Keo thought the teenager was trying to convince himself more than he was Miller.
“They know,” Miller said with absolute certainty. “Trust me, they know. I’ve been around enough of them that I can tell when they know. And they fucking know.”
Keo and Gene exchanged a quick look.
“Then why—” Gene started to ask, but he didn’t get to finish before the crack! of a gunshot broke the island’s quiet and the window next to him shattered.
Gene ducked down, dropping Deuce and throwing his arms over his head.
Keo dived to the floor as a bullet slammed into the ceiling above him. He landed hard on the dirty and shoeprint-caked slate tiles, but even through the rain of glass shards falling into the tub around Gene, he heard the echoing ploompt! from outside.
Grenade launcher. That was a grenade launcher!
He expected an explosion, waited to be screaming in agony as fire and shrapnel ripped through him, but instead he looked up and saw a cylindrical canister appearing out of the night like a bulbous bullet, but slower and shinier. It slipped through the broken window and rainbowed from one end of the room to the other before bouncing off the counter behind him. The loud hissing filled the air even before the object had settled, telling him that he was wrong—it wasn’t a grenade, but a gas canister.
Keo grabbed his shirt and pulled it up and over his mouth and nostrils. His eyes stung immediately even before the smoke managed to engulf his side of the bathroom. When he had first seen the room he thought it was big, but now as he teared up and his lungs burned, he wished it was much bigger.
The sounds of Gene and Miller coughing up a storm in the room around him invaded his senses. Gene might actually have been crying, or that might have been Miller. Maybe both. Or all three of them, for all he knew.
He was trying to maintain his grip on the MP5SD when he heard the loud pounding of footsteps. Not ghouls this time, because these were heavier and showing all the subtlety of a stampeding herd of elephants. He wasn’t sure how long it had been—ten seconds? Ten minutes?—since he could barely keep his eyes open, and every time he took a breath it felt like someone was stabbing his chest with a spear, or a dozen.
The door. Someone was knocking on the door.
No, not knocking.
Banging.
It would take the ghouls hours, maybe days, to finally break through, he remembered thinking. The creatures weren’t known for their strength, and he had felt relatively safe inside the confines of the bathroom. They would need something like a sledgehammer, or maybe a car to get the job done.
Boom-boom-boom!
It sounded as if they had found one of those two things right now, because the entire room seemed to be trembling each time they smashed into the doors on the other side.
He had made it across the bathroom, alternating between breathing and trying to look past the gathering smoke. It was difficult enough trying to maintain his vision through the waterfall of tears and the sensation of someone dropping barrels of ground peppers into his eyes, but every step made him want to give up and fall down and scream until the pain went away.
Boom-boom-boom!
He spun around until he was facing the doors—or, at least, where he thought the doors were—and waited. He didn’t have to actually see to know where they were—he just had to follow the crushing sounds of blow after blow landing against the mahogany wood somewhere on the other side of the blanket of smoke.
The MP5SD was slippery against his hands, and someone was screaming to his right. Keo ignored everything and focused on what was in front of him, which at this point was smoke and…more smoke.
Soon, the tear gas would be sucked out through the broken window, but soon wasn’t fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
Boom-boom-boom!
His vision started to blur. Or maybe that was all the tears flooding them. God, he hadn’t cried this much since…well, he’d never cried this much in his life. Of course, no one had ever locked him inside a bathroom with an exploding gas canister before, either, so it wasn’t like he had any experience here.
There was a final boom! before the very distinctive sound of wood splintering came from across the room.
There goes a door. Maybe both.
He sought out the window and saw a figure next to it curled up inside the large bathtub. Gene, trying desperately to make himself small and be spared the tendrils of crushing smoke gathering around him like tentacles. It wasn’t going to work. Poor Gene was alternating between crying and trying not to cough his lungs out.
The window!
What was that Gene had said earlier?
“Push comes to shove, we can always escape through the window.”
