door,” Thuy said, wiping at sweat dripping from her forehead with the back of her free hand. She looked almost close to tears. “Please. Just tell him to open the door.”

  “I can’t do that,” Keo said.

  “He can’t do that,” Lara added. “You know we can’t do that. It’s suicide.”

  “He has to,” Thuy said.

  “I won’t,” Keo said. “And Bunker wouldn’t do it anyway.”

  “You have to. You all have to!”

  “We don’t have to do anything.”

  Thuy pressed the muzzle of the gun against the back of Lara’s head. Keo grimaced, then thought Get a handle on the situation. Get a handle on this now, goddammit!

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Keo said. “We can talk this out.”

  “No, we can’t,” Thuy said. “Just tell Bunker to open the door. Please.” Then, with even more anguish, “Please.”

  Keo shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

  “Who does it have?” Lara asked. Her eyes moved to the corner in a futile effort to see Thuy standing behind her. “Is it your sister? Your brother? Husband? Tell us, Thuy. We can help you. We can get them back for you.”

  Thuy shook her head, but she’d also pulled the gun back slightly. Keo’s heartbeat slowed down seeing that.

  “It won’t let her go,” Thuy said. “I have to do this, or it won’t let her go.”

  Her? Keo thought.

  “It told you it’d let her go if you do this?” Lara asked.

  “Yes,” Thuy said. “Yes…”

  “It’s lying,” Keo said. “I know this blue-eyed ghoul. It’s a liar. It’s using you, and when it’s done using you, it’ll get rid of you and your friend. You can’t trust a single thing it’s promised you.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Thuy said.

  “We can help you.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said, shaking her head. She looked close to tears. That struck Keo as ironic because she wasn’t the one with a gun pointed at the back of her head.

  “Give us a chance,” Keo said. “What do you have to lose?” he almost added, but he decided it wouldn’t strike the hopeful mood he was trying to get across.

  “Listen to him, Thuy,” Lara said. “You can trust us.”

  “I…” Thuy said.

  “Trust us.”

  “I can’t!”

  At that very second, Keo caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye.

  At first he thought it was the kids on the couch, but it wasn’t them. It was too subtle and was barely perceptible. He might not even have caught it if every single one of his senses wasn’t attuned to the entire room at the moment.

  Whatever it was, it was coming from the far right side of the common room, past the couch that Gummy and Wilson were sitting on.

  It was the door into the vault room.

  And it was opening slowly…

  Additional alarm bells went off inside Keo’s head, and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to turn to look. The fact that the door didn’t just burst open was even more confusing than why it was opening in the first place. Or had it always been ajar and wasn’t actually opening? Could that have been it? Could—

  A gun barrel, part of a rifle, poking out of the thin, open slit.

  What the hell?

  Slowly, at first, because whoever was on the other side didn’t want Thuy to notice.

  They didn’t want Thuy to notice.

  Immediately, a thousand questions raced through Keo’s head.

  Who was it? was the biggest one of them all.

  It couldn’t have been Bunker. He was still in the entryway, guarding the outer door.

  So who the hell was it?

  Keo checked on Thuy and Lara. Both women were still staring back at him—

  Something in Lara’s eyes. A sudden flicker of confusion, because she’d noticed his momentary distraction. It’d been minor, and Thuy had missed it, but Lara hadn’t.

  He almost smiled. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to disguise what he’d seen from Lara. Of course, she’d noticed it on his face. She noticed everything that took place on his face, especially when he was trying to hide something from her.

  Fortunately, Thuy was still behind Lara and couldn’t see her expression clearly, so she had no idea—

  The girl, Gummy,
let out a slight yelp as she jumped up from the couch and turned to look at the vault room—at the gun poking out of its opening door.

  Keo shouted, “Lara, get down!”

  He was still shouting down when there was the very loud pop! of a gunshot echoing inside the metal-lined room and blood spraying the nearby wall as bodies fell.

