by Sam Sisavath
“I thought you said we were on the same side,” Gregson said quickly.
“Not if you keep making me ask twice. I hate having to ask twice.”
“All right.”
“All right?”
“Yeah, all right.” Then, after Keo had holstered his sidearm: “We overshot our mark yesterday, ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes. Then we saw the beach and thought, what the hell. We couldn’t link back up with our forces anyway, so we figured we’d go out with a bang. Worst-case scenario, we were prepared to drive right into the ocean a la Thelma and Louise.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Keo said.
“The movie?”
Keo shook his head.
“I’ve heard of it,” Jordan said.
“Good?” Keo asked.
She shrugged. “It was an oldie. I liked the car, though.”
“I guess that’s all that counts,” he chuckled before turning back to Gregson. “Where are the rest of your forces?”
“Sorry, can’t do,” Gregson smiled back. “Need-to-know, and you don’t need to know. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not telling you shit about that.”
“Tough guy.”
“When it comes to that? Fuck yeah, tough enough.”
Keo nodded. He believed the man. “So what were you doing out here yesterday? Can’t hurt to tell us that, right?”
Gregson thought about that for a moment too, before nodding. “We were doing our part.”
“Which was what, exactly?”
“Take out one of the towns.”
“The collaborator towns?”
“What other kinds are there?”
Keo exchanged a glance with Jordan, and he could tell she was thinking the exact same thing: Gillian. T18.
He turned back to Gregson. “What do you mean, ‘take out’ one of the towns?”
“What do you think I meant?” Gregson said. He reached back and banged on the tank. “This thing’s designed to do one thing, and it ain’t making pies.”
“You shelled it? The town?”
“We flattened the fuck out of it, yeah.”
“And the people in it?” Jordan asked.
Gregson shrugged.
“What the hell does that mean?” she said, a noticeable warning edge creeping into her voice.
“We destroyed it,” Gregson said. “Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”
“What were you running from?” Keo asked.
“Technicals and rocket launchers. I mean, our armor could have survived a lot, but there were a lot of them, and who knows what else they had. Besides, our orders were to hit and run, then link back up with the rest of our forces. Failing that…well, it’s been a while since we saw the beach. We knew they’d follow us here. Didn’t think they’d send the skin meats, though.”
“Skin meats?”
“Those ghouls. That’s what some of us call them.”
Keo raised an eyebrow. “You also call them ghouls?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Where’d you get the name from?”
Gregson looked confused; either that, or he had another piece of information he thought was need-to-know. “It’s just a name. Who cares?”
“Just curious,” Keo said.
“How many people did you kill in the town?” Jordan asked.
Gregson didn’t answer her.
“How many?” she asked again.
“I don’t know; we didn’t exactly get close enough to count,” Gregson said. “A lot, I guess. I just drove. The others did the shooting. The mission was to leave just enough behind.”
“‘Just enough’ for what?” Keo asked.
“So they can tell the others what happened.”
“You want them to know. The other collaborators, in the other towns.”
“Yeah,” Gregson nodded. “To let everyone know there’s something worse than the ghouls out here. Us. We killed just enough to make our point.”
“Hundreds?” Jordan said. “Did you kill hundreds?”
“Maybe. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because they’re the enemy,” Gregson said. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us. If you’re against us, then you’re the enemy, and the enemy doesn’t deserve mercy. This is war, lady. We’re trying to take back the planet.” He looked to Keo. “You should understand that. How long have you been fighting these assholes out here?”
“You sonofabitch,” Jordan said. “There are women and children in those towns!”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” Jordan was almost screaming at him now. “What the hell does that mean?”
Gregson craned his head toward her, shouting back, “Bullshit, that’s what that means! They stopped being women and children the moment they agreed to become food for the skin meats! They’re just targets now!”
“You bastard…”
“Fuck off!”
Jordan reached for her gun as Gregson scrambled up from the ground, the two of them moving almost simultaneously. Keo beat them both to the punch by hitting Gregson in the side of the face with the stock of his M4, sending the tank driver collapsing back to the ground.
“Don’t,” Keo said, putting one hand over Jordan’s arm as she aimed her Glock at Gregson.
“Why the hell not?” Jordan asked, almost spitting the words out.
Why the hell not? Keo thought, realizing he didn’t really have a good answer for her. He had been worried he had just killed three U.S. Army soldiers earlier, but that turned out not to be the case. Gregson and his friends were something else entirely. Something that was either bad news or very bad news. He still hadn’t decided yet.
He pushed Jordan’s gun hand down. She resisted at first—he could see the defiance in her eyes, how badly she wanted to pull the trigger—but eventually relented.
“Why not?” she asked again, staring back at him. “You heard what he did. He killed God knows how many people back there. There are pregnant women and children in all those towns, Keo. He slaughtered pregnant women.”
