by Sam Sisavath
He took one step, then two—and when the Three Stooges still hadn’t turned around to acknowledge his presence—Keo went faster, and faster, and faster up the hallway.
There were ten doors to his left and ten more to his right. He passed the first closed apartment door without trouble and was almost at the second one—three doors down from his target—when Mullet, at the very back, began to turn around.
The man’s eyes widened at the sight of Keo sneaking up behind him, and he opened his mouth to say something. Keo shot him in the forehead, the gunshot bouncing off the narrow passageway as a barely audible pfft!
Keo heard it just fine, but the other two never turned around.
It was an easy shot from less than nine meters away, and even as Mullet was slumping to the floor, Keo fired again, his second round slamming into the back of Shaggy’s head before the submachine gun’s first bullet casing had the chance to clink against the wooden floorboards underneath him.
The first man, at the front of the line, reacted faster than Keo had anticipated. He put his knife away and was spinning around, his right hand stabbing down to his hip for his holstered sidearm at the same time. It was a slick move, and clearly he had practiced it before. But it wasn’t fast enough, and the man was wrapping his fingers around the gun when Keo shot him, striking him in the throat.
Blood gushed out in an arc, spraying the wall as the man stumbled but didn’t go down. Keo tracked him and nailed him in the face with a second bullet. Keo was already running forward, stepping over Mullet, then Shaggy, before the third body crumpled completely to the hallway floor.
The open door allowed Keo to quickly turn and slip into the apartment—
And almost stumbled over a body lying on the carpet.
Rick, Keo thought at the sight of the upturned face.
There were thirty-nine men in Winding Creek, and Keo only knew a handful of them. Rick was a familiar face because Emma knew his wife, and they’d had something approaching a double date once.
Keo stepped over Rick, sweeping the room before picking up speed toward the open bedroom door on the other side. He had a feeling he already knew who he had been listening to screaming as he got closer.
The woman was sobbing when Keo stepped through the doorframe. The sobs were mixed in with someone else’s pained grunting. The latter was coming from a man, his pants huddled around his knees as he thrashed on top of the pale figure underneath him. An assault vest, along with a gun holster, lay in a pile on the floor next to the bed. An AR, elaborately painted with camo, leaned against an armoire nearby.
The woman saw Keo over the man’s right shoulder as he entered the room, and recognition flickered across her eyes.
Wendy. Rick’s wife.
Keo thought about putting the man out of his misery, but there was a chance his bullet could go right through his target and hit Wendy. So instead of squeezing the trigger, he slung the MP5SD and pulled out his knife and stepped toward the bed.
Either the man heard Keo or he realized something was wrong—or it could have just been the fact that Wendy had stopped making any sounds at all, or even fighting him—because he ceased both grunting and thrusting and raised himself off his victim. He hadn’t gotten very far when Keo grabbed him by his oily wet hair and jerked his head back, lifting his sweat-slicked body further off Wendy, before he shoved the extremely sharp point of the Ka-Bar into the nape of the man’s neck.
He pushed it deep, deep, and deeper.
Wendy might have grabbed at her mouth in horror if her hands weren’t bound with duct tape and tied to the bed post behind her. She was stretched out on the bed like some kind of sacrifice, and maybe she was, Keo thought, remembering the three men lining up outside the apartment for their turn.
The man’s body spasmed as Keo pushed the knife downward with one hand. When the guy stopped moving completely, Keo rolled him off Wendy and over the side of the bed. He landed with a loud, sickening thump on the floor even as blood poured out of him.
Keo glanced back at the bedroom door—then past it and into the living room beyond—to make sure no one had sneaked in while he was busy. After all, if there were three waiting outside there could easily be four or more, with the lollygaggers just now showing up.
But there was no one but Rick out there.
He turned back to Wendy, who attempted to cover herself with her legs. Her eyes were bruised and there were red marks around her neck. Keo took pity on the both of them and grabbed a blanket and put it over her. There was blood on the cotton fabric, but he didn’t think Wendy cared. Keo hurried over to the headboard and cut her hands free, and she quickly scrambled away from him, clutching the sheets to her breasts.
He wiped the blood from the Ka-Bar on a white shirt hanging off the bedpost and put it away before unslinging the MP5SD again. “Wendy, right?”
She nodded, her eyes going from him to the door. No, not the door, but the body outside. “He’s dead,” she whispered.
Keo nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s dead,” she whispered again.
She was in shock. It didn’t come through in her voice—barely below a whisper—but he recognized it on her face, in the way she sat clutching the blanket and stared at Rick’s unmoving form.
Keo gave the open doors another quick check before moving across the room to the window. He peeked out from behind the curtain and searched for—then found—the same body in the street. The two guys were still there, still rummaging through the man’s pockets. What the hell were they looking for that it was taking so much time?
From a higher position he could see more of the town—and the bodies. There was a dozen or so more of them farther up the street and along the sidewalks. Mostly men from their shapes, but he saw a few women sprinkled among them. Thankfully, no kids—or, at least, nothing small enough to be a kid. It almost looked like the victims were fleeing to the town square when the invasion happened. Why?
