by Sam Sisavath
“He?”
Right. “He.”
More like it.
“You talk about it like it’s still a human being,” Keo said.
“He takes offense to being called ‘it.’ I like to humor him. It keeps things moving smoothly, and it doesn’t cost me anything.”
“Except your soul.”
“You believe in such things, Keo?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. And I’m betting you don’t, either.”
“Goes to show you don’t know me that well.”
“I know you better than you think.”
“You presume. There’s a difference.”
“Maybe.” Then, with a smirk, “Besides, that’s some accusation about me selling my soul, coming from the guy who just tried to murder me with a missile.”
Keo had to grin at that. “I’m just saying, you lay down with dogs, you wake up with a tail. At least, I think that’s how the saying goes.”
Buck put the beer down and leaned back against the table. “Face it, people like us don’t care about any of that esoteric bullshit. We are what we are. Have been, even before the world went to shit. Before the ghouls, before Mercer; and we’ll still be who we are meant to be long after this new iteration of Black Tide is gone and another one replaces it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Haven’t you been asking yourself where he is? Where all the ghouls are? Why he isn’t already here drilling into that brain of yours?”
Keo didn’t say anything. He was almost too afraid to.
But he finally said, “Could be all the BO. I hear they hate it when their victims stink.”
“That’s not it.”
“Are you sure?”
“He’s not here because he’s busy elsewhere.”
Keo narrowed his eyes. “What did you do?”
“Me? I haven’t done anything. You saw them, didn’t you? At Axton? Cordine City? That was only a small part of what he has at his disposal. Lara’s been building an army from the ashes of Black Tide, but so have I, and so has he. That meeting earlier, the one you decided to crash? It was me giving orders on how to proceed after I leave to join him at Darby Bay. The truth is, I’m supposed to be there right now, alongside our mutual friend.” He smiled at Keo. “But I just had to come back; I just had to see you up close and tell you, face to face, about how fucked you and your friends are.”
“Where is it? Where’s the fucker?”
“His name is Merrick.”
“Merrick? Sounds like a disease.”
Buck glanced down at his watch.
“You late for a party?” Keo asked. “Don’t let me keep you. I was perfectly content sitting in here all by myself before you showed up.”
Buck looked back up. “Merrick and his army should already be arriving at their target right about now. You think all those planes and tanks Black Tide have will make any difference? It doesn’t matter if there’s one or one hundred Warthogs if there aren’t any pilots to fly them. Tonight is the beginning of the end, Keo. It all starts with Darby Bay, and it’ll end there, for all intents and purposes. Your friends just won’t know it until it’s too late.”
Wait. Darby Bay? Did he just say Darby Bay?
Buck saw his reaction, and one corner of his mouth tugged upward into a satisfied smile.
“Merrick is attacking Darby Bay,” Keo said, and thought, It’s attacking Lara. It’s going after Lara.
“Did you think I was attacking the neighboring towns because I needed their women and supplies?” Buck asked. “I have plenty of both. I knew that sooner or later she’d hear about the raids, about the women and children, and ride to the rescue. That’s her job now, isn’t it? Saving the world from men like me? It was inevitable. And it was so predictable.”
Keo laughed. It came out of nowhere, and he surprised even himself.
Buck narrowed his eyes, confusion replacing the smugness that had been all over his face just seconds ago. “What’s so funny?”
“That’s it?” Keo said when he finally stopped laughing. “All of this—the raids, the army, the planning—and it all comes down to revenge?”
“What’s more primal than revenge? We’re primal beasts, when you get right down to it. We’ve always been. Civilization just hid it, but it never really went away. We fuck and we kill, and when someone crosses us, we demand vengeance. What could be more human?”
“Oh, I could think of plenty of things.”
Buck leaned forward, his hazel eyes focusing intently on Keo. “If it were up to me, I’d deal with you myself. Mercer’s killer. Oh, the things I could do to you, all the while listening to you beg for mercy.”
“Sounds like you’ve been thinking about this for a while, Buck. Obsessively, you might say. Might want to get some help for that.”
“A man can come up with some very creative ways to kill someone in five years.”
“So what’s stopping you? Or is talking me to death one of those ‘creative ways’ you came up with?”
Buck chuckled and sat back. “Part of our deal was that he gets you all to himself. You and everyone who was there that day, in Houston. I’ll just have to be satisfied with knowing that whatever plans he has for you, it’ll be beyond anything I could have come up with. Besides, this isn’t about one man, or even one woman. This is about dismantling the new Black Tide, about punishing those traitors who stayed behind. This is about showing them that they made the wrong choice and that it’s going to cost them everything.”
Keo clenched his teeth, but despite his best efforts, he couldn’t come up with a response. His head was too busy spinning, images of Lara fighting off wave after wave of ghouls flooding his mind’s eye.
I’m sorry, Lara. I screwed up. I’m sorry…
“I hope you said your good-byes before you left Darby Bay,” Buck said, “because that was the last time you’re going to see them again. It took five years, but it’s here. The night of reckoning.”
