“It what?” another voice said.
Both Keo and Jack turned to look at Martin as he walked inside. His horse, a big black mare, stood outside on the sidewalk.
“What are you two talking about?” Martin asked. Then, looking around, “Where’s Huston?”
Keo was about to answer when he saw the backpack in Martin’s hand. It looked very familiar.
“Well? Where’s Huston?” Martin asked again.
“He said it took her,” Jack said, hiking one thumb at Keo.
“‘It?’”
“Yeah. It.”
“What’s ‘it?’”
Jack shrugged. “Ask—”
“It,” Keo said before the young slayer could finish. “Fucking it, Martin.”
Martin stared at Keo. “It?”
“Yeah. It.”
“Fuck,” Martin whispered.
“Yeah,” Keo said. “That about sums it up.”
Jack turned from Martin to Keo, then back again. “What’s he talking about? What is ‘it?’”
Martin ignored his brother. “When?”
“Less than a minute ago,” Keo said.
“It took her?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“The fuck if I know.” Keo poured himself another glass of Maker’s Mark and drained that, too. When he was done, he nodded toward the back hallway. “It’s waiting for you.”
“For me?” Martin asked.
“That’s what it said.”
“What exactly did it say?”
“‘Tell him he shouldn’t have followed me.’”
“That’s what it said?”
“That’s what it said.”
“Word for word?”
“Word for fucking word. And oh, it also said, ‘Tell him I’ll see him soon.’”
“And it took Huston.”
“Yeah.”
Jack had been listening intently and silently and had finally understood. His face was flushed red as he said to Keo, “You let a fucking blue-eyed ghoul take Huston?”
“Let it?” Keo said. “I didn’t fucking let it do anything, kid. But it took her just the same. The bastard got the drop on me. On her, too.” Keo glanced at the dark back hallway again. “It left the same way it came in: Through the basement.”
Martin took a couple of steps toward the back, the palm of his right hand resting on his still-holstered pistol. He looked back at Keo. “How many?”
“Just the one,” Keo said.
“Just one?”
“Just one. No black eyes. Just it.”
“Jesus Christ, it’s waiting in that basement for us to come down?” Jack asked.
Martin ignored his brother again and said to Keo, “You were in there before. Did you see it?”
Keo shook his head. “It wasn’t in there when I was. Not when the girl was in there, either.”
“You sure?”
“I would fucking know, Martin.”
Martin nodded. “There has to be another way into the place, then.”
“You’re free to find out.”
Keo thought about taking a third shot but decided against it. His adrenaline had run its course, and he was calmer now. Either that, or he was too drunk to tell the difference.
He focused on the pack in Martin’s hand. “Is that mine?”
Martin tossed the bag over the counter, and Keo caught it. “Found it three blocks from here, next to the remains of a horse, just like you said. Didn’t see anything else, though. You said you also had weapons bags?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t find those. Maybe they took it.”
“Ghouls?”
“They do funny things when the blue eyes are around. You know that.”
Keo nodded. “Yeah.”
He looked down at the bag and turned it over in his hands. It was definitely his. The fabric was designed to withstand wear and tear, because the person who’d given it to him knew the importance of its contents. And the pack had done its job very well despite looking as if it’d been dragged across a dozen blocks. It was heavily scratched, and there was blood—black and red—over much of the lower half, including pieces of the white inguz rune patch—two X’s one on top of another—near the top.
Keo opened it up and checked the contents, breathing a sigh of relief. Everything was there. Thank God, everything was still there.
“It’s a trap,” Jack was saying to Martin. He was standing next to his brother, the two of them looking at the dark corridor that led into the basement on the other side. “You know that, right, Martin?”
Of course he knows that, Keo thought.
“Of course I know that,” Martin said out loud.
Great minds think alike, Keo thought as he came out from behind the bar. He said, “It wants you to follow it inside.”
“What’s in there?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. I never made it completely down the stairs. But it’s dark.”
“How dark?”
“Fucking dark.”
Martin glanced back at Jack, who wordlessly unzipped the tactical pack he carried and took out a flashlight.
“I just have one,” Jack said.
“Give it to me,” Martin said. Then, after Jack had passed it over, “Stay up here.”
“The hell I am. I’m going down there with you.”
“Stay up here,” Martin said.
Keo thought Jack might keep arguing, but the edge in Martin’s voice did the trick, and the younger slayer backed down.
Martin turned to Keo. “What’s in there?”
“I told you, I never made it down the stairs,” Keo said.
Martin flicked on the flashlight and shined it into the basement. The light slipped through the open door and vanished into the darkness beyond, as if the shadows had simply swallowed it up.
“It was wearing some kind of mask,” Keo said.
“The creature?” Martin said.
“Yeah. That’s a first. They don’t usually wear masks. Or anything.”
“This one does.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just does.”
“You don’t think that’s a little odd?”
“I don’t think much about it at all. And right now, all I care about is getting Huston back,” Martin said as he began walking toward the basement.
