The Walls of Lemuria (17 page)

“Roger that,” Norris said.

Soon, Keo was down to fifty miles per hour. He wasn’t comfortable enough to go any lower, but he was also wary of going too much faster. There hadn’t been a lot of debris or abandoned vehicles for the last few miles, but he had seen plenty of evidence that they existed around Bentley. All he needed was to hit a piece of metal on the road going this speed and they would be tumbling down the highway instead of driving up it.

“What now?” Norris said through the radio.

Keo glanced up at the rearview mirror, expecting to see a vehicle coming up the road behind Norris. There wasn’t any, but then again, they had gotten a pretty good jump on the shooters.

How did they get to the gas station in the first place? They didn’t walk there…

He slowed down some more.

The radio squawked, and Norris said, “What’s going on? Why are you slowing down?”

“We need to stop for a minute,” Keo said.

“What?” Gillian said. She was staring wide-eyed at him. “Why are we stopping? They’re back there, Keo! What if they’re chasing us?”

“Exactly. We need to find out.”

“How?”

Keo stopped the Chevy in the middle of the road and turned off the engine.

“Stay here,” he said to Gillian before climbing outside.

He jogged up the road to the Durango, parked a few meters away. Norris flashed Keo a questioning look through the bullet-riddled windshield. Rachel was, too. Keo couldn’t see Christine or Lotte in the backseat.

All four of the SUV’s door windows were gone and there were holes across Norris’s driver side door. For the life of him, Keo couldn’t figure out how Norris was still alive after the battering his vehicle had taken. When he glanced back at the Chevy, though, he guessed Norris probably had the same question about him.

Jesus, how are we still alive?

“What’s going on?” Norris asked. He swatted at shards of glass still clinging to his window frame.

“Turn off your engine,” Keo said.

Norris hesitated, but did it.

Keo walked past them and up the road slightly. He stopped and listened. For a moment, all he could hear and feel was his own heartbeat. The adrenaline was still pumping overtime through his body, making it hard to concentrate—

There!

Car engines. More than one.

Coming up the road toward them.

Keo ran back to the Durango. “Can you hear them?” he shouted at Norris.

Norris shook his head. “Hear what—” He stopped. “Fuck!”

“Drive drive drive!”

He was still running to the Chevy when Norris fired up the Durango and took off, swerving around the parked truck. Keo quickly lunged back into his vehicle and turned on the engine.

Gillian was staring after the fleeing SUV. “Are they leaving us?”

“No,” Keo said. He slammed on the gas and chased after Norris. “They’re following us.”

“Who?”

“The shooters back at the gas station.”

He glanced at the rearview mirror, but they still hadn’t come into view yet. That was the good news.

“Why are they following us?” Gillian asked, her voice trembling.

To finish the job,
he thought, but said instead, “I don’t know.” He grabbed the radio. “Norris, we need to get off the interstate.”

“Are you crazy?” Norris said through the radio. “We don’t know this place. We’ll get lost without even realizing it.”

“Norris, we can’t lose them on the highway. If they have faster vehicles, they’re going to catch up to us sooner or later. We’re not going to win a gunfight with guys carrying assault rifles.”

Norris didn’t answer right away. After a few seconds, the ex-cop said, “Okay, call it.”

“First exit you see, take it.”

“Roger that,” Norris said, though Keo detected zero traces of enthusiasm in his voice.

Keo didn’t like this idea any better than Norris, but it wasn’t as if they had a choice. He looked up at the rearview mirror again. There was nothing back there, which meant their pursuers were still too far back. If he concentrated hard enough, he thought he could hear them coming, but that was probably just his imagination.

Up ahead, Keo saw the Durango’s remaining rear light come on as Norris slowed the vehicle down. An exit was coming up and the SUV was moving into the right lane to take it.

Keo tapped on the brake and followed, praying to God this was the right move, that they weren’t going to get themselves killed by leaving the highway…

“Who do you
think they were?” Gillian’s voice was still trembling noticeably thirty minutes after the attempted ambush, but at least her hands had stopped shaking. “Why were they trying to kill us?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Could be anyone. For any reason. I don’t know.”

“But why were they shooting at us? Were they soldiers?”

“No, I don’t think so. Looked like guys playing soldiers, though. We were lucky.”

“Lucky?” She gave him a horrified look. “You call this lucky?”

“The guy who fired the first shot was a lousy marksman. If he’d been better, we wouldn’t be having this talk. One of us would be dead. Maybe both.”

“Oh.” She took a moment to digest that. “I still don’t feel very lucky.” She looked at the floor and kicked at the pile of glass scattered down there. “God, how are we even still alive?”

“I told you. We were lucky.”

“I guess you’re right.” She frowned. “I still don’t feel very lucky, though.”

They had turned off Interstate 20 and onto Highway 145 twenty minutes ago before merging onto Highway 146, heading farther south. The Durango had pulled back earlier and let the Chevy take the lead again.

If Keo thought the view from I-20 was trees and green and little else, the two-lane road along 146 was even less thrilling. The only difference was the lack of a strip between the north and southbound lanes. That, and the endless walls of trees to both sides of them were thinner and older, the branches, leaves, and trunks battered brown and dry from too much sunlight and not enough rain.

