Keo sat up with some effort and looked around him.
He was inside the great room of the same cabin, lights from the fireplace separating him and his two captors providing plenty of illumination to see with. The men were well-armed, with gun belts and knives—no, not knives, but machetes; there was a big difference, namely the reach and cutting power—strapped to their hips, and each one had a pump-action shotgun slung over his back. One was in his early thirties, the other younger, about late twenties. They both sported thick facial hair and would have looked identical, except one of them was a redhead.
Keo’s hands and legs were free, which confused him. His weapons were gone, but they had left his gun belt with an empty holster. He spotted both the MP5SD, his pistol, and knife in a pile along with his bug-out bag in the corner to his left.
“You got a name?” the older of the two, who wasn’t the redhead, asked.
“Yeah,” Keo said.
When he didn’t keep going, the two men exchanged an amused look before Redhead said, “You being a smartass?”
“Not nearly smart enough,” Keo said, and reached back to rub at the bump at the base of his skull.
“Sorry about that. You sort of, uh, came at us out of nowhere, and we weren’t sure what to do. You’re lucky; we usually shoot first and ask questions later. Does it hurt?”
“What do you think?”
He stared at the two men again. They weren’t Buckies, he knew that much. Not only because he couldn’t locate a circled M anywhere on their bulletproof vests, but more importantly he wasn’t restrained or, worst case, dead.
That knowledge allowed him to relax, if just slightly.
“Which one of you geniuses hit me?” Keo asked.
“Him,” Redhead said, indicating his partner.
“Guilty,” the other guy said, reaching back and patting his shotgun. “I call her Annie.”
“Annie’s a real bitch,” Keo said.
The guy chuckled. “That she is.”
“Your horse got away,” Redhead said.
“What?” Keo said.
“Your horse. It got away. Sucker was waiting for me at the front door when I opened it. Quiet as a mouse; I didn’t even hear a peep out of it until it nearly took my head off. Last I saw, it vanished into the woods.” Then, with a crooked grin, “You always sleep with your horse?”
“It’s not my horse.”
“No?”
Keo shook his head. “No.”
“It looked pretty domesticated to me,” Not Redhead said. “You took it from its previous owner?”
“He didn’t need it anymore.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
Not Redhead grinned. “Yeah, I do. It’s a tough world out there.” He reached into his pack and took out a see-through bag and tossed it over.
Keo caught it, opened it, and smelled dehydrated jerky. “What is this?”
“Deer,” the redhead said.
Keo took out a piece, gave it a try, decided it was good enough, and finished off the stick before dipping in for seconds.
“Mikey, I think he likes it!” Not Redhead chuckled.
“I guess so,” his partner said. Then, “I’m Willis. That’s Lam.”
“Like the Lamb of God, minus the b at the end,” the guy named Lam said.
“Thanks for the tip,” Keo said. “I’m Keo.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“John was taken.”
“Say what?”
“Exactly.”
Willis and Lam exchanged another look, this one more confused than amused. But they shrugged it off.
Definitely not Buckies.
Keo glanced around him while he chewed on another piece of jerky. His watch read 5:11 a.m., which explained why it wasn’t nearly as black outside the windows, but it was still dark enough that Willis and Lam shouldn’t have been sitting here with a raging fireplace, making themselves into a target for any ghouls passing by. He would have been alarmed if he didn’t already know who the two men were, or what they did for a living. The shotgun and the machete gave it away.
“You know who we are, don’t you?” the one named Willis asked, one corner of his mouth grinning at Keo.
Keo nodded. “You’re slayers.”
“That’s right. But you thought we were someone else at first, didn’t you? Who did you think we were?”
Keo shrugged. “Someone else.”
“Given that reaction, I guess it’s lucky for you that we came along instead.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong.”
It had been almost two years since he ran into a slayer. The last time was somewhere outside of Wichita City, Kansas. Keo wondered if that old man was still alive.
“What are slayers doing down here?” Keo asked.
“The same thing we do everywhere else,” Lam said. “Hunting ghouls.”
“We tracked a pretty sizable group headed south from nearby Olsen,” Willis said. “But we lost them somewhere around Winding Creek.”
You didn’t lose them, we killed them for you, Keo thought. Me, Jim, and Duncan. But mostly Jim’s shotgun.
“You’ve been to Winding Creek?” Keo said instead.
“Not yet. We’re heading in tomorrow morning,” Lam said. “Which is very soon,” he added, glancing down at his watch. “Figure they might want to hire us on for a while if we can show them there are ghouls in the area.”
Besides the old man outside of Wichita, Keo had seen plenty of guys like Willis and Lam before. Too many of them in the years since Houston, in fact. Slayers were essentially mercenaries that hired their services out to towns to clean out any ghouls in the area. Without fail, they were rough and tumble types, people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—stay put in one place for too long. For a time Keo had even hung around a few of them, but the idea of going from place to place searching out ghouls and killing them wasn’t something he was interested in doing for a career.
