by Sam Sisavath
“Bullet grazed your temple,” Sherry had said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
Oh, trust me, I know, he had thought when she’d told him that.
Keo didn’t get up until he was absolutely certain Buck (if he had actually shown up in person this time) hadn’t left any of his flunkies behind to see if anyone would try to fight the fire. The final building had collapsed, and the flames were already starting to die down when Keo swung back onto Horse.
“Time to go. Next stop: Fenton.”
His next stop was Fenton, but it wasn’t right away. He couldn’t afford to show up with an aching side and a still-pounding temple. Instead, he settled for a farm just outside of Winding Creek. The owner was a man named Henry whom Keo had gotten to know—or as much as you could “know” someone that you only saw once a month. Henry liked keeping to himself and only really appeared in town occasionally.
Keo didn’t bother going into Winding Creek; he already knew what he’d find in there.
There were no signs of Henry at the bungalow, where he lived with a woman and her two kids, which wasn’t surprising. Henry wasn’t an idiot, and after the Buckies had laid waste to the nearby town, he would have fled. That is, if he hadn’t gotten himself killed before he got the chance.
Henry had a pair of goats and raised chickens, taking the eggs into town whenever he needed something in trade, but all the animals were gone when Keo arrived. The place gave off an abandoned vibe even though it had only been a few days since Winding Creek fell. In a year, the grass would reclaim the yards, and a few years after that, the woods would cover this place and no one who didn’t know of its existence before would have any clue it was ever here.
Keo walked Horse slowly through the open front gate, then at the same pace across the yard just in case he was wrong and Henry was still there, watching him carefully with a rifle and his finger on the trigger. The last thing Keo wanted was to get shot (again) when he didn’t have to. Fortunately (for him, anyway, though not so much for Henry and his family), no one had a bead on him, and Keo reached the front door in one piece.
When he knocked on the thick slab of oak, no one answered. When he tried the latch, it opened without resistance. Keo peered inside, one hand on the MP5SD, the other on the door in case he needed to swing it closed quickly.
The curtains over the windows were pulled open, allowing plenty of natural sunlight in. There was no blood on the floor in the great room, and when Keo stepped inside and checked, there were none in any of the bedrooms, either. There was no evidence at all that there had been a fight of any kind. The place was simply empty.
There was also no lingering smell of rotting garbage in the air. That meant no ghouls had nested in the place after Henry and his family left. Keo liked to think the home’s previous owners got away, and the lack of blood helped with that theory.
He found food in the kitchen—too much, which would seem to counter his hope that the family had made it out. If that were the case, wouldn’t they have grabbed all or most of the nonperishables they could instead of just leaving them sitting around in the pantries?
Think positive, remember?
Keo unsaddled the horse, then ate his fill of the abandoned food while the thoroughbred wandered around inside the house, going back and forth between the windows, sometimes stopping to look out of one of them. Keo grinned at the mental image of someone out there spotting Horse peering out at them from inside the building.
After stuffing himself, Keo went into the bathroom, and using light from a high window, checked his wounds in the mirror. It was the first time he’d actually seen himself in a few weeks, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. He was paler than he remembered, with bags under his eyes. The scar along one side of his face looked obscene and ugly in the low light.
Getting prettier every day, pal.
Keo unwound the gauze around his temple to get a look at the bandage underneath, then removed that to check the stitching. Just some minor bleeding, but otherwise everything was where it should be. For such a small bullet graze, the damn thing was still giving him one hell of a headache. By comparison, the pain from his side had lessened into a dull sensation. He still felt it every time he did anything, like climbing on and off Horse, but there wasn’t the continuous pounding like there was coming from his temple.
The stitching was still in place down there, too, and there was no bleeding. He assumed the same was true on the other side, except he couldn’t see it without another mirror. It didn’t feel damp back there, which was good enough.
Before leaving the bathroom, Keo went through the drawers and medicine cabinet. He found bottles of pills for a variety of ailments and feminine products. Another bad omen that Henry and family hadn’t run off unscathed. Of course, they could have and just didn’t have time to take the food and everything else with them.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
He went back into the living room and locked the front door, pushing the deadbolts into place one after another—there were three in all, evenly spaced from top to bottom. Each bolt clanked! into place with the kind of satisfying sound that put Keo’s mind at ease. Henry knew how to protect his home, and it would take a tank to break the door down.
When that was done, he looked out the windows to make sure there was no one out there. There were security bars over all the windows, each one fastened securely on the other side. Henry wasn’t a fool, after all, and he had lived through The Purge.
Keo pulled the curtains and went to check out the bedrooms more thoroughly this time. He settled on the kids’ room. The mattress was comfortable, and as soon as his head touched the pillow, he was almost instantly asleep.
He dreamt of a woman, but it wasn’t Emma.
“Where exactly are you going to go?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Keo said.
“Will you come back?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“What do you know, Keo?”
