by Sam Sisavath
Maybe dead. Maybe alive.
Maybe. Too many maybes. That was the problem. That was always the problem. The uncertainty of it all. Where he was going, what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what the hell was happening out there in the rest of the world.
But he couldn’t think of all that right now. He had to stay in the present. And right now, the present was precarious.
He glanced down reflexively at his watch again: 7:39 p.m.
Time flies when you’re sitting in a tree, having a staring contest with a squirrel…
*
He was thirty meters up from the ground, give or take a couple of meters. It hadn’t been an easy climb, but then his mom always did call him wonsungi (or “monkey,” as he later found out) for a reason. When you were an Army brat living on strange bases around the world, it helped to be able to entertain yourself. A tree was a lot easier to find and befriend.
Now, as Keo looked down at the horde of undead things moving below him, he wished he had climbed just a little bit higher. Maybe all the way to the top. Fifty meters. Maybe sixty would have been about just right. Or higher…
He stopped counting after the fiftieth creature glided under him and through the woods as if they didn’t even need to touch the ground. Of course, that was impossible. The bloodsuckers may be light on their feet, thanks to their skeletal frames and non-existent muscle mass, but they hadn’t mastered the ability of flight just yet.
At least, as far as he knew.
Who knew what they would be capable of in another year. Or ten years. Or a hundred. Could they even die? God knew they couldn’t be killed. He had seen plenty of them still moving even without a head. How was that even possible?
Keo didn’t remember when he had stopped breathing, but he wasn’t aware of his chest rising and falling as he watched them flitting across the soft ground. If it was dark outside the park, it was nearly pitch-black inside, and all Keo could really make out were silhouetted, deformed monstrosities that shouldn’t exist but did. The loud crunch-crunch of leaves and the snap! of twigs were like hundreds of tiny firecrackers going off all at once.
Bloodsuckers. Creatures. Things that shouldn’t be alive, but were.
Where did they come from? Where were they hiding during the day? Some of them had to have been nesting inside the houses along the shoreline. How else could they have appeared so fast? The activity began almost as soon as night fell, the sound of their footsteps like stampeding animals getting louder as they got closer and their numbers swelled. At one point, he lost sight of the ground completely because there were so many of them, like a black ocean of tar swallowing up the world.
Should have kept climbing…all the way to the moon…
Mercifully, they were starting to thin out now, and he could finally see the dirt and trampled foliage again. There were still the occasional creatures racing across, trailing behind the others. He wondered if they had gotten lost somewhere. Or maybe they overslept. That made him smile despite himself.
Back when the woods were clogged with their unending numbers, he had been forced to pinch his nostrils against their smell. It was a pungent odor, undeniable and everywhere at once. Even breathing through his mouth became ineffective after a while.
Like rotting cabbage left out in the sun…then mixed with shit. Cat shit.
Climbing the tree instead of running to the closest house for shelter was a no-brainer, especially with everything he knew about Pollard. Not just what Fiona had told him, but what he had discovered about the man from his actions. There was no doubt in his mind that spending a night in any of the surrounding houses would have resulted in a gunfight or capture. So he did the unthinkable (some might even say crazy; Norris definitely would) and stayed inside the woods.
Or, well, above it. Mostly above it, anyway.
He liked to think he was smarter than a squirrel, and those creatures had figured out how to survive the nights. Stay off the ground. It was a simple enough concept, but one that he and Norris rarely embraced unless they absolutely had to, like the first night Pollard’s people chased them into the woods—
Keo froze in place. He might have also ceased breathing again.
Two of them had appeared out of the shadows and stopped a dozen or so meters from the tree where he was perched, unmoving. They were standing so close to one another—or were they hunched over? It was hard to tell from this high up—that for a moment they almost looked like lovers holding hands during a walk in the moonlight. Which was absurd, and he realized that quickly when one lifted its head and sniffed the air.
Can it smell me?
Why couldn’t they smell him, though? He could smell them just fine, even from a distance. Then again, he didn’t reek like they did. Or at least, he hoped he didn’t. When was the last time he took a shower? Or changed clothes?
Too long ago. Way too long ago.
Keo flicked the fire selector on the submachine gun to full-auto. It was an instinctive response, because he knew shooting them did nothing. It didn’t even slow them down, for God’s sake. But maybe if they started climbing he could knock them back down with a well-placed shot to the head. Or in the eyes. Could they still see without eyes? Oh, hell, of course they could. They could “see” without a head.
If all else failed, he could just smash their faces in with the stock—
One of the creatures took off, bounding out of his peripheral vision with surprising speed. The second one remained behind, still sniffing the air around it, as if it knew—somehow—that he was nearby, but was unable to locate him. Maybe that even frustrated it. Could they get frustrated? At times he had seen some of the creatures show something that looked like human emotions. Irritation, annoyance, and once, even fear.
Or was it all in his mind? Was he assigning them familiar human traits in an attempt to make them easier to understand? The mind did strange things when it was confronted with impossible realities. Maybe he was simply coping—
The creature raced off after the first one, the crunch-crunch of its footsteps fading into the darkening night.