Every now and then they saw man-made driveways that led to country houses behind large clusters of trees. Sometimes those houses were more visible from the road, even welcoming (at least on the outside). Other times they were too well hidden to see much of what lay in the back, which he guessed was part of the charm of living out here. The last three homes they had pulled into the driveways of had revealed covered windows up front. They had quickly reversed each time and continued on.

The fact was, they were lost. They didn’t know where they were going, and although Gillian still had her map, it didn’t show them houses or buildings or any place that could reasonably be considered a viable shelter. The only good news as far as Keo could tell was that the ambushers hadn’t followed them off the interstate. He was sure they had lost the pursuit once they left I-20, parked half a mile away, and turned off their engines. The sound of vehicles passing by behind them had been all too obvious.

They’re hunting us. Like prey.

Who the hell are these guys?

So they went south off the interstate because they couldn’t go anywhere else. According to Gillian’s map, the road they were on now wouldn’t take them all the way to Fort Damper, though there was a road farther down that would eventually reconnect with highways heading into the city of Corden. That was an option Keo kept at the back of his mind. For now, he was just happy they weren’t being shot at or pursued.

“There’s not a lot out here,” Keo said after a while.

“It’s the country,” she said, as if that should explain everything.

He guessed it did. They were deep in the boondocks now. The sticks. People didn’t come out here unless they were trying to get away. He had seen it in the homes they’d passed. They hadn’t been big homes—most were three, four-bedroom bungalows. There was probably a river or a lake nearby. Fishing spots, maybe.

The radio on the dashboard squawked, and he heard Norris’s voice. “How much longer, kid?”

Keo picked up the radio. “I don’t know. This isn’t exactly my backyard.”

“Well, it’s not mine, either.”

Keo glanced at Gillian, who shook her head back at him. “Don’t look at me. I’ve never been out here before. I’ve always just driven straight to Corden and back on the interstate.”

“Let’s just keep going until we find some place we can stop and rest,” Keo said into the radio.

“We need to find a place soon,” Norris said. “I’m running low on gas.”

“How low?”

“In another hour, we’re gonna be squeezing into that Chevy with you.”

*

They drove past
three more houses, each one located so far from one another that Keo was sure the residents probably had no idea the other existed. Each time they pulled into the driveway, they saw covered windows, and each time Gillian let out a sigh of frustration.

“This is hopeless,” she said.

“We’ll find a place,” Keo said.

She flashed him an annoyed look. “How can you be so damn optimistic after everything we’ve been through?”

“Have you ever been to Mogadishu in the summer?”

“I don’t even know where that is.”

“It’s in Somalia. In the Horn of Africa.”

“Am I supposed to know where the Horn of Africa is? Is that, like, in Africa?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s not fun. Especially when you’re an American. Everyone in that country has an AK-47.”

“What were you doing in Mogadishu?”

“This guy had this thing that the guys I worked for wanted, so they sent me and some people to go get it.”

Gillian stared at him in silence for a moment.

“What?” he said.

“What exactly did you use to do for a living before all of this, Keo?”

“I got things for people.”

“What kind of things?”

He shrugged. “Stuff. And things. It’s always different. Sometimes it’s just to take people places. You know—work.”

She shook her head. “Forget I asked.”

*

Eventually, the girls
in Norris’s vehicle couldn’t stand it anymore. Keo began hunting the side of the road for a place—any place—until he saw an old, rusted sign for an RV park. The road into it was overgrown with grass and there were no indications it had been traveled recently. He pulled into it and drove about 100 meters off the highway until they came to a camping ground next to a river.

The park might have been worth visiting once, but those days were long gone. It was now a junkyard for abandoned vehicles, everything from trucks to bicycles to husks of old mobile homes. The newest piece of junk looked at least a decade old. But while the cars took over one side of the park, there was still the other half left over, with a nice view of the river in the back.

Keo and Norris pulled up next to a couple of picnic benches, both falling apart and beaten by the elements.

Norris climbed out with his shotgun clutched in his hands and scanned the area around them for threats. He looked weary and paranoid at the same time. “No one sits or touches or leans against anything. Understand?”

Gillian had gone over to the SUV, and with Rachel, helped Lotte out of the Durango and back into her wheelchair. They left to do their business, leaving Christine behind. The girl was circling their cars, apparently counting all the holes along the sides, while eating a packet of Ring Dings.

“Jesus, I can’t believe we survived all that,” Norris said, looking at their vehicles.

“We got real lucky,” Keo said.

“You got a good look at those guys?”

“A bit.”

“What did you see?”

“Tactical gear and assault rifles. That’s all I needed to see.”

“Face paint, right? Tell me those guys weren’t black.”

Keo chuckled. “Yeah, face paint.”

“Thank God,” Norris said.

They spent the next twenty minutes going over both cars, making sure there were no leaks in the gas tanks or anywhere else that was vital. The vehicles had, miraculously, escaped pretty intact, save for the broken windows and bullet holes. Everything they needed to keep going (with the exception of the Durango’s dwindling gas supply) was still in one piece.