…just like Gillian.
The people who had been cleaning the streets when he first showed up were now gone. Maybe they had moved on to the next subdivision, or maybe the work was done. He didn’t think so, though. A place this large, with this many streets and homes, had to have plenty of trash even without the trappings of what civilization once had to offer.
The sky above him had also gotten noticeably darker since the last time he was outside. Rain was definitely coming. And soon.
He had been walking for an hour and was still no closer to the front gate. He didn’t recognize any of the streets, mostly because they all looked identical. Had he taken a wrong turn somewhere? Or had he been walking in a straight line this entire time and missed a turn? Did Steve even make a turn—
Honk!
A car horn, so small that he thought it might have come from a toy, blared behind him.
Keo turned around as Jack drove up in a golf cart. It may or may not have been the same one in which his brother had driven Keo here a few hours ago. Keo’s mind was still too clouded from his visit with Gillian, and he couldn’t be sure one way or another.
The younger Miller stopped in the street next to him. “There you are. Someone said they saw a weirdo walking around the neighborhood. I thought it had to be you.”
Keo grunted. “I thought I had a few more hours until you picked me up.”
“Change of plans.” Jack patted the seat next to him. “Climb in. Steve wants to see you now.”
“What about?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“What is it about you Miller boys and surprises?”
Jack grinned. “Hey, if there weren’t surprises, life would be awfully dull.”
Keo climbed in and Jack drove them off.
He made a mental note of Jack’s gun belt and a revolver in the holster. It was similar to Steve’s setup.
Like brother…like brother.
He peeked out from under the cart’s roof at the slowly darkening horizon. It wasn’t just a sign of gathering precipitation, but night was also coming. A double whammy. His watch ticked to 4:56 p.m.
“What happens when it gets dark?” he asked.
“Everyone heads home at five.” Jack glanced at his own watch. “So, soon. I know what you’re thinking: ‘But what about rush hour traffic?’ Lucky you, I know how to avoid all of that.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“Oh, what’s the matter, sport? The reunion didn’t go as planned?”
Keo glanced over at him. “You knew.”
“That she was preggers? ’Fraid so. I’m the one who got her off the fields and brought her home for ya.”
“That was awfully nice of you.”
“She wanted to know why, but I didn’t tell her. I figured you’d like to do the honors. You can thank me later.”
“I’ll do that. Later.”
Jack laughed. “Perk up, sport. There’s plenty of women around. We did a survey last month. There are five women for every guy. Tell me you don’t like those odds. The best part? They don’t expect you to put a ring on it.”
The younger Miller was still very amused with himself as he drove, and it was all Keo could do not to reach over and snap his neck. It was tempting. It was so tempting, but he was still walking (or riding, now) in a fog, unsure of how to proceed.
He thought about Jordan, somewhere out there, and hoped she had found shelter for the night, because darkness was coming faster than normal today.
After exiting T18A1, Jack turned left and took Keo back through the agriculture fields for a second time. Keo watched the multiple—and seemingly endless—streams of people returning home. They were talking, laughing, and looking for all the world like they belonged here, that all their life had led to this moment.
“I’ll never forget what happened to them. But I can’t change the past, or dwell on it. I can’t afford to. I have to think about the future.”
Could he really settle here? Take what guys like Steve gave him and be happy with it? Maybe find a woman and have a kid. Or two kids. So what if his children were destined to become another cog in the ghoul machine? So what if the entire human race had been reduced to chattel? So what if all those months of fighting and killing and almost dying more times than he could count to get here, to reunite with Gillian, had all been for nothing?
So fucking what.
“Forget her,” Jack was saying. “Plenty of fish in the ocean. That ugly mug notwithstanding, you can do pretty good here, sport. I mean, look at me. I got a woman at home. She’s giving birth to twins in five months. Life’s good.”
“They leave you guys alone?” Keo asked. “The monsters?”
“We call them crawlers.”
“Why crawlers?”
“It’s…nicer. Plus, Steve’s orders. Don’t want to start calling the bosses monsters, right? Think about the meetings. How awkward would those be?”
“Hunh.”
“But yeah, they stay out of the town at night. Don’t ask why. One of the mysteries of the universe. It’s easier if you don’t think too much about it. Better for your sanity, especially at night.”
They finally reached the marina, and this time the gate was down and two of the four soldiers guarding the booth hurried out of the small building to raise it for them. Jack turned inside.
As they drove through the empty parking lot, there were noticeably fewer soldiers around than earlier in the day. He only saw two people walking back and forth on the docks, and about a half dozen more were heading toward the gate. It made sense for such a drastic drawdown of forces at night. What idiot would attack the town under the cover of darkness? For that matter, what moron would be outside, in those woods, when night fell?
Jack drove toward the office buildings, but instead of heading for Marina 1 as Keo had expected, the younger Miller turned left and parked in front of the large warehouse at the north end of the lot.
