At the moment, it was his best option, because going back to Winding Creek to look for traces of the women was suicide.
Keo sighed. He hated when he had choices, because he invariably chose the wrong one. It was a curse. Or maybe he just wasn’t smart enough to always make the right choice. He knew a few people who would readily agree it was the latter.
I suck at this, he thought, before giving the horse a soft tap on both sides of its belly. The animal stopped eating and continued walking through the woods.
Even as they slipped out of dark patches of shadows and into bright sunlight and back again, Wendy’s voice continued echoing inside Keo’s head, and he couldn’t shake it no matter how hard he tried.
“They took the women,” she had said, in that flat, almost monotone whisper as if she were afraid of being overheard. “And the babies. God, they took all the babies…”
And each time, without fail, he would ask himself, Why did they take the kids? What the hell is going on out there?
Or maybe the question he should have been asking himself was, just how much was it going to cost him to find out?
Nine
Princeville, Texas, looked serene from a distance, especially through the clear lens of a five-hundred-dollar pair of binoculars. It was three in the afternoon, and sunlight flickered off its gravel-topped buildings and empty roads. A McDonald’s arch was the most obvious thing at this end of the city, but farther in Keo could spot a bank and a strip mall. There were a couple of hotels in the distance, but he was too far away to make out details. Highway 77 popped out of the flat ground to his right and ran straight north, disappearing behind an apartment complex and what might have been a two-story (or possibly three) hospital.
The place looked deserted, but appearances could be deceiving, and Keo stayed far enough out of sight that he felt relatively safe he could disappear back into the trees at the first hint of trouble. He had settled on the west side, with a large, open field between him and the city limits. Tall, swaying grass brushed against his shoulders while he crouched and would have been tapping at his waist if he were standing.
Keo took a moment to look back at the horse. It was chewing grass a few meters behind him, still inside the woods. He’d tied the reins to a branch, but that wasn’t really going to stop the thoroughbred if it decided to take off. The animal was big and strong enough to snap half a dozen branches if it wanted to say adieu to him, and the fact that it hadn’t…
Weird horse, Keo thought, before looking back out at Princeville.
He’d always avoided cities like Princeville in the past, and instead opted to trade and at times linger around the smaller towns. There had been a lot of Winding Creeks, and each one had served their purpose. Food, supplies, and company.
So why had he settled at Winding Creek, of all places? The answer to that was an easy one: Emma. She was a beautiful woman, and Keo was a sucker for beautiful women. Maybe that was why he had run headfirst into town when he heard the shooting and why he was still here now, looking for signs of where Buck’s people might have taken her and the girl. He owed mother and daughter that much: To try to locate, and if possible, help them. To do any less would be an asshole thing to do.
“Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” someone once said to him not all that long ago, and Keo had spent a lot of effort trying not to be one.
At least, not anymore.
A sudden snort from behind him, and Keo glanced back to find the horse with its head raised high and looking at him.
“What?” Keo said, about a second before he heard it.
He turned around and refocused on Highway 77 across the expansive field with the binoculars, locating the familiar source of the noise without any problems. It was, after all, the only thing moving around out there besides the grass.
There it is. I knew it had to be out there.
It was a technical—a civilian truck with a machine gun mounted in the back—heading toward Princeville. A man in dark clothing, a balaclava protecting his face against the cold winds, stood in the truck bed manning the MG. There were two other figures inside the vehicle—
Shit, he thought when a second, then a third, technical appeared behind the first. They had the same configuration—men in front and a gunner in the back behind a mounted weapon that could fire a few thousand rounds in his direction in the space of less than a minute if they had any inklings he was around.
A Toyota and two Fords, all beat up from heavy use. The four-lane road they were traveling on was smooth enough and completely abandoned so they could afford to drive at top speed into the city. The men in the back were wearing civilian clothes with the familiar black urban assault vest—the same kind he was currently wearing—though he couldn’t make out their circled M’s from all the way out here.
Keo lowered the binoculars when the last of the vehicles disappeared one by one out of view. He remained crouched for a moment, listening to the fading car engines. Soon, it was just him and the horse again.
Three technicals. Three machine guns. Maybe more already in Princeville that he couldn’t see. A place like that was big enough to hold—whether temporarily or permanently—a lot of people with a lot of guns.
A hell of a lot of guns.
Keo sat down and dug out a bag of deer jerky from his bag. He was chewing on one of the sticks when he felt a nudge against his shoulder and looked over to find the horse’s brown eyes staring back at him. To his unsurprise, it had snapped the branch he had tied its rein to without any effort.
“What? You tired of eating grass?”
The animal seemed to nod toward the jerky in Keo’s hand.
“I guess you deserve it. You did let me ride you.”
He held up the half-eaten meat, and the horse snatched it out of his hand. Keo smirked, then dug out another one, and the horse also gobbled that one up.
Keo fished out a third piece for himself. “Go easy there, pal. Jerky don’t grow on trees, you know.”
The horse turned and walked back to where it had been grazing.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Keo said, before looking out at Princeville again.
