by Sam Sisavath
She didn’t answer him until she had finished what she was writing, then refolded the map and slipped it back into the glove compartment. “I just want to make sure we don’t forget, that’s all.”
“Forget what?”
“That these places were once here, that once upon a time they served a purpose. I just want to remember them, even if it’s just some scribbling on a map.” She shrugged. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“It’s not.”
“Yeah?”
He started the truck. “No. Not at all.”
“Are you just saying that because you want to get in my pants?”
He smiled. “Not at all.”
“Liar.”
He cleared his throat. “So, you used to live in Corden?”
“Oh, that’s slick—” she started to say, but the words turned into a scream when a gunshot split the air and the windshield spiderwebbed.
Keo reached across the seats and grabbed Gillian’s head, pushing her down. She struggled against him, caught somewhere between paralyzing fear and surprise, but he was stronger and he managed to get her down just enough that the second and third shots smashed through the windshield and stitched the headrest of her seat instead of her head.
He stuck his free hand toward the dashboard and groped for the radio at the last place he remembered seeing it less than a second ago. Got a hold of something plastic and cold and pulled it down, pressed the lever, and shouted into it, “Drive, drive, drive!”
Keo dropped the radio just as bullets punched into the front hood of the Chevy and he heard the ping-ping! of lead slicing through metal. He didn’t look up—he didn’t have to—letting go of Gillian and grabbing the steering wheel with one hand and pulling the gear into drive with the other, then slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.
The truck lurched forward—ping-ping! as two more shots pierced the side and the rear passenger window shattered against a third shot—as Keo struggled to control the steering wheel. He pulled himself up into a sitting position just as he felt a slight bump and knew they were out of the parking lot and back on the highway.
He caught a glimpse of the shooter—no, shooters—coming out from behind the gas station as he sped off. Two men, both armed with assault rifles, but it wasn’t their weapons that got his attention. It was the fact that they were both wearing black shirts and black pants with the legs shoved inside black army boots, and their faces were covered in green and black paint. They were also wearing some kind of stripped down assault gear, and their waists bulged with pouches he was sure were stuffed with magazines for their weapons.
Ping-ping-ping! as bullets punched into the side of the Chevy even as he drove past them, willing the truck to go faster faster faster. The gas pedal was completely pressed against the floor, and he would have shoved it all the way through the vehicle if he could at that moment.
The tires struggled mightily against his control, even with both hands gripping the steering wheel. The two shooters only stopped firing at Keo because they had begun shooting at Norris in the Durango, which was following him onto the highway. He thought he could hear the girls in the SUV screaming, but of course that was impossible with bullets flying around him—
And more shooters were emerging out of the stretch of grass that lined the highway divider. (Jesus, how had he not seen them before?) There were two more of them, similarly dressed, their faces covered. One was firing an AK-47 and the rounds punched into the side of the Chevy behind Keo’s seat, one shattering the window.
Keo didn’t stop to find out if there were more of them somewhere out there. Four was enough. Four was goddamn too many already.
He kept the gas pedal shoved against the floor, hands on the steering wheel, and the truck pointed west up the road. He glanced quickly at his side mirror and saw the Durango keeping pace, swerving a bit on the road, just a split second before the image—and the glass—exploded in front of his face.
He looked up at the rearview mirror instead. The two shooters at the gas station had moved into the road and were shooting after them. They weren’t hitting much of anything at this distance, though Keo imagined they must have been aiming for the Durango behind him and not the Chevy. He hoped the girls had gotten down as low as they could go back there.
He pulled his foot off the gas pedal just enough to let the SUV catch up. He spotted Norris in the rearview mirror, leaning forward against the steering wheel. Norris’s own windshield was pockmarked with holes, but the vehicle seemed to be moving fine.
It wasn’t until they were far enough down the highway and he couldn’t hear any more shooting that Keo allowed himself to relax a bit and pulled his foot slightly off the gas pedal. He looked over at Gillian, picking herself up from the floor of the front passenger seat. She had glass in her hair and there was a small cut along her left cheek. She must not have noticed it as she sat back on her seat, crunching broken glass under her. She didn’t seem to have heard (or felt) that, either.
“Gillian,” Keo said.
She didn’t react to the sound of his voice.
“Gillian,” he said again, louder this time.
She finally looked at him. Her face was calm, but that was a façade. He had seen it before from civilians in the aftermath of a gunfight. The real her was in turmoil, every emotion she had ever felt in her lifetime swirling around inside her at this very moment, like ocean waves trying to drown her. He had felt the same thing during his first couple of combat experiences.
“Gillian,” he said a third time.
“Yes,” she said, and just saying that one word brought her back closer to the surface. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking in her lap. A drop of blood from her cut cheek dripped and landed on the back of one hand, and she finally noticed the wound. “Oh God, I’m bleeding.”
“It’s okay. It’s just a graze. You’ll be fine.”
She looked at him, and he didn’t think she believed him.