“What’s going on?” Keo asked.
“Find out inside,” Jack said.
They climbed out and Keo peeked up at the sky again. Just past five o’clock, but it already looked impossibly dark, thanks to the gathering clouds. He could almost taste the coming precipitation.
“Looks like it’s gonna be a long and rainy night,” Jack said. “We don’t usually get a lot of that around here. Should be good for the crops.”
“Do they come out in the rain?”
“Who?”
“Them.”
Jack looked at him funny. “The crawlers? Why would they care about the rain?”
Because I’ve seen them turn to stone and sink in a lake. Because they’re freakishly terrified of bodies of water. Maybe the rain has the same effect?
But he didn’t say any of those things out loud. He had a feeling Jack didn’t know—and probably didn’t care, either.
He shrugged, said, “Just wondering.”
“You wonder too much,” Jack said. “Come on, let’s see what Steve wanted to show you. I hear it’s a real humdinger.”
Jack hobbled the short distance to the warehouse with the help of a cane, and watching him, Keo once again went through the pros and cons of taking the man’s revolver and shooting him dead right then and there.
The pro was that he would be armed again, and Jack would be dead.
The con, though, meant having to fight a lot of soldiers still inside the marina with nothing but a revolver and its six bullets. Besides the two leftovers he had seen at the docks, there were the four at the guard booth and the half dozen or so heading toward the gate.
The odds were against him at the moment.
So what else is new?
He didn’t have time to do anything anyway, because the twin doors slid open as soon as they approached them, revealing two more soldiers in black uniforms standing in front of a bright LED lamp. They stepped aside for Keo and Jack.
The interior of the warehouse was massive, and shelves lined the sides. The high ceiling was rein
forced with thick beams, and a dozen or so black birds watched Keo walking underneath them like curious spectators, as if they knew something he didn’t.
It wasn’t the shelves or the lone twenty-eight-foot yacht parked in its own slot to his right that drew Keo’s attention. It was Steve. He was standing in the middle of the room, his back turned, and he was holding a knife in one hand. Blood on the blade dripped to the ground where there was already more than one fresh pool.
Steve looked over his shoulder as Keo and Jack entered the warehouse. “Hey, how’d the reunion go? Or should I take reports of you walking around the neighborhood all by your little lonesome as not a good sign?”
“Sounds about right,” Keo said. “Jacky boy says you wanted to show me something.”
“Come see.” He turned around. “Goes to show you, you never know what you’ll find unless you make the effort to look.”
Steve stepped aside to reveal a figure hanging from the ceiling beams by a blue rope.
It was a woman, though it was hard to tell because her face was covered in blood and one eye was almost entirely shut, the flesh around it black and purple. She had short blonde hair and her lips were cut, her nose possibly broken, and Steve had cut ribbons into her shirt with the knife, leaving the flesh underneath dripping red with blood.
Jordan.
Chapter Eighteen
The rope was a double braid nylon, the kind used to tie up boats, and it must have bit into her wrists as they kept her suspended in the air half a foot off the ground. Thick rivulets of blood dripped down the sides of her face and onto the concrete floor, where they were quickly absorbed by the larger pools already gathering under her dangling boots.
Keo willed himself to take slow and steady breaths, pushed aside his accelerated heart rate, and took stock of his situation.
Steve, behind him, was armed, and so was Jack in front of him. The two soldiers at the doors would also be a big problem. He would have to kill Steve first, because he was closest. He could do that by taking the knife and jamming it into his throat, or go for the revolver in his hip holster. There were six bullets in the gun. One to Steve’s head—at this range, Keo couldn’t have missed if he had blindfolds on—then the second shot would take out Jack.
The two at the doors? Depending on how alert they were, he could probably take both out before they could return fire.
Probably.
He was being overly generous of his own skills, of course. But even if Steve or Jack put up a fight that lasted longer than a few seconds, he believed enough in his abilities that he could, reasonably, kill both soldiers with minimal danger to himself and Jordan, who would be hanging helplessly from the rafters throughout all of this.
And then what?
Assuming he could kill everyone in the warehouse who needed killing, that still left…all the soldiers outside. The two on the docks, the four at the front gate, and the ones still making their way out of the marina. They would converge on the warehouse as soon as the first shots rang out. Worse, they would have him cornered inside.
Not good.
No, shooting his way out of here, while dragging a half-conscious Jordan with him, was not going to work. It wouldn’t serve Jordan in any way, except possibly to get her killed minutes after rescuing her.
There had to be another way.
How?
Wait. What was that Steve had said to him when he first arrived? About how he viewed Tobias’s people and those he called stragglers?
“You see, I put people who haven’t gotten with the reality of our situation into two categories: The ones that don’t know any better, and the ones that are determined to make things miserable for everyone else. You belong in the former category.”
There it was. He didn’t have to convince Steve of a lie, he only had to convince the man of something he already believed.
