by Sam Sisavath
“He had someone with him named Frank that he wanted me to meet. Or this Frank wanted to meet me. I’m not sure which.”
“Frank?” Carly said. “What a stupid name. Sounds like an out of work porno actor.”
“You know a lot about that?” Blaine asked from his usual position behind the yacht’s controls.
“Hey, I had cable TV, just like everyone else. Scrambled, sure, but you can still see stuff if you look at it at just the right angles.”
“Makes sense to me,” Blaine said. He glanced back at Lara: “Maybe this Frank heard one of your radio messages and wanted to meet the woman behind it. Like it or not, you’re pretty popular these days.”
“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe that could even be remotely true. Nothing Keo had told her about this Frank made him sound like a “fan.” Besides, just the thought of someone out there going through all this trouble just to “meet” her was…unsettling.
What was that Keo had said about Frank?
“He had information about the ghouls. How they operate, their chain of command, all the nitty-gritty stuff. He also said he knew how to beat them.”
She looked at Carly and Blaine, then at the wide-open and calm ocean outside the windshield behind them. What good was Frank’s information to her, even if it was true? Or to Vera and Elise, and all the others onboard the Trident at the moment? She couldn’t think of a single thing.
We should have gone straight to the Bengal Islands, Will. You would have taken us there, wouldn’t you? You would have done the right thing. The smart thing. You always did.
“It’s a moot point anyway, because he wasn’t there,” Lara said. “They got separated two nights ago. Keo says he’s still alive, but I’m not sure he actually believes it.”
“So that’s why he didn’t radio in,” Carly said. “A lot of people are losing their radios these days…”
Lara put a hand on Carly’s arm and they exchanged a brief, private smile. It was a rare occasion to see Carly so somber, and Lara thought she needed the support, even if it was just a simple touch. God knew Carly had done so much more for her over the last few weeks.
“So what did happen over there last night?” Blaine asked. He was, thankfully, oblivious to the private moment taking place behind him. “If Keo was on that beach, that means he was either involved or he saw what went down.”
“A little of both,” Lara said.
“Why am I not surprised?” Carly said.
Lara told them about Gregson and Mercer, about the tank, the destruction it had caused including the scorched fields and the cemetery of bones, and what Gregson and Keo had told her was happening out there in the rest of Texas.
“Damn,” Carly said when Lara was done. “Sounds like a party I’m glad no one invited me to.” She might have even shivered a bit. “They have that kind of firepower?”
“I saw the tank with my own eyes,” Lara said. “I don’t have any reason to disbelieve this Gregson.”
“People lie, Lara.”
“I don’t think Gregson was lying. He didn’t have any reasons to at the time.”
“But they’re definitely not the U.S. Army?” Blaine asked.
“No,” Lara said. “Far from it. They’re dangerous. That’s why we should steer as far away from them as we can. And that means staying the hell away from the coast unless we absolutely have to.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
“So what about Keo?” Carly asked. “He’s gone for good this time?”
“I think so, yeah,” Lara nodded.
“Too bad. Carrie was really looking forward to having him back onboard. You told her yet?”
“I didn’t see her on my way here, but Bonnie said she’d talk to her. Were they ever involved? Keo and Carrie?”
“I don’t think so. From what she’s told me, he was stuck on this Gillian chick twenty-four seven. But not anymore, I take it.”
“I guess it’s complicated.”
“It’s Keo, so why wouldn’t it be?”
“There was another woman on the beach with him. Her name was Jordan.”
“That guy works fast,” Blaine chuckled.
“Let the man have his distractions,” Carly said. “I’m a little—okay, a lot—annoyed with him for bringing us down here, but the guy’s done a lot for us. He deserves a little tail.”
Lara smiled, remembering how clueless Keo had been when she mentioned that Jordan probably wouldn’t be leaving with her. Then, later, when Jordan confirmed it, the numbers still didn’t seemed to have computed for Keo.
I guess he really is still stuck on Gillian, she remembered thinking.
“So what’s the order, boss?” Blaine asked.
“How are we for fuel?” Lara asked.
Blaine glanced down at the monitor in front of him. “I’m not gonna lie; we’re running low. We’ll be running on reserves soon, but it’s enough to get us back to Port Arthur and hit another one of the refueling depots on Gage’s list.”
Carly looked at Lara, and she was almost pleading. “Tell me we’re going back.”
“We are,” Lara said. To Blaine: “Pull up anchor and take us back.”
“Thank Jesus Lord,” Carly said, not even trying to hide the relief on her face.
“What about the fuel situation?” Blaine asked.
“One problem at a time,” Lara said.
Carly walked over and casually draped one arm over Blaine’s shoulder. “Boss lady’s spoken. Port Arthur or bust, el chauffeuro. Is that how you say chauffeur in Spanish?”
Blaine grunted. “Close enough.”
*
“TOO BAD ABOUT Keo,” Carly said as she walked Lara back to her cabin. “We could have really used him, especially now with stupid Danny still running around out there, refusing to pick up my phone calls.”
