by Sam Sisavath
“God, no.” Then, “Those guys back there. They weren’t soldiers, either.”
“No. They just started dressing in those uniforms recently. Before then, they ran around in hazmat suits and gas masks.”
Hazmat suits and gas masks? Now that rings a bell…
“You say there are more of them around?” Keo said. “Besides the ones we’ve seen already?”
“A lot more.” She looked anxiously toward the window. “How long are we going to stay here?”
“Until I’m sure no one else is going to pop up. Then we’ll leave.” He glanced at his watch. “Still six more hours until nightfall. Relax.”
“Relax. Right.”
“Do your best.”
Carrie went back to scooping syrup-drenched pieces of fruit into her mouth with one of the cheap plastic sporks they had found in the back of the Ridgeline. Lorelei, meanwhile, ate ravenously from a can of SPAM.
“Tell me about this town,” Keo said to Carrie.
“What about it?”
“Why did you run away?”
“You really don’t know? About the towns?”
“‘Towns’? So there is more than one?”
“That’s why it’s called L11,” she said, watching him carefully, maybe trying to gauge if he was messing with her. When she was certain he wasn’t, she continued. “There are dozens of them in Louisiana alone. That’s what I heard, anyway. The one we escaped from was called L11.”
“L11,” Keo repeated again. “So there are ten more before it. And more after it?”
“Yes, I think so. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard the stories.”
“And there are people in these towns? How is that possible? What happens at night? How do they keep the bloodsuckers out?”
“You don’t know?” she said again. “Where have you been all this time?”
“In the woods. I guess I’m a little behind the times.”
“Have you ever been to the camps?”
“These are different from the towns?”
She nodded and told him, and Keo listened intently.
Carrie explained the camps filled with survivors. The towns like L11, where the creatures stayed out. And humans donating blood every day. “The agreement,” as Carrie put it. Then there were the pregnant women. He found that the hardest to swallow, but when he stared at the women and saw the very real fear on Lorelei’s face underneath her hair, he believed it. Every single word of it.
“Goddamn,” he said when she was finished. “So they’re working for those things? The enemy?”
“Yes,” Carrie said. “They watch over us in the daytime.”
“But that’s not all they do.”
“No. They do a lot of other…things.”
Keo nodded. Suddenly the presence of those men in hazmat suits and gas masks trying to kill him in Robertson Park made sense. Or as much “sense” as selling out your own species to bloodsucking creatures made any sense, anyway.
“You’re taking this well,” Carrie said, watching him closely.
He shrugged. “I’ve seen some crazy things in my life.”
“Crazier than this?”
“Not this, but I’ve seen people do some crazy things to survive.”
He spent a few minutes rolling all the information he had just absorbed over in his head in silence. A year ago he wouldn’t have believed a single thing Carrie had just said, but what was possible and impossible had been upended for good in the last eleven months. These days it seemed anything was not only possible, but likely.
After a while, he glanced back at her. “You said they wanted to impregnate you.”
“Yeah. That’s why we ran.”
“Were the guys too ugly?”
Carrie rolled her eyes. “It’s not the sex. It’s what happens afterward. With the babies.” She looked almost imploringly at him. “You understand, right? Why we couldn’t stay? Why we ran?”
He nodded and thought about Gillian. “I understand.”
She nodded back gratefully then returned to eating her canned fruits with the flimsy utensil.
“One of the men I shot mentioned a kid over the radio,” Keo said. “Was that why they were there?”
“I heard them talking on the radio,” Carrie nodded. “One of the kids spotted your boat at the marina. That’s why they were checking it out.”
“‘Kids’?”
“They have eyes everywhere. Kids. Eleven, twelve-year-olds. They’re all over the cities on bicycles. Some on skateboards.”
“Skateboards?”
“Whatever they’re used to and can get them from place to place the easiest, I guess.”
“What do these kids do, exactly?”
“They’re spies. Lookouts. Their job is to go around the city looking for survivors. The guys in uniform come later. That’s how they found us. One of those stupid kids spotted us and the trucks swooped in.”
“Kids on skateboards, towns, camps, and pregnant women carrying babies to feed the ghouls,” Keo said, shaking his head. “Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are real, too.”
“‘Ghouls’?” Carrie said.
“That’s what she calls them.”
“Who?”
“The woman on the radio.”
Carrie stared at him like he had a third eye. Then Lorelei joined in.
Keo sighed. “My turn, I guess.”
He told them about the woman on the radio. The repeating message. Bodies of water. Sunlight. Ultraviolet. And silver.
“Is she right?” Carrie said. “About everything? I know about sunlight, but the others…”
Keo nodded. “She’s right about pretty much everything. The only thing I can’t be sure of is the ultraviolet light. Hard to test that one out without the right equipment, and I have no idea where to get those.”
“But silver…”
“It works. I was testing it out last night.” And got Shorty and Zachary killed doing it, he thought, but left that part out. Instead, he said, “The boats at the marina. Do you know what happened to them? That sailboat was the first and only vessel I saw since I arrived in the city.”
