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

by Sisavath, Sam

  “You came prepared,” Keo said. He turned the bottle over and noticed the expiration date.

  “Don’t worry, that’s just a suggestion,” she said. “Probably. Anyway, the town’s not far from here. Maybe another hour, so we can afford to stay awhile or until you’re ready to move again.”

  “It’s just a small headache.”

  She peered at his face—or specifically, his scabbing forehead. “He really laid you out good. I thought you were going to bleed to death in that office last night.”

  “That bad?”

  “But you look okay now. Still ugly as hell, but better.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I mean, compared to the first time I saw you.”

  She walked to the kitchen and laid her pack and rifle on the island counter, then began flipping through the top pantries and pulling drawers along the counter. Dust erupted every time she opened something, then again when she closed them.

  Keo shook out two of the pills and washed them down with water. He walked over to one of the windows, and staying as far away from the grime-smeared windowsill and glass panes as possible, looked out at the clearing and the woods beyond. He couldn’t help but remember all those months at Earl’s cabin at the start of The Purge.

  Gillian was there. So was Norris, and Rachel and her daughter, and the girl, Lotte. Jordan and her friends didn’t show up until later. Then there was that whole mess with Levy, and the garage…

  But most of all, he remembered the good times. The days and nights and weeks and months when they didn’t have anything to worry about, when it seemed like they could hide from whatever was going on in the world around them. At the time, he had no idea what the ghouls were doing, and thinking back, he didn’t care. He would have been happy to live however many months or years he had left at the cabin with Gillian and Jordan and the others.

  What was that old saying? “Ignorance is bliss.”

  What he wouldn’t give for a little bit of ignorance right now.

  “Did you take the pills?” Jordan called from the kitchen.

  “Yes.”

  “Take a few more later. They won’t make you drowsy.”

  He did feel better, though it wasn’t really the pills but mostly the resting, the not moving his feet every other second. The throbbing remained, but it wasn’t nearly as unbearable as it had been a few minutes ago when they were out there in the woods.

  He finished off the water, then putting the bottle away (you never knew when an empty bottle would come in handy), called back to Jordan, “Find anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Did you expect to find something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You said no one’s been here awhile. Why wouldn’t Miller put someone out here? Use it as a station or something.”

  “He did, once. Not just here, but other locations around the area. The strip malls, the warehouses…until we convinced him it was a bad idea. Nowadays, he sticks to the other side of the river.” Then, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. What did you do back there to make Miller think you could kill Tobias for him?”

  “I’m not convinced he thought I could. Chances were, he was hoping I could take out a few of your people. Best-case scenario, maybe make your men reveal themselves.”

  “That’s probably true. You do make pretty good bait, Keo.”

  He grunted. “Stop trying to butter me up.”

  “Don’t take it too personally—” There was a loud thump! followed by a clattering sound, then Jordan’s voice, screaming, “Keo!”

  He turned back to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Her rifle and pack were still on the counter, but there were no signs—

  Jordan was on the floor on her stomach behind the counter, both hands clawing at the wooden floorboards.

  “Keo!” she shouted again.

  He unslung the MP5SD and ran to the kitchen. He was halfway there when Jordan managed to spin around onto her back and lifted her head, looking at something on the other side of the counter. Her Glock was lying across the kitchen where she had sent it clattering when she fell.

  He changed directions at the last second, and instead of running to the right side of the counter, he went left where Jordan’s feet were. When he finally made the turn and saw it, Keo might have actually frozen for a full second.

  The bottom half of the creature’s body was hidden inside the cabinet under the sink, where it had apparently been hiding when Jordan stumbled across it. It had lunged out through the open door and had gotten a hold of her legs and was trying to pull her toward it—pull her out of the sunlight and into the shadows that fell over its part of the counter. She was kicking at it, but it had two solid grips on one of her legs and wouldn’t let go.

  It must have heard him coming, because its head snapped in his direction and twin lifeless black eyes settled on him. He lifted the submachine gun and pointed at it, and the creature actually sneered at him.

  “Don’t shoot me, Keo!” Jordan shouted.

  Keo almost laughed.

  Gee, thanks for that suggestion, Jordan. Real helpful there.

  He fired three times into the cabinet, splintering the door and sending rounds inside rather than trying to hit any specific part of the ghoul’s body. He didn’t know how many times he hit it, but once was enough and its head flopped to the floor even while its body continued to jerk up and down with Jordan’s struggling motions.

  She finally realized it had stopped trying to pull her into the darkness under the sink and stopped kicking. Jordan stared at it, gasping for breath, before finally regaining enough control to reach forward and pry its bony fingers off her leg. Then she scrambled backward and up to her feet. She picked up her Glock and stumbled away from the kitchen, then looked over at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “There’s more of them in there,” she said, almost gasping out the words.

  “Where?”

  “The lower cabinets.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard them when I was on the floor. And I can smell them. Can’t you?”