He hadn’t greeted that comment with much enthusiasm, and Keo still didn’t have a lot of it as he stumbled in that direction, but he had very little choice at the moment. Unfortunately for him, while his mind had declared that this was the correct path, his legs had somehow turned to Jell-O while he wasn’t looking, and he had to grab at the nearest wall to keep from falling down.
And his lungs. Jesus, his lungs were on fire.
He pushed off the wall—or was it a counter?—and braved the endless curls of smoke, using the window as a beacon of hope. If he could get to it, if he could climb out, and he could somehow crawl up to the rooftop…
Out there, he would be able to breathe again, to see, to not feel like every inch of his body was on fire.
He didn’t know how far he had actually gotten before something blindsided him and Keo went sailing across the room. He must have slammed into another wall and gone down in a pile. Not that he felt it. Any of it. He just knew it was happening. At that moment, the only thing he was intensely aware of was screaming pain from his insides as it threatened to turn all of him into a pool of liquid.
Keo was on his back and looking up as the thing that had assaulted him rose up from the floor. It was a minotaur, blackened and monstrous, and it peered back at him with glassy oblong eyes.
No, it wasn’t a beast from Greek mythology after all. It was just an asshole in a gas mask.
Pain exploded across Keo’s face as something struck him and his head snapped backward and slammed into the slate tiles. It hurt, but the blow wasn’t nearly as intense as the inferno raging inside his body, threatening to burst through his eyeballs.
Then, mercifully, there was just darkness.
CHAPTER 6
Keo’s lungs were still burning, but at least he could breathe again without fearing that his entire chest cavity was going to cave in with every breath. Motor control was (gradually) coming back, along with feeling in his legs and arms, though he was pretty sure his eyes were the color of mandarin oranges. If Keo weren’t already covered in scars, he would have been hesitant to look at a shiny reflective surface at the moment.
Instead, he concentrated on his surroundings.
They were inside the living room of the same two-story house where he, Gene, and Miller had retreated for the night. The windows were broken, the jagged shards still sticking out of the frames covered in coagulated black blood. It looked less like plasma and more like mud: thick and still oozing.
Two men in black uniforms similar to the one Miller wore sat on the floor in opposing corners, M4 rifles lying across their laps and gas masks dangling from their hips. One was already snoring, the other getting there. A third man leaned against a wall looking out the window while spooning gobs of mashed potatoes into his mouth from a bag of MRE. Keo recognized the distinctive bulky six-shot cylinder and short barrel of the M32 grenade launcher—the weapon that had sent the tear gas sailing into the bathroom—slung behind the man’s back.
If Keo had any ideas about taking that launcher and giving the soldier a taste of his own medicine, he quickly gave it up when he looked down at the zip ties around his wrists and ankles. They were the same color and brand as the ones he had used on Miller earlier. He wondered if they found a warehouse full of this stuff or something.
>
“Finding stragglers,” Miller had said about his mission. “People hiding out in the hills or the cities. Bringing them back to the towns.”
Keo bet those zip ties came in real handy for that. Maybe Gillian and Jordan and the others had been hauled into T18 in similar conditions. At the moment—and as crazy as it might sound—that was his best-case scenario of ever finding them again.
He looked around the room again. There were plenty of signs that the ghouls had trampled their way through the carpeting earlier, so where were they now? The windows were wide open and it was still obviously night outside, so what was stopping them—
A flicker of movement, as one—no, two—five—emaciated forms scampered past the windows on the house’s front lawn. More of them, on the sidewalks and streets beyond, like moving shadows come alive.
Keo tensed, and so did the soldier leaning in front of him. The man actually stopped eating his MRE for a while. A few seconds, anyway, before he went back to business as usual. But for a while there, the man hadn’t been so sure.
So you’re still scared of them too, huh?
