by Sam Sisavath
Keo and Norris pulled up next to a couple of picnic benches, both falling apart and beaten by the elements.
Norris climbed out with his shotgun clutched in his hands and scanned the area around them for threats. He looked weary and paranoid at the same time. “No one sits or touches or leans against anything. Understand?”
Gillian had gone over to the SUV, and with Rachel, helped Lotte out of the Durango and back into her wheelchair. They left to do their business, leaving Christine behind. The girl was circling their cars, apparently counting all the holes along the sides, while eating a packet of Ring Dings.
“Jesus, I can’t believe we survived all that,” Norris said, looking at their vehicles.
“We got real lucky,” Keo said.
“You got a good look at those guys?”
“A bit.”
“What did you see?”
“Tactical gear and assault rifles. That’s all I needed to see.”
“Face paint, right? Tell me those guys weren’t black.”
Keo chuckled. “Yeah, face paint.”
“Thank God,” Norris said.
They spent the next twenty minutes going over both cars, making sure there were no leaks in the gas tanks or anywhere else that was vital. The vehicles had, miraculously, escaped pretty intact, save for the broken windows and bullet holes. Everything they needed to keep going (with the exception of the Durango’s dwindling gas supply) was still in one piece.
“Real lucky,” Keo said.
“I’d like to get a piece of those assholes,” Norris said. “Send some payback their way.”
Norris looked toward the road, as if he could see past the turn and out onto the highway. Fortunately he couldn’t, which meant anyone passing by wouldn’t be able to see them, either.
Rachel and Gillian were walking back with Lotte, Gillian pushing the wheelchair. Even from a distance, he thought they looked excited about something.
“How’s Rachel?” Keo asked.
“Scared,” Norris said. “Shit, I was scared, too. I told you, right? I’ve never been in a gunfight in my life. Over two decades on the job.” He shook his head. “You saw four back there, too?”
“Yeah. Two at the gas station and two more hiding on the highway.”
“How’d they sneak up on us?”
“Good question.”
Better question: Who the hell were those guys?
“At least we lost them,” Norris said. “The question now is, what do we next? The Durango’s not going to last for very much longer.”
Keo glanced at his watch. The day had crept up on them and it was already noon. Normally that wouldn’t be so bad, except it got dark way too fast around this part of the state this time of the year. “We need to start looking for a place to stay the night.”
“Yeah, not a lot of options out here.”
“Guys?” Gillian called out to them when she was closer. “We found something on the other side of the park.”
“What is it?” Keo said.
“It’s a cabin,” Gillian said. “And there’s nothing covering the windows.”
*
The cabin must have been some kind of manager’s office for the park, back when the area was still serving customers. It was just slightly beyond the clearing, hidden behind the pile of cars, and would have stayed invisible if the girls hadn’t stumbled across it.
The exterior was old and weather-beaten, and the interior was covered in cobwebs, signs that no one had been inside for years. Which was exactly what Keo was hoping to find. The absence of any kind of foot traffic meant no creatures, either. The cabin had two bedrooms in the back, and something that was even more valuable—a basement.
While Rachel and Gillian drove the trucks over and Christine stayed outside with Lotte, Keo and Norris looked over the wooden basement door built into the floorboards. It looked as old-fashioned as the rest of the cabin, and it was covered in a thick layer of dust that Keo kicked at.
“Looks good,” Keo said.
“How’s that?” Norris said.
“A lot of dust means the door hasn’t been opened recently. So there’s nothing down there that’ll want to eat us.”
“You hope.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Your funeral,” Norris said.
Keo flicked on the flashlight duct-taped to the end of his weapon’s barrel while Norris got into position and grabbed the brass ring connected to the door.
The ex-cop looked over at Keo. “You ready?”
Keo nodded.
Norris changed his grip on the ring. “Okay,” he said. Then, showing surprising strength for a fifty-six-year-old retiree, pulled the door open with a loud grunt.
A cloud of dust and God knew what else erupted when Norris flung the door open. Keo fought through the cough and aimed the Remington into the opening. A thick patch of black emptiness greeted him.
Keo moved the shotgun back and forth and side to side, illuminating some questionable wooden steps leading down. The basement floor was packed dirt, but the walls were block concrete. The flashlight revealed rectangular objects underneath dirt-covered blue tarps. Boxes, maybe. Good supplies, if they were lucky, but that was a stretch given the state of the cabin.
He waited for signs of movement—scurrying, a pair of black eyes—but there was just the stream of loose dirt and dust flitting back and forth across his flashlight beam.
Norris had already unslung his shotgun and turned on the flashlight, shining it down along with Keo’s. “What do you see?”
“Nothing,” Keo said.
“Doesn’t mean there’s nothing down there.”
“Nope.”
“So, what now? Go down there and find out?”
“Not like we have a lot of choices. This might be the best place we’ll find all day. Like you said, the Durango’s almost out of gas, so that really limits our options.”