Keo finally let himself breathe again.
Close one. That was a real close one there, pal.
He closed his eyes briefly. Not for long. Maybe a few seconds. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his heart rate and only allowed himself to relax when he was taking normal breaths through his nostrils again.
He heard a scratching noise and looked up and across from him.
The furry thing stood on its hind legs, on the same branch it had appeared on this evening when it engaged him in a staring contest. It had disappeared when the bloodsuckers started showing up, leaving Keo to wonder where it went. Apparently it had been triumphant during its absence, because the animal now had an acorn squeezed between two small hands. It was definitely the same squirrel from earlier, he was sure of it.
Probably.
He watched it watching him back across the small distance. Somehow, even though the semidarkness, he could see the animal clear as day.
What was it thinking now? Maybe once again trying to figure out what a human was doing trying not to fall asleep on a tree branch that could snap under him at any second and send him plummeting back down to the ground, to the black-skinned and deformed things that ruled the night.
Or maybe it was just a dumb, furry thing chipping away at an acorn with its teeth.
I’m trying to understand the motivations of a squirrel while sitting on a tree branch and trying not to fall off and die a grisly death (or worse).
Does life get any better than this?
*
He couldn’t go to sleep. He couldn’t afford to. The branch was wide enough to sit on, but it wasn’t going to catch him if he flopped over the side while dozing off. He couldn’t allow that to happen, so Keo tried every trick in the book to stay awake.
It was easy the first few hours, but his eyelids started to get heavy around ten. He had to resort to all those years of experience, all those hours of sle
epless nights when staying awake meant the difference between life and death, getting paid and…well, dead people didn’t care about bank accounts anymore, did they?
He drank the remaining two bottles of water he had left in his pack. Dehydration caused fatigue, and fatigue caused drowsiness. He managed to space the liquid out until midnight when he finally tasted the last drop.
Around one, he began pulling on his earlobes and rubbing the back of his hands between his thumb and index finger to keep alert. When that lost its effect after about an hour, he lifted his legs and pressed against the back of his knees. After a while, he resorted to pinching different parts of his body.
When he started to become immune to those acupuncture tricks at around two in the morning, he did stretching exercises with his arms, reaching up, sideways, and twisting his torso in every direction possible. He couldn’t do much with the limited space and the fragility of the branch under him, but they were enough to keep him active and stave off sleep for a little while longer.
He moved onto breathing exercises around four o’clock, sucking in air through his nose and pulling in his abdomen toward his diaphragm with every exhale. He did it just quickly enough to make the exercise effective while still not making too much noise.
Because he could still hear them down there. They weren’t moving directly under him anymore, and they were more spread out now, but the woods were so quiet (even the birds knew better than to make too much noise up on their high perches) that it was easy to pick out their scratching movements from long distances.
It occurred to him a few hours ago that the creatures weren’t running blind around the park. They were, in fact, surging in the same direction all throughout the night—northwest. There was a reason for that. Pollard’s people were in that direction, gathered at the park visitors’ building. Fiona had told him that, and the creatures always seemed to just know where people were hiding, especially in large clusters.
The cities. I wonder what the cities were like in the early days…?
His brief happiness that the monsters were potentially, right now, cutting into Pollard’s numbers went out the window when he waited and waited and didn’t hear a single gunshot. There should have been a lot of it, because there was no way in hell Pollard’s well-armed little paramilitary unit would go down without a fight. So what did the silence mean? Maybe the creatures did find Pollard’s group but couldn’t get to them. Pollard’s men, in turn, might be too disciplined to shoot unnecessarily.
All the while, he was stuck up a tree, desperately trying not to fall asleep.
It was five in the morning when he glanced down at his watch for the tenth time in the last two hours.
That was the good news. Sunrise came early during the summers. All he had to do was stay awake for two more hours…
*
Shit!
He snapped awake, reaching blindly out to grab at something—anything—and just barely managed to wrap his fingers around a thick branch directly above him while his other hand was flailing wildly in open space. The MP5SD had fallen off his lap during his little almost-drop, but luckily the strap had kept it from dropping to the ground below; instead, it just dangled from his shoulder.
Sonofabitch.
He righted himself, sucking in a deep breath.
He had almost died. Almost fallen right off the tree and died. Because there was no way he was going to make it back up if he fell. The noise alone would have brought at least a dozen (hundreds) of the bloodsuckers still crunching and snapping along the woods all around him. It was so quiet they would have easily heard a big dummy like him landing on the ground.
Close. Real close one there, pal.
He looked down at his watch again: 5:16 a.m.
Christ. It hadn’t even been much of a nap. A few minutes, at the most. A few more seconds and—
He pulled the submachine gun up by the strap and placed it back in his lap, then stared off at nothing. For some reason, his mind wandered back to Fiona.
