Another nod. “There were five of us, but we got split up. Mom and me went one way, and they went another. I heard shooting, the screaming…”
“How did they track you?”
“I don’t know. They were just there.”
“But you got away?”
“I ran. Mom told me to run, so I ran.”
Keo looked around them again just to make sure they were still alone before he turned back to her. “This was yesterday? In the daytime?”
“Uh huh.”
“How many men took her?”
“I don’t know…”
“A dozen?”
“Maybe.”
“More?”
“Maybe…”
The more questions he asked, the more confused she looked.
She’s a kid, and she’s scared. Stop with the Twenty Questions, you idiot.
Keo pursed a smile at her and nodded. “Okay. That’s good enough for now.”
He stood back up, but before he could say or do anything, the girl grabbed him around the waist and didn’t seem as if she was ever going to let go.
“Don’t leave me, Keo,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Why would I?” Keo sighed. “I’m not going to leave you. Okay?”
She craned her head to look up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. He’d never seen her cry before, and the sight broke his heart. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Keo said.
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“Mom says if you say it twice, it’s a real promise.”
Keo smiled. “Okay, wonsungi. I promise. Again. Good?”
She nodded and went back to smearing tears against his clothes.
Keo sighed, then glanced back at the tree line. Jonah’s was on the other side, along with the snipers between here and there. How many snipers? That was the question.
He checked his watch. Three hours until morning.
He patted Megan on the back, not quite sure what he was supposed to do in this situation. It wasn’t like he’d ever had to take care of a kid before. They usually avoided him, and vice versa.
“All right, kid,” Keo said quietly. “Everything’s going to be okay. You’re safe now. You’re safe now…”
Depending on how he wanted to look at it, the situation had either turned out very well or gone sideways on him. The upside was that he had found Megan (One out of two ain’t bad, he thought, especially considering the week he’d been having), but her presence also made carrying out the original plan difficult. How was he going to take out two (maybe three, or possibly more) snipers with a ten-year-old kid in tow?
Who says you have to keep your promise to Jonah’s? You came here looking for Emma and Megan. Well, you found one of them.
He was tempted to go with that. After all, what did he owe Jonah or Sherry and the others, really? If anything, he’d already done his part by saving Sherry from the Buckies earlier. Even if he hadn’t shown up, Jonah’s would still have had to deal with Buck’s boys. So really, when he thought about it logically, there was no reason for him to stay.
So why are you still here?
Good question…
He was weighing his choices as he led Megan away from the spot where he had tangled with Blue Eyes and went farther back into the woods, away from the tree line and the snipers on the other side. He’d gotten lucky that his fight with the creature hadn’t alerted the Buckies—if they had been close enough to the woods to overhear, anyway—but Keo was still trying to figure out what the hell the monster was doing out here.
Had the ghoul been stalking the snipers? Or was there another reason it was sitting in the tree just…waiting.
Was it waiting? And if so, for what? Or who?
Keo kneeled next to a large bush while Megan crouched in front of him. She had been carrying some berries in her pockets that she had picked while heading south with her mother, and was eating those now. The horse stood next to them, chewing leaves from a low-hanging branch. Keo felt better with the thoroughbred nearby; it had proven it possessed the survival instincts to make it out here by itself, and the animal definitely had a better sense of smell and hearing than he or Megan did.
Ninja horse to the rescue. I can dig it.
He spent a few minutes watching Megan eating her berries one by one. She wasn’t wolfing them down but cherishing each and every one as if afraid they would run out. She didn’t look as malnourished now as when he had first spotted her, which made sense since it had only between two days since the attack on Winding Creek, and Emma would have done everything possible to keep her fed until they were forcibly separated yesterday.
“Where were you when you guys ran across the Buckies?” Keo asked. He kept his voice as low as possible while still allowing Megan to hear.
The girl matched his pitch with her answers. “About five miles from here.”
“On the road?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you walked all the way here by yourself?”
She nodded. “Mom said that if we got separated for me to keep going south until I found the ocean. So that’s what I did.”
“You didn’t know about Jonah’s?”
“What’s Jonah’s?”
“Never mind. Did you see anyone else on the way here? Anyone at all?”
She shook her head. “No one. Just you.”
“And you were out here at night this whole time by yourself?”
“I climbed up and hid in the trees when it started to get dark. They can’t climb. The ghouls.”
Some of them can, Keo thought, remembering the sight of Blue Eyes perched on the tree branch above him. Some of them can…
He asked instead, “Why did you risk coming down while it’s still dark?”
“I would have stayed up until morning if I hadn’t heard people talking. Ghouls don’t talk.”
Some of them can, he thought again, but said, “That’s how you found me.”
“Uh huh. But there was just you.” She gave him a quizzical look. “Who were you talking to, Keo?”
Keo thought about telling her the truth (“See, there was this blue-eyed ghoul, and apparently it knows I was in Houston, and it knows I took part in killing one of its kind, so it’s really pissed off at me right now, and I’m pretty sure it’s still out there, somewhere, waiting for me to let my guard down to gets its revenge.”) but decided it probably wasn’t the best idea.
