The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (21 page)

Jordan crouched at the edge and listened, and Keo joined her. He had to put his hand down against the ground because the sudden movement nearly made him keel over.

“You okay?” she whispered.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Mom.”

She pursed her lips.

“Anything?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Looks clear. You ready?”

She got up and jogged into the clearing and slid against the wall next to one of the windows before he could respond. Keo sighed. He would have liked to sit and listen for another thirty minutes, maybe an hour. Not just to be sure they were the only people around, but because he could have used the rest. But that was just wishful thinking now, and he hurried over to join her outside the cabin.

The window next to them revealed a dust-covered floor, along with a kitchen lit up with sunlight through the windows above the sinks and a barren fireplace on the other side. There was no furniture to speak of, and the only thing staring back at them were the heads of two deer mounted on the far wall next to a darkened hallway that was just a bit
too
dark for his liking. The passageway led into the back of the house.

“Anything?” he whispered.

She shook her head. “You?”

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I can rest in the woods,” he said, even as another throbbing pain rushed through him. He gritted his teeth and hoped she didn’t notice.

It must have shown on his face anyway, because she looked more determined when she said, “No cover. If they find us out here, we’ll have nowhere to run. In here, at least we have a chance.”

He started to argue, but she had already moved toward the door, and Keo had no choice but to follow.

The handle was a simple lever, and she pressed it and pushed the door inside and stepped in a half-second later. Keo had to admit, she had developed a pretty nice rhythm since the last time they saw each other back at Earl’s cabin. Being out here with Tobias’s people, fighting Steve and the town, had definitely increased her battle movements. Now all she needed was a little more patience, a notion that Keo thought was funny since he’d never really been known to have a whole lot of that himself.

Dust brushed against his face as he stepped inside the cabin. The living room smelled slightly stale, but he blamed that on the lack of ventilation thanks to all the closed windows. The back hallway was partially submerged in shadows, but he didn’t detect movement or see obsidian eyes staring back at him.

Jordan had slung her rifle and opened up her pack. She pulled out a bottle of water and an old Tylenol bottle and handed it to him. “Sit down, drink, and rest for a while.”

“You came prepared,” Keo said. He turned the bottle over and noticed the expiration date.

“Don’t worry, that’s just a suggestion,” she said. “Probably. Anyway, the town’s not far from here. Maybe another hour, so we can afford to stay awhile or until you’re ready to move again.”

“It’s just a small headache.”

She peered at his face—or specifically, his scabbing forehead. “He really laid you out good. I thought you were going to bleed to death in that office last night.”

“That bad?”

“But you look okay now. Still ugly as hell, but better.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean, compared to the first time I saw you.”

She walked to the kitchen and laid her pack and rifle on the island counter, then began flipping through the top pantries and pulling drawers along the counter. Dust erupted every time she opened something, then again when she closed them.

Keo shook out two of the pills and washed them down with water. He walked over to one of the windows, and staying as far away from the grime-smeared windowsill and glass panes as possible, looked out at the clearing and the woods beyond. He couldn’t help but remember all those months at Earl’s cabin at the start of The Purge.

Gillian was there. So was Norris, and Rachel and her daughter, and the girl, Lotte. Jordan and her friends didn’t show up until later. Then there was that whole mess with Levy, and the garage…

But most of all, he remembered the good times. The days and nights and weeks and months when they didn’t have anything to worry about, when it seemed like they could hide from whatever was going on in the world around them. At the time, he had no idea what the ghouls were doing, and thinking back, he didn’t care. He would have been happy to live however many months or years he had left at the cabin with Gillian and Jordan and the others.

What was that old saying?
“Ignorance is bliss.”

What he wouldn’t give for a little bit of ignorance right now.

“Did you take the pills?” Jordan called from the kitchen.

“Yes.”

“Take a few more later. They won’t make you drowsy.”

He did feel better, though it wasn’t really the pills but mostly the resting, the not moving his feet every other second. The throbbing remained, but it wasn’t nearly as unbearable as it had been a few minutes ago when they were out there in the woods.

He finished off the water, then putting the bottle away (you never knew when an empty bottle would come in handy), called back to Jordan, “Find anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Did you expect to find something?”

“Maybe.”

“You said no one’s been here awhile. Why wouldn’t Miller put someone out here? Use it as a station or something.”

“He did, once. Not just here, but other locations around the area. The strip malls, the warehouses…until we convinced him it was a bad idea. Nowadays, he sticks to the other side of the river.” Then, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. What did you do back there to make Miller think you could kill Tobias for him?”

“I’m not convinced he thought I could. Chances were, he was hoping I could take out a few of your people. Best-case scenario, maybe make your men reveal themselves.”

“That’s probably true. You do make pretty good bait, Keo.”

He grunted. “Stop trying to butter me up.”

“Don’t take it too personally—” There was a loud
thump!
followed by a clattering sound, then Jordan’s voice, screaming,
“Keo!”

He turned back to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Her rifle and pack were still on the counter, but there were no signs—

Jordan was on the floor on her stomach behind the counter, both hands clawing at the wooden floorboards.

“Keo!”
she shouted again.

He unslung the MP5SD and ran to the kitchen. He was halfway there when Jordan managed to spin around onto her back and lifted her head, looking at something on the other side of the counter. Her Glock was lying across the kitchen where she had sent it clattering when she fell.

He changed directions at the last second, and instead of running to the right side of the counter, he went left where Jordan’s feet were. When he finally made the turn and saw it, Keo might have actually frozen for a full second.

