The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (35 page)

It was only thanks to the returning darkness once the lightning disappeared that he was able to push down the overpowering need to run and hide. He couldn’t see them anymore and that somehow made it better, even though he knew they were still out there watching his every movement.

He forced himself to move again, crouched, and rolled the dead soldier into the water, then walked the brief distance over to the first slip. The boat inside was a twenty-footer with a single motor in the back, thin and sleek with a T-overhead canvas. It didn’t look nearly powerful enough to outrun most of the boats tied up around him, but he didn’t need a fast vessel right now; he just needed one that would run. The currents would make up for any speed deficiencies.

He hurried back to the same metal box in front of the docks, the one that housed all of the keys to the boats. It was still unlocked and inside were the keys, designated by slip numbers. He found the one he needed and pocketed it and slammed the lid shut—

He didn’t hear the gunshot, but he felt it
buzz
past his head just before the bullet
pinged!
against the metal box, leaving behind a large dent.

Keo spun around, quickly tracing the trajectory of the bullet back to—

The water tower.

If it wasn’t for bad luck…

He would have unslung the M4 and fired back if he thought it would do any good. But it wouldn’t have, because the tower was too far away and he would be essentially shooting into the darkness, because although he could just barely make out the rocket-shaped structure, he had absolutely no clue where the shooter was.

Buzz!
as a second bullet passed over his head and disappeared into the parking lot behind him.

Just as he had predicted, shooting in this condition was hit and miss, and right now, thank God it was two in the miss column and none in the first. It wasn’t just the distance and the suffocating darkness, it was also the wind and the cold adding to the difficulty scale.

The problem was, although the first bullet had nearly taken Keo’s head off and the second had gone long, it was only a matter of time before the sniper adjusted and found just the right distance. Either that, or until he radioed—

Someone opened fire with an M4 behind him, and he turned just in time to see a figure at the front gate firing—
but
not at him.
The man was shooting at the group of office buildings across the marina, the muzzle flashing, lighting up the guard booth nearby with every pull of the trigger.

Dave.

A man running out of Marina 1 stumbled and fell, his body illuminated by bright lights from inside. Other figures were moving visibly on the other side of windows, scrambling for cover as glass around them exploded from Dave’s barrage.

Keo started lifting his rifle to help Dave out when another bullet slammed into the key box inches from his head—
ping!
—and ricocheted into the pavement.

He scrambled away from the box, hoping that taking himself away from the stationary object would make him a harder target to reacquire. Then again, if the guy had some kind of night-vision-capable scope, than it probably didn’t matter how far Keo moved—

Buzz!
as another round hit the parking lot a foot to the right of him, spraying water and concrete chunks on impact.

Keo would have gotten up and ran away if he had the time, but he didn’t. Men were pouring out of the offices across the marina, and Dave had stopped firing. Either he had run out of bullets and was changing magazines, or something else had happened. Keo flicked the fire selector to burst fire and unleashed half of his rifle’s magazine into the source of light across the parking lot.

He wasn’t trying to hit any specific target, but simply firing at where the lights were the brightest, which at the moment was the single wide-open door that a pair of figures were rushing out of. The distance was fifty meters, and it was a little hard to miss when you were just shooting into the only source of light in, at that moment, the entire world.

His aim was true enough that both men fell out of the door and didn’t get back up.

Keo spotted a tall silhouette behind one of the broken windows, looking out, and he put another burst in that direction. The man ducked his head just in time, and two others behind him scrambled for cover behind a desk.

He was waiting for more soldiers to come out of the other offices, but the windows behind those remained blackened. Which meant all the soldiers had, for whatever reason, congregated in one place. That was good for him and Dave.

That is, if Dave was even still alive.

He was standing up, looking at the gate to make sure Dave was still there, and at the same time realizing that he had stayed at the same spot for way too long when instead of a buzzing sound, there was instead a sudden sting and his right leg buckled slightly under him. Keo knew what had happened before he saw the blood pour out of the right side of his thigh and flood down the parking lot along with the rain, as if drawn irresistibly to the river.

