by Sam Sisavath
Keo fought back a cough as something moved in the corner of his left eye. He turned, saw it bounding out of the dark corner. Its mouth was opening wide, showing jagged yellow teeth smeared with dark, old blood.
He shot it in the chest, and the creature flopped to the floor with a loud thump.
Then Jim was there, squeezing in between Keo and Duncan, and the massive boom! as he unloaded both shotgun barrels that left Keo’s ears ringing. The walls and floor might have also trembled in the aftermath, but Keo couldn’t be completely sure because he was trying desperately to fight through the shock of being so close to the blast.
Dammit, Jim! Not so close, you idiot!
The rest of the ghouls had fled into the bedrooms in the back. Keo couldn’t quite hear them with his ears still buzzing, but he could smell them everywhere in the closed cabin.
“I guess we should finish it,” Jim said as he reloaded his shotgun. Or Keo thought that was what he had said. The sheriff could have been reciting his grocery list for all Keo knew.
Jim took point, stepping over three twisted bodies lying on the floor toward the bedroom. Duncan followed, nervously changing up his grip on his pistol.
Keo gave the ghoul he’d killed a quick look before turning and following the two men into the back of the dark cabin, thinking to himself, And you thought the days of going into dark rooms were over. Optimistic much?
As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a fight, and Keo didn’t have to do very much. Jim did most of the work—or his shotgun did, as its double barrels full of silver buckshot tore into their victims inside the bedroom even before Keo or Duncan could enter after him.
In the end, Keo left the house feeling almost sorry for the creatures.
Almost.
Killing them proved easier than disposing of the bodies, which included dragging the bony carcasses outside. Keo managed two figures at a time while doing his very best not to imagine them as children, given how little they weighed and how small they both were. The sun was already eating away at their flesh even before he could get them off the porch and into the yard. He wished he could have said the stinging scent of evaporating ghoul skin, muscle, and everything else that covered their bleach-white bones was something new, but he was too used to it to lie to himself with any conviction.
Duncan and Jim grabbed rags from their saddlebags to wipe at the dust that covered them, while Keo ran his fingers through his hair and shook off the remains of vaporized ghoul—specks of gray cremated ash—that had been lifted into the air by the wind. He grabbed a bottle of water from Jim and poured the contents over his face and hair, then drank whatever was left.
“That was easier than I thought,” Jim said as he wiped at his face and forehead with another bottle.
“I told you you didn’t need me,” Keo said.
“Maybe not this time…”
“This is the first and only time, Jim.”
“What if more show up?”
“Then it’s time to recruit more deputies. But this is it for me. One and done.”
Jim nodded, though Keo didn’t fail to notice the lack of verbal confirmation.
He glanced down at the pile of bones instead. It never ceased to amaze him how white they looked once the sun got ahold of them, almost as if they were bleached by chemicals.
“Brings back memories,” Duncan said, his hands on his hips. “How many bones did we bury after The Walk Out, Jim? A few thousand?”
“Maybe that,” Jim nodded. “Maybe more.”
“You weren’t here, Keo, but they were everywhere. It was like someone had taken a digger and unearthed every cemetery in the world and dumped them around Winding Creek.” The deputy shook his head. “I don’t think I ever had to work so hard in my life. Not that I minded, mind you. No one did, because it meant these buggers were gone.” He glanced around at the unmowed yard. “Hell, there’re probably a few hundred of them under our feet as we speak. God knows we buried enough of them everywhere.”
The Walk Out, Keo thought with a smile. He still remembered the shock of watching ghouls coming out of the buildings around the city as the helicopter he was sitting in hovered in the air. There was a seemingly endless wave of them—tens of thousands—obeying a command that only they could hear. You did it, Will. You did it, he remembered thinking.
Keo looked over at Jim and Duncan now as the two lawmen grabbed the multipurpose folding shovels they’d brought with them and walked back over. He doubted if either men knew who Will was or the things he’d done in the name of humanity. In the five years since, in all the towns he’d gone through and the people he’d met, not a single person had mentioned Will’s name.
You died a hero, and no one even knows it except for those of us who were there.
It would have been a tragedy if the man himself cared. Keo didn’t know him—at least, not the man that he was before his transformation—but from everyone who did, he didn’t think Will would have been the least bit bothered that no one even knew the sacrifices he had made that day under the HC Dome.
But Keo knew who Will was, and so did everyone who was there. And, more importantly, she knew, and he thought that was probably the only thing that mattered to Will at the very end.
Wish I could have known you better, pal. Maybe in another life…
“We only brought two,” Jim was saying, holding up his shovel. “Didn’t think you would actually agree to come along.”
Neither did I, Keo thought, but said, “Two’s all you need.”
Duncan glanced down at the dozen or so remains. “You can always spell me. I’ll dig and you shovel, how about that?”
“Nah. Besides, I got a long walk ahead of me.”
“You’re going already?” Jim asked.
“I gotta go take a shower or at least change clothes.” He sniffed himself and shook his head. “I forgot how much they smell.”
