by Sam Sisavath
It wasn’t a ghoul. It was a man. And he was wearing a dark gray hazmat suit—the thin kind worn by soldiers. The man inside was much bigger than Josh, and a hell of a lot heavier, too. Josh felt as if he had been broadsided by a speeding car, not by a man whose face was blurred behind some kind of gas mask.
Josh processed the information in the three or four seconds it took the guy to scramble up and sit on Josh’s chest and punch him in the face. He hit Josh once, then again, and again. Josh knew he was bleeding before he felt the blood trickling down his face. His nose was definitely broken, and maybe one lip was cut. Or both.
He tasted blood.
Just for good measure, the guy punched him a fourth time before slowly climbing off him. From his vantage point, the guy looked like a giant, stretching, stretching, almost touching the ceiling with his height. The man reached down and started pulling out his holstered sidearm. It looked like a Glock. Josh saw dark brown eyes behind the wide gas mask lens looking down at him, and he wanted to ask the man what the hell he was doing, why he was wearing that stupid suit to begin with.
Josh couldn’t get the words out. His chest and back were racked with involuntary spasms, his face throbbed, and it felt like every bone in his body was broken. He ached all over.
He thought about looking for his gun, but he didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t sure he was even still lying on the floor looking up at some stranger in a hazmat suit about to shoot him. Maybe he was just imagining all of this. Or dreaming it. Maybe he was actually still in the semitrailer, trying not to make too much noise, or even breathe at all, so afraid the ghouls might hear him.
Maybe—
He heard a gunshot. It was booming, massive, and it added to the chaotic ringing in his ears. First there was just one gunshot, then there was a second one, and Josh thought, Well, that’s it. I’m dying now.
But he didn’t die.
He didn’t feel the new set of pains from his chest, where he expected them. The guy was aiming for his chest, so that’s where the bullets would have gone. Only there were no bullets, because the guy hadn’t fired.
Josh watched, unable to really comprehend, as the man in the hazmat suit fell to the floor next to him in a crumpled heap of dark gray, shiny fabric. There was no blood at all, though Josh did see two holes in the man’s back, spaced about two inches apart. When Josh raised his head a little bit, he saw the blood inside the man’s suit.
He looked over at Gaby standing nearby, holding her Glock in both hands. She was staring down at the dead man on the floor, before pulling her eyes away and looking at him.
He remembered Gaby from a few days ago, with the bloody key gripped between her fingers like a weapon, stabbing Betts’s neck. That Gaby had been on the verge of tears, and had shaken for hours afterward.
This Gaby, looking back at him, was strangely calm. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He managed to nod, but when he opened his mouth to answer, pain shot through him. He laid his head back down on the floor instead and stared up at the ceiling.
Idiot, you should have stayed outside.
You’re such an idiot…
CHAPTER 21
LARA
SHE HADN’T THOUGHT she would see another one, or maybe she had just been hoping she wouldn’t see another one. But there it was, lying on the floor of the clinic with two bullet holes in its back.
A man in a hazmat suit.
Another man in a hazmat suit.
This suit looked different from the ones she had encountered with Will and Danny in Dansby, Texas, all those months ago, but Will said it was the same type of suit. Level B, he called it. Not the big, bulky Level A with its own breathing apparatus. Back in Dansby, they had encountered ten men in Level B hazmat suits, determined to keep their loyalties to their ghoul masters. Here, there was just one. Or at least, just one they could see. Lara couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“It must be nearby,” Will said.
“Do we even wanna find it?” Danny asked.
“Yes,” Lara said. “If we know it’s around here somewhere, we have to look for it.”
They were talking about a blood farm, the same kind they had found in Dansby. Men, women, and children harvested by the ghouls to supply them with a never-ending flow of fresh blood. Because the ghouls couldn’t watch over the “farms” in the daytime, they needed human collaborators to do the job. That was where these men in hazmat suits came in. They wore the suits to distinguish themselves from other humans, to let the ghouls know they were part of the team. Lara had learned all this from a young collaborator named Kevin.
“And then what?” Will asked her.
“What does that mean?”
He was looking at her carefully, in that calm, non-argumentative way that was, nonetheless, argumentative. It sometimes annoyed the hell out of her.
“We can’t take them with us, Lara,” he said. “You know that. What happened the last time we stumbled across one of these farms?”
“We freed one of them.”
“No, we got lucky. We still don’t know how they put those people in a coma. Or if it’s even a coma. Even you didn’t know, and you’re the doctor.”
Third-year medical student, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud.
“We need to stay on course, keep going,” Will continued.
“They could be around here,” she insisted. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands. This city is thousands of times bigger than Dansby.”
“Even more reason not to try to find them.”
“See no evil, hear no evil, is that it?”
“In this case, yes.”
She was flustered. It had been a while since she had thought of Will as someone who wasn’t always and completely on her side. She felt that now, and it was a terrible, hollow feeling. The worst part was, he was so damn cold and detached about it.