Was she back with Pollard now? Probably. There was no reason for her not to go back. Would he punish her for getting captured? Maybe. Ironically, the fact that Keo had shot her in the shoulder might have saved her life. It was hard to blame someone for getting snatched after they had taken a bullet while executing your orders. Hard, but not impossible. Given what Fiona had told him about Pollard and what had happened to the man’s former second-in-command, the ex-officer apparently didn’t take failure very well.
Screw you, Pollard. Your kid had it coming.
Thinking about Fiona made him feel slightly guilty for some reason, so he thought about Gillian instead. The last time he had seen her, her hair was almost down to her waist. And those deep green eyes. She was back at Santa Marie Island right now. Or, at least, he hoped she was. If not, then all of this would have been for nothing.
5:32 a.m.
Almost there…
*
He climbed down with sunlight at his back. The warmth was as soothing now—maybe even more so—as all the other mornings. The growing heat around him was all the confirmation he needed to finally escape back down to solid ground.
He scooted down the length of the tree, surprised at his own speed and agility for someone who hadn’t slept all night. It was probably the adrenaline and the exhilaration of still being alive after almost dying more than once in the last twenty-four hours.
Keo hopped the last few meters and landed in a crouch. He stood up and immediately unslung the MP5SD.
Crunch!
He spun around, lifting the submachine gun, but it wasn’t halfway up when he saw the barrel of the rifle pointed straight at him and he stopped moving entirely. Another inch, and there would be a loud boom! and a hole would appear in the very center of his chest. Or head, if the guy was a really good shot, which at this distance, he didn’t really have to be.
The man behind the camouflaged rifle was leaning behind a tree twenty meters from him. Too close to miss, even if he was covered from head to toe in…what the hell? It took Keo a few seconds to realize the man was wearing a ghillie suit put together from materials abundant in the park, namely leaves, mud, and grass.
Keo was frozen in place. It would only take a split-second to raise his weapon enough to fire, but there were two problems with that. He didn’t have a split-second, because that was all the man needed to pull the trigger. The other, more important point was that the man’s rifle didn’t move at all, because the hands holding it were rock steady.
“We were wondering how you were going to get down from there,” the man said, and Keo saw something that looked like pale lips smiling behind the layer of mud and dirt that covered his face.
Wait. Did the man just say we?
Snap! A branch broke under a heavy boot behind him.
Keo didn’t turn around. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, not with the rifle pointing at him. Any little move, and he was likely a dead man. The fact that he was still alive was confusing. Why was he still alive? Did Pollard want him unharmed? What was that Fiona had said?
“Pollard was willing to just kill you when you were out there running around. But now that you’re cornered, he’ll want more. He’ll demand his pound of flesh. He’ll want to take his time with the two of you because he can afford to now.”
Keo could smell the second man before he heard or felt the barrel of his rifle tapping against the back of his neck. “You’re a long way from home,” the second man said. “You speak English?”
“Yeah,” Keo said.
“Say something else.”
“Something else.”
Chuckling. “Smartass, huh?”
Keo bit his tongue and didn’t answer that one.
“You got a name?” the man behind him asked.
“Keo,” he said.
“What kind of name is Keo?”
“Larry was taken.”
CHAPTER 6
“What are you doing out here, smartass?”
That was th
e smaller one, who walked behind Keo, while the bigger one led the way.
They had been going west for the last five minutes, and neither man was in any particular hurry. Keo couldn’t figure out how they had gotten the drop on him. From what he could tell, they had been in the woods for a while, given the ghillie suits both men were wearing. The mud and dirt on them also looked fresh.
Quiet as mice. With rifles.
Had they really been in the area all night, hiding in plain sight? It was a crazy thought (absolutely bonkers), but what other explanation was there?
The one in front of him was about six feet tall, and the thick ghillie suit made him appear twice his size. He was cradling a rifle that looked like a modern version of the Browning light machinegun, but more importantly, the scope on top of it would have made shooting Keo at twenty meters child’s play. He couldn’t tell the man’s age with all the junk over his face, but he guessed he was somewhere in his forties. The man carried himself well, moving with a smoothness only possible for someone used to being out here.
The one behind him was younger by at least twenty years. Keo could tell that much from just his voice, never mind the annoying personality. Like the older one, the ghillie suit hid most of his features, but it didn’t hide the camo rifle he was pointing at Keo’s back from a meter away at the moment. That was just far enough to keep him from trying anything, but close enough that he could hear his captor’s breathing. The man had Keo’s MP5SD, along with the Glock .45 and the Ka-Bar, stuffed into the now mostly-empty pack.
He was in an impossible situation between the two of them, with a big unknown waiting ahead of him. Still, he might have taken his chances and tried to escape anyway…if they hadn’t bound his hands together at the wrists with zip ties.
The one bright spot that he could see was that they weren’t Pollard’s men. He knew that much right away. Pollard’s people had a uniform—black assault vests and camo face paint—but they didn’t do ghillie suits. These men hadn’t shot him on sight (another big plus), and they seemed almost amused by the fact that he had climbed down from the tree this morning.