The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (29 page)

“Looks like it’s gonna be a long night,” Grant said. “We’re going to find them, though. Not a lot of places to hide around here. No one’s going to harbor them, either. Sooner or later they’ll run out of corners, and then we’ll get them.”

Keo didn’t respond. Instead, he tried to imagine where Jordan and Dave (if it was Dave, and not another one of Tobias’s inside men) would go. Like Steve, they would know better than to brave the woods. Even before the rainstorm it had gotten too dark, and that brought out things worse than soldiers. Would they hide out in the inside man’s place? That would depend if he was single or if he shared a house with someone (or someones). Not that it mattered, because he didn’t know who had taken Jordan anyway, which left him with…

Jordan. Where would Jordan go?

Keo was thinking about that as two horsemen galloped past them along the shoulder of the road, flashlights shining in his face. Compared to the Maglites they were carrying, the golf cart’s own headlights were barely strong enough to illuminate the paved lanes in front of them. If not for the LEDs hanging off the poles, Grant would be driving almost in total darkness.

Thunder boomed in the distance, seemingly getting closer (and louder) with each new one. For a second Keo thought they were gunshots and was thankful he was wrong. Gunshots would mean Steve had found Jordan and her friend, but soldiers still running around searching every house and building meant the exact opposite.

They were about to pass the open gate into T18A1 when Keo tapped Grant on the shoulder. “Hey, turn left.”

“What?” Grant said.

“Turn in here.”

“I got orders to take you to Processing.”

“You can do that later. I have to swing over and talk to a friend about something.”

“Forget it.”

Keo reached over and drew Grant’s gun—a Glock—and pressed it roughly into the man’s side. “I said,
turn in here.
”

Grant almost missed the entrance but stopped in time and turned into the subdivision. The gate was already open, which wasn’t a surprise since soldiers had probably been going in and out of the place before they even arrived.

Keo spotted two people inside the guard booth, shivering against the cold. They were soaking wet and neither one felt like coming out when they saw the golf cart moving past their window. One of them did make the effort to wave Grant through. Grant started to slow down when Keo jammed the gun harder against his gut. Grant took the hint and they continued through.

Steve’s people were flooding all five subdivisions at once, but that also meant they had to stretch their numbers thin. They drove past soldiers along the sidewalks knocking on doors. They seemed to be moving in groups of two, flashlights cutting through the sheets of falling rain. Every single one looked miserable and wet, and a few gave them envious stares as they cruised by under the (barely there) protection of the cart’s roof. Keo just hoped he had the gun held low enough that the others couldn’t see where it was pointed.

“Turn here,” Keo said when they finally reached their destination.

Grant turned the cart up onto the driveway and parked out in the open. Keo took a brief second to look around him—a pair of soldiers down the street, about five houses down; two more on the opposite side further up the road. The two behind him were the problem, but they were moving slowly, the combination of the weather and the need to search every room of every house before moving on taking up most of their time. No doubt the warmth of the houses compared to the bone-soaking rain outside convinced them to make all those searches go slower, too.

He hoped, anyway.

Keo pulled off Grant’s M4 rifle and shoved the Glock into his front waistband, then climbed out of the golf cart. “Get out.”

Grant did and was soon hopping from foot to foot, arms folded across his chest as rain ran down his head and uniform. His teeth started chattering almost right away.

“Don’t be such a girl; it’s not that cold,” Keo said.

He nodded toward the door and Grant moved toward it obediently, asking, “Where are we?”

“Shut up and move.”

“You’re not going to get away with this.”

“You know what a bullet tastes like, Grant?”

Grant shook his head. “No…”

“If you don’t want to find out, keep your mouth shut unless I speak to you.
Comprende?
”

The soldier swallowed and kept moving. Keo followed him, only allowing himself to shiver and his teeth to chatter when Grant wasn’t looking.

Christ, it was freezing cold. And it was only going to get worse as the night dragged on. He wondered how long it was going to take the neighborhood to be completely flooded. Hopefully Steve had paid attention to the sewers so the water would have someplace to go when that did happen.

