by Sam Sisavath
“How many machine guns did you see?”
“What?”
“Machine guns. How many did you see?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know…”
“Vehicles?”
“Horses. They were riding horses.”
“All of them?”
“Some were on foot…”
“No vehicle?”
“I didn’t see any. I didn’t see any…”
Keo nodded. The lack of vehicles would explain why he hadn’t heard them while he was still back at the cabin. Vehicles meant engines and engines made noise. A lot of very loud noises, especially out here where the preferable mode of transportation was horses or on foot. Horses were easy to feed—there was green everywhere you looked—whereas cars needed fuel, which was as rare as a decent porterhouse steak these days.
Then Keo asked the question he’d been dreading. “Emma and Megan. Did you see them?”
Mark shook his head. “No…”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes…”
“Are you sure, Mark?”
The baker seemed to think about it before answering. Then, “I ran. God help me, I ran out the back with Angel. I didn’t see anyone. I’m sorry, Keo, I’m sorry. I just ran.”
Angel. Close enough.
“Okay,” Keo said, when the pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons fire made Mark spin around so fast that he almost pulled his daughter off her feet.
“Oh, God,” Mark said breathlessly. “Oh, God…”
“Go,” Keo said.
Mark turned back around to look at him. “Go where?”
“My cabin. Go.”
“What if they find us there?”
“Then I guess you keep running.”
Mark stared at him like he was having difficulty processing Keo’s last statement.
“Go,” Keo said, harder this time so it would get through to the terrified man. Then, in a calmer voice and with just a ghost of a grin that was directed at Mark’s daughter, “And try not to make too much of a mess, okay? I just cleaned the place this morning.”
Mark nodded, might have been on the verge of saying something—maybe even to thank him?—but stumbled forward past Keo instead.
The girl followed her father but looked back at Keo, tears streaming down her face. She really did look a lot like Megan in every way but the eyes. Megan was, Keo thought, an old soul like her mother.
Keo smiled back at the girl. It was probably a terrible attempt at being comforting, but the girl returned it anyway, just before she and her father vanished around a large tree, with only the very loud (Too loud) crunch-crunch of their footsteps left in their wake.
He turned back around.
The shooting had slowed, with only the occasional pop! followed by long beats of silence before another gunshot could be heard. Keo wasn’t entirely sure if that was good or bad. But he was sure of one thing: He wasn’t going to find out standing here underneath the very comforting shade of a large tree.
He unslung the MP5SD and took the first step toward the tree line.
Winding Creek wasn’t the biggest place Keo had been in before, during, or after The Purge. In fact, it wasn’t very big at all. Like most locations in the state of Texas that had been repurposed in the weeks and months after the ghouls took over, it was a small community most people had never heard of, but one with all the right ingredients to make it stand out—surrounded by thriving farmland, and close enough to a water source that allowed it to thrive. Of the six hundred or so people who had been settled here, most of them either went home or went in search of greener pastures.
The place wasn’t anywhere close to “home” for Keo, but then most places weren’t. There were really only two reasons he stayed, and their names were Emma and Megan. He was thinking of them now as he reached the edge of the tree line and went into a crouch, his breath hammering against his chest.
You’re out of shape. Time to get back on the treadmill!
Keo leaned slightly forward and looked through two towering oak trees with trunks bigger than five of him combined. That was plenty of cover as he peered out toward the north end of Winding Creek. A paved road led into Main Street through a series of buildings, their backs facing him at the moment. All the action was taking place on the other side, as far as he could tell. The houses would be farther back, but to get to them he would either have to cross Main Street or spend another thirty minutes going around it.
The church tower was fifty meters or so directly ahead—a brick-and-mortar rectangle that ended in a sharp point topped by a white cross. The middle of the structure was hollowed and held a large bronze and copper bell at the center. Keo was used to that thing banging away an hour before every sundown and even more often on Sundays. Apparently people still went to church in Winding Creek, which made the place a novelty in a post-Purge world.
Pop-pop!
Automatic rifle fire coming from his right, somewhere near the town square.
Bang!
A single shot, likely from a handgun.
Bang! Bang!
Two more shots, also from handguns, but these came from a separate pistol than the first.
Two shooters. Exchanging gunfire? Maybe. To find out for sure, he’d have to leave the safety of the woods and venture out. Either that, or go around and pray that Emma and Megan were home when the attack began. What were the chances of that—
A flash of movement in the corner of his left eye, and Keo slid back to put a thick bush between him and two men on horseback as they tore across the open flat field. He glimpsed civilian clothes, fingerless gloves clutching reins, thick boots in stirrups, and black urban assault vests. Gun belts and holsters, pouches, and AR rifles thumping against their backs. If Keo had to guess, both men were strapped with enough spare magazines to weigh two full human beings each.
Can’t say they didn’t come prepared.
Both horsemen flew across Keo’s line of vision before disappearing through two buildings—a bakery (Mark’s) and an apartment where he knew a few people that called the place home. The men on horseback were clearly reacting—and now heading—toward the new reports of gunfire.
