The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (9 page)

Keo opened his
eyes to large doses of sunlight in his face and Steve sitting next to Gene on the sofa across the room. They looked like they were talking and had been for some time. Steve’s soldiers were already outside the house, moving around on the lawn. The one with the M32, Horace, was on the sidewalk beyond.

“You did the right thing,” Steve was saying to Gene. “You’ll find out when we get there that all this running around was a waste of time.”

“And I can leave anytime?” Gene asked.

“Absolutely, but you won’t want to once you see what’s there.”

Gene nodded, though he didn’t look as if he quite believed Steve, but was too smart to say so if he did have any doubts.

“Morning,” Jack said, coming out of the kitchen with an open can of SPAM. He was shoveling large chunks of it into his mouth and talking at the same time. “You said you wanted to visit T18. This is your lucky day, sport, because that’s exactly where you’re going. Excited?”

“I can barely contain myself,” Keo said.

Jack chuckled.

“Let’s get going,” Steve said. He stood up before fixing Keo with a hard stare. “One wrong move, and you’re a dead man. Do we understand each other?”

“Crystal.”

“Good man.” He turned around and called through the broken windows, “Donovan, Taylor. Come get our guest of honor.” Then to Gene, “Come on, son. Time to go home.”

Gene nodded mutely, the kid who had fought off the soldiers these last few months seemingly MIA after last night. Keo couldn’t really blame him. He’d been in his share of scrapes, but getting gassed in a bathroom, well, that was something he didn’t want to go through again if he could help it.

Donovan and Taylor came back inside and pulled Keo up from the floor. He paid very close attention to Donovan, who had his MP5SD and pack slung over his back.

“Go for it, you know you want to,” Taylor said, grinning knowingly at him.

Keo smiled back, but thought,
Damn.

Donovan pulled out an all-black tactical knife from a sheath strapped low to one of his thighs and sliced the zip ties around Keo’s ankle, but left the one around his wrists. Then Taylor gave him a (not so) friendly shove in the back as they led him outside.

If the sun was ridiculously bright before, it was practically blinding as he walked down the driveway. The crisp morning air flooded his lungs, and for a moment Keo almost believed there was nothing wrong with the world. He took a moment to stare at the impressive sight of birds flocking in formation above him. That ended when Taylor gave him another shove in the back, this time with the cold barrel of his rifle.

Steve turned in the street and led the way toward the eastern marina. Horace had taken point, while Jack limped on his two crutches behind him. They were moving slowly, probably for Jack’s sake. Keo let the cool air cleanse the remains of last night’s gas from his face and eyes. What he wouldn’t give for a bottle of water to wash away the rest.

He was very aware of Donovan and Taylor moving step-for-step behind him. They were keeping their distance—Donovan further back than Taylor. He thought about making a run for it every time the narrow spaces between houses popped up to the left and right of him, but whenever he calculated the distance with the time he’d need to make it to safety, the results always came out against him surviving.

“You stopped at Galveston Island on your way over here?” Steve, walking in front of him, asked.

“I was thinking about going back for a visit,” Keo said. “Nice?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons of things to see and do. The seawall in particular. Now that’s engineering.”

“You from around here?”

“Pearland. You know where that is?”

“Nope.”

“Up I-45. Close enough that I spent most of my free weekends down here. I’ve always wanted an oceanside house.”

“So what’s stopping you now? Pick one. Or fifty.”

“You know that old saying, ‘I don’t want to join a club that will have me’? Now that there’s no one around to keep me from taking any house I want, it doesn’t quite have the same cachet. Know what I mean?”

“You a man who worries about cachet, Steve?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I could care less.”

“No?”

“Nope. Give me a gun, a boat, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Steve turned around but continued backpedaling down the street. He smiled at Keo. “And if I don’t?”

“I’ll probably end up killing you.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

He chuckled, though it sounded just a little bit too forced. “One of these days, you’re going to tell me what you used to do for a living. Until then—” he spun back around, “—I’ll have to be satisfied with knowing I can put a bullet in your head any time I feel like it.”

*

They took all
three boats with them, including Keo’s twenty-two-footer. Personally, with the bigger and more powerful vessels the soldiers had arrived in, Keo would have dumped his, but Steve had other plans. Like the one Jack had come in yesterday, Steve’s was an equal-size offshore model with two engines in the back.

Steve had, he told Keo, approached Santa Marie Island last night using trolling motors to escape detection. Just that alone made him much smarter than all the other “soldiers” Keo had met the last few months, including the poor bastards that had assaulted Song Island.

Once they put him inside Steve’s boat, Donovan zip tied his ankles back up and placed him on a bench up front alongside Gene.

“You okay?” Keo asked the kid.

Gene gave him a nervous smile. “Yeah, you?”

“My eyes still sting a little.”

“Mine, too.”

“Can we get some water?” Keo asked Steve, standing behind them at the console.

“No,” Steve said. “Consider it punishment for shooting my little brother in the leg. Now shut up and enjoy the ride.”

Taylor piloted Keo’s twenty-two-footer, while Jack and Horace followed behind them on the second offshore vessel.

They cruised along Galveston Bay for a while before Keo spotted civilization in the distance and what looked like a fairground to the left of a channel. Carnival rides, including a Ferris wheel and a large red round structure, jutted out from behind a long boardwalk next to the bay. He imagined the place teeming with tourists on the weekends, a far cry from the ghost town it had become.

