Rooster

by Sam Sisavath

  The leader rode off with the woman. Keo looked after them when he felt a nudge on the back of his shoulder.

  He glanced back and saw big brown eyes staring at him.

  Horse.

  Keo grinned. The sight of the animal was the only reason he hadn’t opened fire when he had the chance earlier. He had spotted Horse running at him, with Wally bucking on top of its saddle.

  Horse. Out here.

  Why was Keo so surprised?

  That animal’s definitely going to outlive me, alright.

  The thoroughbred sniffed Keo before nudging him in the shoulder blade again.

  “What’s it doing?” Wally asked. He was standing next to Keo and the horse, his fists on his hips.

  “It’s my horse,” Keo said.

  “What?” Wally said.

  Keo ran a hand down Horse’s mane. The animal let out a loud, approving whinny.

  “It’s my horse,” Keo said again. “His name is Horse.”

  Wally stared at Keo for a moment. Then he looked over at the thoroughbred, back to Keo, and back again.

  Finally, the big man grunted. “I don’t give a shit. I’m still riding it, so move.”

  Keo took a couple of steps back as Wally grabbed Horse’s reins and put a boot in a stirrup. He grabbed the pommel and was in the middle of lifting himself up when Horse took a quick half dozen steps back.

  “Whoa, whoa, you stupid horse!” Wally shouted just before he lost his grip and fell down on his butt again.

  The three men who had stayed behind chortled, and one of them said, “I don’t think it likes you, Wally.”

  Wally glanced over at Keo with an accusing stare. “Did you tell it to do that?”

  Keo shrugged. “It’s a horse.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t speak horse. Verbally or telepathically.”

  The big man didn’t look convinced as he picked himself up for the second time. He turned to Horse, who stood nearby grazing at some sparse grass. Keo could see his mind working, trying to decide if it was worth another attempt.

  “Second time’s the charm,” one of the three mounted men said.

  Wally shook his head. “Hell no.” He turned back to Keo. “But that doesn’t mean you’re riding it, either. Start walking.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” Keo said.

  He turned around and began walking back toward the bomb shelter. The leader and the woman were already at the building entrance and had disappeared down its square-shaped entranceway.

  Wally appeared next to Keo, pulling Horse along by the reins. Keo glanced past the big man at the thoroughbred. Like the other horses, they had unshod Horse. The animal looked over and caught his gaze before letting out a snort.

  “I saw that,” Wally said.

  “Saw what?” Keo said as innocently as he could muster.

  Twenty-Six

  Wally didn’t look all that happy to be walking when there was a perfectly good horse with an empty saddle right next to him, but the last two times he tried to mount the thoroughbred had ended up with him on the ground. Horse had made it very clear he wasn’t going to be ridden.

  After the second failed attempt, Wally gave up and walked the rest of the way on foot, but he still wouldn’t give the horse to Keo to ride. Not that Keo minded too much. As long as he wasn’t running for his life and bullets weren’t flying over his head, it wasn’t an entirely bad morning, with just the right amount of chill in the air.

  Wally’s comrades didn’t have any issues with their horses, and one rode off while the other two remained with the group. Keo assumed the man had gone on to scout the area. There seemed to be enough communications between the Cordine City people through their radios to convince him whoever was in charge, now that Winston was KIA, had their shit together. At the moment, Keo was betting that was the posse leader who had taken off with the woman.

  After about five minutes of walking in silence, Keo finally said, “At least one of us should get to ride Horse.”

  “Yeah, me,” Wally said.

  “I meant me.”

  “I know you did.”

  Keo smiled. “So we should both be punished, is that it?”

  Wally grunted. “That’s exactly it.”

  Better than running for my life, Keo thought, before asking the big man, “Where did you find him, anyway? The last time I saw him, he was on the fifth floor of an office building, waiting for me to come back.”

  “Someone spotted him walking around the city yesterday; said he looked like he was searching for something.” He flashed Keo a wry look. “Or someone, I guess. You must have made a hell of an impression. I didn’t know horses were that loyal.”

  “We’ve been through a few scrapes together, yeah.”

  “I guess so. It was stubborn at first, didn’t want to be rounded up, I guess; but it played along pretty fast when we started feeding it.”

  “Yeah, he eats like a horse.”

  “Damned thing surprised the hell out of me when it just took off like that.”

  Keo glanced over at Horse. The thoroughbred walked casually on the other side of Wally, oblivious to both of them.

  “He’s faster than he looks,” Wally said.

  Tell me about it, Keo thought, remembering their hair-raising escape from Axton.

  He looked back over at the bomb shelter entrance. The area surrounding it actually looked like a real property from a distance. The devastated house and barn stood, and the remains of the building that once hid the underground bunker’s entranceway stuck out like sore thumbs among all the nothingness.

  “What happened last night?” Keo asked. “I heard explosions.”

  Wally didn’t answer.

  “Oh come on,” Keo said. “We’re not enemies. I think you know that by now.”

  “I don’t know shit,” the big man said.