Now where was he? Right…
Three technicals. Three machine guns. Probably more inside the city.
Those were some bad odds. What made it worse was that he didn’t know for sure just how bad his odds really were. There could be a few hundred guys like Buck in the place right now. Or a thousand. Okay, maybe not a thousand. At most it was a few hundred. But at least more than twenty or so, if the leftovers he’d seen back at Winding Creek were any indication. That was still a heck of a lot of guys.
Keo sighed and wondered what she would say if she knew what he was about to do.
“Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” she had once said to him. “If you won’t stay with us, if you won’t come back to the Trident with me, at least promise me you’re not going out there just to get yourself killed. Tell me you’ll at least try to make it back, and mean it.”
This wasn’t quite the same situation, but it was damn close. He was about to embark on something that could very well get him killed when the much better alternative was open to him and all he had to do was take it.
Except he couldn’t. Emma had welcomed him into her life, into her home, and into her little girl’s life. Her ten-year-old-going-on-thirty little girl, whose birthday was less than two weeks away.
“My birthday’s in two weeks,” she had said. “What are you gonna get me?”
“Why should I get you anything?” he had answered.
“It’s tradition.”
“People make new traditions these days. Ever heard of the phrase ‘Out with the old, in with the new?’”
“No. Sounds stupid. Besides, I like the old ones better. So what’re you gonna get me?”
“You’ll see.”
“You got me something already?” she had said, trying and failing to hide the excitement in her voice.
He was all set to go look for a birth
day present, too, but that was going to have to go on the back burner.
Now where was he?
Ah.
Three technicals. Three machine guns. Probably more waiting for him inside Princeville.
Yeah, those were some really bad odds. Real shitty odds.
So what else was new?
He couldn’t just walk away. He wished he could—and maybe, not all that long ago he could have pulled the trigger and even found ways to justify it in his mind—but those days were long gone. He couldn’t decide, though, how much that should worry him.
Oh, who are you kidding. It should worry you lots, pal.
He was still chastising himself as he slid along the two buildings toward the voices up ahead. Two guys going back and forth. It wasn’t the most stimulating conversation ever, but then it was hard to find good conversationalists these days. Most people would point to him as a prime example.
“How many?” one was asking.
“Five dozen, I think,” the other one said.
“Shit, that’s a lot.”
“That’s a hell of a lot, yeah.”
He wasn’t sure what they were talking about—what the “five dozen” was referring to—because he’d stumbled across them in mid conversation. A part of him wanted to keep going until he found just one guy, but he’d been moving steadily up the back streets of Princeville for the last thirty minutes before he located these two and didn’t feel like trying his luck deeper in the city. Besides, he needed information, and sooner or later he’d have to talk to someone. These two bozos might as well be those someones.
He walked casually out from between the two buildings, the submachine gun slung over one shoulder and one hand playing with the cheap metal lighter he’d found half-buried in the ground while sneaking his way into town.
They were standing on the sidewalk with an empty strip mall across the street. As far as Keo could tell, there wasn’t another living soul around for miles, but of course that wasn’t true. Princeville was big enough that Buck’s men had to spread out to cover every part of it. That was exactly what Keo was counting on. That, and the fact Buck had a lot of men, enough that maybe not all of them would recognize that Keo didn’t belong. After all, who knew everyone in a hundred-or-more men army?
At least, that was the plan. If he was wrong about even just one of those assumptions, he was probably a dead man.
Keo sighed, thought, This is such a bad idea, and stepped out from between the buildings.
The first of the two chatterboxes to hear his approach spun around, hands tightening on the AK-47 clone in front of him. He was young, mid-twenties, and looked like he was losing the battle to grow a mustache. Like his buddy, he sported a rough circled M on the front and back of his assault vest.
“Hey,” Keo said. “You guys got a cigarette?”
The second one was taller with a buzz cut, but about the same age. He, too, had startled at Keo’s sudden arrival and lifted his rifle slightly. “The fuck you come from?”
“Got a cigarette?” Keo asked him.
“What?”
“Cigarette,” Keo said, and held up the lighter for effect.
The two men stared at him, then exchanged a confused look. But neither one raised their weapons in alarm.
So far, so good…you big, dumb idiot.
The two were reacting exactly as Keo had hoped—confused. The fact that he wasn’t in any hurry and was walking casually toward them as if he belonged, combined with the black assault vest he’d stolen from the man he’d knifed inside Winding Creek, added to the role he was playing: He was just one of them, looking for a cigarette. And a man who belonged didn’t have to be afraid of two guys standing guard.
“Where’d you come from?” Failed Mustache said, but even as he asked the question, Keo noticed the man unclutching his fingers around his weapon.
Eureka.
“Buck told me to check the woods,” Keo said.
“What for?”
“Fuck if I know. Just in case someone followed us from Winding Creek or something, I guess.” He shrugged indifferently. Then, adding just the right amount of impatience, “You guys got cigarettes or not?”
