The Bones of Valhalla (Purge of Babylon, Book 9)

by Sam Sisavath

  Keo focused on the two approaching him. One was six-five and built like a truck (Calvin was written on his name tag). The second one was around six foot, skinnier, and African-American (Bellamy was scribbled across his chest), and by just the way they were walking, with Calvin always a step behind, it wasn’t hard to guess who was in charge.

  “On your feet,” Bellamy said.

  “I like the view from down here,” Keo said.

  “On your feet, soldier.”

  Keo grinned. “Now that’s just mean. I spent an awful lot of time and effort avoiding that title.”

  The two men had stopped in front of the cell bars and Calvin’s hand dropped to the Sig Sauer at his hip, but Bellamy didn’t make any moves toward his holstered Glock.

  “Rhett sent me to come get you,” Bellamy said. “They’ve made a decision.”

  “You should have started with that,” Keo said.

  He stood up and brushed at his stained slacks and shirt, even though it didn’t do any good. Besides three days in here without an open window, he’d dripped (then had to wipe off) what passed for “food” on his clothes since they hadn’t bothered to give him utensils, not even those flimsy plastic ones.

  “What’s the verdict?” Keo asked. He directed the question at Bellamy. If Calvin was bothered by that, he didn’t show it.

  Someone knows his place.

  “You’ll find out when we get there,” Bellamy said. He took a step back and nodded at Calvin, who moved toward the gate. “Hug the wall.”

  “Could you at least buy me dinner first?”

  “Do it.” This time, Bellamy reached for his gun for effect.

  Keo gave him a wry smile and turned around, then pushed up against the wall until his chest touched the jagged brick surface. The gate clinked and clanked behind him as Calvin opened it with all the dexterity of an ape who had just learned how to use his opposable thumbs a day ago.

  “Did you guys make contact with the Trident?” Keo asked.

  “Ask Rhett when you see him,” Bellamy said.

  “How did it go?”

  “Ask Rhett when you see him,” Bellamy said again.

  “Oh, come on—” Keo started to say when a pair of incredibly strong hands grabbed his arms and bent them behind his back, followed by the rubbery sensation of plastic handcuffs slipping over and then tightening around his wrists. Keo was momentarily surprised by not just how strong but quick Calvin had been.

  Who knew the Yeti could move that fast?

  Calvin took a step back and turned Keo around, then put one massive hand around Keo’s right arm and located a good grip.

  “Easy there, Tex,” Keo said. “It’s our first date. Let’s take it slow and steady with the PDA, huh?”

  Calvin ignored him and marched him out of the jail cell. Bellamy stepped back to let them pass. Keo breathed in some more of the fresh air as they walked across the room, then expelled it slowly.

  “Must be nice living on an island,” Keo said.

  “It has its moments,” Bellamy said as he followed them to the door.

  The third man, Donovan, hadn’t moved from his spot, but it wasn’t where Donovan stood that caught and held onto Keo’s attention. It was the man’s face. He looked…conflicted?

  Aw, shit. And everything was going so well, too.

  Okay, maybe not “well,” exactly, but better-than-I-could-have-hoped-for-ish.

  But maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was reading too much into one man’s facial expression. After all, he’d never been particularly good at reading faces. Every woman he had ever met or dated or been locked in a room with for more than a few minutes could have told him that.

  Then again, this wasn’t about a single look on Donovan’s face. It was also about his body language, the way he was gripping the lever—way too tightly, as if he were afraid it would slip from his hand if he relaxed even for a second.

  Donovan looked away as Keo and Calvin neared him, and by the time they reached the door the jailer had slipped behind it so Keo couldn’t see him anymore.

  Shit.

  “So, Rhett sent you guys to get me?” Keo asked as he was led into the hallway.

  “That’s right,” Bellamy said. From the sound of his voice, he wasn’t very far behind them; Keo guessed only about five feet.

  The door clanged shut; then he heard the click-clank of the lock turning into place. That last part made Keo smile to himself.

