by Sam Sisavath
Keo didn’t bother cleaning up after he was done, but he did wipe his bloody hands and grab the kit before leaving. He kept his ears open the entire time, knowing that sooner or later the bad guys (Heh heh, “bad guys”) would either track him to the cabin or accidentally stumble across it. If they launched a manhunt, it wouldn’t be hard because there was only so much space around town.
Either way, the results were the same. He guessed he had a few minutes’ head start on them, maybe more if Buck’s boys took the death of the two horsemen as a sign to slow down. But that wasn’t something he could rely on.
Keo grabbed the bug-out bag and added extra jerky and bottled water to what was already inside. It was a good forty-something pounds by the time he was done, but an extra forty-something pounds to haul around was better than starving or dying of thirst a few days from now. Mark had also bypassed the water purification tablets in the kitchen, either because he didn’t know what they were—they were bundled up in unremarkable-looking brown packaging—or he was being nice.
Either/or works for me.
Even better, Mark had also missed the stash of painkillers on the top shelf of the closet (Just in case). Keo shoved them into the pack after snapping one open and downing two of the white pills to help with the lingering aches and pains. It was good stuff that he had stumbled across and hoarded away for just such a rainy day about two years ago.
“What about Emma and Megan?” a voice asked in the back of his head.
That stopped him in his tracks, and Keo stood still in the middle of the cabin.
What about them? He couldn’t do anything for them, not against that army in Winding Creek. How many men did Buck actually have that Keo never got to see? How many shooters did you need to take a town? Even one as domesticated and easy pickings like Winding Creek? Twenty well-armed soldiers? Fifty? It would take something close to those numbers to pacify a town of just over a hundred people in less than a few hours.
Few hours? Try one.
Barely an hour. Winding Creek never stood a chance.
“But what about Emma and Megan?” the voice asked again.
Going back into Winding Creek was suicide. He had no idea what had happened to Emma or Megan or anyone else for that matter. Whatever element of surprise he had was ruined when Wendy shot herself. After that, they would be expecting him; there would be guards around the town perimeter and more men on horseback. And if he was really unlucky, that machine gun he’d heard earlier but still hadn’t caught sight of would be waiting to punch a few hundred holes into him.
No, there was nothing back for him in Winding Creek. No Emma or Megan, or even information about their whereabouts. He’d done his part; he’d gone back to find out only to end up being run out of town. What else could they possibly expect from him?
Nice one. You almost convinced yourself that time, pal.
Keo ignored the voice and forced himself to move again.
He didn’t bother with extra clothes but did head back into the bedroom to grab two more magazines for the MP5SD. He checked the front windows just in case there were shooters outside, and when he didn’t see one, he grabbed the door and threw it open—
It stared at him, brown eyes as big as his fists.
Or, at least, it seemed that large because the animal was standing so close to the front door that he wasn’t quite sure how it had managed not to knock on the slab of wood with its forehead.
“The hell?” Keo said out loud.
It was the same horse from the woods. Had it followed him to the cabin and waited out here this entire time?
Its long black mane hung off its neck like a thick rug, and there was something majestic about the animal that made Keo think it would have gone for a pretty penny pre-Purge. But the most interesting part was that Keo hadn’t heard it moving around out here. He hadn’t even seen the damn thing until he opened the door. Were horses supposed to be able to move so stealthily? The thing was easily over a thousand pounds, and combined with its horseshoes, it should have made some noise while moving around out here.
“What do you want?” Keo asked.
The horse took a couple of steps back and lifted its head slightly up and down before resuming its staring at him.
“Man, you’re weird.”
Keo looked past the animal at the thick wall of woods beyond the clearing. The horse may have tracked him easily to the cabin, but apparently Buck’s boys were having more trouble. Either that, or his instincts were right and they were being more cautious after he wasted the last two.
He turned back to the animal in front of him. “Can you hear them out there? Are they coming?”
The horse snorted and bent its head to graze the grass at Keo’s feet.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Keo watched it eat for a moment, then took a chance and reached for the reins dangling off its shoulder. He expected the creature to resist, but it continued to feed.
“Easy, boy,” Keo said. It seemed like the thing to say to a horse that could stomp him into the ground if it so chose.
Keo ran his hands along the animal’s flanks. It was like running his fingers through a tangle of silk. He flicked playfully at the stirrups, and when the horse still didn’t lift its head in protest, he wrapped one tentative hand around the saddle’s horn.
“Okay?”
The horse ignored him.
“I’m going to climb up now…”
Silence.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, like throw me off, then try to kill me.”
When the horse still didn’t respond, Keo sighed and thought, Beats walking on a bum leg, and put one foot into the stirrup before starting to pull himself up—
The animal lifted its head and looked back at him. It was such a casual glance, like it was wondering what the hell he was doing, and Keo froze in mid-climb with one foot in the stirrup and the other leg halfway over the saddle.
