by Sam Sisavath
The girl matched his pitch with her answers. “About five miles from here.”
“On the road?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you walked all the way here by yourself?”
She nodded. “Mom said that if we got separated for me to keep going south until I found the ocean. So that’s what I did.”
“You didn’t know about Jonah’s?”
“What’s Jonah’s?”
“Never mind. Did you see anyone else on the way here? Anyone at all?”
She shook her head. “No one. Just you.”
“And you were out here at night this whole time by yourself?”
“I climbed up and hid in the trees when it started to get dark. They can’t climb. The ghouls.”
Some of them can, Keo thought, remembering the sight of Blue Eyes perched on the tree branch above him. Some of them can…
He asked instead, “Why did you risk coming down while it’s still dark?”
“I would have stayed up until morning if I hadn’t heard people talking. Ghouls don’t talk.”
Some of them can, he thought again, but said, “That’s how you found me.”
“Uh huh. But there was just you.” She gave him a quizzical look. “Who were you talking to, Keo?”
Keo thought about telling her the truth (“See, there was this blue-eyed ghoul, and apparently it knows I was in Houston, and it knows I took part in killing one of its kind, so it’s really pissed off at me right now, and I’m pretty sure it’s still out there, somewhere, waiting for me to let my guard down to gets its revenge.”) but decided it probably wasn’t the best idea.
“Him,” he said instead, nodding at the horse next to them.
“The horse?” Megan said.
“Yeah. His name’s Horse.”
She made a face. “What kind of name is that?”
“It’s a great name. Unfortunately, Horse doesn’t talk much.”
“Of course not, Keo. He’s a horse.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She looked at him curiously, as if trying to decide if he was messing with her.
Keo smiled. “Anyway. You said there were others with you and your mom while you guys were coming here. How many were there?”
“Kevin, his dad, and Jules and her mom. And I think someone else that I don’t know, but I’m not sure…”
Keo didn’t know who Kevin was, but the only male Winding Creek survivor at Jonah’s was Breckin, and none of the other women with Christine were named Jules. That told him that like Emma, the others never made it to their destination. Which meant it was a miracle Megan had—in the dark, no less.
She’s way tougher than she looks. You’d be proud, Emma.
Keo checked his watch again. Two hours and twenty-four minutes until morning.
“What are you doing out here at night?” Megan asked.
“Looking for you and your mom,” Keo said.
“You were looking for us?”
He was amused by the surprise in her voice. “Of course. What else—”
She threw herself at him, and like the last time, she almost bowled him over. He just barely managed to stay partially upright while hugging her back.
“Mom said you’d come looking for us,” Megan said. She sounded somewhere between sobbing and laughing. “She said you wouldn’t abandon us. I wasn’t sure. But I should have been. I should have known you wouldn’t abandon us, Keo.”
“Of course not, wonsungi. You know better than that,” Keo said and patted her on the back while thinking to himself, Jesus, can you get any more awkward? You suck at this.
She pulled away and wiped at her eyes. She was trying to smile and talk at the same time. “Are you going to go look for her? For Mom?”
“Yeah,” Keo nodded. “After I make sure you’re okay, I’m going after her next.”
“What about the ones who took her?”
“I’ll take care of them, too.”
“They had guns, Keo.”
“I have guns, too, wonsungi.”
“You’ll be okay? Can you get help?”
He thought it was cute that she was concerned for his welfare. When was the last time someone actually gave a damn about whether he lived or died? Really, really cared?
“Yeah, I’ll be okay,” Keo said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll get her back.”
“You swear?”
“Only on Saturdays, but never on Sundays.”
She gave him a confused look.
“I mean, yes, I swear,” Keo smiled.
“I knew you liked her,” Megan said, smiling back at him.
“Of course I like your mom. Did you think I didn’t?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Did I ever do anything to make you think otherwise?”
“Well, you never stayed over…”
I guess she noticed that, too.
“I always meant to,” Keo said.
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Will you stay now? When we get Mom back?”
It’s a trick. Don’t hang yourself, dummy, Keo thought, but he smiled again anyway and said, “Yeah. I will.”
She pursed her lips, fighting back a scream of joy. Instead, she lunged at him again, and this time he was ready for it and embraced her back.
Better. You’re definitely getting better at this.
Next to them, Horse looked on curiously.
TWENTY-FIVE
HE DIDN’T PUSH Megan for specifics about how the Buckies not only found, but captured, Emma and the others on the road, mostly because whatever details she knew weren’t going to help him find her. How it happened didn’t matter, because he already knew where they had taken her—the same place they were taking the others: Fenton.
What the hell is going on in that place?
Besides, Keo had no interest in further traumatizing the girl by making her relive yesterday. He was already thinking about the job ahead of him, trying to help her get her through it.
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money. And console a kid about her abducted mother?”
Yeah, that wasn’t exactly on his list of expertise, and he wasn’t looking forward to trying his hand at it. At all.
