by Sam Sisavath
“We’re going to take the truck,” Gaby said. “If you have something in there that you want to keep, speak up now.”
“Aren’t you generous,” Danny said.
“We’re already taking her truck; might as well let her keep whatever we don’t need.”
“We should hurry up and go, guys,” Nate said, walking over to them. “No telling who might have heard that gunshot.”
“Alice,” the girl said.
“Alice?” Danny repeated.
“Alice, come out,” the girl said. She wasn’t talking to them.
Danny backed up as the driver-side passenger door opened and a small figure scrambled out in jeans and boots. Both articles of clothing looked about a couple of sizes too large for her, but they were cinched in place by a belt. She had big brown eyes and looked nervously from Danny to Gaby before running over and grabbing the bigger girl around the waist.
“Well, damn,” Danny sighed.
CHAPTER 18
KEO
“YOU THINK SHE bought it?” Jordan asked, watching the boat as it faded into the distance. In a few seconds, they wouldn’t be able to tell there were three heavily-armed women in a tender out there in the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.
You should be on that boat too, pal. So why aren’t you?
“Bought what?” he said.
“About Frank.”
“It’s the truth.”
“But not the whole truth.”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
“I thought she’d, I don’t know, press you more on him.”
“She’s got a lot on her mind, and when you’ve been through as much as she has, you learn to prioritize. The better question is, why aren’t you on that boat with Lara heading back to the Trident?”
“Are we going through this again?”
She sounded exasperated, though he couldn’t understand why. He had offered her a chance at probably the best thing that was going to come around in a long time—space on the Trident, out there somewhere, safe from all this madness—and she’d turned it down.
Just like you did. So who’s the bigger idiot?
Probably a tie…
“Gillian’s my friend,” Jordan said. “I have a lot of friends back in T18. I’m not going to stand by and watch them get massacred by Mercer. Not if I can do something about it.”
“I’m just going back for Gillian and no one else, Jordan.”
“There’s nothing that says we have to stay tied at the hips when we get there. You go do your thing, and I’ll do mine.” She turned around and began walking up the beach, back to the road. “You coming?”
He sighed, then turned to follow her. “What about Tobias?”
“What about him?”
“You know where he is right now?”
“The backup location. He should still be there, unless something’s happened.” She glanced back at him. “You want to ask him for help,” she added. It wasn’t a question.
He nodded. “Unless he’s still licking his wounds, then we could use a few more guns. Or a dozen.”
“So it’s ‘we’ now?”
“If you insist on sticking around, we should at least do this together. Strength in numbers, and all that. Will he help?”
She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will. I can’t see him sitting by and letting Mercer’s people run a tank through T18. Not after everything he—we—went through to save them.”
“We’ll need a vehicle. Can’t walk all the way back to League City. Well, we can, but I’d prefer not to.”
“Too bad the tank’s out of fuel. Maybe you can push it and I’ll steer.”
“What am I, the Hulk?”
“I thought you didn’t read comic books.”
“I don’t, but everyone knows the Hulk. Big green guy with ripped short-shorts.”
“Close,” she chuckled. “Anyway, if you don’t wanna push me, maybe you can carry me. Let me ride piggyback.”
“Only if we take turns.”
She gave him a brief smile, and he returned it.
“I like this better,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“When you’re not being an asshole.”
“When was I ever an asshole?”
“About half the time you open your mouth.”
He snorted and got another grin from her.
“You really think he’s still out there?” Jordan asked as they stepped up onto the road. She didn’t have to say who “he” was. “Tell me the truth.”
“I don’t know.”
“You sounded pretty confident with Lara. I almost believed you.”
“I guess I’m getting better at lying.”
“How was it supposed to work, anyway? You were just going to introduce Frank to her? ‘Hey, Lara, this is Frank. Frank, this is Lara. You kids chat.’ And what, she wouldn’t ask any of the obvious questions, like why she’s talking to a ghoul?”
“Funny, that’s what I asked him the last time we were together in Sunport.”
“What did he say?”
Keo shrugged. “I got the sense he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or if he had, he didn’t feel like telling me.”
*
THERE WERE TWO trucks, both Ford F-150s, which at this point Keo was sure was as ubiquitous to Texas as dickheads with guns trying to kill him. The vehicles were white and tan, both covered in dirt and mud, looking well-used. They were moving on large tires that chewed up the highway at a steady pace toward the beach.
He was expecting some kind of military hardware on display, but no, there were just two guys in the back of each truck, with two more inside. He couldn’t make out faces at this distance, even looking through a pair of binoculars he’d gotten from Gregson’s tank, but he could see just enough to know they were wearing black long-sleeve uniforms.
Collaborators.
He lay flat on his stomach in the fields, ten meters from the road. This part of the beach still had tall, swaying grass that was untouched by the tank’s flamethrower. Somewhere on the other side of the two-lane road was Jordan, waiting for his signal.
