by Sam Sisavath
Keo nodded. “You’re slayers.”
“That’s right. But you thought we were someone else at first, didn’t you? Who did you think we were?”
Keo shrugged. “Someone else.”
“Given that reaction, I guess it’s lucky for you that we came along instead.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong.”
It had been almost two years since he ran into a slayer. The last time was somewhere outside of Wichita City, Kansas. Keo wondered if that old man was still alive.
“What are slayers doing down here?” Keo asked.
“The same thing we do everywhere else,” Lam said. “Hunting ghouls.”
“We tracked a pretty sizable group headed south from nearby Olsen,” Willis said. “But we lost them somewhere around Winding Creek.”
You didn’t lose them, we killed them for you, Keo thought. Me, Jim, and Duncan. But mostly Jim’s shotgun.
“You’ve been to Winding Creek?” Keo said instead.
“Not yet. We’re heading in tomorrow morning,” Lam said. “Which is very soon,” he added, glancing down at his watch. “Figure they might want to hire us on for a while if we can show them there are ghouls in the area.”
Besides the old man outside of Wichita, Keo had seen plenty of guys like Willis and Lam before. Too many of them in the years since Houston, in fact. Slayers were essentially mercenaries that hired their services out to towns to clean out any ghouls in the area. Without fail, they were rough and tumble types, people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—stay put in one place for too long. For a time Keo had even hung around a few of them, but the idea of going from place to place searching out ghouls and killing them wasn’t something he was interested in doing for a career.
“There’s just the two of you?” Keo asked.
“We crossed into Texas with six,” Lam said. “But you know how it is. This ain’t a job for the faint of heart. One mistake and”—he snapped his fingers—“that’s it. Six feet under.”
“Or worse,” Willis said.
“Or worse,” Lam nodded.
“We got some friends following us down here later. It’s a big state; we were hoping to find enough jobs to keep us busy for a while. Maybe enough to last us a few years before we moved west.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a retirement plan,” Keo said.
Willis chuckled. “Beats farming and cleaning up cow shit.”
“You’re going into Winding Creek in the morning?”
“That’s right. You from this area?” Then, after Keo nodded, “What’s it like? We thought about going in last night, but you know, it’s not always the smartest idea to pop into a new place in the dead of night. People’ve gotten shot for less.”
“You’ll see,” Keo said, and chewed on another piece of deer jerky.
“Goddammit,” Lam said, though Keo didn’t think that was a somber goddammit but more of an annoyed goddammit.
“There goes our meal ticket,” Willis said.
Yup. Definitely more annoyed than somber.
And he thought he didn’t play well with others. Lam and Willis had come here looking for a job. Instead, they had followed Keo into Winding Creek only to find a lot of blood in the streets, empty buildings, and not a single survivor to offer them employment.
They stood in the town square an hour after sunup, with plenty of light to see everything that needed to be seen. The place looked much different than when Keo was last here less than twenty-four hours ago. Then again, at the time he had only seen the very spot he was currently standing on from a window almost a block away. It was a moodier atmosphere up close, and the already decaying bodies only added to that.
“Jesus Christ. Who did this?” Lam asked.
“You ever heard of a town called Fenton?” Keo asked.
Lam and Willis exchanged a look.
“What?” Keo said.
“On the way down here,” Willis said. “But we didn’t go inside.”
“Any reason why not?”
“They didn’t exactly have their welcome mats out.”
“Meaning?”
“There were guard towers and machine gun nests along the roads into town. The place looked more like a military outpost.”
“Given their artillery, it didn’t look like they’d need our services,” Lam said.
“How big is Fenton?” Keo asked.
Willis shrugged. “Pretty big, from what I saw. And growing.”
“Growing how?”
“They were putting up new buildings. Looked like a real boom town.”
What the hell does a booming town need women and kids for? Keo thought, remembering everything Wendy and Lewis had told him.
“You gonna tell us what happened here?” Lam asked.
Keo did, and the two slayers listened quietly.
When he was done, they exchanged another look, before Willis finally said, “Damn glad we stayed out of Fenton.”
“How many people did you see up there?” Keo asked.
“Like I said, we didn’t go inside,” Lam said, “but there was a lot of activity. They have a thriving farming community, too. And plenty of livestock. It didn’t look like they would need to raid other towns for supplies.”
“And gas,” Willis said. “They had plenty of gas. You could hear machinery running everywhere, and there was a line of cars going in and out. You know what a technical is?” And when Keo nodded, “They had a lot of those, too.”
“Where are they getting the gas?” Keo asked.
He remembered all those vehicles inside Princeville that Buck’s people were using. They were also using horses, but they seemed to have plenty of fuel to burn. There was a reason Keo mostly walked everywhere; the same for the slayers. Fuel, at least the ones that were still usable after all these years, were rare commodities.
“Hell if we know,” Willis said. “But they had plenty of it, though. You could smell gasoline in the air around the place from all that construction they were doing.”
