by Sam Sisavath
“The less shitty of two really shitty alternatives.”
He glanced at his watch: 4:16 P.M. Keo unclipped the radio he had taken from the dead man. It hadn’t squawked yet, which meant the body was still undiscovered. He was surprised it was taking so long. Apparently the soldiers weren’t nearly as organized as he had thought.
“Why did you take the radio?” Carrie asked.
“They’re going to start communicating when they find the body,” Keo said.
“So this way we can listen in on them. Find out what they’re going to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Smart.”
He smiled. “I’ve had recent experience dealing with assholes trying to kill me.”
Keo went into the living room and sat down with his back against the wall, both eyes focused on the glass side door. Lorelei sat silently across from him, knees pulled up against her chest. She had reverted back to the frightened girl from yesterday morning at the marina. He thought he would be grateful for the quiet, but after a while he found himself missing the sound of her voice.
The radio finally squawked about five minutes later, and a man’s voice said, “Lewis is dead.” Keo picked up a lazy Southern drawl. “You should see him. Goddamn.”
“What the fuck happened?” another man asked.
“Hell if I know,” the first one said. “He’s got a big hole under his chin where someone shoved a knife up into his face.”
“Fuck.”
“What I said.”
“Everyone, sound off,” the second man said.
Keo listened to three other voices calling out on the radio as ordered.
One of them was a woman, who said, “You said Lewis is dead? How the hell did that happen? I just saw him taking a piss about twenty minutes ago.”
“Yeah, well, someone clocked him while he was taking the whiz probably,” the Southerner said. “His fly’s still open. Luckily, he shoved his little Lewis in before they took him out. Thank God for small miracles.”
“Ouch, what a way to go,” someone else said, and there was laughter.
I guess Lewis wasn’t the most popular guy in the group.
“Shut the fuck up,” the second man snapped.
Must be the leader of this little sideshow.
“Everyone get back to the OP until we can figure out what happened,” the leader said.
“Travis,” the woman said.
“What?” This was the Southerner.
“Lewis’s radio. Does he still have it?”
There was a brief moment of silence before Travis finally responded. “No, it’s gone. Shit.”
“What?” the leader said. “What’s going on now?”
“Lewis’s radio is gone,” Travis said. “Whoever killed him has it.”
“That means they might be listening in on us right now,” the woman said.
Looks like there’s at least one with a working brain cell in the bunch. So why isn’t she in charge?
“Fuck,” the leader said, annoyed. “Everyone, get back here. Now. Until then, no one uses the radio.”
The radio went dead after that. Keo waited to hear more, but they had completely shut down on him. He assumed they were going to switch radio frequencies as soon as they met in person, which, again, meant they weren’t nearly as stupid as he had originally thought.
Carrie came out of the kitchen where she had been watching the back window and, probably, listening through the open door. “They found the body.”
“Uh huh,” Keo nodded.
“What now?”
“They’re probably going to start looking for us once they meet up and come up with a plan.”
“Then we should go before they get here.”
He looked out the window at the empty dock. “We’re not going to walk the rest of the way to Song Island from here, Carrie. And I’m not getting to Santa Marie Island without a boat.” He gave her his best reassuring smile. “Besides, there’s only five of them left.”
“Only five?”
“Five’s better than six. I’ve seen worse odds.”
“Really? Where?”
“Have you ever been to Kabul in the spring?”
Carrie started to answer when he held up his hand and tilted his head to listen.
“What is it?” she said instead.
“Outboard motors.” He looked back out the window. “They’re coming back. The boat that left earlier.”
“How does that help us? Doesn’t it just mean the bad guys will have more people looking for us now?”
Keo smiled.
“What are you smiling at?” Carrie asked, annoyed.
“The guys at the house are meeting in person to change their radio frequency so I can’t listen in on them anymore, remember? The ones on the boat don’t know that.”
“How can you be sure?”
He held up the radio. “I’ve been listening. There’s no way the guys on the boat know about what’s happening here. Besides, this thing has a max range of two miles.”
“I still don’t know where you’re going with this.”
“We need a boat. There just happens to be one coming toward us right now. The question is, do you trust me?”
She stared at him and didn’t answer.
“Carrie. Do you trust me?”
She finally sighed and nodded. “Do I have a choice?”
“Daebak.”
“What?”
“It means let’s get us a boat.”
*
It was an all-white twenty-footer with three guys inside. One stood behind the steering wheel in the center while the other two sat on a long plastic seat behind him, both cradling M4 rifles. They looked like men who had been on a long but uneventful trip and were glad to be back. The outboard motor was a Yamaha, about 200 horsepower from the sound of it, pushing the boat through the calm Beaufont Lake surface without any trouble.
It took the three men exactly fifteen seconds to spot Carrie standing at the end of the dock, waving her hands frantically over her head at them. It took them another ten seconds to slow down before he saw one of them on a radio, no doubt trying to reach someone at the house. He knew that was the intention because the radio he had picked up from Lewis squawked softly (he had turned down the volume) and he heard a male voice asking about “the woman.”