He pushed himself back up, turned around, flicked the fire selector on his rifle to semi-auto, and squeezed off everything he had left in the magazine at the water tower. He aimed for the largest target—the barely visible tip—while knowing full well he wasn’t going to hit anyone from this distance, but hoping he did just enough to distract the guy. He imagined he could hear the
ping! ping!
of his bullets bouncing off the metal tower, but of course that was impossible given the pounding rainstorm around him.

He moved left while shooting, angling back toward the docks. Keo sent off his last round and dropped the magazine and slammed in a new one, turning around almost simultaneously as two men in the office opened fire—except not at him. Maybe they couldn’t see him very well, but they certainly had no trouble seeing the golf cart as it rumbled slowly
(Christ, that thing is slow)
across the parking lot.

Keo switched his fire over to the office, again using the lights as his target finder. He stitched the two rectangle-shaped windows, forcing the two figures firing out of them to stop shooting and duck for cover.

He was still shooting when Keo heard the
buzz!
as the bullet tore through the left sleeve of his raincoat and took away a chunk of his flesh underneath. Blood poured out, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as when he had gotten hit in the thigh. Maybe it was the cold numbing his flesh or the fact that he knew stopping to dress his injuries now meant death, but Keo managed to grit his teeth through the shoulder wound and turned around just as Dave appeared, the golf cart flying in his direction like an out-of-control lumbering beast.

“Take the first boat!” Keo shouted.
“Go go go!”

Dave slammed on the brake and climbed out of the golf cart as Keo turned around and took a step sideways and squeezed off a round at the water tower. He took another step and fired again, and kept repeating the process until he heard Dave running past him, gasping for breath as he went.

Keo glanced back in time to see Dave make the docks and run up it toward the twenty-footer, Jordan’s body a big black unmoving clump draped over his shoulder.

He glanced back at Marina 1. Lights poured out of the windows and the open door, but he couldn’t detect any signs of movement. Maybe they had finally had enough and didn’t think it was worth it to get their heads blown off—

Buzz!
as another bullet came within an inch of Keo’s right ear.

Sonofa
bitch.

He ran after Dave and Jordan, grabbing the third and final magazine from his pouch as he did so. A hole appeared in the plank in front of him, splintering wood, as the sniper fired again. The bullet disappeared into the water below, and Keo ran past the newly created hole without wasting a precious half-second contemplating the near-miss. His entire night had been a series of near-misses. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had two holes in him as proof of that.

Dave had already climbed into the boat and placed Jordan’s body across a long bench in the back while scrambling to one of the two lines keeping the boat in place. Dave glanced up as Keo ran over. “The key!” he shouted.

“I got it!” Keo shouted back.

He reached into his raincoat pocket and fisted the key. He would have tossed it to Dave, but he didn’t have any faith in either one of them making the exchange in this weather. So he ran the whole distance and leaned over and handed it to Dave instead, then ran back to unwind the bowline.

All of that took three precious seconds, enough time for the sniper to reacquire them, and there was a sharp
ping!
as a bullet drilled into the portside of the boat. Dave either didn’t see or hear the impact, or he was too focused on putting the key in the ignition to do anything about being shot at. The boat’s motor roared to life at about the same time Keo got the line free and tossed it into the back.

That was also when he heard the familiar
clop-clop-clop
of horse hooves and looked back and saw the elongated, shadowy forms of men on horseback coming through the marina gate. While the distance and darkness made making out their exact numbers impossible, he managed to distinguish three, maybe five forms out of the moving blob, though he had no illusions that that was all of them.

“Come on!” Dave shouted behind him.

Keo hopped into the boat just as something
buzzed!
past his head and hit the water a few meters off starboard. He pretended it was a fly instead of thinking about how close he had just come to having his brains splattered in the river.