“It looked like they were building an army,” Lam said. “Or a bigger army, anyway, ’cause it looked like they had a good chunk of that already. We’ve been across a dozen states, killing ghouls since The Walk Out, but I’ll be damn if that wasn’t the closest I ever came to seeing someone assembling a real honest to goodness armed forces. The only thing they were missing was air power.”
A burgeoning army. Technicals out the ass. And plenty of gas.
So what the hell does Buck need with the women and children?
“Anything left?” Willis was asking as he looked around. “In the buildings and houses?”
Keo shook his head. “I didn’t have a lot of time to look around when I was here yesterday. Too busy trying not to get shot. But you boys feel free to check.”
“Hell, we’re already here,” Lam said, though he didn’t sound all that enthusiastic. “Might as well make it worthwhile.” Then, “What about the bodies?”
“What about them?” Willis asked.
“Should we bury them?”
“Man, it’d take weeks. Let the animals have them. They gotta eat, too.” He looked over at Keo as if just realizing he was still there. “You knew them, right?”
Keo didn’t respond right away. If Emma and Megan had been one of the bodies instead of just the men and women they’d stumbled across since entering the city limits, it might have been a different answer. But it wasn’t, and he had to find Jonah. He had to find Emma and Megan, and spending even a few more hours here burying all these bodies wasn’t going to help him achieve that.
“You’re right; animals gotta eat, too,” Keo finally said. “Besides, if they don’t, something else will be by to take them.”
Keo didn’t have to say what that something else was because Lam and Willis already knew. It was their occupation, after all.
“Let’s get this over with and get outta here,” Lam said. “This place’s already starting to give me the creeps.”
They headed toward the main warehouse where m
ost of Winding Creek’s goods were stored—it was the largest building by far and hard to miss—while Keo went in the opposite direction.
It had occurred to him while walking back to town that although he did have a map of the area at his cabin, he would have a better chance of not just identifying but locating whatever Jonah was from a map inside Winding Creek. After all, if Lewis had told the truth and he sent Emma and Megan along with the other survivors to whatever this Jonah was, then the women already knew of its existence. And if they knew, maybe it was common knowledge with the other townspeople, too. Say, like with its only two lawmen.
Keo found the sheriff’s office near city hall and stepped around the dried blood splatters on the walkway. There were bullet holes in the walls and one of the windows was shattered, and through the still-open door, Keo spotted a wild dog at work on a body lying prone on its stomach. He recognized Duncan right away by the 1911 still holstered at his hip.
The dog looked up as Keo neared and bared its teeth at him, but when Keo stood still and watched it back, the animal decided he wasn’t a danger and went back to eating. Keo’s stomach turned slightly at the sight, but he reminded himself that he’d seen a lot worse and stepped around Duncan to get to the big desk at the back.
The jail cell at the far end, along with the gun rack on the wall, were empty. There were stray cartridges on the floor, probably dropped when the building was being looted, but there were no signs of Jim.
Keo went to the desk and opened the drawers one by one before finding what he was looking for in the very bottom drawer—a stack of maps. He took them out when he heard a growl and looked up to find the dog again, giving him the evil eye.
“Go ahead, keep eating, I’m not gonna stop you.”
The dog seemed to bristle at being spoken to, but after a few seconds, it returned to Duncan’s dead body and there was only the sound of sharp teeth rendering flesh.
Keo got the hell out of there as fast as he could, then found a bench far from the blood and bodies and went through his haul.
He spent the first ten or so minutes scouring each map looking for a town called Jonah. Failing that, he started hunting for roads called Jonah. When that didn’t turn up anything either, his next hour was spent looking for anything called Jonah—anything at all—but the closest he came was a small stream called Jonas Lake somewhere near a city called Conroe just outside of Houston.
He was still searching for a clue—any clue—when Lam slammed a wooden crate on the bench across from him and began sifting through it. Keo recognized the box—it was one of Mark’s. Keo had seen it plenty of times when the baker showed up at Emma’s place with a fresh supply of bread.
In the bright morning sun, and with Lam sitting down across from him, Keo glimpsed the teeth marks along the sides of Lam’s necks, and as the man took off his fingerless gloves to scratch an itch, there were more similar markings around his wrists. Both Lam and Willis had been wearing long-sleeve shirts, and the collars of Willis’s jackets were high up enough that Keo hadn’t noticed the bites before last night or this morning. And that was exactly what they were—bite marks made by ghoul teeth.
He had met others like Lam (and probably Willis, too). Not as slayers, but as survivors of The Purge. The ghouls didn’t always turn the ones they bit; sometimes they kept them alive as sustenance, drawing blood from them night after night. The lucky ones, it was said, were the ones that stopped being useful and were either finally turned or allowed to drift away.
Keo looked back down at the map before Lam could catch him staring. “Found anything good?”
“They left behind a lot of stuff, mostly things they probably didn’t think were worth taking,” Lam said. He pulled out a half-empty bottle of water, a pair of socks, and a can of sardines. “I don’t blame them; they got their pick of the place, so why bother with the leftovers?”
“You’ve seen this before? Towns being raided like this?”