Instead, he occupied his mind with the Buckies and Fenton and just what was going on in that place. That question and others swirled around in Keo’s head as he made his way back to the tree line with thirty minutes left before night finally gave way to morning.
Too many questions and not a lot of answers made his head hurt. He knew one thing: the attack on Winding Creek was one clue in a larger puzzle. Jonah had told him as much, with the Buckies having already attacked two other towns. And those were only the places he knew about, because there were survivors. How many more were out there? How long had this been going on? And maybe, most importantly, what the hell is going on in Fenton?
In his travels since Houston, Keo had gone through hundreds of small towns, some with only a handful of people and others with as many as a few thousand. There were definitely more places like Winding Creek out there—communities that were lightly protected, with people who thought the worst was over and that their long nightmare was finally at an end. How wrong they were.
Hell, he could have taken Winding Creek with a couple of guys. Once you took out Jim and Duncan, what kind of resistance was left?
Easy pickings, every single one of them.
He felt bad for the townspeople of Winding Creek and Dresden, and the third town that Jonah had mentioned. What was it? He couldn’t remember. Something with a J. But sympathy only went so far, because at the moment there was really only one concern on his mind: finding Emma.
He had come up with a way to achieve that goal and had thought of it while Megan was telling her story about how they had run into the Buckies on the road. It was going to take some doing, but then what else was new?
If it were easy, any ol’ Dick, Jane, and Tom could do it.
So he sat near a few meters from where the woods met the fields and waited for morning. He could feel dusk creeping up on him like a physical creature. It wasn’t exactly the best feeling, mostly because Keo was also still thinking about his encounter with the blue-eyed ghoul. He spent most of his time listening for snapping twigs and footsteps, and glanced behind and above and, every now and then, just for good measure, below him whenever he thought he felt the air shift, no matter how slightly.
He didn’t like leaving Megan behind, but it was better than dragging her along for this. Besides, she had Horse to look after her. The thoroughbred was a tough cookie and was old enough to have survived The Purge, then the years after that. It was a survivor, all right, and it wasn’t afraid of very much. If Keo had any doubts about that, seeing it jump out of nowhere and blindside Blue Eyes erased them.
That is one tough hombre.
Besides, things were going to get hairy real fast, and the last thing he needed was to worry about Megan getting caught in a crossfire. He could picture himself having to tell Emma why he had dragged her little girl into a gun battle, and failing badly.
He blinked as a thin ray of sunlight hit his eyes. It had pierced through the thick tree crowns above him.
Already?
Keo glanced at his watch again.
I guess morning’s early today.
He relaxed his stance and changed up his grip on the MP5SD. The presence of sunlight meant no ghouls—at least not where there was light, like the area around him now. He could also stop worrying about Megan and Horse and concentrate on the task at hand.
Keo got up, and, bent slightly over at the waist, moved closer toward the tree line. It didn’t take long before he could see the sunburnt green and brown carpet on the other side. And there, in the distance, Jonah’s six buildings silhouetted against the shoreline. There was still enough dusk that the thick stalks of grass looked more like ocean waves swaying back and forth.
He held the binoculars up to his eyes, switched off night vision, and scanned the horizon. It wasn’t going to be very easy to find a pair (or more) of snipers in all that waist-high grass. Even an idiot would know to dress properly for the environment, and with nearly a mile’s worth of land from here to the beach, Keo wasn’t all that confident about his chances of locating the enemy position. Or positions, which was more likely.
The only upside was that he hadn’t encountered an entire army waiting to attack Jonah’s. That much was clear after his run-in with Blue Eyes and the information Megan had given him. He might have been using a silenced weapon, but he had moved around loudly enough in the woods that anyone nearby would have surely heard him. Of course, he could have been wrong and there might be Buckies in other parts of the woods. It was a hell of a big place, after all, and you could get lost in it if you weren’t careful.
Now that’s not very positive thinking, pal.
He continued scanning the horizon, concentrating on the acres between him and Jonah’s, and only extending his search to where the houses ended on both sides. That limited his searching perimeter enough that if anything popped up between him and the beach—
He saw it before he heard it—a gray object in the sky coming from beyond the shoreline. It appeared above Jonah’s and slashed overhead, flying just low enough that he could see its belly and the Sidewinder missiles attached underneath its wings.
Now that’s something you don’t see every day.
It was a plane, and not just any plane, but an A-10 Thunderbolt II. But like most people who had been on a battlefield, Keo knew it by its nickname, the Warthog.
The aircraft streaked past the field before disappearing above Keo’s head and beyond the woods—
Movement out of the corner of Keo’s left eye, this one coming from the ground in front of him. He looked down just as a head, mimicking a curious gopher, popped out of all that green about a quarter of a mile in front of him. The man was looking after the Warthog, and as soon as the A-10 vanished, the figure lowered his profile and attempted to re-blend back into its surroundings.
Gotcha.