Grant was waiting at the front door, trembling underneath a pair of small solar-powered LED lights. Keo leaned across him and knocked on the slab of wood. He could only see pitch blackness through the side security windows, but soon a lamp turned on before moving across the foyer toward them.

“Not a fucking word,” Keo said to Grant.

Grant nodded. Or shivered. Keo liked to think he was afraid and not just freezing.

The door opened and a man in his thirties, wearing thin-rimmed glasses, looked out at them. He was wearing slacks and a white T-shirt and used the lamp in his hand to illuminate Grant’s face before moving over to Keo’s.

He lingered a bit on Keo—or maybe just on the scars.

“Yes?” he finally said.

“Jay?” Keo asked.

“Yes. Do I know you?”

“No.”

Keo nudged Grant in the back and the soldier stepped anxiously inside the house, glad to be out of the cold night. Jay looked conflicted, and for a moment Keo thought he might fight back, but instead he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and stepped aside to let them in.

Grant sighed audibly as they were immediately embraced by the warmth of the house. It might not have air conditioning or heating anymore, but a well-insulated building still offered more than decent protection against the climate, especially one that was currently being rocked by a thunderstorm.

Keo closed the door behind them, grateful for the sudden soothing silence, with only the distant
pak-pak-pak
against the rooftop to remind him what was going on out there. “Where’s Gillian?” he asked.

“She’s asleep,” Jay said.

“It’s barely six in the evening.”

“She…had a long day.”

Jay was a terrible liar. What’s worse, he probably knew it but couldn’t do anything about it. He was either a very decent guy not used to lying, or an asshole. Keo wanted to believe it was the latter, but chances were pretty good it was probably the former.

Just my luck.

“What’s this about?” Jay asked.

“Gillian!” Keo shouted.

“I told you, she’s asleep,” Jay started to say.

“Shut up, Jay.”

The man looked as if he might argue, but like last time, decided to back down instead.

Grant, standing between them, looked back and forth, clearly picking up on the extra “something” going on between them. Or, at least, coming from Keo. Smartly, though, he kept his mouth shut.

“Gillian!” Keo shouted again.

He heard footsteps coming down the stairs before Gillian finally appeared in a nightgown, which was supposed to confirm Jay’s statement that she had been sleeping. He didn’t buy it. Keo didn’t need to ask her, because he could see it on her face.

“Keo,” she said softly, genuinely surprised to see him there.

“Grant and I were just tooling around in his cool golf cart and decided to see how you were doing,” he said.

She gave him a confused look.

“Joke,” he said.

“Oh.”

Jay hurried over and stood next to her. “What’s this about?” he asked again.

Keo locked the door behind them. “They’re coming,” he said, directing everything at Gillian and ignoring Jay.

“Who?” Gillian said.

“The soldiers. They’re searching every house in town.”

“What?” Jay said, alarmed. “Why are they doing that?”

“Stop fucking around. There’s no time for that. Right, Gillian?”

She didn’t answer.

“Right?”
he said again.

She sighed. “Right.”

“Where are they?”

“Upstairs.”

“Gillian,” Jay said.

“It’s okay, Jay,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “He knows already. Keo’s a smart guy.”

Not that smart, or I would have been here earlier before he knocked you up,
Keo thought about saying, but didn’t.

Jay looked over at him, as if to say,
“Is he?”

“Just enough to get in trouble,” Keo said.

“How long do we have?” Gillian asked.

“It’s probably going to take them about thirty minutes to get here. Maybe more, maybe less. How secure are they?”

Gillian thought about it. Jay, next to her, looked physically pained.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not very. We didn’t expect a house-to-house search.”

Keo put a hand on Grant’s shirt collar and dragged him forward. “I need someplace to put him.”

“Jay can help with that,” Gillian said.

Keo gave her a disbelieving look.

“He can keep him from running off,” Gillian said. Then to Jay, “Go get your little black bag, honey.”

