Jim climbed off his horse and tied the reins to a low-hanging branch. “Phil found one of his goats about half a mile from his property. It was all chewed up; looked like they’d been sucking on it for days. He didn’t notice it was missing until this morning and went looking for it.”
Keo didn’t have to look far to see evidence that someone—more than someone, actually, but someones—had been going back and forth from the cabin and the surrounding woods. Grass had been trampled, stepped over, and footprints led to the front door where clumps of dirt, some still damp, remained. The prints hadn’t been made by a human being—or, at least, nothing that was still one. They might have been mistaken for bare feet if he didn’t look closely enough or recognize their deformed nature. There were old specks of blood, dark black under the sunlight, but not enough to really notice if he wasn’t already looking for them. That would be animal blood, or whatever it was the creatures had been dining on. Ghoul blood, like the undead things themselves, evaporated in sunlight.
He reached behind him and pulled out his SIG Sauer. He’d grabbed his knife before leaving his place, and it sat snugly on his left hip. Keo assumed both lawmen checking their own weapons next to him were also carrying the right weapons, not that he’d taken the time to make sure. They might have been insulted if he had; he knew he would if someone had asked him. Everyone was armed with silver weapons these days. Even Emma carried a knife with a silver-edged blade on her at all times.
“Ever thought about carrying something with more rounds?” Keo asked, nodding at Jim’s six-shooter.
“That’s why I brought this along,” Jim said, pulling a sawed-off shotgun from a scabbard hanging off his horse’s saddle. He grabbed a handful of shells and stuffed them into his pants pockets.
“Silver buckshot?”
“Of course,” the sheriff said. “You?”
Keo nodded. “Of course.”
The older man turned to face the cabin. “So, how are we going to do this?”
“You’re asking me?”
Jim shrugged. “This is the first ghoul nest we’ve had in five years. We figured you’d have more experience taking them on.”
“Well, it’s not rocket science. We could just burn the place down like you did last time, but that might start a fire, and no one wants that.”
“Nope. Too close to the farms.”
“Uh huh. So let’s just knock on the door and see what happens.”
Duncan grunted. “Oh, I got a pretty good idea what’s going to happen.”
“Got a better idea, Deputy?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Then less talking, more knocking,” Keo said, and began walking toward the cabin.
The lawmen hurried to catch up, Jim walking to his left, while Duncan took his right.
You’re doing this for Emma and Megan. Remember that.
It’s a one and doner.
There was a metal security gate over the door, but it was hanging off two of its top hinges. Keo grabbed one of the rusted-over bars and pulled it back. The gate made a loud creaking sound, like something out of a bad horror movie.
Jim reached over and took the gate from Keo, allowing him to square up in front of the door. The slab of wood was dark brown, with a latch for a handle, and nothing resembling a doorknob. It looked thick enough that Keo was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to kick it open, so he didn’t even try. Instead, he pushed down on the latch and the door swung open with—unlike the gate over it—almost no sound at all.
He heard movement just before he saw them scurrying in the darkness inside. It was pitch-black, thanks to the blankets over the windows, and Keo gave himself a few seconds to let his eyes adjust.
He was still working on that when Duncan slipped past him and into the building and began shooting.
“Duncan!” Jim shouted, but he was about a second too late.
Keo sighed and pushed the door all the way in and followed Duncan inside. The deputy was still firing his 1911 Colt at a creature as it attempted to flee into a back hallway. It took three bullets, but one finally found its target and the ghoul—it was small, just barely bigger than Megan—seemed to slide before dropping, and lay still on the filthy floor.
Everything about the cabin’s great room was dirty, with sheets of dust swarming them as soon as Keo took the first step inside, the rustic wood creaking loudly under his boots. The thunderous bang! bang! of Duncan’s shots shook loose even more layers of dirt from the ceiling, and those landed on top of them.
Keo fought back a cough as something moved in the corner of his left eye. He turned, saw it bounding out of the dark corner. Its mouth was opening wide, showing jagged yellow teeth smeared with dark, old blood.
He shot it in the chest, and the creature flopped to the floor with a loud thump.
Then Jim was there, squeezing in between Keo and Duncan, and the massive boom! as he unloaded both shotgun barrels that left Keo’s ears ringing. The walls and floor might have also trembled in the aftermath, but Keo couldn’t be completely sure because he was trying desperately to fight through the shock of being so close to the blast.
Dammit, Jim! Not so close, you idiot!
The rest of the ghouls had fled into the bedrooms in the back. Keo couldn’t quite hear them with his ears still buzzing, but he could smell them everywhere in the closed cabin.
“I guess we should finish it,” Jim said as he reloaded his shotgun. Or Keo thought that was what he had said. The sheriff could have been reciting his grocery list for all Keo knew.
Jim took point, stepping over three twisted bodies lying on the floor toward the bedroom. Duncan followed, nervously changing up his grip on his pistol.
Keo gave the ghoul he’d killed a quick look before turning and following the two men into the back of the dark cabin, thinking to himself, And you thought the days of going into dark rooms were over. Optimistic much?
