Smart dead things? Now where’d he heard that before? Right. It was something Lara said, about how the creatures were dead but not stupid. A motto her boyfriend had come up with that had kept them all alive. For a while, anyway. As far as Keo knew, it hadn’t helped the ex-Ranger in the end.
Gene led them up a flight of stairs, their footsteps against the carpeted steps the only noise in the entire house.
“How do you know they didn’t sneak in through the back door since the last time you were here?” Keo asked as he and Miller followed the teenager up.
“I can tell just by looking at the floor,” Gene said. “Or the walls. Things moved, broken furniture, glass, that kind of thing. And like I said, they smell. Once they’re inside a house, the stink doesn’t go away for weeks even after they’ve moved on. Can you smell it?”
“No.”
That wasn’t entirely true. He did smell something. Abandonment. But that was normal these days. You couldn’t stick your head into a building, a vehicle, or anything with enclosed spaces and not get a whiff. It was everywhere.
“No smell means they’re not inside,” Gene was saying.
The second floor was wide open, with curtainless windows exposing the calm waters of Galveston Bay on the other side.
“You sure we’re going to be safe up here?” Keo asked.
“I’ve stayed here before,” Gene said. “The last time was almost three weeks ago. They’ve never come close to sniffing me.”
“First time for everything.”
“Trust me, we’ll be fine.”
Famous last words, kid.
Miller, moving in front of him, must have had the same thought, because he gave Keo a quick look.
“What?” Keo said.
“I didn’t say anything,” Miller said.
“Uh huh.” Then, “I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“How do they know to avoid you?”
“Avoid me?”
“Yeah. How do they know not to have you for dinner?”
Miller seemed to actually think about it for a moment. “I don’t know. They just do.”
“That’s it? You’re not even curious?”
“It works. I don’t care why or how, just that it does.”
“I bet that’s what the Nazi sympathizers said during World War II.”
“There’s a difference between me and them.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m still alive.”
“For now.”
Miller snorted. “Have you looked around you?”
“What about it?”
“There’s no winning here, sport. We’re down for the count. The faster you accept it, the easier it’ll be.”
“Are you trying to recruit me?”
Miller grinned back at him. “You interested?”
Keo chuckled. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”
Gene pushed his way into the master bedroom at the end of the second-floor hallway. It was appropriately huge, with satin sheets crumpled on the floor. The king-size bed looked to be in good condition, though clouds of dust flitted off the sheets and across the streams of fading sunlight coming in through an open window.
The teenager led them past the bed, a massive dresser, and LCD TV, and toward a pair of doors in the back. Keo already knew what was on the other side even before Gene pulled them open. It was a bathroom, big enough to fit a couple of families and their pet. More sunlight poured in through a window behind a large bathtub and reflected off the long mirror opposite from it.
“Here?” Keo said.
“Doors are solid wood, super tough,” Gene said. He knocked on one of the mahogany slabs for effect, producing dull thudding sounds. “They’re going to need a battering ram to get through them. Push comes to shove, we can always escape through the window.”
“The window?” Keo said doubtfully.
“I’ve tested it out. You can climb onto the roof from it.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Why, you scared of heights?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean I want to go around climbing people’s roofs, Gene.”
The kid smiled mischievously before walking over and opening the cabinet underneath the sink. He took out a backpack and put it on the counter, then unzipped it and pulled out a bottle of water that he tossed to Keo. It was warm, and Keo brushed aside a generous layer of gathered dust.
“I have go-bags in all the safe zones around the island,” Gene said. “Lots of water, but I’m running out of food.” He also pulled out a Glock handgun. “You need another one?”
“I’m good,” Keo said. Then to Miller, “What about you? You need a gun?”
Miller gave him a look that said he wasn’t entirely certain if Keo was kidding. “Yes.”
“Too bad. Have a seat instead.”
Miller grunted, then hobbled over to the toilet in the back. It was separated from the shower stall by a three-inch wall, and the wounded soldier sat down gratefully on the porcelain lid.
Keo stared at the man for a moment. He had expected Miller to at least try to escape once during the trek from the marina over to the house, but he had remained perfectly obliging. In fact, it seemed as if he hadn’t given the possibility of escape a single thought.
“How long before your friends show up looking for you?” he asked Miller.
“My friends?” Miller said. Either the guy was surprised by the question, or he really was a very good liar.
“When you don’t return to T18. What happens then?”
Miller shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
“Are you telling me no one’s going to care if you don’t report back in?”
“Report back? Man, you’re way overestimating us. We’re not nearly that organized. I wish we were. It’d make a lot of things easier.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want. No skin off my nose.”
Keo eyed him closely, but if Miller had a tell, he disguised it well.
He looked over at Gene instead. “I’ve seen them climb before. The ghouls. You sure we shouldn’t cover up the window?”
