by Sam Sisavath
“You too, man. Hope you find Jonah whatever—or whoever—that turns out to be.”
Yeah, me too, for Emma and Megan’s sake…
SIXTEEN
“HOPE YOU FIND JONAH, whatever—or whoever—that turns out to be.”
Truer words were never spoken, and they reminded Keo he was doing something he had promised himself he wasn’t going to do ever again: Get involved in other people’s business.
Remember the last time? Song Island? Black Tide Island?
What’s with all the islands? What happens if Jonah turns out to be another island?
With your luck, there’s a better-than-average chance of that being true.
Wasn’t that why he had stayed in the cabin outside of town by himself? And why he never spent the entire night at Emma’s? It was one reason—the best reason, as far as he was concerned—but there were others. Getting involved in other people’s business usually ended up with him on the wrong end of a lot of guns.
There used to be a time when he actually got paid to stick his nose in other people’s business. But of course all that changed when the world went kaput, monsters turned out to be real, and it was every man for himself. Then there was a woman, then another woman, and more women…
What was it with him and women?
And yet here he was, wandering through the woods heading south with no idea of where he was going, when the smart move would have been to turn west—or east or north, anywhere but south—and kept going. He could easily avoid the Buckies by leaving the state altogether. After all, Fenton was just one city in a big ass state.
So why was he still heading southeast?
Because that was where Jonah (whoever or whatever that turned out to be) was, and where Emma and Megan went, and regardless of what he tried to tell himself—or how much he chastised himself—he just couldn’t turn away now without making sure mother and daughter were okay. Maybe it was the softy in him (You went soft a long time ago, pal), but he just had to be sure.
Besides, to do anything else would be an asshole move, and Keo was not an asshole. At least, he was trying very hard not to be one.
Keo figured that sooner or later he’d run into the Gulf of Mexico, and once he did that he could continue south along the coastline. It wasn’t exactly the best plan, but in the absence of anything even approaching an idea of where he was going—
Snap!
He darted forward, then right until he was behind one of two large trees. The MP5SD was already in his hands and Keo was sliding around the gnarled surface of the trunk, essentially going in a circle, when he spotted his pursuer.
It walked toward him, dragging its reins behind it like it had all the time in the world. The soft, slightly damp ground meant it didn’t make a lot of noise, and it was only because of a dry twig snapping that Keo had heard the animal at all.
Damn horse really is a ninja.
As soon as Keo fully rounded the tree trunk, the thoroughbred stopped moving and looked across the twenty meters or so at him.
“You again,” Keo said, lowering his weapon.
Horse took that as a positive sign and walked over at its own leisurely pace.
“What’s the matter? Can’t find someone else to bother, so you had to keep looking for me? How did you find me again, anyway?”
It might have sniffed the air.
“Hey, it’s a free country; do what you want.”
Keo turned and resumed going southeast.
He didn’t look back for the longest time, but when he finally did, the horse was still back there, though it had made up ten meters since the last time Keo checked.
Keo hadn’t been walking long enough to get tired and need a ride, so he continued on foot. He didn’t stop again until around noon to eat a bag of MRE from his supplies. He found a spot next to a tree with plenty of shade to enjoy his warm lasagna, but not before removing the animal’s saddle.
“You’re welcome,” Keo said.
The horse snorted its approval, then immediately began grazing on the plentiful grass nearby. He could imagine the thoroughbred out here for a long time, with plenty of feed to go around and no real dangers. Five years ago, nighttime would have been Horse’s most dangerous hours, but that was true for just about everything whether they walked on two or four legs and couldn’t take flight or, in a pinch, scamper up a tree for safety.
The horse eased its way over before stopping to chew on a stalk of grass about ten feet in front of Keo.
“By the way, where were you last night? You just took off after I got my head bashed in, didn’t you? Some guard horse you turned out to be.”
It looked over at him—briefly, before returning to its feeding.
“Feel free to apologize anytime.”
Keo was a city boy—had been all his life—and although he’d learned enough about what made horses tick since, they were still mysteries to him, and in a lot of ways Keo preferred it that way. He liked walking wherever he could when possible, because it kept him in shape; these days, being more physically capable than the next guy could save your life.
When he was done eating, Keo pulled off his pants and took a few minutes to clean and redress the graze on his thigh. The horse stopped its meal momentarily to sniff the air when Keo applied some ointment to the wound.
“What?” Keo said. Then, when the horse went back to its meal, “That’s right, go back to eating. You seem to be really good at that.”
The pain had numbed over, and he hardly felt it anymore even after all the walking he’d done this morning, but maybe that had a little something to do with getting bashed in the head by the butt of a shotgun. After that, a little tingle from his thigh was barely worth acknowledging.
He was pulling his pants back on when the animal suddenly went very stiff just before its head snapped up and it looked behind them. Keo took the cue and snatched up his submachine gun before slipping behind the cover of the tree he’d been sitting against. The horse remained silent next to him, unmoving, eyes focused on something behind them.
