Devil's Haircut

by Sam Sisavath

  Keo remained where he was and had been for the last two hours, sitting on the floor with one of the windows over his right shoulder and the door to his left. The lights from the flashlights were fleeting—appearing and disappearing seconds later—as the men on horseback moved up the road without bothering to stop.

  He glanced over at Rita, sitting on the floor on the other side of the door from him. She had her Mk 14 rifle in her lap, her head slightly lolled to one side, and if he listened closely enough, he could hear her snoring softly. Claire was on the floor in front of them, lying on her back with a pillow from one of the back rooms underneath her head. She had gone to sleep an hour ago and was snoring louder than Rita.

  He was amazed at how easily Claire had clocked out. He envied her because he couldn’t do more than grab a few minutes of sleep at a time before his internal alarm kept going off. He didn’t fight it; he was, after all, behind enemy lines even if the people in the immediate buildings around him weren’t a threat. Not yet, anyway. In Keo’s experience, non-threats could become one in the blink of an eye.

  It was different with the guards on horseback. Those would be Buck’s men. Buckies. Mercerians. Whatever you wanted to call them, they were the “sanctionable” ones. The ones Lara wouldn’t give him too much grief over if he had to kill. “Self-defense” went a long way these days.

  The patrol that had just passed them by was the second one in the last hour, but he couldn’t tell if they were the same ones or a completely different team. According to Claire, the bulk of Buck’s men would be sheltered behind the fence on the other side of the agriculture field. Which was also where he had to be. That was the whole point of coming here, after all.

  Get in, get out. No muss, no fuss.

  Yeah, should be easy enough.

  He might have unwittingly chuckled out loud, because Claire sat up on the floor in front of him.

  She looked around before locating him in the semidarkness. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Keo said. He glanced down at his watch’s glowing hands. “It’s almost midnight, and still no signs of Plan Jeremy.”

  Claire looked down at her own watch. “He’ll be here soon.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I introduced myself.”

  “You ‘introduced’ yourself?”

  “Let’s just say I haven’t been farming the entire time I’ve been here.”

  Keo smiled. “Is this part of what Gaby taught you?”

  “Among other things.” She stood up and walked over to the other side of the window next to him and peered out at the streets. “How many patrols so far?”

  “Two. Is that normal?”

  She nodded. “They take their time. Not exactly a lot going on at night. Especially now that they don’t even have to deal with ghoul strays.”

  “You really have been paying attention.”

  “Hey, that’s my job—” She stopped short and hurried away from the window, flattening her back against the wall next to it.

  Keo snatched up the MP5SD lying across his lap and hurried to his feet just as flashlight beams hit the curtainless window between him and Claire and lingered on the far wall across the reception area. Keo glanced over at Rita to check on her—

  Rita’s eyes snapped open, her hands clutching at her rifle. They locked eyes, and Keo put a finger to his lips. The sniper stood up and flattened her back against the wall. It didn’t take her long to see the beams coming in through Keo’s window and hitting the back wall. The lights moved gradually along framed paintings and old pictures of the clinic’s former staff like a pair of eyes searching for something.

  Keo glimpsed a shadowed face peering into the window on the other side while the flashlight in the man’s hand continued to move around the interior of the building. It went everywhere, including—

  Goddammit.

  Claire saw it at the same time he did—one of the flashlight beams had found and stopped on the pillow on the floor where she had been sleeping. Claire looked over at Keo and shook her head as if to say sorry.

  Keo snapped a quick glance back at Rita, who had slung her rifle and drawn her SIG Sauer. There was a long suppressor attached to the end of the barrel, and she clutched the pistol and nodded back at him.

  And things were going so well, too.

  One of the beams had vanished, leaving just one to scour the parts of the reception area that it could reach from outside.

  Searching, searching…

  Footsteps immediately behind Keo, on the other side of the wall, just before the doorknob next to him jiggled—softly at first, then louder and harder as the man on the sidewalk put some muscle into it.

  But the door was locked, and it wouldn’t budge.

  The lingering flashlight beam finally left the window, but Keo didn’t breathe any easier or loosen his grip on the submachine gun, because someone was knocking urgently on the door next to him now. The rapping was like firecrackers in the deathly quiet Fenton night.

  Knock-knock-knock!

  Keo exchanged another look with Claire, then with Rita. He saw steely determination from both women.

  Knock-knock-knock!

  Then silence.

  “Well?” a voice asked.

  The door rattled for a few more seconds.

  “It’s locked,” a second voice said. The speakers were both male, as far as Keo could tell.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” the first one said.

  “There’s someone inside,” the second one said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Someone put that pillow there. It wasn’t there last night.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  “It’s probably just kids looking for a place to hook up. They still do that, you know.”

  “I wanna make sure.”

  “It’s just a pillow, man. Who cares?”

  “I care.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Gee, I dunno, because it’s my job?” the second one answered.

  Great, Keo thought, I had to run into the one guy in Fenton who takes his job seriously.