  “I could have shot you back there, but I didn’t.” Because the sight of Horse surprised the hell out of me, Keo thought, but he said instead, “That’s gotta count for something.”

  Wally seemed to think about it.

  “And it’s going to be a long walk,” Keo continued. “Might as well make it less boring.”

  “We had the city rigged up in case of something like this,” Wally said. “Didn’t think we’d ever have to use it, though.”

  “‘In case of something like this?’ What is ‘this?’”

  “Ghouls. Invaders. Basically, in case we got overrun. It was a last-resort type of thing that Winston cooked up. Pretty much everything that happens in Cordine City is Winston’s idea.” He frowned. “So he’s dead?”

  Deader than a doorknob, pal, Keo thought, but he said, “I don’t know. I was too busy running for my life to find out for sure.”

  “But you saw him down there? Near the end?”

  “I saw him, yeah. We had a nice long talk.”

  “About Fenton.”

  “Yeah. But mostly about me not being from Fenton. After that, he had me taken back to my cell. That was the last time I saw him.” Keo nodded forward at the remains of the property. “Maybe he’s still down there. I don’t know. I didn’t exactly do a thorough check of the place before I headed straight for the exit this morning.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you kidding me? It was dark down there, and there was blood everywhere. After last night…” Keo shivered, and there was nothing fake about it. “Daylight is right. That’s always been my motto.”

  Wally chuckled. “That’s a good motto.”

  “I’d say so. It’s kept me alive this long.”

  “Here,” Wally said. When Keo glanced over, he found the big man holding a half-full bottle of water toward him. “You need this more than I do.”

  “Thanks,” Keo said, and took a drink. He didn’t realize how dry his throat was until he got some liquid down the pipe.

  “For your face, dummy,” Wally said.

  “What?”

  “Your face. You still go
t blood over most of it.”

  “Oh.”

  He had forgotten all about Brett’s blood and…other things that had splattered his face that he’d spent most of last night trying to wipe off. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

  “What happened? A building fall on top of you?” the woman had asked him earlier. Keo had thought she was talking about the scar.

  The least of my beauty marks, as it turned out.

  He poured some water into his palm and splashed his face, then used his shirt to clean off as much as he could. By the time he was done, his shirt was a mess, but better the mess on his clothes than on his face.

  “Whose blood is that, anyway?” Wally asked. “Can’t be the nightcrawlers. Those go away in sunlight.”

  “I don’t remember,” Keo lied.

  He used up the last drops of water and tossed the bottle and took the opportunity to sneak a quick look at Wally’s sidearm jutting out almost haphazardly from his gun holster. Three feet separated him and the weapon, and they hadn’t bothered to tie his hands. All it would have taken was reaching over and…

  Then what? There were two more behind him. Even if Keo could grab Wally’s gun and take him out, he’d have to turn and shoot the other two. He was a dead man if either one of the guys back there had his rifle out. And even if they didn’t, could he really take out three before one of them fired back? At this distance, it wouldn’t exactly take a dead shot.

  Don’t do anything stupid. You can talk your way out of this.

  “So you guys blew up your own city last night in order to save it. Do I have that right?” Keo asked.

  “Didn’t exactly have a lot of choices,” Wally said. “They were everywhere. Christ, we didn’t think there were that many of them still out there. And all in one place? I mean, they were always around. Some would wander into the city, and we’d take care of them. But it was never like last night. Fuck, there were a lot of them last night.”

  Keo wasn’t surprised to hear the disbelief in Wally’s voice, even after an entire day to process what had happened. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before. The slayers outside of Winding Creek had expressed similar surprise. Peters’s guys had said pretty much the same thing back at Axton. Even he had said and thought it once or twice (or a dozen times) since Jonah’s.

  They’re still out there. A lot of them. Way, way more than we thought.

  The night is still not ours. Not by a long shot…

  “So Winston had buildings rigged to explode in case you guys came under attack?” Keo asked.

  “Yeah,” Wally said.

  “Sounds a little dangerous for everyone.”

  “It was. But like I said. Last resort.”

  “What kind of explosives did you guys use?” Keo asked, remembering how much the underground facility shook, even this far from the main city center.

  “They were mostly IEDs. You know what those are?”

  “Improvised explosive devices. A terrorist’s best friend.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. But…”

  “But?”

  “I think Winston and whoever the guys were that put the devices together underestimated the size of the explosions, ’cause they did way more damage than anyone was expecting.”

  “You guys didn’t test them out first?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Right,” Keo said. “Last resort.”

  He looked past the open fields at the remains of Cordine City. Even out here, from a distance, the damage was obvious. Winston’s people—however many of them remained after last night—were going to have their work cut out for them if they wanted to fix the place up. If it were up to Keo, he’d just find another city.

  “You guys only set off two,” Keo said. “Was that all you had?”

  “No, but the first one really took out a lot of them. Hundreds.” He shook his head. “It was unreal. The second one wasn’t as effective, though.”

  “What happened? Why’d you stop with just two?”

  “We barely got off the second one. There were more, but the fuckers took off after that, so we shut it down.”

  The big man paused, and Keo saw him looking off at nothing in particular.