As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a fight, and Keo didn’t have to do very much. Jim did most of the work—or his shotgun did, as its double barrels full of silver buckshot tore into their victims inside the bedroom even before Keo or Duncan could enter after him.
In the end, Keo left the house feeling almost sorry for the creatures.
Almost.
Killing them proved easier than disposing of the bodies, which included dragging the bony carcasses outside. Keo managed two figures at a time while doing his very best not to imagine them as children, given how little they weighed and how small they both were. The sun was already eating away at their flesh even before he could get them off the porch and into the yard. He wished he could have said the stinging scent of evaporating ghoul skin, muscle, and everything else that covered their bleach-white bones was something new, but he was too used to it to lie to himself with any conviction.
Duncan and Jim grabbed rags from their saddlebags to wipe at the dust that covered them, while Keo ran his fingers through his hair and shook off the remains of vaporized ghoul—specks of gray cremated ash—that had been lifted into the air by the wind. He grabbed a bottle of water from Jim and poured the contents over his face and hair, then drank whatever was left.
“That was easier than I thought,” Jim said as he wiped at his face and forehead with another bottle.
“I told you you didn’t need me,” Keo said.
“Maybe not this time…”
“This is the first and only time, Jim.”
“What if more show up?”
“Then it’s time to recruit more deputies. But this is it for me. One and done.”
Jim nodded, though Keo didn’t fail to notice the lack of verbal confirmation.
He glanced down at the pile of bones instead. It never ceased to amaze him how white they looked once the sun got ahold of them, almost as if they were bleached by chemicals.
“Brings back memories,” Duncan said, his hands on his hips. “How many bones did we bury after The Walk Out, Jim? A few thousand?”
“Maybe that,�
�� Jim nodded. “Maybe more.”
“You weren’t here, Keo, but they were everywhere. It was like someone had taken a digger and unearthed every cemetery in the world and dumped them around Winding Creek.” The deputy shook his head. “I don’t think I ever had to work so hard in my life. Not that I minded, mind you. No one did, because it meant these buggers were gone.” He glanced around at the unmowed yard. “Hell, there’re probably a few hundred of them under our feet as we speak. God knows we buried enough of them everywhere.”
The Walk Out, Keo thought with a smile. He still remembered the shock of watching ghouls coming out of the buildings around the city as the helicopter he was sitting in hovered in the air. There was a seemingly endless wave of them—tens of thousands—obeying a command that only they could hear. You did it, Will. You did it, he remembered thinking.
Keo looked over at Jim and Duncan now as the two lawmen grabbed the multipurpose folding shovels they’d brought with them and walked back over. He doubted if either men knew who Will was or the things he’d done in the name of humanity. In the five years since, in all the towns he’d gone through and the people he’d met, not a single person had mentioned Will’s name.
You died a hero, and no one even knows it except for those of us who were there.
It would have been a tragedy if the man himself cared. Keo didn’t know him—at least, not the man that he was before his transformation—but from everyone who did, he didn’t think Will would have been the least bit bothered that no one even knew the sacrifices he had made that day under the HC Dome.
But Keo knew who Will was, and so did everyone who was there. And, more importantly, she knew, and he thought that was probably the only thing that mattered to Will at the very end.
Wish I could have known you better, pal. Maybe in another life…
“We only brought two,” Jim was saying, holding up his shovel. “Didn’t think you would actually agree to come along.”
Neither did I, Keo thought, but said, “Two’s all you need.”
Duncan glanced down at the dozen or so remains. “You can always spell me. I’ll dig and you shovel, how about that?”
“Nah. Besides, I got a long walk ahead of me.”
“You’re going already?” Jim asked.
“I gotta go take a shower or at least change clothes.” He sniffed himself and shook his head. “I forgot how much they smell.”
“You killed one of them two nights ago.”
“One’s different than a whole nest. The smell’s more noticeable.” Keo gave them a mock salute. “Have fun, boys,” he said, and started off.
“Hey, Keo,” Jim called after him when he was almost out of the clearing. Then, when Keo stopped and glanced back, “Thanks.”
“Like I said, don’t get used to it, Sheriff.”
Jim smiled. “I’ll tell Emma how helpful you were.”
“Don’t give her any ideas.”
“What does she see in you, anyway?” Duncan asked as he shoved the spade into the ground and pushed it in with one boot.
“Must be my winning personality,” Keo said.
“What personality?”
“You’ll have to take your clothes off to find out, Duncan.”
“Yeah, no thanks,” the deputy said. “But I’ll be sure to ask her when I get back from Dresden tomorrow.” He winked. “I’ll even bring back flowers. I bet she’ll love that.”
“Dresden?”
“Up north, to find out why they didn’t show up as planned last week,” Jim said. “He could use some com—”
“He doesn’t need company,” Keo said, cutting the sheriff off.
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind, now that I think about it,” Duncan said. “Maybe I’ll ask Emma if she wants to come along…”
Keo turned and started off. “Good luck with the digging, boys,” he said, and slipped back into the woods, glad to be moving as far away from the stench of dead ghouls as possible.
