He pushed himself back up, turned around, flicked the fire selector on his rifle to semi-auto, and squeezed off everything he had left in the magazine at the water tower. He aimed for the largest target—the barely visible tip—while knowing full well he wasn’t going to hit anyone from this distance, but hoping he did just enough to distract the guy. He imagined he could hear the ping! ping! of his bullets bouncing off the metal tower, but of course that was impossible given the pounding rainstorm around him.
He moved left while shooting, angling back toward the docks. Keo sent off his last round and dropped the magazine and slammed in a new one, turning around almost simultaneously as two men in the office opened fire—except not at him. Maybe they couldn’t see him very well, but they certainly had no trouble seeing the golf cart as it rumbled slowly (Christ, that thing is slow) across the parking lot.
Keo switched his fire over to the office, again using the lights as his target finder. He stitched the two rectangle-shaped windows, forcing the two figures firing out of them to stop shooting and duck for cover.
He was still shooting when Keo heard the buzz! as the bullet tore through the left sleeve of his raincoat and took away a chunk of his flesh underneath. Blood poured out, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as when he had gotten hit in the thigh. Maybe it was the cold numbing his flesh or the fact that he knew stopping to dress his injuries now meant death, but Keo managed to grit his teeth through the shoulder wound and turned around just as Dave appeared, the golf cart flying in his direction like an out-of-control lumbering beast.
“Take the first boat!” Keo shouted. “Go go go!”
Dave slammed on the brake and climbed out of the golf cart as Keo turned around and took a step sideways and squeezed off a round at the water tower. He took another step and fired again, and kept repeating the process until he heard Dave running past him, gasping for breath as he went.
Keo glanced back in time to see Dave make the docks and run up it toward the twenty-footer, Jordan’s body a big black unmoving clump draped over his shoulder.
He glanced back at Marina 1. Lights poured out of the windows and the open door, but he couldn’t detect any signs of movement. Maybe they had finally had enough and didn’t think it was worth it to get their heads blown off—
Buzz! as another bullet came within an inch of Keo’s right ear.
Sonofabitch.
He ran after Dave and Jordan, grabbing the third and final magazine from his pouch as he did so. A hole appeared in the plank in front of him, splintering wood, as the sniper fired again. The bullet disappeared into the water below, and Keo ran past the newly created hole without wasting a precious half-second contemplating the near-miss. His entire night had been a series of near-misses. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had two holes in him as proof of that.
Dave had already climbed into the boat and placed Jordan’s body across a long bench in the back while scrambling to one of the two lines keeping the boat in place. Dave glanced up as Keo ran over. “The key!” he shouted.
“I got it!” Keo shouted back.
He reached into his raincoat pocket and fisted the key. He would have tossed it to Dave, but he didn’t have any faith in either one of them making the exchange in this weather. So he ran the whole distance and leaned over and handed it to Dave instead, then ran back to unwind the bowline.
All of that took three precious seconds, enough time for the sniper to reacquire them, and there was a sharp ping! as a bullet drilled into the portside of the boat. Dave either didn’t see or hear the impact, or he was too focused on putting the key in the ignition to do anything about being shot at. The boat’s motor roared to life at about the same time Keo got the line free and tossed it into the back.
That was also when he heard the familiar clop-clop-clop of horse hooves and looked back and saw the elongated, shadowy forms of men on horseback coming through the marina gate. While the distance and darkness made making out their exact numbers impossible, he managed to distinguish three, maybe five forms out of the moving blob, though he had no illusions that that was all of them.
“Come on!” Dave shouted behind him.
Keo hopped into the boat just as something buzzed! past his head and hit the water a few meters off starboard. He pretended it was a fly instead of thinking about how close he had just come to having his brains splattered in the river.
Think positive!
He almost laughed as he landed in the back of the boat next to Jordan’s swaddled form resting on the bench to his right. Dave was already reversing out of the slip, having also seen the horsemen coming in their direction, the clop-clop-clop of hooves somehow managing to pierce through the rain’s stranglehold on sounds.
Then boom! and Keo cursed.
Three to five? If only he was that lucky. There had to be at least a dozen of them, men in wet raincoats, pulling up as they reached the end of the parking lot and began unslinging their rifles. They were almost right in front of him, so close that he could see mists flooding out of the nostrils of their mounts as the animals reared to a stop.
Keo opened fire into the marina, and one man fell off his horse just before the lightning vanished and darkness swallowed the world up again, the soldiers returning to their formerly indistinguishable black forms.
He pulled the trigger again and again, even as Dave spun the steering wheel and Keo had to turn around in order to keep shooting into the parking lot. He was still firing while simultaneously gritting his teeth in anticipation of return fire. The sniper had also either stopped shooting, or his shots were going wide and Keo couldn’t hear it over the pouring rain and his own gunshots.
At first Keo thought the lack of return fire from the marina was because he was dropping the horsemen, but that couldn’t have been it. Without any lights in the parking lot and his vision hindered badly by the rain, all he could see were indecipherable shapes moving in front of him as he waited for the inevitable.