“Him,” he said instead, nodding at the horse next to them.
“The horse?” Megan said.
“Yeah. His name’s Horse.”
She made a face. “What kind of name is that?”
“It’s a great name. Unfortunately, Horse doesn’t talk much.”
“Of course not, Keo. He’s a horse.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She looked at him curiously, as if trying to decide if he was messing with her.
Keo smiled. “Anyway. You said there were others with you and your mom while you guys were coming here. How many were there?”
“Kevin, his dad, and Jules and her mom. And I think someone else that I don’t know, but I’m not sure…”
Keo didn’t know who Kevin was, but the only male Winding Creek survivor at Jonah’s was Breckin, and none of the other women with Christine were named Jules. That told him that like Emma, the others never made it to their destination. Which meant it was a miracle Megan had—in the dark, no less.
She’s way tougher than she looks. You’d be proud, Emma.
Keo checked his watch again. Two hours and twenty-four minutes until morning.
“What are you doing out here at night?” Megan asked.
“Looking for you and your mom,” Keo said.
“You were looking for us?”
He was amused by the surprise in her voice. “Of course. What else—”
She threw herself at him, and like the last time, she almost bowled him over. He just barely managed to stay partia
lly upright while hugging her back.
“Mom said you’d come looking for us,” Megan said. She sounded somewhere between sobbing and laughing. “She said you wouldn’t abandon us. I wasn’t sure. But I should have been. I should have known you wouldn’t abandon us, Keo.”
“Of course not, wonsungi. You know better than that,” Keo said and patted her on the back while thinking to himself, Jesus, can you get any more awkward? You suck at this.
She pulled away and wiped at her eyes. She was trying to smile and talk at the same time. “Are you going to go look for her? For Mom?”
“Yeah,” Keo nodded. “After I make sure you’re okay, I’m going after her next.”
“What about the ones who took her?”
“I’ll take care of them, too.”
“They had guns, Keo.”
“I have guns, too, wonsungi.”
“You’ll be okay? Can you get help?”
He thought it was cute that she was concerned for his welfare. When was the last time someone actually gave a damn about whether he lived or died? Really, really cared?
“Yeah, I’ll be okay,” Keo said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll get her back.”
“You swear?”
“Only on Saturdays, but never on Sundays.”
She gave him a confused look.
“I mean, yes, I swear,” Keo smiled.
“I knew you liked her,” Megan said, smiling back at him.
“Of course I like your mom. Did you think I didn’t?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Did I ever do anything to make you think otherwise?”
“Well, you never stayed over…”
I guess she noticed that, too.
“I always meant to,” Keo said.
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Will you stay now? When we get Mom back?”
It’s a trick. Don’t hang yourself, dummy, Keo thought, but he smiled again anyway and said, “Yeah. I will.”
She pursed her lips, fighting back a scream of joy. Instead, she lunged at him again, and this time he was ready for it and embraced her back.
Better. You’re definitely getting better at this.
Next to them, Horse looked on curiously.
Twenty-Five
He didn’t push Megan for specifics about how the Buckies not only found, but captured, Emma and the others on the road, mostly because whatever details she knew weren’t going to help him find her. How it happened didn’t matter, because he already knew where they had taken her—the same place they were taking the others: Fenton.
What the hell is going on in that place?
Besides, Keo had no interest in further traumatizing the girl by making her relive yesterday. He was already thinking about the job ahead of him, trying to help her get her through it.
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money. And console a kid about her abducted mother?”
Yeah, that wasn’t exactly on his list of expertise, and he wasn’t looking forward to trying his hand at it. At all.
Instead, he occupied his mind with the Buckies and Fenton and just what was going on in that place. That question and others swirled around in Keo’s head as he made his way back to the tree line with thirty minutes left before night finally gave way to morning.
Too many questions and not a lot of answers made his head hurt. He knew one thing: the attack on Winding Creek was one clue in a larger puzzle. Jonah had told him as much, with the Buckies having already attacked two other towns. And those were only the places he knew about, because there were survivors. How many more were out there? How long had this been going on? And maybe, most importantly, what the hell is going on in Fenton?
In his travels since Houston, Keo had gone through hundreds of small towns, some with only a handful of people and others with as many as a few thousand. There were definitely more places like Winding Creek out there—communities that were lightly protected, with people who thought the worst was over and that their long nightmare was finally at an end. How wrong they were.
Hell, he could have taken Winding Creek with a couple of guys. Once you took out Jim and Duncan, what kind of resistance was left?
Easy pickings, every single one of them.
He felt bad for the townspeople of Winding Creek and Dresden, and the third town that Jonah had mentioned. What was it? He couldn’t remember. Something with a J. But sympathy only went so far, because at the moment there was really only one concern on his mind: finding Emma.