There was always something sad about seeing a once-thriving city abandoned, left to tilt against the wind and the elements. How long would these rides stay up? Maybe another year. Maybe a decade. That would probably depend on their construction, he guessed. That red thing, whatever the hell it was, looked like it could last a few more decades before tumbling back down to earth.

If there was once thriving life to the left of the channel, there wasn’t much on the right side. He glimpsed warehouses, businesses, and overgrown fields of grass spread across undeveloped land. The juxtaposition of the two areas was stunning, and Keo found himself drawn back to the structures along the boardwalk to his left. Abandoned or not, at least there was a lot to look at over there.

They cruised through the channel, passing silent buildings and sun-bleached parking lots still filled with vehicles. It wasn’t until they went underneath a highway that stretched across the channel that they finally saw a shipyard. It covered a huge chunk of the water and was spread out to both sides. The multitude of open slips told him hundreds of boats had once called this place home. Where were all those boats now? At the bottom of the bay, probably. Maybe the vessel he was riding in now was one of the lucky few survivors.

After the shipyard, it became a series of turns and empty houses and buildings and more (though much smaller) docks with empty slips. Keo lost track of how many times they eased around a bend, and each time he thought they might have reached their destination, they kept going. The path was wide enough that Donovan felt at ease keeping their boat moving at a reasonable speed. At this point, the soldiers had probably traversed this same area so many times it would have been second nature to them by now. To Keo, one stretch of water and empty parking lots and the wooded areas that surrounded them looked like the dozen others they had passed in the last hour. He stopped trying to make sense of his scenery after a while.

One thing was certain: They were getting further inland.

Donovan didn’t slow down until they had slipped under a large highway that ran west to east. Signs told him it was Interstate 45, with Galveston back east and Houston, along with the rest of Texas, to the west. Once they went under the I-45, the river began narrowing and thick patches of woods sprouted up to both sides of them.

Keo knew they were getting close to their destination when he started seeing men in black uniforms moving among the trees to their right. Sentries. They were all very well-armed, and a few of them waved to the boats. Donovan and Steve waved back.

Soon, the soldiers gave way to civilians along the riverbanks. Like the soldiers, they were concentrated only on the right side. A dozen or so women were washing clothes against the rocks while half-naked kids jumped into the water, which had to be cold given the falling temperature. Keo was reminded of documentaries about frontier times, before washing machines and dryers were invented.

The people waved excitedly at them as they passed by. He had to look long and hard before he could conclude that they either wanted to be here, or they were really good actors.

“What are they doing?” Gene asked, straining to see the women—and they were almost all women, except for the children—off the boat’s starboard.

“Washing clothes,” Keo said.

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“That’s how people used to wash clothes before washing machines.”

“No, not that,” Gene said. “Her.”

He was pointing at a young woman standing further up on the bank holding a laundry basket and talking to a couple of older women as they scrubbed clothes against some boulders. She had a noticeable belly, but it wasn’t because she was fat.

She was pregnant.

Now that he had seen one, it was easier to spot others. Two more women who also looked pregnant, though not nearly as far along as the first one.

He thought about Carrie and Lorelei; the girls had fled one of the collaborator towns and had ended up at Song Island with him.

“It’s not the sex,”
Carrie had told him.
“It’s what happens afterward. With the babies. You understand, right? Why we couldn’t stay? Why we ran?”

Because the babies didn’t belong to the women who would give birth to them; they would belong to the ghouls, to continuing the cycle of humans supplying blood to the creatures for years, decades, and generations to come. That was the foundation of an “agreement,” the why and how towns like T18 existed in the first place, because the people here—the women washing clothes by hand, the children swimming in the river—had come voluntarily. They had agreed. Sanctuary and safety, in exchange for human slavery.

Keo wasn’t entirely sure what he was feeling. He had heard the stories and believed them, but to actually see it in person was an entirely different universe. Part of him didn’t blame them for choosing this path, but the other part, the one that had kept him alive this last year, felt a bit sick to his stomach.

He glanced back at Steve, standing next to Donovan behind the center console. “Why am I here?” he asked, shouting over the roar of the double motors to be heard.

Steve didn’t answer, and for a moment Keo thought the man hadn’t heard him. He seemed preoccupied with waving back to a couple of kids that were chasing after the boat along the banks, as if Steve were some kind of returning hero.

“Why am I here?” Keo asked again, shouting louder this time.

“You’ll find out,” Steve shouted back.

“I’d like to know now.”

“I bet you would, but you’ll find out when I decide you can find out. And not a moment sooner.”

“They look so happy,” Gene said next to him. He looked mesmerized by the sight of the women and children. “Are they really that happy? Is this real?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

“They look so happy,” Gene said again.

Don’t be fooled,
Keo was going to tell the kid, when he caught a glimpse of a figure among the civilians on the riverbanks.

A woman, and something about her seized his attention. It helped that she was standing up just as their boat passed, and she was clearly taller than the other women around her, which made her stick out even further.

Keo shot up from the bench, wobbly on his feet because of his zip-tied ankles, and looked back at her until they locked eyes over the river.

She was moving up the riverbanks, trying to keep up with them, but there were just too many people in her way, and a few seconds later she disappeared behind some tall trees.

After all this time, all these months and uncertainty, there she was, still as breathtakingly beautiful as the day he sent her away on Mark’s boat, hoping to save her life.

Gillian.

They had taken
over a small city called Wilmont and turned it into T18. The place was separated into two parts, with a residential district and a commercial area connected by a wide steel bridge further up the river. As far as Keo could tell, the left side of Wilmont was abandoned, with the civilians (and Steve’s men) congregating entirely on the right side.