But there was nothing back there that Keo could see, hear, or feel.
He slowed down his breathing anyway to help with his senses, but there was still just the chirping of birds in the trees above him and the scratch-scratch of four-legged creatures scurrying along some branches nearby.
“What?” Keo whispered to the horse. “You hear something or not?”
Horse turned its head to look at him.
“Well?”
Keo swore the thoroughbred might have shrugged its shoulders before it went back to grazing. But that was impossible, because horses didn’t shrug.
Or did they?
“Make up your mind, Horse. This is no time for games.”
He remained standing, gun at the ready, for the next five minutes, paying just as much attention to the (nonchalant) way Horse chewed on its lunch as he did to his evergreen environment. Birds. Squirrels. Something that might have been a hawk flying past the crowns of the trees above him.
After a while, Keo came out of his alert stance.
“You smelled something?” he asked Horse. “Heard something? Felt something, maybe?”
The animal ignored him.
“If I have a heart attack, it’ll be your fault, you know that, right? Not that you’d care.”
Keo picked up the saddle and put it back on the horse before grabbing his pack and starting off again. He didn’t have to look back to know Horse was keeping up because he could hear the squishy thump-thump of its hooves against the soft ground. He wasn’t sure if it was being loud on purpose, for his benefit.
Weird horse.
He knew he was headed in the right direction when he could feel the change in the air—it started to get breezier, and he could almost taste the salt on his tongue. Keo thought Horse would begin to wander off when it realized where Keo was headed, but the animal continued to follow on his heels anyway.
“You know that’s saltwater out there, right?”
/> The horse didn’t respond but didn’t break off, either.
“Just remember you’re a horse, Horse. You don’t drink saltwater.”
A few minutes later, they reached the tree line and the end of the wooded area after what seemed like a few days of walking, though it had been less than four-something hours. They stepped out into a large wide-open field overgrown with grass that reached all the way up to Keo’s waist.
The breeze was heavier out here, causing the stalks of grass to sway side to side, and it was easy to imagine the whole thing as one big, massive rug. He could see the coastline in the distance—maybe less than a mile—and hear the echoes of ocean waves bashing against a beach.
And there, finally, the first manmade structures he’d seen in a long time jutting up from the ground about where the beach would be. It was a group of buildings clumped tightly together. He counted six, but there could have been more, because all he could really see were seemingly connected shadows.
“What do you see?” he asked Horse. “You got better eyes than me, don’t you? Super eyes? You know, I used to know someone with super eyes. He’s gone now, though…”
When was the last time he thought of Frank? It had been a while, actually. Frank wasn’t his real name, but only a few people knew that.
“Well?”
The horse dipped its head and brushed at the grass with its muzzle.
“Not the answer I was looking for. You’re no help at all.”
Keo looked back at the buildings. He was too far away to make out what he was looking at exactly, especially with the sun in the background silhouetting everything out there. It could have been a town (Jonah Town?) or a leftover seaside bed-and-breakfast, for all he knew. (Jonah’s Bed-and-Breakfast, maybe?)
“Now remember, no swimming. Understand?”
Horse sniffed the air but didn’t acknowledge him. Or, at least, Keo didn’t think it did.
I’m talking to a horse like it’s a real person. Jesus, if anyone sees this, I might die of embarrassment.
Keo unslung the MP5SD and held it in front of him as he began walking across the field. The thickly massed blades of grass made the crossing slow going, not that Keo was in any hurry. There was plenty of daylight left, and there didn’t seem to be any activity in the area. There wasn’t even anything that looked like a road, which made him wonder how anyone went back and forth from the buildings. Was there a spur road he couldn’t see from his position?
That was, of course, assuming he wasn’t looking at a ghost town, and Jonah-whatever could still be out there, somewhere else. The other possibility was that Lewis had lied to him, which was entirely possible. But why would a dying man lie? The only reason Keo could think of was if he still hadn’t trusted Keo.
But I have such a trusting face.
Kinda.
He pushed the doubts into the back of his mind. He’d find out the answer soon enough, so there was no point in rehashing it.
Horse kept pace next to him and seemed to have less trouble moving through the unending waves of grass than Keo. For Keo, parts of the field were so heavy with sunburnt blades of brown-green stalks that it was almost like trudging his way (slowly) through thick mud—one that went all the way up to his waist.
“So here’s the deal,” Keo said to the animal. “My legs are just fine for now, but sooner or later I’m gonna want a ride if you insist on coming along. Deal? Consider it the price of my company.”
The horse stopped moving and lifted its head.
Keo stopped, too, and turned to look at it in its large brown eyes. “I’m just saying, why walk when there’s a perfectly good saddle on your back. Know what I mean?”
The animal let out a series of short snorts and took a step back, then another one, just before a gush of wind told Keo why the horse was suddenly so alarmed: Sweat and body odor in the air.
He spun back around, lifting the H&K in the same fluid motion, just as some kind of creature lunged out of the ground, its body wearing a layer of grass that covered it from head to toe.