  Why bother locking it, Donovan ol’ pal? There’s no one in there anymore, remember?

  But of course that thought didn’t last for very long, because he was too busy concentrating on what lay ahead of him—or as far ahead as he was going to make on this particular trip, anyway. He didn’t think it was going to be very far at all.

  Captain Optimism, amirite, Danny?

  “Rhett said he’d come to get me himself when they finally made up their minds,” Keo said.

  “He’s a busy man,” Bellamy said. “He’s running the place now.”

  “Is that right? He never told me that.”

  “I guess he didn’t think you needed to know.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Why tell a condemned man anything?”

  “Exactly.”

  Keo glanced sideways to his right, at Calvin. The big guy hovered over him, much taller up close than the six-five Keo had pegged him at earlier. More like six-six. One inch might not have seemed like a lot, but it factored into Keo’s calculations. Just as he took into consideration Calvin’s size and possible weight. The guy was practically busting out of his uniform, so much so that his name tag actually wrapped around his pecs.

  And what have they been feeding you, big boy?

  Keo was sure of one thing: Whatever Calvin had been surviving on, it was probably not the slop they had been giving him while he sat in his jail cell.

  Behind them, Bellamy followed in silence, the only noise coming from the tap-tap-tap of their boots against the hard floor. Keo had no clue where his prison was located in terms of the building’s blueprint, because he hadn’t bothered to memorize all the turns and hallways they had led him through after the Comm Room. For all he knew, he could have been in an entirely separate building. He regretted the lack of forethought now because he had absolutely no idea where they were going—one gray wall looked like the last one—or why there didn’t seem to be anyone around.

  Up a creek, and me without my hands for paddles.

  He wanted to tell himself that he’d had to deal with worse situations. There was that whole mess with Pollard’s army in Louisiana, surviving Song Island, then going toe-to-toe with a blue-eyed ghoul. Compared to those trying times, he was only dealing with two guys here. Two human guys, at that. Of course, he had free hands in all those other incidents, so maybe that had a little something to do with his successes.

  Oh, stop your whining and get on with it. You shouldn’t even be alive anyway. Everything after this is a bonus.

  Shit, almost convinced myself that time!

  “So, the big boys finally made up their minds, huh?” Keo said.

  “Yup,” Bellamy said from behind them.

  “And you don’t know if they’ve radioed the Trident yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “A man of few words, I see.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Two words that time. Eureka!” He snapped Calvin a grin. “Is Bellamy your boss or something?”

  “Or something,” Calvin said in a deep baritone.

  “Listen to that voice! You ever thought about doing soul music?”

  “What?”

  “Soul music. You got the voice for it. Right, Bellamy?”

  A mild chuckle from the back of their little caravan. “Sure, why not?”

  Keo was hoping they would eventually run across people in the hallway, but after the third turn they still hadn’t seen anyone and he was starting to get a feel for just how big the facilities on Black Tide were. Of course it made some sense why they hadn’t seen anyone yet.
Who would put the brig close to the living quarters?

  Even so, he expected to see some faces, not a big fat nothing.

  “Where are we going?” Keo asked.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” Bellamy said.

  “I didn’t realize the brig was on the other side of the island. How big is this place, anyway?”

  “Big enough.”

  “Not much of an answer.”

  “It’s all you’re going to get.”

  “Tell me something…”

  “What’s that?”

  “You guys manage to scrape Mercer’s brains off the Comm Room floor yet?”

  Calvin was the first to react—he actually twitched with his entire body, and the fingers gripping Keo’s right arm tightened even further.

  Now now now.

  He threw his entire body into Calvin, and despite all the big man’s impressive bulk, the sudden shock of being rammed into knocked him off-balance. He stumbled and crashed into the wall, while somehow still managing to hold onto Keo’s arm and dragging him along.

