by Sam Sisavath
It was quiet out there. Maybe too quiet.
He stuck his head out and past the walls before quickly pulling it back down. A half second, at the most, and a sniper would have had to line his weapon exactly at the spot where Keo had revealed himself to get off a shot. But no shot came, and the risky move had given Keo a decent look at his surroundings. Or, at least, one side of it.
Flat land. Farming land? Maybe. He hadn’t gotten that good of a look, but what little he had seen appeared barren. Which was strange, because he had expected to emerge right in the middle of Cordine City.
Then he remembered something Scarlett had said:
“We’re on the edge of town. Close enough for people to run to it. For us to run to it.”
So he wasn’t literally in Cordine City, which meant the flat lands he’d spotted in that brief half second made sense.
He counted down from five, and on one burst through the opening and immediately felt uneven ground underneath him as he swung the rifle right, then center, then left—and back again. He kept moving forward as he did so, making it harder for a sniper (if they were out there) to pick him off. The last thing he wanted was to eat a bullet after surviving last night. Now that would suck.
But there was no one out there waiting for him, and when he glanced down, saw that he was standing on rubble. Small blocks of brick and mortar littered the floor next to the bomb shelter entrance and the immediate vicinity.
Right. A bomb hit this place.
Check that. Bombs.
Keo lowered the AR and looked across flat lands and was greeted by steel girdles jutting out in the bright morning sunlight to his east.
Cordine City. Or what was left of it.
Charred brick walls stood where offices, storefronts, and apartment buildings used to. Even from a distance and with just one side of the city open to him, he could tell it had taken the brunt of whatever had detonated last night. He would have to get closer to really see the full extent of the damage, but even from here he could see the soot and smoke still lingering in the air. There were skeletal remains of ghouls all around him, evidence of last night’s dead stretching from where he stood to the city beyond like jagged roads made of bleach-white bones.
Cordine City hadn’t looked all that impressive when Keo first approached it more than forty-eight hours ago, and it looked even less so now. Two explosive detonations had done that. The question was, who and why?
There were no answers to be found from where he stood. How last night’s siege went down, how it ended, and what happened afterward was something that didn’t impact him as of this morning. And besides, he didn’t care. He had other things to worry about besides what had happened to a bunch of strangers.
Keo looked around him instead. There had been a building here, on top of the bomb shelter entrance once upon a time, but it had been toppled, likely by the same explosions that had ripped across Cordine City last night. Remains of concrete walls, made of the same type of blocks that the below ground facility was constructed of, circled him. He recognized the partial remains of a farmhouse nearby and something that might have been a barn, along with two vehicles that were overturned not too far off—both trucks, their broken windows covered in bright red blood.
“We’re on the edge of town,” Scarlett had said about the bomb shelter. “Close enough for people to run to it. For us to run to it.”
She and Brett had made it, but not everyone had.
Keo stared at the nearest vehicle—a white Ford resting on its side, roof facing him—and thought he could probably push it back on its tires. Of course, then he’d have to get lucky and find keys—
Specks of the dirt erupted in front of him and pelted his pants legs.
Keo glanced down, thought, What the hell? just before the realization hit him about two seconds later, long enough for the shooter to get off a second shot.
The second round zipped past Keo’s head and landed somewhere behind him, kicking up another handful of dirt.
Sniper!
Keo turned and ran.
He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but it was always a good idea to run away from the bullets instead of toward them. Of course, he hadn’t always followed this very simple rule, but today was an exception. The thought that he’d survived the insanity of last night, only to get picked off out here while standing around like an idiot under the sun this morning, didn’t quite sit well with him.
So he ran, even as two more bullets zip-zipped! over his head as the shooter attempted to correct for the distance. Like the first two shots, Keo hadn’t heard any reports of gunshots, which meant the man was using a suppressor.
Everyone’s a copycat these days!
Fortunately for Keo, he had begun running in a zigzag pattern as soon as he took off. He burst left for five meters, then right for two, back left, then right again as bullets zip-zip-zipped! around him. They were landing to his left, then to his right, and a couple fell short—all signs that the shooter was having difficulty adjusting and might have been even trying to predict where he would go next, and failing badly.
Good luck with that! Keo thought, because even he didn’t know which direction he’d go and for how long before he actually did it.
So far, so good as the subsonic rounds kept missing, but the problem for Keo was that there was absolutely nothing but open ground in front of him. There was no shelter and nothing that could even be mistaken for a natural defilade to hold up and take a breath. He had seen just how desolate Cordine City was when he first approached it, with the main highway on the other side of town. Out there, as far as he could tell, there was nothing but endless brown grass and uneven land.
I’ll settle for a lousy tree right about now!
Keo kept running anyway, because the alternative was to stop and catch his breath and make himself into an even better target. He risked a glance over his shoulder just as a round fell well short and disappeared into the ground.