The bottom half of the creature’s body was hidden inside the cabinet under the sink, where it had apparently been hiding when Jordan stumbled across it. It had lunged out through the open door and had gotten a hold of her legs and was trying to pull her toward it—pull her
out of the sunlight
and into the shadows that fell over its part of the counter. She was kicking at it, but it had two solid grips on one of her legs and wouldn’t let go.

It must have heard him coming, because its head snapped in his direction and twin lifeless black eyes settled on him. He lifted the submachine gun and pointed at it, and the creature actually
sneered
at him.

“Don’t shoot me, Keo!” Jordan shouted.

Keo almost laughed.

Gee, thanks for that suggestion, Jordan. Real helpful there.

He fired three times into the cabinet, splintering the door and sending rounds inside rather than trying to hit any specific part of the ghoul’s body. He didn’t know how many times he hit it, but once was enough and its head flopped to the floor even while its body continued to jerk up and down with Jordan’s struggling motions.

She finally realized it had stopped trying to pull her into the darkness under the sink and stopped kicking. Jordan stared at it, gasping for breath, before finally regaining enough control to reach forward and pry its bony fingers off her leg. Then she scrambled backward and up to her feet. She picked up her Glock and stumbled away from the kitchen, then looked over at him.

“What?” he said.

“There’s more of them in there,” she said, almost gasping out the words.

“Where?”

“The lower cabinets.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard them when I was on the floor. And I can smell them. Can’t you?”

Keo took a quick, involuntary step away from the cabinets. “You sure?”

“You can’t smell them?”

He sniffed the air. There was that smell again, the same one he had detected when he first entered. But it seemed to have gotten stronger…

“Yeah,” he said.

“What should we do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do we just…leave? What if someone else comes in here and stumbles across them later?”

Keo aimed and fired a shot into one of the closed cabinet doors.

He heard something scurrying behind the cheap wood paneling for a moment before settling into silence again. He had to remind himself that they were just bags of bones, and if losing a head or a limb didn’t bother them, squeezing into the small spaces of the cabinets probably didn’t register at all.

“Screw this,” Keo said. “We can’t save everyone. We can barely save our friends.”

He took another couple of steps back and picked up her M4 and handed it to her. Jordan grabbed her pack and slung it back on.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll rest later, when I’m dead.” That drew a quick, almost pained look from her. “Too soon?”

She gave him a half-smile, but it was easy to see she hadn’t completely recovered from being grabbed by the ghoul and almost dragged into its hiding place. Keo knew from experience that even though the creatures looked like emaciated little children, they were goddamn resilient. It probably helped that they didn’t care about self-preservation when they locked onto a prey.

He was still backing up when a flicker of movement drew his attention.

He spun toward the hallway in the back and the smell hit him. It was bearable earlier, but that had all changed. The stench was suffocating now, because there were so many of them out in the open and squeezed into the hallway at once.

Jesus Christ, where did they come from?

It had to be the back rooms. They had been inside (Sleeping? Resting? What exactly did ghouls do in the daytime?) until now.

They crowded into the hallway, so many that Keo didn’t know where the shadows began and their numbers ended. Black eyes peered out of the darkness at him, but it was the growing overwhelming smell of rot and decay that got to him. They would have come out if not for the swaths of sunlight splashing across the living room, an invisible barrier they couldn’t cross even though he could tell they wanted to with every fiber of their being.

“Oh God,” Jordan breathed beside him.

She drew her Glock, the one with the silver magazine, and pointed it at them, but Keo grabbed her arm before she could fire.

“There’s too many of them,” he said. “One or ten dead won’t make any difference. But we have limited ammo. Especially the right kind.”

She nodded, and they backpedaled toward the door together, side by side.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

She shook her head and shivered slightly.

He knew how she felt, and didn’t feel better himself until he opened the door and stepped outside. The warmth of the sun against his back was like a mother’s embrace, and fresh air filled his lungs once again.

He forgot about his throbbing headache and turned around and followed her back into the woods without a word.

After the near-miss
with the riders, then the surprise at the cabin, they took the rest of the way back to T18 slowly while listening for sounds of more soldiers and other things that might be hiding in the darker parts of the woods around them. And there was a lot of it, further increasing Keo’s paranoia.

Gradually, he noticed that the air had become chillier, and when he glanced up at the sky, it had darkened since the last time. He had to look at his watch to make sure it wasn’t even noon yet.

“You feel it?” he asked.

“What?” Jordan said.

“The air.”

She paused for a moment. “I think it’s going to rain.”

“Does it rain a lot out here?”

“This far inland? It’s only rained twice since I’ve been here.”

“Maybe you guys are due.”

“I guess. How’s your head?”

“I took two more pills.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The pills are kicking in, but I’ll feel better when we finally reach T18.”

Finally, around midday, he heard the familiar rush of water and they approached the tree line slowly before going into a crouch and looked out.

Like yesterday, there were people on the opposite riverbanks, maybe even the same ones. Women were washing clothes while children jumped into and frolicked in the river. A few soldiers stood around in the back, some chatting with the civilians. The sound of laughter and inane chatter was completely incongruent with the world as Keo knew it, and had been surviving in, for the last year.

He stared at them in silence for a moment. These people were at home and at peace with their choice. He could tell that just from the way they talked and moved around. His first instinct was to pity them, but maybe they were the smart ones. They had accepted and embraced the reality of the world, and from the looks of it, they were happy. People like him and Jordan, on the other hand, were living hand to mouth, getting by on what they could scavenge, and always looking over their shoulders.

Who was he to pity them? They would probably pity
him
, and he would have a pretty hard time convincing them it should be the other way around.