Of course no one answered, because the men at the two-story red house had already switched frequencies, though he figured they could probably hear the boat coming right about now. How long did he have before the leader switched back to the old frequency to warn the returning soldiers? Ten seconds? Twenty? This entire plan was already tenuous enough, but it was going to go straight to hell as soon as someone from the house realized what was happening.
But for some reason, no one had responded by the time the boat slowed down as it neared Carrie, who had lowered her hands to her sides and was watching the vessel approach. The two men on the seat had stood up and were clutching their rifles as they scanned the area, looking wary of an ambush.
You have no idea, boys.
He was impressed with Carrie. She had to have nerves of steel to just stand there as the boat came straight toward her. It was either insane courage, or she was too terrified to do anything else. He couldn’t see her face from his position, but he guessed it was probably a mixture of both.
The boat slowed down as it sidled up to the dock. One of the men had moved toward the bow, one hand on the gunwale to keep from toppling over. The soldier behind the tall, clear plastic windshield at the helm fixed Carrie with a hard look, hands carefully manipulating the vessel with surprising deftness.
“Don’t move!” the man behind the steering wheel shouted. “Stay right where you are!”
Carrie didn’t move or say anything back.
The third soldier had started to let his guard down. Maybe it was the sight of Carrie in her jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt, with no signs of a weapon anywhere on her. It was hard to look at the woman and think she w
as dangerous, especially the way she hardly moved.
Nerves of steel. Or suffocating, mortal terror.
Either/or works for me.
Keo was lying in the grass at the end of the dock, almost completely hidden among the two-foot-tall yard that grew around the house and up and down the shoreline. He watched the boat sidling alongside Carrie’s still form and the man at the bow leaping out, landing on the wooden planks in front of her.
The third man slung his rifle and threw a line to the first one, who wrapped it around a wooden post. When Keo saw the man finish wrapping the rope and pull it tight, then straightened up, he pulled the trigger and shot the man in the back.
Even before the soldier went down, Keo was already scrambling up from the warm ground.
It took the two in the boat a few seconds to realize what had happened. Keo didn’t blame them. They hadn’t heard anything—the suppressor on the MP5SD had done its job. The fact was, they had a better chance of seeing the bullet casing ejecting (if they had been looking in his direction) instead of hearing the actual gunshot.
Keo didn’t give them a chance to gather themselves.
He was on one knee, using the higher angle to aim and put the second round into the driver’s chest. The shot shattered the protective screen at the same time. The soldier stumbled back and into the third one, and the two of them went down in a tangled heap. The boat rocked but was held in place by the line.
Keo was on his feet and racing forward, shouting, “Get down! Get down!”
Carrie dropped and flattened herself against the dock as Keo ran up at full speed. He hadn’t taken his eye or the submachine gun’s red dot sight off the boat the entire time and was waiting patiently for the third man to pop back up.
One second…
…two…
There, finally.
Keo shot him once in the chest, then put a second bullet into his forehead as he was falling back down.
He reached Carrie a second later, stepped over her prone form, and checked on the first man. Dead. He swept the boat, making sure the other two weren’t going to get back up anytime soon, either.
“Lorelei!” he shouted.
The teenager burst out of the house before he even finished screaming her name. She was carrying their supply bag, which probably weighed almost as much as her. She didn’t seem to feel the extra weight, though, and he guessed that was thanks to a combination of fear and adrenaline.
Carrie scrambled back up and Keo helped her into the boat. “What about the bodies?” she asked.
“We’ll toss them later,” he said.
She looked as if she was about to throw up again but thankfully managed to keep it in this time.
The boat moved under them and Carrie had to grab at the rail for support, almost stepping on one of the dead soldiers. He waited for Lorelei, then helped her onto the boat, too. She wasn’t quite as lucky and actually stepped on the driver’s open palm.
“Oh God,” she whispered, her face pale.
“Later,” he said.
He turned, grabbed the rope, and was untying it when the first volley of gunfire sliced through the air and pelted the dock around him, the already-rotting wood disintegrating inch by inch against the barrage.
“Keo!” Carrie shouted.
He looked across the lake and at another dock seventy meters away as uniformed men fired in his direction. Bullets zip-zip-zipped past his head and sliced into the water, and more than a few drilled holes into the boat’s fiberglass side.
More men were running along the shoreline toward them, assault rifles and legs pumping wildly as they sprinted with everything they had.
Keo tossed the line back into the boat and jumped in after it, landing between Lorelei and Carrie, both crouched behind the gunwale amongst the two dead soldiers. Keo moved behind the steering wheel and grabbed the throttle and pushed it up, doing his best to ignore the fact he was standing on a dead man’s arm. It couldn’t be helped. There was only so much space inside a twenty-foot boat, especially around the cramped space around the steering console.