Because he knew it was coming—a fusillade of lead that he or Dave had no hopes of surviving. They were still backing away from the docks, trying to reach a part of the river where they could use the motor and were, for all intents and purposes, sitting ducks for a good ten, twenty seconds.
“Get down!” he shouted when it finally came—the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire that wasn’t his, muzzle flashes lighting up the wide open spaces in front of him.
Except the horsemen weren’t shooting at him or Dave or Jordan.
What the hell?
Maybe it had something to do with the dark shape moving between the horses, inciting the animals to let out loud furious whines and scramble about the wet concrete pavement. The thing was fast, and something—a long coat?—was fluttering around it, visible for brief half-seconds against the staccato bursts of gunfire as it moved through the throng of men and beasts.
Any hopes Keo had of seeing details were rendered impossible by the night and rain. The figure in the long coat was on the ground, then it was in the air, then it was on the ground again. It was moving so fast Keo could barely keep up with it. He didn’t know when he stopped shooting, but time seemed to slow down as he stood there and watched the figure grabbing men off their horses and throwing them across the parking lot.
Something sailed through the air, and Keo instinctively ducked even though he didn’t have to. A black-clad soldier, hands and feet flailing, hit the river just five feet off the starboard and was sucked under.
Then the boat’s stern dipped slightly, and a motorized roar shattered the shrill wind and falling rain. Keo didn’t know when Dave had turned them around, but suddenly they were blasting downriver and leaving the docks behind.
Keo hurried to the stern and looked back toward the marina as gunshots continued to ring out and muzzle flashes lit up the parking lot again and again and again. He waited for bullets to zip past his head or punch into the hull of the twenty-footer, but none of those things happened. The soldiers on horseback—and some on the ground now—were firing at somethin
g among them. Something that wasn’t him or Dave or Jordan. That same something that Keo had seen earlier, moving with a ferocity he didn’t know was possible.
Slowly, the flashes began to disappear one by one until they had ceased completely. There was a brief pause before someone screamed. A shrill cry, dripping with fear instead of pain, and it burrowed its way through the cold and night and rain and into Keo’s gut.
The docks were still fading fast behind him when Keo thought he saw something that shouldn’t have been there, that shouldn’t have been possible.
Eyes.
Blue fucking eyes.
They were looking after him, the twin orbs pulsating against the rain and darkness. He shouldn’t have been able to see them through the night and distance, but there was something vibrant about them, full of life, and they drew him in like lighthouse beacons.
“Christ, you’re bleeding!” Dave shouted, his voice breaking through Keo’s temporary stupor.
He looked back at Dave, and by the time he turned back around, the marina had vanished into the darkness.
And with it, the eyes.
What the fuck…
It had attacked the soldiers. He knew that for a fact. It had come out of nowhere and waded into Steve’s horsemen before they could open up on him and Dave. At that range, with that many guns, and with the boat in such a vulnerable position, they would have been shredded and sank in a hail of bullets.
...just happened?
He had heard the stories. From Lara and Carly, from Gaby and Danny. But he hadn’t believed it. It was too much. Despite everything he had been through and seen, the idea that there was something out there more horrific than the black-eyed ghouls…
Blue eyes.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He sat down and leaned back against the starboard hull, then squinted up at Dave’s silhouetted form. “You know how to drive this thing?”
“Better than you!” Dave shouted back over the roar of the motor.
Keo grinned. That was good to hear, because with the hole in his thigh and the other one in his left arm, he wasn’t entirely sure he could have stood behind the steering wheel and fought against the currents and the storm at the same time.
“Hey,” Keo said.
Dave looked back at him. “What?”
“Don’t run aground.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
But Dave did want to know, and there was a click as he turned the button that powered on the spotlight at the front of the boat. They must have been everywhere, just like the last time he saw them, because it didn’t take Dave very long to see them.
“Oh, fuck me,” Dave said.
“Yeah,” Keo said.
He closed his eyes, the pak-pak-pak of rainwater against his forehead, eyelids, and face fading into the background. Even the cold had ceased to matter as Keo relived the last few seconds.
Blue eyes.
He couldn’t get over it. The image of it, looking after him, bounced around inside his head like a sledgehammer.
It had blue eyes…and it had saved his life.
Dae-fuck-me-bak.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You were good back there,” Keo said. “Like Evel Knievel. But on a boat.”
Dave chuckled. “You ever been stuck on a shrimp boat in the Gulf during hurricane season?”
“That happen a lot to you?”
“Just once. But I don’t need a second time to know it’s not fun. You learn a lot about what you’re capable of when the wrath of God is bearing down on you.”
“I’m glad I brought you along, then.”
“Right, because you had a choice.”
“Yeah, that too.”
Dave paused, and Keo could sense him wanting to say something else.
“What is it?” Keo said.
“What the fuck happened back there?” Dave asked, looking back at him. “We were sitting ducks, and then I saw…something. Not just the soldiers, but something else. Did you…?”