“They were the enemy,” Gregson said softly. He had pushed himself back up to a sitting position against the tank and was wiping his bloody mouth with his shirt. “They made their choice, now they have to pay for it. This is just the beginning. If you thought yesterday was bloody, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He grinned at them; it was a grotesque sight with his teeth covered in blood. “Mercer’s got plans. Big plans.”
“What was it called?” Keo asked him.
“What?” Gregson said.
“The town you were assigned to attack.”
“T-something. Benoit knew the exact name, but one town sounds the same as all the others to me. T-this, T-that.”
“Was it T18?”
Gregson shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Benoit.” He glanced over at the first uniformed body Keo had shot. The man lay on his stomach among the blackened grass a few meters away, the back of his bald head reflecting the bright sun. “Oh, I guess you can’t.”
“I guess not,” Keo said.
He drew his Glock a second time and shot Gregson in the right thigh.
“Shit!” Gregson shouted, falling sideways to the ground while clutching his leg. “What’d you do that for?”
Keo ignored him and looked at Jordan. She was staring at Gregson, the hate from a few seconds ago mostly gone from her face, replaced by something that looked almost like sympathy.
“Why didn’t you let me shoot him?” she asked quietly.
“You’re a good person, Jordan,” Keo said. “I’m not.”
*
GREGSON WASN’T LYING about the tank being out of fuel. It was bone dry. They had also burned through their entire armory yesterday, including the flamethrower,
and were just left with small arms. Keo salvaged four AR-15 rifles and a can of ammo with 5.56 rounds, which would go a long way in backing up his M4’s dwindling magazine, though he was more grateful to find MREs and water bottles tucked inside two storage compartments. There was a pile of civilian clothes in the back, but they were splattered with blood from the two tankers Keo had shot through the hatch.
He collected the rifles and stuffed the water and food into a couple of tactical backpacks when he saw the edge of a brown paper sticking out of a pants pocket on one of the dead man. Keo tugged it out, then unfolded it.
It was a map of Texas, with black markers circling towns around the southeast part of the state. Not the big cities like Sunport or Galveston, or even Houston, but the smaller, surrounding ones. There were red X’s over some of them—about a dozen in all—but the rest were just circled.
“Shit,” he said under his breath when he recognized one of the towns that had been circled.
Wilmont. Or, as he had come to know it the last few weeks, T18.
Gillian. Pregnant Gillian.
He had left her behind with Jay because there was no other choice, and after the week he’d been through, he was convinced it was the right decision. But now…
Keo put everything down and concentrated on the map. One of the places with an X over it was marked as T22, and it was somewhere on the other side of Sunport.
What was that Gregson had said?
“We destroyed it. Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”
So what did that mean for T18, which was missing an X? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Or maybe as far as Gregson’s crew knew, T18 wasn’t their concern because it was someone else’s job.
A lot of maybes, and most of them bad.
So what else is new?
Footsteps, just before Jordan’s head appeared in the opening above him. “Find anything useful?”
“Just one,” he said, and handed the map up to her.
Jordan sat on the turret, put the map in her lap, and looked at it for a moment. “What am I looking at? What do the X’s stand for?”
“Targets.”
“Oh.” She paused for a moment, then, “They have T18 circled, but not X’ed out.” She looked down through the opening at him. “Gillian.”
“Yeah,” he said, and climbed up with the rifles and backpacks.
He settled on the turret and glanced around him. The difference between the charred fields and the white sand of the beach on the other side was startling. Keo collected his thoughts and considered his options.
He had guns, ammo, and now, extra food and water. He could see himself spending a few more months down here in peace. Even if Lara never showed up with the Trident—and there was no reason for them to, without further contact from him—he could be satisfied. Even more so, if Jordan decided to stay behind, too.
It wouldn’t be such a bad life—or however long he had left. Not bad at all.
“What about Gillian?” Jordan asked, bringing him back. “What if T18 is next on the list?”
He didn’t answer her.
“Keo, we have to go back for her. She’s our friend.”
“I tried that, Jordan. We both tried that. Remember?”
“Things are different now. There are tanks rampaging through towns. Gillian doesn’t know that. She stayed because she thought her baby would be safer in T18. Well, it’s not. Not anymore.”
It’s not my problem, he thought, but didn’t say it.
“Keo,” Jordan said.
“She’s still safer with Jay,” he said. “Especially now that the towns know they’re being hit. They’ll take more precautions, put up proper defenses. Protecting their doctors will be top priority.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“It’s what I would do, and I’m just a shooter. The guys running these places are smarter than me. You saw the setup they had back there. It’s like that everywhere.”
Jordan didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if she had given up trying to convince him. She looked past him instead, at the ocean on the other side of the burnt field. Wind blew her short blonde hair into her eyes, and she had to brush it aside.