Keo didn’t know why he did what he did next. Later, he would think that the terror on Huston’s face as she was dragged into the darkness might have had a little something to do with it.
Whatever the reason, Keo looked over at Jack before tossing him the pack he’d been so desperate to find all night. “Hold this for me. Don’t lose it. I mean it. Don’t fucking lose it.”
“Where you going?” Jack asked.
“Where do you think?”
He turned and followed Martin.
The slayer stopped and looked back at him. “What are you doing?”
“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” Keo asked.
Martin grinned. “Your funeral.”
No shit, Keo thought, but he said, “Don’t rub it in.”
Martin turned and continued on. Keo followed but remembered the four rounds in the Ruger and drew it, and added the missing two bullets from the loop around his waist.
“Shoot for the head,” Martin said without looking back at him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Keo said. “This isn’t my first rodeo, pal.”
Martin’s flashlight revealed bare footprints that had walked over the leftover puddles of blood on the basement landing. They led toward the stairs before disappearing down into the darkness below. There was only one pair of tracks, as if the creature was carrying Huston the entire way. There was also no reason for the ghoul to have stepped into the blood. It had done so purposefully.
Sadistic fucker, Keo thought as he followed Martin down the stairs, the single beam of light leading their way.
Keo hadn’t seen the clutter in the basement before,
but it was impossible to miss now with the flashlight giving him a better look at his environment. There was the pool table that Carter had mentioned, still partially covered in a tarp. Cue sticks for it on a rack against the nearby wall, along with a shelf holding large glass mugs covered in a thick film of dust.
Bar stools stacked in another corner…
Framed pictures of dogs playing poker…
Piles of clothes…
Piles of bloody clothes, though Keo couldn’t see those details, but he was pretty damn sure they were there.
Martin stopped halfway down the stairs to wipe at a bead of sweat on his forehead. Keo was going to ask why he was sweating when it was so chilly down here, but then felt perspiration on his own cheek and brushed at it.
“I don’t see anything,” Martin said, not quite whispering. “You?”
“No,” Keo said, matching Martin’s pitch.
He had stopped a few feet behind the slayer to give him room in case he had to move abruptly. The last thing Keo wanted was to be so close that Martin got tangled up with him while they were on the stairs and had to react to something. Like, say, a blue-eyed ghoul leaping out at them from the shadows.
“You saw it come down here?” Martin asked.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Unless I went blind the last hour, then yeah, it came down here. You saw those footprints.”
“Right,” Martin said, before he started moving again.
There was an impossible-to-miss bad smell in the air, but not the kind of overwhelming stench that usually signaled the presence of ghouls. But it was unmistakable, and it hadn’t been here when Keo was last in the basement.
“It’s not here anymore,” Keo said, trying very hard not to let the relief come through. “It’s gone.”
“Where did it go?” Martin asked.
They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and Martin ran his flashlight across the scarred brick walls. There were more shelves storing everything from clothes to mugs to pitchers to boxes of playing cards.
“Wait,” Keo said.
“What?” Martin said.
One of the shelves was angled awkwardly, as if it someone had moved it out of place. Keo might not have noticed it if the other shelves weren’t so perfectly flush against the wall. It was almost as if…the bastard had wanted them to see it.
It’s a game. It’s playing a game with us.
“You see it?” Keo asked.
“Yeah,” Martin said.
The slayer moved across the room toward the far wall, his flashlight bouncing up and down against the large oak shelf. It had definitely been moved, and very recently. The dust that coated the floor had been shifted, and not for the first time.
Martin slid alongside the shelf, gun and flashlight shining into an opening behind the furniture. It was some kind of door leading into an even darker (Of course it’s darker. Why wouldn’t it be darker? I’m not that lucky.) passageway on the other side.
The lone beam of light raked across old and moldy brick walls and disappeared down a long, long tunnel that seemed to keep going and going.
Martin looked back at him. “What the hell is this, Keo?”
The dark road to hell, would be my guess, Keo thought.
Fourteen
Martin wasn’t a coward, but he also wasn’t stupid enough to just run into a dark tunnel armed with a flashlight and Keo as backup, not when he had a small army of willing slayers that could back him up instead. The blue-eyed ghoul clearly wanted Martin to follow it inside, and maybe that was more than enough to keep him from doing just that.
What was that Huston had said about the man?
“It could have been a whole lot worse. It set a trap for us in Lake Dulcet, then again outside of Houston. It’s a clever fucker. Thank God Martin knows what he’s doing.”
Keo’s conversation with Martin after they backtracked and left the basement behind mostly confirmed Huston’s belief in the man.
“They like to play games,” Martin said. “I’ve seen it. They toy with you. It’s how they get off. That, and the other thing.”
The other thing was when they stopped playing and fed. Keo had seen that, too.
“It wants you down there,” Keo said. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“You said it wasn’t personal, but all of this feels pretty damn personal to me.”
“It’s not personal.”
“You sure about that?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Keo. It’s not personal. This is business. I kill ghouls. After I kill this fucker, I’ll move on to the next fucker, and I’ll put a bullet into its brain, too. That’s the job.”