Then another, and another.
Keo finally slowed until he could turn around. He continued backpedaling and used the opportunity to catch his breath. The air was better out here, far from the bomb shelter and Cordine City. Which was probably where the shooter was at the moment because—
A cloud of dust lifted from the ground as a bullet impacted it. The round had landed a good ten meters in front of Keo. A few seconds later, another one hit at about the same spot, but by then Keo had already put five more meters between him and them.
Keo stuck a middle finger into the air. It didn’t matter if the shooter couldn’t see him—or if he could, he couldn’t make out the gesture—because it made Keo feel better. Just like it did the morning when Greengrass’s people cornered him in the office building.
Getting shot at by unseen snipers is becoming a real bad habit.
Time to get a new habit!
“You missed!” he shouted, then listened to his voice echoing for a moment before dying in the wind. “Better luck next time, pal!”
He turned around and resumed jogging. There were a lot of open spaces waiting for him. It was going to take another half hour, at least, before he found anything worthwhile—
The ground. It was shaking.
Keo kept moving but glanced back and cursed under his breath.
A thick cloud of dust had appeared behind him. But these weren’t the tiny puffs of bullets falling short—it was dirt being kicked up into the air by horses as they raced across the open land toward him.
“Oh, come on,” Keo said as he turned around and broke off into a full sprint. “This isn’t fair. This is so not fair!”
Twenty-Five
I’m running again. So much running. When was the last time I wasn’t running from something trying to kill me? Can’t remember.
And I hate running.
There had to be alternatives to running, but he couldn’t see any among all the empty fields that surrounded him, with the first signs of trees a good mile or so in the distance. And those
could very well have just been mirages. With his luck, they were just that.
Definitely hate running.
Shouting from behind him, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He slowed down just enough to peek over his shoulder.
One of the men in pursuit of him had broken free of the others, and the voices were the other riders shouting after him. The lead rider had gotten close enough (Christ, how’d he get so close, so fast?) that Keo could make him out pulling at his reins, trying to stop his mount, but it only seemed to make the horse run faster.
What the hell?
The charging animal was fifty meters away and gaining fast, while the other five were struggling to catch up. For a while there, the rest of the posse (So what does that make me? Sundance or Butch?) had slowed down to try to figure out what was happening.
Forty meters…
Thirty…
Damn, that’s one fast horse!
There was no way he was going to outrun it. No way at all.
Keo stopped completely, planted both feet, and lifted the AR. He peered through the rifle’s red dot scope and zeroed in on the rider, but his eyes were drawn somewhere else. Down, to the animal, its brown fur glinting under the sunlight as both horse and man charged toward Keo’s position with wild abandon. The horse moved fluidly, gracefully, and was easily in complete control of the situation.
No way.
The sight of the horse—a thoroughbred—kept Keo from pulling the trigger.
No fucking way.
Was he seeing things? Was this another mirage? Maybe a nightmare? Was he actually still trapped underneath the bomb shelter and daydreaming all of this?
“Shit!” Keo shouted as he leapt out of the way just seconds before the horse could run him over.
He managed to pull a duck and roll against the hard ground at the last second, snapping back up to his feet with dust all over his clothes. But he’d hung onto the rifle and Keo lifted it again, pointing it at the horse and its rider—but mostly at the human—as they slid to a stop behind him, the big man in the saddle screaming something incoherent as he jerked on the reins with everything he had. Which was a lot, because the guy had to be a good two hundred pounds and six-feet-plus. That only made what the horse had done even more impressive.
The thoroughbred let out a loud whine even as its rider dropped one hand from the reins and reached for his holstered sidearm, eyes snapping to Keo from less than ten meters away. That was a mistake, because by taking one hand off the reins, the big man gave up whatever little control he had over the horse, and the animal bucked. The man went flying, screaming as he did so, and landed with a crashing thump! against the ground.
Horse hooves pounding the hard dirt from behind him made Keo spin around, just in time to see the posse pulling up in front of him. Unlike the big man, his friends had already drawn their weapons, and Keo found himself staring at two rifles and three pistols, and trigger fingers just looking for an excuse to shoot him dead.
He didn’t think about it for very long. A second, possibly two if he was being generous, before he tossed the rifle, then unhooked the gun belt and let it drop to the ground, along with the pistol inside the holster.
“Hold your fire!” Keo shouted.
The riders fanned out to surround him, and the only sounds were his slightly labored breathing and unshod horse hooves shuffling across the dirt. The riders were all wearing civilian clothes, and half of them hid their faces behind balaclavas.
Keo forced a big smile and said to the closest man, “Hey, how’s it going? Nice weather we’re having, huh?”
The riders stared back at him with hollow, tired eyes. A few of them had holstered their weapons now that they’d gotten a good look at him and saw he was no longer armed. The big one that had fallen off his horse picked up Keo’s rifle and gun belt.
