by Sam Sisavath
“I don’t know. Maybe a gun shop?”
“Gun shops carry stuff like that?”
“Around here, I guess.”
“Maybe it was a mistake to come up this far north…”
“We can always go back down.”
“Yeah, we should think about that…”
Keo smelled burning fish from the living room. So that was why they had started the fireplace. Fish for breakfast.
The woman with the shotgun had moved directly in front of Keo now. He could make out the New Orleans Saints’ fleur-de-lis on the back of her shirt, illuminated by the flickering fireplace light. She was shuffling her feet nervously and he was close enough that Keo could see long black hair that hadn’t seen a decent shampoo in a while.
“Hey, you still out there?” the man called out the window at Norris.
There was no reply.
“I don’t think he’s going to say anything,” the second woman said. “You did shoot at him.”
“It was a mistake,” the man said defensively. “I panicked when I saw him coming out of the woods.”
“Did you think he was, you know, them?” the first woman said.
“What do you mean?”
“Because he’s black.”
The man didn’t answer right away. Keo couldn’t tell if he was turning the question over in his head or if he was slightly offended by the suggestion. He finally said, “Of course not. They can only come out at night. I knew it wasn’t them. He just freaked me out running toward us with that rifle.”
“Oh,” the woman said, sounding slightly embarrassed.
Keo had to smile. Norris running out of the woods with an M4 would scare anyone. He wondered what the ex-cop was doing now. Maybe he was trying to reach Keo through the radio. No chance of that, since he had turned it off earlier as he approached the house. The last thing he wanted was for it to start squawking as he sneaked in to get a good look at the new occupants.
“I think he’s gone,” the woman whom Keo couldn’t see said.
“Can’t take the chance,” the man said.
“Then what?”
The man shook his head. “We shouldn’t have started the fire. I told you that was going to be a mistake.”
“Forget about that,” the woman said. There was a slight edge in her voice. “Arguing about it won’t make any difference now.”
“Maybe we should head back to the boat—”
Keo stepped forward and pressed the barrel of his weapon against the back of the first woman’s neck. She let out a startled yelp just as Keo grabbed her shotgun with his other hand and wrenched it free from her grip. It hadn’t taken much effort at all, as if she were just waiting for someone to come and take it from her. He leaned the weapon against the wall instead of tossing it to the floor. The last thing he wanted was for the 12-gauge to go off involuntarily and kill someone, especially him.
The man at the window spun around, as did the second woman—she was almost as tall as the man, both of them maybe five-eight—who moved forward holding a handgun. A six-shot revolver. Silver-chromed. Fancy. Light brown eyes pierced the semidarkness, and a long blonde ponytail whipped behind her.
They both looked young, maybe in their twenties. Keo couldn’t see the face of the woman in front of him, but he guessed she was about the same age. He wondered if she was half the looker as the one pointing the handgun at them.
“What the fuck!” the woman with the gun shouted.
She wasn’t really pointing the weapon at him, since Keo had slipped behind the first woman and was now using her as cover. He was so much taller than her that he had to bend slightly at the knees, which wasn’t entirely comfortable, so he hoped this wasn’t going to take too long.
“He’s got a gun!” the woman in front of Keo shouted.
“Oh, shit,” the man said. He kept raising his rifle and lowering it, as if he couldn’t quite make up his mind what to do. “Oh, shit,” he said again. “What now, Jordan? What now?”
The tall woman, Jordan, held the revolver steady in her hands as she moved forward another step, trying to see Keo behind his shield. “Let her go, you asshole! Let her go right now!”
“No,” Keo said.
That seemed to throw them off, and Jordan and the man exchanged a look. The woman in front of Keo was shaking badly.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Jordan said.
“I mean no,” Keo said. “N-o. The opposite of yes.”
Jordan’s face looked conflicted. Not quite as indecisive as the man’s. His response, he guessed, wasn’t what she had expected.
Finally, she just shouted again. “Let her the fuck go, asshole!”
Keo almost smiled. He could tell she was trying her best to sound tough, but it wasn’t an easy thing to pull off. Her hands didn’t waver and the six-shooter remained steady in front of her, which was impressive for a civilian. But did she know that if she started shooting there was a better chance she would hit her friend than him?
“Here’s your problem,” Keo said. “I have a gun that can fire thirty rounds with one squeeze of the trigger. As luck would have it, so does my friend back there.”
The man spun around—and froze at the sight of Norris aiming his M4 through the window at him from less than a meter away.
“Lower your weapons and we won’t kill you,” Norris said, the sound of his gruff voice prompting the man to toss the hunting rifle away so quickly that Keo expected an accidental discharge and was thankful there wasn’t one.
The woman, Jordan, proved to be made of sturdier stuff than the man. She didn’t lower her handgun, and instead glanced back at Norris, then at Keo, and back again. She looked pained from the indecision. She was clearly afraid of being shot (who wasn’t?), but she was also afraid of what would happen if she did surrender. He actually felt bad for her.
Jesus, I really have gone soft.
“Relax,” Keo said. “I could have killed all three of you before you even knew I was inside the house. You’re still alive now because I decided we’re not enemies.”
