by Sam Sisavath
He hurried over to the closest Bucky just to make sure he wasn’t cheating and was wearing a bulletproof vest. The man was lying on his stomach and didn’t move when Keo reached him, but Keo put an extra round into the back of his head anyway just to be sure.
Better safe than sorry.
He moved to the other four, checking them one by one—and making sure they didn’t get back up like the first one—before he jogged over to where he had last seen Carl and company, not far from where Fingerless Gloves had fallen.
He located two bodies easily, lying close to one another, the ground and grass around them ripped to shreds by gunfire. Carl was on his back, sporting an almost perfectly placed bullet hole in his forehead. The second body was lying facedown on the ground, and Keo reached for the shoulder to turn it over to see if it was Floyd or the girl—
“Don’t you fucking touch him,” a voice said.
Keo froze in mid-reach. The voice had come from his right, and it was definitely a woman.
Floyd and Carl it is, then.
“Don’t shoot,” Keo said.
He resisted every instinct to turn his head even slightly. What were the chances she didn’t have a weapon pointed at him right now and was just bluffing?
Don’t press your luck, idiot.
“Give me one good reason,” the woman said.
“I saved your life.”
“The hell you did.”
“Actually, yeah, I did. Or did you think those other three fellows fell down and died out of fright when you pulled your pop-out-of-the-ground gag on them?”
The woman didn’t answer.
A second of silence, then five…
“You’re hurt,” Keo said. “I can help.”
“Why would you help me?” the woman asked. “You’re one of them.”
“Like I told Carl, I’m not. I stole this vest.”
“You stole it?”
“Well, not technically. The original owner was dead.”
“What happened to him?”
“I cut his throat.”
Again, silence.
Keo’s legs had become slightly wobbly, and he swore his face was starting to itch for some reason. He wanted desperately to pull his hand back from it mid-reach or at least change up his stance to lighten the strain on his body.
“We good?” Keo asked.
Another second, followed by another five…
“Yeah,” the woman finally said.
Keo breathed a sigh of relief and straightened up, looking over.
She was also standing up gingerly, an act that seemed to take a lot out of her, while putting away a handgun.
Yup. This close to her blowing my head off.
She peered at him from behind her painted face. “Who the hell are you?”
“Keo,” he said.
“What?”
“My name. It’s Keo.”
“What a stupid name,” the woman said. She bent down, stopped temporarily, and seemed to regather herself before finishing the move and picking her rifle up from the ground. “I’m Sherry.”
“Nice to meet you, Sherry,” Keo said. He glanced south toward the group of buildings in the distance. “So, can I ask you a question?”
Sherry blinked at him and grimaced, and he noticed she was holding her side with one hand. “I guess you’ve earned at least one question.”
“That place over there. What’s it called?”
“Jonah’s,” Sherry said.
Keo grinned.
“What are you so happy about?” Sherry asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at him.
NINETEEN
SHERRY WAS BLEEDING from at least two bullet wounds, but only one had the potential to kill her if it wasn’t taken care of as soon as possible. The other one was a graze along her left leg that she had suffered during the first volley that killed Carl and Keo’s best friend, Floyd.
“I should look at that,” Keo said.
“What?” Sherry said as she picked up both Carl and Floyd’s rifles.
“Your wounds.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You can barely stand.”
Sherry ignored him and said, “You coming or not?” and walked off with the two extra rifles cradled in her arms.
One, two, Keo thought as he watched Sherry walk off.
Or tried to.
She managed ten feet before she collapsed, dropping the rifles before slamming into the ground next to them on her back.
Keo walked over to where she lay and stood above her. She blinked up at him while gasping for breath, her hands clutching her bleeding right side. All ten of her digits and generous portions of her palms were covered in fresh blood.
“You still fine?” Keo asked.
She clenched her teeth. “Go to hell, Keo. What kind of name is that, anyway?”
“Wendell was taken.”
“Come again?”
“Only with the pretty ones.”
Keo crouched next to her and got a better look at her wound. There was already a lot of blood on the ground beneath her, which meant she was bleeding on both sides.
“Looks like a through and through,” Keo said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re going to bleed to death pretty soon if I don’t clog it up.”
She grimaced. “Can you do that?”
“What? Clog it up? Sure. You got a sponge?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Fuck off.”
He chuckled. “Lucky you, I brought a first aid kit with me.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
She lay still as Keo unslung his pack and took out the kit.
“You’ve done this before,” she said as he used a bottle of warm water to wipe away at the blood around her waist to get a better look at the gaping hole.
“Once or twice. This is going to hurt, by the way.”
“And what, getting shot didn’t?”
“This is going to hurt more because you know it’s coming.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Trust me, it makes perfect sense.”
“Oh, shut up and just do it.”
“I’m going to have to ruin your fancy ghillie suit to get at it.”
“Just do it already.”