He wasn’t sure how long they stared at each other in that pose. Maybe it was just a few seconds, or an entire minute had passed. By the time Keo decided he was already committed, it felt like a lifetime, and he threw his leg over the saddle and settled down.
The horse went back to grazing.
“Okay,” Keo said, with probably a bigger sigh of relief than he had intended. “Okay, this’ll work, this’ll work…”
He was pretty sure the horse was a thoroughbred, one of those animals born to be fast, though how old it was he had no clue. Could it have predated The Purge? That would mean it had somehow managed to survive against all odds. Most horses Keo had encountered in the years since were young, the vast majority of them having been born and raised post-Purge. It was a lot easier to survive now—for humans and animals alike—with the ghoul population reduced to a tiny fraction of its former self.
Not that the horse was going to give him any hints about its past. There was nothing on the saddle to indicate who its previous owner had been, and as far as Keo was concerned, it didn’t matter. Its previous rider was dead, and the horse hadn’t seemed all that concerned about it, given how easily he had allowed Keo to take over.
Adapt or perish, right? Even the horses know that.
They had been traveling through the woods for just a few minutes before the horse suddenly stopped in its tracks and lifted its head high. It let out a short snort and Keo glanced over his shoulder, back in the direction they’d come.
There was nothing back there. Nothing but oak trees.
He had purposefully steered them clear of the country road that he knew led to Winding Creek’s front doors. Those same narrow lanes would have been the ones Buck and his men had used to launch their attack, but there was a back door in. More of a hiking trail, really, but it could host horses and men on foot, along with vehicles as long as they weren’t too wide.
He wondered if Emma and her daughter had been taken along one of those roads. If they had survived the initial onslaught on the town. What were the chances of that? Decen
t, because Emma would be smart enough to hide when the attack began. And Megan was well on her way home before the chaos ensued.
Keo hoped, anyway.
But in the absence of their bodies, the possibility existed that both women were still out there, alive. Or, at least, that’s what he kept telling himself.
The horse let out another snort, and Keo leaned forward and patted its shoulder with his free left hand. “What is it? You hear something?”
He didn’t know why he expected the thoroughbred to answer, because it didn’t. Instead, it turned its head back around and faced forward again and resumed moving, this time at a slow walk.
Keo straightened up in the saddle. “Guess not.”
They continued on for another ten minutes, the horse occasionally picking up speed only to slow down again. There wasn’t any pattern that Keo could discern, because each time the animal changed gears, Keo went low and listened. Really, really listened. Except all he could hear were the birds chirping in the trees and the surprisingly loud scurrying of furry animals along the dangling branches.
Eventually, Keo started to notice the drop in temperature, which prompted him to check his watch. He hadn’t been keeping track of time since the mess in town, but it had been two hours since he barely escaped the apartment building. His body wasn’t aching nearly as much as it had before thanks to the pills he’d downed, but he still got reminders of what he had come to call his Plummet of Death every now and then. But aches were better than gaping wounds.
After about another thirty or so minutes of aimless jogging, then walking, then jogging again (Make up your damn mind, horse.), it occurred to Keo that by avoiding the roads but at the same time keeping parallel to it for the sake of familiarity, it meant he was getting closer to Princeville, the closest big city to Winding Creek by far.
Keo had never actually gone through Princeville, but he had skirted along its edges on his way south. Twenty thousand-plus people had called the place home before the Purge, and there was enough of a population that Texas A&M University had built a satellite campus there. He had also spotted an airport to the east, though the closest Keo ever came to spending time in the city was hunkering down for a few days in a farm along a state highway that ran right through town.
The horse had stopped moving again and gone back to grazing on the generous grass. Animals were getting fat on the land these days, with more than enough food to go around. The ones that could feast on nature, anyway. It was easy for horses, deer, and the other land-based population to rebuild now that there wasn’t a constant horde of ghouls to feed on them. There was still the threat of humans, but those were far and few. Not everyone had learned the valuable skill of hunting. Most of the people at Winding Creek had belonged in that category.
Thoughts of the town’s populace brought him back to Emma and Megan. Everything brought him back to Emma and Megan.
They were out there, somewhere. Maybe dead, maybe still alive but captured.
“They took the women. And the babies. God, they took all the babies…” Wendy had said.
By babies she had clearly meant the children. (Probably.)
Keo could understand taking the women, and even the teenagers. He had learned long ago that men were cruel and base creatures, and like the ghouls they’d fought to survive six years ago, men could do unspeakable things to one another as long as it satisfied their primal urges. Keo had seen plenty of it happening even before The Purge. The fall of civilization only gave them more opportunities and less consequences. Wendy, and those men who had lined up outside her apartment, were just reminders of that sad fact.
“They took the women. And the babies. God, they took all the babies…”
The women and the kids? But especially the kids. What were Buck and his people going to do with kids?
Then again, maybe he didn’t want to find out. Maybe it was better for him if he let it all go. It hadn’t gone very well when he ran off into Winding Creek without a plan. He’d almost died. Should have died except for his Plummet of Death. Talk about doing something stupid and getting away with it.