  He softly clicked the fire selector on his MP5SD to semiauto. The switch barely made any sound, but it made enough of one that Rita could hear it. The sniper looked across the door at him, and they exchanged a brief nod. Claire, standing unarmed on the other side of the window from Keo, stood perfectly still.

  Bam! as something slammed into the door on the other side. The slab of wood trembled slightly, but never came close to breaking.

  Someone laughed.

  “Not funny,” the second man said. “You try it.”

  “Hell no,” the first one said. “You’re the one with the hard-on to get inside.”

  A second bam! from outside. The door quivered like the first time, but again, easily held.

  “Okay, okay,” the first man said. “Go easy there, Tarzan. If you absolutely have to get inside, I’ll go wake up Benson. He’s the one with keys to all these buildings over here.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” the second one asked.

  “I dunno. Maybe because it’s funny watching you try to break down a solid oak door?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Another round of laughter before the two men left, taking their bickering voices with them.

  Keo sought out Claire in the darkness. “How long before this Jeremy shows up?”

  “He should be here soon,” Claire said.

  “Not soon enough,” Rita said. “Those guys are coming back. If we’re still here when they do…”

  Keo focused on Claire. “Can Jeremy really get us where we need to be?”

  “Yes,” Claire said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean it, Claire. Are you sure.”

  This time, Claire didn’t answer right away. She seemed to think about it—for a second or two too long for Keo’s liking—before finally nodding. “Yes. He can ge
t us inside.”

  “All right, then we’ll wait for Jeremy.”

  “What about the patrol?” Rita asked.

  “That’s what the suppressors and dark closets are for,” Keo said.

  Twelve

  Two Days Ago

  “Who were they?”

  “Loman and Biden.”

  “Are those their real names?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Is Keo your real name?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Did you know them?”

  Gaby shook her head. “I’ve never seen them before. But that’s not unusual. We were getting huge influxes of recruits in the first two years after Houston, and they’ve been coming in at a steady stream ever since.” She glanced over her shoulder at the guards standing outside the room; only two of the four were visible through the security glass. “I don’t know most of these people by name unless I look at their name tags. Some of them came here with Lara when she returned to Texas to deal with Fenton, but not everyone.”

  “Did you guys ever start keeping records?” Keo asked.

  “Of course. Everyone who joins up has to go through Black Tide’s basic training. We don’t just give everyone a gun and send them out here, Keo. So yeah, there are records. I have Carly going through them now, but it might take a while for her to get everything together. We have a lot of people out there, stationed in a lot of places.”

  “Paperwork.”

  “Yeah, paperwork. That’s the problem with civilization. The paperwork.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment. He was standing, leaning against the brick wall while she sat on a chair. Lara lay on the bed between them, tucked underneath a duvet. She had been heavily sedated after the surgery and hadn’t woken up since. This was, ironically, her first full night’s sleep, and all it took was an attempted assassination.

  “Too bad we can’t question them,” Gaby finally said. “Who they were, how they got here…”

  “Yeah, too bad,” Keo said.

  “Of course, we could have, if you hadn’t crushed Loman’s neck.”

  “He didn’t exactly give me a choice.”

  “Couldn’t you have just broken a couple of bones?”

  “Couldn’t you have just wounded Biden?”

  “Fair enough,” Gaby said, and smiled.

  He returned it.

  It was quiet inside and outside the room, as if the entire city of Darby Bay had learned what had happened and no one was quite sure how to proceed. Of course, that was unlikely. The Black Tiders definitely all knew, but the civilian population probably didn’t have a clue. At least, not yet. But news like this wouldn’t stay secret for very long. Sooner or later, it would leak.

  “Thank God you were here,” Gaby said. “Lara and I’d be dead right now if you were still running around out there doing your own thing. It must be fate, bringing you back here just when we needed you most.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “You don’t believe in fate?”

  “I believe in a lot of things. Most of them, I can’t put into words.”

  “For a guy who’s survived so much, I’m shocked you’re still such a Doubting Thomas.”

  “That’s my secret to staying alive this long. Doubting everything.”

  “Seems to be working.”

  “Seems to be.” Then, “What else did you find out about the partners in crime?”

  “Nothing that’ll help us figure out who they really are, but I should have more soon. Malone and a few others are asking everyone about them now. If I’m being honest, I’m not very confident they’ll find anything useful. Whoever they were, they were really good.”

  Not good enough, Keo thought, looking at Lara’s sleeping form. But almost good enough.

  “What kind of sedatives did they give her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know; I didn’t ask. They said she should be awake later today and that she’s not in any danger.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Keo instinctively brushed against the butt of the Glock in his hip holster with a couple of fingers. He’d found a gun belt after what had happened, just in case.

  “Come in,” Gaby said.

  A young man with a blond buzz cut opened the door and leaned inside. There was light in the hallway behind him, but it wasn’t bright enough in the room for Keo to read the kid’s name tag, though he assumed it was Malone when the man said, “I’m done with the interviews, Gaby.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Gaby said.

