A knock on the cabin door interrupted her thoughts.
“Come in,” she said.
Bonnie stepped inside in loose-fitting cargo pants and an olive thermal sweater, looking more like a soldier than even Benny or Blaine. Lara was still amazed by the transformation Bonnie had gone through since they first met on Song Island. Then again, she could probably say the same thing about all of them, including herself, though the others didn’t quite look at home with an M4 slung over their backs and a gun belt hanging off their hips. Bonnie did, and even managed to pull off the short haircut.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I heard Keo still hasn’t called yet,” Bonnie said.
“Not yet.”
“You think he’s okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Bonnie walked over and leaned against the table, then stared down at the map even though Lara could tell it wasn’t her chicken scratch notes that were on the ex-model’s mind at the moment.
“What is it, Bonnie?” she asked.
“Carrie’s worried about him,” Bonnie said.
“Keo can handle himself. I’m more worried about the others.”
“The—what do you call it?”
“Expedition.”
“Right. The expedition. Are they okay?”
“Alive and well. I talked to Danny earlier.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“How’s everyone doing? I know I haven’t been moving through the decks as much as before.”
“Everyone’s good, doing their part. Don’t worry about us. You already have a lot on your mind.”
“So no secret meetings about overthrowing my rule?”
Bonnie chuckled. “Not since two weeks ago. You’re safe for at least another few days.”
“Good to hear.” She walked over to her small fridge in the corner and came back with two cold water bottles, handing one to Bonnie. “So why did you really come here?”
“That obvious, huh?”
Lara shrugged.
“It’s Gage,” Bonnie said.
Of course it would be Gage. She knew the man would come back to haunt her eventually. She had been dreading it, but at the same time knowing it was inevitable, that the sooner she dealt with it the easier she would be able to sleep at night.
Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.
“What about him?” Lara asked.
“After Carrie asked me to come see you about Keo, she told me that when she took Gage his breakfast this morning, she left his room with a bad feeling.”
“What did she say exactly?”
Bonnie paused for a moment. Then, “She couldn’t put it into words, just that he didn’t seem right. Like he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She left as soon as she could, but she hasn’t been able to shake it.”
She sighed.
Gage. The Trident’s former captain.
What would Will do?
“He’s been down there for a while,” Bonnie continued. “Long enough that I think he’s figured out by now we don’t need him to run the yacht anymore.”
She nodded, remembering the look on the man’s face when she took him off the bridge and gave the helm to Blaine. He knows, she remembered thinking at the time. His usefulness has come to an end, and he knows.
“What are you going to do?” Bonnie asked. There was a slight wavering in her voice, as if she was afraid to hear the answer.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lara said.
4
Keo
Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into. Shoulda taken the easy way out when you had the chance, pal. And you had a lot of chances, didn’t you?
Live and learn…maybe.
He expected ghouls in the shadows, but the floor was empty when he took his first tentative step outside the janitor’s closet at the end of the hallway, silver bullet-loaded M4 in front of him and one eye fixed behind the weapon’s red dot sight. The trigger felt good against his finger, and the warmth of morning sunlight was like a comforting embrace. The pain in his leg—the result of a bullet hole—had resurfaced thanks to last night’s mad dash; running for your life, apparently, didn’t contribute to the healing process.
Jordan moved quietly behind him, watching his six. They weren’t quite moving in stacking formation, but he could feel the fabric of her sweaty clothes every time she turned too quickly to sweep an open door or one of the (too many) hallways to their left and right. He was doing the same, watching and listening for signs of something to shoot, watching for things that didn’t belong, and doing his very best to shut out her persistent haggard breathing.
It took much longer to reach the stairwell than he would have liked. Either the floor had widened sometime last night, or they were moving very, very slowly. The feel of sunlight through the (Still intact, so that’s a good sign) windows to their right made him breathe just a little bit easier with every step.
The tiled floor showed signs of the dirt they had tracked in here last night and the cubicles they had run past still looked in one piece this morning. More importantly, he couldn’t smell them in the air. Even a floor this large wouldn’t have been able to hide the creatures’ stench, especially if there was more than one of them around, and there had definitely been more than one of them around last night.
So far, so good.
Keo couldn’t help it and grinned to himself.
Famous last words there, pal.
They remained silent (or at least they didn’t talk, but it was hard to stay completely quiet; their boots’ soles squeaked every so often against the dust-caked floor) during the trek until they finally arrived at the stairwell door.
Keo glanced back at Jordan, standing behind him pulling security. She looked over her shoulder, saw him, and nodded. Just a week of running around out here with her and they were already working like an (almost) well-oiled machine. In another month, he’d probably know what her sweat tasted like.
He turned back and pressed one ear against the warm stairwell door.
Five seconds…
Ten…
Nothing.
There was just stillness on the other side.
He looked back at Jordan, and she mouthed, “Anything?”