“…the ones that don’t know any better…”
“Found her about a mile from here,” Steve was saying. “She had a nice hiding spot, too, but I figured she had to be nearby after what happened with Eric in the woods.”
Eric was the teenager from earlier, the one Keo had spared in order to give his message to Steve. He should have known the little bastard would mention that Keo wasn’t alone, that Jordan was with him. It had never occurred to him that Steve would have someone out there looking for her after he left the bridge. Steve hadn’t said a word about her, and Keo had assumed…
You ass.
“She wouldn’t tell me her name,” Steve said. He gestured with the knife, flicking (Jordan’s) blood back and forth across the floor. “Wouldn’t say much, really. But who else would be running around out there except your friend?”
“She’s not my friend,” Keo said.
Jordan blinked her one good eye, looking past Steve and at him. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw disappointment on her bloodied face.
“No?” Steve said. “She was with you earlier.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s my friend.”
“Then who is she?”
“Just someone who decided to come along to T18. She’s tired of living hand to mouth out there with Tobias. After I killed him, she asked to come back, too, wanted to rejoin the town.”
“Is that right?” Steve looked back at Jordan. “So why didn’t she come in from the cold the same time as you?”
“I promised her I’d talk to you about it first. Make sure you didn’t hold a grudge against any of Tobias’s people. She’s not the only one, you know. There are others.”
“How many more?”
“A handful.”
Steve smirked. “Can’t say I’m surprised.” Then he narrowed his eyes at Keo. “Not that I believe what you’re saying.”
“Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know. Why would you agree to kill a man you barely know? Why would you come back here after I used you as bait? I don’t know why you do most of the things you do, Keo.”
“There you go overthinking it again,” Keo said, injecting just enough amusement into his voice to make it convincing. “I already told you, I’m not that complicated.”
He looked past Steve and at Jordan. Her good eye was closed, and she was bleeding and hurt (badly, badly hurt), but he hoped there was nothing wrong with her hearing. If she had been listening, maybe she would understand what he was doing. Or trying to do, anyway.
“He’s not wrong,” Jack was saying. “You saw that girl he was doing all of this for. Preggers or not, I’d probably kill a few guys just to get some of that.”
Steve grinned. “She’s not bad.”
“She was hotter before,” Keo sighed. “But she’s not going to be pregnant forever. Know what I mean?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said. “My girls are glowing.”
“It’s probably because of all the potatoes you’re feeding them,” Steve said.
Jack shrugged. “Maybe.”
Steve nodded at Keo, as if to say, “Okay, maybe I believe you,” before turning back to Jordan. He cupped her bloodied chin and lifted her head until she could look him in the eyes.
“Look at me,” Steve said. “Hey.”
She opened her eye slowly.
“Is he right?” Steve asked her. “You were waiting for a signal to come in?”
Jordan didn’t react.
Come on, Jordan, play along…
Finally, her head moved. It was nodding, or trying to.
“Why didn’t you say that when they caught you?” Steve asked.
She struggled to answer, small incomprehensible sounds escaping her bloodied lips.
“I can’t hear you,” Steve said. “Louder.”
“No…chance…” she managed to say.
Steve let go of her chin, then pulled a small rag out from his back pocket and cleaned his hands. He did the same to the knife before sliding it back into its sheath.
“The boys did that to her face,” Steve said to Keo. “I guess they got a little
carried away. Tobias’s people may have suffered heavy losses yesterday, but they’ve been hounding us for months. I’ve lost more than my share, too.”
“What about the knife?” Keo asked.
“That was me,” Steve said with a dismissive shrug. “She wasn’t being very cooperative.” Then, “Where are the others? The rest of Tobias’s people?”
“Somewhere out there. You found where they were last night? The YMCA near the highway?”
“Scouts did,” Jack said.
“They were there when I left. I guess your guys must have spooked them. I was supposed to tell her—” he nodded at Jordan “—that everything was arranged, then she would relay the message back to the others and they’d all come in at the same time.”
“The lambs are coming home,” Jack smiled. “I told you they’d come running back when we finally got rid of Tobias.”
“Easier said than done,” Steve said. “Until today, anyway.” He nodded at Jack. “Get her to Bannerman. Make sure no one sees her like this.”
“I hate going there. Bannerman gives me the creeps.”
“Suck it up,” Steve said. Then to Keo, “Come on,” before starting off.
Keo looked back at Jordan and caught her staring at him with her good eye. He gave her a barely visible nod and she blinked back once.
He turned around as Jack ordered the soldiers to bring Jordan down, and he heard her grunting with relief as she was lowered to the hard concrete floor.
Outside, the clouds above T18 had grown in size and gotten much grayer. Though they had over an hour before sundown, it was already dark enough that the LED floodlights had begun switching on along the docks.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Keo asked.
“Bannerman will take care of her,” Steve said. “She should be fine in a couple of days.”
“Those knife cuts won’t be fine in a couple of days.”
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 108