  Malone slipped back outside, closing the door after him.

  Gaby stood up. “You gonna stay a while?”

  “I got nowhere else to go,” Keo said.

  “Good. I’d like one of us to be with her at all times.”

  “I got this covered.”

  Gaby left, and Keo walked around the bed and took her spot in the vacated chair. It was wooden and uncomfortable, and he couldn’t understand how Gaby could sit in it for so long. His butt was already starting to rebel, and it had only been a few seconds—

  “You guys really know how to ruin someone’s nap.”

  He smiled at Lara as she turned her head to look at him. She managed a small smile back, but it clearly took a lot out of her.

  He leaned forward. “You’re looking pretty good for someone who almost died last night.”

  “What can I say? I come from good genes.” She paused, then, “Last night?”

  He nodded.

  “What time is it now?” she asked.

  “Six in the morning. You’ve been out for about ten hours.”

  “No wonder I feel so good. Well, as good as you can feel after getting shot, I mean.” She tried moving but gave up after a few seconds of wincing. She lifted the duvet and peeked down at her bandages for a moment before covering herself back up. “Why is it so dark in here?”

  “Mood lighting.”

  “What’s the mood we’re going for?”

  “The ‘our fearless leader is hurt and everyone’s sad about it’ mood.”

  Lara gave him a wry smirk. “At least it’s not Dear Leader. I’d be really worried if people started calling me that.” She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her strength. She opened them again after a few seconds. “Where did Gaby go? I thought I heard her voice.”

  “She went to talk to Malone. He’s been asking around about Loman and Biden.”

  “Who?”

  “Loman and Biden. Biden’s the one who shot you. Loman was his partner in crime. You didn’t recognize either one of them?”

  Lara shook her head and stared up at the dark ceiling. “Too many new faces every day to keep track of them all. I spend a lot of time with the operational teams, but the support guys… There are a lot of new faces.”

  “That’s what Gaby said.”

  Lara looked over at him. “You guys okay?”

  “We’re fine. You’re the only one who got tagged.”

  “Is that what you call getting shot? ‘Tagged?’”

  “You should hear what this guy I did a job with in the Balkans called it. Something to do with a mule’s ass.”

  “Pass.”

  “Smart.”

  They exchanged another brief smile.

  “So what’s the working theory?” Lara asked.

  “We can talk about that later, when you’re better.”

  “Might as well talk about it now. Give me something to do.”

  “Lara…”

  “Tell me,” she said, with as much conviction as she could muster. “Please. It’ll give me something to do instead of just lying here like an invalid.”

  “We don’t know all the facts yet. Gaby’s trying to figure them out. She’ll come back and fill us in when she knows more.”

  “No guesses so far?”

  “There’s a chance they could be Mercerians. You, me, and Gaby aren’t exactly very popular with them these days. Especially me and you. And if they were Mercerians, then they could hav
e been sent by Buck.”

  “You think they could be from Fenton…”

  “It’s possible Buck saw an opportunity with you being here and acted on it. Like you guys said, people are joining and putting on those fancy blue BDUs all the time. There are too many faces to keep track of, and it’s not like you guys were IDing people before letting them in the door. Does anyone even still carry around their driver’s license anymore? Loman and Biden could have been called something else a week ago. Even a day ago.”

  She closed her eyes and let out a tired sigh. “Everything’s been moving so fast since Houston. We expanded too quickly. In turn, we needed more and more resources. That meant more and more manpower.”

  “And round and round it goes.”

  “Exactly.” She paused again. “This was bound to happen. We’ve become a bureaucracy, Keo. Too many people, too many things happening at once, and not enough control. This is my fault. I should have seen it coming, but I was too preoccupied. I’m always too preoccupied with something. If it’s not Fenton, it’s something—or someone—else.”

  “Maybe it’s time to rein it in.”

  She looked over at him. “How?”

  “After we deal with Fenton, maybe it’s time to focus on one mission at a time. You’ve done enough out there. They should be able to take care of themselves for a while without you having to hold their hands.”

  “You think I’ve been wasting my time, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

  “It sounded like you were.”

  “I wasn’t. I think you’ve been doing a hell of a good job. But…”

  “I knew there was a but coming.”

  “You’re only one person, Lara. And one person can’t save the world by herself.”

  “But I can try. Who else is going to if I don’t?”

  “You can’t do it alone.”

  “You left me.”

  And there it was. He’d been waiting for it since he came back. They’d been skirting around the issue all this time, approaching it from angles but never tackling it head-on. But he knew it wouldn’t last. He knew that sooner or later they would have to confront it.

  Lara sighed and looked away. “I didn’t mean it like that. It was your life. I didn’t have any right to make you commit to something that would have taken years of your life. That would have been selfish. You had every right to leave when you did. I shouldn’t have said what I said.”