“He’ll be fine,” Lara said. “He’s got Gaby and Nate to watch his back.”
“Gaby, yes. Nate? I’m not so sure.”
“Is it the haircut?”
“What else? I gotta get Gaby to convince him to cut it. She could tell that boy to jump into the ocean and wrestle a shark, and he’d do it.”
“Guys will do anything for a pretty girl, I guess.”
“How do you think I’d been paying the bills before the world went kaput?”
“No details, please.”
“Your loss.”
They entered her cabin and Lara unclasped her gun belt and tossed it on the small bed, then went to a small fridge in the corner and took out a bottle of water. She walked over to her bed and sat down, opened the nightstand, and took out one of Zoe’s bottles. She shook out two of the painkillers and downed them with the water.
“Arm giving you trouble?” Carly asked.
“It’s manageable.”
“You sure?”
“It itches more than it hurts.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“The pills help.”
Carly caressed one side of her neck. “At least some dumb bitch didn’t shoot you in the neck.”
Lara smiled. “I was lucky. Gage could have done a lot more damage.”
“It’s funny,” Carly said.
“What’s that?”
“I think he actually thought we’d forget about all the shit he’d done, or was planning to do to the island.” Carly looked thoughtful while staring across the room at the window. “Funny the things people manage to convince themselves.”
“Danny will come back, Carly,” Lara said. “He’ll contact us when he gets the chance.”
“But…”
“But nothing.”
Carly narrowed her eyes at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I told you everything.”
“No, you haven’t.” She didn’t take her eyes away. “Tell me, Lara. What did you learn out there that you’re not telling me now?”
Lara sighed. “Mercer.”
“What about him?”
“I told you his people are attacking
the towns.”
Carly nodded.
“One of them was a place called T29,” Lara continued. “It’s between Hellion and Starch.”
“Hellion,” Carly said. “That’s where Danny and Gaby were the day before their last call-in. The place where they ran into some trouble.”
“Yeah.”
Carly paused, maybe processing the information, or maybe she already knew and was too afraid to know more.
“Tell me the rest,” her friend said anyway.
“There’s a chance the expedition might have run across T29 on their way to Starch. I don’t know. But it’s Danny…”
“Yeah, it’s Danny,” Carly said quietly.
“He’ll be fine, Carly.”
“I know,” the redhead said, smiling back at her. “Besides, he promised me he’d come back and he knows I’d kick his ass if he didn’t keep it.”
Lara gave her friend a pursed smile, wondering to herself how many times she had told herself that exact same thing about Will…
*
HER RADIO ON the nightstand squawked sometime later. When she opened her eyes, it was still daylight and there were no signs of Carly, who had stayed behind for another hour to talk and who was still talking when the pills kicked in and Lara drifted off to sleep.
“Lara, you awake?” Blaine said through the radio.
She rolled over and snatched the radio, then pressed the transmit lever.
Is it Will? she wanted to say, but instead, the words that came out were, “Is it Danny?”
“No, sorry,” Blaine said.
Goddammit, Danny. First Will, now you. You goddamn Rangers.
“What’s going on?” she asked, sitting up on the bed. Her head was pounding and she made a mental note to talk to Zoe about switching meds to something less…torturous.
“We need you on the bridge.”
“Are we there already?”
“We’re not even close. There’s something else.”
“I’m on my way,” she said, and climbed out of bed, grimacing when she accidentally reached down to push up with her left arm without thinking.
She grabbed her gun belt and clasped it into place. With the radio in hand, she headed out into the hallway. Turned right and walked the short distance to the bridge on the other end.
The door was open and Carly and Blaine were already inside, surrounded by sunlight. She was surprised to see that it was still afternoon, which meant she hadn’t slept more than a few hours at the most.
Carly looked over. “Hey, sleepyhead.”
“Sorry about dozing off on you.”
“Eh, I liked talking to myself better anyway.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“Four hours, give or take.”
“You should have woken me sooner.”
“No point, until now.”
She looked out the front windshield, expecting to see something that didn’t belong, but there was just the familiar blue waters staring back at her. “What am I looking at?”
“Someone wants you,” Carly said, and pressed one of the many buttons along the curved boat console.
Lara didn’t know what the button did until she heard a young woman’s voice slowly rising through the bridge’s speakers. It was slightly distorted—until Carly pressed something else and the voice cleared up.
“The scanner picked it up about thirty minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Normally I wouldn’t bother with the radio, but it can get pretty lonely up here by myself.”
Lara focused on the voice. “Is she live?”
“Oh yeah,” Carly said. “Poor girl’s been saying the same thing over and over since I showed up.”
Carly pressed the same button a few more times and the volume increased, the voice becoming clearer:
“…goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”
There was a brief pause, then the woman (girl) continued, this time from the beginning:
“This message goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”
Carly turned down the volume until Lara could barely hear the voice. Not that she really needed to. The girl was simply reading the same three sentences over and over.
“How do you know I’m the ‘Lara’ she’s looking for?” Lara asked.
