“I don’t care one way or another. Steve is just a mouthpiece for the creatures. They’d just replace him with someone else if he was gone. My goal was never to kill Steve or his people; it was always just to save the townspeople.” He sighed, looking at the ring in Keo’s palm. “I don’t know why I held onto it. Maybe it was just a reminder of what used to be. If you’re still alive when we meet again, you can give it back to me.”
There was a line of vehicles filled with people and supplies waiting in the parking lot of the YMCA. Reese was in one of the cars and Wyatt was perched in the back of a truck. The street behind them was empty, and he could see the raised structure of I-45 in the distance. It looked gray and never-ending, but also strangely inviting.
“So this is it?” Jordan asked. “You’re giving up?”
Tobias gave her a pursed smile. “Not by a long shot, Jordan. But for now—right now—it’s time to take a break.” He glanced back at his people. “They’re tired. I’m tired, too. My number one job was always to make sure they stay alive. That means giving them time to get healthy. After that, we’ll reevaluate.”
“What about the people back in T18? They’re going to wonder why you’ve stopped communicating with them.”
“They’re smart, and they’ll get by until we make contact again.”
Jordan shook her head. She wasn’t convinced.
“You’re not coming with us, are you?” Tobias asked her.
“No.”
“About yesterday…”
“It’s not yesterday,” Jordan said. “Keo’s going to need my help to get back to T18 and save Gillian.”
That caught Keo by surprise, and he looked over at her.
She avoided his stare and focused on Tobias instead. “She’s my friend, too. I owe it to her.”
“All right,” Tobias nodded. “It’s not like I could ever make you do anything you didn’t want to, anyway.”
He waved to Reese, who, along with another man, grabbed some weapons and packs out of one of the trucks and jogged over to them. Reese didn’t look happy when he handed them over—including the MP5SD and Keo’s pack—but Keo couldn’t care less. He was too busy clasping the belt back on and beaming as he checked the magazine inside the submachine gun.
Tobias was looking at Keo closely.
“What’s on your mind?” Keo said.
“The Steve I used to know was a good man. We wanted to do what was right for people, but somewhere along the way he went astray. The Steve that sent you out there as bait is the one you’re facing now. If you get the chance, pull the trigger. Not for me or for my people, but for your own sake.”
“I’ve never had much trouble pulling the trigger when it needs to be pulled.”
“I don’t doubt that at all. He sent you out there for a reason. Steve, for all his faults—and God knows he has many—was always a very good judge of character. He always knew how to manipulate people, how to make them do things that would benefit him.”
“I don’t think that was a compliment. To him or to me.”
“Maybe not,” Tobias said. “But I’m guessing it’s pretty accurate.”
Keo shrugged.
Tobias turned to Jordan. “I’m taking everyone to the backup location. You remember where that is?”
Jordan nodded. “I remember.”
“When you get tired of this guy, come find us.”
“No promises.”
“No promises,” he repeated.
Tobias turned around and whirled his hand in the air, and the vehicles fired up. The sudden loud blast of machines scattered birds in nearby trees, and more than a few creatures in the overgrown yards around them, on both sides of the streets, scampered away. Keo wondered how long it would take Steve’s people to track them down to this location by just the noise alone.
Reese pulled up in the truck and Tobias hobbled into the front passenger seat before leaning back out and nodding at the two of them. “Good hunting.”
Then they were gone, the caravan turning into the street and heading toward the interstate. Keo and Jordan watched them go, bright sun shimmering against the roofs of their vehicles, the smell of exhaust filling his nostrils for the first time in a long time.
“Well, that was easy,” Keo said. “I was expecting more screaming and gunplay.”
“There’s a reason we followed him for this long,” Jordan said. “Tobias is a good man.”
Keo held up the gaudy ring. “He’s got bad taste in jewelry though.”
“We better get going. That much noise is going to attract attention, even this far from T18. Just like we have scouts around the woods, Miller does, too.”
Keo put the ring away and looked at her. “What are you still doing here, Jordan?”
“Gillian’s my friend, too,” she said, walking off, “and I’m tired of losing friends. That includes you, Keo.”
CHAPTER 14
“You don’t have to do this,” Keo said for the third time since they left the YMCA behind and began the trek back to T18. That was almost an hour ago.
“Shut up,” she said.
“I’m serious. I can do this on my own. I have the ring of power. Its gaudiness will be more than enough to strike down the bad guys.”
She smirked. “You don’t even know if it’s going to work.”
“Tobias seemed to think it will.”
“It’s been months since he talked to Miller. People can change a lot these days. You, of all people, should know that.”
They walked in silence for another few minutes, passing parts of the woods that he didn’t recognize from yesterday. Jordan was leading the way because she was more familiar with the area, and according to her, just as it didn’t pay to stay in the same place for too long, it wasn’t smart to travel the same path more than once if they could help it. She knew better, so he deferred to her experience.
