He didn’t hear it, but he imagined it was there somewhere outside the vehicle—the telltale swoosh!—as the sun glinted off the dull olive green of the rocket-propelled grenade as it flashed across the windshield, entering the periphery of his vision from the right and disappearing out of the left.
Keo didn’t have time—didn’t waste time—tracking the rocket’s trajectory as it missed the truck by a few feet and kept going. A civilian might have slammed on the brake in shock, but Keo wasn’t a civilian. He floored the gas pedal and the Ford F-150 lurched forward, gaining even more speed as it went.
“Keo!” Jordan shouted as her body was thrown back against her seat by the sudden acceleration.
“Hold on!” he shouted back.
He had both hands on the steering wheel to make sure the truck didn’t do anything he didn’t want it to. His eyes shot left then right, to the rearview mirror and forward, always moving, even as he willed the truck to go faster, faster, faster.
They had been moving at forty miles an hour before, but he was already up to sixty—
—seventy—
—ninety—
“Keo!” Jordan shouted again, clutching to the handhold over her door with one hand, the other gripping her M4 by the barrel.
“Ambush!” he shouted back. “Hold on!”
He zeroed in on the rearview mirror as a man-sized lump—no, two—stood up to the right of the highway, where they had been hiding among the sunburnt fields. They were wearing dark-colored uniforms.
Collaborators?
He expected pursuit at any moment—vehicles to burst out of the grass like some wild animal—but each time he stole a quick glance at the rearview mirror the road behind him remained empty, and even the two that had stood up were just looking after them—
A loud boom! shattered his eardrums, and a second later the steering wheel was fighting his control and the truck was, impossibly, starting to turn sideways. Then he went from looking at the gray stretch of pavement out the windshield to staring at the cloudless sky to seeing the sun-bleached grass twirling in front of his eyes.
They were flying. The Ford was flying through the air.
But not for long. They came back down to earth, and there was an earsplitting blast as the glass around him shattered, drowning out Jordan’s screams. The cacophony of natural and unnatural sounds was followed by the loud crunch! of metal as the car smashed, rolled, and smashed again into the abandoned farmland.
The engine was still turning when he opened his eyes, very aware of the seatbelt strap pinning him to his seat. He pushed past the thrum of pain and concentrated instead on the heavy tap-tap of footsteps in the background. Something wet streaked across his forehead and into his hair and drip-drip-dripped down to…the ceiling?
Combat boots appeared outside the shattered front windshield before he could unlatch himself from the seat belt and reach for his weapon. The legs were upside down for a reason. Oh, right, because he and the truck were overturned.
“Holy shit, they’re still alive,” someone said.
“Not for long,” a second voice said.
The familiar sting of cold metal pressing into the side of his temple was enough to make Keo forget about the pain. He couldn’t quite turn his head all the way around, so he couldn’t see who was crouching just outside the driver-side door.
“Close enough for ya, Tanner?” the first voice asked with a laugh.
“Just about,” the second man, Tanner, said, followed by the very clear click of a gun hammer being pulled back.
“Well, do it already, before she—”
A loud squawking noise cut him off, followed by a muffled female voice. “What’s the body count?”
“—too late,” the first voice finished.
“Sonofabitch,” Tanner said, and Keo felt the barrel depress slightly against his temple.
“Give me a sitrep,” the female voice said.
He heard another click as someone keyed a radio’s transmit lever. “They’re still alive,” the first man said.
“I’m on my way. Don’t do anything until then.”
“Tanner wants to—”
“I said, don’t do anything until I get there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the man said, though Keo detected obvious derision and wondered if he had transmitted that last part or said it to empty air. “You heard her; don’t pop them yet.”
“Fuck,” Tanner said.
Rough hands grabbed and pulled him out of the overturned Ford and deposited him on the ground on his back, allowing him a great view of the wide-open skies above. It was a very bright afternoon, the kind that would have looked perfect from the aft of the Trident.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.
“Look at that face,” the man named Tanner said. “Shit, man, looks like you’ve been through the wringer. Made you real pretty.”
“Girl looks pretty good, though,” the other one said.
“She still alive?”
“I think so. She’s moving. I’ll go check…”
Footsteps, fading.
Then Tanner’s voice again, somewhere in the background. “How’d you dodge that first rocket?”
Rocket? What— Oh. That rocket.
“You must be the luckiest sonofabitch I know,” Tanner said when Keo didn’t answer. “Harry never misses. That guy’s like a savant with an M72. Good thing Doug was a better shot, or you’d still be hauling ass down the road. Too bad for you, chum.”
An M72 LAW rocket launcher. Uncle Sam’s version of an anti-tank weapon that apparently was just as good against a moving truck going, what, ninety miles an hour? He tried to imagine what the F-150 must have looked like when it was hit. The round probably struck the back first, which accounted for the booming sound, before sending the Ford shooting forward and upward like a launching missile. He would have approved of the sight if he wasn’t the one inside the target at the time.