The boat roared to life, drowning out the sound of gunfire. Even so, he could hear the buzzing noise of bullets zipping past his head.
“Stay down!” Keo shouted.
Not that he had to. Both women looked permanently stuck against the bottom, Lorelei with her hands thrown over her head and Carrie doing her best not to look at the face of a dead man staring back at her with lifeless eyes.
The boat shot forward, fighting against his control. He got it turned around and pointed it down the lake even as bullets continued to zip-zip-zip around him, punching into different parts of the boat and vanishing into the brown water. He pushed the throttle up as far as it would go and the boat rocked, the bow lifting dangerously into the air as the motor poured on the power and the stern dipped, threatening to go under the lake’s surface.
Keo finally allowed himself to duck down into a crouch, still tightly gripping the steering wheel above him with one hand. Thank God the lake was wide enough that he didn’t have to worry about driving them right into the shoreline.
He threw a quick look back at the soldiers as they finally reached the dock he had just abandoned. A couple of the men were still firing, but the boat was already a good sixty, seventy meters away and putting more space between them with every passing second. Keo couldn’t even hear the sound of gunshots over the motor anymore, even when a bullet snapped off one of the windshield fragments in front of him and disappeared into the dashboard.
Close, but no cigar.
Soon the soldiers faded into the background, and Keo finally stood back up to take full control of the steering wheel. Carrie was rising next to him, looking back at the house. Lorelei was still on the floor, apparently having decided not to risk it, even if she was lying across a dead man’s legs.
“You okay?” he shouted at Carrie.
She nodded back. “You?”
“One piece.”
“Do we have enough gas to get to Song Island?”
He looked down at the gas gauge. It was almost at “E.”
Carrie frowned. “We’ll never make it!”
Keo nodded at the skinny trolling motor latched to the bow. “We’ll get there. It just might not be as fast as we want.” He looked up at the darkening skies and could feel Carrie tightening up next to him. “We’ll make it.”
She gave him a pursed smile. “If you say so.”
“I promise,” he shouted. “And I always keep my promises, even if it might take a while.”
CHAPTER 17
WILL
“Kate.”
“Hello, Will.”
“What are you doing here?”
She smiled at him. “I could ask you the same thing.”
The Kate he remembered smiled rarely. Which was how he knew all of this was a lie, even if it did feel, sound, and even smell real.
“You’re not really here,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said. “I know it’s hard to believe, Will, but I have things on my mind at the moment other than you.”
“Mabry’s keeping you busy.”
“I’m always busy.”
“Are you still in the state?”
“Maybe. But then, when has distance ever stopped the two of us? Whether you want to admit it or not, there is something that ties us together, you and I. A bond beyond the physical that you’ll never have with Lara.”
Lara…
Stop it. She can read your mind.
“Oh, Will. You still think you can keep things from me. Haven’t you learned by now? When I’m with you, I know everything. I know things you don’t even realize you know.”
“How are you in my head right now, Kate?”
“There are ways. So many ways that you can’t even imagine. What’s that saying you love so much, Will? ‘Know thy enemy’? You’ll never know us. Never really know us. Which is why you’ll never win.”
They were still in Dunbar. He knew that m
uch. Night was falling around him, but for some reason he wasn’t anxious at all, which didn’t make any sense. Every inch of him should have been tingling at the moment, itching to get indoors. Darkness was not his friend. It hadn’t been for almost a year now.
But of course, it was just a dream. Or a figment of his imagination. Or whatever the hell Kate did when she invaded his head.
Trying to make sense of it—any of it—was pointless.
She was wearing a long white dress. It was silk or gossamer. One of those. Almost see-through, though it played tricks with his mind, the hem billowing as if it had a life of its own. She looked radiant, long black hair glimmering under the falling dusk. He couldn’t have looked away even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.
“You always were a charmer, Will,” she smiled.
She’s in your head.
He forced himself to look away from her, to take in his environment instead. Occupy his mind with other thoughts that weren’t so dangerous.
Hide his secrets…
The street looked familiar, and it took him a moment to recognize the strip mall where the soldiers and the U-Haul had taken up residence earlier in the day. Except most of the men in uniform were dead, their bodies spread around the white and orange trailer in an almost semicircle. The gunfight he had listened to with Danny was over.
This is yesterday. Why am I seeing a day that’s already happened?
A man with red hair, wearing a military vest, stood over one of Josh’s soldiers. The injured man was lying on the parking lot looking up, one bloodied hand raised in some kind of meek defense. Neither one of them seemed to noticed that Will was watching them.
So this is what it feels like to be a ghost.
The man with red hair shot the soldier in the head with a 9mm handgun. Then he calmly ejected the magazine and put in a new one before looking over at the U-Haul nearby. “Open it,” the man said.
Big mistake, Will thought, though he didn’t know why.
He heard giggling behind him and looked back at Kate. She stood a short distance away, hands clasped in front of her, a wicked, knowing grin spreading across blood-red lips.
“What’s in the trailer?” he asked her.