  Eleven

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lara…”

  “Keo, I’m okay. I’m okay.” She pursed a smile and held his head between her hands, then pulled him forward and down, and kissed him on the forehead. “I’m okay. We’re both okay. Everyone’s okay. Okay?”

  He forced a smile. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You sure?”

  The grin came easier this time. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, and laid another long, lingering kiss on his forehead. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay…”

  Lara was okay, but not everyone was. Thuy wasn’t, but Keo didn’t really give a damn about that right now. After what she’d pulled, her health was the last thing on his mind.

  The rifle that had appeared out of the vault room belonged to Bunker, who had somehow weaved his way through the complex without anyone seeing him and gotten, if not completely behind Thuy, then just far enough not to be noticed when he made his move, which was only spoiled when Gummy finally did catch a glimpse.

  So how had Bunker managed to do all that?

  “There are hidden security doors throughout the complex,” Bunker had said. “The McCanns weren’t just paranoid about the ending of the world showing up at their front doors sooner rather than later; they also weren’t completely trusting of the people that might end up down here with them when the shit hit the fan. So they had hidden security doors put in throughout the place, connecting the entry hallway to the bedrooms to the common area to, yes, the vault room.” Then, when Keo had stared at him without saying a word, “What? Do I have food in my teeth?”

  “You didn’t tell me about any damn hidden security doors, Bunker,” Keo had said.

  “I didn’t?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  “No, no, I’m sure I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “I don’t remember you telling us anything about any hidden security doors either, Bunker,” Lara had chimed in, looking even more pissed at Bunker than Keo had—and Keo was pretty damn angry to begin with.

  “Oh. Must have slipped my mind,” Bunker had said.

  The way the rancher had said it, with such a straight face, made Keo almost believe him. Almost. Except his memory wasn’t completely gone, and he distinctly recalled the first time Bunker walked him and Lara through the underground facility, giving them a thorough (or, at least, he thought it was thorough back then) tour. In the months since, they’d been down here a few times, bringing supplies and fixing things up, and there had never been any mentions of “hidden security doors” that linked all the rooms.

  But, like the McCanns, maybe Bunker couldn’t completely trust them yet, which would explain his “forgetfulness.” Then, over the months when he changed his opinions about them (if he ever did), it really did slip his mind.

  Either that or Bunker was just being a royal pain in the ass.

  Whatever the answer, Keo was able to drop it for the meantime because he had other, more pressing business to deal with. Namely, making sure Lara was okay.

  She was. Thank God she was. Despite having his surprise ruined by Gummy, Bunker had hit what he was aiming at—Thuy’s right forearm. The woman had dropped the Glock she was holding to Lara’s head when she was shot, and went down while blood—all hers—sprayed the wall and floor. The bullet had cracked Thuy’s ulna bone in half and sent her rolling around on the hard and cold floor in pain.

  But she was alive because Bunker hadn’t gone for the killing shot.

  “Why didn’t you go for the head shot?” Keo had asked him.

  “Didn’t seem appropriate,” the man had said.

  “The fuck you mean it wasn’t appropriate? You saw where she was pointing that gun?”

  Bunker had shrugged. “I heard what she was saying. What you guys were all saying. She’s not doing this because she wanted to. She had to.” He had shrugged again. “I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I’m not an asshole like you, Keo. I don’t go around killing people if I don’t have to; unless they completely deserve it.”

  “So in your summation, she didn’t completely deserve it?”

  “Not completely, no.”

  “And how’d you come to that conclusion? From my vantage point, she had a gun to my woman’s head. She might as well have one to the baby inside her belly, too.”

  “She might have done a lot of things that could have hurt a lot of people, but she didn’t.”

  “Because we didn’t give her the chance.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  “Dammit, Bunker.”

  “What? You’d have gone for the head shot?”

  “You’re goddamn right I would have.”

  “What if it wasn’t Lara?”

  “Doesn’t matter, because it was Lara.”

