Just like at the Deuces.
Just like with Jackson and the bookstore.
This is a trick. This is another one of its tricks!
The ghoul’s voice, hissing hot and cold breath against Keo’s face, came back to him:
“Pathetic. Did you really think this was a fight? You’re just my playthings, meat. You’re just my temporary cure against boredom.”
“Huston!” Keo shouted again even as he scrambled to his feet. He must not have called her name loudly enough, because Huston didn’t stop.
Either that, or she had heard him but didn’t care.
Keo went after her, doing his best to navigate the road of broken concrete in his path. Some were as big as his head and others as small as his pinky finger, and every one of them seemed to be trying purposefully to uproot him as he moved over them. He spent as much time trying to maintain his balance as he did not choking on the debris that still crowded the air and filled his nostrils and mouth.
Not surprisingly, Huston reached the big pile of rocks first. She stood next to it and looked up at the opening above her.
“Huston, it might be a trap,” Keo said.
“There’s someone up there,” Huston said.
Wait. Had she said someone or something? He was hoping it was the former, because if it was the latter, then his fear that this was all just another game had come true.
Keo reached Huston and looked up.
Huston was right. There was someone up there. But that someone could also be a something, because Keo could only see a hooded figure standing near the edge of the crater looking down at them. He—or it—was wearing a dark trench coat, the kind that was very similar to the one the blue-eyed ghoul was wearing on the road earlier.
Keo reached for Huston’s arm to drag her away, to run, when a second hooded figure appeared next to the first one. It was only then that Keo noticed the rifle cradled in the first hooded figure’s arms.
Ghouls don’t use guns. They don’t need them.
These weren’t ghouls after all.
But was that a good thing or just more reasons to worry?
Keo noticed more details about the men. Their rifles had attached suppressors, and the hilts of machetes clung to their hips.
Rifles with suppressors and machetes…
Keo sighed with relief. “I thought you guys were dead.”
One of the men flipped back his hood and pulled down his half-mask to reveal his face. It was Felix, alive and well.
Or alive, anyway. Keo couldn’t be sure about the “well” part just yet.
The Taiwanese raised a pair of curious eyebrows back at him. “Could say the same thing to you, Chinaman. What are you doing down there?”
“Oh, you know, had some free time,” Keo said, though most of it came out as a whisper. “You made it out of the tunnel.”
“Barely.”
“What happened?”
“Long story. What’s wrong with your voice?”
Keo rubbed his throat. “Long story, too.”
“Does it have blue eyes?”
“Lucky guess.”
Felix grunted. “Nothing lucky about it.”
“You’re still alive,” Huston said as she stared at the second figure, standing next to Felix. “I thought you guys were dead.”
“You okay, Doc?” the second figure asked.
“As good as can be expected.” Then, anxiously, “What happened? Where’s everyone else?”
The second figure flipped back his hood and pulled down his half-mask. It was Martin. For a moment, Keo had expected to find Terminal, which would have been annoying but just his luck given how badly the night had gone for him so far.
But it was Martin, and he didn’t look very happy. In fact, he looked like he’d just been to hell and back.
The slayer leader looked down at Keo and Huston, clearly searching for a very specific face among the two of them. It wasn’t his or Huston’s that Martin was hoping to find, Keo could tell that much.
“Where’s Jack?” Martin asked.
“Isn’t he with you?” Huston said.
Martin and Felix exchanged a quick look.
“Martin?” Huston said. “What happened to Jack?”
“We don’t know,” Martin said.
“What about everyone else?”
Martin’s face turned somber, and Keo thought, I guess not everyone made it out of the tunnel.
Twenty-Two
“It ambushed us. Killed Rogers and Terminal. Ripped them apart with its bare hands. It was like there was a dozen of the fuckers down there instead of just one. We didn’t stand a chance. After a while, it became obvious it was just fucking with us.”
Felix had recounted the events with a stoned face. Keo assumed that was because he’d detached himself from the loss. It was what soldiers did when they saw comrades go down: Talk about it like a witness to the events instead of a participant; that way, you take away some of the sting.
Some, but not all. You could never get rid of all of it. Keo had managed to dodge that trap because he never really allowed himself to become close to the people he worked with. They were always just assets, extra personnel to help him get the job done. He never got involved. Hell, he never bothered to learn their real names when he could help it. They were always Tall Guy, Short Guy, Guy with an Accent, and Blonde Lady.
These days, though, that level of attachment was a little harder to achieve. These days, he had people he truly cared about. There was one woman, in particular…
He pushed her image out of his mind. He wasn’t there yet. So close, and yet so far away. Right now, he needed to focus on the present, on surviving this.
Right now, that was all that mattered.
Keo and Huston had been helped out of the underground parking garage and into the lobby of a mall still under construction. The walls were done, but there were large gaping holes in the roof, and the floors were only partially covered in tiles. There was a large, round fountain in the middle that looked as if it might have been a real crowd-pleaser if it’d ever been finished; right now, it was covered in moss and dust and bird shit. Storefronts—some glass, others boarded up with lumber—surrounded them, but only half sported names. There were plenty of for rent signs everywhere. Non-functioning escalators led up to an equally in-process second floor.