“So what’s the plan?” Jordan asked. “You’re just going to walk up and hand the ring to Miller and ask him to pretty please give you Gillian?”
“You act like that’s a bad plan.”
“It’s a stupid plan. He didn’t expect you to survive yesterday. He practically dangled you so we’d expose ourselves.”
Jordan had a point, but Keo knew men like Miller. They were cunning and dangerous, but also vain. When presented with the opportunity to take a prize like Tobias’s state championship ring and lose nothing in return, would Miller really turn it down? Keo didn’t think so. Which was good, because he was going to put his life on the line for that belief.
Solid plan, pal. You just forgot the part where everything turns to shitburgers and you get killed.
“About Gillian,” Keo said. “You never told me what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“T18. You left and she didn’t. You never told me why.”
“We talked about it more times than I could count, and I thought she was going to leave with me.” She looked momentarily lost in thought, maybe reliving all those conversations with Gillian. “But when the time came, I left and she stayed behind.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her when you see her again.”
“And she hasn’t tried to leave since?”
Jordan shook her head. “I sent her messages using one of our inside guys, but she never answered. The only thing left would have been to get our guy to approach her, and I didn’t want to risk exposing him like that in case—”
She didn’t finish.
“In case of what?” Keo asked. When she still didn’t say anything, “Jordan.”
“You’ll have to ask her when you see her again,” was all she would say.
“Jordan…”
“She was different in the weeks leading up to the escape. To this day I don’t know what happened, but when the time came, I was the only one who left. Only she can say why.”
He thought about pressing the issue, but one look at her and he knew he wasn’t going to get f
ar. If anything, it would probably piss her off.
So he asked instead, “How long have you been running around out there with Tobias’s gang?”
“Three months. It feels like three years. Time has a way of slipping by out here.”
They walked on, moving as quickly as they could without making too much noise. Keo caught a couple of squirrels sitting on a branch nearby watching them pass, and he grinned. He had a long and glorious history with squirrels.
“So, these people on Song Island,” Jordan said after a while. “They sound like good people.”
“Sure, if you don’t mind all the crazy shit they do.”
“Hunh.”
He gave her a curious look. “Meaning?”
She had walked on in front of him, but he pictured her smiling to herself when she said, “You calling someone else crazy. That’s a good one.”
He grunted. “You haven’t met these people. They’re all nuts.”
“I’d still like to meet them one of these days. Especially Lara.”
“Maybe you will.”
“You think he found them by now? Her boyfriend Will?”
“He’d have to be alive first to do that.”
“You don’t think he is?”
“We were out there for a month and never heard a peep from him. If he was still alive, he would have already made contact.” He shrugged. “But what do I know. From what everyone keeps telling me, he’s too stubborn to die, so anything’s possible, I guess.”
“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“People finding each other out here. Like you and Gillian.”
“Happily ever after?”
“Maybe just a happily for now—”
Clop-clop-clop!
Jordan froze and started lifting her rifle, but Keo grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down to the ground first. They ended up behind a thick bush on their stomachs, faces pressed into the soft earth just as two men on horseback galloped past them.
Soldiers in black uniforms, M4s thumping against their backs.
They were heading off in the same direction Keo and Jordan had just come from: toward the YMCA building. It had to have been the cars firing up at the same time. Tobias’s people had made a hell of a ruckus, but they could afford to, because they were abandoning the base.
He was hoping one of the soldiers might be Jack Miller, who would have made for an even better bargaining chip than Tobias’s ring. But that turned out not to be the case. Even though he only saw the two men from the back as they were riding away, one was too thin and the other was too tall to be Jack.
Next to him, Jordan had eased her carbine forward and was gripping it perhaps just a little too tightly. He could tell she wanted to fight.
He shook his head and they exchanged a brief look, then waited for the clop-clop-clop to slowly fade into the background.
When they couldn’t hear the soldiers anymore, they picked themselves up and brushed the dirt off their clothes.
“They’re heading for the YMCA,” Jordan said.
“If we move farther back into the woods, away from the road, can you still find T18?”
“I’ve been walking and running and fighting around here for months now. I could find T18 with a blindfold on.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“Yes, smartass.”
They continued on, but also moved deeper into the woods. It wasn’t a guarantee they wouldn’t run into more soldiers, but Keo didn’t feel like taking any chances now. He’d already taken too many unnecessary risks on his way here, and having found Gillian, he wanted to play it as safe as possible.
“Kill Steve. Save Gillian. Live happily ever after.”
*
His head had started bothering him as soon as they left the YMCA behind, and it only continued to get worse during the long walk back to T18. The quick spurt of adrenaline from the near-miss with the mounted soldiers hadn’t helped, either.
“You okay?” Jordan asked when she saw the way he was touching his head.
“A little dizzy,” he said, stopping momentarily and leaning against a tree. “I guess I’m still not over getting my head bashed in by your friends.”