They sat in silence for the longest time, but of course, it didn’t last.
“So when you are going back for her?” Jordan finally asked.
He sighed, staring out at the impossibly blue Gulf of Mexico. “As soon as I find a working vehicle.”
He didn’t see it, but he thought he could feel her smiling triumphantly behind him.
“Shut up,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t the world’s biggest idiot (maybe just Texas’s), when a small black dot appeared against the water’s surface in the distance. He stared at it for a moment, wondering if he was seeing things, but that couldn’t have been it, because the object was definitely getting bigger…as it got closer.
“Is that…?” Jordan said.
“Yeah,” he nodded, reaching for a rifle. “That’s a boat heading this way.”
CHAPTER 16
LARA
“YOU LOOK LIKE shit, Keo,” Maddie said. “I mean, no offense, but compared to when we last saw you, it looked like you got caught in a combine.”
“He was definitely handsomer the last time we saw him,” Bonnie chimed in.
“I don’t know, scars give a man character.”
“Yeah? Then Keo went and got himself a big ass load of character.”
Keo smirked at the two women. “Nice to see you guys, too. Especially you, Bonnie.”
Bonnie rolled her eyes at him. “Give it a rest. I gave you plenty of chances when you were on the Trident.”
“What can I say. I’m an idiot.”
“Won’t get any arguments from me.”
Bonnie glanced past Keo to the woman standing on the road behind him. She was holding a rifle, with another one slung over her back, and looked as if she was waiting for some kind of signal that everything was okay. Keo did that now, turning and waving, then slung his own weapon. The woman nodded back but didn’t come over.
“Is that her?” Bonnie asked. “The one you kept turning me down for?”
“That’s Jordan,” Keo said. “Things didn’t work out with Gillian. Long story.”
“Must be.”
“What did happen to your face?” Lara asked.
“That’s part of the long story.”
“I guess we’re going to be here awhile,” Maddie said. She looked over at Lara. “Where do you want us, boss?”
“Stay close,” Lara said. When Maddie had started back toward the boat they had arrived ashore in, she said to Bonnie, “Keo’s friend has the right idea. We don’t want anyone sneaking up on us. Coming here was risky enough; let’s not push our luck.”
Bonnie nodded, then said to Keo, “Don’t be a stranger,” before heading up the beach with her M4.
Lara noticed that the ex-model walked a bit wobbly at first and was slowly adjusting with every step. The result of living on the Trident for so long, she thought; they had all become used to the boat’s movements. She wondered if she looked that odd. Maddie, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems re-familiarizing herself with walking on land.
She glanced around them again, unable to fully shake the paranoia. The place had looked deserted when they were on approach, but after last night, she wasn’t willing to just accept anything at face value. These days, ambushes were easy to come by and harder to spot from a distance, and God knew you could hear a motor coming for miles if you had ears.
“Yachting accident?” Keo asked, looking at her bandaged arm.
“Something like that.”
With Bonnie now watchin
g the road, Keo’s friend walked down the beach toward them. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, and younger than Lara by at least a few years.
The woman stuck out her hand. “You must be Lara. Keo has told me a lot about you.”
Lara shook her hand. “All good, I hope.”
“Eh.”
They exchanged a brief, easy smile.
“We were afraid you might have left when I didn’t radio in yesterday,” Keo said.
“I should have, especially after the fireworks show last night. You wanna fill me in on what happened? I guess I should have known you would be right in the middle of it.”
“Long story.”
“Of course it is.”
“Where’s the tugboat?”
“It’s out there somewhere.”
“Who’s captaining it?”
“Blaine.”
“What happened to el capitan?”
“He’s been dealt with.”
“Hunh.”
“Yeah.”
He fixed her with a long look. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed or disturbed. Keo had never been particularly easy to read, and the weeks they’d spent on the Trident together hadn’t helped her understand him any better. Then again, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a lot on her mind at the time. Or still did.
“Didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.
“He didn’t give me much of a choice.” Then, because she didn’t want him to ask any more questions about Gage, “So, where is it? The last time I saw one in person, it was in a museum and I was ten.”
“You know about that?”
“Impossible not to. Woke me up from this,” she said, holding up her left arm.
“This way.” Keo turned around, and with Jordan, led her up the beach.
“Was it them?” Lara asked.
“Depends on who you mean by ‘them,’” Keo said.
“The U.S. Army.”
“Then no.”
“Dammit.”
“You were hoping, too?” Jordan asked, looking back at her.
Lara nodded and told her about Beecher, a colonel who was in charge of a few thousand soldiers and civilians somewhere in Colorado. “That’s the only remnants of the U.S. Army I know of, and I got the sense they were barely surviving up there.”
“What about the Navy?”