“Danny?” she said. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s right,” Danny said, almost apologetically. “Carly, the girls, you, and those teenagers. We don’t have the ability to save any more people. Hell, we don’t even have the space. Once we get everyone to Song Island, and it turns out to be the safe haven we hope it is, then we can come back here. It’s not like they’ll be going anywhere, right?”
She was suddenly annoyed with both of them, but especially with Will. But most of all, she hated knowing they were both right. They had the others to look after. The girls. Josh and Gaby. One of these men had almost killed Josh.
But knowing and accepting were different animals. She felt guilty and angry at the same time, and the feeling made her skin crawl.
“Lara,” Will said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She wanted to shake it off, but she willed herself not to. “This is my call. Okay?”
She looked at him. His call. He was doing it again, taking the burden of the hard decisions, putting it on himself. Because he could handle it. Because he was Will, ex-Army Ranger, ex-SWAT commando, and there was nothing he couldn’t handle.
But she knew better. She saw him at night, when he wasn’t so sure, so steely-eyed, when they made love and he sighed against her like any other man, not the superman everyone else had come to rely on. She remembered when he had confessed that he was afraid, back in Lancing.
“That scares me,” he had said, “because it means whatever happens, wherever we go, it might not be enough to protect you.”
Protect me. He does everything to protect me.
“What about him?” she asked, looking down at the dead man on the floor.
“I think it’s a bit too late for him, Doc,” Danny said.
“Let’s go,” Will said, “before more of them show up. A city this size has got to have a pretty big blood farm, and it must take more than one asshole to watch over it.”
The others were waiting outside. The trucks were gassed up, and their supplies were back where they belonged. Carly was outside the truck, the girls peering out of a window over her shoulder,
the air conditioner blasting away at their hair.
“How many?” Carly asked.
“Just the one,” Danny said.
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“Where there’s one, there’re usually more. And they must have heard the gunshots, but they didn’t show up, so…” He shrugged. “Maybe they’re scared and know we’re bad men with guns.”
“Either way, we’re not sticking around to find out,” Will said.
“I like that idea,” Carly nodded.
Danny climbed back into the Frontier with Carly, while Lara followed Will to the Ridgeline.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when it was just the two of them outside.
“Don’t be,” she said. “You’re looking out for us, doing what’s best. And you’re right. We can’t do anything for them anyway.”
She thought about Megan, a girl they had saved from the Dansby blood farm, only to lose track of her during the siege at the facility that very same night. Lara didn’t even know what happened to Megan, and in the months since, she had always wondered if bringing Megan back with them had been the right thing to do. It had felt like the right thing at the time, but Megan might think otherwise now. She would still be at the farm, yes, but she would still be alive.
Or some kind of “alive”…
“Still, I’m sorry,” Will said.
She gave him a pursed smile, her own way of apologizing. He brushed hair out of her eyes, a simple move that always made her feel like a teenager. “What about Gaby?”
“What about her?”
“I think one of us should talk to her. About what happened.”
“She’s a tough kid. She’ll be fine.”
“That’s it? She’s a tough kid so she’ll be fine?”
“I’ve seen people like Gaby before, Lara. She’ll be fine.”
Lara wasn’t convinced as they climbed back into the Ridgeline. Josh and Gaby were in the back, and Lara fought the urge to flinch at the sight of Josh’s face. His eyes were bruised and swollen, his left eye in particular puffed up to twice the size of his right. His nose was broken, with a small Band-Aid over the bridge. His lips were cut, but they had stopped bleeding. Although Lara was sure the teenager was in some pain, he looked more embarrassed than hurt.
Gaby, on the other hand, looked fine sitting next to Josh, handing him a bottle of water every other minute and fussing over him. Lara wondered if it was all a front. Maybe Gaby was going through some things inside her head that she couldn’t express in words. Lara remembered the first time she had killed someone. It still lingered with her, something she didn’t think would ever go away.
And this wasn’t even Gaby’s first time. They knew about Betts and how Gaby killed him so they could escape. Both times, Gaby was justified in what she did. Lara would have done the same in her place. Carly, Will, and Danny, too. But they were older, and they had seen more. Gaby was eighteen, but looking at her now, fussing over Josh, Lara couldn’t tell if that calmness was an act, a brave front, or the real thing.
Either way, that’s a tough girl. Maybe Will’s right.
“You guys ready?” Lara asked.
“Good to go,” Gaby said.
Josh gave her a thumbs-up. When he tried to talk, his words slurred, a combination of the pain medication she had given him and his bruises, so he had stopped trying.
Will started the Ridgeline and eased them back onto the feeder road, where they continued parallel to the highway. There was just enough space along the small roads that they could use them instead of braving the congestion, even though every other half mile meant driving up onto the sidewalks, sometimes even the lawns, before moving back to the streets.
It was slow going, but they were making steady progress. Lara was worried about the Frontier behind them. It was pulling the cargo trailer and had more trouble going up and down the sidewalks, so she kept in touch with Carly as much as possible.
“How’s it going back there?” she said into the radio.
