Crack! as something broke under his boots. A piece of glass.
He stopped for a moment to look around, the submachine gun at the ready, and the thought Thank God for silver bullets racing through his head.
When nothing jumped out of the dark at him, Keo continued toward the stairs, moving as quietly as he could while wearing heavy boots. Which was to say he wasn’t very quiet at all. Every step sounded like someone stomping wildly on wet bags filled with excrement. But maybe he was imagining that part.
A pool of moonlight shone across the steps to let him know he wasn’t the first person to head in this direction. And very recently, too. There were bloody boot prints on them, and from the look of it, someone was in a hurry, because the wearer was jumping up three steps at a time. In a hurry or running away from something.
Keo didn’t see any suggestions as to what that “something” could be. At least not until he’d taken the first step himself and turned slightly to get a better look at the rest of the stairs waiting for him.
There. More bloody prints, but these were bare feet alongside the booted ones.
A ghoul.
He’d guessed correctly: Whoever was in the window trying to get his attention had been chased up the second floor by a nightcrawler.
So maybe this isn’t a trap after all.
…unless that’s what they want me to think.
Keo shook his head. He couldn’t start second-guessing himself now. His entire existence had been about going with his gut. And right now, his gut told him someone on the second floor needed his help.
God, he hoped he was right. It was going to really suck if this was just another trick.
The building was old, and every time he put a boot down on the steps, it produced an impossibly loud creak. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that loud, but it sure as hell sounded awfully loud to his ears.
He couldn’t see the second floor from his current position, just below the halfway point. There was a turn in the stairway and too many shadows beyond the banisters. Keo couldn’t even make out the ceiling, much less the hallway or whatever else was waiting for him up there.
So how was he going to solve this little riddle? Sneaking up wasn’t going to work. He was making too much noise.
But there was one other option…
Keo gritted his teeth just before launching himself up the steps. He took the next two one by one before hopping two at a time and saw the banister coming up. He kept his hands on the submachine gun, the weapon in front of him the whole time and ready to shoot anything that popped out of the shadows. He just hoped that “anything” wasn’t the same person that had been trying to flag him down. That would be one more unnecessary death on a conscience that was getting heavier as the night wore on.
This fucking night will never be over!
Fortunately, no one emerged out of the darkness to startle him, so Keo didn’t shoot anyone as he rounded the top of the stairs and made it onto the second floor. The hallway split up into two directions, right and left. Each side had multiple doors with the two closest ones he could make out wide open, though they didn’t reveal a single damn thing within.
But of course they didn’t, because if they did, then this would be way too easy. And nothing about tonight had been easy.
Keo slid his half-mask partially down to take a sniff.
Oh yeah, there it was.
It was in the air—a foul odor that was hard to miss. It wasn’t just the familiar stink of abandonment, which almost every building he went into these days was brimming with, but something else, something unnatural.
There was a ghoul on the second floor.
He couldn’t tell how close it was from the stink, but it was here. Maybe it was in one of those rooms or another one that he couldn’t make out yet. Now that Keo had confirmed its presence, he pulled the half-mask back up.
Crash! as an unseen door smashed open from the very end of the hallway to his left!
Keo ran toward it, hoping he didn’t trip over something on the floor. He couldn’t see very much, but there was carpet under his boots. He passed one door, two—
A figure lunged out of the third door in front of him and rammed into the wall across the narrow hallway. The figure twisted around, something skinny and metal (Is that a pipe?) flickering in the shadows in its right hand.
Keo would have collided right with the silhouetted figure if he’d kept running, but fortunately he managed to stop in time and was about to open his mouth to shout either a warning or a threat—he had no idea what was going to come out—when a second shadow burst out of the open doorway and right at the first one.
“Get down!” Keo screamed.
The first figure dropped to the floor even as its head turned in his direction.
Keo fired three shots, striking the second figure as it was flying across the hallway. He had no idea how many of his rounds landed, but at least one did because the creature went limp while still in midair. Except its momentum carried it forward and into the first shadow, already crumpled on the floor.
“Oh God, oh God!” the figure screamed.
It was a woman’s voice, and she was desperately trying to throw the ghoul off her. It took a few tries before she managed to get a good enough hold on the lifeless corpse that had ended up draped all over her and push it off.
I know that voice.
The woman struggled up to her feet, her breath coming out in short and loud spurts. She turned, saw him, and jumped back while raising the metal rod in her hand.
“Whoa, whoa,” Keo said, taking a quick step back. He pulled down the half-mask while holding out one hand, palm up to shield himself from an incoming blow. “It’s me. Jackson! It’s me!”
Jackson didn’t let down her guard but did lean forward to get a better look at him. Hazel eyes flickered with recognition. “Jesus, you’re still alive.”
“You, too.”