And it was pointing a rifle at him.
SEVENTEEN
IT WASN’T A CREATURE. Or a monster. It was a man wearing a ghillie suit covered in the exact same grass that swarmed the fields around him, and he had a camo-painted rifle in his hands pointed at Keo from less than twenty meters away.
This is not good.
The camouflage was good, and Keo might have walked right past the ambusher if the wind hadn’t blown in the right direction at just the right time. Even then, the horse had caught it first, but Keo liked to think he would have also, eventually.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
In the second or so it took the man to reveal himself and lift his rifle, Keo had already pushed through the shock and was about to pull the trigger (Not fast enough, pal!) when he saw movement out of the corners of both eyes and two more ghillie suits sprung out of the ground to his left and right. The two new figures flanked the first, which meant they had all been lying there this entire time while he stupidly walked right at them.
It took Keo just a half-second to pick up the sun glinting off the other two rifles, both of which were also aimed, predictably, at him.
Aw, man, this is so not fair.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, the submachine gun pointed at the first ambusher, but no one said a word or moved for the longest time. He could hear Horse shuffling his legs behind him, and the animal might have let out a warning whinny or two.
Stupid horse, this is where you run.
Except the animal didn’t, and continued to hold its position behind Keo. He didn’t know what to make of that, not that he really had the time to try to figure it out with three rifles pointed at him. All it would take was one pull of the trigger and he was a dead man. Oh, sure, he could probably get one of them—two, if he was really fortunate—but he was definitely not going to get all three before at least one of them put a round through him.
Bad. This is very, very bad.
Three rifles and three guys in ghillie suits, though there was a good possibility one of them was a woman. The one on his right. She was smaller than the other two by a good foot, though the varied heights of their suits might have been throwing him off. Not that it mattered, really. A woman or a kid or a donkey, it was still another person with their weapon pointed at his head.
Finally, after what seemed like minutes but was probably less than a few seconds, Keo said, “Looks like we’re at an impasse.”
The man in the center exchanged a quick look with the one to his right (Keo’s left) before doing the same to the one on his left (the possible woman). Keo couldn’t really read their reaction from twenty meters away; the fact that all three ambushers’ faces were covered in black and brown paint didn’t help. They had really gone all out with the whole “blending into the environment” part; he had to give them that.
“How you figure that?” the man in the center said. He had a deep voice. “There are three of us and only one of you. That doesn’t sound like an impasse to me, son. Sounds more like a ‘You’re royally screwed.’”
The man’s got a point.
“That’s not true,” Keo said anyway. He kept the MP5SD pointed at Deep Voice even though he could see all three of them without having to move his head thanks to their forced early reveal. “There’s Horse.”
“Your horse?” the one to Deep Voice’s right said. He sounded much younger than his companion.
You hit puberty yet, kid? Keo wanted to ask him but said instead, “That’s three against two,” and thought, Man, do I even buy that? Do they? How long before they shoot me in the face?
Damn, I don’t want to get shot in the face…or anywhere else, for that matter.
“Your horse,” the second man said, as if just to be sure.
“Yeah, Horse,” Keo nodded.
“Are you for real?” the woman (Aha, I was right!) to Keo’s right said. “His name is Horse?”
“He didn’t exactly c
ome with a name tag,” Keo said.
“But you call your horse Horse.”
“It’s a horse. I don’t think it cares what I call it.”
“Good point, Holly Golightly.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Don’t you?”
“Nope.”
“Too bad, cause it’s a killer reference.”
“Speaking of which, I’d appreciate not getting shot by you and your dad here.”
The woman chuckled. “He’s not my dad.”
“Grandpa?”
Deep Voice grunted. “Enough.”
“Why?” Keo said. “I was having a nice conversation with your not-daughter.”
The man ignored him and said, “Put down your weapon.”
“Can’t do that.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“That’s not true. I can choose not to lower my weapon.”
“Then we’re going to kill you,” the younger man said. He regripped his rifle, though Keo wasn’t sure if that was for effect or if he was just a little bit nervous.
Which one makes me feel better?
Oh, right; neither.
Now that he’d had some time to get a better look at his ambushers, Keo was pretty sure his biggest threat was Deep Voice in the middle. The man was armed with a bolt-action rifle with a large scope on top like his two companions. They really did look like a father and his children out for a little hunting trip.
So kill the old man first. Gotcha.
Either Deep Voice suspected what Keo was thinking, or he got lucky when he said, “It won’t be the first time these two have killed someone. Even if you somehow get me, they’ll get you for sure.”
“And your horse, too,” Young Guy said, and once again regripped his rifle. It looked like a nervous gesture to Keo that time.
Shoot the old man, then take out the girl, and then Mr. Nervous.
Good plan. Now all you have to do is make sure you don’t die while pulling it off.
“Leave Horse out of this,” Keo said. “Don’t make me sic PETA on your ass, kid.”