  “I’m just saying. What if it wasn’t Lara, and you heard what Thuy said about being forced to do this?” Then, when Keo didn’t answer fast enough, “Hey, I get it, it was your woman. If it was mine, I might do the same thing.”

  Keo had gritted his teeth at the man. “You and me are gonna have a long talk once this is over, Bunker.”

  “About what?”

  “Thuy, those hidden security doors you forgot to tell us about…”

  “I swear I told you about those.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I swear I did, though.”

  “You can keep swearing all you want, but you didn’t.”

  “Hunh.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What?”

  “That’s all you have to say for yourself? ‘Hunh?’”

  Bunker shrugged again. “What do you want me to say?”

  Keo wanted to keep arguing with him—and throw out more choice name-calling—but he just didn’t have the patience to talk to Bunker for the rest of the night. Besides, he needed to make sure Lara was okay. She was all that mattered, and why he’d been truthful with Bunker when he said he would have taken the kill shot.

  You’re goddamn right I would have. In a heartbeat.

  After Bunker returned to the outer hallway to keep an eye on the door that connected the facility to the basement, Keo checked on the girls. They were both okay, with Wilson still playing the protector and rarely straying too far from Gummy’s side. Neither kid said very much when Keo talked to them, and though they were shaken by the events, they had calmed down noticeably. Wilson, in particular, might have been small, but he saw a lot of toughness in her face.

  Kid’s got serious mettle, Keo thought. Too bad she can’t shoot for shit.

  But aiming was something you could get better at; an interior toughness, on the other hand, wasn’t something you could learn. Wilson had that in spades.

  Still, it made him wonder just what kind of hell the two sisters had gone through out there while they were on their own. Even now, after everything that had happened—the attack on the house, Thuy’s betrayal—he thought they would still have taken his offer to come back here to the ranch knowing all of what would happen.

  Keo left the kids eating in the common area kitchen—they never seemed to stop eating, actually—to join Lara in the infirmary. It was really just another bedroom—one of the smaller ones—that had been converted by Lara months earlier.

  “Just in case,” Lara had said when she told them what she was going to do with the empty room.


  “Just in case?” Bunker had said.

  “Just in case,” Lara had repeated. It was her motto from back in the days when she was still running Black Tide.

  “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst” was her other favorite motto, born from the days when she was still running around out there with other survivors.

  Thuy lay on the infirmary cot, unconscious. Lara had treated her wound and broken arm and put her under with some powerful sedatives. She stood next to the woman’s bed, checking her vitals manually with a stethoscope. There were no beeping machines or complicated medical devices down here. Lara had wanted to search Texas for some, but they just never got around to it.

  That meant she was doing everything the old-fashioned way at the moment, including having hung a bag of IV fluids that dripped morphine into Thuy’s system to help with the pain. Keo couldn’t have given two shits about Thuy’s pain, but Lara didn’t share that sentiment, even if it was her who had been on the wrong end of Thuy’s gun not more than an hour ago.

  “She gonna be ready for her hanging, Doc?” Keo asked when he entered the room.

  “Hanging?” Lara said. “Who said anything about a hanging?”

  “Just kidding,” Keo said, but he thought, Or am I?

  “She’s stable. The bullet shattered her ulna, so that arm’s going to be in a cast for a while. Two months, maybe longer.”

  “You’re assuming she’ll be wearing a cast.”

  “She has to, or it won’t heal.”

  “You’re assuming she’s going to get a chance to heal.”

  Lara turned around to look at him, leaning against the wall next to the door. They locked eyes for a moment.

  “We’re not going to kill her, Keo,” she finally said.

  “She tried to kill you.”

  “She took me hostage.”

  “With your gun.”

  “I don’t think it makes much of a difference whether it was my gun or yours or Bunker’s.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “It doesn’t to me. Besides, you heard what she said: She didn’t have any choice.”

  “Bullshit. Everyone has a choice. She just made the wrong one.”

  “Yes, it was the wrong one, but you have to give her some leeway.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”