The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (24 page)

Keo leaned back, then met and held Steve’s hard gaze. “You’re overthinking it. I don’t give two shits about you or this town of yours. I’m a survivor. I’ve always been. I got through all this by telling myself there was something on the other side, waiting for me.”

“And what would that be?”

“Gillian.”

“What if she wants to stay?”

“Then we’ll stay.”

“Just like that?”

“I’m not fussy. And like I said, I’ve been out there for a year and it’s nothing to write home about.” He let a ghost of a smile cross his lips. “You look like you have a good thing going on here. My guess is, while you insist everyone do their duty with the blood stuff at night, you and your soldiers exempt yourselves. Am I right?”

“Perks of the job. One of many.”

“So what’s not to like? Free food, a steady job, and Gillian. Sounds pretty good to me.”

“And you’re not holding a grudge about what happened yesterday?”

“As long as you’re not holding a grudge about me killing three of your guys.”

Steve shrugged.

“So that’s that,” Keo said. “Am I pissed off about yesterday? Yeah, sure. But I understand why you did it. Hell, I can even respect it. It was clever, and a win-win situation for you however it ended up.”

“You could have died yesterday.”

“Same shit, different day. I could have died a thousand times in the last year, so there was nothing special about yesterday.”

Steve chuckled before snatching up Tobias’s ring and spinning it on the desktop again. He didn’t say anything and just watched the jewelry go round and round in front of him.

Keo waited.

Had he been convincing enough? The Keo from one year ago wouldn’t have had any problems selling Steve on what he’d just said, because it would have been the truth. But this version of him, this Keo who had voluntarily stayed on Song Island even when he didn’t have to, then stayed even longer on the
Trident
, was less predictable.

Finally, Steve picked up the ring and put it away before standing up. “Come on.”

“Where we going?”

“It’s a surprise. You like surprises, don’t you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” Steve grinned back.

*

There was a
plain white golf cart waiting for them outside Marina 1 that wasn’t there when they first entered the building. It had solar panels on top and at the back and looked pretty well-used.

Steve climbed behind the steering wheel. “Hop in.”

Keo walked around and slid in the front passenger seat. There were two seats in the back and more space where the golf bags were supposed to go. Dry mud caked the floors and fell off as Steve started the electric engine and maneuvered them through the marina, then toward the exit Keo had only seen but never gone past.

“How many of these do you have?” Keo asked.

“Three,” Steve said. “Solar panels don’t charge for shit, and it takes weeks just to get enough juice to power the batteries, so I usually end up having to switch between them.”

“Sounds like a tough life.”

Steve grinned. “Everyone’s gotta make sacrifices for the greater good.”

“I hear that. So, you wanna tell me where we’re going?”

“Relax. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. The only reason you’re still alive is because you’re right. I can use a man with your particular set of skills. You’re going to be my personal Bryan Mills.”

“Who?”

“Liam Neeson’s character in
Taken
.”

“I don’t watch a lot of movies.”

“You’re missing out. In the film, Neeson plays a badass ex-CIA agent with ‘a deadly set of skills.’ Some guys stole his daughter and he has to get her back. Never seen it?”

“Like I said, I’m not much of a cinephile.”

“We can change that. I have stacks of Blu-rays at my house. Just the first two
Taken
, though.”

“How many were there?”

“Three.”

“They took his daughter in all three parts?”

“They took his wife in the second part.”

“What about the third?”

“I don’t remember. It was kind of a shit movie. Anyway, you like classics?”

“Sure, why not.”

“One of these days you should come around and we’ll have a movie night.”

“You have electricity at your house?”

“Generator.”

“I thought the whole point of living in this place was to go back to our roots. Off the grid.”

Steve chuckled. “You believe everything you hear?”

“Apparently so.”

“You’ll learn, kid.”

The golf cart hummed toward the entrance, where two soldiers rushed out of a booth to manually raise a large metal slab blocking their path. They drove past the gate, and Keo finally saw what was on the other side.

He wished he could have been surprised, but he had heard the stories and expected something like it. Even so, he was still stunned by the scope of what he saw as they drove up a road flanked by wide fields to both sides of them.

T18 had a thriving farming community, with acres and acres of crops spread out as far as he could see, hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes moving among them. There was only the tree lines to his right and the river to his left to stop the rows of wheat swaying in the slight breeze. They drove past more fields covered in stalks of corn, along with dozens upon dozens of rows of plants, fruits, and red and green and yellow things he didn’t even know the names for.

The closest Keo had ever been to a farm was in the outskirts of Colombia a few years back, when he’d had to sleep inside a sugarcane field while waiting to kill someone. He’d grown up in San Diego, and before that on military bases around the world. As an adult, he’d spent almost all of his life in cities, working in jungles made of concrete instead of dirt. He couldn’t have grown a tomato if someone put a gun to his head.

The cart was moving slow enough that Keo was able to get a good look at his surroundings, and he wondered how long they had been at this. He could only spot a few soldiers, most of them on horseback moving among the fields. They were less guards and more security, which made sense because he wasn’t looking at prisoners forced to garden under a warm sun; these people wanted to be here, just like the women at the riverbanks.

“What are you growing?” he asked Steve.

“Everything,” Steve said. “Wheat, corn, vegetables, fruits… When was the last time you had fresh corn?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Or tomatoes? Potatoes? What about fresh from-the-oven bread? This is just one of our agricultural fields. We have two more on the other side of the subdivisions.”

