by Sam Sisavath
She snapped a quick look at the front wall across the lobby, at the undisturbed barricade and the pools of moonlight coming in from the openings above. Still dark, and nothing had come in while she was asleep.
Stupid. So stupid.
“I’m sorry, Danny,” she said again.
“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s hunky dory.” He took out a bottle of water and handed it to her. “Partially my fault. I was too preoccupied in the office, didn’t think to check up on you lovebirds until now.”
She chased away more of the grogginess with the water before handing the bottle back to him. “Any progress?”
“If you call the fact that we had a nice, long chat progress, then yes.”
“He’s talking now?”
“Lips grew back.”
“So they can regenerate flesh.”
“One second he’s mouthless, the next he’s making sounds. Or hissing, anyway. Musto presto, new lips-for-you-to.”
“What did he—it—whatever—say?”
Danny sat down and she did the same, her eyes wandering back to the front wall again.
“It’s him. One hundred and twenty-two percent,” Danny said. “He knew things I never told anyone. About me, about us.”
“Like what?”
“Afghanistan. SWAT. This really hot blonde who I picked up at a bar and was convinced I was going to marry, only to find out—Well, you don’t need to know all the details. Point is, he knew things that only Willie boy would know.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.”
“But what if.”
“We already went over this, kid. You just have to trust me. I’m not wrong.”
“You’re that sure?”
He nodded. “Sure as sure can be. Surest, if you will.”
“That’s pretty sure.”
“You’re damn straight.”
She managed a half-smile. “What is he doing right now?”
“Recuperating. He took a pretty solid beating before he dropped in on us. It was apparently quite the death match on the rooftop, with attempted quartering and such. Real serious shit.”
“So he’s really hurt.”
“On a scale of Ouch and FUBAR, he’s about plus ten beyond FUBAR.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope. That’s why I dug him out of the rubble to help him heal faster.”
She must have gasped out loud, because Danny chortled and looked barely able to contain himself.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s free, and as you can see, I’m still in one piece and adorable.”
“You should have waited for us.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know; watch over you in case it tried something?”
“It didn’t.”
“But it could have.”
“But it didn’t,” Danny said. “It’s Willie boy. He’s skinnier—okay, he’s basically skin and bones—and he’s seen better days hair-wise. But you have to admit, he looks pretty snazzy in that trench coat.”
“That’s a trench coat?”
“Well, it was, about a few million pieces ago.”
“Why was it—he—wearing a trench coat?”
Danny shrugged. “Fashion sense?”
She sighed and shook her head with exasperation, not sure if she was angry with Danny or unable to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a loose blue-eyed ghoul behind her right now, with nothing between her and it (him?) but a single door. She had seen what they could do back at the farmhouse and last night. How fast and strong and so goddamn hard to kill they were unless you got them in the head, and that was so, so much easier said than done.
“Did he tell you how it happened?” she asked.
“He said it was Kate’s doing.”
“His Kate?”
“One and only. That night, after we ran the gauntlet from the farmhouse…”
She nodded. How many times had she relived that day? Too many to count.
“She got to him, then,” Gaby said.
“Yeah,” Danny nodded.
He didn’t add anything else and she had difficulty finding the right words, so the two of them sat in silence and listened to Nate snoring lightly next to them while staring at the barricaded wall. She knew Danny was thinking the exact same thing that she was: That day after the farmhouse, when they lost Will to the roadblock…
After what seemed like hours, though it was probably just a few minutes, she said, “So what now?”
“We wait until sunup, then go home,” Danny said.
“What about him?”
“He had a pretty interesting story to tell me. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger, as the saying goes. New Willie has been reconning the enemy, gathering intelligence. Apparently he’s made himself such a nuisance that the enemy cooked up this little scheme and stalked us all the way from Starch just to use us as bait to lure him here.”
She looked over at Danny. “So does he? Know something they don’t want us to know?”
Danny grinned back at her, his blue eyes glinting with mischief—or maybe that was just the moonlight reflecting off them.
“Well?” she said. “Does it—him—Will know something or not?”
“I guess you could say that,” Danny said. “Does knowing a way to save the human race count?”
23
KEO
“THIS FEELS FAMILIAR,” Erin shouted about two hours into the trip.
She stood behind the helm of the twenty-footer, the balaclava that covered almost her entire face except for her eyes playing tricks with her voice. If he were sitting anywhere on the fast-moving vessel besides a few feet in front of her on a narrow bench, he might not have heard a single word she said.
He pulled his balaclava down slightly to shout back: “Yeah, but this time I’m not in any danger of getting tossed overboard.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
He grinned and pulled the mask back up, leaving the cold wind to smack against the exposed parts of his face.