Blue eyes, Dave. It had blue eyes, and it saved our asses.
“I don’t know what I saw,” Keo said. “We got out, that’s all that matters.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So let’s focus on staying alive.”
Dave nodded and stared off the bow, though Keo didn’t believe he was going to let it go because Keo himself hadn’t been able to since he saw it. He had spent the last few hours trying to wrap his mind around what had happened at the marina, and it still didn’t compute. If the ghouls weren’t supposed to come into the towns, then what was that thing doing back there?
Better yet, why had it attacked the soldiers? Why did it save them? Or was that what it was doing in the first place? Maybe it just saw the soldiers as the easier prey and preventing them from shooting him and Dave was just a happy coincidence.
Riiight.
Keo sat in the back of the boat, his butt on the cold floor, and finished wrapping the last piece of gauze around his left arm. The round had gone through and taken a big chunk of flesh with it, but it hadn’t impacted bone, which was the best thing he could have hoped for. The same with the hole in his right thigh. That didn’t feel quite as bad because he was sitting down and wasn’t putting a lot of pressure on it. Or, at least, that’s what he told himself.
He packed up the first-aid kit Gillian had given them back at the house and returned it to Dave’s pack. The bandages were constricting around his shoulder and thigh, but it was better than bleeding to death.
For the last two hours, they had been sitting on the twenty-footer as it shifted back and forth against the waves somewhere between Trinity and Galveston Bay. Even Dave wasn’t quite sure where since their vision was limited by the pitch blackness and they could barely see more than a few meters around them.
Floating on the water at night again. This is starting to become a bad habit.
The rainstorm was still pouring, but thankfully not at them. They had cleared its zone almost as soon as they exited the channel along what Dave said was the Kemah Boardwalk, and as Keo had guessed when they passed it earlier, the place had once been a major tourist attraction.
Lightning continued to flash in the distance, the reports of thunder following a few seconds later. If it had seemed like they were caught in the belly of a rampaging beast before, they were now watching that same monster as it ravaged the area around T18. It had taken them nearly an hour since clearing the channel to scoop up water from the boat and deposit it back into the bay. Thank God there was a plastic jug and some small containers stuffed into the livewells.
Even so, Keo was still sitting in an inch of water as he watched and listened for sounds of an incoming pursuit. There was a definite chilly wind, but his clothing had been soaking wet since the night began so he was already used to the discomfort.
“Storm’s not letting up,” Dave said after a while. “That’s a good sign, right? They wouldn’t chase us in this weather, would they?”
“Depends…”
“On what?”
“How badly they want you dead.”
Dave snorted. “What about you?”
“I didn’t kill Steve’s brother. I’m just an annoyance. Maybe he’s pissed off at me, but blood is thicker than an annoying stranger.”
“You saying that from experience?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He slipped back into silence for a moment, perching at the front of the boat with his M4 gripped in his lap. He hadn’t left the spot since the boat ran out of gas and left them drifting in the bay. Then, “What’s the deal with you and Gillian, anyway?”
“No deal,” Keo lied.
“Bullshit.”
“Believe what you want.”
“You two used to be a couple, right? I heard the two of you talking on the second floor, remember? I was pretty sure you guys were going to start humping like rabbits right outside my door. That would have bee
n pretty sick, by the way.”
“You have something against pregnancy sex?”
“I was talking about her doctor husband/boyfriend/whatever being on the first floor at the same time.”
“I didn’t know you were so sensitive, Dave.”
“I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I like listening to people doing it.”
Keo grinned and opened one of the side pockets on the pack and took out the small, unlabeled bottle that Jay had given him. He shook out a couple of the white pills and swallowed them.
“How is she?” Dave asked. “Doc must have given her something really good to keep her knocked out through that entire mess.”
Keo grunted up to his knees and moved over to Jordan, who was still lying on the bench at the stern of the boat. There was just enough moonlight for him to see her bundled form. The only part of her that was exposed to the elements was the upper half of her face so she could still breathe. The swelling around her right eye made him flinch every time he saw it, but thankfully her body wasn’t shivering quite as much as when they were braving the rainstorm earlier.
It was a miracle that Dave, despite all his vast experiences, had managed to steer them around the river and out here using only the spotlight at the front of the boat as a guide. And all the while, the creatures were swarming endlessly along the riverbanks to both sides of them. Keo had seen it before—when he braved a much wider channel with Lara and the others—but this time they were so close (he could smell them) he expected the darting, stick-thin figures to start throwing themselves through the air at them at any moment. But they hadn’t, for whatever reason.
Maybe my luck really is changing, he started thinking. Then almost right away, Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself that, pal.
He sat back down now. “She’s better than us right now. Sleeping like a baby.” He picked up the M4 and checked the magazine for the fifth time in the last hour. “Anything?”
“Not a thing,” Dave said. “What about you? Does it hurt?”
“Yeah, it hurts.”
“A lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Take some of those meds your girlfriend gave you.”
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 115