He glimpsed more men in black urban assault vests moving around. (Christ, where’d they all come from?) There were four on horseback and seven (maybe eight) on foot. They were patrolling, while a dozen or so were going in and out of a large warehouse on the other side of the square, a constantly moving line of people carrying boxes and bags to a pair of waiting U-Haul trailers hitched to horses. Keo recognized the building where Winding Creek stored its goods—everything they had harvested from the land, including those coffee beans that Emma had offered him the first day they met.
He glanced back at Wendy. She hadn’t gotten off the bed. He couldn’t even be sure if she had moved at all since scrambling away from him.
“Wendy…” When it didn’t look as if she had heard him, Keo said louder, “Wendy.”
She finally turned to face him. Her hair was in her face, and she looked on the verge of crying hysterically but somehow, somehow didn’t.
“Emma,” he said. “Do you know what happened to Emma and Megan?”
“Emma?” Wendy said, still whispering. He wondered if she was even aware of that.
“Did you see what happened to them?”
Wendy shook her head before her eyes wandered back to Rick in the living room.
“What about the others?” Keo asked.
“Others?” she said, and this time didn’t look over at him.
“I see bodies outside, but that’s not everyone. It’s not even close. What happened to the rest?”
“They took them.”
“They took them?” he repeated.
“The babies,” Wendy said. “They took all the babies.”
“All the babies?”
“All the babies,” Wendy said again. “They took all the babies.”
The children. She means the children. I think.
He glanced out the window again, at the men in assault vests raiding the storage warehouse on the other side of town, at the ones roaming the streets and sidewalks. More heavily armed figures were going in and out of buildings. The houses were on the other side
. What were the chances Emma and Megan were still there? What were the chances they had managed to survive the assault at all?
Keo turned back to Wendy. “What about the women? Did they take them, too?”
“Yes,” Wendy nodded. “They took the women. And the babies. God, they took all the babies.”
“Where?”
“Where?” Wendy said.
“Where did they take all the babies?”
Wendy shook her head. “I don’t know…”
“But you saw them. Take the babies. The children.”
She nodded.
“What about—” Keo started to ask when Wendy finally climbed off the bed and stood over the dead man on the floor. “Wendy?” When he didn’t get a response: “Wendy, are you okay?”
She was still clutching the blanket to her nude body, but her bare back was to him, so Keo couldn’t see her face. Not that he needed to in order to know what was going through her head at the moment.
“Wendy,” he said. Then, when she didn’t answer, he said again but louder, “Wendy. Over here. Wendy.”
She crouched down until he could only see the top of her head on the other side of the bed.
“Wendy,” Keo said. “It’s okay. We’ll get out of here. I promise—”
He hadn’t gotten promise completely out when the sound of a gunshot interrupted him and the top of Wendy’s head that he could see disappeared out of view.
Keo ran back to the bed, but even as he rounded the floorboards he already knew what he was going to find on the other side.
There was blood, along with clumps of other things dripping from the bedsheets, and Wendy’s body was curled up on the floor almost in a fetal position next to her assaulter. The blanket was somehow still clutched to her body, keeping her clothed as she fell. A handgun lay nearby, as did the pile of clothes and weapons the dead man had taken off.
Well, shit.
SIX
DEPENDING on how far the closest bad guys were, Keo figured he had anywhere from thirty seconds to a full minute before he was overwhelmed. Maybe even more time if he was really, really lucky.
Yeah, right.
Winding Creek had settled into an eerie calmness after the initial bloodbath, and the gunshot was loud enough it wasn’t going to take a lot to figure out where it had come from. His only real chance was that the men racing toward him now would do it cautiously and take their time entering the building. Of course, he could be dealing with a bunch of assholes with more balls than brain cells, which meant they would throw caution to the wind and storm the place at full speed.
Keo snatched up the dead guy’s fancy AR and slung it—you never knew when an extra weapon would come in handy—and shoved a pair of spare magazines for it into some empty pockets on his cargo pants. He picked up the equally fancy Colt .45 1911 model semiautomatic Wendy had used to end her life from the floor and grabbed two spares for that. By the time he had zipped up another pants pocket, he could already hear them coming up the stairs, the bam-bam-bam of their heavy boots like hammers against the floorboards.
More balls than brain cells it is!
He rushed out of the bedroom, moving slower than before thanks to the added weight. Not by much, but enough that he noticed. He had thought about grabbing Rapist Number One’s assault vest so he didn’t have to cram everything into his available pockets, but that would have cost him an extra ten seconds or more, and right now that was ten seconds more than he had to waste.
Keo reached the open living room door and stepped over Rick’s lifeless body. He pushed against the doorframe and leaned out, then looked left toward the top of the stairs at the end of the hallway.
The men he’d killed lay where he last saw them—three inconsequential lumps of human waste that he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over. He heard them coming well before he actually saw them, their boots sledgehammering against the wooden staircase steps. He might have also heard voices but couldn’t be sure over the pounding footsteps.