Buck grinned widely, and Keo imagined a certain blue-eyed ghoul taking over the man’s human face.
“You didn’t think we’d all forget, did you?” Buck asked. “Well, did you?”
Twenty-One
“Sneak into Fenton. Find out what’s in the warehouse. Go back to Lara.”
“Go back to Lara…”
It was an easy enough job. Okay, so maybe “easy” wasn’t quite the right word; but it was a straightforward task that, while dangerous as hell (then again, what wasn’t dangerous as hell these days?), was doable. Very doable. That was why Lara had chosen him to lead the mission: Because he’d done harder things. Way, way harder things. Sneaking onto Black Tide Island, then killing Mercer, for one. Now that was hard. Compared to that, this was a cakewalk.
Okay, maybe not really a cakewalk. But definitely easier by a few degrees.
For one, he wasn’t alone this time. He had the help of some experienced soldiers.
Like Rita, like Gholston, like Rudolph…
All dead now.
Claire’s still alive. So there’s that.
Keo clung to that last one. It was the only thing he could do, given his current situation. There wasn’t much bright side to everything that had happened, but at least he had the knowledge the teenager had gotten away. Otherwise, Buck would have used it to antagonize him during their long talk, if that weren’t the case.
Run, kid. Run as far and as fast as you can, and don’t look back.
If only Claire knew what Buck had said, or where he was headed right now, she could have radioed Darby Bay and warned them about what was coming toward them—if it wasn’t there already.
“You didn’t think we’d all forget, did you? Well, did you?”
He sighed out loud to the empty room and watched small white clouds form in front of him. He had been worried about Lara being angry that he had disobeyed orders. Now, he would be happy if she was pissed off and never forgave him, because it would mean she had survived tonight.
Merrick.
That was the creature’s name. Keo could have gone an entire lifetime without knowing that little FYI. What the monster called itself didn’t mean a damn thing to him, or do him any good right now.
But of course it had to be Merrick. Of course it had to start with an M.
Just like Mabry. Just like Mercer. Just like Marlon J. Jefferson.
And now, Merrick.
What’s the deal with all the M’s?
There was no one inside the building to answer that question, though he did hear the occasional voices outside the door to his right. Buck had left anywhere from forty minutes to an hour ago. For some reason, Keo found it difficult to concentrate. It didn’t help that he couldn’t see his watch.
He had glimpsed the silhouettes of guards waiting outside when Buck opened the door to leave. Two that Keo could see, likely more that he couldn’t. After what he had done—and maybe a little because of his reputation—Buck would be a fool to leave just two men out there.
Think much of yourself, pal?
Just a tad.
Great. Now try to think of a way out of this.
That was easier said than done, because he couldn’t see any way out of here. Not even a sliver. Not even a tiny, itty bitty sliver of hope.
Butkus. That’s what you got. Jack shit, and Jack’s not answering his phone.
It had grown colder inside the room, and he shivered against the thick rope holding his arms behind him, with the cold metal chair’s backrest between them and his back. There was no way he was getting out of the chair. At least, not as long as his limbs were still attached. Even if he could, then what next? The door? What about the men with guns waiting outside?
For some reason, he was still wide awake. He was tired from head to toe, and his muscles ached, and it had to be the middle of the night outside. Well past midnight, actually. So why couldn’t he force his body to shut down so he could get some sorely needed rest? Instead, his mind was filled with images of Lara fighting off ghouls and Darby Bay under siege…
“I told them to give you something special. After all, we wouldn’t want you to fall asleep on me tonight,” Buck had said.
What had they shot into his veins? Whatever it was, it was keeping him wide awake and alert. More strung out than he should be, given everything that had happened and how late it was. And he couldn’t stop thinking about Lara, about the hell she could be going through right this very second…
He focused on the metal desk in front of him instead. Buck hadn’t done him any favors when he switched off the lamp before leaving. Keo would be sitting in complete darkness, if his night eyes hadn’t taken over. He could see enough to know that he wasn’t going to find anything to help him out of his bindings, much less out of the building.
There were no rays of sunshine, no yellow brick road out of this one. He had disobeyed Lara’s orders and tried to kill Buck, and ended up captured. The entire compound was on high alert, and even if he made it out, he’d have to shoot his way through a few hundred men.
Or a few thousand.
The numbers were irrelevant anyway, since once you reached two zeroes, tacking on an additional third or fourth made no real difference.
He should have stuck to the original plan. Maybe then he would have been on his way back to Darby Bay right now. Or already there, beside Lara when Merrick attacked.
“Tonight is the beginning of the end, Keo. It all starts with Darby Bay, and it’ll end there, for all intents and purposes. Your friends just won’t know it until it’s too late.”
He didn’t know what was happening at the port town right now. Was Merrick already there? If Buck was to be believed, then the answer was yes. Blue Eyes and that army of undead it had been hiding, building in secret all these years since The Walk Out, would already be at Darby Bay’s walls. If they weren’t already inside it. After so many years of only sporadic ghoul encounters, would the Black Tiders be able to deal with a vast horde the likes of which they hadn’t seen in over five years?