Winston’s men. Or what’s left of them, after last night.
“What the hell happened, Wally?” a man on a big white horse that stood in front of Keo asked. He was talking to the big man, the one still breathing hard behind Keo. “Why’d you race ahead like that?”
The man named Wally sighed and tossed Keo’s weapons away, then spent the next few seconds batting at his pants and shirt and rifling dust out of his hair. “I didn’t. Damn animal just took off.”
“Why did it do that?”
“You think I did it on purpose?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Fuck off.”
The man on the white horse grunted before turning his attention back to Keo. “You were in the bomb shelter last night.” He was in his thirties with dark black hair, and the way the others flanked him, Keo knew the boss of a posse when he saw one.
“Yeah, I was,” Keo said.
He had considered lying, but it didn’t seem like the smart thing to do. They had clearly seen him leave the shelter—or, at least, the shooter had. Keo assumed the man (or woman) had relayed that info to the horsemen. The one in front of him had a radio clipped to his hip, as did some of the others.
“I don’t recognize him,” the only woman in the group said. Early thirties, with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She eyed Keo the whole time, as if she wanted to shoot him just to get it over with. “A face like that, I’d recognize him if I’d seen him before.”
“Handsome?” Keo said.
“Not the word I’d use. What happened? A building fall on top of you?”
“Ouch.”
“Anyone else?” the leader asked.
They shook their heads one by one, which didn’t come as a complete surprise to Keo. The only ones who had really been around him were the men stationed within the facility with Winston, and they were all dead. There was a possibility whoever had found him in the office building stairwell might have been among the six men, but that turned out not to be the case. He was, for all intents and purposes, a blank slate to these people.
I can work with that.
“Who are you?” the leader asked Keo. “What were you doing down there?”
“Keo. And I was passing through the city when someone grabbed me,” Keo said. “Next thing I know, I’m in some kind of cell with a bunch of assholes from Fenton. Then the building comes under attack and all hell’s breaking loose.”
“Fenton?” the woman asked. “Did you say Fenton?”
“Winston told me they were from Fenton, anyway. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Or here, for that matter. If I’d known you guys were this sensitive to trespassers, I would have stayed clear of Cordine City.”
The woman and the leader exchanged a long look.
“I’m just trying to stay alive,” Keo said. “I don’t know who you guys are or what your beef is with Fenton. I don’t know what happened last night, either. I just wanna get out of here in one piece.”
The leader looked back to Keo. “You met with Winston.”
Keo nodded. “I did. We had a nice long talk.”
“About what?”
“Fenton, mostly.”
“What about Fenton?”
“He asked me if I was one of them. I said I wasn’t.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. They took me back to my cell, and then the shit hit the fan. People were screaming, everyone was shooting, and the next thing I know, things are blowing up. I took the safe route and stayed indoors for as long as I could until this morning.”
This time the leader exchanged glances with the other four. Keo tried to read their faces and came up with…not much. Did they believe him? It was a good story, and if Cordine City was at war with Fenton, then appealing to their anti-Fenton feelings was his best bet.
He hoped, anyway.
“Look,” Keo said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I was just passing through, like I said. Then suddenly I’m down in that place, and there are ghouls everywhere. I barely got through last night alive.”
“How did you get out of your cell?” the woman asked.
“One of your gu
ys opened it and let us out.”
“Who?”
Keo shook his head. “I don’t know. No one ever bothered to introduce themselves while I was down there except for Winston.”
“They’re still down there?” the leader asked. “Nightcrawlers?”
“They ditched the place last night. I don’t know why. I don’t know why anything happened. I was just happy to find a big enough door to keep them out. Then this morning I come outside and someone tries to snipe me. What the hell’s that about?”
Someone chuckled behind Keo. He glanced back to find Wally, the big man, still brushing at his clothes. “That’s Felix. He’s got a bit of an itchy finger.”
“Yeah, well, his itchy finger almost put a round in me for no reason,” Keo said, injecting just enough indignation to make it sound good.
“After last night, can’t blame him.”
“Sure I can.”
“He didn’t recognize you,” the leader said. “He was just doing his job.”
“Yeah, whatever. Tell him if I see him, I’m kicking his ass.”
“He said you gave him the finger,” Wally said.
“It seemed like the right reaction at the time.”
Wally chuckled again, while there was another brief exchange of looks between the leader and the woman.
“What happened to Winston?” the leader asked him.
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “I’m sorry, guys, but I don’t know. It was nuts down there last night. There were ghouls everywhere… I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many of the fuckers in one place since The Walk Out.”
The leader narrowed his eyes at him. “You better be telling the truth.”
“Go down there and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
“We will,” the man said before he picked up his horse’s reins and turned the animal around. “In the meantime, you’re coming back with us.”
“Oh, come on. I just wanna get out of here.”
“Tough fucking luck.”