“It’s…impressive,” Keo said, and realized that he actually meant it.

“This is what Tobias was trying to save them from. Now do you understand why he’d never have won? But that was something he could never understand. I tried to explain to him. I really did, but he just couldn’t fathom why this is a better life than running around out there scavenging and hiding from the crawlers. That’s no way to live.”

“You’re right. That is no way to live.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Steve said, and reached over and slapped Keo on the shoulder. “My brother Jack’s a good second-in-command, but he’s a little gimpy right now.”

“You offering me a job?”

“Why, you interested?”

“I’m not opposed to it.”

“That’s what I wanna hear. But not just yet. You did me a favor removing Tobias, but let’s wait and see how you feel tomorrow. After all, it’s probably going to be the biggest decision of your life.”

They drove on past the fields, which seemed to keep going and going around him. And to think this was just one of three in T18. Keo didn’t even want to imagine how much bigger the other two were, or how much manpower was working them.

“Around 4,000,”
Jack had told him when he asked about the population of T18.

Eventually they passed the fields, and Steve turned into a subdivision blocked by a tall rolling gate. It had a sign across the front that once read “Wilmont Heights” but had since been covered up with a banner now reading, “T18A1.”

Like the marina entrance, this one also had a guard booth. A soldier rushed out as they approached and pushed the gate open for them. Steve drove through.

“There are five subdivisions,” Steve said. “One’s for military personnel only, and the rest are for everyone else.”

“Jack told me you had 4,000. How do you control that many people?”

“Control?” Steve said, not even bothering to hide his amusement. “What makes you think we control them? They can leave whenever they want. But why would they? These houses are the only things standing between them and the crawlers at night. There’s nothing for them out there.”

Keo had gone through whole subdivisions during his trek across Louisiana, and the empty houses never failed to leave him utterly depressed. But he didn’t get that same abandoned vibe now as they cruised up T18A1. The streets were sparse but clean, and he found out why when they drove past the first of what turned out to be a dozen or so workers along the sidewalks picking up garbage and stuffing them into bags. They were all civilians, and he didn’t see a soldier in sight.

“What did these poor bastards do to get this job detail?” Keo asked.

“You ever heard the phrase, ‘People who can, do; those that can’t, teach’?” Steve asked.

“I may have run across it once or twice.”

“Well, these guys can’t even teach, so this is the price of staying in town. You get it now?”

“What’s that?”

“This is what they’ll do to stay here. That’s how valuable this place is compared to what’s out there, why Tobias would never have been able to ‘rescue’ them. Because they don’t want to be rescued.”

“Nothing wrong with picking up garbage for a living.”

“It’s not, but you don’t wanna know what the poor bastards who can’t even do this are doing to earn their keep.”

“Does it smell?”

Steve chuckled. “Boy, does it ever. But hey, someone’s gotta do the dirty work, right? That’s how the world runs. Everyone’s got a role to play. That includes you and me.”

There were row after row of homes around them. They looked almost identical, except for a few add-ons and color schemes. What caught him by surprise were the yards; they all looked as if they had been recently mowed, though they seemed to lack the uniform clean-cut look he was used to seeing in suburban neighborhoods before The Purge. Almost all of the windows were open, even if he couldn’t see any homeowners around. Keo guessed they didn’t have to worry about crime these days.

The golf cart was the only vehicle in the entire place, its mechanical hum drawing curious looks from the people along the sidewalks. Keo was used to seeing cars and trucks parked along curbsides in subdivisions, but there were none of those here. As a result, the streets looked wide and inviting and nothing at all like what a real neighborhood should look like. In fact, there was nothing “real” about T18A1, or T18 for that matter.

Steve finally slowed down and turned into the driveway of a house near the back of the street. It was a two-story building, but there was nothing extraordinary about it. At least, nothing that would indicate this was where a man of Steve’s position lived.

“Here we are,” Steve said, putting the cart in park. “Your stop.”

Keo climbed out. “Where are we?”

“Go knock on the front door and find out.” Steve put the golf cart in reverse and started backing down the driveway. “I’ll send someone to come get you later, but until then, I would refrain from wandering off.”

Keo watched Steve back into the street, spinning the steering wheel, then tipping a nonexistent cap to him before driving off.

One of the men picking up garbage across the street stopped what he was doing and waved at Keo for some reason. He was in his fifties, with a full white beard and looked like Santa Claus, if Saint Nick had lost a good hundred or so pounds. Keo wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so he waved back.

Then, he turned around and looked at the house. It had brick in the front but wood paneling along the sides and, he guessed, in the back as well. It had an attached garage like every other house up and down the street. There were no mailboxes, but there was evidence someone had attempted to grow flowers around the walking path.

Keo took that walkway now, up to the front door.

He was halfway there when the door opened and she looked out.

She had one hand on the doorknob, the slight breeze picking up her long jet-black hair. The months hadn’t dulled the brilliance of her green eyes, and Keo couldn’t have stopped the stupid smile spreading across his face even if he wanted to.

“Keo,” she said. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

“I promised, didn’t I?” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, you did.”

He was so focused on her face, on the way her hair fluttered behind her, that it took him a while before he saw the rest of her. She was clutching the doorknob with one hand—a bit too tightly, for some reason—while the other one was rubbing her stomach, which was a lot bigger than he remembered…

“You’re pregnant,” he
said.

“You always were a master of observation, Keo.” She smiled at him, though he thought it was probably a little more forced than she had planned.