“There’s just the two of you?” Keo asked.
“We crossed into Texas with six,” Lam said. “But you know how it is. This ain’t a job for the faint of heart. One mistake and”—he snapped his fingers—“that’s it. Six feet under.”
“Or worse,” Willis said.
“Or worse,” Lam nodded.
“We got some friends following us down here later. It’s a big state; we were hoping to find enough jobs to keep us busy for a while. Maybe enough to last us a few years before we moved west.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a retirement plan,” Keo said.
Willis chuckled. “Beats farming and cleaning up cow shit.”
“You’re going into Winding Creek in the morning?”
“That’s right. You from this area?” Then, after Keo nodded, “What’s it like? We thought about going in last night, but you know, it’s not always the smartest idea to pop into a new place in the dead of night. People’ve gotten shot for less.”
“You’ll see,” Keo said, and chewed on another piece of deer jerky.
“Goddammit,” Lam said, though Keo didn’t think that was a somber goddammit but more of an annoyed goddammit.
“There goes our meal ticket,” Willis said.
Yup. Definitely more annoyed than somber.
And he thought he didn’t play well with others. Lam and Willis had come here looking for a job. Instead, they had followed Keo into Winding Creek only to find a lot of blood in the streets, empty buildings, and not a single survivor to offer them employment.
They stood in the town square an hour after sunup, with plenty of light to see everything that needed to be seen. The place looked much different than when Keo was last here less than twenty-four hours ago. Then again, at the time he had only seen the very spot he was currently standing on from a window almost a block away. It was a moodier atmosphere up close, and the already decaying bodies only added to that.
“Jesus Christ. Who did this?” Lam asked.
“You ever heard of a to
wn called Fenton?” Keo asked.
Lam and Willis exchanged a look.
“What?” Keo said.
“On the way down here,” Willis said. “But we didn’t go inside.”
“Any reason why not?”
“They didn’t exactly have their welcome mats out.”
“Meaning?”
“There were guard towers and machine gun nests along the roads into town. The place looked more like a military outpost.”
“Given their artillery, it didn’t look like they’d need our services,” Lam said.
“How big is Fenton?” Keo asked.
Willis shrugged. “Pretty big, from what I saw. And growing.”
“Growing how?”
“They were putting up new buildings. Looked like a real boom town.”
What the hell does a booming town need women and kids for? Keo thought, remembering everything Wendy and Lewis had told him.
“You gonna tell us what happened here?” Lam asked.
Keo did, and the two slayers listened quietly.
When he was done, they exchanged another look, before Willis finally said, “Damn glad we stayed out of Fenton.”
“How many people did you see up there?” Keo asked.
“Like I said, we didn’t go inside,” Lam said, “but there was a lot of activity. They have a thriving farming community, too. And plenty of livestock. It didn’t look like they would need to raid other towns for supplies.”
“And gas,” Willis said. “They had plenty of gas. You could hear machinery running everywhere, and there was a line of cars going in and out. You know what a technical is?” And when Keo nodded, “They had a lot of those, too.”
“Where are they getting the gas?” Keo asked.
He remembered all those vehicles inside Princeville that Buck’s people were using. They were also using horses, but they seemed to have plenty of fuel to burn. There was a reason Keo mostly walked everywhere; the same for the slayers. Fuel, at least the ones that were still usable after all these years, were rare commodities.
“Hell if we know,” Willis said. “But they had plenty of it, though. You could smell gasoline in the air around the place from all that construction they were doing.”
“It looked like they were building an army,” Lam said. “Or a bigger army, anyway, ’cause it looked like they had a good chunk of that already. We’ve been across a dozen states, killing ghouls since The Walk Out, but I’ll be damn if that wasn’t the closest I ever came to seeing someone assembling a real honest to goodness armed forces. The only thing they were missing was air power.”
A burgeoning army. Technicals out the ass. And plenty of gas.
So what the hell does Buck need with the women and children?
“Anything left?” Willis was asking as he looked around. “In the buildings and houses?”
Keo shook his head. “I didn’t have a lot of time to look around when I was here yesterday. Too busy trying not to get shot. But you boys feel free to check.”
“Hell, we’re already here,” Lam said, though he didn’t sound all that enthusiastic. “Might as well make it worthwhile.” Then, “What about the bodies?”
“What about them?” Willis asked.
“Should we bury them?”
“Man, it’d take weeks. Let the animals have them. They gotta eat, too.” He looked over at Keo as if just realizing he was still there. “You knew them, right?”
Keo didn’t respond right away. If Emma and Megan had been one of the bodies instead of just the men and women they’d stumbled across since entering the city limits, it might have been a different answer. But it wasn’t, and he had to find Jonah. He had to find Emma and Megan, and spending even a few more hours here burying all these bodies wasn’t going to help him achieve that.
“You’re right; animals gotta eat, too,” Keo finally said. “Besides, if they don’t, something else will be by to take them.”
Keo didn’t have to say what that something else was because Lam and Willis already knew. It was their occupation, after all.