“It’s going,” Carly answered. “I wish Danny was a better driver, though. It’s like being stuck in a car with an eighty-year-old man with arthritis who refuses to admit he has arthritis. It’s annoying.”
“I drive fine,” they heard Danny say through the radio. “In fact, I drive great. They used to call me Danny the Driver because I drove so well.”
Lara smiled. She could picture Carly rolling her eyes. “Let us know if you need to stop or if something happens.”
“Will do,” Carly said.
Will leaned over and said into the radio, “Stay frosty.”
“Oh, I’m frosty,” Danny said. “I’m so frosty, they used to call me Danny the Frosty Snowman.”
This time Lara actually rolled her eyes.
*
USING THE MAP, they were able to abandon the feeder road system and start using smaller streets, eventually returning to the main highway when US 287 became I-10 and they began moving east instead of south. It was still slow going on the interstate until they broke through near the edge of town.
By 11:11 A.M., they left the city of Beaumont behind.
Not long after, they were driving through a thickly forested area, with towering trees to both sides of the highway. Will estimated they would cross the Texas-Louisiana border in about forty-five kilometers, or klicks as he put it.
“What’s that in miles?” Gaby asked.
Lara smiled. She was glad she wasn’t the only one having trouble with Will’s kilometers.
“Twenty-eight miles,” Will said. “Give or take.”
“You could have just said that in the first place,” Lara teased.
He gave her a mildly annoyed look, which made her grin. She liked needling him whenever the opportunity presented itself, because there were so few opportunities with Will.
“Road looks pretty clear,” he said, already moving past the topic. “It gets tricky once we’re across the state line. Beaufont Lake isn’t exactly easy to get to, and we’ll have to leave the interstate, take a small road farther down south. And from there, find a spot to launch to Song Island. Hopefully there will be a marina or two nearby that we can use.”
“Hopefully?” Gaby asked worriedly.
“There has to be,” Lara said. “How else did the people already on Song Island get to the island in the first place?”
“Makes sense,” Gaby said.
I hope so.
*
WHEN THEY FINALLY drove across the Texas-Louisiana border, Lara felt great relief. It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought they would ever actually get out of Texas alive, and the simple act of crossing an imaginary line on a map was like a great big weight lifting from her chest.
There was no celebration or fanfare in the truck as she watched Texas recede in her side mirror. Not that you could really tell where the Lone Star State ended and the Bayou State began. The sun-drenched stretch of interstate concrete looked the same here as it had for the last thirty miles.
The road ahead of them thinned out noticeably, and it became a rare thing to see cars on the road. Which made sense, since they were now moving through flat farming country. Sometimes they went for whole chunks of minutes without seeing another sign of civilization, though she caught sight of the occasional farmhouse or barn in the distance, swamped by overgrown grass, or a garden overcome by weeds.
After a while, the monotonous sight of vast farmland got the better of her, and, lulled by the cold air conditioner blasting away against the bright sun outside, her eyelids started getting heavy.
She didn’t remember when she closed her eyes, but when she opened them again, it was almost two hours later and the Ridgeline was exiting I-10, having slowed down almost to a crawl in order to maneuver around a big pile-up between a couple of trucks and a big rig in front of them.
She sat up in her seat, rubbing at her eyes. She saw buildings, stores, and gas stations around her again. “Where are we?”
“A town called Salvani in Beaufont Pari
sh,” Will said.
She glanced up at the review mirror and saw Josh and Gaby sleeping in the back, Gaby’s head resting on Josh’s shoulder. They looked comfortable, like a couple.
“Will, you should have woken me up,” she said, slightly annoyed with him.
“Maybe next time.”
Lara heard stirring behind her as Josh and Gaby were woken by their voices. Josh stretched and yawned, while Gaby rubbed her eyes and looked out the window.
“Wow, civilization,” Gaby said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”
Lara caught sight of the reddish-tinted rooftops of a La Quinta to their right as Will took the feeder loop. He turned into the right exit, passing a Shell gas station, before turning onto Ruth Street. She glanced at her side mirror and saw Danny in the Frontier following closely behind.
“Waffles,” Gaby said longingly in the back seat. “It’s been ages since I’ve had waffles. I would absolutely kill for waffles right about now.”
Josh nodded in agreement, but apparently still didn’t trust himself to speak. He had become even more bruised and purple in the hours since his encounter with the man in the hazmat suit back in Beaumont. The swelling was worse, and it would probably take a day for everything to start going down.
They passed the Waffle House sign, letters spelling out the restaurant’s name in yellow square blocks hoisted high in the air. Passed a Conoco gas station, a Sonic fast food restaurant, and an Archer Sports and Outdoors warehouse. Lara glanced at a big billboard ad for teeth cleaning along the side of the road, and suddenly the stores and buildings gave way to homes and open, undeveloped land.
“Are we close?” Lara asked.
“We’re almost there,” Will said. “Ruth Street becomes Route 27 and keeps going until we’re alongside Beaufont Lake. Sixty klicks, give or take.” He added quickly, “About forty miles.”