“Barely,” Jackson said, even as she wiped at black liquid dripping from her face. Thick globs of the stuff clung to her right cheek and chin, and it was either the smell or just the sensation of having ghoul blood on her, but Jackson looked like she was about to vomit.
“You okay?” Keo asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Are you bleeding? Are you hurt?”
“No. No…”
“Are you sure? You don’t sound sure.”
“Yes. Yes...” She leaned back against the wall and looked down at the ghoul crumpled on the floor between them. “Is it dead?”
“I was using silver bullets.”
“But is it dead?”
Keo thought that was an odd question. His mention of “silver bullets” should have ended the conversation, but apparently it hadn’t.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” he said.
He crouched next to the body and poked at it with the submachine gun. The ghoul was bigger and longer than most, though that wasn’t saying much. It had nevertheless shrunk from its natural size, its bones becoming deformed like the rest when they were turned, but it had some remaining heft to it. That wouldn’t have lasted past the night, if it were alive.
Keo turned the creature over onto its back. It was naked, because ghouls didn’t need clothes, but sometimes you found one or two of them walking around with lingering articles of clothing on them that they couldn’t get rid of. Most of those were recently turned.
He glanced up at Jackson. The teenager hadn’t moved from the same spot and hadn’t looked away from the dead ghoul at her feet.
“You sure you’re okay?” Keo asked.
Jackson nodded but didn’t say anything. Keo couldn’t tell if she just didn’t have the words or she didn’t know what to say. And she kept staring down at the dead creature as if she couldn’t look away.
“What is it?” Keo asked.
“It’s Liz,” Jackson said. Her voice came out softly, as if she didn’t want to say it.
“What?”
“It’s Liz.”
“It�
�s Liz?”
Jackson nodded.
Keo was going to ask, “Are you sure?” when Jackson made an odd gurgling sound and bent over at the waist. Keo knew what was coming and shot back up to his feet and jumped back, but even so, Jackson still managed to get some vomit on the tips of his boots.
Sixteen
“You’re still alive.”
“So are you.”
“I thought you were dead. We both did.”
Keo didn’t have to ask who the we included. Jackson was talking about herself and Liz, who lay between them on the dirty carpeted floor of Edna’s B&B. Or what used to be Liz. That woman was long gone, replaced by a frail skeletal creature.
“How did you get away?” Jackson asked.
She sat across the hallway from him, her head hidden somewhere between her bent legs. She was flicking the lighter that she’d used to signal him on and off, on and off, and staring at the flame.
“I’m not sure,” Keo said. “I ran. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“How far did you get?”
“Not far enough. They caught up to me.”
“But you survived.”
“Barely.”
“But you survived.”
Keo nodded, and thought, I guess that’s the goal these days. Survive at all costs.
He thought about telling her about Carter, how he’d found the teenager purely by accident at the Deuces…only to lose her to a stray bullet. Was there anything to be gained from revealing that information, though? Jackson had already lost Sharon and Liz, not to mention all the others before that. If this entire night had gone badly for him, it was doubly—Twice? Infinitely?—worse for her.
Keo said, “There are slayers a couple blocks from here. They were the ones who took care of the ghouls for us.”
“Slayers?” Jackson said, raising her head. “I heard shooting out there before, but I wasn’t sure who it was. It sounded bad.”
“The slayers knew what they were doing.”
“I guess they would. It’s their job.”
“Yeah.”
“How did Liz get bitten?” Keo wanted to ask but didn’t.
As with Carter, what did it matter how Liz had been turned? The fact was that she had, and now lay between them. Knowing the hows of it wasn’t going to change anything.
“What are you going to do now?” Keo asked.
“I don’t know,” Jackson said.
“You could join the slayers.”
“Why would I do that? I’m not one of them.”
“But you could stick with them for a while. It’ll be a lot safer in their company.”
“I’ve met slayers before. They’re too…” She seemed to struggle to find the right words. Finally, she just shook her head. “I don’t know how to say it. I just never felt right around them. I mean, I don’t like ghouls; none of us do. But the slayers, they really don’t like them.”
You wouldn’t too if you were fed on and kept alive by the bastards, just so they could keep feeding on you.
He knew what really drove slayers, but maybe Jackson didn’t. It wouldn’t surprise him. Not everyone understood the full magnitude of what had happened to the human race during the yearlong Purge. Keo did, but he’d been in the thick of it, fighting with Black Tide up to the very end.
He said, “Well, you can’t just walk around out there by yourself. It’s too dangerous.”
“It’ll be morning soon,” she said. “I’ll be okay then.”
Keo glanced down at his watch.
10:58 p.m.
“It’s not going to be morning for a long time,” he said.
“You said it yourself; the slayers killed all the ghouls.”
“Not all of them.”
“How many are left?”
Keo looked across the small space at her. “There’s one out there that I know for sure of. A blue-eyed ghoul. The slayers are hunting it right now.”