“You decided?” Jordan said incredulously.
“Yes. I’m the one with the automatic weapon.”
That seemed to placate the man. Then again, Keo guessed it wouldn’t have taken much, judging by how fast he had tossed his weapon.
“Jordan, please,” the man said. “You heard him. We’re not enemies.”
“Listen to the kid,” Norris said, sounding every bit like the ex-cop that he was. “You don’t want to make this any worse.”
“Jordan,” the man said. “Just do what they say. Please.”
Jordan didn’t look convinced by either one of them, but he could tell she was smart and she knew there was no way out of this. Of course, he had seen very smart people do some pretty stupid things before when they thought they had no choice.
“Listen to your friend,” Keo said. “Put down the gun.”
Her mouth twisted into a silent scream and she actually looked even more angry. He didn’t know that was even possible.
“Dammit!” she shouted, then bent her knees and slowly lowered the revolver.
“Kick it over here,” Keo said. “Not that I don’t trust you, but you look pissed off enough to try something stupid.”
She glared defiantly at him before grudgingly kicking the revolver over.
“Good,” Keo said, and let go of the woman in front of him.
She stumbled forward and ran into Jordan’s arms. They embraced, Jordan still watching Keo over her friend’s shoulder. The man at the window breathed a sigh of relief, and so did Norris behind him.
“Close one,” Norris said.
“You okay?” Keo asked.
“Kid missed me by a mile.” He grunted. “I think I almost pissed my pants, though.”
“Oh, nice.”
“What now?” Jordan said.
Keo remembered how Earl had treated him and the others when he found them in the basement of the RV park. Earl hadn’t had to do any of those things,
but he had anyway because he was a decent human being.
The legend of Earl lives on.
“Well?” Jordan said. “Are you going to shoot us now or later?”
“I like this one,” Norris chuckled behind them.
“Oh, shit,” the man said. He was looking over at the fireplace, at two large channel catfish spit roasting over the fire. Both fish were turning black.
Keo slung his weapon. “Let’s feed you first. Then we can talk about who gets to stand where on the firing squad.”
CHAPTER 25
Being invited back to the house for breakfast after being held at gunpoint was probably not what the three newcomers had expected. It took them a few seconds to absorb the offer, then another few minutes to talk amongst themselves while Keo and Norris waited outside the bungalow. Eventually, they decided they had nothing to lose. Or Jordan decided. If he thought she was the leader when he only heard their voices, he was proven correct when he saw them together.
Afterward, Jordan and her friends, Mark and Jill, followed Keo and Norris back to the house. Keo had already called ahead on the radio, and by the time they arrived, Gillian and the others had the food laid out and waiting for them. Breakfast was MREs and canned goods that Earl and the others had raided from the same pawnshop where they got most of their weapons. There were large crates of the stuff stacked in one corner of the basement.
Jordan tackled a bag of MRE when she wasn’t trying to drink them dry, while Jill and Mark hungrily spooned up fruits dripping with artificial syrup out of cans. All three looked as if they hadn’t eaten anything in days, which prompted Keo to wonder what they had been surviving on all this time. They didn’t look malnourished exactly, but not entirely healthy, either.
He and the others sat and stood around the newcomers, watching them devour everything put in front of them. It had been such a long time since they’d interacted with anyone from outside the house that the three friends’ presence created a noticeable spark of energy. If Jordan and her friends noticed the attention, they didn’t react to it. Then again, they were probably too busy eating and drinking.
“How long have you guys been staying here?” Jordan asked.
“We got here a few days after all of this began,” Keo said. “We’ve been here since.”
“I don’t blame you for not leaving this place. I mean, look at it. Besides supplies, you’ve got fish in the river and hunting grounds, right?”
“Not so much the hunting grounds.”
“No?”
“We think the creatures fed off most of the land-based wildlife. The ones that can’t climb, anyway.”
“You guys must be really hungry,” Gillian said with a smile.
Jordan blushed a bit. “We ran out of supplies about a month ago. We’ve been traveling up the river since, picking up useful things where we can and staying on land occasionally. But most of the time we stay on the boat. We have some fishing poles onboard that we use to catch fish along the banks.”
“How do you sail upriver?” Keo asked.
“If there’s enough wind blowing in the right direction, you can sail anywhere,” Mark said.
“Mark’s the expert,” Jordan said. “You have any boat questions, you should ask him. Jill and I are just along for the ride.”
“Where did you guys come from?” Gillian asked.
“We were at Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans when all of this happened,” Jordan said. “The only reason we’re still alive is because we were on Mark’s boat when it started.”
“The boat belongs to my dad,” Mark said. He tilted his can and sucked down the remaining juices, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’ve been boating with him since I was ten.”
“The river comes all the way up here?” Keo asked.
“It goes everywhere,” Jordan said. “There are dozens of large and small veins. We just followed it north as far as it would take us.”
“Why north?”
“South’s the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Ah.”
“We wanted to find out if anyone else was still out here, and going inland seemed the best option.”