He had come up with a way to achieve that goal and had thought of it while Megan was telling her story about how they had run into the Buckies on the road. It was going to take some doing, but then what else was new?
If it were easy, any ol’ Dick, Jane, and Tom could do it.
So he sat near a few meters from where the woods met the fields and waited for morning. He could feel dusk creeping up on him like a physical creature. It wasn’t exactly the best feeling, mostly because Keo was also still thinking about his encounter with the blue-eyed ghoul. He spent most of his time listening for snapping twigs and footsteps, and glanced behind and above and, every now and then, just for good measure, below him whenever he thought he felt the air shift, no matter how slightly.
He didn’t like leaving Megan behind, but it was better than dragging her along for this. Besides, she had Horse to look after her. The thoroughbred was a tough cookie and was old enough to have survived The Purge, then the years after that. It was a survivor, all right, and it wasn’t afraid of very much. If Keo had any doubts about that, seeing it jump out of nowhere and blindside Blue Eyes erased them.
That is one tough hombre.
Besides, things were going to get hairy real fast, and the last thing he needed was to worry about Megan getting caught in a crossfire. He could picture himself having to tell Emma why he had dragged her little girl into a gun battle, and failing badly.
He blinked as a thin ray of sunlight hit his eyes. It had pierced through the thick tree crowns above him.
Already?
Keo glanced at his watch again.
I guess morning’s early today.
He relaxed his stance and changed up his grip on the MP5SD. The presence of sunlight meant no ghouls—at least not where there was light, like the area around him now. He could also stop worrying about Megan and Horse and concentrate on the task at hand.
Keo got up, and, bent slightly over at the waist, moved closer toward the tree line. It didn’t take long before he could see the sunburnt green and brown carpet on the other side. And there, in the distance, Jonah’s six buildings silhouetted against the shoreline. There was still enough dusk that the thick stalks of grass looked more like ocean waves swaying back and forth.
He held the binoculars up to his eyes, switched off night vision, and scanned the horizon. It wasn’t going to be very easy to find a pair (or more) of snipers in all that waist-high grass. Even an idiot would know to dress properly for the environment, and with nearly a mile’s worth of land from here to the beach, Keo wasn’t all that confident about his chances of locating the enemy position. Or positions, which was more likely.
The only upside was that he hadn’t encountered an entire army waiting to attack Jonah’s. That much was clear after his run-in with Blue Eyes and the information Megan had given him. He might have been using a silenced weapon, but he had moved around loudly enough in the woods that anyone nearby would have surely heard him. Of course, he could have been wrong and there might be Buckies in other parts of the woods. It was a hell of a big place, after all, and you could get lost in it if you weren’t careful.
Now that’s not very positive thinking, pal.
He continued scanning the horizon, concentrating on the acres between him and Jonah’s, and only extending his search to where the houses ended on both sides. That limited his searching perimeter enough that if anything popped up between him and the beach—
He saw it before he heard it—
a gray object in the sky coming from beyond the shoreline. It appeared above Jonah’s and slashed overhead, flying just low enough that he could see its belly and the Sidewinder missiles attached underneath its wings.
Now that’s something you don’t see every day.
It was a plane, and not just any plane, but an A-10 Thunderbolt II. But like most people who had been on a battlefield, Keo knew it by its nickname, the Warthog.
The aircraft streaked past the field before disappearing above Keo’s head and beyond the woods—
Movement out of the corner of Keo’s left eye, this one coming from the ground in front of him. He looked down just as a head, mimicking a curious gopher, popped out of all that green about a quarter of a mile in front of him. The man was looking after the Warthog, and as soon as the A-10 vanished, the figure lowered his profile and attempted to re-blend back into its surroundings.
Gotcha.
Keo zeroed in on the man—or, at least, he assumed it was a man (What a chauvinist!)—as his target produced his own pair of binoculars and peered forward at Jonah’s. The figure was kneeling, rising just slightly above the grass line to see past it. As Keo had expected, the man was wearing appropriate clothes—green and brown and gray—that helped him to blend in with his environment. Keo might not have ever caught him if he hadn’t risen just a bit too high to look after the Warthog.
The figure didn’t expose himself for very long before he sank back into the grass.
Keo waited, still looking through the binoculars for the other two (assuming there were two more out there), but they never made themselves known.
At least I found one.
With the location still fresh in his mind, Keo lowered his binoculars and lifted the MP5SD and began jogging in that direction. He wasn’t too worried about making noise, not while he was still almost four hundred meters away from his target.
As he got closer, he was hit by heavy winds coming inland from the ocean. There was enough grass slapping against each other to wash over sounds of his movements, which he was pretty sure were minimal to begin with. With the appearance of dawn, the animals around him had also come alive, adding more to Keo’s cover.
At the three-hundred-meter mark, his target still hadn’t reappeared, and Keo had to convince himself he was going in the right direction. It would have been a hell of a thing if he had gone off track somewhere in the last hundred meters—
Road To Babylon Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 22