Norris sighed, then slung his shotgun and reached into his pocket. “Heads you go, tails I—”
Keo had already leaped through the hole and landed on the dirt floor just in front of the stairs before Norris could finish. He straightened up and spun left, then right, then left again just to be sure. His finger was on the shotgun’s trigger at all times, ready to pull at the first sign of movement.
This is such a bad idea.
The only sound was his own labored breathing, and the sudden burst of movement and violent teeth coming at him from the shadows that Keo was expecting never came. There was just him scooting left, then right, the crunch of his sneakers against the unsteady dirt floor. The fact that the room smelled abandoned meant no one (no thing) had been down here in a while. Definitely longer than two days.
“Goddammit, kid, you almost gave me a heart attack, for crying out loud,” Norris said, leaning over the hole above him.
Keo gave the basement a final look before lowering the Remington. “There’s nothing down here but dirt and old supplies.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’ve been down here for almost a minute and I’m still alive. Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Good enough for me,” Norris said, just before he vanished out of sight.
The basement was a decent size, maybe 650 square feet, with concrete walls and shelves that were mostly empty. The ones that weren’t held empty gas cans and boxes of plastic cutlery that didn’t look usable anymore. At least, Keo wasn’t going to be using them anytime soon. He pulled the tarps one by one and was disappointed to find just empty crates.
“What’s down there?” Gillian asked, looking through the hole behind him.
“Nothing,” Keo said.
She looked around the room, then pinched her nose. “It smells.”
“But that door looks pretty solid, and there are no other ways in.”
“What about our stuff in the cars?”
“We’ll bring in what we need for the night, and maybe something extra in case we have to stay down here a while.”
&n
bsp; “I’m not looking forward to this, Keo.”
“Yeah, well, it beats staying out there when night comes,” Keo said.
*
It was one in the afternoon by the time they brought everything they needed (and a little extra, just in case) into the basement. The girls predictably weren’t looking forward to sleeping on a dirt floor. They spent the remaining daylight eating and watching the sun go down and didn’t climb into the basement until four. The room was just large enough that everyone was able to carve out their own space, with Gillian settling down next to Lotte’s wheelchair.
Keo turned on the only portable LED lamp they had been able to salvage from the police station and used the light to climb back up to the door. Every inch of the stairs creaked and groaned with each step he took, and Keo swore he could feel the wood starting to give under his feet. They were both too heavy to climb at the same time, so Keo went up and inspected the door while Norris looked on from below.
The basement door opened outward, so he slipped a tire iron from the Durango through another brass ring on this side of the thick block of wood and tried to lock it in place, but it wasn’t long enough. He tossed the tire iron down to the dirt floor and Norris held up his shotgun. The ring was just big enough to fit the Remington, and the weapon had the length to slide across the door, with a good six inches of the barrel braced against the wall.
Keo tried opening the door. It moved slightly, but not enough to reveal any lights from the other side. Even if the creatures found them down here, brute strength alone wouldn’t get them inside. He hoped, anyway.
“Looks good,” Keo said, climbing back down.
“Well, at least that shotgun will finally come in handy stopping those things,” Norris said. “God knows it hasn’t done much good before.”
Keo walked over and sat down next to Gillian and Lotte. The girls were eating bags of chips and drinking bottled water, their faces bright against the pool of light.
“Is that really going to work?” Gillian asked, nodding up at the basement door.
“It should,” Keo said.
Gillian didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say anything. Keo thought it was probably for Lotte’s benefit.
“This is the first time I’m glad I’m in a wheelchair,” Lotte said.
“Why’s that?” Keo asked.
“I’m the only one without dirt butt.”
He grinned and Gillian actually giggled. He gave her a surprised look.
She smiled back at him. “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“Saving my life back at the gas station. Again.”
“It’s becoming a habit.”
“I know,” she sighed. “Gloria Steinem’s going to revoke my feminist card pretty soon.” She pulled a bag of chips from the box they kept the food in. “Chips?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“You save my life, I give you chips. I think we’re fair and square, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
Keo took the bag and opened it, sucking in the surprisingly enticing smell of baked potato chips. Maybe he was just starving, because he couldn’t remember the last time he voluntarily ate junk food.
For the longest time, there was just the sound of crunching chips. No one really had much to say, though Keo noticed they glanced at the door every now and then.
“Keo,” Gillian said after a while.
“Hmm?”
“What would make someone do something like that?”
“Do what?”
“Those men back at the gas station. Why did they try to kill us? I don’t understand it.” He could see her struggling with the question. “You’ve been around. I know you’ve done things. You don’t have to say it; I know you don’t push papers in offices for a living. Can you tell me why you decided to save us and those people back there tried to murder us?”
Rachel was listening on the other side of the basement. So was Norris, though Keo thought he already knew the answer. You didn’t spend two decades of your life working as a cop and not know what man was capable of.