Just that I have to leave, because I can’t stand being this close to you and not acting on it, he wanted to say but didn’t, because it wouldn’t have been fair to her. She had so much going on, so much on her plate, and she had already lost so much.
“I know I’m not good at staying still in one place for too long,” he said instead. “Try not to miss me too much.”
“That’s impossible,” she said, and smiled back at him. “You’re a hard man to replace.”
“You can always find another gun. I hear Peters is pretty handy with a rifle.”
“That wasn’t what I meant, Keo.”
That took him by surprise, and she gave him a look that said she had more to say but for some reason, couldn’t bring herself to do it.
He wanted to push her, to make her say it, but he didn’t. Maybe he was a little afraid what he would do if she did.
“Doesn’t mean I’ll be gone forever,” he said just as the helicopter touched down nearby and the wind from the rotor blades tried to drown out his voice. “Send me an email if you need to get a hold of me.”
“An email?” she said, amused.
“Or snail mail. Either works.”
“Or I can just send a Warthog to go out there looking for you.”
“That’ll work, too,” he grinned before turning and running toward the waiting helicopter.
He climbed on, and when he looked back, she had stepped away but was still looking after him.
She waved, and he waved back, and it was the last he saw of her.
He remembered watching her on the helipad, her arms hugging her chest, blond hair blowing around her face as the chopper lifted into the air. He wasn’t sure how long she stood there looking after him, because soon he lost sight of her, and then there was just the Gulf of Mexico.
He thought of her now.
The crystal blue of her eyes, the golden color of her hair, the smoothness of her skin against the sun…
TWENTY-NINE
HE WOKE up to scratc
hing noises.
From outside the house.
He lay perfectly still and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness, all the while listening to the scratch-scratch.
It was coming from behind and slightly to the right of him, where the bedroom’s lone window would be. The door in front of him, now that he could make it out, remained closed, and it was still just him inside the room.
Keo didn’t have to look at his watch to know it was well past midnight—and pitch dark outside in Henry’s yard. It was also eerily silent, which was another clue that there was something out there. Not just anything, but something that could scare animals, even the ones that were safe up in the trees. They had gone deathly quiet for fear of attracting attention.
He reached over for the MP5SD leaning against the nightstand next to the bed. The heavy feel of it, with a full magazine loaded with silver rounds, was like the warm blanket he had tossed to the floor before falling asleep. The extra weight of the SIG Sauer on his right hip and the tactical combat knife with the silver-coated blade on his left added to his overall sense of security. He had dozed off with his clothes and boots still on, mostly because he was too exhausted to take them off.
Have silver, will survive the night.
Hopefully.
He couldn’t smell it—couldn’t smell them—but he knew what was out there. Maybe he should have known they would be in the area after what he had seen in Winding Creek: the bodies. That always attracted scavengers. Animals in the daytime…and another kind of animal at night.
Keo turned his head toward the window, but the curtains were pulled and he couldn’t see out. That was fine with him, because it meant whatever was out there, whatever was scratch-scratching the glass, couldn’t see in at him, either.
He slowly eased himself up from the bed, grimacing a bit at the slight stinging pain from his side. The throbbing from his temple that had been accompanying him since leaving Jonah’s was noticeably missing.
Thank God. Any more of that, and I might have to crack open my skull to make it stop.
He attributed his reasonably good condition to the almost-full night’s sleep he had gotten. A quick glance at his watch confirmed it was well past midnight: 2:14 a.m. He had lain down around six, before nightfall, so he’d gotten more than a decent eight hours—
Thoom.
It came from outside his room, from the living room.
Thoom.
The door. Someone (something) was striking the door.
Good luck with that, Keo thought even as he rose from the bed and moved as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast at all. He might have been able to double time it, but the second or two he would gain as a result wasn’t nearly worth aggravating the stitching at his side.
Besides, he wasn’t concerned about the house’s front door giving in. Henry had installed a giant slab of oak out there, and along with the three deadbolts, it was going to take a hell of a lot to bust through that thing. And the windows had burglar bars over them, securely fastened to the walls, so even without the glass panes—
The loud crash! of glass breaking.
Jinx, Keo thought as he opened his door and slipped out into the dark hallway.
There was nothing up the corridor to his right but the master bedroom where Henry slept with his wife; Keo had avoided the bigger room on purpose. The left side of the hallway led back into the great room and the front door—
Thoom.
Crash!
Thoom.
Crash!
He wasn’t worried about the door. The impacts sounded almost puny by comparison to the breaking windows. It didn’t take long for them to run out of glass to break, leaving just the insistent (but weak, so, so weak) pounding against the door.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
It was almost pathetic, like little kids bumping their heads in frustration. Keo wasn’t the least bit worried. It was going to take them all night just to make a dent in that door, even if every single creature out there pounded on it endlessly.
Good luck with that, boys.