“Full-auto,” he said into the radio now, not bothering to whisper because the trucks were still too far away to overhear. The radios, like the binoculars and the spare ammo he had on him, were salvaged from the tank.
“Spray and pray?” Jordan said through the radio. He thought he detected a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Hopefully throw a little aiming in there, too. I’ll take the first truck, and you concentrate on the second one. Shoot anything that moves.”
She didn’t answer that time.
“Jordan,” he said. “Shoot anything that moves. We only need one working vehicle. Take out the two in the back first. Don’t stop shooting until they both go down. Then focus on the ones inside. Got it?”
“Got it,” she said.
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Jordan…”
“This isn’t my first rodeo, Keo,” she said, sounding slightly annoyed. “I was outside T18, running around with Tobias for months before you showed up. I can handle this.”
“I know you can,” he said, hoping it was at least convincing.
The collaborators charging toward him now had already seen the Abrams parked out there under the sun behind him. It was hard to miss, surrounded by barren earth charred black by fire. The trucks hadn’t left the road yet, so he guessed they were approaching the situation with caution, maybe a little bit afraid that cannon was still operational. Playing back what Gregson had said in his mind, Keo wondered if these incoming threats were part of the group that had fought with the tank yesterday and were just now showing up to finish what their ghoul allies had failed to do last night.
“We overshot our mark yesterday,” Gregson had said, “ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes.”
He lowered the binoculars and laid it next to his pack, which had begu
n to tremble slightly as the vehicles neared. The four in the truck beds were peeking over the cabs, but they clearly only had eyes for the tank parked out there in the field, which was exactly what he was hoping for.
He picked up the M4 and focused on the first truck—the white one—as it sped toward him.
Fifty meters…
Forty…
He could make out the two figures inside the cab now. Both men—one had a bright red beard and the other looked bald.
Thirty meters…
The two in the back looked nervous. Both men. Twenties. The lack of a machine gun mounted in front of them did wonders for Keo’s confidence. The last thing he wanted was to go head-to-head with a technical.
Twenty meters…
He smelled overworked tires and leaking fluid, both indications the vehicles had been on the road for some time now. He wondered how many other collaborators were running around out there, trying to deal with Mercer’s encroachment.
Ten meters!
Keo shoved every other thought away, popped up onto one knee, and looked through the red dot sight at the front windshield of the white truck. He pulled the trigger and stitched the glass from right to left, starting with the driver before picking up the front passenger, and didn’t stop shooting until the truck swerved as the man behind the steering wheel did exactly what Keo expected—he slammed on the brake instead of trying to drive through the gunfire.
The first F-150 was already skidding when Keo heard the pop-pop-pop of Jordan’s rifle from the other side of the road. Keo concentrated on his target as it came to a stop, presenting its backside to him—along with the two uniformed men scrambling around in the truck bed. They were picking themselves up, having tumbled off their feet sometime during the chaos.
Keo flicked his fire selector to semi-auto and shot the first soldier in the chest as he was rising, an AK-47 clutched clumsily in one hand. The man disappeared behind the closed tailgate, while the second one—younger than Keo had first thought; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen—was spinning around, face frozen in shock, just before Keo put two rounds into the largest part of him.
Meanwhile, the tan truck had done the exact same thing as the white one—its driver had hit the brakes when he saw the lead vehicle skidding in front of him. It always amazed Keo how poorly civilians reacted to being shot at.
He was already on his feet and racing through the grass, while at the same time angling his way back toward the highway. Jordan had continued firing, her rifle slamming round after round toward the second truck. Keo had a fresh magazine in his M4 before he was within sight of the driver, who was still alive and had spotted Keo as he stepped onto the road.
Keo put two fresh bullets into the windshield, directly over the spot where the driver was. The man twitched and must have stepped on the gas, because the truck lurched forward and barreled through the fields and kept going for a good thirty meters before finally slowing down on the other side.
He ignored the runaway truck and focused on the tan one still parked on the road in front of him. Fresh blood was splashed across the windshield, blocking his view of the passenger, but he could see the other driver just fine. The man had already opened his car door and was standing outside with his rifle, shooting over the truck bed at Jordan’s position.
Keo jogged up the road, and he was within thirty meters before the man finally heard his approach and turned around. Keo shot him through the open driver-side door window and watched the man drop to the pavement.
The man was still alive when Keo reached him, though he had dropped his rifle and was in the process of reaching for his sidearm. Keo shot him in the chest, and the man stopped moving.
“Jordan!” he shouted.
“I’m good!” she shouted back.