He sat with Felix on a loveseat that was covered in a thick, heavy tarp, the two of them eating bags of civilian MREs. The area was supposed to be for tired shoppers to take a load off, and there were spaces for more furniture to come. Keo hadn’t realized how hungry he was until the slayer brought out some food. His stomach was growling even as the flameless ration heater did its job warming up the beef entrées and Felix mixed coffee in a bag with water from a canteen.
“Nothing like a bag of Meal, Ready-to-Eat in the morning,” the slayer said.
“It’s not morning,” Keo said.
“Close enough.”
Felix was used to MREs not because it was a primary source of food for many in the aftermath of The Purge, but because he was a former army man. That explained his expertise with the C4 he’d used to make a “door” for Keo’s escape from the underground structure earlier.
“Seven years in the army as a combat engineer, and I’d probably be a lifer if the end of the world didn’t happen,” Felix said.
“Let me guess: This wasn’t the first time you’ve used C4 since The Purge?” Keo asked.
Felix chuckled. “There’s been a time or two when we didn’t want to crawl into a dark cave after some nightcrawler. Those nests of theirs are nasty business. Sometimes it’s easier to just blow them to hell. Works just as well as chopping them to bits. Safer, too.”
“I didn’t know you guys cared about safer.”
“There are times when you get tired of being covered in ghoul shit.”
“You mean blood?”
“Same difference.”
Felix had picked up the C4 back at the Deuces, along with all
the other weapons and supplies Keo and Jackson hadn’t bothered to take. They were in one of the heavier duffel bags that Keo had bypassed right away.
After his rescue, Keo had armed himself with a gun that the slayers had brought along with them for backup. Like Jackson and him earlier, Felix and Martin had left a lot more behind at the Deuces but had plans to go back when all of this was over. The lack of horses had diminished their ability to carry more than just a couple of spare handguns and ammo. Their focus, smartly, had been on emergency items.
Despite his and Martin’s harrowing ordeals in the tunnel, Felix had escaped the events entirely unscathed. The same was true for Martin. At least physically. While Keo and Felix ate, Huston and Martin were talking—and had been for some time—across the large and empty lobby from them. They were keeping their voices down, not that Keo thought they were afraid he might eavesdrop, but because the topic wasn’t something that required loud words.
He wasn’t sure if it was just the much-cleaner air he was enjoying, but his throat didn’t hurt nearly as much as before. There was still some discomfort, but not enough to keep him quiet. His right arm, too, had vastly improved. Not that Keo was about to test that theory by lifting heavy boulders anytime soon.
He was through half of his entrée bag when Keo finally asked Felix the question that had been on his mind: “How did you and Martin get out of that tunnel alive?”
“To be honest with you, I don’t know,” Felix said.
The slayer stared past Keo, as if reliving what had happened down there. Keo had seen that plenty of times on the faces of people who had just been involved in their first firefight. But this wasn’t Felix’s first time going up against a blue-eyed ghoul. According to Martin, they’d been chasing the thing for a month now ever since Louisiana. Maybe, Keo thought, Felix was finally starting to realize that they hadn’t been hunting it, but the other way around.
“We were making pretty good progress, too, for a while,” Felix said.
“So what happened?”
“Ran into some kind of cave-in.”
“Natural?”
“I don’t know. There was just a wall of rocks. We turned around and were headed back to the Deuces when it attacked.”
“That’s when you lost Terminal and Rogers.”
“Yeah. After it killed Rogers and Terminal, it left.”
“It left?”
“Yeah. It just left.”
Because it’s playing. It wants the good times to keep rolling. Killing you and Martin down there would have been too easy. And easy is boring.
“You guys went back to the Deuces,” Keo said.
Felix nodded. “It was the only way out, back through the basement.”
“Did you get any licks in?”
“We pumped enough silver bullets into the fucker, but nothing where it would have really counted. It took Terminal with it, but it would have taken Rogers, too.”
“It took Terminal?”
“Put his body over its shoulder like he was nothing and just disappeared. I don’t even want to think about what it’s doing to his body right now. Rogers…” Felix paused for a moment. Then, “We couldn’t bring his body back with us, so we made sure he wouldn’t come back.”
Keo didn’t ask how Felix and Martin had managed that.
He’d also lost his appetite and put the half-empty MRE bag on the floor next to him. He sat back against the comfortable fabric to process everything Felix had told him. The more details he heard about what had happened to the slayers in the tunnels, the less he liked it.
“What?” Felix said. They weren’t exactly sitting directly across from one another—the loveseat was in an L shape—but Felix didn’t have to squint very hard at all to pick up Keo’s expressions. “What’s on your mind?”
“You went back to the Deuces.”
“Yes. I told you that already.”
“Was anyone there?”
“No. Everyone was gone.”
“Everyone?”
“Yeah, everyone. Why?”
Because not everyone was gone when I went back to the Deuces. Rondo was there, and he tried to kill me, but Jackson killed him instead. When I left, his body was still there.