Carly rolled her eyes. “Is there more than one Lara spreading the news on the radio that no one told me about? It’s you, girl.”
“She’s been repeating the same message for thirty minutes?”
“She took a break about ten minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Then she changed channel and repeated it. I wonder where she got that idea.”
“Yeah, we’re trailblazers, all right,” Carly said. “All the young’uns are following in our footsteps.” Carly smiled at her. “You’re mucho popular these days, kiddo. The first celebrity in the apocalypse, if you will. First, some guy gets Keo to call us down here just for a meet and greet, now there are people actually calling you on the radio. I’m kinda jealous.”
“They’re pretty smart,” Blaine said. “Whoever the ‘we’ is with her. They know we’re still broadcasting, so we’re likely to also be monitoring the frequencies.”
“Good for her,” Carly said, “but we’re not going to answer, are we?”
“She says they need our help. Your help, Lara. Desperately, apparently. Do we just ignore that?”
“Yes,” Carly said. She looked at Blaine, then at Lara. “Guys, come on. Did we forget what happened with Song Island? What that Karen bitch almost did to us? We don’t answer strange calls over the radio.”
“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t know about Beecher,” Blaine said. “Or that kid in Japan. Those guys in New York, Alaska…on and on.”
“But none of those people wanted something from us.” She focused on Lara. “This is a very bad idea. You have to see that.”
“She’s got a point,” Lara said.
Blaine nodded. “I guess.”
“Don’t guess, know,” Carly said. “We need to go back to Port Arthur. We should never have left in the first place, but I’ll accept it, because it’s Keo and God knows we owe K-pop like crazy. But we have to go back now. Tell me we’re going to ignore this and go back for Danny and Gaby. That’s what Will would do. You know that, Lara. He’d take care of his own first.”
Lara pursed her lips into a half-smile. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who was asking herself What would Will do? a lot these days.
“Lara?” Carly said.
“We keep going to Port Arthur, as planned,” Lara said. “We’ll pick up Danny and Gaby, refuel and resupply, and then we head south to the Bengal Islands.”
“Thank you,” Carly said.
“I should have done it a month ago. I’m sorry I waited so long.”
“Hey, better late than never.” Carly sighed with relief and hugged her (maybe a bit too tightly, and Lara winced a bit from a jolt of pain along her left arm), and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she whispered back.
Despite the radio’s lowered volume, Lara could still hear the girl’s voice coming through the bridge’s speakers, talking to her, asking her to make contact, desperately seeking her help. She did her best to shut it out and concentrated on the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico outside the window instead.
Somewhere out there was Danny, Gaby, and Nate, waiting for her to come pick them up, hoping they hadn’t been abandoned. She was the one who had sent them out there, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave them behind.
Not again. Not again…
CHAPTER 20
GABY
THE GIRL’S NAME was Taylor, and she was fifteen. Her sister, Alice, was eleven and reminded Gaby of Elise and Vera, but unlike those two, Alice was malnourished and her clothes hung off her body. Her big sister didn’t look any more well-fed, but that could have just bee
n the large man’s overalls and bad haircut. Which was to say, she probably cut her own hair and Alice’s in the year since the end of the world.
If Alice hadn’t come out of the truck, Gaby was pretty sure she, Danny, and Nate would have been on the road to Starch by now. Or maybe they would have even reached the town already. It was only sixty miles to the west of them, after all. Though with the collaborators likely on high alert after yesterday, maybe she was being too generous.
Instead, they were somewhere in the woods surrounding Larkin, waiting in the living room of a small cottage as Taylor carried a pile of rifles out from a back room while Alice dragged a raggedy backpack along the wooden floor after her.
“Someone must have been real nice, because I think Christmas just came early,” Danny said.
“You’d be surprised what you can find out there, just sitting around,” Taylor said. “You can take whatever you want. I don’t even know how to use most of them, and I’m a little scared to even try.”
She laid the weapons down on the heavily chipped wooden kitchen counter, and Gaby, Nate, and Danny walked over and formed a semicircle around it.
“That thing’s bigger than you,” Danny said to Alice.
The girl grunted back at him. Danny grinned and took the backpack from her and opened it, then pulled out unopened boxes of bullets and three handguns—two automatics, including a Glock, and a six-shot revolver.
“God bless Texas,” Danny said, and laid the handguns down next to the pile. “Dig in, kids.”
“You don’t want to keep any of these?” Nate asked Taylor.
The teenager shook her head. “I already have the hunting rifle.”
“She won’t let me have one,” Alice frowned.
“You’re too young.”
“Not anymore.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about this again.”
The younger sibling had a point, Gaby thought. They had all grown up fast these days. You had to, or you didn’t at all.
“Where’d you find them?” Nate asked.
“Mostly around town,” Taylor said. “We haven’t really strayed too far from Larkin. There are fish in the pond out back, so we’ve been able to keep going with the supplies we took from homes and stores nearby. There’s just the two of us, and we don’t really need a lot.”