  Keo took a quick, involuntary step away from the cabinets. “You sure?”

  “You can’t smell them?”

  He sniffed the air. There was that smell again, the same one he had detected when he first entered. But it seemed to have gotten stronger…

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “What should we do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do we just…leave? What if someone else comes in here and stumbles across them later?”

  Keo aimed and fired a shot into one of the closed cabinet doors.

  He heard something scurrying behind the cheap wood paneling for a moment before settling into silence again. He had to remind himself that they were just bags of bones, and if losing a head or a limb didn’t bother them, squeezing into the small spaces of the cabinets probably didn’t register at all.

  “Screw this,” Keo said. “We can’t save everyone. We can barely save our friends.”

  He took another couple of steps back and picked up her M4 and handed it to her. Jordan grabbed her pack and slung it back on.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll rest later, when I’m dead.” That drew a quick, almost pained look from her. “Too soon?”

  She gave him a half-smile, but it was easy to see she hadn’t completely recovered from being grabbed by the ghoul and almost dragged into its hiding place. Keo knew from experience that even though the creatures looked like emaciated little children, they were goddamn resilient. It probably helped that they didn’t care about self-preservation when they locked onto a prey.

  He was still backing up when a flicker of movement drew his attention.

  He spun toward the hallway in the back and the smell hit him. It was bearable earlier, but that had all changed. The stench was suffocating now, because there were so many of them out in the open a
nd squeezed into the hallway at once.

  Jesus Christ, where did they come from?

  It had to be the back rooms. They had been inside (Sleeping? Resting? What exactly did ghouls do in the daytime?) until now.

  They crowded into the hallway, so many that Keo didn’t know where the shadows began and their numbers ended. Black eyes peered out of the darkness at him, but it was the growing overwhelming smell of rot and decay that got to him. They would have come out if not for the swaths of sunlight splashing across the living room, an invisible barrier they couldn’t cross even though he could tell they wanted to with every fiber of their being.

  “Oh God,” Jordan breathed beside him.

  She drew her Glock, the one with the silver magazine, and pointed it at them, but Keo grabbed her arm before she could fire.

  “There’s too many of them,” he said. “One or ten dead won’t make any difference. But we have limited ammo. Especially the right kind.”

  She nodded, and they backpedaled toward the door together, side by side.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head and shivered slightly.

  He knew how she felt, and didn’t feel better himself until he opened the door and stepped outside. The warmth of the sun against his back was like a mother’s embrace, and fresh air filled his lungs once again.

  He forgot about his throbbing headache and turned around and followed her back into the woods without a word.

  CHAPTER 15

  After the near-miss with the riders, then the surprise at the cabin, they took the rest of the way back to T18 slowly while listening for sounds of more soldiers and other things that might be hiding in the darker parts of the woods around them. And there was a lot of it, further increasing Keo’s paranoia.

  Gradually, he noticed that the air had become chillier, and when he glanced up at the sky, it had darkened since the last time. He had to look at his watch to make sure it wasn’t even noon yet.

  “You feel it?” he asked.

  “What?” Jordan said.

  “The air.”

  She paused for a moment. “I think it’s going to rain.”

  “Does it rain a lot out here?”

  “This far inland? It’s only rained twice since I’ve been here.”

  “Maybe you guys are due.”

  “I guess. How’s your head?”

  “I took two more pills.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “The pills are kicking in, but I’ll feel better when we finally reach T18.”

  Finally, around midday, he heard the familiar rush of water and they approached the tree line slowly before going into a crouch and looked out.

  Like yesterday, there were people on the opposite riverbanks, maybe even the same ones. Women were washing clothes while children jumped into and frolicked in the river. A few soldiers stood around in the back, some chatting with the civilians. The sound of laughter and inane chatter was completely incongruent with the world as Keo knew it, and had been surviving in, for the last year.

  He stared at them in silence for a moment. These people were at home and at peace with their choice. He could tell that just from the way they talked and moved around. His first instinct was to pity them, but maybe they were the smart ones. They had accepted and embraced the reality of the world, and from the looks of it, they were happy. People like him and Jordan, on the other hand, were living hand to mouth, getting by on what they could scavenge, and always looking over their shoulders.

  Who was he to pity them? They would probably pity him, and he would have a pretty hard time convincing them it should be the other way around.

  Jordan hadn’t said a word since they looked out across the river. He wondered if she was rethinking the last few months of her life. She had been trying to rescue these people, but they probably had no idea and might not have been all that grateful if she had succeeded.

  “Jordan,” he said softly.

  She looked over.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded, then got up. “Let’s get going. I don’t want to be caught out here when it starts raining.”