But apparently that wasn’t the case by the time Felix and Martin returned. So what had happened to Rondo’s body? Did ghouls take it? That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Dead bodies still had the one thing the nightcrawlers craved—blood. They were known to dig up corpses and feed on roadkill, so a “fresh” dead body like Rondo’s wouldn’t have just been allowed to rot.
Felix said again, with just a hint of annoyance, “What?”
“Then what?”
“Then what, what?”
“What happened after you and Martin came back to the Deuces?”
“We packed up what we could and went looking for everyone. We found you and Huston here instead.”
“How did that happen? How did you find this place?”
“We followed tracks here.”
“What kind of tracks?”
“Blood. There was a lot of blood. Like someone or something had been dragging bodies across Paxton. It wasn’t that hard.”
Keo didn’t reply, but Felix’s words echoed inside his head:
“There was a lot of blood. Like someone or something had been dragging bodies across Paxton. It wasn’t that hard.”
“…it wasn’t that hard.”
He glanced over at Martin, still talking with Huston across the lobby. Their foreheads were pressed against one another now, Huston’s hands around his neck. It was a very intimate moment, and Keo quickly looked away to give them some privacy.
He stared instead at a sign on the wall next to where Huston and Martin were standing. Big block letters pointed to one side with the words underground parking lot. The room Keo and Huston had found themselves in was, in fact, part of an underground structure. Or it was supposed to be, but the section they were in was the only completed area. Even now, Keo couldn’t figure out how the ghoul had been accessing the place. Felix and Martin certainly hadn’t found another way in and wouldn’t have stumbled across them if they hadn’t blasted their way through at just the right spot.
…if they hadn’t blasted their way through at just the right spot…
“…it wasn’t that hard.”
Felix had returned to eating when Keo looked back at him. The slayer must have sensed him staring, because he looked up, spork halfway to his mouth, and said, sounding even more agitated now, “What? What?”
Keo stood up and walked over until he was standing next to the jagged opening where Felix had blasted a hole into the lobby floor with his C4.
…if they hadn’t blasted their way through at just the right spot…
Keo glanced back at Felix, chewing his meal. “How did you know where to set the charges?”
He didn’t know why it took him so long to ask the question. Maybe he was just so happy to have escaped from his underground prison that it hadn’t occurred to him until now. Whatever the reason, now that it had snapped to the forefront of his mind, he couldn’t do anything to get rid of it.
And he didn’t want to, either, because it didn’t make any sense.
“…it wasn’t that hard.”
“What do you mean?” Felix asked.
“I mean, how did you know exactly where to set the charges? The room we were in was a small part of a larger unfinished structure. The rest was sealed off. The odds of you choosing this exact spot to set your charges, directly above us, was pretty goddamn good luck. So how did you know where to set the charges?”
Felix put down his MRE and got up. Even as the slayer walked over, Keo could see the gears turning in his head as he, too, began questioning everything that had happened tonight.
“Felix,” Keo said when the slayer didn’t answer him fast enough. “How did you know to choose this spot? This exact spot? Did you just guess?”
“Of course not,” Felix said, sounding almost
offended. “I don’t guess when it comes to C4.”
“So, how did you choose?”
Felix stared down the hole before looking back up at Keo. “We found a sledgehammer. It was Rondo’s.”
“Rondo’s? Are you sure?”
“I’ve seen it more times than I care to count. It was Rondo’s.”
Felix walked around the crater to the water fountain. He disappeared behind it, before returning, dragging a familiar-looking sledgehammer with him. It was definitely Rondo’s. Keo was sure of it. It was kind of hard to mistake something that had already tried to kill him twice now.
“What was it doing here?” Keo asked.
He distinctively remembered leaving it behind, along with Rondo’s body back at the Deuces. But according to Felix, Rondo’s body was missing when they returned.
“…it wasn’t that hard.”
Felix dropped the sledgehammer onto the floor. “It looked like he—or someone using his sledgehammer—was trying to break through that spot. We didn’t know you and Huston were down there. It was a stab in the dark.”
Keo stared at him in silence for a moment.
Rondo’s missing body could be easily explained. Ghouls weren’t picky about their meals. But why would the creatures take his sledgehammer? Or, if it wasn’t them, then who was it? And how did it end up here, trying to smash through the very spot that led down to where he and Huston were being kept?
Felix continued: “The sledgehammer was already here before we showed up. Martin sort of lost his cool when he saw it. He picked it up and went to town. I didn’t want him to kill himself trying to break through the floor, so I convinced him to let me use the C4s. I guess we were both curious what was down there. I think he was hoping it might be Jack. We still don’t know what happened to him or the others.”
Suddenly, it all made sense to Keo.
Huston had heard banging sounds before Felix took out the ceiling. Keo had thought she was imagining it, but she hadn’t. She’d been hearing Martin attacking the floor with Rondo’s sledgehammer.
“We got lucky,” Felix said. “That’s all.”
“No, you didn’t,” Keo said.
Road to Babylon (Book 8): Daybreak Page 21
