Purge of Babylon (Book 6): The Isles of Elysium

by Sisavath, Sam

  Steve turned in the street and led the way toward the eastern marina. Horace had taken point, while Jack limped on his two crutches behind him. They were moving slowly, probably for Jack’s sake. Keo let the cool air cleanse the remains of last night’s gas from his face and eyes. What he wouldn’t give for a bottle of water to wash away the rest.

  He was very aware of Donovan and Taylor moving step-for-step behind him. They were keeping their distance—Donovan further back than Taylor. He thought about making a run for it every time the narrow spaces between houses popped up to the left and right of him, but whenever he calculated the distance with the time he’d need to make it to safety, the results always came out against him surviving.

  “You stopped at Galveston Island on your way over here?” Steve, walking in front of him, asked.

  “I was thinking about going back for a visit,” Keo said. “Nice?”

  “Oh, yeah. Tons of things to see and do. The seawall in particular. Now that’s engineering.”

  “You from around here?”

  “Pearland. You know where that is?”

  “Nope.”

  “Up I-45. Close enough that I spent most of my free weekends down here. I’ve always wanted an oceanside house.”

  “So what’s stopping you now? Pick one. Or fifty.”

  “You know that old saying, ‘I don’t want to join a club that will have me’? Now that there’s no one around to keep me from taking any house I want, it doesn’t quite have the same cachet. Know what I mean?”

  “You a man who worries about cachet, Steve?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I could care less.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. Give me a gun, a boat, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Steve turned around but continued backpedaling down the street. He smiled at Keo. “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll probably end up killing you.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  He chuckled, though it sounded just a little bit too forced. “One of these days, you’re going to tell me what you used to do for a living. Until then—” he spun back around, “—I’ll have to be satisfied with knowing I can put a bullet in your head any time I feel like it.”

  *

  They took all three boats with them, including Keo’s twenty-two-footer. Personally, with the bigger and more powerful vessels the soldiers had arrived in, Keo would have dumped his, but Steve had other plans. Like the one Jack had come in yesterday, Steve’s was an equal-size offshore model with two engines in the back.

  Steve had, he told Keo, approached Santa Marie Island last night using trolling motors to escape detection. Just that alone made him much smarter than all the other “soldiers” Keo had met the last few months, including the poor bastards that had assaulted Song Island.

  Once they put him inside Steve’s boat, Donovan zip tied his ankles back up and placed him on a bench up front alongside Gene.

  “You okay?” Keo asked the kid.

  Gene gave him a nervous smile. “Yeah, you?”

  “My eyes still sting a little.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Can we get some water?” Keo asked Steve, standing behind them at the console.

  “No,” Steve said. “Consider it punishment for shooting my little brother in the leg. Now shut up and enjoy the ride.”

  Taylor piloted Keo’s twenty-two-footer, while Jack and Horace followed behind them on the second offshore vessel.

  They cruised along Galveston Bay for a while before Keo spotted civilization in the distance and what looked like a fairground to the left of a channel. Carnival rides, including a Ferris wheel and a large red round structure, jutted out from behind a long boardwalk next to the bay. He imagined the place teeming with tourists on the weekends, a far cry from the ghost town it had become.

  There was always something sad about seeing a once-thriving city abandoned, left to tilt against the wind and the elements. How long would these rides stay up? Maybe another year. Maybe a decade. That would probably depend on their construction, he guessed. That red thing, whatever the hell it was, looked like it could last a few more decades before tumbling back down to earth.

  If there was once thriving life to the left of the channel, there wasn’t much on the right side. He glimpsed warehouses, businesses, and overgrown fields of grass spread across undeveloped land. The juxtaposition of the two areas was stunning, and Keo found himself drawn back to the structures along the boardwalk to his left. Abandoned or not, at least there was a lot to look at over there.

  They cruised through the channel, passing silent buildings and sun-bleached parking lots still filled with vehicles. It wasn’t until they went underneath a highway that stretched across the channel that they finally saw a shipyard. It covered a huge chunk of the water and was spread out to both sides. The multitude of open slips told him hundreds of boats had once called this place home. Where were all those boats now? At the bottom of the bay, probably. Maybe the vessel he was riding in now was one of the lucky few survivors.

  After the shipyard, it became a series of turns and empty houses and buildings and more (though much smaller) docks with empty slips. Keo lost track of how many times they eased around a bend, and each time he thought they might have reached their destination, they kept going. The path was wide enough that Donovan felt at ease keeping their boat moving at a reasonable speed. At this point, the soldiers had probably traversed this same area so many times it would have been second nature to them by now. To Keo, one stretch of water and empty parking lots and the wooded areas that surrounded them looked like the dozen others they had passed in the last hour. He stopped trying to make sense of his scenery after a while.

  One thing was certain: They were getting further inland.

  Donovan didn’t slow down until they had slipped under a large highway that ran west to east. Signs told him it was Interstate 45, with Galveston back east and Houston, along with the rest of Texas, to the west. Once they went under the I-45, the river began narrowing and thick patches of woods sprouted up to both sides of them.