Think positive!

He almost laughed as he landed in the back of the boat next to Jordan’s swaddled form resting on the bench to his right. Dave was already reversing out of the slip, having also seen the horsemen coming in their direction, the
clop-clop-clop
of hooves somehow managing to pierce through the rain’s stranglehold on sounds.

Then
boom!
and Keo cursed.

Three to five? If only he was that lucky. There had to be at least
a dozen
of them, men in wet raincoats, pulling up as they reached the end of the parking lot and began unslinging their rifles. They were almost
right in front of him
, so close that he could see mists flooding out of the nostrils of their mounts as the animals reared to a stop.

Keo opened fire into the marina, and one man fell off his horse just before the lightning vanished and darkness swallowed the world up again, the soldiers returning to their formerly indistinguishable black forms.

He pulled the trigger again and again, even as Dave spun the steering wheel and Keo had to turn around in order to keep shooting into the parking lot. He was still firing while simultaneously gritting his teeth in anticipation of return fire. The sniper had also either stopped shooting, or his shots were going wide and Keo couldn’t hear it over the pouring rain and his own gunshots.

At first Keo thought the lack of return fire from the marina was because he was dropping the horsemen, but that couldn’t have been it. Without any lights in the parking lot and his vision hindered badly by the rain, all he could see were indecipherable shapes moving in front of him as he waited for the inevitable.

Because he knew it was coming—a fusillade of lead that he or Dave had no hopes of surviving. They were still backing away from the docks, trying to reach a part of the river where they could use the motor and were, for all intents and purposes, sitting ducks for a good ten, twenty seconds.

“Get down!” he shouted when it finally came—the
pop-pop-pop
of automatic rifle fire that wasn’t his, muzzle flashes lighting up the wide open spaces in front of him.

Except the horsemen weren’t shooting at him or Dave or Jordan.

What the hell?

Maybe it had something to do with the dark shape moving between the horses, inciting the animals to let out loud furious whines and scramble about the wet concrete pavement. The thing was fast, and something—a long coat?—was fluttering around it, visible for brief half-seconds against the staccato bursts of gunfire as it moved through the throng of men and beasts.

Any hopes Keo had of seeing details were rendered impossible by the night and rain. The figure in the long coat was on the ground, then it was in the air, then it was on the ground again. It was moving so fast Keo could barely keep up with it. He didn’t know when he stopped shooting, but time seemed to slow down as he stood there and watched the figure grabbing men off their horses and throwing them across the parking lot.

Something sailed through the air, and Keo instinctively ducked even though he didn’t have to. A black-clad soldier, hands and feet flailing, hit the river just five feet off the starboard and was sucked under.

Then the boat’s stern dipped slightly, and a motorized roar shattered the shrill wind and falling rain. Keo didn’t know when Dave had turned them around, but suddenly they were blasting downriver and leaving the docks behind.

Keo hurried to the stern and looked back toward the marina as gunshots continued to ring out and muzzle flashes lit up the parking lot again and again and again. He waited for bullets to
zip
past his head or punch into the hull of the twenty-footer, but none of those things happened. The soldiers on horseback—and some on the ground now—were firing at something among them. Something that wasn’t him or Dave or Jordan. That same
something
that Keo had seen earlier, moving with a ferocity he didn’t know was possible.

Slowly, the flashes began to disappear one by one until they had ceased completely. There was a brief pause before someone screamed. A shrill cry, dripping with fear instead of pain, and it burrowed its way through the cold and night and rain and into Keo’s gut.

The docks were still fading fast behind him when Keo thought he saw something that shouldn’t have been there, that shouldn’t have been possible.

Eyes.

Blue fucking eyes.

They were looking after him, the twin orbs pulsating against the rain and darkness. He shouldn’t have been able to see them through the night and distance, but there was something vibrant about them, full of life, and they drew him in like lighthouse beacons.