  Keo didn’t mind being pulled, because that just allowed him to twist sixty degrees until he was facing Calvin, who had thumped into the wall with his back, having turned at the last second until they were face-to-face. Keo saw the flash of confusion on the other man’s face, but if Calvin didn’t know what was about to happen, he figured it out pretty fast when Keo smashed his forehead into the bigger man’s face. There was a satisfying crunch! as Calvin’s nose turned to mush, his blood spraying the hallway.

  Stars flooded Keo’s eyes and his head rang, and he was almost sure that a piece of Calvin’s pulverized nose was jutting out of his own forehead (That’s what you get for using a part of your head as a battering ram!), but he fought through all of that—or as much as he could—and staggered back and spun around. He blinked through the blood coating his eyes (his, Calvin’s, but mostly Calvin’s) as Bellamy stood five feet from him.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bellamy said even as he backpedaled, the look of shock frozen on his face.

  For some reason, Keo grinned and wondered what he must look like with his face coated in a film of Calvin’s plasma while the man himself was sitting against the wall, large body tilted dangerously over to one side as blood drip-drip-dripped from his chin like heavy raindrops. Calvin was still alive, because Keo could hear him breathing. Or wheezing, anyway, because the air was clearly going through that bloody hole in the middle of his face that used to be his nose. It was a grotesque sight, but at the moment Keo couldn’t be bothered to feel any sympathy for the man.

  Keo didn’t so much as run at Bellamy as he threw himself like some human missile at the man. His aim was true and he crashed into Bellamy’s chest, turning his body slightly at the last second so that his shoulder buried itself into the other man’s sternum just as Bellamy managed to get the Glock out of its holster.

  He collapsed back down to Earth on his shoulder and let out a pained grunt, even as Bellamy landed on his back farther up the hallway. For some reason Keo thought his luck might have been good enough to jostle the gun loose from Bellamy’s hand, but he was wrong. Very, very wrong, as it turned out, because he found himself staring at the wrong end of a gun barrel.

  Keo gritted his teeth and waited to eat a bullet, but for whatever reason Bellamy, sitting on the hallway floor on his ass, didn’t fire. Instead, he just stared across the iron sights of his weapon at Keo, that look of shock still present on his face.

  After what seemed like an eternity—though it was probably more like two or three seconds—Keo let out a resigned sigh and slowly picked himself up from the floor and onto his knees. He was breathing hard, but that was more from exertion and the throbbing pain originating from his forehead than fear.

  Bellamy stood up, the gun never wavering from Keo’s head for a single heartbeat. After a moment, he smirked.

  “I had to give it a shot,” Keo said.

  “Nice try,” Bellamy said.

  “So what was the plan?”

  “Take you outside, shoot you, then say you were trying to escape. But this actually works better. You killed Calvin, and I had no choice.”

  “In my defense, he was a big motherfucker and I had to put him down with the first try or I wasn’t going to get a second one.”

  “Understandable,” Bellamy said. He took a moment to wipe at the blood on his cheeks and chin—not his or Keo’s, but Calvin’s that had whipped free from Keo during their collision.

  “Does Rhett know about this?” Keo asked.

  “No. Any other questions?”

  “Nah, that’ll do.” Keo reached up with his bound hands and brushed at a thick patch of blood over his right eye. “Can I at least stand up before you shoot me? I’d hate to die on my knees. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.”

  “Sure. It’ll look weird if you were on your knees when I put a round through you anyway.”

  “Much obliged.” Keo struggled up to his feet, but while he was doing so Bellamy took two, then three more steps back. Keo grinned. “I feel like we’ve lost some trust.”

  “No shit,” Bellamy said. He picked what looked like a shard of bone sticking to his shirt and flicked it away. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Talk about having a thick head, huh?”

  Bellamy chortled. “What did you say to Mercer before you shot him?”

  “What makes you think I said anything?”

  “Jane said she heard you say something before you pulled the trigger.”

  “I don’t know a Jane.”

  “She was in the Comm Room. She got out before the shit went down.”