Four
He had gone nearly a year without shooting, stabbing, or maiming another human being, but Keo always knew that streak was going to end sooner or later. He was surprised it had lasted this long, and he credited most of that to his current situation—Megan, Emma, and a relatively quiet life he had stumbled across being the main reason.
Winding Creek was a hole in the wall, hidden from the world except for those who were brought here almost six years ago, and it had remained that way since. Life after The Purge was essentially the same for the townspeople—at least for those who had stayed behind when they no longer had to. Sometimes he wondered what life would have been like if he had found the place earlier in his travels.
Look at you, thinking about white picket fences. Disgusting.
His cabin was bigger and (definitely) cleaner than the one the ghouls had occupied, but it wasn’t exactly luxurious. There was a single bedroom in the back with a great room taking up most of the space up front. It measured less than six hundred square feet in total (not that Keo ever broke out the measuring tape, but he eyeballed it at about that size) and would be smaller than most one-bedroom apartments in the city. But it was plenty big for just him, and besides, how much room did one man need, anyway?
He ran more water over his hair and face, then changed clothes after returning home, before heading back into the kitchen. From one of its windows and through the repurposed rebars, he could just make out the sun reflecting off the steeple of Winding Creek’s church. It was the one constant sign that there was someone else out there beyond the ring of woods, that he wasn’t alone.
You wouldn’t need constant reminders if you’d moved in with Emma like Megan wanted you to, a voice said in the back of his head. Rejoin civilization again, like a civilized human being.
Oh, shut up, he thought, and pulled the curtains closed.
This was good enough. It had to be good enough. Committing now would only make things more complicated. There was a reason he still had a bug-out bag in his bedroom closet, because you never knew. You just never knew.
He stopped in front of the window that the ghoul had broken two nights ago and stared at it. There wasn’t any blood left on the jagged shards of glass or on the windowsill. The sun had taken care of that. Too bad the sun couldn’t fix the window for him, too.
He thought about Emma, about what she was doing now, and how she would react when he reappeared after sneaking out on her last night. It was the first time she’d asked, and he knew it took a lot of courage on her part. Emma, like him, was wary of getting involved, and yet she had taken the risk…only to have him skip out on her like a thief in the night.
What a manly thing to do.
God, you suck.
To keep himself busy and from thinking about all his faults, Keo spent a few minutes digging out the .45 bullet from the floorboards. It was mostly lead, with just enough silver stirred into the final product to kill ghouls. You really didn’t need much—certainly nothing like the silver-coated buckshot Jim had used back at the ghouls’ nest. Just a little silver would do it. How the hell did it work, anyway? Maybe one of those scientists Keo was sure were still out there would figure it out and tell him one of these days.
He tossed the salvaged material into a bowl already filled with other metals, things that could be turned into bullets later. There were still plenty of weapons and ammo just lying around even six years after The Purge, but they weren’t going to last forever. Keo had learned to be prepared.
Just in case…
There was one advantage to being so close to civilization again—coffee. Winding Creek was the first town he’d come across that knew how to grow the stuff, and getting a whiff of freshly-brewed coffee in the air one morning while scouting the area had made him temporarily question his sanity. That was also how he’d met Emma.
Stop thinking about her. Jesus.
Keo was grinding the beans with the water heating up on the kettle behind him when he heard it: a very faint popping sound.
His head snapp
ed up.
It took him a second—maybe a second and a half, or possibly even two—to fully process what he had just heard. By the time he knew what the noise was with absolute certainty, two more identical sounds had echoed.
Pop-pop!
Then, quickly after that:
Pop-pop-pop!
Keo abandoned the beans and rushed to the nearest window and looked south toward the skinny white steeple in the distance, poking out from the tree crowns like an unwanted appendage.
Pop-pop!
They seemed to be getting louder with each one, maybe even getting closer. Or maybe now that his brain had fully recognized the noises for what they were, they just appeared louder, more urgent. Maybe—
Brap-brap-brap! Brap-brap-brap!
Keo went deathly still, and this time he didn’t have to waste a second trying to decipher the new noise. He knew exactly what it was.
The water had begun to boil when Keo ran into the bedroom and grabbed the P220 from under the pillow. He shoved it into his front waistband, then grabbed one side of the bed and tossed the mattress and box springs over. The dusty rug that he hadn’t touched in over five months came next; Keo jerked open the trap door, reached in, got a good grip on the side handles, and lifted the box up and deposited it next to him.
It wasn’t much to look at: a three-quarters thick pine rectangle, twenty-three inches long, nine inches wide, and nine inches deep. There was no lock, since Keo assumed if someone knew where it was, they wouldn’t have any trouble cracking the lid anyway. He pulled it open and stared at its contents.
Almost a year. He’d almost gone a full year…
“Daebak,” he said out loud to the empty room.
Pop-pop-pop!
The gunfire got louder as he closed in on the town limits. From the many times he’d gone back and forth, Keo knew he had another hundred or so paces ahead of him. Of course, since he was running at almost full-speed (Faster than a donkey but slower than a cheetah, pal!) and was extending his normal stride, it was more like fifty (give or take) steps left.
Road To Babylon Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 4