“Those first few weeks were rough,” Mark said. “We kept waiting to hear about what had happened. Waited for the state or the government to come in and tell us what to do. But they never did. And the city…”
“Have you ever seen a city like New Orleans empty in the middle of the day?” Jordan asked.
“Can’t say I have,” Keo said.
“It’s spooky. Like walking through a cemetery.” She paused for a moment. “They almost caught us the first night…”
“They got Rick and Henry,” Jill said. Her voice was squeaky, as if she was afraid to talk too loudly. Keo guessed that was a habit from being “out there.”
“Yeah,” Jordan said, and went back to her MRE bag of beef stew without elaborating.
Keo exchanged a brief glance with Norris and Gillian. No one had to tell them what had happened to Rick and Henry. Everyone knew. They still remembered the first night vividly, almost half a year later. It was hard to forget when you discovered everything you thought you knew about the universe was wrong.
Jordan stood up from the living room couch where she had been sitting with the others and walked over to one of the windows. She rasped her knuckles on the thick block of wood on top of it. “This is how you keep them out?”
Keo nodded. “That and the bars.”
“I’ve seen them break down doors, but this stops them? The burglar bars and this block of wood?”
“We’ve been here since November of last year. So yeah, they work pretty well.”
“It’s a hell of a place you guys got here. I can see why you didn’t keep moving.”
“Definitely more leg room than in Mark’s boat,” Jill said.
“Speaking of the boat,” Rachel said. She had kept quiet all this time that the sound of her voice surprised Keo a bit. “Have you ever heard of Santa Marie Island?”
Mark looked up from rooting around his empty can of fruit. “Santa Marie Island? Near Galveston?”
“Yes!”
“My dad took me sailing around the Gulf of Mexico when I was fifteen. We stopped by Galveston for a while. One of the islands we passed along the way was Santa Marie. It looked like a nice stretch. Plenty of marinas to dock.”
“You can get there from New Orleans?” Keo asked.
“If it’s in the Gulf of Mexico, you can get to it by boat,” Mark said. “My dad and I have even crossed the Panama Canal once or twice and sailed the Pacific Ocean.”
“So you can sail to Santa Marie Island from here?” Rachel asked.
“It’d take weeks and we’d need a lot of supplies and good wind, but yeah, I don’t see why not. And if we could find fuel, we would get there faster using the outboard motor, but we try to limit it to emergencies.”
“Why the river?” Keo asked.
“What about it?” Jordan said.
“You guys said you’ve stayed on the river since New Orleans. Since all of this began, except for the occasional supply runs on land, or like back at the bungalow to cook the fish. So why the river?”
Jordan, Mark, and Jill exchanged a brief look.
“You don’t know?” Jordan said to Keo.
“Know what?”
“It’s the water.”
“What about it?”
“They won’t cross it,” Jordan said. “Even back at Lake Pontchartrain. We could see them on the shore, watching us at night, but they never tried to attack the boat. It doesn’t matter how close we get to land; as long as we’re on the water, they stay away. I think they’re afraid of it.”
“‘It’?”
“The water.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t a clue. They just are.”
“Sonofabitch,” Norris said. Then to Keo, “Did Levy say anything about Earl keeping a boat around here?”
“He said Earl didn’t,” Keo said.
“Speaking of which, where is Levy?” Gillian asked.
Keo looked around them. He swore he had seen Levy standing around and listening to the conversation just a few minutes ago. Where the hell did he sneak off to, and how did no one notice until now?
*
Keo walked with Jordan back to the bungalow. She was wiping oily fingers from some potato chips she had eaten back at the house on already-dirty jeans, while well-worn sneakers caked in dirt and mud crunched the morning ground.
“Mark and Jill trust you,” Keo said.
“I guess,” she said, though she didn’t look comfortable admitting it.
“Was it always like that?”
“No. Rick was supposed to be it. We depended on him the first few days while trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But after he…what happened to him, happened, someone had to step up. I guess that was me.”
“You’re doing a pretty good job.”
“Maybe…”
“You’ve kept them alive all these months. That’s no small accomplishment.”
“Yay me,” Jordan said. She glanced up at the trees, at the birds in flight, and the animals perched on tree branches without a care in the world. “You said they’re feeding off the animals too?”
“I think that’s a fair bet. There hasn’t been a single deer in these woods, and Levy says there are supposed to be a lot of them.”
“Levy’s the one that snuck off when no one was paying attention?”
“Yeah.”
“Strange kid.”
“Kid?” he smiled.
She grinned sheepishly back at him. “I guess we’re about the same age.” Then she looked around her again. “Do you think they do to the animals what they do to us? I mean, turn them?”
“I don’t think so. At least, I haven’t seen one yet. Then again, sometimes it’s hard to tell what those things used to be once they’ve turned.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Once…one night I saw one of them come very close to us along the banks. It didn’t attack, because like I said, they never do, but this one was watching us very curiously. You know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Like it knew us. Or recognized us.” She went quiet for a moment, and there was just the sound of their footsteps. Then, “Afterward, I thought that it could have been Rick. Or Henry.” She shook her head. “But it couldn’t be. Like you said, once they turn, it’s hard to tell them apart, or if they’re even male or female.”