He hurried to the back and looked into the truck bed. There was just one body—a young woman with a blonde ponytail—lying on her back in a pool of blood, staring up at him. She was clutching her stomach with both hands, blood pumping through dirt-covered fingers as she struggled to keep breathing. For a moment he thought it was Gaby, but the cheekbones were too sharp and the nose a little too flat.
Another body lay on the highway behind the vehicle where it had fallen. A man in his thirties, his face pressed into the hot pavement.
“Clear!” Keo shouted.
Jordan picked herself up and jogged over. “You okay?” she asked.
“I’m good,” he said. “You?”
“I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo.”
“Noted.”
When she reached the truck, Jordan looked into the back and saw the girl, and her face paled. Maybe this wasn’t her first rodeo, but seeing your victim up close was a different animal than shooting them from a distance while looking from behind a rifle.
“Check the other truck, just in case,” Keo said.
She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Instead, she gave the girl another look, then turned and hurried over to the white Ford parked in the grass halfway to the beach.
Keo turned back to the woman. She was still alive, if just barely. The bullet had hit her in the stomach and it didn’t matter how hard she held on; the blood wasn’t going to stop pouring out of her.
“Sorry,” Keo said, and slung his rifle and reached for his sidearm, but by the time he looked back up, the girl had stopped moving completely. She continued staring, wide-eyed, at the bright morning sun above her.
Keo put the handgun away and checked his watch: 10:16 A.M.
He glanced up the road, back at Sunport’s industrial buildings in the distance.
On the other side was T18…and Gillian.
*
“WHAT ABOUT GREGSON?” Jordan asked when they were back on the road in the tan Ford F-150, with the beach fading in the rearview mirror.
There was blood in the front passenger seat where Jordan had shot out the window the same time she killed the man next to it. To avoid sitting in the mess she had made, Jordan was in the backseat with the rest of their supplies, including the AR-15s he’d taken from the tank and everything they had managed to salvage from the other truck.
The driver of the vehicle had somehow managed to escape Jordan’s initial volley unscathed, until Keo killed him outside on the road, so Keo had the luxury of not sitting in someone’s blood as he drove. Not that he hadn’t done something like it before and had a feeling he’d have to do it again in the future.
“What about him?” Keo said.
“Even after everything he’s done, I don’t like the idea of leaving him out there.”
“You wanna go back and put him out of his misery?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I don’t like leaving him out there, hurt.”
“He’s getting what he’s got coming.”
“A lot of people can say the same about you.”
“And they’d be right.”
She was watching him curiously in the rearview mirror. “You really believe that?”
“Yeah,” he said without hesitation.
“I don’t.”
“That’s because you’re a good and decent human being, Jordan.”
“When did that become a bad thing?”
“About the same time the world ended.”
She didn’t answer, and instead looked out her window at the outskirts of Sunport rolling by. He couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through her mind at the moment. Maybe it was still Gregson, or the girl she had shot. Maybe both. Or she could be wishing she had left with Lara, like he had told her to.
“Any idea who’s taken over T18 after Steve didn’t come back from Santa Marie Island?” he asked.
Jordan thought about it for a moment. Then, “A few people come to mind, but no one stands out. Steve had that place on a pretty tight leash. I would have said Jack, but he’s dead, too.”
“What’s the protocol when one of the leaders get taken out
?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know how Steve got chosen in the first place.”
“Tobias never talked about it? Steve told me they used to be co-leaders.”
She shook her head. “He never did.”
“What about Gillian?”
“What about her?”
He grinned. “How do you think she’s going to react when I show back up there again?”
Jordan smiled back at him. “Gillian loves you, Keo.”
“She has a strange way of showing it.”
“Don’t blame her for what happened with Jay. We thought you were dead. It was worse for her. There were times when I didn’t think she’d make it. Not because she couldn’t physically, but because she didn’t want to.”
Keo didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet.
“In a lot of ways, that baby saved her life,” Jordan continued. “Don’t hate me, but she made the right decision. I don’t mean sleeping with Jay; I don’t know why she did that. I mean deciding to stay behind, even after you finally showed up.”
“I know,” he said.
And he did, which was why he was fully prepared to move on. The truth hurt, but it was undeniable. Gillian, in her current state, would have struggled to survive out here. Maybe if he had gotten her to the Trident, where Zoe could have helped with the pregnancy, but there was a lot of space between T18 and the Gulf of Mexico.
Besides, who was he kidding? Happy endings were for other people, not someone like him. He had come to accept that long ago, even though, for a short time there, he had almost managed to convince himself that he deserved one, too.
What an idiot. I guess we know better now, don’t we?
CHAPTER 19
LARA
“I CAN’T BELIEVE he didn’t come back with you,” Carly said, even before Lara had completely stepped inside the bridge of the Trident. “And after dragging our asses down here, too. You should have given him a swift kick in the balls for wasting our time.”
“He has his reasons,” Lara said.
“He always has his reasons. What were they this time?”