“Trust me,” he said. “I’ve seen people shot before. You’re not shot. You were just cut by flying glass. Okay?” When she didn’t respond, he said again, more forcefully, “Okay?”
She nodded mutely.
“I need the radio, Gillian,” Keo said, pointing to the two-way Motorola on the floor at her feet.
She picked it up, looking at it as if she didn’t know what she was holding, then finally held it over to him before reaching back up to her cheek to feel the cut. Her fingers came away with some blood, but thankfully not too much.
Keo pressed the transmit lever on the radio. “Norris, you still with me?”
“Yeah,” Norris said through the radio. It sounded like he was hyperventilating slightly. It took a moment for Keo to realize that he was, too.
In and out, in and out…
“You and Gillian?” Norris asked through the radio.
Keo checked on Gillian. She was still staring silently down at the smeared blood on her fingers. “We’re fine,” he said into the radio. “How’s everyone in your car?”
“The girls are freaking out,” Norris said. “What the hell happened back there? Who were those guys?”
Good question.
Who the hell were those guys? Where did they come from? Where did they get those weapons?
“I don’t know,” Keo said.
He looked down at his speedometer. He was still going well over sixty miles per hour. That meant Norris was, too. He took his foot off the gas a little bit more.
“Gotta slow down, Norris,” he said into the radio. “The last thing we want is to get into a wreck out here.”
“Roger that,” Norris said.
Soon, Keo was down to fifty miles per hour. He wasn’t comfortable enough to go any lower, but he was also wary of going too much faster. There hadn’t been a lot of debris or abandoned vehicles for the last few miles, but he had seen plenty of evidence that they existed around Bentley. All he needed was to hit a piece of metal on the road going this speed and they would be tumbling down
the highway instead of driving up it.
“What now?” Norris said through the radio.
Keo glanced up at the rearview mirror, expecting to see a vehicle coming up the road behind Norris. There wasn’t any, but then again, they had gotten a pretty good jump on the shooters.
How did they get to the gas station in the first place? They didn’t walk there…
He slowed down some more.
The radio squawked, and Norris said, “What’s going on? Why are you slowing down?”
“We need to stop for a minute,” Keo said.
“What?” Gillian said. She was staring wide-eyed at him. “Why are we stopping? They’re back there, Keo! What if they’re chasing us?”
“Exactly. We need to find out.”
“How?”
Keo stopped the Chevy in the middle of the road and turned off the engine.
“Stay here,” he said to Gillian before climbing outside.
He jogged up the road to the Durango, parked a few meters away. Norris flashed Keo a questioning look through the bullet-riddled windshield. Rachel was, too. Keo couldn’t see Christine or Lotte in the backseat.
All four of the SUV’s door windows were gone and there were holes across Norris’s driver side door. For the life of him, Keo couldn’t figure out how Norris was still alive after the battering his vehicle had taken. When he glanced back at the Chevy, though, he guessed Norris probably had the same question about him.
Jesus, how are we still alive?
“What’s going on?” Norris asked. He swatted at shards of glass still clinging to his window frame.
“Turn off your engine,” Keo said.
Norris hesitated, but did it.
Keo walked past them and up the road slightly. He stopped and listened. For a moment, all he could hear and feel was his own heartbeat. The adrenaline was still pumping overtime through his body, making it hard to concentrate—
There!
Car engines. More than one.
Coming up the road toward them.
Keo ran back to the Durango. “Can you hear them?” he shouted at Norris.
Norris shook his head. “Hear what—” He stopped. “Fuck!”
“Drive drive drive!”
He was still running to the Chevy when Norris fired up the Durango and took off, swerving around the parked truck. Keo quickly lunged back into his vehicle and turned on the engine.
Gillian was staring after the fleeing SUV. “Are they leaving us?”
“No,” Keo said. He slammed on the gas and chased after Norris. “They’re following us.”
“Who?”
“The shooters back at the gas station.”
He glanced at the rearview mirror, but they still hadn’t come into view yet. That was the good news.
“Why are they following us?” Gillian asked, her voice trembling.
To finish the job, he thought, but said instead, “I don’t know.” He grabbed the radio. “Norris, we need to get off the interstate.”
“Are you crazy?” Norris said through the radio. “We don’t know this place. We’ll get lost without even realizing it.”
“Norris, we can’t lose them on the highway. If they have faster vehicles, they’re going to catch up to us sooner or later. We’re not going to win a gunfight with guys carrying assault rifles.”
Norris didn’t answer right away. After a few seconds, the ex-cop said, “Okay, call it.”
“First exit you see, take it.”
“Roger that,” Norris said, though Keo detected zero traces of enthusiasm in his voice.
Keo didn’t like this idea any better than Norris, but it wasn’t as if they had a choice. He looked up at the rearview mirror again. There was nothing back there, which meant their pursuers were still too far back. If he concentrated hard enough, he thought he could hear them coming, but that was probably just his imagination.
Up ahead, Keo saw the Durango’s remaining rear light come on as Norris slowed the vehicle down. An exit was coming up and the SUV was moving into the right lane to take it.