He shook his head before turning back around to the door. This time he put one hand on the doorknob, finding courage in the streams of sunlight splashing all the way across the floor and over half the door. It was surprisingly warm inside the building at the moment, but that could have just been thanks to his thick winter clothing.
“Go,” Ol’ Blue Eyes had hissed at him last night inside the stairwell.
“Go where?” Keo had responded.
“Down!” he had shouted.
And that was where he and Jordan had gone. They went down the stairs, expecting ghouls to appear from below at any moment. He kept waiting and waiting, but black eyes and the terrifying noise of stampeding bare feet never filled the enclosed space around them. There were only his and Jordan’s labored breathing and their pounding boots all the way down to—
The third floor. He didn’t know why he had chosen it. Maybe he didn’t trust his luck to last for thirty more feet. Or maybe he instinctively knew there wasn’t anything good waiting for them in the lobby. Certainly no escape from the building. If there were already ghouls inside, then there would be even more outside. A hell of a lot more. Every single creature that had been sniffing their trail for the last week ever since Santa Marie Island would be converging on the single building as soon as Jordan fired that first shot.
“We’ll meet again!” the blue-eyed ghoul had shouted. Or hissed. Though Keo sometimes thought the creature was making an effort to sound more human—
A nervous tap on his shoulder.
He glanced back at Jordan, who gave him a quizzical look.
“Ready?” he mouthed.
She retreated a few steps to give him room, then aimed her M4 at the door. Finally, she nodded. Keo took a long, solid b
reath, then made sure the sun was still splashing across the door. You could never be too careful when it came to sunlight these days.
Now.
He pulled the door open and swung it all the way to the side while he took three quick steps backward.
In the five seconds it took the door to fully open, hit the spring doorstop on the wall, and swing back in the other direction, a dozen ghouls piled inside the enclosed space in front of him had untangled their elongated limbs. He wasn’t sure if he saw surprise in their black eyes or heard squeals of delight, but he definitely smelled the acidic burn of vaporizing flesh as the sun hit them.
He fired into the door anyway—it was mostly just instinct, the need to shoot when presented with a target—and put a three-round burst into the center mass of the writhing blob of flesh. A round hit bone and ricocheted into another creature trying to come unglued from the mass around it. Ghouls shrieked as spilt black blood turn gray, then white, and limbs clattered to the hard concrete landing. The frontal half of a head vanished before his eyes—
The door closed back up with a solid click!
“Jesus Christ,” Jordan breathed next to him.
“Yeah,” Keo said. He wrinkled his nose at the stinging smell in the air and began breathing through his mouth. “I guess we’re not going in there.”
“Our supplies, they’re on the twentieth floor, Keo.”
“Uh huh.”
“The radio’s up there, too.”
“I know.”
“It took us forever to find that thing.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Goddammit,” Jordan said, and pursed her lips in frustration.
They took another couple of steps back from the door, just far enough to escape the gagging stench in the air, but still close enough to hear the movements from the other side. The sudden shift from deathly stillness to frantic activity seemed to be coming not just from in front of them, but also from below and above them, as if the entire building had come alive.
Despite the comforting feel of the sun against his back, Keo shivered unwittingly anyway. He never liked being this close to the undead things, and he didn’t think he would ever get used to it. He hoped he never got used to it, because the day that happened would also mean he was no longer operating at full readiness, and that was dangerous.
“Come on,” he said, and led her away.
They walked silently through two rows of cubicles, drawn irresistibly to the sunlight pouring in through the glass curtain wall on the other side of the floor.
“I guess it was too much to expect them to all follow Frank out of the building,” Keo said.
“‘Frank’?” Jordan said.
“Ol’ Blue Eyes.”
“You gave him a name? When did that happen?”
“Guy saved my life twice. The least I could do was call him something other than ‘it’.”
“Why Frank?”
“You know, because of what he is…was.”
Jordan looked blankly at him.
“Mary Shelley?” Keo said.
“Oh.” Then, “Not quite human anymore, but not quite…the other thing, either.” She flashed him an approving smile. “Clever. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
He shrugged. “It comes and goes.”
“Frank,” Jordan repeated. “I could think of worse names, I guess. It’s definitely better than Keo.”
“Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”
“You’re a tough guy, you can take it.”
“Still, everyone’s got their limits, Jordan.”
She snorted, then glanced up at the ceiling. “What did he say to you last night? When we were on the twentieth floor?”
“‘We’ll meet again.’”
“‘We’ll meet again’?”
“Uh huh.”
“That sounds…” She shivered instead of finishing.
“Yeah,” Keo said. “Still freaks me out a little, thinking about that promise.”