Keo decided that he liked her, so he did his best to keep her pain to a minimum as he cut away a section of the ghillie suit, then cleaned and dressed her wound. She grunted, then gritted her teeth to keep from crying out at least three times. Finally, he made her sit up so he could wrap her waist with gauze tape.
When he was done, he took out his bottle of painkillers and shook out two white pills. “You’re going to need these.”
“What are they?” she asked.
“For the pain.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I’m not so much worried about you as I am about me. This’ll look better if you walked me to Jonah’s than if I were to carry you. For that, you’ll need these for the pain.”
“You afraid of getting shot, Keo?” she grinned, before taking the pills and swallowing them with the leftover water from the bottle he’d used to clean her wound.
“Hell yeah,” Keo said, and stood up.
He looked toward the buildings in the distance. He had a feeling someone over there could see him back just fine. What were the chances that same someone had him in the crosshairs of their scope right this moment? He was, as far as he could tell, about a mile away, but there were plenty of rifles that could shoot a man dead from that distance.
“Wait here,” Keo said, and walked back to where Red Handkerchief had fallen. He picked up the man’s M40 rifle, then went through his pouches for extra ammo for the weapon.
“What are you doing?” Sherry called from behind him.
“Sniper rifle,” Keo said, walking back to her.
She was on her feet again, trying mightily to keep from top
pling over even as sweat covered her face.
“This thing’s good at eight hundred meters,” Keo said. “That’s almost half a mile.”
“Can you use that?” Sherry asked.
“Couldn’t be that hard. This scope’s so big a housewife could use it.”
“At eight hundred yards?”
“Maybe four hundred…”
Sherry looked down at the rifles she’d dropped—Carl’s and Floyd’s, as well as her own—then back at him.
“You don’t need the other two,” Keo said.
“I can’t just leave them out here.”
“Someone else can come back for them later.” He picked up her bolt-action and slung it, then offered her his hand. “Come on.”
He thought she was going to argue, but instead she relented and moved in closer so he could wrap one arm around her body, careful not to jostle her bandaged waist, and they started the long walk back to the silhouetted buildings in the distance.
“So, no backup?” Keo asked.
“You mean, why didn’t anyone from Jonah’s rush out here to help us when the shooting began?”
“Before, during, or after, yeah.”
“You were right; if you’d walked toward the town alone, especially in that vest, they would have shot you down like a dog before you even got close.”
“Maybe I should take the vest off…”
“That might be a good idea.”
They stopped, and Keo spent a minute doing just that, shoving the spare magazines into his pack instead.
They were about to start moving again when Sherry said, “You must have trained him pretty well.”
“Who?”
He followed her gaze back toward the tree line.
Horse, walking toward them. It didn’t look hurt and seemed to be taking its sweet time as it skirted around the dead Buckies.
“That’s one sneaky horse,” Sherry said.
“Too sneaky. I was thinking about putting a bell around its neck, just so I’ll know where it is at all times.”
“I guess it’s learned to be quiet.”
“It would have had to, to survive all these years.”
He wrapped his arm around Sherry’s body, and they started walking again.
It didn’t take Horse long to reach them, and when it did, the animal downshifted into a slow walk to his left. Keo looked over at it, checking for visible signs of injury, but Horse had escaped the firefight unscathed.
“And where were you?” Keo asked the thoroughbred. “Just took off again like last time, didn’t you? Thanks for nothing.”
It glanced over at him, stared for a few seconds, before turning away again.
“What did he say?” Sherry asked.
“Huh?” Keo said.
“The horse. What did he say?”
“About what?”
“When you asked where it went?”
“How should I know? I don’t speak horse.”
“Then why—” Sherry started, but stopped herself and shook her head instead. “You’re an idiot.”
He chuckled. “So you’re not impressed with me anymore?”
“That ship’s sailed.”
“My loss, I’m sure.” Keo glanced back at the tree line (“Just in case,” as someone he knew liked to say) before looking forward at Jonah’s. “What were the Buckies doing here?”
“The what?”
“That’s what I call them. Buckies.”
“Why?”
“Their leader. His name’s Buck.”
“And that’s why you call them Buckies?”
Keo shrugged. “In absence of an actual name, yeah. What do you call them?”
“Killers. Murderers. Scumbags. A hundred other names I could think of.”
“So, not friends, then?”
Sherry shook her head before giving him another one of her suspicious looks. “You said you killed the guy who was wearing that vest you had on. Which means you’ve run into them before. Where?”
“Winding Creek.”
“You were there? During the attack yesterday?”
Keo nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I’m looking for two people who might have escaped down here.”
“What are their names?”
“Emma and Megan. Ring any bells?”
Sherry thought about it for a moment before shaking her head. “I don’t recognize the names, but there’s a lot of people at Jonah’s. We’ve been taking in refugees from a lot of places the last couple of weeks. Those…Buckies have been busy.”