She looked at him worriedly for a moment. “You need to rest. Get off your feet.” She glanced around them, then bit her lips for a moment. Finally, she said, “Come on. I know a place around here.”
They headed off again, Jordan taking him deeper into the woods.
“So everyone’s gone?” Keo asked when they had been walking for a few minutes.
“Gone?”
“Tobias’s people.”
“Except for the ones still in town, yeah.”
“How many inside agents do you have?”
“Two that I know of for sure, more that only Tobias knows about. They’re risking a lot to help us, and he doesn’t want to unnecessarily endanger them. The more people know, the greater their chances of being discovered.”
“So except for the undercovers in T18 and you, that’s it. Tobias has officially thrown up the white flag.”
“You heard him. He said he was just going to rest, to let the others heal up.”
“And you believe that?”
She sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Sorry.”
“What are you sorry about?”
“You followed Tobias because you believed in him. It’s never an easy thing when your leader decides he’s had enough, and vamos.”
“I guess.”
“And you’ve never slept with him?”
She threw him an annoyed look.
Keo raised his hands in surrender. “I was just double checking.”
“When you feel like triple checking, just keep in mind that I know where we’re going and you don’t,” she said, moving ahead of him.
He smiled and followed her.
They were now moving through a part of the woods that made him a little uneasy. The canopies were getting thicker, which meant the sun was having a harder time finding its way through. As a result, the air had grown chillier and Keo instinctively clutched the MP5SD in front of him.
“You know where you’re going?” he asked after a while.
“The woods might look endless, but it’s not. There’s a cabin not far from here that we’ve used before.”
“Is that a good idea? If you know about it, what are the chances that the soldiers do, too?”
“We’ll have to risk it. You need to rest for a while. That lightheadedness you’re feeling is a result of the blows you took. You might have even gotten a concussion, and it’s just now showing up.”
Keo felt his forehead again. The cut had started to scab over, but it was going to be a while before it healed. The good news was that it would definitely heal, unlike the scar along the left side of his face. Pollard’s farewell gift wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, if ever.
Thanks again for that, Pollard, you sonofabitch. I’m glad both you and your son are dead.
“Okay,” Jordan said as she finally slowed down before stopping completely.
She held her rifle at the ready as she peered through two trees at an old cabin sitting in a rough circular clearing that would be, in a few years, swallowed back up by the woods. Two dirt-encrusted windows flanked a door and a chimney jutted out on one side of the roof. The building looked just big enough to have a couple of bedrooms in the back.
The bright spot was that the clearing was wide open to the skies, and a thick pool of sunlight shone down on the cabin. It was a far cry from the last few minutes, when it seemed like they were walking deeper and deeper into the lightless bowels of the woods.
Jordan crouched at the edge and listened, and Keo joined her. He had to put his hand down against the ground because the sudden movement nearly made him keel over.
“You okay?” she whispered.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, Mom.”
S
he pursed her lips.
“Anything?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Looks clear. You ready?”
She got up and jogged into the clearing and slid against the wall next to one of the windows before he could respond. Keo sighed. He would have liked to sit and listen for another thirty minutes, maybe an hour. Not just to be sure they were the only people around, but because he could have used the rest. But that was just wishful thinking now, and he hurried over to join her outside the cabin.
The window next to them revealed a dust-covered floor, along with a kitchen lit up with sunlight through the windows above the sinks and a barren fireplace on the other side. There was no furniture to speak of, and the only thing staring back at them were the heads of two deer mounted on the far wall next to a darkened hallway that was just a bit too dark for his liking. The passageway led into the back of the house.
“Anything?” he whispered.
She shook her head. “You?”
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I can rest in the woods,” he said, even as another throbbing pain rushed through him. He gritted his teeth and hoped she didn’t notice.
It must have shown on his face anyway, because she looked more determined when she said, “No cover. If they find us out here, we’ll have nowhere to run. In here, at least we have a chance.”
He started to argue, but she had already moved toward the door, and Keo had no choice but to follow.
The handle was a simple lever, and she pressed it and pushed the door inside and stepped in a half-second later. Keo had to admit, she had developed a pretty nice rhythm since the last time they saw each other back at Earl’s cabin. Being out here with Tobias’s people, fighting Steve and the town, had definitely increased her battle movements. Now all she needed was a little more patience, a notion that Keo thought was funny since he’d never really been known to have a whole lot of that himself.
Dust brushed against his face as he stepped inside the cabin. The living room smelled slightly stale, but he blamed that on the lack of ventilation thanks to all the closed windows. The back hallway was partially submerged in shadows, but he didn’t detect movement or see obsidian eyes staring back at him.
Jordan had slung her rifle and opened up her pack. She pulled out a bottle of water and an old Tylenol bottle and handed it to him. “Sit down, drink, and rest for a while.”
Purge of Babylon (Book 6): The Isles of Elysium Page 15