It had been a while since Keo found himself trapped in one spot with ghouls on the other side trying to get at him. But there was no paralyzing fear or the overwhelming sense of dread that usually accompanied such moments. Instead, there was just a flush of annoyance as he stepped out of the back hallway and listened to them fruitlessly bang on the door.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
They were insistent, he would give them that. But insistence wasn’t going to knock down a door that probably took two grown men just to lift into place.
They had broken the glass panes on the two front windows and ripped the curtains loose, and hands now poked through the burglar gate. Dark faces, skins pulled tight against deformed skulls, peered in with lifeless black eyes. As soon as they saw him, they began frantically trying to squeeze through the tiny areas between bars, and the phrase “squares and round pegs” immediately came to mind.
Meanwhile, the thoom continued from the other side of the door.
Thoom. Thoom.
Again and again.
Thoom. Thoom.
Keep at it, boys. One of these days you might knock that door down, he thought, relaxing and letting the submachine gun hang at his side.
Even the obvious rise in intensity—thoom-thoom-thoom—didn’t bother Keo too much. He didn’t move from his spot, even when he heard shuffling from his right and Horse walked over—calmly, impossibly calmly—to where he was standing. Apparently the animal wasn’t too concerned, either.
Ninja horse. It’s survived this long for a reason.
Keo put a hand on the thoroughbred’s reins. “They woke you up, too, huh?”
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
“Ghouls, man. No sense of courtesy whatsoever.”
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
“Go into my room. It’s quieter in there.”
He directed Horse into the back hallway. The animal understood and walked past him, but Keo didn’t look back to see if it knew enough to go into the kids’ room that he had left open instead of the parents’ bedroom farther back.
Instead, Keo focused on the creatures trying to squeeze in through the windows, slicing their skin on the jagged shards of glass that still clung to the frames. They were frenzied to gain entry, their eyes zeroing in on him from behind the bars—
THOOM!
His head snapped back to the front door. That latest blow had sounded a hell of a lot stronger than any of the previous ones.
THOOM!
The door actually moved that time, and Keo thought he heard both the hinges and deadbolts clinking.
What the hell were they using to ram the door? Something heavy, and tough. Maybe it was a car—
THOOM!
The ghouls had abandoned the windows, because Keo couldn’t see them anymore. Where did they go? And why?
THOOM!
He faced the door again, reaching back and making sure he had the spare magazines for the MP5SD stuffed in his back pocket.
THOOM!
That time, the door did more than just slightly move—it actually shook—and Keo was certain one of the three hinges that held the heavy wood in place had also moved. The deadbolts, for their part, seemed to have held their ground.
A quick, panicked thought: Did Henry focus on the wrong side of the door? Was it the hinges that were the weak spots, and not the deadbolts?
That’s not good. That’s not good at all—
THOOM!
The door trembled, and one of the hinges snapped and the heavy brass clacked against the floor. The flat hinge rested where it fell, but the removable pin ricocheted into the air in Keo’s direction, landing and rolling, before stopping two feet from the toe of his boots.
That’s definitely not good.
Keo was looking down at the pin, trying to come up with a mental image of what was out there that could have possibly done that, when there was another massive—
THOOM! and the door flew open, and th
is time there was the echoing clank-clank-clank! of deadbolts as pieces of the locks clattered to the floor around Keo.
Aw, crap.
It stood in the open doorframe—tall and proud, and could have easily been mistaken for a human man even with its naked black flesh that seemed to glow against the darkness outside. Moonlight gleamed off its smooth domed head, its twin blue orbs pulsating as it looked in at him.
Blue Eyes.
Was it the same one? From the woods outside of Jonah’s? Was it possible?
It looked so human and yet so inhuman. Keo thought he could feel the simultaneous cold and heat radiating from the creature’s pores reaching across the space of the living room to caress the exposed part of his own skin.
But that was probably all in his mind. Wasn’t it?
There were just enough shadows around the monster that Keo couldn’t tell if it was the same one that had attacked him outside of Jonah’s. Not that you could really tell the Blue Eyes apart—or, at least, Keo never could. There had been one exception five years ago, but he was long gone.
Blue Eyes—whether it was the same one or not, it didn’t really matter anymore—wasn’t alone. Far from it. The black eyes scurried around its legs like little children unable to stay still in one place for more than a few seconds at a time. But Keo knew better: They weren’t children, they were soldiers waiting for orders.
Someone had once tried to explain to Keo how it all worked, how the blue-eyed ones controlled the black eyes through some form of psychic connection. Six years ago, Keo wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible and might have even laughed in their faces. But then, six years ago the world still made sense.
He didn’t know how long he stood there staring at Blue Eyes. It could have been seconds or whole minutes, but Keo didn’t snap out of it until the blue-eyed creature smiled—or Keo thought it smiled. It really just looked as if its lips (were those even lips?) curved slightly. Before Keo could be sure either way, the black eyes had slid past its legs and into the bungalow.
One, two—a dozen.
Two dozen.