They finally reached the other side of the floor, where the windows were still in place, the creatures having somehow climbed all the way up to the twentieth floor while bypassing the rest. He guessed the brick-and-mortar walls outside had just enough handholds for things that didn’t care about falling. He remembered the surreal sight of them last night, plummeting out of the sky, arms and legs flailing, as he and Jordan raced through the floor in search of someplace to hide.
“You think he’s dead?” Jordan asked.
“I don’t know. He’s survived before. T18, the island…”
“There were a hell of a lot more of them here last night, Keo.”
“He has a knack for surviving. It wouldn’t surprise me if he found a way out of here while we were hiding in the janitor’s closet.”
Keo pressed against a section of the dust-covered window and peered down at the sidewalks and streets below. Downtown Sunport was as quiet and still this morning as when they had reached its city limits yesterday evening.
He could see bones on the ground below—arms and legs, most of them still attached to the skeletal remains of ghouls that hadn’t been able to crawl their way out of the path of the rising sun after free-falling down the side of the building last night. The fall might not have killed them, but it had pulverized and shattered limbs, making escape difficult.
Jordan was staring back at the stairwell door across the floor. “How are we getting down?”
“We’ll improvise,” he said, and began backpedaling.
“What—” Jordan said, before realizing what he was doing, and hurried backward after him. “Geez, would it kill you to give me a heads up?”
“Heads up,” he said.
She smirked. “Jackass.”
Keo stopped about ten meters from the wall and stitched one of the windows with a three-round burst. He stopped firing and they listened to glass falling and shattering against the sidewalk below, the sound echoing across the city for a few seconds afterward. Cold wind flooded inside through the newly made hole, and Keo welcomed the fresh air into his lungs.
“Now what?” Jordan asked.
“Ladies first,” he said.
Three floors were better than twenty and were easily manageable once they pulled apart curtains from some of the offices and tied them together into a makeshift rope. He lowered Jordan down first, then followed.
The sidewalk was covered in bones, and the still-strong smell of vaporized blood and flesh stung his nostrils while he was coming down. It was worse once he reached the pavement, and he had to pull his shirt over his nose to stave off most of the stench. Jordan had already done likewise while waiting for him.
“How would we know if he made it or not?” she asked, her voice muffled through her shirt.
Keo walked into the middle of the street, maneuvering around a pair of stalled vehicles, including one with a caved-in roof from when a creature had fallen down on top of it, and looked up. He found the twentieth floor easily enough, thanks to the line of broken windows stretching from one end of the building to the other.
He tried to put himself in Frank’s shoes (bare feet?). Frank wasn’t limited by what a human body could do. Keo had seen that for himself three times now. The guy could take a beating, and the things he did defied the laws of physics. Hell, it defied the laws of nature.
The last time Keo had seen him, Frank was on the twentieth floor. Keo hadn’t understood what he was doing until he was squeezed into the janitor’s closet with Jordan, listening and waiting for an attack that never came.
It was Frank; it had always been Frank. They wanted him and Frank knew that, which was why he hadn’t followed them down. He gave the creatures what they wanted instead of leading them to Keo and Jordan. Himself.
That’s three times now you’ve saved my life.
Dammit. How do you even begin to repay someone who has saved your life not one, two, but three times? Keo wasn’t entirely sure he was looking forward to finding out the answer to that questio
n.
“What are you looking at?” Jordan said behind him.
Keo eyeballed the twentieth floor, then turned and looked at the building facing it from across the street. The opposite structure was almost entirely all black marble but shorter at just fifteen stories.
Then he saw it and couldn’t help but grin.
“What?” Jordan said. “What are you grinning at like an idiot?”
“He fell short,” Keo said.
“Who?”
“Frank.” Keo pointed at a lone broken window on the fourteenth floor of the black marble building. “He was aiming for the rooftop but he had too far of a jump, and his trajectory dipped before he reached it. He’s fast—and shit, can he jump—but apparently even he has his limitations.”
Jordan stared at the single broken window on the fourteenth floor of the building across the street. “Are you saying he leapt from our building to that one? Keo, that’s—”
“Impossible?” Keo smiled. “Jordan, we’ve been walking around with a blue-eyed ghoul for the last week, trying to stay one step ahead of collaborators and undead things. ‘Impossible’ shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary anymore.”
Keo wasn’t surprised to find ghouls inside the lobby of the marble building. He could see them moving around in the shadowed parts through the windows, and he spent just as much time wondering how many were inside as he did ignoring the lingering smell of dead things in the streets around him.
“So I guess that’s out of the question,” Jordan said, standing next to him.
“Guess so.”
“What now?”
“How are you for ammo?”
She tapped the ammo pouches around her waist, then sighed.
“That much, huh?” he said.
“One more for the M4, and two for the Glock. You?”
“Same.”
She sneaked a look over her shoulder, back at the taller building they’d just climbed down from. “Our supplies are still up there, along with the radio.”
“The operative phrase being ‘up there.’”
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 5