“They want what we have,” Keo said. “That’s all it is.”
“The supplies?”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s just one gas station. There have to be dozens, hundreds, sitting around for the taking. Why would they care if we just took from one?”
“It’s just human nature, Gillian. Some people abide by the tenets of civilization, not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s who they are. Others are just looking for an excuse to bring out the monster inside them. The end of the world is a hell of an excuse, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.
Instead, she leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. Keo wasn’t sure how to respond at first, but he finally put one arm around her and pulled her tighter against him.
*
He stayed awake long after the others fell asleep, keeping one eye on the door, anticipating some kind of movement to alert him that they had been discovered. Eventually he gave in around three in the morning and didn’t open his eyes again until nearly seven, with slivers of sunlight shining into his face from the wooden floorboards above.
He stood up and glanced around him. The others were still asleep, Gillian curled up on the floor next to him. Lotte was drooling out of one side of her mouth and looked dangerously close to falling out of her wheelchair.
Keo walked across the room and kicked Norris’s shoe. The ex-cop opened his eyes and groped for the shotgun that wasn’t there.
“It’s morning,” Keo said. “We made it through another night, old timer.”
Norris stood up and stretched, his joints popping with every movement.
“Let the girls sleep for a while,” Keo said. “They had a stressful last few days.”
Norris grunted back and watched Keo walk over to the stairs and start climbing up.
Near the door, Keo stopped and listened for a moment.
“Anything?” Norris asked below him.
Keo shook his head, then pulled Norris’s Remington out of the brass ring and tossed it back down to him.
“Still in one piece,” Norris said. “Maybe our luck really is changing.”
Keo was reaching for the door when it flew open by itself.
He reached for his shotgun, freezing at the sight of a man wearing a camouflage cap and pants and long-sleeve shirt, staring back down at him. But it wasn’t the man’s hunting clothes or bearded face that got Keo’s attention. It was the AR-15 rifle in his steady hands, the barrel pointed straight down and between Keo’s eyes.
CHAPTER 16
“Hi there,” the man with the rifle said. “Tell your friend down there to take his hands off the shotgun, or I’m gonna have to put you down.”
“Shit,” Norris said behind Keo.
Pale brown eyes flickered past Keo and down to, he presumed, Norris. The man’s hands were amazingly steady. Despite the beard, he wasn’t really that old. Late thirties, maybe, and he had definitely killed before. Not a killer by any means—Keo had met plenty of those and knew the look—but the man was fully capable of unloading his magazine into Keo from a meter away.
Keo stayed perfectly still and waited for the opening that never came.
He was poised four rungs down from the top, but he was high enough on the stairs that he didn’t have to move very much to pop his head through the open door. The Remington was slung over his back and the prospect of actually using it was nil. There were no two ways about it; he was dead in the water.
Or just dead.
A second figure appeared, walking around the door and stopping behind the first man. He was wearing similar hunting clothes, stringy blond hair sticking out from under the sides of his LSU Tigers cap. He was younger, and at first Keo thought they might be father and son, but no; the years weren’t that far apart. Maybe ten at the most.
�
�You were right,” the second man said. “There were people in here. How’d you know?”
“This place was abandoned when I came by three months ago,” the first man said. “Those cars weren’t outside, either.”
“Hey, Earl, there’re a bunch of supplies in these trucks!” a third voice shouted from somewhere outside the cabin.
The two men eyed Keo carefully. The younger man had unslung his rifle—another AR-15—but hadn’t aimed it into the basement. If Keo thought the older man was experienced, the second one looked anything but. He had an almost anxious look about him.
“What are we going to do with them?” the younger man asked.
“I don’t know,” the first one said, then, “Hey, come on, don’t do it.” He wasn’t speaking to Keo, but to Norris behind him. “This doesn’t have to get bloody.”
Keo resisted the urge to look back at Norris to see what he was doing down there. He decided to trust that the ex-cop would know what to do in this situation—not that he thought Norris had been in a jam like this before. Instead, Keo concentrated on the figure above him, and to a lesser extent, the one in the back.
If he could get to one of those rifles, they had a chance. A small chance, but it was better than nothing, because that was all he had right now. A big fat nothing.
“Shit, they got kids down there, Earl,” the second man said, leaning over the older man to get a better look.
“I see ’em,” the first man, Earl, said.
Keo saw something in Earl’s eyes and knew the man had instantly made a decision. He braced himself for what was coming, got ready to dive up through the hole for the rifle (was that even possible?), when Earl took a step back and pointed the AR-15 away from Keo.
“Truce,” Earl said.
Keo stared at him, not quite sure if this was some kind of trick—a joke at his expense, maybe—or if he was really seeing two men with the drop on him calling for…a truce?
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Earl said. “Least of all kids. I’m Earl and this is Levy. Come on out of there and let’s talk,” he said, directing that last part to Norris and the others in the basement below Keo.