Jackson stopped playing with the lighter and lifted her head. Even in the semidarkness, Keo saw the change come over her face. “A blue eyes. Just like you guys were talking about earlier. You thought there was one out there, calling the shots.”
“Turns out we were right.”
“Oh God,” Jackson said, and wrapped her arms around her bent legs.
Keo didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did Jackson. They were content to sit in silence with Liz between them. The corpse didn’t smell as much as ghouls normally did; Keo passed that off to Liz’s recent transformation. Her body hadn’t gotten the chance to rot yet. Then again, it could very well be that it was Liz and not just some random ghoul, and that made all the difference.
Jackson untangled her arms from around her knees to continue cleaning her face with Keo’s half-mask. He’d given it to the teenager because neither one of them had anything else for her to wipe away the blood on her face with. There was more on her clothes, but she ignored it. They didn’t have any water, so she’d had to make do with spit, but that wasn’t going to clean everything off. That was the problem with ghouls—no matter what you did, you could never completely get rid of them.
Eventually, Keo picked himself up from the floor. “I gotta go, kid. But you can’t stay in this city on your own. The way I see it, you have two options: Come with me or join the slayers. What’s it gonna be?”
Jackson looked up at him but didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to decide if his continued company was better than the slayers’, or if something else was going through her mind.
“Make a choice,” Keo said, glancing down at his watch for effect, even though he’d already done it a minute earlier and knew exactly what time it was.
Jackson did, standing up alongside him after picking up the metal rod she’d been using as a weapon. It was the same one from the lobby of the office where they’d been hiding out in earlier. Jackson had grabbed it while she was fleeing the ghoul, and only after she’d run out of every bullet and lost her knife. God only knew how long she and the creature had been playing hide-and-seek through the backstreets of Paxton. Keo didn’t feel like making the kid relive what was clearly a mentally and physically painful ordeal, so he hadn’t asked for details.
“Where are we going?” Jackson asked.
I guess that means she’s coming with me, Keo thought as he turned and walked down the hallway toward the stairs, with Jackson following closely behind.
He said, “Home.”
“Where’s home?”
“A ranch about twenty kilometers from here. I’m staying there with a couple of people.”
“Why did you leave in the first place?”
“I was doing a supply run.” Keo patted the pack strapped to his back. “This.”
“Is that what you were looking for earlier?”
“Uh huh.”
“How’d you find it?”
They went down the stairs, the same steps creaking even more loudly underneath his boots now that he wasn’t attempting to tiptoe. But since he wasn’t trying to creep up on someone this time, Keo didn’t care as much.
“Luck,” Keo said. “Once we reach the ranch, you can decide if you want to stay with us or not.”
“Okay,” Jackson said.
Keo stopped and looked back at her, standing on a couple of steps behind and slightly above him. “You sure you’re okay? If you’re hurt, I have some Tramadol.”
“What’s that?”
“Painkillers.”
“Oh.” Jackson pursed a smile. “I’m okay,” she said, but he didn’t believe her for a second. At least, he didn’t think she was anything close to being mentally “okay.”
He continued down.
“Keo,” Jackson said.
“Yeah?”
“You want your mask thing back?”
“Um, no,” Keo said, thinking about how much ghoul blood and vomit was already on that thing.
“You have guns again,” Jackson said when they stepped out of Edna’s and onto the si
dewalk.
Keo had reflexively taken a quick glance up the street toward Deuces to see if anything had changed since the last time he was outside. There were no gunshots or screams, so he relaxed a bit as he and Jackson turned toward the other end of town.
“The slayers,” Keo said. “They had more guns than they knew what to do with them.” He took out the Glock and handed it to her. “Here.”
“What about you?”
Keo patted the revolver. “I have this.” Then, doing the same to the MP5, “And this.”
Jackson put the Glock into her empty hip holster. Keo also passed along the two magazines for the pistol.
“Silver bullets?” Jackson asked.
“Uh huh.”
“Good.”
He looked down at the rod she had put into her waist belt. “What happened to your knife?”
“I lost it.”
He was going to ask How? but decided that it didn’t matter. Besides, it probably involved her running or fighting the thing that used to be Liz.
They walked in silence for a while, content to let their footsteps be the only sounds up and down the empty streets. Paxton wasn’t nearly as frightening now without ghouls jumping out of the darkness. It felt almost peaceful.
Until it’s not.
So he kept his eyes open and his ears listening, and reminded himself that there was still a blue-eyed ghoul out there, somewhere. He wondered if Martin and the slayers had caught up to the creature yet. Maybe he should have asked for a spare radio, that way he could monitor their progress. But he hadn’t, so that was a moot point.
“What’s in the bag?” Jackson asked finally.
Keo smiled. He’d been waiting for the question and was surprised it had taken her so long. “Medical stuff.”
“What kind of medical stuff?”
Road to Babylon (Book 8): Daybreak Page 15