  Keo knew they were getting close to their destination when he started seeing men in black uniforms moving among the trees to their right. Sentries. They were all very well-armed, and a few of them waved to the boats. Donovan and Steve waved back.

  Soon, the soldiers gave way to civilians along the riverbanks. Like the soldiers, they were concentrated only on the right side. A dozen or so women were washing clothes against the rocks while half-naked kids jumped into the water, which had to be cold given the falling temperature. Keo was reminded of documentaries about frontier times, before washing machines and dryers were invented.

  The people waved excitedly at them as they passed by. He had to look long and hard before he could conclude that they either wanted to be here, or they were really good actors.

  “What are they doing?” Gene asked, straining to see the women—and they were almost all women, except for the children—off the boat’s starboard.

  “Washing clothes,” Keo said.

  “I’ve never seen that before.”

  “That’s how people used to wash clothes before washing machines.”

  “No, not that,” Gene said. “Her.”

  He was pointing at a young woman standing further up on the bank holding a laundry basket and talking to a couple of older women as they scrubbed clothes against some boulders. She had a noticeable belly, but it wasn’t because she was fat.

  She was pregnant.

  Now that he had seen one, it was easier to spot others. Two more women who also looked pregnant, though not nearly as far along as the first one.

  He thought about Carrie and Lorelei; the girls had fled one of the collaborator towns and had ended up at Song Island with him.

  “It’s not the sex,” Carrie had told him. “It’s what happens afterward. With the babies. You understand, right? Why we couldn’t stay? Why we ran?”


  Because the babies didn’t belong to the women who would give birth to them; they would belong to the ghouls, to continuing the cycle of humans supplying blood to the creatures for years, decades, and generations to come. That was the foundation of an “agreement,” the why and how towns like T18 existed in the first place, because the people here—the women washing clothes by hand, the children swimming in the river—had come voluntarily. They had agreed. Sanctuary and safety, in exchange for human slavery.

  Keo wasn’t entirely sure what he was feeling. He had heard the stories and believed them, but to actually see it in person was an entirely different universe. Part of him didn’t blame them for choosing this path, but the other part, the one that had kept him alive this last year, felt a bit sick to his stomach.

  He glanced back at Steve, standing next to Donovan behind the center console. “Why am I here?” he asked, shouting over the roar of the double motors to be heard.

  Steve didn’t answer, and for a moment Keo thought the man hadn’t heard him. He seemed preoccupied with waving back to a couple of kids that were chasing after the boat along the banks, as if Steve were some kind of returning hero.

  “Why am I here?” Keo asked again, shouting louder this time.

  “You’ll find out,” Steve shouted back.

  “I’d like to know now.”

  “I bet you would, but you’ll find out when I decide you can find out. And not a moment sooner.”

  “They look so happy,” Gene said next to him. He looked mesmerized by the sight of the women and children. “Are they really that happy? Is this real?”

  “I don’t know,” Keo said.

  “They look so happy,” Gene said again.

  Don’t be fooled, Keo was going to tell the kid, when he caught a glimpse of a figure among the civilians on the riverbanks.

  A woman, and something about her seized his attention. It helped that she was standing up just as their boat passed, and she was clearly taller than the other women around her, which made her stick out even further.

  Keo shot up from the bench, wobbly on his feet because of his zip-tied ankles, and looked back at her until they locked eyes over the river.

  She was moving up the riverbanks, trying to keep up with them, but there were just too many people in her way, and a few seconds later she disappeared behind some tall trees.

  After all this time, all these months and uncertainty, there she was, still as breathtakingly beautiful as the day he sent her away on Mark’s boat, hoping to save her life.

  Gillian.

  CHAPTER 7

  They had taken over a small city called Wilmont and turned it into T18. The place was separated into two parts, with a residential district and a commercial area connected by a wide steel bridge further up the river. As far as Keo could tell, the left side of Wilmont was abandoned, with the civilians (and Steve’s men) congregating entirely on the right side.

  And among those civilians was Gillian.

  She had seen him too, he was certain of it. They might have locked eyes for just a brief second or two, but the way she had looked back at him, following the path of the boat, he could tell she recognized him.

  Gillian.

  The fact that she was still alive, after all the ifs and maybes of the last six months, was the best news he could have hoped for, especially after the disaster that was Santa Marie Island. The problem was, he was still in zip ties and being boated away from her.

  That left Keo to focus instead on his new surroundings.

  The marina where they docked was tiny compared to the shipyard they had passed earlier, but it had a full complement of boats, anywhere from thirty to forty of them (So that’s where all the boats went), occupying almost all of the available slips. Heavily armed soldiers stood watch, with two stick figures moving along a walkway that ringed the top of a rocket-shaped water tower in the near distance.