Keo zeroed in on the man—or, at least, he assumed it was a man (What a chauvinist!)—as his target produced his own pair of binoculars and peered forward at Jonah’s. The figure was kneeling, rising just slightly above the grass line to see past it. As Keo had expected, the man was wearing appropriate clothes—green and brown and gray—that helped him to blend in with his environment. Keo might not have ever caught him if he hadn’t risen just a bit too high to look after the Warthog.
The figure didn’t expose himself for very long before he sank back into the grass.
Keo waited, still looking through the binoculars for the other two (assuming there were two more out there), but they never made themselves known.
At least I found one.
With the location still fresh in his mind, Keo lowered his binoculars and lifted the MP5SD and began jogging in that direction. He wasn’t too worried about making noise, not while he was still almost four hundred meters away from his target.
As he got closer, he was hit by heavy winds coming inland from the ocean. There was enough grass slapping against each other to wash over sounds of his movements, which he was pretty sure were minimal to begin with. With the appearance of dawn, the animals around him had also come alive, adding more to Keo’s cover.
At the three-hundred-meter mark, his target still hadn’t reappeared, and Keo had to convince himself he was going in the right direction. It would have been a hell of a thing if he had gone off track somewhere in the last hundred meters—
Think positive! Think positive!
He sighed and kept moving.
Two hundred and fifty meters…
The sun was casting a massive orange glow across the entire field now, and Keo thought if anyone looked out from Jonah’s, they would surely have spotted him. But would they know it was him and not just some random Bucky? Jonah and Sherry would have told the sentries about him being out here by now. Not that he was afraid of being sniped from the buildings. The best shooter Jonah had was Carl, and he was already underground with Floyd.
For the next fifty or so meters, Keo recalled his conversation with Jonah, just before he went down to the beach with Sherry:
“Don’t shoot me,” he had told Shorty.
“I can’t shoot that far anyway,” the man had said.
“No, Jonah, I mean, tell your men not to shoot me.”
Jonah had chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’m serious. I don’t want to get shot by your guys. This is already going to be hard; I don’t need to dodge bullets coming from your houses, too.”
“You’ve done this before?” Jonah had then asked.
“What? Go swimming after midnight?”
“No, running into a field that’s probably filled with bad guys intent on murdering you.”
Keo had grinned.
“What’s so funny?” Shorty had said.
“A bad guy with a gun,” Keo had said. “That’s what people used to call me.”
Jonah had grinned back. “Yeah? You and me both, brother.”
He was thinking about Jonah, about what Short Stuff had been five years ago—or even six years ago—as he made the two-hundred-meter mark. The guy didn’t look like a cop, and although he wasn’t too short for the Army, Keo couldn’t quite picture him humping around in a uniform. Maybe a uniform, but definitely not while serving Uncle Sam.
Keo pushed Jonah out of his mind when he realized he was already starting to breathe hard. He blamed it on the lack of food and little sleep. It was hard to catch a nap when you were hiding in dark woods with a scared ten-year-old girl and a constantly eating horse, while you knew for goddamn certain there was a blue-eyed ghoul somewhere out there, maybe waiting, just waiting for you to close your eyes in order to pounce.
Think positive!
At the hundred and fifty meters mark, Keo was feeling good again. He had gotten a second wind and his legs wer
en’t nearly as weak as they had been in the previous fifty, which was definitely very good—
A human head popped out of the ground about forty meters in front and slightly to the right of him. It was not the same head he had seen earlier through the binoculars from the tree line, because this one wasn’t quite as elaborately covered in camouflage. Keo knew because he saw the man’s face when he turned around, as if he was searching for something.
I guess I wasn’t as quiet as I thought!
Keo saw the whites of the man’s eyes at the same time he was spotted, and the man might have opened his mouth to say something when Keo lifted the MP5SD and, slowing down just enough to increase his aim, put the first round squarely into the man’s face. Thank God for the optic on the submachine gun, because it made the thirty or so meters that separated them a piece of cake.
The gunshot was little more than a pfft! and the noise was already fading into the crisp morning air even before the head disappeared.
And we’re off!
Keo was lowering his weapon to continue running at full speed when a second head appeared, except this one didn’t stop at just the head—a torso followed as the man spun around in Keo’s direction, revealing a black assault vest with a white circled M in the middle. The Bucky was gripping a rifle, and he was lifting it when Keo shot him in the neck. A spray of blood arced through the air and splashed the moving grass around him.
Oh, fuck me, Keo thought when three more heads, followed very quickly by the rest of the men attached to them, jumped out of the ground near the same spot where the two he had shot had been hiding.
He had two options—and only two options: Get down and hide, or run straight at them.
It was a no-brainer. At least, it wasn’t for Keo.
Why? Because you’re the world’s dumbest man?
Something like that, he thought as he switched the fire selector on the H&K to full auto and, running full speed toward the Buckies, squeezed the trigger and prayed.
TWENTY-SIX
OF COURSE there would be a small army hiding in the fields.
Of course it wouldn’t just be two (or, at worst, three) snipers waiting for him.
Of course this wasn’t going to be easy.