Carrie shook her head. “I don’t know. I spent most of my time in the camp before they relocated us to L11. It’s weird, though. Those marinas are usually filled with boats.”
“You used to live around here?”
“The east side,” she nodded. “That’s where we were headed when they grabbed us.”
“What’s over there?”
“My old house.”
“That’s it?”
She looked embarrassed. “I couldn’t really think of anywhere else to go. I don’t even know what I expected to find there. Everyone I know is gone. I just didn’t…know where else to go.”
Lorelei reached over and clutched Carrie’s arm tightly. The two girls exchanged a brief private smile, an attempt to give each other strength that he wasn’t entirely sure was successful.
Keo watched them closely for a moment. The teenager, hiding behind her hair as if it were an invisible force field, doing her best not to draw attention. The older Carrie, who would have been pretty if not for the dirt and grime. They looked beaten and tired and in so many ways were the exact opposite of Gillian.
Or, at least, the last time he saw Gillian.
Was she even still alive out there?
He had to know. And that meant finding a boat. Maybe somewhere down south.
He had to go down there anyway…
“Have you ever heard of Song Island?” he asked Carrie.
“Yes,” Carrie said, looking back at him. “It’s on Beaufont Lake. I used to go fishing with my dad down there when I was a kid. Those were some of the best times of my life. Why?”
“I was told there might be people there. The plan was always to find out one way or another if they’re still there before I headed off to Santa Marie Island.”
“An island,” Carrie said. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Because
the creatures—the ghouls—wouldn’t be able to cross the lake. Do you think that’s why all the boats are missing? Maybe the soldiers are going around destroying them so no one can use them to get to these islands?”
“That’s one theory.”
“You said going to Song Island was the original plan. Is it still the plan?” Carrie asked anxiously.
He nodded, thinking about Zachary, who had come with him specifically to find out what had happened to his friends who had gone to Song Island, following the siren call of a radio message promising shelter and security many, many months ago.
“I owe it to a friend to make a pit stop there first,” Keo said.
CHAPTER 7
GABY
HORSES. THEY SENT the guys on horses after her.
Like a posse in a Western. Now I’ve seen everything.
But instead of six-shooters and Winchesters, this posse was carrying assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. They were wearing identical uniforms, combat boots, and two of them had caps to keep the sun out of their eyes. There were four and they were spread out in pairs of two, which told her they weren’t complete dummies.
She kept that in mind as they moved slowly through the woods, sometimes ducking to get under low-hanging branches. The only positive she could find was that they didn’t appear to be expert trackers and seemed to be searching randomly, perhaps hoping to just stumble across her. So there was that. It had been hard enough keeping Peter and Milly on course, but it had been downright impossible to get them to stop stepping on every twig in their path.
This is what it’s like to run around with civilians. How did Will and Danny ever do it?
She gripped the AK-47 tighter. Mac had done her a favor and kept two magazines in his pouches, with two more for the M1911. Unfortunately all the bullets were regular ammo, which meant she had to get out of the woods by nightfall. If she was caught in here without silver to defend herself with…
Gaby looked down at Mac’s watch: 9:13 A.M.
Plenty of time.
That was the other good news. Night wasn’t her friend anymore, but she had plenty of time to find shelter. Of course, that might be harder to do than she had expected, given the lack of civilization inside the woods—
“What now?” Peter whispered behind her. He was so close she could feel his breath against the back of her neck.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe we can wait them out.”
Milly moved nervously behind them. They had been crouched in the same spot for the last thirty minutes, waiting to see how the guards would proceed. She had expected a stronger chase and was surprise they had only sent four. Then again, she had to remember they didn’t have that many in town to begin with.
You don’t need a lot of guards when no one wants to leave.
Well, almost no one.
She looked back at Peter and Milly. She had a lot of questions for them: Why leave and why now? The questions had been nagging at her ever since they entered the woods. No one else in town had seemed interested in abandoning the safety of L15. The woman Anna, who had sold them out the first chance she got, was proof of that.
“What?” Peter said when he caught her staring.
Gaby didn’t say anything. She turned away and took in their environment for the tenth time in as many minutes. They were surrounded by trees and bushes, with the sound of Hillman Lake behind them. Forty yards from the shore, give or take. Close enough to make the heat just slightly bearable.
The closest two men on horseback were moving away from them before turning right. Gaby listened to the fading clop-clop-clop of the horseshoes against soft earth. Every now and then there was the squawk of radios as the men communicated back and forth in muffled voices.
Gaby glanced back at Peter again. “How big is the lake? Can we go around it?”
He shook his head. “It’s big. Half a kilometer. It would take too long to circle it.”
“How deep?”
“You mean you want to cross it?”
“Where else are we going to go? If we can’t go around it and we can’t head back toward town, there’s only one direction left—across the lake.”
“It’s pretty deep,” Peter said. “There are shallow ends—”
Crack! A bullet slammed into a tree trunk two feet from Peter’s head, cutting him off. He flinched with his entire body, instinctively dodging flying bark as the gunshot echoed loudly around them.