Keo tapped on the brake and followed, praying to God this was the right move, that they weren’t going to get themselves killed by leaving the highway…
CHAPTER 15
“Who do you think they were?” Gillian’s voice was still trembling noticeably thirty minutes after the attempted ambush, but at least her hands had stopped shaking. “Why were they trying to kill us?”
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Could be anyone. For any reason. I don’t know.”
“But why were they shooting at us? Were they soldiers?”
“No, I don’t think so. Looked like guys playing soldiers, though. We were lucky.”
“Lucky?” She gave him a horrified look. “You call this lucky?”
“The guy who fired the first shot was a lousy marksman. If he’d been better, we wouldn’t be having this talk. One of us would be dead. Maybe both.”
“Oh.” She took a moment to digest that. “I still don’t feel very lucky.” She looked at the floor and kicked at the pile of glass scattered down there. “God, how are we even still alive?”
“I told you. We were lucky.”
“I guess you’re right.” She frowned. “I still don’t feel very lucky, though.”
They had turned off Interstate 20 and onto Highway 145 twenty minutes ago before merging onto Highway 146, heading farther south. The Durango had pulled back earlier and let the Chevy take the lead again.
If Keo thought the view from I-20 was trees and green and little else, the two-lane road along 146 was even less thrilling. The only difference was the lack of a strip between the north and southbound lanes. That, and the endless walls of trees to both sides of them were thinner and older, the branches, leaves, and trunks battered brown and dry from too much sunlight and not enough rain.
Every now and then they saw man-made driveways that led to country houses behind large clusters of trees. Sometimes those houses were more visible from the road, even welcoming (at least on the outside). Other times they were too well hidden to see much of what lay in the back, which he guessed was part of the charm of living out here. The last three homes they had pulled into the driveways of had revealed covered windows up front. They had quickly reversed each time and continued on.
The fact was, they were lost. They didn’t know where they were going, and although Gillian still had her map, it didn’t show them houses or buildings or any place that could reasonably be considered a viable shelter. The only good news as far as Keo could tell was that the ambushers hadn’t followed them off the interstate. He was sure they had lost the pursuit once they left I-20, parked half a mile away, and turned off their engines. The sound of vehicles passing by behind them had been all too obvious.
They’re hunting us. Like prey.
Who the hell are these guys?
So they went south off the interstate because they couldn’t go anywhere else. According to Gillian’s map, the road they were on now wouldn’t take them all the way to Fort Damper, though there was a road farther down that would eventually reconnect with highways heading into the city of Corden. That was an option Keo kept at the back of his mind. For now, he was just happy they weren’t being shot at or pursued.
“There’s not a lot out here,” Keo said after a while.
“It’s the country,” she said, as if that should explain everything.
He guessed it did. They were deep in the boondocks now. The sticks. People didn’t come out here unless they were trying to get away. He had seen it in the homes they’d passed. They hadn’t been big homes—most were three, four-bedroom bungalows. There was probably a river or a lake nearby. Fishing spots, maybe.
The radio on the dashboard squawked, and he heard Norris’s voice. “How much longer, kid?”
Keo picked up the radio. “I don’t know. This isn’t exactly my backyard.”
“Well, it’s not mine, either.”
Keo glanced at Gillian, who shook her head b
ack at him. “Don’t look at me. I’ve never been out here before. I’ve always just driven straight to Corden and back on the interstate.”
“Let’s just keep going until we find some place we can stop and rest,” Keo said into the radio.
“We need to find a place soon,” Norris said. “I’m running low on gas.”
“How low?”
“In another hour, we’re gonna be squeezing into that Chevy with you.”
*
They drove past three more houses, each one located so far from one another that Keo was sure the residents probably had no idea the other existed. Each time they pulled into the driveway, they saw covered windows, and each time Gillian let out a sigh of frustration.
“This is hopeless,” she said.
“We’ll find a place,” Keo said.
She flashed him an annoyed look. “How can you be so damn optimistic after everything we’ve been through?”
“Have you ever been to Mogadishu in the summer?”
“I don’t even know where that is.”
“It’s in Somalia. In the Horn of Africa.”
“Am I supposed to know where the Horn of Africa is? Is that, like, in Africa?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s not fun. Especially when you’re an American. Everyone in that country has an AK-47.”
“What were you doing in Mogadishu?”
“This guy had this thing that the guys I worked for wanted, so they sent me and some people to go get it.”
Gillian stared at him in silence for a moment.
“What?” he said.
“What exactly did you use to do for a living before all of this, Keo?”
“I got things for people.”
“What kind of things?”
He shrugged. “Stuff. And things. It’s always different. Sometimes it’s just to take people places. You know—work.”
She shook her head. “Forget I asked.”
*
Eventually, the girls in Norris’s vehicle couldn’t stand it anymore. Keo began hunting the side of the road for a place—any place—until he saw an old, rusted sign for an RV park. The road into it was overgrown with grass and there were no indications it had been traveled recently. He pulled into it and drove about 100 meters off the highway until they came to a camping ground next to a river.