  Keo shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  Bellamy narrowed his eyes, and Keo couldn’t tell if that was confusion or anger. “You just murdered one of the most important men on the planet, and you don’t remember what you said to him before you did it?”

  “‘One of the most important men on the planet?’” Keo smirked. “I think you’re overvaluing him just a tad. If I had my hands free right now, I’d pinch my fingers together to further make my point.”

  “Fuck you,” Bellamy said, and his face reddened noticeably.

  Now that Keo had no trouble reading. Bellamy was pissed.

  “Go for the head,” Keo said.

  “What?” Bellamy said. The Glock in his hand trembled slightly, but not enough for Keo to make up the seven or so feet that separated them at the moment. The handgun was also pointed squarely at his chest—center mass.

  “Go for the head,” Keo said. “One shot, one kill. I don’t know if you’ve shot anyone before, but a body shot isn’t a guarantee. A headshot—now, that’s one and done. After all, as soon as you pull that trigger, everyone on the island will know and come running.”

  “You think anyone on this island cares about what happens to you?” Bellamy asked.

  “I like to think I made an impression.”

  “Oh, you did; there’s no doubt about that.”

  “Still, one shot, one kill.” Keo reached up and tapped his forehead. “As evidence, I point to Mercer’s brain splattered all over the Comm Room.”

  Bellamy’s eyes narrowed even further—was that even possible?—and he lifted his hand slightly so the gun was now aimed at Keo’s head. “Better?”

  Keo smiled. “Watch out for the kick,” he said, just before he launched himself forward and left—then right! It was a feint, and he was hoping to confuse Bellamy just enough to throw off his aim—

  The bang! came faster than Keo expected, but he had been expecting it nonetheless. He twisted his body as fast as he could, but of course it wasn’t fast enough. It was never going to be fast enough. He was only human, after all. Frank, or one of his blue-eyed pals, could have dodged the 9mm round easily.

  But Keo wasn’t a ghoul and even the fastest man alive couldn’t dodge a bullet at seven (six, now?) feet, a cold, hard fact that was drilled home when the round hit him in the temple and actually spun him like a top. He slammed into the wall ab
out the same time a streak of red splashed across the dull gray concrete.

  Footsteps squeaked as Bellamy moved closer for the finishing shot, but Keo was too tired (And bleeding. Shit, I’m bleeding.) to turn around and confront his would-be killer. Not that it mattered. It could have been Mercer’s ghost come back from the grave (or wherever it was that the island had buried him) to get its revenge, for all the crap Keo gave at the moment.

  A bullet was a bullet, was a bullet.

  And dead was dead, was dead.

  …except when dead wasn’t really dead.

  Right, Frank? I could definitely use your help right now, ol’ pal.

  “You really thought that was going to work?” Bellamy asked from behind him. There was almost a singsong quality to his voice, as if it were all fun and games now.

  “Yeah, sort of,” Keo said into the wall.

  “You really are too stupid to live.”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  He wished he had the strength to turn around and flash one of those faux grins that was full of bravado, if just to piss Bellamy off one last time. But he didn’t, so instead he stared down at the floor, at his feet, as he propped his body up against the wall with the top of his head. Blood drip-drip-dripped down from his right temple and made small, messy individual puddles on the floor. Sooner or later, they would merge and become one big, messy pool.

  Oh, the joys of coming together, he thought, and almost laughed. But of course, nothing came out when he opened his mouth except labored breathing and what sounded dangerously like a pathetic wheeze.

  On the bright side, at least he wasn’t going to have to worry about the concussion he had no doubt suffered from ramming his forehead into Calvin’s face. So there was that, if not a whole lot else.

  See? There’s always a bright side to everything.

  He definitely heard himself chuckling that time, and it ended up being a spurt of uncontrollable giggling. That was probably the only reason Bellamy hadn’t shot him in the back of the head yet.

  “What the fuck are you laughing at?” Bellamy asked.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Keo said. “Sorry, sorry, private joke. You had to be there.”