“You killed one of them two nights ago.”
“One’s different than a whole nest. The smell’s more noticeable.” Keo gave them a mock salute. “Have fun, boys,” he said, and started off.
“Hey, Keo,” Jim called after him when he was almost out of the clearing. Then, when Keo stopped and glanced back, “Thanks.”
“Like I said, don’t get used to it, Sheriff.”
Jim smiled. “I’ll tell Emma how helpful you were.”
“Don’t give her any ideas.”
“What does she see in you, anyway?” Duncan asked as he shoved the spade into the ground and pushed it in with one boot.
“Must be my winning personality,” Keo said.
“What personality?”
“You’ll have to take your clothes off to find out, Duncan.”
“Yeah, no thanks,” the deputy said. “But I’ll be sure to ask her when I get back from Dresden tomorrow.” He winked. “I’ll even bring back flowers. I bet she’ll love that.”
“Dresden?”
“Up north, to find out why they didn’t show up as planned last week,” Jim said. “He could use some com—”
“He doesn’t need company,” Keo said, cutting the sheriff off.
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind, now that I think about it,” Duncan said. “Maybe I’ll ask Emma if she wants to come along…”
Keo turned and started off. “Good luck with the digging, boys,” he said, and slipped back into the woods, glad to be moving as far away from the stench of dead ghouls as possible.
FOUR
HE HAD GONE NEARLY a year without shooting, stabbing, or maiming another human being, but Keo always knew that streak was going to end sooner or later. He was surprised it had lasted this long, and he credited most of that to his current situation—Megan, Emma, and a relatively quiet life he had stumbled across being the main reason.
Winding Creek was a hole in the wall, hidden from the world except for those who were brought here almost six years ago, and it had remained that way since. Life after The Purge was essentially the same for the townspeople—at least for t
hose who had stayed behind when they no longer had to. Sometimes he wondered what life would have been like if he had found the place earlier in his travels.
Look at you, thinking about white picket fences. Disgusting.
His cabin was bigger and (definitely) cleaner than the one the ghouls had occupied, but it wasn’t exactly luxurious. There was a single bedroom in the back with a great room taking up most of the space up front. It measured less than six hundred square feet in total (not that Keo ever broke out the measuring tape, but he eyeballed it at about that size) and would be smaller than most one-bedroom apartments in the city. But it was plenty big for just him, and besides, how much room did one man need, anyway?
He ran more water over his hair and face, then changed clothes after returning home, before heading back into the kitchen. From one of its windows and through the repurposed rebars, he could just make out the sun reflecting off the steeple of Winding Creek’s church. It was the one constant sign that there was someone else out there beyond the ring of woods, that he wasn’t alone.
You wouldn’t need constant reminders if you’d moved in with Emma like Megan wanted you to, a voice said in the back of his head. Rejoin civilization again, like a civilized human being.
Oh, shut up, he thought, and pulled the curtains closed.
This was good enough. It had to be good enough. Committing now would only make things more complicated. There was a reason he still had a bug-out bag in his bedroom closet, because you never knew. You just never knew.
He stopped in front of the window that the ghoul had broken two nights ago and stared at it. There wasn’t any blood left on the jagged shards of glass or on the windowsill. The sun had taken care of that. Too bad the sun couldn’t fix the window for him, too.
He thought about Emma, about what she was doing now, and how she would react when he reappeared after sneaking out on her last night. It was the first time she’d asked, and he knew it took a lot of courage on her part. Emma, like him, was wary of getting involved, and yet she had taken the risk…only to have him skip out on her like a thief in the night.
What a manly thing to do.
God, you suck.
To keep himself busy and from thinking about all his faults, Keo spent a few minutes digging out the .45 bullet from the floorboards. It was mostly lead, with just enough silver stirred into the final product to kill ghouls. You really didn’t need much—certainly nothing like the silver-coated buckshot Jim had used back at the ghouls’ nest. Just a little silver would do it. How the hell did it work, anyway? Maybe one of those scientists Keo was sure were still out there would figure it out and tell him one of these days.
He tossed the salvaged material into a bowl already filled with other metals, things that could be turned into bullets later. There were still plenty of weapons and ammo just lying around even six years after The Purge, but they weren’t going to last forever. Keo had learned to be prepared.
Just in case…
There was one advantage to being so close to civilization again—coffee. Winding Creek was the first town he’d come across that knew how to grow the stuff, and getting a whiff of freshly-brewed coffee in the air one morning while scouting the area had made him temporarily question his sanity. That was also how he’d met Emma.
Stop thinking about her. Jesus.
Keo was grinding the beans with the water heating up on the kettle behind him when he heard it: a very faint popping sound.
His head snapped up.
It took him a second—maybe a second and a half, or possibly even two—to fully process what he had just heard. By the time he knew what the noise was with absolute certainty, two more identical sounds had echoed.
Pop-pop!
Then, quickly after that:
Pop-pop-pop!
Keo abandoned the beans and rushed to the nearest window and looked south toward the skinny white steeple in the distance, poking out from the tree crowns like an unwanted appendage.