The offshore boat they were moving in had a T-top, but the canopy was missing. Even so, it was the best and fastest vessel Hart had to offer. If anyone were around to see them, they would spot a long, white object slicing at fast speeds across the wide-open Gulf of Mexico. There was absolutely nothing else around them, the Ocean Star having faded into the distance (Probably for good) a long time ago.
Keo was looking forward when Erin appeared next to him and said, “Move over.”
“The fuck?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the empty helm.
“Relax; it’s on cruise control,” Erin said, laughing behind her ski mask.
“I didn’t know this thing had cruise control,” he said, scooting over on the bench to give her space.
Erin sat down with a heavy sigh. “The girl told me about it before she gave me the keys.”
The girl was Faith, James’s girlfriend. The two made for a nice-looking couple, and Keo found himself wishing them well as he and Erin set off. He was, though, resigned to the realization that he would never find out how they did, because chances were very good he wasn’t going to ever see them again. Not them or Lara or anyone else on the Trident, for that matter.
There you go again being Captain Optimism, pal.
Next to him, Erin closed her eyes and leaned her head against the fiberglass helm. “You know what’s funny?”
“Johnny Carson?”
She ignored him, said, “Despite everything I know, I would have found a way to justify it—what’s happening out there, what we’re doing. It wouldn’t have been easy, and some days would be harder than others, but I think I would have pushed on anyway, lying to myself. And every day the lies would eat at me more and more. It was already bad even before I met you.”
“What would have happened then? When you couldn’t handle it anymore?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know now, but probably noth
ing good.”
“So you’re saying I was your savior?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Sounded like it…”
“What I’m saying is, I think I would have kept on going to the bitter end, and I wouldn’t have been the only one. When I see what Riley’s doing back at the Ocean Star, it just reminds me what cowards the rest of us are. At least he’s doing something.”
“From what I hear, his plans wouldn’t have gotten very far if Lara and the Trident hadn’t shown up.”
“Maybe, but he’s at least doing something. Unlike us. We would have kept telling ourselves about all the things Mercer did for us to justify our cowardice.” She paused for a brief moment before continuing. “Even though we saw the collaborators as enemies, we told ourselves we were doing it for their own good, that we were ultimately saving them. We knew all about the pregnancies, the daily bloodletting. We scouted them months in advance of the attacks.”
“James told me.”
“We knew what was going to happen. What the body count was going to look like. You don’t throw planes and tanks into the mix and not know.”
She went silent and stared forward, and Keo couldn’t tell what she was looking at—or maybe what she was looking for. For all he knew, she could have been staring past the open seas and into the past, wondering how things might have changed if she had acted.
So that’s what guilt looks like on someone else.
“I should have stopped him,” Erin said. “God, we had so many chances.”
“We?”
“Those of us who had doubts. When I think back, I know it wasn’t just me.”
“Like Riley.”
She nodded. “I always knew he wasn’t comfortable with the plan. I could see it on his face, in his eyes whenever we met with Mercer to discuss strategy. He was always so quiet, especially compared to the others.”
“Who else was in the inner circle with Mercer?”
“There was me, Riley, Benford, and Rhett. We were the first four. Later, he added others. Bellamy, Jerkins…”
“And you all had doubts?”
“Not all of us. But it wasn’t just Riley and me, I know that. I don’t know, maybe in some naïve way we—I—were hoping Mercer would move past it. He talked about it on and off, but it just never seemed real until a few months before R-Day officially started.” She sat back and sighed. “We’re civilians, Keo. We’re not like you, bred for this sort of thing. We trusted in Mercer. Trusted in him implicitly.”
“That’s what manipulators do,” Keo said. “They prey on your loyalty.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know how hard it was on my own in the early days. When he found me, living became more than just surviving. It became living again.”
“Was that before or after he brought you to Black Tide?”
“Before.”
“How did he know about the island in the first place?”
“He never said, but he’s ex-Army, so that probably has something to do with it. I would never think to look for weapons at an Army base. I wouldn’t even know where to find one off the top of my head. Do you?”
“Ran across some guys who did the same thing in Louisiana.”
“Friend or foe?”
Keo pulled up his balaclava and tapped the scar that ran down the side of his face.
“So that’s what happened there,” Erin said. “What became of them?”
“There was shooting and bad words,” he said. “I don’t play well with ex-Army types. Wannabe joke-spouting ex-Army comedians are the exception.”
“Good to know.”
Keo pulled the mask back down over his face and stared at the nothingness in front of them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sure we’re going in the right direction? Because it’s been a couple of hours, and I still don’t see anything that even looks like an island out there.”
“It’s a secret U.S. military base, Keo. They’re not going to make it easy to find. With an ocean this big, you’d have to be either super lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—to just stumble across Black Tide by accident.”