“There are no handholds out there,” Gene said. “We’ll be fine. I told you. I’ve been here before, and they’ve never come close to checking the place out.” Gene pulled back the sleeve of his sweatshirt and glanced down at a black sports watch. “Two more hours until nightfall.” Then he gave Keo a crooked, almost nervous grin. “Should be fun, right?”
“Yeah, sure, kid,” Keo said. “But just to be safe—” he opened his tactical pack and took out a spare Glock and handed it to Gene “—here’s something you can use. Magazine’s loaded with silver bullets.”
“Thanks.” Gene took it and turned it over in his hands. “You remember all those guns from the other house?”
“Uh huh.”
“You think some of them had silver bullets?”
“You didn’t check?”
“It never occurred to me to.”
“We’ll go through them tomorrow morning and find out. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Until then, let’s just try to survive tonight first.” He glanced over at Miller. “What about you?”
Miller looked over. “What about me?”
“You have something to add? Maybe a secret handshake that’ll keep the crawlers at bay?”
“Nah,” Miller said. He leaned back against the toilet and closed his eyes. “Looks like you and the kid got it all figured out.”
Keo could be wrong, but he swore Miller almost smiled that time.
CHAPTER 5
Once upon a time, he was trapped inside an attic listening to the creatures as they tap-tap-tapped below him. This time he was inside a second-floor bathroom. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, apparently.
Gene had heard the sudden movements—like scratching—from outside the house too, and his entire body stiffened. Keo could just make out the teenager’s dirty sweatshirt in the semidarkness. H
e sat inside the bathtub with his back against the wall, the only window inches to the left of his head. The kid’s eyes kept darting between Keo and the window and Miller, sitting against the glass shower stall to Keo’s right. A large swath of moonlight illuminated half of the room in a strangely serene baby-blue tint.
Keo tightened his grip on the MP5SD resting in his lap. He felt better knowing the bullets were silver, but that might not do him a lot of good if there were a lot of them out there right now. Sooner or later, he would use up his spare magazines, and then what? He remembered seeing Danny carrying a silver knife around with him. Smart. Guns ran out of bullets, but knives didn’t.
I need to get me one of those. Maybe a sword.
“Hey,” Keo whispered across the room at Gene. When the kid glanced over, “How many of them are out there?”
Gene didn’t look like he understood the question. Or maybe he couldn’t hear him.
Keo raised his voice a bit (but not too much). “The island. How many ghouls are on the island? How many houses? Ballpark figure.”
“Fifty or so, I think,” Gene said.
Fifty or so. Assuming at least two people to a house and four maximum would give him one hundred at least, and two hundred at the most. Probably somewhere in the middle to account for the loners, the retirees, and the divorcées. Somewhere around 150. Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little less. And that wasn’t counting however many bloodsuckers had invaded the island during The Purge.
That was a hell of a lot more targets than he had bullets for.
Outnumbered again. So what else was new?
He looked over at the doors. Solid wood. Tough. He wouldn’t have been able to physically hammer them down with his body. He’d need a sledgehammer at least. So Gene had chosen wisely by bringing them here. Would 150 (or so) ghouls be able to batter their way through in a single night?
Maybe. Maybe not.
He turned back to the window. His instincts were to barricade it or at least cover it up with something, but Gene had said he’d found it that way. And the kid had been surviving on the island by himself for months now, which meant he knew what he was doing. Keo hoped, anyway.
“How many?” Gene whispered.
“Hmm?” Keo said.
“How many are out there, you think?”
“One-fifty, give or take a few dozen here and there. Could be less. Could be more. I’m just spitballing numbers.”
“Sounds about right,” Gene said. He had Deuce between his legs, the barrel pointed up at the ceiling.
Keo glanced at Miller in the corner. The man’s eyes were closed, as if he was trying to sleep, but Keo could tell by the rise and fall of his chest that the soldier was still wide awake.
“What do you think?” Keo asked him.
Miller opened his eyes. “About what?”
“How many do you think are out there?”
“I don’t know. One-fifty sounds about right.”
“What are the chances they’ll leave you alone if you go outside in that uniform?”
“I don’t know.” Miller looked suddenly very uncertain. “There were always others with me when I’m out at night, and we were always on missions.”
“What kind of missions?”
“Finding stragglers. People hiding out in the hills or the cities. Bringing them back to the towns.”
“And here I thought everyone went there voluntarily.”
He shrugged. “What can I say? There are a lot of stubborn people out there. You should know a thing or two about that.”
“You saying I’m stubborn?”
“Maybe I’m wrong. It’s been known to happen.”
“Why don’t you just leave them alone?” Gene said. There was an edge to the kid’s voice, and Keo saw him flexing his fingers around Deuce.
“It’s not my call,” Miller said, and smartly didn’t meet Gene’s accusing eyes when he said it. “I just follow orders, sport.”