The taller one with the buzz cut also relaxed his grip around his AR. Even better, he slung his rifle before answering. “Don’t smoke. It’s a filthy habit; bad for your health.”
“Yeah, well, who wants to live forever?”
“Me,” Failed Mustache said, and he and Buzz Cut chuckled.
Keo gave them a dramatic eye roll. “Whatever. I’m gonna go see if anyone has some I can bum.” He started to walk off before stopping and glanced back. “Buck still at the same place? I gotta report in in person.”
“At the mall, yeah,” Buzz Cut said.
Keo nodded and turned to go.
“Hey,” Failed Mustache said. Then, when Keo glanced over his shoulder, “You see anything in the woods?”
“Yeah. Plenty.”
Failed Mustache waited for Keo to answer, and when Keo didn’t, the man said, “So? What’d you see?”
“Trees. Tons of the stuff. Don’t know where they came from.”
Buzz Cut snorted. “Wise guy.”
Keo gave them a half-assed salute and continued up the street.
He didn’t breathe easier until he had put at least twenty paces between them, and even then he kept waiting for gunfire.
Twenty paces became forty, then fifty, then a hundred.
Christ, that worked. I can’t believe that worked.
Keo put the lighter away and calmly moved the MP5SD until it was thumping in front of him instead of slung behind him. The submachine gun was now within easy reach if the other Buckies weren’t quite as easily convinced as Failed Mustache and Buzz Cut. The prospect of having to shoot his way up Princeville just to get some information wasn’t something he was looking forward to, but at least he’d gotten past the first hurdle.
Highway 77 ran somewhere to his right, on the other side of a series of empty buildings and apartments. Sunlight beat down on him, and he glanced at his watch just to make sure he still had time left before sunset. Buck’s men hadn’t looked all that concerned about the coming nightfall, which told him they had been out here long enough to know how to deal with any ghouls they ran across. Chances were good their bullets, like the knives in their sheaths, had silver in them. You didn’t survive this long without knowing what the ghouls feared the most—sunlight and silver.
Keo took mental notes of everything he crossed, including the abandoned businesses to his left. There were more to his right across the two-lane road, but they were harder to make out with the sun in his eyes. He had to walk around the occasional bones on the sidewalk, remnants of The Walk Out that hadn’t been brushed away by wind and elements or taken by animals.
Unlike smaller towns like Winding Creek, there hadn’t been anyone in Princeville to clean up the mess after the ghouls exposed themselves to sunlight five years ago. It would take years, he guessed, before these left-behind remnants were either completely devoured by insects and animals or turned into dust in the wind. In the years since Houston, he had come across bones that had simply fallen apart, almost as if whatever had turned the ghouls had also weakened them to the very, well, bone. It was one of those things that Keo was more than happy to let the scientists sort out. Assuming there were even guys in lab coats still around.
Like most cities, Princeville had seen its share of looters over the years. It used to be that Keo could find nonperishables and water without having to try very hard. Most survivors had abandoned the towns where they had been held against their will, and that translated into more people claiming what used to be so abundant for roamers like himself. The dwindling resources was one reason Keo had stuck around Winding Creek. The town fed itself from the fields, and though it didn’t completely ignore the leftovers of the world around it, its citizens didn’t treat them as necessities. The people had more than they needed to survive; they had become comfortable as a resu
lt. Too comfortable, as it turned out, considering how easily the Buckies had pacified them this morning.
A growl, and Keo stopped and turned left.
A dog squatted in the alleyway between two buildings, a bleached white bone on the ground in front of it. The animal gave him a warning look before snatching the bone—it looked like a deformed hand, with long, delicate fingers just barely hanging on—with its long, sharp teeth and hopping onto its feet, then turning and jogging away.
Keo couldn’t help but smile. Five years ago, the dog would have been running from ghouls, but now it was surviving on their bones.
What goes around, comes around.
He turned and continued up the sidewalk.
He hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he tensed up slightly as a car flew down the street in front of him. It went from being a small dot in the distance to a black Toyota in the blink of an eye. He couldn’t be sure if it was one of the three he’d seen earlier, not that it mattered, because one technical was the same as another—deadly if that MG was pointed at him.
Keo willed himself to walk normally, neither moving fast nor slow or making any overt attempts to hide from the oncoming vehicle. He glimpsed people through the front windshield—two in the front and three more squeezed into the back. But it was really the guy manning the machine gun, its tripod welded to the truck’s cab, that got his attention because the barrel was pointed in his direction.
A thousand rounds a minute. A thousand rounds a minute…
He waited for the technical to get closer, fighting every instinct to dive into the same alleyway where he had spotted the dog, or lift the H&K into a shooting position.
The gunner. He would have to take out the gunner first—
No. Whatever you do, don’t do that.
When the truck was within ten meters, Keo gave it an acknowledging wave with one hand. The guy in the front passenger seat returned it before looking away, as did the gunner in the back.
Crunch! as the front tires of the truck obliterated a stray femur on the road just before it blasted past him and vanished in the opposite direction.
Road To Babylon Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 9