Who are these guys?
He remained very still, the MP5SD clutched in front of him, and listened for more hints about what was happening in the part of the town that he couldn’t see from his position. The air had gone eerily quiet since the sudden bursts of shooting two minutes ago. Even after moving closer toward the brush, Keo still couldn’t pick up any new sounds.
No shooting, no voices. A big, fat nothing.
That can’t be good.
What were the chances the good folks of Winding Creek had managed to fight back against their attackers and won, and were now taking stock of their losses?
Yeah right.
Keo sighed, and thought, Like you had anything better to do today anyway, and pushed back up onto his feet before taking the first steps into the open fields.
FIVE
MARK’S BAKERY was the most obvious point of entry via the back door, and though Keo found evidence of a struggle inside the place, there was surprisingly very little blood. A few drops here and there, including a broken glass countertop and a couple of overturned chairs. Given Mark’s state, Keo had expected much worse and had envisioned him fighting for his life before tearing out of the back.
He eased through the small building, using the counter and then the chairs for cover. The bakery had a glass door and two curtainless windows that looked out into the streets. He kept low and made it all the way to the front without being detected. Keo pushed against the wall, then slid up to his full six-one height before peeking outside.
He searched for that machine gun he’d heard earlier, the brap-brap-brap that had gotten his attention more than anything. Keo had gone up against a lot—guys with guns, a lot of guys with a lot of guns—but he despised having to face an MG. It was unfair, really, like bringing a knife to a gunfight when the other guy told you only
knives were allowed.
Or something like that.
He couldn’t locate the machine gun (something like that would be welded onto the back of a technical or being lugged around by a beefy guy with arms the size of his thighs, most likely), but he did locate where the two horsemen he’d seen earlier had gone. They had stopped in the street and were standing over a body.
The motionless figure had on dark pants and a white shirt and was definitely male. (Not Emma or Megan. Thank God.) Two more figures stood on the street, one crouched over the body. Jeans and khaki cargos, and similar black assault vests like the two horsemen. Except now that Keo could get a better look at the men without them moving in a blur, he was able to spot the rough white circle emblems with what looked like the capital letter M in the middle. The images looked as if they were made with white markers and drawn in by hand, and appeared at random locations on the front and back of the vests. One of them had his M higher up and over one of his pouches, while another had his closer to the center.
Now where have I seen that before?
One of the men was prodding at the dead figure’s temple with the muzzle of his rifle while the others looked on. They might have also been exchanging quips, but Keo couldn’t make out words from inside the bakery, but their reactions—one might have laughed—seemed to lend credence to that. He eyeballed the distance at about seventy meters, give or take.
The dead man could have been anyone. There were exactly one hundred and twenty-seven people in Winding Creek. Of those, thirty-nine were adult males and the rest were women and kids. Keo hadn’t gotten to know all of the men—not that he would have been able to tell who was lying on the street at the moment from where he was hiding anyway, with the man’s face turned in the wrong direction.
The fact that the town had more women than men wasn’t strange at all. Most towns these days had the same slanted numbers in favor of the fairer XX sex. The majority of those females also had children, with most of them under the age of five. It was a young population boom designed purely to serve masters that were now gone.
Well, mostly all gone, anyway.
Keo was still thinking about numbers, trying to decide how much of this mess he was willing to get himself into in order to save a woman and a ten-year-old girl who hadn’t known he existed (and vice versa) until less than a year ago, when he heard the screaming.
He wasn’t surprised to hear it. It was inevitable. He’d seen it in other places, sometimes while it was happening, but most of the times just the bloody and filthy aftermaths. There was no reason Winding Creek would be spared once someone stronger and with more guns discovered its existence.
The screaming came from the apartment complex next door, and the fact that it was a woman made damn sure Keo couldn’t ignore it. Not that he would have anyway (Yeah, keep telling yourself that, pal), but thoughts of Emma—or worse, Megan—flashed across his mind’s eye even as he darted back across the bakery to the same door he’d entered only a few minutes earlier.
He sneaked a look out first before exposing himself, then crossed the short distance to the apartment. There was an alleyway between the two structures, and Keo made sure the four heavily-armed men down the street weren’t looking in his direction before he jogged across the empty space. They weren’t, he saw, either because they couldn’t hear the screaming or they didn’t care because it wasn’t anything they hadn’t been expecting.
The apartment had a back door and it was already slightly ajar when Keo reached it. He pushed it open with the suppressor attached to the end of his submachine gun, ensuring that the weapon took the lead and saw whatever—if anything—was waiting for him before he did so he wouldn’t need to lift it first to fire.
His forefinger tested the trigger of the H&K. He’d found it three years ago in a dump just outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, next to a dead man who was wearing cowboy boots for some reason. The gun hadn’t been very well maintained, but that was easily remedied. Keo had used a lot of weapons in his time, but he had a real love for the German-made MP5SD. If he were a more superstitious man, he might even consider it his good luck charm.