Martin had said all that with absolute confidence, but for some reason Keo continued to have his doubts. He’d seen vendettas before, and this smelled like one of those times. And the last thing he wanted was to get in the middle of one man and his undead friend’s very personal grudge match.
After they returned topside, Martin radioed his men. It didn’t take long before Terminal returned with a couple of others—Felix, the Chinese guy Huston had mentioned before, and Rogers, who was nearly as big and broad as Rondo and might have been able to pass for his “little” brother in the dark.
“We call them R&R,” Jack said as Rogers broke out a plastic carrying case from their supplies and began spreading around headlamps. They were rectangle light boxes attached to a plastic strap that went around the head.
Jack grabbed a couple of them. “They run on three triple A batteries. That’s why we don’t use them unless we have to. Batteries don’t come cheap these days. The ones that run these can be recharged, but those take forever.” He showed Keo the only big button on the front that took up one half of the light box, while the other half was devoted to the flashlight itself. “On and off. So simple even a monkey could do it.”
Jack pressed the button, and a bright light hit Keo in the eyes. He flinched, not ready for the sudden brightness.
“Bright, right?” Jack said.
“Yeah,” Keo said, blinking to get his vision back.
“LED. Clicking the button cycles through the options.” He demonstrated each one. “Close. Distance. Night vision.” Jack tapped the side of the box, and the brightness lessened. “Dimming function. Tap it again, and it goes back to full power.”
Jack slipped the headlamp around his forehead and handed a second one to Keo, who took it but didn’t put it on.
“Try it on,” Jack said.
“I don’t need to. I’m not going back down there,” Keo said.
“Say what?”
“You heard me. I’m not going back down there.”
“Why not?”
Because I don’t plan on dying in this shithole of a town for total strangers. And because I need to be somewhere else.
But Keo didn’t think either one of those answers would satisfy Jack, so he said instead, “That’s what it wants us to do. So I’m not going to do the one thing it wants me to do.”
“No one has to go down there who doesn’t want to,” Martin said. He’d already put his headlamp on and was checking his M4 carbine. “But it’s got Doc, and we don’t leave people behind. Having said that, this is strictly on a volunteer basis.”
Terminal, his face still heavily bandaged, picked his machete up from the bar and slid it back into its sheath. “I’m in.” He shot Keo something that could only be interpreted as disgust. “I’m not a fucking coward.”
“It’s not about being a coward,” Keo said. “It’s about not giving the creature what it wants.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“You sure?” Martin said to Terminal.
“You damn straight I’m sure.”
“What about your face?”
“What about it?” He grabbed a headlamp from Rogers and snapped it on. “Doc’s saved my life more times than I can count. Least I could do is go after her.” The slayer trained those disgusted eyes on Keo again
. “She saved your life, too, Chinaman.” Then, glancing over at Felix, the only Asian in their group, “No offense.”
“He’s not Chinese,” Felix said.
“For real?”
“Yeah.”
“What is he, then?”
Felix shrugged. “Maybe Japanese. Or Korean. But he’s definitely not Chinese.”
“Whatever,” Terminal said. “Close enough.”
Keo didn’t respond to any of that. He was sure the slayer was hoping for some kind of reaction, maybe even one that he could use as an excuse to avenge his broken nose. Keo wasn’t about to give him what he wanted.
Martin didn’t seemed to care one way or another if Keo was going with them. He was already turning to Felix. “What about you?”
“I’m in,” Felix said.
“Betsy and me definitely ain’t missing the fun,” Rogers said. Keo guessed “Betsy” was the large 12-gauge shotgun Rogers was rubbing with a cloth.
Martin looked over at two more slayers that had arrived minutes earlier but remained standing near the door. Keo hadn’t met either one of them until now—a man named McBroom and another one named Merrifield. They were much older than the others and didn’t look nearly as enthusiastic about going into the basement.
“You two stay up here to watch our six,” the slayer leader said to them. “Last thing we need is for that fucker to creep up behind us.” He unsnapped a radio from his waist and held it up. “Don’t squawk unless it’s something you can’t handle. I don’t know what’s down there, so maintain radio silence unless absolutely necessary.”
“Gotcha, boss,” McBroom said. He was in his fifties and looked a bit like a grizzly bear with his thick facial hair.
“We got this. You guys find Doc,” Merrifield said. He was shorter than McBroom, but wider. Not exactly fat—none of the slayers were—but maybe the most “healthy” of the bunch.
“What about me?” Jack asked.
“You’re staying up here with them,” Martin said.
“What? No way!”
“You’ll follow orders.”
“You said anyone could volunteer.”
“Yes, I did, but I didn’t say I’d accept it.”
“Martin, he took Doc!”
“It’s not up for debate. You’re staying up here with McBroom and Merrifield to make sure that blue-eyed fuck doesn’t try to sic a swarm of black eyes on us from behind. That’s final.”
Road to Babylon (Book 8): Daybreak Page 13