  They were led up the dock, with Taylor and Donovan (still carrying the MP5SD and Keo’s pack, with all the silver bullets) up front. Keo watched Steve stop momentarily at a stainless steel metal box resting on a long pole just inside the parking lot, in front of the docks, and opened it. He took out the boat keys and hung them inside, then closed it—there was no lock, just a latch—and continued on.

  Keo made a mental note of the box’s location and, more importantly, its contents.

  He saw mostly men standing guard along the length of the marina, and the last time he had seen this many near a shoreline, he was lobbing grenade rounds at them. When Keo saw men on horseback moving back and forth along the banks nearby, he nearly did a spit-take.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t like horses?” Steve asked.

  “I like horses just fine,” Keo said. “It’s the guys on top of them that bother me.”

  “Welcome to the new world order. You hear that?”

  Keo listened for a moment. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”

  “Nature. That’s the whole point of this, you know. We’re going back to our roots. That’s what they want.”

  Keo didn’t have to ask who “they” were. Different people might have different names for them—ghouls, nightcrawlers, bloodsuckers, creatures, even monsters—but they were always the same. They. That was all you really needed to say.

  “You ever wondered why they want it like this?” Keo asked. “Taking us back to the Stone Age?”

  “I know exactly why, and I’m good with it.”

  “It must be nice to care so little about your fellow human beings.”

  Steve chuckled. “Don’t make me slap you again, Keo.”

  “We wouldn’t want that now, would we? Especially me.”

  “That’s a good boy.”

  They walked through a wide-open (and very empty) parking lot that took up a huge chunk of the marina and toward a pair of buildings to the right side of the grounds. Men milled around inside one of them, visible through open doors and windows. A large warehouse that looked like it could hold a handful of boats at one time squatted to one side of the buildings. Keo wondered what was inside. It probably wasn’t boats…

  “Expecting trouble?” Keo asked, looking around him at the armed men.

  “You never know when you’ll run into someone with a fancy German submachine gun,” Steve said.

  Keo grunted. “It’s not that fancy.”

  “What’s the matter, an American gun like the M4 isn’t good enough for you?”

  “I didn’t know you were so patriotic, Steve.”

  “Rah rah, and all that jazz.”

  They were heading toward one of the two buildings next to the warehouse. Someone had spray painted “Marina 1” and “Marina 2” on the walls.

  “Your boys look a little on edge,” Keo said.

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” Steve said. They stopped in front of the buildings and Steve nodded at Taylor and Jack. “Take the kid to Processing.” And to Donovan and Horace, “The two of you with me.”

  Steve pulled open the door and stepped inside Marina 1.

  Behind Keo, Taylor was leading Gene away while Jack waved one of the soldiers on horseback over. Gene looked over at Keo, and if he expected to see fear in the teenager’s eyes, he would have been disappointed. Gene looked almost happy, as if he had come home.

  “See you around, Gene,” Keo said.

  “Yeah, see you around, Keo,” Gene said.

  Jack had traded places with the horseman and had tossed his crutches to Taylor. “Save them for me, just in case.” He looked over at Keo. “Don’t worry about the kid. Look at him. Once he sees what T18 has to offer, he’s never going to want to leave. They never do.”

  Jack turned the horse around and galloped off, while Taylor led Gene after him.

  “Come on,” Donovan said, and poked Keo in the back with the M4 again.

  Keo followed Steve into Marina 1.

  It was an office suite, with a big desk where a secretary would have sat and a row of empty cheap plastic chairs along the walls fo
r the guests. A dead plant draped over the side of a faded brown pot and magazines were strewn along a chipped table. Keo walked across dirty, heavily mud-caked tiled flooring and into a back hallway that Steve had disappeared into earlier.

  They walked all the way to the end before Donovan said, “Inside,” and gave him another shove in the back with the same barrel.

  He stepped inside, expecting Donovan to follow, but the man instead turned around and headed back to the waiting area.

  Steve had already made himself comfortable inside a nice big office. The place looked heavily lived in, with a blanket and pillows on a pullout sofa along one wall and empty plastic bottles of water littering the corners.

  The older man was pulling up the lone window, letting the cool breeze from the river rush inside. He looked comfortable, like a king in his (shabby) throne room. “Have a seat, Keo.”

  Keo sat down on a surprisingly comfortable chair in front of a desk, its laminated surface covered with a large and heavily annotated map of the area that finally allowed him to see T18/Wilmont in relation to the rest of the Gulf Coast. They were on the outskirts of League City, on the other side of the I-45 highway. A long river, like the slithering body of a snake, stretched from T18 all the way to Galveston Bay.

  Steve walked back over. “I saw that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You looking at the map.” He smirked. “You think you’ve committed enough important details to memory?”

  Keo smiled. “You give me too much credit. My memory is shit. I was just trying to figure out where I was.”

  “Ah,” Steve said, though he clearly didn’t believe a single word Keo had said.

  The man sat down on an executive chair and opened one of the drawers and produced a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels, then grabbed two shot glasses from another drawer. Keo watched him expertly pour the Tennessee whiskey into both glasses before sliding one across the desk.