  “What?” Keo pressed. “What else happened last night?”

  Wally squinted up at the sun. “Some of the guys swore they saw a blue-eyed nightcrawler running around out there. They said it killed some of our guys; that it tried to stop us from setting off the second bomb. But I didn’t see it myself, so I don’t know.” He looked over at Keo. “Did you see something like that down there?”

  Up close and personal. Too up close and personal, thank you very much.

  “No,” Keo lied. “I guess I got lucky.”

  He’d been lucky, all right. Lucky that Cordine City’s fighters were willing to destroy their own city in order to “save” it. Lucky that Blue Eyes decided stopping them took priority over Keo’s measly life.

  Yeah. Real lucky.

  Let’s hope it lasts…

  “Damn right you were lucky,” Wally was saying. “It was a bloodbath up here.”

  “Did the guys who spotted the blue-eyed ghoul say what happened to it?”

  Wally shook his head. “They said it took off. When it did that, every black eyes in the place followed. You know about that, right? The whole psychic-hive-mind thing they have?”

  “Yeah, I know about that,” Keo nodded and thought, Of course it escaped. Of course the fucker escaped.

  And it was still out there, somewhere…

  “It’s out there right now, with that horde, looking for you,” Greengrass had said. “Whether we’re still in Cordine City or not, it’ll find you.”

  Fucking Greengrass. Now I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life.

  Keo sighed, and to take his mind off Greengrass’s words, said, “I take it Cordine City is full of bleach-white bones right now?”

  “We’ve been burying them all morning, and we’re not even close to being done. And our manpower’s way down, too, so that doesn’t help.” He smirked. “You were lucky to be down there last night. It was a bloodbath up here before we detonated the first IED and sent a lot of the bastards to hell. I wish I could have been down there, too.”

  No, you don’t, Keo thought, but he said, “So why weren’t you?”

  “No time. I thought about taking the tunnel, but then I remembered that was a no-go.”

  “What tunnel?”

  “There used to be one other way into the shelter besides the front door. A tunnel that links it to another building in the city. But as far as I know, that was sealed up years ago.”

  Not anymore, Keo thought.

  “You are one lucky SOB,” Wally said. “I hope you’re thanking whatever God you believe in, sport.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Lucky Keo.”

  “What kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “Kyle was taken.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what Kyle said.”

  Wally narrowed his eyes over at him. “You making fun of me?”

  “I’d never do such a thing, Wally.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “You better be.”

  “Hey, you’re the one with the gun.”

  Wally grunted. “You’re weird, man. You got a weird name, and you talk to horses.”

  “I’ll cop to the first, but not the second.”

  “No?”

  Keo smiled. “I don’t actually talk to Horse…”

  The man and woman that had gone on ahead of them to search Winston’s bomb shelter were named Nolan and Cassandra, and they were just stepping out of the underground facility when Wally and Keo finally reached them.

  Nolan paused next to his horse to stare at Wally.

  “What?” Wally said, annoyed.

  “You walked all the way over here?” Nolan asked.

  “The horse wouldn’t let me ride it.”

  “Why not?”
>
  “It’s his,” Wally said, nodding in Keo’s direction.

  Nolan looked over at Keo for confirmation.

  “His name is Horse,” Keo said.

  “You named your horse, Horse?” Cassandra asked. There was just a trace of amusement in her voice.

  Better than a trace of ‘I should shoot you dead now to save myself the trouble of doing it later.’

  “I’m not very good at naming things,” Keo said.

  “Considering your name’s Keo, I believe that,” Cassandra said.

  “Forget about the horse or your shitty name,” Nolan said. “The bodies are gone. We didn’t find a single one of them down there.”

  “Did you think they’d still be down there?” Keo asked. “Which part of ‘There were ghouls all over the place last night’ didn’t you understand?”

  “That’s pretty convenient for you. With the bodies gone, you can weave any story you want and there’s no one—or any evidence—to contradict you.”

  “Sure didn’t feel very convenient last night when I was running for my life. You found those two ghouls in Winston’s office?”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “What did you do to them?” Cassandra asked.

  “I bashed their heads in with that football statue.”

  “Football statue?”

  “Winston’s Heisman Trophy,” Nolan said.

  “Oh.”

  Nolan fixed Keo with a hard, suspicious look. “You may be telling the truth, or you may be full of shit. Either way, you’re not going anywhere for a while.”

  Keo sighed. “What’s it going to take to convince you I’m not a threat?”

  “What makes you think you can?” Nolan asked as he climbed back into his saddle. “As they used to say back in the old days—until we can verify your story, don’t leave town.”

  “Got visitors,” Wally said, just as the familiar whup-whup-whup of a helicopter broke through the morning quiet.

  Keo glanced up just as the chopper swooped past them. It was a Sikorsky UH-60, with a man leaning out one of its open sides manning a minigun. Keo shivered at the sight of the weapon. If the man wanted to, he could obliterate every single one of them down here in a heartbeat.

  “Should we, uh, be standing out in the open like this?” Keo asked, not even trying to hide the very real worry in his voice.