“So what you’re saying is, yes, we’re going in the right direction.”
“Yes, we’re going in the right direction.”
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure.”
“So I’ve been spilling my guts, and I noticed you haven’t reciprocated.”
“What were you hoping to hear?”
“What happened?”
“What happened what?” he asked, even though he knew damn well what she was referring to.
“You know what,” Erin said. “You’re not going there to stop this war by killing Mercer. It’s personal. I can see it on your face when you talk about him. So what happened? What did Mercer do to you?”
“One of your teams killed a friend of mine. I tracked them back to Lochlyn.”
“You thought he would be there?”
“I was hoping he’d be there.”
“What about Davis and Butch? The iPod?”
“I shot Butch and took Davis for questioning.”
“Is he dead? Davis?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked over at him. “Don’t lie to me, Keo.”
“I’m not lying to you. He was still alive when we parted company. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I had other things to worry about.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes.”
She turned away.
“You knew them?” Keo asked.
“Of course I knew them. They were part of my unit.”
“Davis?”
“He was a good friend,” she said, and didn’t say anything else.
* * *
“HOW DOES an island that small make it through all the tropical storms and hurricanes that whip across the Gulf of Mexico every year?” Keo asked.
“Simple but tough Army engineering would be my guess,” Erin said. “In all the time we’ve been here, we’ve survived over a dozen storms the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. It was terrifying the first few times, but after a while you get used to it, and now you just hunker down until it passes. The place is incredibly sound, and it’s been designed to be used and reused. That includes the airfield, the surrounding woods, and the beaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if braving storms was part of the curriculum.”
They sat on the same bench at the front of the twenty-footer, staring at the first light he had seen since they left the Ocean Star. It wasn’t even that bright, but against the vast emptiness of the sea and the night, it might as well be a lighthouse beacon. With the single engine that had been propelling them for the last few hours turned off, the world was once again dead silent, with just the sloshing of the currents under and around them.
Keo scanned the island from side to side, noting where it began and ended now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It was about two kilometers long, but he couldn’t tell from his current distance how much of it was covered in vegetation, though there didn’t seem to be a lot of trees. Or, at least, nothing tall enough to stand out against the dark canvas that surrounded the place like a black glove.
“Two kilometers?” he asked.
“Just a bit longer than a mile,” Erin said.
“How wide?”
“Maybe a quarter mile. There’s a landing strip that runs through the middle. The main facilities are joined into one contiguous structure, and it’s ringed by woods and beaches. The first few weeks after we arrived, we were always stepping on empty shell casings that had been left behind. We’re looking at the back of the island now. Boats usually dock on the other side where there are piers and slips. This side is pretty much used for beaching exercises. But since we’re coming from the Ocean Star, it makes sense for us to land here.”
“Where there’s less security.”
“Exactly.”
“Hart said the place was primarily used for war games.
”
She nodded. “There were stacks of files and old maps detailing various scenarios they had run through this place in the past. I don’t think they spent a lot of time here though, probably as long as it took them to complete whatever games they had in mind. It’s a durable place, but it’s not exactly cozy.”
“So, shitty accommodations?”
“I guess soldiers don’t need more than a cot and a pillow.”
“You guys didn’t find any of them when you showed up?”
“Soldiers? No. It was empty. No ghouls, either.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not luck. Mercer knew it would be empty. That’s why he brought us here.”
Keo sneaked a look at her, sitting next to him. There was something about the way she had said Mercer’s name. He had noticed it twice now: there was a reverence to it, the kind of respect that made him question if she could be trusted when the chips were down and his hide was on the line. Maybe he had made a mistake deciding to trust someone who, less than a day ago, had threatened to kill him more times than he could count.
“You good with this?” he asked.
She looked back at him and saw the way he was eyeing her. She pursed her lips into a forced smile. “No. Not at all.”
“What does that—”
“I mean, I’m not good with what we’re about to do,” she interrupted, “but yeah, I’m good with this this.” She faced forward again. “It has to be done. If he’s gone, there’s a chance we can pull the others back and stop this war and save lives.”
“Whose lives?”
“Theirs, ours, all of us.”
Keo nodded. He didn’t want to tell her that the chances of that actually happening were low, that even with Mercer gone there were probably going to be true believers determined to carry on the fight in their dead commander’s memory, or something equally ill-conceived.
But right now Erin didn’t need to know about his doubts. He couldn’t afford for her to start having second (third?) thoughts. God knew this was going to be tough enough without having to worry about her, too.
“How are we going to do this?” he asked.
“There’s nothing special about it. I already radioed ahead when we were on the Ocean Star and told them we were coming. They’re expecting us”—she glanced at her watch—“about now.”