Barely.
Still, it gnawed at him.
“They took the women. And the babies. God, they took all the babies…”
Why the hell had they taken the kids? But maybe the better question was, did he really want to know?
“And it was such a nice morning, too,” Keo said out loud.
The horse stopped grazing long enough to lift its head slightly and exhaled through its nose.
Keo smiled. “For you too, huh?”
He patted the thoroughbred on the neck, then smoothed down its mane with his free hand. It seemed to like it and let out a soft whinny in approval.
“Sorry about shooting your previous owner. I guess you weren’t all that fond of him, huh?”
He looked back just to be sure there wasn’t anyone sneaking up on him (or worse, who had been eavesdropping while he was talking to a horse, which would have been even more embarrassing).
Then he spent a few minutes thinking about what to do next.
Going forward would take him toward the southern tip of Princeville, but west would lead him away from it. The smart move would be to avoid the city altogether. There was nothing for him there except trouble. Potentially a lot of trouble, if it turned out Buck and company had set up camp there, which was a good bet. What were the chances he might be able to find the spoils of their attack—including the women and children—with them? He hadn’t spotted the captives in town, which probably meant they had already been moved by the time he arrived.
What were the chances they were in Princeville right now?
At the moment, it was his best option, because going back to Winding Creek to look for traces of the women was suicide.
Keo sighed. He hated when he had choices, because he invariably chose the wrong one. It was a curse. Or maybe he just wasn’t smart enough to always make the right choice. He knew a few people who would readily agree it was the latter.
I suck at this, he thought, before giving the horse a soft tap on both sides of its belly. The animal stopped eating and continued walking through the woods.
Even as they slipped out of dark patches of shadows and into bright sunlight and back again, Wendy’s voice continued echoing inside Keo’s head, and he couldn’t shake it no matter how hard he tried.
“They took the women,” she had said, in that flat, almost monotone whisper as if she were afraid of being overheard. “And the babies. God, they took all the babies…”
And each time, without fail, he would ask himself, Why did they take the kids? What the hell is going on out there?
Or maybe the question he should have been asking himself was, just how much was it going to cost him to find out?
NINE
PRINCEVILLE, Texas, looked serene from a distance, especially through the clear lens of a five-hundred-dollar pair of binoculars. It was three in the afternoon, and sunlight flickered off its gravel-topped buildings and empty roads. A McDonald’s arch was the most obvious thing at this end of the city, but farther in Keo could spot a bank and a strip mall. There were a couple of hotels in the distance, but he was too far away to make out details. Highway 77 popped out of the flat ground to his right and ran straight north, disappearing behind an apartment complex and what might have been a two-story (or possibly three) hospital.
The place looked deserted, but appearances could be deceiving, and Keo stayed far enough out of sight that he felt relatively safe he could disappear back into the trees at the first hint of trouble. He had settled on the west side, with a large, open field between him and the city limits. Tall, swaying grass brushed against his shoulders while he crouched and would have been tapping at his waist if he were standing.
Keo took a moment to look back at the horse. It was chewing grass a few meters behind him, still inside the woods. He’d tied the reins to a branch, but that wasn’t really going to stop the thoroughbred if it decided to take off. T
he animal was big and strong enough to snap half a dozen branches if it wanted to say adieu to him, and the fact that it hadn’t…
Weird horse, Keo thought, before looking back out at Princeville.
He’d always avoided cities like Princeville in the past, and instead opted to trade and at times linger around the smaller towns. There had been a lot of Winding Creeks, and each one had served their purpose. Food, supplies, and company.
So why had he settled at Winding Creek, of all places? The answer to that was an easy one: Emma. She was a beautiful woman, and Keo was a sucker for beautiful women. Maybe that was why he had run headfirst into town when he heard the shooting and why he was still here now, looking for signs of where Buck’s people might have taken her and the girl. He owed mother and daughter that much: To try to locate, and if possible, help them. To do any less would be an asshole thing to do.
“Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” someone once said to him not all that long ago, and Keo had spent a lot of effort trying not to be one.
At least, not anymore.
A sudden snort from behind him, and Keo glanced back to find the horse with its head raised high and looking at him.
“What?” Keo said, about a second before he heard it.
He turned around and refocused on Highway 77 across the expansive field with the binoculars, locating the familiar source of the noise without any problems. It was, after all, the only thing moving around out there besides the grass.
There it is. I knew it had to be out there.
It was a technical—a civilian truck with a machine gun mounted in the back—heading toward Princeville. A man in dark clothing, a balaclava protecting his face against the cold winds, stood in the truck bed manning the MG. There were two other figures inside the vehicle—
Shit, he thought when a second, then a third, technical appeared behind the first. They had the same configuration—men in front and a gunner in the back behind a mounted weapon that could fire a few thousand rounds in his direction in the space of less than a minute if they had any inklings he was around.