The back door opened up into a hallway, with a view of the front lobby about thirty meters ahead. The super’s office, long ago converted into a storage room, was to his right. There were a few empty boxes on the floor leading to the front doors that Keo stepped over so he could sneak a quick peek into the office. Looters had taken everything they could (food and weapons) and left the rest (clothes and farming supplies).
Keo faced forward, then continued on.
He didn’t have to see it to know it was coming, because he could smell it long before he made it to the other side of the corridor. The air was thick with it, and though it had been a while, it hadn’t been that long ago.
He stepped over a pair of empty bullet casings scattered among the tossed boxes, then had to go around a thick pool of blood near the mouth of the hallway. Trails of blood led him to five figures stacked on top of one another like hastily assembled campfire logs near the center of the room. The man on top was lying on his back, and there was a very neat bullet hole in his forehead. The three rounds in his chest, that were still dripping blood onto the men underneath him, weren’t nearly as orderly. Thick lines of blood, fresh enough that they tickled at his nostrils, connected the pile to the stairs five meters to his left.
Five bodies. All adult males.
More screaming, coming from above him. It was loud enough that Keo instinctively went into a slight crouch and pushed against the hallway wall as he looked out the open lobby door and into the street. Of the four heavily-armed bodies he’d seen out there earlier, the two on horseback had vanished, leaving just the two on foot to go through the dead man’s pockets. The screaming, again, hadn’t been worth their attention.
Keo stood up and slid out of the back hallway and around the random pools of blood blocking his path to the stairs. He avoided the heavy trails of red as well as the bloody boot prints that traveled randomly in and out of the thick liquid by sticking to the side and taking the steps one at a time, the submachine gun leading the way the entire time.
There was no way to tell from just the screaming who the woman was. It could have been Emma for all he knew, though it didn’t make sense for her to be here, unless she had fled here from her home during the attack. But more likely it was one of the many women in Winding Creek that he’d never gotten around to meeting. There were certainly plenty of them.
But the fact that it could have been Emma—regardless of how remote—was enough to keep him moving instead of responding to the very real instinct to bug out. Go back to the cabin, grab his bag, and get the hell outta here. Because this wasn’t his fight, and it wasn’t like he’d never seen a town being taken over by force before. It was always bloody, always violent, and the men always ended up dead and the women in…worse shape.
So why didn’t he stop and turn around and obey his instincts to get the hell out now while he still could? Now, while no one had any idea he was even around? Because this was stupid. This was so, so goddamn stupid.
It might be Emma. It probably isn’t, but it might be her.
Then he was at the second floor without realizing it, and instead of turning around, Keo stopped and listened to the woman. She had stopped screaming and was sobbing now. He couldn’t tell if she was in pain, but it was clearly distress. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out, which was good because no one had ever accused him of being smarter than the average bear.
He heard male voices, too—more than one—occasionally drowning out the woman. They were talking amongst themselves, and there was an edge to them. And excitement.
Keo took the last step and went into another crouch before leaning around the corner.
There were three of them, lining up along the wall outside an open door almost exactly halfway up the hallway from the staircase. Their backs were to him, and like the ones he’d seen in the streets, they wore civilian clothes
and black assault vests, the sloppily (Hand-drawn? Looks like it.) circled white M emblem on different parts of what was clearly some shabby attempt at a uniform…ish. They had their rifles slung, and the bloody boot prints he’d been painfully avoiding on his way up led to the figures in front of him now.
Keo gripped the submachine gun tighter, when one of the men (in the middle) said, “Fuck, how long’s he going to take?”
“Shut up,” the one at the front said. He was leaning casually against the wall, patiently biding his time by tossing a bloody knife from hand to hand.
“I’m just saying,” the first guy said.
“You say too much.”
“You don’t think he’s taking too long?”
“No.”
“He’s ruining her.”
“You’ll get your shot.”
“I just don’t want him to ruin her before I do, that’s all.”
“Finders keepers,” a third one said.
The first speaker glanced over his shoulder. He was young—early twenties, with shaggy hair and light blue eyes. “Finders? He didn’t find shit.”
“How do you know?” the third one said. Keo couldn’t see his face, but he had a mullet that went down past his collar.
“Because I was outside clearing the fucking church with him when they found her.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
“I just did.”
Mullet harumped but let it go.
“He’s taking way too long,” Shaggy said as he turned back around.
“Shut up,” the one up front said again.
“I’m just sayin’…”
A fucking Three Stooges routine, these assholes, Keo thought as he climbed the last step.
He might have made just a little bit more noise than he had intended to. He blamed it on the sudden rush of adrenaline pouring through him because his body knew exactly what he was about to do even before his mind accepted it.
A year. Almost went a whole year…
The woman screamed again, louder this time (though maybe that was just because Keo was now on the same floor and she just sounded louder), and drowned out any noise he might have made as he straightened up and the magazines in his front pockets clacked softly against one another.