“So you’ve been out there at night in those uniforms, and nothing happened?” Keo asked.
“Uh huh,” Miller nodded.
“Interesting.”
“How so?”
Keo shrugged. “Just wondering if that uniform will fit me.”
Miller’s eyes widened a bit, and he opened his mouth to say something when—
Crash!
He froze. And so did Gene and Keo.
Broken glass from downstairs. The living room windows; Keo was sure of it. The island was so still, the silence so complete, that the noise might as well be cannons going off right under them.
“Oh, shit,” Gene whispered. “I don’t understand. We didn’t leave any clues down there. They should have just run past the house like all the other times.”
Maybe they can smell us.
He didn’t know if they could or not, but what else could it be? They had left the front of the house exactly the way they had found it this afternoon. They had even left the bathroom window curtainless for fear of messing with the status quo.
So how the hell did they know?
“Give me a gun,” Miller said. He was fidgeting in his corner. “I need a gun.”
“What’s the matter?” Keo asked. “You don’t think that uniform’s going to save you?”
“I think I don’t wanna find out.”
“Well, tough nuts.”
“Come on, man.”
“Let me think about it,” Keo said. Then, a second later, “I’ve thought about it. The answer’s still no.”
Keo gave the window another quick glance before scrambling to his feet and darting across the pool of moonlight and onto the other side. Gene anxiously watched him slide against the thick double doors and press his hands and ear against the smooth and slightly cool mahogany finish.
He willed his heartbeat to slow down, then held his breath and listened.
Footsteps.
The familiar tap-tap-tap of bare feet against carpeted flooring.
At first they were distant, like faded echoes, but they quickly grew in volume. A lot of them.
Too many, racing up the steps to the second floor.
Growing louder, and louder—
Keo staggered away from the door as…
…silence.
He waited for the inevitable. The familiar pounding of flesh against wood. He had heard it before—too many times to count.
But there wasn’t any this time.
What the hell?
Behind and to the right of him, Gene had stood up inside the tub, his rifle gripped tightly in front of him. Miller was a statue in the corner, his eyes glued on Keo. They were both waiting for the relentless assaults against the door, too.
So where was it?
Keo pushed his ear back against the smooth, wooden surface. He listened for the telltale signs, the tap-tap-tap of bare feet moving around outside, but he could only hear…
Silence.
He’d heard them earlier, hadn’t he? Of course he had, because Gene and Miller had heard them, too. They had broken through the living room windows and raced up the steps and converged on the second floor.
So where were they now? Had they searched the main bedroom and finding no one, just decided to…leave? Without even bothering with the two doors on the other side of the room?
Yeah, right.
“Well?” Gene whispered behind him. “What’s out there?”
The kid looked rooted in the tub, and the sight of him clutching Deuce made Keo smile for some reason. He turned back to the door and leaned against it for the third time, listening to the overwhelming silence outside.
Finally, Keo shook his head.
“I told you,” Gene said, and although he did his best to sound confident, he couldn’t hide the slight trembling in his voice. “They’ll check the houses, but if they don’t see anything out of the ordinary, they’ll move on.”
“Are you sure there’s no other way inside?”
The teenager shook his head. “I checked. It’s just those doo
rs and this window.”
Keo didn’t tell him about the last time he had been in a building that was supposedly secured. That time, the ghouls had found a way in through the—
“Vents,” he said.
“What?” Gene said.
“AC vents.”
He hurried away from the door and began scanning the ceiling, looking for grates designed to blast air into the room in the summer and heat in the winter.
There, just above the mirror over the long sink counter with the two faucets for him and her. Except it was small. Too small. Barely one-by-one-foot. Even the scrawniest ghoul was going to have difficulty crawling through that thing.
“What about the vents?” Gene asked from the bathtub.
“Nothing,” Keo said. “False alarm.”
But he didn’t completely breathe easier. They were still in a house and on an island teeming with ghouls. There were at least a hundred of the monsters outside right now, scouring the homes and buildings and parked vehicles for signs that someone stupid enough (like me) had arrived on Santa Marie Island and decided not to leave before sunset.
Dammit. He should have taken the twenty-two-footer back out and slept on the ocean like he had the last few nights. He should have risked the chances of running into one of Miller’s friends. At least out there he’d be able to hear trouble coming from miles away. And if push came to shove, he could have always gone into the water. He’d done it before.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.
“This is wrong,” Miller said.
Keo looked over at him. “Now you have something to say?”
“This is wrong,” Miller repeated.
“What is?” Gene asked.
“They’ve never been this quiet before,” Miller said. He was breathing hard for some reason.
“Never?” Keo said.
“Not when they know people are nearby. People that aren’t us. In uniforms. And they goddamn know you’re in here.”
“You don’t know that,” Gene said. “They’ve always passed the house over. Tonight’s no different.”
Purge of Babylon (Book 6): The Isles of Elysium Page 5