A new pair of footsteps approached before a familiar female voice (this time unmuffled) said, “He’s not wearing a uniform.”
The same woman who had ordered Tanner not to kill him through the radio. His savior. In the flesh, she had a just barely-there Hispanic accent.
“No, but that’s definitely one of our trucks,” Tanner said. “Goran and Paul took two of them out to track down that tank from yesterday.”
“Sunport?”
“Yeah.”
A brief moment of silence.
“We should finish them off,” Tanner said, slightly agitated. “Look at the blood inside. That’s not new. They killed Goran and Paul, and who knows how many, for their vehicle.”
The woman still didn’t say anything.
“We should—” Tanner pressed.
“No,” she cut him off.
“Why the fuck not?”
“If they came from Sunport, then they might know something about who’s launching these attacks,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were in the tank. My guess is it’s run out of fuel and they had to commandeer Goran and Paul’s truck. Right now, we need intel more than we need two more dead bodies. Go and bring the truck over.”
“I’m telling you, Marcy, this is the wrong move—”
“And I said, go and bring the goddamn truck over,” Marcy snapped.
I guess we know who wears the pants in this family, Keo thought, wishing he could see the woman’s face.
Footsteps leaving. Tanner, huffing and puffing as he went, probably.
Dumb bastard. Pushed around by a girl.
“You got a name?” the woman asked.
Was she talking to him?
The crimp in his neck had lessened, the throbbing pain starting to numb, and he was finally able to turn his head slightly to the left, just enough to see a woman with curly black hair staring down at him. She was in her thirties, wearing a black uniform with a patch of Texas over one shoulder. The name “Marcy” was stenciled across a name tag, and a pair of binoculars hung loosely off a long neck.
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Collaborators. Just my luck.
Brown eyes peered back at him. “Name. You got one?”
“Keo,” he said.
“Keo,” she repeated. “What kind of name is that?”
“José was taken.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Funny, you don’t look Hispanic.”
“It’s my disguise.”
Pale lips curved into a smile, but there was no genuine trace of humor. “All right, funny guy. Let’s find out what you know. Then I’ll decide if I’ll do you a favor and kill you and your friend fast, or take my time.”
They didn’t have to carry him very far because the truck was parked nearby. He was put into the back, his ankles and arms zip tied, but at least they didn’t blindfold him, which allowed him to keep an eye on the amazingly bright sky. Of course, some of that great view was marred by a man in a black uniform manning a machine gun standing above him. The welding that connected the MG’s tripod to the cab looked rushed, which made him wonder if they had put the technical together only recently, possibly in response to Mercer’s attacks yesterday.
He turned his head until he could see Jordan’s unconscious body next to him. She was also bound, strays of short blonde hair matted to her forehead by small clumps of blood. She looked okay—or as okay as you could look after getting tossed off the road by a rocket strike, anyway.
The back of the truck closed with a bang!, and then they were back on the road.
The soldier manning the machine gun was alert, swiveling the weapon around as they moved. It looked like an older model squad automatic weapon, but even an aging piece was still dangerous when you could throw a few hundred rounds a minute downrange without having to reload.
Why was he so surprised the collaborators were all over the highway? Maybe he had expected them to remain around the towns to protect the inhabitants instead of spreading out into the countryside. How many other groups were out there between him and Gillian, waiting to ambush whoever was stupid enough (like us) to be driving out in the open?
Of course, he wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for Mercer. Hell, he’d probably be on the Trident right now, maybe even watching Bonnie and Carrie swimming in bikinis at the back of the anchored boat. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Coulda, woulda, but didn’ta, pal.
The soldier standing near his head shuffled his feet, the dried dirt caking his boots flaking off with every movement.
“Hey,” Keo said.
The man ignored him.
“Hey,” Keo said again.
The man looked down. He was wearing dark shades and Keo got a quick glimpse of himself in the reflective lens, lying on the truck bed. There was blood along the side of his face and in his hair, but he concluded that they looked worse than they actually were, since it certainly didn’t feel as if he was bleeding to death at the moment. Probably.
“What?” the man said.
“Where we going?”
“Base,” the man said, and returned his attention to the road.
“Angleton?”
“Angleton’s dead,” the man said. “Been dead for a year now.”
“So where’s base?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
Keo hadn’t been able to glimpse the man’s name tag, with the soldier’s back to him most of the entire time. “You got a name?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the man said.
Keo smiled. A man after his own heart. “I’m Keo.”
“Good for you. Now shut up.”
“Just trying to pass the time. Seen any tanks lately?”
That got the reaction Keo was looking for, and the soldier stared down at him for three very long seconds. “Keep it up. I got a shit-stained rag in my back pocket that’s looking for a mouth to call home.”
“Fair enough.” Keo glanced at Jordan instead. “Jordan.”
She didn’t move.
“Jordan,” he said again, louder this time.
She finally opened her eyes and grimaced up at the sun for a moment.
“Over here,” he said.