“Refugees?”
“Winding Creek wasn’t the first town those fuckers visited,” Sherry said, her face darkening noticeably. “It’s war out there, Keo. And this is just the beginning.”
Oh, great. Just what I need. Another war where no one’s paying me anything to fight.
My career’s really gone down the toilet these days…
Jonah’s was exactly six very large buildings resting on large poles where the beach met the fields of grass. The stilt construction was par for the course for structures next to an ocean that could swallow them up without a moment’s notice. Keo was pretty sure he could make out figures moving around on some of the second-floor decks despite the sun in his eyes. There might have also been people on the roofs of a few of the houses, but he couldn’t be certain because if there were, they were lying on their stomachs to lower their profile.
With Sherry in tow, Keo’s almost-mile trip took almost an hour of slow walking and occasionally stopping to let Sherry catch her breath. The horse remained with them the entire time, seemingly content to walk very slowly beside him. The thoroughbred sniffed the air occasionally, as if trying to determine if there was any danger in front of them.
“You guys have sentries?” Keo asked.
“Yeah,” Sherry said. “We were supposed to be the early warning system. Me, Carl, and Floyd. There are probably two or three snipers with their scopes on you right now.”
Tell me something I don’t already know.
“You knew the Buckies were going to show up sooner or later,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“They first came almost a week ago.”
“What did they want?”
“You saw what they’re doing out there. Do you even have to ask?”
“The refugees you took in.”
“Yeah.”
“But you didn’t give them up.”
“We told them they weren’t here, but I doubt if they believed us. And after what just happened, it’s pretty clear they didn’t.”
“You think they’re going to send more?”
“I think they’re going to realize their men are dead when they don’t report in.”
“And then what?”
“That’ll be up to Jonah.”
“Your fearless leader?”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of?” Keo thought. It was an odd response. Was he or wasn’t he?
The buildings continued to grow in front of them, and Keo could make out movement on the ground and underneath the houses as well as along the second-floor decks that wrapped around the four sides of the structures. He was pretty sure he could make out three people lying on rooftops now, the sun glinting off the barrels of their weapons.
“How did you find this place?” he asked. “It’s not on any map I’ve looked at. There isn’t even a road leading to it.”
“It’s a new development. Two of the houses were still being finished when we arrived. I don’t think any of them have even been lived in. There was supposed to be a road leading to it that curls around the woods, but they never finished that, either.”
They were within fifty meters of the buildings when Keo stopped. There were trucks parked underneath the structures and along gravel parking lots that linked the houses. Keo counted thirty or so visible faces peering back at him and probably a lot more indoors that he couldn’t see.
Horse stood patiently to his left, occasionally snorting the air whenever a
particularly strong breeze washed over them.
“Remember, don’t drink the water,” Keo said to the animal.
“I’m pretty sure he’s not dumb enough to drink the water,” Sherry said.
“You can’t be too sure. He is just a horse, after all.”
“Some horses are smarter than people.”
“Yeah, but can they shoot a gun?”
Sherry gave him a look that said she wasn’t sure if she should answer or not. When he chuckled, she rolled her eyes and looked forward just as a Jeep rumbled through the grass toward them. Keo counted two in the front seats and two more in the back, the barrels of their rifles jutting in the air, but no mounted machine gun.
“Don’t touch your guns,” Sherry said.
“Trigger happy?” Keo asked.
“I wouldn’t say that. Mostly…anxious. We’ve been hearing nothing but horror stories about your friends the Buckies.”
Keo reached over to put a hand on Horse’s reins to steady the animal. The horse turned its head to look at him, maybe to ask what he thought he was doing, but it seemed to understand and went back to watching the approaching Jeep.
The vehicle stopped in front of them, and the two in the back immediately hopped out. All four were wearing civilian clothes, and the two that had leapt out pointed their weapons at Keo.
“Don’t shoot,” Sherry said. “He’s…a friend.”
“Try to sound a little more enthusiastic, why don’t ya,” Keo said.
The driver stayed inside the Jeep, but his front passenger climbed out, and together with the other two carefully approached Keo and Sherry. They were all wearing gun belts (Keo assumed the driver was as well), but the third man was only carrying a 1911 pistol in one hand. The man looked around at the fields behind Keo and Sherry, as if expecting some kind of ambush. When nothing happened, he fixed them with a look before spending a few extra seconds on Keo’s face.
Keo got a good look at the guy in return: Thirties, five-foot-something even with boots on, and dark black eyes. Keo had seen plenty of alpha males before, guys who called the shots even if they didn’t look the part, but Shorty, well, fell short.
And yet he seemed to be in charge by the way the others fanned around him. “What happened out there, Sherry?” he asked.
“Fenton’s men,” Sherry said. “They killed Carl and Floyd.”