Definitely more balls than brains.
The first one had taken two steps onto the second floor, sunlight from the window down the hallway to Keo’s right glinting off his smooth, bald forehead, when Keo shot him in the chest with the MP5SD. The man looked surprised, but Keo had seen that expression before: they didn’t know where the sudden pain was coming from because they hadn’t heard the gunshot. That usually lasted for half a second (sometimes it was just a barely noticeable flicker) before their legs turned to jelly and they collapsed, like this one did. The man was holding a submachine gun of his own, and he pulled the trigger unwittingly as he fell, spraying 9mm rounds into the nearby wall.
The second man was on the stair landing when he reflexively started ducking at the sound of gunfire. He was bigger than the first, wearing a Houston Texans jersey underneath his assault vest, and he was turning to flee back down the stairs when Keo shot him twice, the second bullet hitting his target just under the base of the skull.
He dropped.
Someone shouted, “Fuck!” from the steps below, followed by new rounds of pounding footsteps—except these were heading back down.
Maybe some brains after all.
Keo took advantage of the moment to glance to his right. There was a wall with a window back there but no curtains, so he could see a wall of green trees on the other side. He gauged the distance at twenty or so meters of open space, which wasn’t nearly as intimidating as the God-knew-how-many number of men waiting for him on the other side of the corridor.
He turned back left, toward the staircase.
Hushed voices, signs of someone trying to take control, but there were no further movements up or down the stairs. They had probably stagnated somewhere in the middle of the steps—
A head leaned around the corner, and Keo instinctively snapped off a shot at it.
Keo managed to glimpse a thick patch of white hair pulling back just as his 9mm round slammed into the corner about a foot above the man’s head.
“Next one goes into your right eye!” Keo shouted.
Silence.
Five seconds, then ten.
Then, finally, “Who the fuck are you?” a voice asked. Male, guttural.
“I’m the Easter Bunny,” Keo said. “Can’t you tell?”
“You’re pretty damn well armed for a kid’s mascot.”
“I’m the Easter Bunny who can’t find his eggs. I’m really mad right now.”
The man chuckled. Keo thought it sounded reasonably genuine. Mostly.
“Got a name?” the man asked.
“EB.”
“EB?”
“Something wrong with your hearing?”
Five more seconds of silence. Then, “I get it. EB. Easter Bunny.”
Keo smirked. Took you long enough.
“Buck,” the voice said.
“Buck you, too,” Keo shouted back.
Another chuckle. “No. Buck. That’s my name.”
“You don’t say.”
“Seems only fair you’d tell me yours.”
“I already did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Yeah, well, believe what you want. It’s a free country.”
“Have you been out there? It hasn’t been a free country in a long time.”
Jackass has a point.
The same head of white hair was leaning out into the open again—or, at least, enough to get one eye up the hallway and in his direction. Keo fought against the urge to take another shot. The chances of hitting his target was minimal, and he had so, so many questions.
“The babies,” Wendy had said. “They took all the babies.”
Why the hell did they take “the babies?”
“You’re all alone up here,” the man named Buck said. He looked to be in his fifties, with something that might have been a scar across his forehead. If the five dead men between him and Keo meant anything to him, Buck didn’t seem all that bothered by it. At least, not enough to stop shouting back and forth with
him.
“Not true,” Keo said. “I have friends.”
“Oh yeah? And where might they be?”
“Right here with me. Their names are Heckler, Koch, Colt, and my bestie, Ka-Bar.”
Buck snorted. “You a vet?”
“Almost, but I got kicked out of school for dissecting a live turtle.”
“What?”
“Vet school. Wasn’t that what you were talking about?”
“No.”
“Ah. The other vet.”
“So you are one.”
“Nah.”
“No?” the man said doubtfully.
“I’m more of the lone wolf type. Like Chuck Norris. Minus the facial hair.”
“They got memes about you, too?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“What’s that?”
“Memes.”
“Viral shit.”
“Now that’s something I’m glad I don’t have. Sounds painful.”
Buck snorted. “You Chinese or something, EB?”
“Or something.”
“You look Chinese.”
“Then I guess I must be Chinese. Wouldn’t wanna make you feel bad.”
The man with white hair leaned back behind the wall, and Keo heard whispers.
That’s my cue!
He quickly pulled back from the door, turned, and jogged across the living room and into the bedroom. He grabbed one of the blankets crumpled on the bed and one of the pillows, then unhooked the assault vest. This one had the circled M almost near the top and in the middle of two pouches.
A perfect bull’s-eye to aim for. Swell.
He hugged the bundle to his chest and hurried, moving as silently as he could—which took some doing while wearing boots—back to the front door. When he stuck his head quickly out into the hallway, it was as empty as last time except for the five bodies between him and the stairs on the other end.
“You plotting against me, Buck?” Keo shouted down the narrow corridor.
Buck poked his head around the corner, just one eyeball visible like last time. If nothing else, the man knew how to stay hidden. “What makes you say that, EB?”