Good to know, good to know…
The first five were only the beginning. There were more, flitting across what little moonlight was visible beyond the broken windows. If they knew he was inside the house without anything to stand in their way, they didn’t show it. They appeared oblivious to him and the portable LED lamp resting on a dresser that hadn’t been there when Keo walked through the place this afternoon. That was just enough light for him to see Gene lying unconscious on the floor, his back against one of the sofas in front of the windows.
Footsteps, before a pair of calm male voices appeared behind and to the right of him, coming from the kitchen.
“…back by morning,” one man was saying. “I expected better from you.”
“Give me a break; I almost died,” a second voice said. This one sounded familiar, but it took Keo a few seconds to put a name to it, which told him he was still a little out of it from the blows he took upstairs.
J. Miller.
“Bo and Matthew weren’t so lucky,” Miller was saying.
Miller appeared in the living room with a second man. They looked almost identical in their black uniforms, except the second man was just a little taller and was in his early forties. Keo found out why they looked so much alike when he saw the second man’s name tag: “S. Miller.”
“There was another Miller in my outfit,” Miller had said to him back at the marina yesterday. Of course, Miller had failed to add that the other Miller was, likely from the resemblance, his big brother.
So what else did J. Miller lie about?
“Look who’s up,” younger Miller said. For a guy moving on crutches made from a pair of sofa cushions duct-taped to paddles, Miller still looked his cheery self despite red eyes from the tear gas. He looked as if he had washed most of it out, a luxury Keo wished he had at the moment.
“How’s the leg?” Keo asked.
“It’s been better, but can’t complain, considering.” He jerked a thumb at the other man. “This is Steve. You might have noticed the resemblance. Yes, he’s the other Miller I was referring to earlier.”
“Ah, thanks for the clarification.”
“He the one who shot you?” the older Miller asked.
“That’s the other one.” Jack nodded at Gene’s sleeping form. “Shot me with that big .308. Christ, it hurt.”
“You’ll live.”
“Not the point.”
Steve ignored his brother and walked over to Keo, crouching in front of him. Besides being older than Jack, he was a little more haggard, his face lined and weathered from experience. He had the kind of calm, inquiring brown eyes that could be intimidating when focused entirely on you, the way he had them zeroed in on Keo now.
“Like what you see?” Keo asked.
Steve smiled. “What happened to your face?”
“Which part?”
Steve traced an imaginary line along the side of his own face, starting from the temple and finishing up at the jawline.
“Rollercoaster accident,” Keo said.
“I’ve heard those can be dangerous.”
“You have no idea.”
“His name’s Keo,” Jack said.
“Keo?” Steve repeated. “What kind of name is that?”
“Mike was taken,” Keo said.
Steve chuckled. “Is that right?”
“Yup. I was heartbroken, too. Really wanted to call myself Mike.”
“Life’s full of disappointments.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Anyway, I hear you’re a dangerous man, Keo. Took out two of my guys on the docks like it was nothing.”
“I wouldn’t say it was nothing. It was definitely something.”
“A real badass, huh?”
“I do all right with the ladies.”
“What did you use to do before all of this?”
“You mean before I found this quaint little island?”
Smack! as Steve’s open palm struck Keo across the cheek.
He wasn’t prepared for it, which as it turned out was a good thing, because he was too stunned to actually feel the pain. Steve had a pair of meaty hands on him, which made sense since the man looked like a solid 220 pounds of muscle. It was hard to stay blubbery at the end of the world.
“Was it something I said?” Keo asked, trying to shake the blow off.
“What did you use to do?” Steve asked again.
“This and that.”
“Probably ex-military,” Jack said. He was leaning against a nearby wall, clearly enjoying the show.
“Nah, but close,” Steve said. “I can smell ex-military guys, and he’s not one of them. It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me now.” Steve stood up and looked at Jack. “Get some shut-eye and rest your leg. We’re heading back at sunup.”
Jack nodded and found himself a spot on the same sofa that Gene was lying against and lay down.