“Why?” Jay asked.

“Trust me,” she said, before looking back at Keo and adding, “And you can trust Keo. We’re going to need his help to survive tonight.”

“How did you
know she’d be here?” Gillian asked as she led him up the stairs.

They were moving much slower than they really had to, not that Keo was complaining. Despite everything, being this close to her, smelling her, was still preferable to not seeing her again.

“I took a stab in the dark,” he said. “She’s stuck behind enemy lines at night and she can’t leave the safety of the town. Where would she go? There’s only one person here who she calls a friend. You. There was also her accomplice, but I took a chance that they burned their cover when they rescued her.”

“That’s a big chance.”

“It was fifty-fifty. I’d take those odds any day of the week and twice on Wednesdays.”

“Wednesdays?”

“I don’t like Sundays.”

She smiled, but it was gone quickly, replaced by the very determined Gillian he remembered from the days and nights of trying to survive after The Purge. “She’s bad off, Keo. I almost didn’t recognize her when Dave brought her here.”

Ah. Dave. The cafeteria man.

“Jay almost fainted at the sight,” Gillian continued.

“I thought he was a doctor.”

“He is, but he’s never seen someone get beaten that badly. It’s really bad.”

“I know. I saw her earlier.”

“You saw her earlier?”

“They were torturing her at the marina.”

“Jesus. Why didn’t you—”

“Save her? I did. Steve would have killed her. I spun him a story and he believed me. Then Dave had to go and jump the gun. She would have been fine after a few days.”

“A few weeks, maybe.”

“Or a few weeks. The point is, she would have been fine. She knew what I was doing and she was playing along. Your husband’s a doctor. Did he give her anything?”

Gillian sighed. “He’s not my husband.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe live-in lover.”

“Give it a rest. Things are difficult enough without you popping back into my life.”

“My mistake. I only spent the last six months fighting everyone in the world to get to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.”

She stopped on the second floor and glared at him. She dropped her voice slightly when she said, “It was hard on me, too. It still is. It’s hard for everyone, okay? You, me, Jay…”

“But he’s the one you’re with. It can’t be that hard on him.”

“I…”

He put a hand on her belly. Four months, and it already looked bigger than a medicine ball. He didn’t want to imagine what she’d be like in four more months. It would be massive and impossible for him to ignore even if he wanted to. All those nights and weeks and months wondering if she was alive, imagining different scenarios about their reunion…

He felt like a two-time chump just thinking about it.

“Your hand’s cold,” she said.

“I’ve been out in the rain.”

“You’re going to catch a cold.”

“I’ll live.” He looked up, seeking out her eyes. “Four months. If you’d just waited a little longer…”

She looked down at his hand, circling her belly over the nightgown. She placed her hand over his and squeezed. “I know.”

“How?”

“How?” she repeated.

“You know what I mean.”

She didn’t answer right away.

“Gillian…”

“It just happened. It sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true. I was one of his helpers and I probably saw him more than anyone in town, including Jordan. One night I was depressed and thinking about…everything. I used to do that a lot, you know. Every face I saw, I wanted it to be you. Every time someone new came through Processing, I wanted them to be you. I thought you were dead, Keo. I tried to be positive, but every day it got harder. And he was lonely, too, and I guess we just thought it would be okay if we weren’t both lonely for one night.”

“Jordan didn’t know?”

“No. I worked in Medical and she was in Agriculture.”

“Do you love him?”

The question blurted out of him. He didn’t know where it came from, and he regretted asking as soon as it left his mouth. Not because it was something he didn’t want to ask, but because it was something he didn’t want to know the answer to.

She didn’t say anything right away, and the wide-open second floor seemed entirely too large. Although she was standing right in front of him and he could feel her belly pressing against the palm of his hand, she was more distant now than she had been in all those days and nights he thought about her, dreamed of her, and rehearsed their reunion over and over again.

Four fucking months.

“No,” she said finally. “He’s a good man, Keo.” She looked up at him. “But I can never love him the way I love you.”