“Go!” Gaby shouted.
Milly and Peter launched to their feet and raced off behind her. She stood up slightly, gripping the AK-47, and searched out the source of the gunfire the best she could, though it was like looking for a needle—
There! A man sitting on a horse sixty yards away.
He was taking aim at Milly’s and Peter’s fleeing forms when her movement drew his attention. She was still swinging the AK-47 around when he snapped off a shot with his M4, but his horse was moving under him and his bullet sailed harmlessly over her, chopping a branch free above her head.
Gaby took careful aim and fired—and missed!
Dammit! she thought, and was about to fire again when the horse, responding to her near-hit, reared up on its hind legs and tossed the rider as if he were nothing more than a nuisance. Long, luxurious brown mane flashed in the air as the animal turned around and galloped off, leaving its rider on the ground.
The man had lost his rifle as he went down, and he was scrambling to find it when Gaby shot him in the back, right over the ass. Or did she actually hit him in one of his cheeks? The man screamed, whether in surprise or pain, she wasn’t sure. He gave up on locating his weapon and began crawling to safety, his bleeding backside in the air, facing her.
Now that’s a sight.
She lifted her rifle to shoot when the man somehow half-crawled, half-lunged behind a big tree.
Gaby took a step forward to finish the wounded man off when another horse pushed its way through a thick bush in front of her, with another uniformed figure swaying in the saddle. They were still far away—almost eighty yards—and hadn’t seen her yet. Gaby decided not to risk a shot at this distance and instead turned and fled in the same direction that Peter and Milly had gone.
Or, at least, the same general vicinity. Her only hope was that Peter was smart enough to grab the girl before she could get too far ahead of him and lead her somewhere safe.
The first thing she had noticed when she fled into the woods earlier was that it was a massive place. It reminded her of Sandwhite Wildlife State Park, but minus the trails, which made it wilder and more unpredictable. If she thought every inch of Sandwhite looked exactly the same, she couldn’t imagine getting lost in here. Thankfully, there was Hillman Lake to her right, so if nothing else, she always knew which direction would lead her away from the town and the pursuit.
She had been running for two straight minutes at a full sprint before she finally heard the noise she had been waiting for. The clop-clop-clop of horseshoes, bearing down on her fast.
She looked over her shoulder. Nothing. But not being able to see the incoming rider wasn’t the same as him not being there. She could almost feel him gaining on her, and she could definitely still hear him getting closer.
Clop-clop-clop!
Clop-clop-clop!
Gaby pulled up to a stop and slid behind a tree. She hugged the gnarled trunk and waited, using the momentary respite to suck in air and did her best to control her breathing, but it was like trying to hold back a freight train.
She was still gasping for breath, trying to temper the adrenaline coursing through her like wildfire, when a man on a horse galloped past her. Like the others, this one was wearing a camo uniform and he was holding onto the reins for dear life with one hand while clutching an M4 rifle at his side. He didn’t look entirely comfortable in the half-second or so that it took him to ride past her.
Gaby didn’t let him get too far ahead. She pushed away from the tree, took aim, and shot the man in the back. He m
ust have pulled on the reins reflexively because the horse let out a furious whine as it slid to a stop, horseshoes digging trenches into the ground.
As the animal settled and the man on top of it hung on, Gaby took two quick steps forward and took aim again, but before she could squeeze off another shot, the man collapsed from the saddle. He crumpled onto the ground on his belly, legs twisted awkwardly under him, and lay still.
The horse didn’t stick around. It turned and ran back—right at her!
Gaby stepped into the animal’s path and threw her hands into the air, waving them wildly to gets its attention. She got it, all right, not that the large brown charging thing with magnificent flowing mane had any intentions of stopping for her.
“Whoa!” Gaby shouted. “Whoa, horse!”
She didn’t have time to process how stupid she must have looked (or sounded) before the horse came within a foot of running her over like she was an annoying gnat. She lunged out of its path, going sideways at the last second, losing the AK-47 at the same time she crashed into some underbrush headfirst.
By the time she picked herself back up, the horse was running freely through the woods until there was nothing left of it but the gradually fading clop-clop-clop echoing back and forth among the trees.
She sighed and struggled to her feet. “Stupid horse.”
Right. The horse is the stupid animal and not you, who just tried to flag it down like it was a taxi. Keep telling yourself that, girl.
She snatched up the assault rifle and jogged over to the dead rider. Gaby robbed him of the M4 and pocketed his spare ammos and a small first-aid kit. She pulled out his holstered sidearm—a 9mm Glock—and stuffed it into her waistband.
Voices, coming from behind her. “Greg! Where the hell are you?”
She didn’t hear galloping, so the man had to be on foot. Gaby didn’t stick around to find out for sure. She slung the newly acquired carbine and hurried off, feeling much better with her pouches stuffed with spare magazines and an extra handgun in her waist. The extra weight made her move slower, but she didn’t want to risk throwing anything away.
“A soldier who complains about having to carry too much firepower is a dead one,” Will liked to say.