  She stood up and pushed through the brush. She was moving too fast, as if she was in a hurry to get away from the civilians and their carefree laughter on the other side of the river. She was already a full meter ahead of him when Keo saw something black moving against the green and brown of the trees and branches in front of her. Jordan had her head slightly down and didn’t see it. He would have screamed at her if he could, but there was no time and he was afraid someone else might hear him anyway.

  Jordan finally looked up and froze at the sight of the man stepping out through two large trees. He was wearing a black uniform and he mirrored her response, halting completely at the sight of her. They stared at one another for just a second, though he imagined it must have seemed longer to the both of them. Time had a habit of stretching endlessly when you were staring death in the face.

  “Hey, wait up,” a voice said behind the man.

  That seemed to spur the man into action, and he reached for his sidearm because his M4 was slung uselessly behind his back.

  Jordan, on the other hand, hadn’t moved at all.

  Keo fired past Jordan, the pfft! of his gunshot sounding much too loud to his own ears even though he knew for a fact it was little more than a coughing noise. The soldier had a name stenciled across his name tag, but Keo didn’t get the chance to read it before the man fell to the ground on his stomach and face—

  Revealing a second figure coming out through the same trees behind him.

  Jordan was still stuck in time, and by now Keo had already caught up to her. He almost pulled the trigger again at the sight of the second black-uniformed body but somehow stopped himself. It wasn’t the fact that the second one was barely out of his teens. Age didn’t enter into Keo’s calculations at all.

  The teenager’s eyes went straight to the dead man in front of him. For a split second Keo thought he would turn around and run for it, but instead the kid scrambled to unsling his rifle.

  Jordan finally snapped out of her stupor and began fumbling with her carbine, but she was having as much difficulty getting a handle on it as the soldier seemed to be. Keo didn’t let either one of them get to their weapons first before he fired a second shot, his bullet sailing over the soldier’s head and hitting the tree behind him on purpose. Bark flew into the back of his head, and the kid ducked as if missiles were coming at him.

  That gave Keo another extra second or two, enough time to grab Jordan’s arm. He said, “Don’t,” and kept going.

  The soldier had gotten back up. He was already gasping for breath, and when he saw Keo coming right at him, it only made him scramble faster for his weapon. But he was having so much difficulty Keo wondered if his rifle was covered in oil.

  The teenager had finally gotten a firm enough grip to raise the M4 when Keo reached him and slammed the stock of his submachine gun into his neck. He gagged, the rifle forgotten, and reached up as Keo shoved the MP5SD’s suppressor into his cheek, putting a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  Jordan hurried over, skirting around the dead man on the ground. She was hyperventilating but slowly getting control. “Jesus, where did they come from?”

  The soldier was looking at Keo, his face turning slightly blue. Keo grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar and sat him down on the ground, his back against a tree, before disarming him. The teenager didn’t fight, probably because he was too busy trembling.

  “When was the last time you shaved?” Keo asked. When he got a confused look back, he said, “Never mind, just thinking out loud.”

  He crouched in front of his captive and waited for him to gather himself. Like all the other soldiers he’d met, this one had a name tag with letters stenciled across it: “Eric.”

  “In and out, slow breaths,” Keo said. When Eric had turned less blue, “There you go. Better?”

  Eric nodded. He opened
his mouth to say something, but Keo shook his head and Eric stopped short.

  “Just listen,” Keo said. He produced Tobias’s ring from his pocket and held it up, then turned it around, making sure Eric got a good look and had enough time to read the inscription at the top. “See it?”

  Eric stared at the gaudy piece of jewelry as if his life depended on it.

  “Got it memorized?” Keo asked.

  The teenager looked unsure.

  “Good enough,” Keo said. He stood up. “I want you to go back to Steve and tell him what you saw. Tell him Keo wants to give it to him. He’s to meet me at the bridge in an hour. Got all that?”

  Eric nodded.

  “Get up.” The teenager stood up and Keo patted him on the shoulder, then pointed him across the river. “Off you go.”

  The soldier looked at him, then at Jordan, maybe wondering if this was a trick. It didn’t take him long to decide to risk it anyway, and soon he was running off. They could hear him snapping branches as he barreled his way through the woods long after he had disappeared out of view.

  Keo turned back to Jordan and found her staring at the dead soldier behind them.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, and he wasn’t even sure if she had heard him.

  Keo put a comforting hand on her arm. “Jordan. You okay?”

  She finally looked up. “I know him.”

  “The kid?”

  “No, him,” she said, looking back down at the dead man.

  “Who was he?”

  “He was in the camp when we first arrived. His name’s Dominic. He helped us get used to how things were. We…” She paused. “We were friends. I always thought I’d be helping him escape one of these days. The last thing I expected was to see him out here in that uniform.”

  The last thing he expected was to see you out here, too, Keo thought, remembering the stunned look on the dead man’s face when he saw her.

  Jordan had gone silent next to him. She had said they were friends, but the way she was looking down at the back of Dominic’s head, with broken twigs in his hair, he guessed they were more than that.