“Let’s get this over with and get outta here,” Lam said. “This place’s already starting to give me the creeps.”
They headed toward the main warehouse where most of Winding Creek’s goods were stored—it was the largest building by far and hard to miss—while Keo went in the opposite direction.
It had occurred to him while walking back to town that although he did have a map of the area at his cabin, he would have a better chance of not just identifying but locating whatever Jonah was from a map inside Winding Creek. After all, if Lewis had told the truth and he sent Emma and Megan along with the other survivors to whatever this Jonah was, then the women already knew of its existence. And if they knew, maybe it was common knowledge with the other townspeople, too. Say, like with its only two lawmen.
Keo found the sheriff’s office near city hall and stepped around the dried blood splatters on the walkway. There were bullet holes in the walls and one of the windows was shattered, and through the still-open door, Keo spotted a wild dog at work on a body lying prone on its stomach. He recognized Duncan right away by the 1911 still holstered at his hip.
The dog looked up as Keo neared and bared its teeth at him, but when Keo stood still and watched it back, the animal decided he wasn’t a danger and went back to eating. Keo’s stomach turned slightly at the sight, but he reminded himself that he’d seen a lot worse and stepped around Duncan to get to the big desk at the back.
The jail cell at the far end, along with the gun rack on the wall, were empty. There were stray cartridges on the floor, probably dropped when the building was being looted, but there were no signs of Jim.
Keo went to the desk and opened the drawers one by one before finding what he was looking for in the very bottom drawer—a stack of maps. He took them out when he heard a growl and looked up to find the dog again, giving him the evil eye.
“Go ahead, keep eating, I’m not gonna stop you.”
The dog seemed to bristle at being spoken to, but after a few seconds, it returned to Duncan’s dead body and there was only the sound of sharp teeth rendering flesh.
Keo got the hell out of there as fast as he could, then found a bench far from the blood and bodies and went through his haul.
He spent the first ten or so minutes scouring each map looking for a town called Jonah. Failing that, he started hunting for roads called Jonah. When that didn’t turn up anything either, his next hour was spent looking for anything called Jonah—anything at all—but the closest he came was a small stream called Jonas Lake somewhere near a city called Conroe just outside of Houston.
He was still searching for a clue—any clue—when Lam slammed a wooden crate on the bench across from him and began sifting through it. Keo recognized the box—it was one of Mark’s. Keo had seen it plenty of times when the baker showed up at Emma’s place with a fresh supply of bread.
In the bright morning sun, and with Lam sitting down across from him, Keo glimpsed the teeth marks along the sides of Lam’s necks, and as the man took off his fingerless gloves to scratch an itch, there were more similar markings around his wrists. Both Lam and Willis had been wearing long-sleeve shirts, and the collars of Willis’s jackets were high up enough that Keo hadn’t noticed the bites before last night or this morning. And that was exactly what they were—bite marks made by ghoul teeth.
He had met others like Lam (and probably Willis, too). Not as slayers, but as survivors of The Purge. The ghouls didn’t always turn the ones they bit; sometimes they kept them alive as sustenance, drawing blood from them night after night. The lucky ones, it was said, were the ones that stopped being useful and were either finally turned or allowed to drift away.
Keo looked back down at the map before Lam could catch him staring. “Found anything good?”
“They left behind a lot of stuff, mostly things they probably didn’t think were worth taking,” Lam said. He pulled out a half-empty bottle of water, a pair of s
ocks, and a can of sardines. “I don’t blame them; they got their pick of the place, so why bother with the leftovers?”
“You’ve seen this before? Towns being raided like this?”
“Too many times to count.” Lam took out a can of SPAM, then produced a titanium scork from his pocket and began eating. “It happens throughout history. The strong take advantage of the weak.” He shrugged. “I like to think what me and the other slayers do as being the complete opposite.”
“Someone’s gotta do it,” Keo said.
“Damn right. And if we can get a hot meal and a bath out of it? Hell, I consider it a fair trade.”
“I wouldn’t disagree. I’ve met plenty of slayers. You’ve always been standup guys.”
Lam grinned. “What can I say? We get to kill ghouls, and every now and then there’s a pretty farm girl who shows us how much she appreciates what we do. It’s win-win.”
Keo chuckled. “I don’t think I could do it, though. No offense.”
“None taken. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.” He looked around. Then, “We found horse stalls. A lot of them.”
“They took the horses.”
“What about the livestock?”
“I don’t know. Probably those, too. If not, then they’ve wandered off. Or something else got them.”
“Right. Something else.”
Keo sneaked another curious look at Lam as the man scorked a big chunk of SPAM into his mouth. Most slayers he’d met were either adrenaline junkies or people looking for a little revenge. Or a lot of revenge, in the case of one old man. The Purge had left them permanently scarred, emotionally and physically, and not all of them had been able to adjust to life post-Purge. Keo often thought of it as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. They had been fighting the creatures for so long that they didn’t know how to stop.
Road To Babylon Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 14
