The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (15 page)

He grabbed Wyatt by the shirt collar and jerked him back roughly, then deposited him to the ground. “Stay, boy.”

Keo stepped forward with the MP5SD at the ready and looked out.

They’d slowly been angling back toward civilization after all, and he was now looking out at a strip mall with a Valero gas station and a row of businesses on the other side of a two-lane road. On the other side was a strip mall with a Valero gas station and a row of businesses in the back. Sunlight glinted off the barrel of a rifle just barely visible on the rooftop of a Wilmont Mutual Insurance office building. The shooter’s head poked up briefly before disappearing again behind a cut-out picture of the Statue of Liberty.

Keo scanned the rest of the buildings and saw a second, then a third man, the two stationed at opposite ends of the connecting rooftops. They were watching the streets and surrounding area with an alertness that told Keo they were waiting for an impending attack. The rest of the strip mall looked deceptively empty, but Keo didn’t buy it.

Behind him, Wyatt was picking himself up from the ground when Keo grabbed him by the shirt collar and walked his former captor back to the tree line.

“Your friends?” he asked.

Wyatt nodded.

“Why here?” Keo asked. “Why are they still hanging around so close to the ambush site?”

“Maybe that’s what we want.”

“Come again?”

“Tobias isn’t stupid.”

“Go on…”

“Maybe he wants the people from T18 to try to hit him again.”

“You’re saying this is a trap? Tit for tat, is that it?”

Wyatt shrugged.

“How many men do you have left?” Keo asked, looking back out at the sentry perched behind Lady Liberty as the man raised his head briefly to glance down the street before ducking back down.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt said.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know how many made it back from the ambush. I was inside the woods, remember? That’s my job. Scout the area for signs of movement coming and going from the town and report back. I wasn’t even supposed to be involved until the shooting started. Then you just ran right at me.”

Keo still couldn’t spot any movements behind any of the storefront windows, but that didn’t mean the buildings were empty. If this was a trap, an attempt to lure Steve’s people into a payback ambush, the shooters would be hiding and waiting to strike.

Clever dogs.

“Is Tobias in there?” he asked.

“I guess,” Wyatt said.

“You guess?”

“They told me to bring you here, so I guess he’s in there, somewhere.”

“Makes sense,” Keo nodded.

“So what happens now?”

“Give me a second.”

“I mean, to me.” Wyatt sighed. “Tobias won’t be happy that I led you right to him.”

“He told you to take me to him, didn’t he? Why wouldn’t he be happy that you did exactly as ordered?”

That seemed to confuse Wyatt temporarily. “I guess…”

“Besides,” Keo said, “I just want to talk to the guy. Sit down and have a chat. Maybe over some warm beers—”

Snap!

Keo spun around—a difficult feat, since he was still half-crouched—in time to see two figures emerging from behind a thick brush. They were both huge men, their faces painted in camo like Wyatt earlier
(More of Tobias’s scouts,
Keo thought). More importantly, they were both armed and by the look on their faces, they were equally surprised to see him.

“Fuck!” one of them shouted, even as he lifted his rifle—an M4 with a red dot scope on top.

Keo was wondering how the hell had they gotten so close without him hearing them until now even as he jerked Wyatt in front of him. Wyatt gasped and tensed up as he realized what was happening. Keo abandoned the MP5SD—it was too long, making it too cumbersome for what he had in mind—and drew his Glock and jammed the barrel under Wyatt’s chin at an angle.

“What the fuck is this?” the same man shouted. Then he added, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, “Wyatt?”

“Don’t shoot!” Wyatt shouted. “Don’t fucking shoot!”

“Yeah, listen to him,” Keo said.

“Fuck!” the second man shouted, pointing his bolt-action rifle at Keo. Or trying to, with Wyatt in the way.

Keo smiled. The constant barrage of profanity was amusing to him for some reason. He just hoped the sight of him hiding behind Wyatt, his Glock against the man’s chin, was enough to keep them from squeezing their triggers. Either the M4 or the bolt-action could do some serious damage at this distance. Which was to say, if someone fired, he was a dead man. Really, really dead.

The two scouts shuffled their feet, not sure whether to move forward, back, or side to side; or just stand there and keep their weapons pointed at him. Keo was just glad no one had fired a shot yet even though he realized all the screaming might have already drawn attention from the strip mall behind him.

He threw a quick look back, out past the trees and into the streets, and sure enough there was movement at one of the buildings. The Wilmont Mutual Insurance office doors were opening and people were pouring out. Armed people.

Goddammit, I hate it when I’m right.

He looked back at the two men in front of him. Like Wyatt, they were wearing hunting clothes, and one of them had blood splatters along his pant legs and shirtsleeve. The blood looked fresh, too.

“Come on,” Keo said to Wyatt, pulling him slightly to the right.

Both men quickly followed, their rifles never leaving him.

“Where the fuck you going?” one of them shouted. Keo didn’t know why he was still shouting.

He had a good point, though. Where the fuck
was
he going? Not front. Not side to side. And certainly not back—

Dammit. There was nowhere to go but back.

He tightened his left hand around Wyatt’s neck, then began dragging the other man backward. He felt the warmth of the sun splash against his back almost as soon as he stepped outside the woods and into the overgrown grass jungle.

The sound of heavy footsteps overwhelmed everything else, and Keo spun around briefly, Wyatt still in front of him, to face at least six men running in his direction with rifles swinging in front of them. They were just about to cross the parking lot when they saw him, slid to a stop, and took aim.

Great. Now instead of two guys with rifles, he was staring at six.