“You didn’t think you could run from me forever, did you?” Blue Eyes had hissed at him underneath Cordine City. “This is the end. But it won’t be fast. It won’t be easy. It’ll be long and hard, and it’ll hurt. We’ll have a lot of fun, you and I. Oh, the wonderful games we’ll play.”
He shivered at the memory of its words, at its close proximity and the way those razor-thin lips of the creature’s arched to form something that it thought was a smile as it said them.
“If I thought he could still get an erection, I’d swear he had the world’s most massive hard-on for you,” Buck had said.
Tell me something I don’t already know, Buck.
He let out another heavy sigh and watched the cloud form and dissipate in front of him. He was pitying himself, and he knew it. He also knew he couldn’t do anything about it, or about much of anything, right now, and it made him angry. Angrier than he’d been in a long time. Maybe even angrier than when he decided to go after Mercer.
All he could do was think about all the things he couldn’t do as he sat in his prison.
He couldn’t go out there to find Claire, to make sure she had gotten away in one piece and wasn’t bleeding out somewhere.
He couldn’t go find Buck and finish the job he had started.
And most of all, he couldn’t run back to Darby Bay and stand beside Lara as the hordes attacked.
He would give anything to see her again, to have her rip into him for disobeying orders. He had it all planned out. Even if she couldn’t forgive him, he would leave knowing he had done the right thing. In his mind, at least. But then, Keo’s definition of the “right thing” was always a little different (A little? Try a lot) than most people’s.
Another sigh as he recalled what Buck had said:
“It took five years, but it’s here. The night of reckoning. You didn’t think we’d all forget, did you? Well, did you?”
Keo let out a scream. It came out of nowhere, and he didn’t bother trying to stop it. It was half frustration and half anger… Oh, who was he kidding? It was almost entirely all anger.
Lara.
Darby Bay.
And here he was, stuck in Fenton. Tied up and waiting to die. The helplessness was too much, and he let it out in one massive, primal scream.
He didn’t know how long it went on, but it must have been long (and loud) enough that whoever was guarding him heard it and couldn’t ignore it, because there was a loud clack! as the door opened and a figure appeared in the doorway, backlit by the moonlight in the background.
Keo couldn’t make out a face, but it was a man, judging by the broad shoulders, and he had a rifle slung in front of him and two horns sticking up from his head like some kind of bat ears, but smoother and metallic. Night-vision goggles.
“What the hell?” the man said. “You dying or something?”
Keo sucked in a deep breath before forcing a smile at the man. “What was that?”
“What the fuck were you screaming about?”
Keo glimpsed a second figure behind the first, peeking in. He, too, was shrouded in shadows and had an NVG device propped on his forehead.
How many guards did Buck put out there? At least two.
“I’m hungry,” Keo said.
“So?” the man said.
“So go get me some food.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Which part of ‘I’m hungry’ didn’t you understand?”
“Fuck off,” the man said, and slammed the door shut.
Keo stared at it for a moment. For some reason, he was sure that was going to work.
“Hey!” he shouted.
The door remained closed.
“Hey, fuckface!” he shouted again, louder this time—if that was even possible because the first Hey had been pretty loud to begin with.
Clack! as the door swung open a second time, and the same outline appeared against the moonlight. “You’re really getting on my nerves, dead man
. Sit tight and wait there like a good little boy, or I’m going to have to come inside and shove a rag in your mouth.”
“Does the rag at least have some food crumbs in it?”
“What?”
“Food crumbs. I told you, I’m hungry.”
“And I told you, I don’t give a shit.”
“Actually you never said that. You said something else, but never ‘I don’t give a shit.’”
The man didn’t respond, either because he was confused or annoyed, or both.
Yeah, probably both.
“I could use some food,” Keo said.
“I don’t care,” the man said.
“What does he want?” a second voice asked from somewhere outside the building.
“He’s hungry,” the first one said, turning slightly in the direction of his partner, who was invisible to Keo at the moment.
“What did boss man say about feeding him?” the partner asked.
“I don’t think he said anything.”
“You don’t think, or you don’t know?”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a huge difference.”
“He said I could have some food,” Keo said.
“Bullshit,” the guard at the door said, looking back at Keo.
“He told me so himself.”
“Did he?” the unseen guard asked.
“Of course not,” the first one said. “He’s lying.”
“I’m not,” Keo said. “Scout’s honor.”
“Bullshit, you were in the Scouts,” the man said.
“I was. I have a box full of medals and everything.”
“Yeah, right.” He glanced over at his partner. “Buck didn’t say shit about feeding him. But he did say not to go in there for any reason.”
A figure appeared over the shoulder of the first one and looked into the room. “Who the hell is he, anyway?”
“The one who blew up the conference building earlier,” the first guard said.
“No shit? I thought he’d be dead by now.”
“Not yet. But he’s going to wish he was—”
The boom! of an explosion cut the guard off, and both figures turned their heads toward the source. It had caught them all by surprise, including Keo, who could still feel the trembling under his feet.