Pop-pop!
They seemed to be getting louder with each one, maybe even getting closer. Or maybe now that his brain had fully recognized the noises for what they were, they just appeared louder, more urgent. Maybe—
Brap-brap-brap! Brap-brap-brap!
Keo went deathly still, and this time he didn’t have to waste a second trying to decipher the new noise. He knew exactly what it was.
The water had begun to boil when Keo ran into the bedroom and grabbed the P220 from under the pillow. He shoved it into his front waistband, then grabbed one side of the bed and tossed the mattress and box springs over. The dusty rug that he hadn’t touched in over five months came next; Keo jerked open the trap door, reached in, got a good grip on the side handles, and lifted the box up and deposited it next to him.
It wasn’t much to look at: a three-quarters thick pine rectangle, twenty-three inches long, nine inches wide, and nine inches deep. There was no lock, since Keo assumed if someone knew where it was, they wouldn’t have any trouble cracking the lid anyway. He pulled it open and stared at its contents.
Almost a year. He’d almost gone a full year…
“Daebak,” he said out loud to the empty room.
Pop-pop-pop!
The gunfire got louder as he closed in on the town limits. From the many times he’d gone back and forth, Keo knew he had another hundred or so paces ahead of him. Of course, since he was running at almost full-speed (Faster than a donkey but slower than a cheetah, pal!) and was extending his normal stride, it was more like fifty (give or take) steps left.
The steeple was growing in size to his left, and he steered clear of the spur road that connected Winding Creek to a two-lane country blacktop. His mind swirled with possibilities (Who was attacking? Who was doing the shooting? And why?) as he dodged branches and went around gnarled tree trunks and hopped over shrubs.
He gripped the MP5SD in front of him, sweat from his palms glistening off the black matted exterior of the Heckler & Koch submachine gun. It felt a lot heavier than he remembered, but then he hadn’t held it in over five months. But he didn’t worry about its ability to function again when he needed it. After all, no one made guns like the Germans, and this particular model had served him well before, during, and after the world went to shit.
Pop-pop-pop!
He was getting closer.
Thirty steps…
He flicked off the safety on the weapon.
Twenty…
Beads of sweat stung his eyes, but he blinked through it.
Fifteen…
Thirty rounds in the magazine. Two more spares in his back pocket.
Ten…
The SIG Sauer P220 pressed snugly against his front waist had seven rounds, which wasn’t good, but he did have two spares in his front pockets—
Shit!
Keo was lifting the submachine gun when the first figure burst through the thick foliage in front of him, the sound of heavy footsteps registering just a second too late. (You’re getting slow, old timer!) The man was breathing hard—gasping, really—and Keo really should have heard it well before he spotted the man himself, but Keo’s own breath was pounding in his ears from the running and had camouflaged it.
Excuses, excuses!
The man was dragging a little girl behind him. She was the same age and height as Megan, but she was wearing a dress, something Megan wouldn’t be caught dead in. Tears flooded down the girl’s cheeks, her entire body seeming to convulse as she was pulled out of the thick brush and onto the other side—
“Oh, Jesus!” the man said when he saw Keo in front of him a split second later. “Keo? Thank God it’s you.”
That’s a first, Keo thought, lowering the weapon and stepping closer.
He focused on Mark. Blood poured down one side of his face from a wound along his temple that Keo couldn’t quite make out with the shadows around them. Mark was wearing his apron, still stained with fresh flour, which meant he had been at work in his bakery when the chaos began.
�
��What’s happening in town, Mark?” Keo asked.
Mark stared blankly at him, as if he couldn’t quite figure out the question. His daughter, Angie (or was it Angela? Abbie? Something with an A, Keo was (mostly) sure of it) stood silently at his side gripping his hand as her own chest heaved with every breath. The girl looked ready to scream but was somehow keeping it in. Keo couldn’t imagine how, but maybe, like most kids her age who were still around, Angie/Angela/A-something had practice being quiet in stressful situations. She was around ten and would have lived through The Purge.
“People with guns,” Mark said. He bent over at the waist to catch his breath. “They just started shooting. Jim, Duncan… They’re dead. They’re both dead.”
Well, shit, that’s not good.
The last Keo saw of the lawmen was the two of them getting ready to dig graves for the piles of ghoul bones outside the cabin on the opposite side of town. While Keo had to circle around Winding Creek to get back to his cabin without going through the town itself, the sheriff and his deputy would have only had to walk the short distance back and would have arrived in town long before he made it back to his place.
Just in time to get killed.
Keo crouched in front of Mark and snapped his fingers in front of the other man’s face to get his attention. Mark glanced up, his chest still heaving, seemingly in sync with his daughter next to him. The baker hadn’t, Keo saw, let go of his daughter’s hand, and Keo didn’t think anyone could pry the two apart.
“Who were they?” Keo asked.
Mark shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know…”
“Strangers?”
“Yes…”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know…”
“How many did you see?”
“Five…”
“But there’s more?”
“Yes…”