Six? It was more like nine, because the three guards on the rooftops were now training their rifles on him, too. That prompted Keo to press his body even tighter against Wyatt’s. Thank God Wyatt was around six foot, which was just an inch shorter than Keo.

“Don’t shoot!” Wyatt was shouting. “Don’t anyone shoot, for Christ’s sake!”

There you go, Wyatt. Keep at it, pal.

The fresh sounds of footsteps behind him forced Keo to drag Wyatt south along the shoulder of the road. The two scouts burst out of the tree line to the left of him a second later. Now he had men with guns at two directions—front and from the right.

They kept pace with him as he pulled Wyatt southward, and they stopped when he stopped. That lasted for a few seconds until a couple of them got smart and ran further down the street before crossing over to outflank him.

He stopped, now with men on all three sides and just the woods behind him.

The woods. He could probably get lost in there. He could always come back later and find Tobias. Steve didn’t say anything about killing Tobias today. There was no timetable, there was just the job.

Yeah, that could work.

Of course, he was assuming the pissed-off looking men with guns—half of them haggard, their civilian clothes splashed with blood—would let him just back up into the trees without a fight. That was a pretty big if right there, but what the hell, it wasn’t like he had much of a choice at the moment.

“Get ready,” Keo said.

“What?” Wyatt said.

“Get ready to move.”

“Christ, you’re going to get us killed!”

“Shut up and get ready—”

“Don’t shoot!” someone shouted. It was a woman. He thought she sounded like the one that had talked to Wyatt over the radio earlier. “No one goddamn shoots!”

She pushed a couple of men out of her way and jogged across the street toward him. He watched her closely from behind Wyatt’s head, doing his best to expose as little of himself as possible to the shooters. He just hoped the riflemen on the rooftops were as bad a shot as the one that had tried to take him out earlier.

“Jesus Christ,” the woman said. “It really is you. I was pretty sure you were dead.”

Keo blinked once, twice.

The sun was in his eyes, but there was no mistaking who the woman was. She’d cut her hair short and the boots made her look taller—and she had been pretty tall to begin with—but it was definitely her.

Of all the people that had escaped on Mark’s boat, she would have been the one he’d put money on surviving. Besides, Gillian had made it, so why not her, too? Despite what Steve had told him about her and Mark dying when his men first encountered them, a part of him never really believed it.

“Well, shit,” Keo said.

She stopped a few feet away and seemed to sigh with a mixture of frustration and annoyance. “What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

He smiled. “Donnie was taken.”

She smiled back, then held out her hand toward him. “Give me the gun, Keo, before someone loses their shit and we all end up dead.”

“Can I trust you?”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice right now, do you?”

Good point,
he thought, and took the gun away from Wyatt’s chin and held it out to her. “So what now?”

“Now you meet Tobias,” Jordan said.

‡

THE TIES THAT BIND

“I can’t believe
you’re still alive,” Jordan said.

“You said that already,” Keo said.

“What happened to your face?”

“Long story.”

“I bet. We spent days and weeks wondering what had happened to you and Norris, not knowing if you were dead or alive or captured…or worse.”

“Just days and weeks? What about months?”

“We eventually had other things to worry about.”

“Santa Marie Island.”

She frowned. “They were waiting for us when we got there.”

“The soldiers.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened, Jordan?”

“She’s alive. You know that, right?”

He nodded. “I saw her back at T18.”

Jordan didn’t respond right away and instead continued leading him through the strip mall while men with guns watched him like a hawk. Despite taking his weapons and pack, the others were still nervous, and he saw fingers in trigger guards. He didn’t blame their skittishness; he had, after all, just shown up in the aftermath of what he now knew was a bloody fight with Steve’s men. These guys were beat up, hurt, and licking their wounds. You had to be extra careful around men who were on edge, especially when assault rifles were present.

“How is she?” Jordan finally asked.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen her.”

“What happened?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“I might not have a later.”

“You’ll be fine. Just…be truthful.”

“Tobias?”

“Yeah.”

Well, you wanted to find him, pal.

Mission accomplished.

She led him into the insurance building and across
(fresh)
blood-covered carpeting while the others returned to wherever they had been hiding before he showed up. He followed Jordan into a back hallway that was just a little bit too dark for his liking.

“You’re waiting for them,” Keo said. “The soldiers. You’re trying to lure them up the road and into an ambush.”

She gave him a quick, sharp look.

“Wyatt gave it away,” he said.

She nodded, relaxing. “We have men planted along the roads. If they’d followed us like we had hoped, we would have had hit them back. We’ve done it before.”

“But they didn’t bite this time.”

“No…”

“Still, pretty gutsy move.”

“Yeah, well, it takes guts to run around out here. But you probably know a little bit about that.”

“Just a little bit, yeah.”

Jordan opened the last door into a small office. There were two people already inside, and one of them—a woman, even though Keo only saw her from the back—was busy wrapping fresh gauze around the thigh of a man with short blond hair. The man’s pant leg had been cut away, and a pool of fresh blood was gathering on the floor under him. Like the men outside, he looked haggard and on edge.

The man looked up when they entered. “This him?”

Jordan nodded. “Keo, this is Tobias.”

Tobias eyed him. Jack wasn’t far off when he described the man—the steely blue eyes, square jaw, and the six-three frame. Early forties, though he could have passed for a man five years younger with a shave and a decent haircut.

The woman working on Tobias was in her fifties and Hispanic, and the gun belt around her narrow waist looked awkwardly strapped on. She swiped at some gray hair and gathered up the bloody rags and bandages and tossed them into a nearby trash bin that hadn’t been emptied in over a year.