“Too many times to count.” Lam took out a can of SPAM, then produced a titanium scork from his pocket and began eating. “It happens throughout history. The strong take advantage of the weak.” He shrugged. “I like to think what me and the other slayers do as being the complete opposite.”
“Someone’s gotta do it,” Keo said.
“Damn right. And if we can get a hot meal and a bath out of it? Hell, I consider it a fair trade.”
“I wouldn’t disagree. I’ve met plenty of slayers. You’ve always been standup guys.”
Lam grinned. “What can I say? We get to kill ghouls, and every now and then there’s a pretty farm girl who shows us how much she appreciates what we do. It’s win-win.”
Keo chuckled. “I don’t think I could do it, though. No offense.”
“None taken. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.” He looked around. Then, “We found horse stalls. A lot of them.”
“They took the horses.”
“What about the livestock?”
“I don’t know. Probably those, too. If not, then they’ve wandered off. Or something else got them.”
“Right. Something else.”
Keo sneaked another curious look at Lam as the man scorked a big chunk of SPAM into his mouth. Most slayers he’d met were either adrenaline junkies or people looking for a little revenge. Or a lot of revenge, in the case of one old man. The Purge had left them permanently scarred, emotionally and physically, and not all of them had been able to adjust to life post-Purge. Keo often thought of it as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. They had been fighting the creatures for so long that they didn’t know how to stop.
“One thing’s for sure,” Lam was saying, “there aren’t a lot of ghouls around the area. They would have taken care of the bodies last night if there were.”
“Have you noticed a decreasing number of them out there?”
“They’re definitely getting harder to find. Why do you think Willis and me were out there looking for them in the middle of the night when we stumbled into you? The ones we’ve found have been pretty weak; as dangerous as an old lady with osteoporosis.”
Keo remembered the ones at the abandoned house that he, Jim, and Duncan had killed. Then there was the lone creature that had broken into his cabin the night before.
“Some would say that’s a good thing,” Keo said.
“Some would, but not when killing them’s your occupation,” Lam grunted, and took another bite out of the SPAM.
Keo looked back down at the maps spread in front of him. “I can’t find it. This Jonah. You ever run across a place called that?”
“Jonah?” Lam shook his head. “I’ve been to a lot of places—big and small—but never heard of a city or town called Jonah.”
“It’s supposed to be farther down south, maybe along the coastline.”
Lam thought about it before shaking his head again. “Doesn’t ring any bells. Sorry.”
They both heard the loud boom! of a shotgun blast and glanced across the town center at one of the apartment buildings. Not just any building, Keo saw, but the same one he’d been in yesterday when he found Wendy. The gunshot had come from the second floor where Wendy’s body would still be.
“The fuck?” Lam said. He opened his pack and took out a two-way radio, then keyed it. “You shoot yourself in the foot again?”
The radio squawked, and Keo heard Willis’s voice. “Fucking dogs, man.”
“Dogs? As in plural?”
“Three of them. A whole pack. They scurried after I blasted the alpha.”
“What were they doing up there?”
“There’s a line of bodies in the second-floor hallway. They look paramilitary, but guns are gone.”
The slayer looked over at Keo. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” Keo said.
The redhead chuckled before saying back into the radio, “Get what you can, and let’s get outta here. I don’t wanna stay any longer than I have to. The place give
s me the creeps.”
“Roger that,” Willis said.
Lam put the radio away. “What’s next for you? If you can’t find this Jonah?”
“Head south,” Keo said, folding and then shoving maps into his pack. “Best-case scenario, I stumble into this Jonah guy—assuming it’s a guy. Or someone who knows where a Jonah-something is.”
“Worst case?”
“I get some exercise and breathe in some nice ocean breeze.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“What about you two?”
“Probably head west. Maybe even go into Houston.”
“Houston? Are you serious?”
“Come on, it can’t be as bad as we’ve heard.”
“It’s not; it’s worse.”
“Bullshit.”
Keo shrugged. “It’s your funeral. Just make sure to keep that pretty flesh of yours all nicely covered up. There are some very hungry people—and I use the term loosely—waiting in there for nice boys like you to waltz through the place.”
“Whatever, man. We can handle whatever Houston throws at us. Besides, Willis and me are kind of history whores. We always thought we’d swing by the city eventually, maybe take a tour of where the Battle of Houston took place. You know, the real battle grounds?”
“You know about that?” Keo asked.
Lam gave him a noncommittal shrug. “I’ve met a few people who say the real fight wasn’t on the streets but under it. I guess we’ll find out when we get there. It’s only been five years. There should still be signs of what really happened that caused The Walk Out.”
“A tour, huh?” Keo said.
“What? You don’t want to know how it happened? How a handful of humans took on and killed King Ghoul in his own nest? It’s history, man. Probably the most important history in human existence, as far as I’m concerned.”
Keo zipped up his pack before slinging it on. “I got enough history for a lifetime. I’ll pass on this one.”
“You know what they say about history.”
“That it’s boring?”
“Yeah, that too. And also, ‘Those who don’t remember it are doomed to repeat it.’”
“Fuck history; I got a submachine gun.” Keo stuck out his hand and Lam shook it. “Good luck to the both of you.”