She turned her head slowly and blinked at him. There was a cut along her right temple, but it looked minor next to the contusion in the middle of her forehead. “This is not good,” she said, her words slightly slurred.
“Hey, we’ve been in worse situations. Remember Santa Marie Island? Or yesterday? Or all of this week?’
“I’m trying not to,” she frowned.
“How’s your head?”
“Like someone’s hitting me with a sledgehammer. Repeatedly.” Her eyes darted upward, toward the collaborator hovering over them. Then, after a moment, “Is there something sitting on my forehead?”
“Looks like you hit it on something during the crash.”
“I don’t know how that’s possible. That seat belt almost cut me in half.”
“We flipped.”
“We flipped?”
“The truck. It flipped.”
She stared at him in disbelief.
“They hit us with a LAW,” he said.
“Law?”
“Light Anti-Tank Weapon. I guess they came fully prepared to take out a tank. Can’t say I blame them.”
“Oh.”
“We’re lucky,” he said.
She frowned again. “One of these days we need to sit down and have a really long talk about your definition of lucky, Keo.”
They drove for another ten minutes or so before the vehicle abandoned the smooth, paved highway and turned right onto a dirt road. Dust enveloped the truck, making him cough. The machine gunner, well-prepared for this part of the trip, pulled a handkerchief that was wrapped around his neck over the lower half of his face. Keo could only close his mouth and try not to breathe in the swirling dust. Jordan did the same next to him, squinting her eyes like she was gagging.
The loud squeal of brakes as the truck, and the ones behind and in front of it, stopped. Doors squeaked open and heavy boots pounded the ground.
The soldier behind the machine gun pulled off his handkerchief and looked down at Keo. “Welcome to base.”
“I call first dibs on the Jacuzzi,” Keo said.
The man grinned, but said nothing. He stepped over Keo, and the truck dipped slightly before rising again as he leaped down the back without bothering with the tailgate.
Keo turned his head and found Jordan looking back at him.
“Another opportunity for that golden tongue of yours to get us out of trouble,” she said. “Start wagging.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Don’t let me down.”
“When have I ever?”
She sighed. “God, you’re going to get us both killed.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
But they didn’t give him a chance to talk his way out of it. Instead, a pair of armed men led Jordan and Keo from the truck and across the large front yard of a farmhouse. They were surrounded by technicals, and armed men stood guard on the rooftops of a two-story white house on one side and the bright red barn in front of them. The highway was somewhere to his right, but Keo couldn’t spy even a tiny glimpse of it at the moment.
The farm was surrounded by vast fields of sun-bleached land, and if something had been growing out there once upon a time, they were long dead, replaced by empty stretches of brown earth. He could probably scream all day and no one would hear, or care, if they heard.
The zip ties around their legs had been removed so they could walk, but the ones around their wrists remained in place. Not that Keo had any intentions of making a run for it. There were too many men in black uniforms with guns, and the ones on top of the barn were watching them like hawks. There were no signs of Marcy, the obvious leader of the pack, and the men walking them didn’t seem interested in conversation.
Keo spotted a dozen vehicles, including the three that had returned from the ambush, before they were escorted through the barn’s open doors and his entire universe suddenly boile
d down to rotting wood and the aroma of stale feed and hay, overlapped with old urine and manure stains.
Jordan made a face. “Jesus…”
“Never been inside a barn before?” he asked.
“No. You?”
“Once or twice.”
“Do they all smell like this?”
“This one’s special. A year’s worth of abandonment.”
“I feel so privileged.”
There was no one inside the barn but them, which he guessed made sense; who wanted to spend all their time in here, with the smells? Their escorts led them to their destination: a metal cage at the back. It looked like some kind of kennel, about ten feet high and just as wide.
One of the men used a key on the cage’s padlock, then pulled the door open. “Inside.”
Keo and Jordan stepped through, crunching year-old hay (and other things he’d rather not think too much about) as they did so. The door clanged shut and the collaborator slipped the lock back through the latch, snapped it closed, then pocketed the key.
“Hands,” the man said.
Keo squeezed his bound hands through the bars, and the man took out a pair of pliers and snipped the restraints. He did the same to Jordan’s zip ties.
“We could use some medical attention too,” Keo said, rubbing at his wrists.
“Tough nuts,” the man said.
“Maybe later, but just the medical attention for now.”
The man grunted. “If it was up to me, I’d keep the both of you hog-tied and rolling around in there.” Then he turned and walked off.
Keo leaned against the cage, feeling like a prisoner in a bad movie, and watched his guards leave. They didn’t go far, though, and stood guard in front of the open barn doors underneath the bright sun. Well, it was bright for now, but it wasn’t going to last forever, which was the problem.
“I thought you were going to talk us out of this?” Jordan said.
“I didn’t exactly get an opportunity.”
“Excuses.”
“Maybe when Marcy shows up…”
“Who’s Marcy?”
“The one running the show.”
“When did you two become buddies?”
The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 27