“The creatures,” Keo said.
Steve, who had settled on the floor across from him, said, “What about them?”
“They’re going to stay out there the entire night?”
“You scared?”
“Fuck yes.”
Steve grinned. “Don’t worry your pretty little head off. They’ll stay away.”
“How does it work? How do they know to leave you alone?”
“You ever heard the phrase need-to-know?”
“No one ever told me.”
Steve snorted. “They’re not coming in as long as we’re in here.”
“You sure about that?” Keo asked, watching as three more of the creatures darted across the windows. Just seeing them out there, with nothing to protect him if they stopped and turned around on a whim, made his skin crawl.
“You better hope so,” Steve said. He laid his M4 across his lap, then looked up at the soldier with the M32. “This is Horace. He’s running around on five cans of warm Red Bull and enough caffeine to keep a herd of longhorns going. Try anything, and he has my permission to put you out of your misery.”
Horace winked at Keo. He was a big man with an Army buzz cut. “Don’t you worry. I’ll take good care of you, spud.”
“I feel so special,” Keo said.
“The only reason you’re still alive is because you didn’t shoot my little brother,” Steve said. “That, and you treated him like a human being after he was wounded. Otherwise I’d have fed you to those things outside.”
“I guess it still pays to be a good guy these days.”
“I paid you back by letting you keep breathing, but I don’t owe you shit after that. Keep that in mind.”
Oh, I’m keeping it in mind, all right, Keo thought while trying to ignore the tingling radiating from his cheek.
*
Keo opened his eyes to large doses of sunlight in his face and Steve sitting next to Gene on the sofa across the room. They looked like they were talking and had be
en for some time. Steve’s soldiers were already outside the house, moving around on the lawn. The one with the M32, Horace, was on the sidewalk beyond.
“You did the right thing,” Steve was saying to Gene. “You’ll find out when we get there that all this running around was a waste of time.”
“And I can leave anytime?” Gene asked.
“Absolutely, but you won’t want to once you see what’s there.”
Gene nodded, though he didn’t look as if he quite believed Steve, but was too smart to say so if he did have any doubts.
“Morning,” Jack said, coming out of the kitchen with an open can of SPAM. He was shoveling large chunks of it into his mouth and talking at the same time. “You said you wanted to visit T18. This is your lucky day, sport, because that’s exactly where you’re going. Excited?”
“I can barely contain myself,” Keo said.
Jack chuckled.
“Let’s get going,” Steve said. He stood up before fixing Keo with a hard stare. “One wrong move, and you’re a dead man. Do we understand each other?”
“Crystal.”
“Good man.” He turned around and called through the broken windows, “Donovan, Taylor. Come get our guest of honor.” Then to Gene, “Come on, son. Time to go home.”
Gene nodded mutely, the kid who had fought off the soldiers these last few months seemingly MIA after last night. Keo couldn’t really blame him. He’d been in his share of scrapes, but getting gassed in a bathroom, well, that was something he didn’t want to go through again if he could help it.
Donovan and Taylor came back inside and pulled Keo up from the floor. He paid very close attention to Donovan, who had his MP5SD and pack slung over his back.
“Go for it, you know you want to,” Taylor said, grinning knowingly at him.
Keo smiled back, but thought, Damn.
Donovan pulled out an all-black tactical knife from a sheath strapped low to one of his thighs and sliced the zip ties around Keo’s ankle, but left the one around his wrists. Then Taylor gave him a (not so) friendly shove in the back as they led him outside.
If the sun was ridiculously bright before, it was practically blinding as he walked down the driveway. The crisp morning air flooded his lungs, and for a moment Keo almost believed there was nothing wrong with the world. He took a moment to stare at the impressive sight of birds flocking in formation above him. That ended when Taylor gave him another shove in the back, this time with the cold barrel of his rifle.
Purge of Babylon (Book 6): The Isles of Elysium Page 6