The Walls of Lemuria (27 page)

Keo yanked the chains for the second time and sunlight flooded the hallway and caught Gavin in the narrow passage. Like with Earl and Bowe an hour earlier, Gavin attempted to flee back into the room, but sunlight splashed across its back and the creature turned to ash. A cloud of remains appeared out of thin air, then the clatter of bones crumpling to the floor.

Norris gave Keo a suspicious look across the room as he picked himself up from the floor. “You waited a little long that time, kid. It almost had me.”

“You’re imagining things,” Keo said, grinning back at him.

*

They buried Gavin’s
bones in the woods next to Earl’s and Bowe’s, using shovels from the shack. Keo and Norris dug the graves and settled the remains into the holes, while Levy stayed back at the house with Gillian and the girls to clean out the two rooms.

Gavin’s room was covered in sticky dry blood and bullet holes, but Levy’s required less work. In truth, Gillian and Rachel were probably doing most of the work back at the house. Everyone had agreed without actually saying anything that Levy should do as little as possible. The guy had already lost too much. Asking him to clean up after his friends would have been cruel.

When they were finished, Keo and Norris stood over the graves—small bumps in the earth that would, in a year or so, be consumed by the rest of the woods—and sucked in the morning air. He hadn’t realized the true meaning of fresh air until he had spent two hours inside a closed house with the dead remains of three bloodsuckers.

“We can do it,” Norris said after a while.

“What’s that?”

“Stay here.” Norris glanced around at their peaceful surroundings. “The house, the generator, the supplies in the basement, and the fish in the river out back. We could stay here indefinitely. Or at least until things get back to normal.”

“You still think things will get back to normal, old timer?”

“Everyone needs hope, kid. It’s a big planet. I can’t believe everyone’s gone except for us.”

“We know for a fact not everyone’s gone. The gas station, remember?”

Norris grunted. “I remember every time I see the Durango. You think they’re around here somewhere? Maybe even looking for us still?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “That’s the problem. I wish I knew, and I don’t.”

Who the hell were those guys?

A pair of hummingbirds flickered across the sky above him, drawing Keo’s attention. Somehow, knowing the birds were still around gave him some level of comfort. If they could survive the end of the world…

“Let’s head back,” Keo said. “I’m hungry.”

“That junk food isn’t going to last long,” Norris said. “We might as well eat as much as we can now. Pig out, get fat, die of high blood pressure and diabetes. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Keo chuckled. “Yeah. Old-fashioned natural death, huh?”

“That’s the dream, kid,” Norris grinned back.

As they walked through the woods back toward the house, Keo found himself stealing a glance around them, listening for sounds of movement other than their own. He didn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something
(someone)
out there.

Who the hell were those guys?

‡

SUMMERLAND

Life went on
after Earl, Bowe, and Gavin—at least for Keo and the others. They had gotten to know the three men somewhat, but there wasn’t the same familiarity that Levy had. Keo personally liked them enough, especially the older Earl, but it was hard for him to think of Bowe and Gavin as more than just a couple of country kids he met briefly before they left, never to be seen again.

It was different for Levy, of course, but the young man surprised Keo by, if not getting over his loss, then rising above it. He hadn’t expected that kind of resilience from the kid, but then, Keo accepted the possibility that he might have misjudged him. A day was hardly enough to get to know someone, especially considering all the emotions that Levy had been forced to endure in just twenty-four hours.

The only remaining survivor of Earl’s group showed them the surrounding area in the beginning, pointing out the danger spots they had stumbled across in the first few days while scavenging for supplies. After that, Levy spent most of his time hunting in the woods, coming back with the occasional bird or squirrel, but even those were getting harder to find. It wasn’t just the land-based animals that were disappearing, as it turned out.

They raided as many houses around the area they were comfortable with, but for every house they entered, they left alone two. Sunlight was their friend, but sunlight could only go so far into a house even after they knocked down all the doors and windows. Most of the time they steered clear of the bigger homes. The creatures, they found, tended to congregate in large areas. Two-story houses were usually filled with them, especially on the second floor.

The stores were equally dangerous, and they spent most of their time looking through the front lobbies, grabbing all the impulse buys along the cash registers. Clothing was plentiful, and by the end of the first week they had enough of a wardrobe to last for years, negating further need for the girls to raid Rachel’s luggage. After that, they concentrated on emergency supplies—non-perishables, canned goods, and batteries. They grabbed anything they thought they could use, either now or later. The basement back at the house filled up quickly as a result.

In the back of his mind, Keo knew the reason he and Norris kept going out wasn’t because they needed supplies. They had plenty, and although you could never have too much these days, they weren’t the type comfortable with sitting around the house. Even after he retired, Norris was restless, which had resulted in his cross-country road trip. Keo had never thought about what he would do past his thirtieth birthday. The fact that he was still alive, with a year still to go, was a miracle.

Each time they went out, they had to go further from the house, and Keo was always wary of going too far north, which would lead them back to the interstate. So they went south instead, sometimes extending east and west, but staying mostly off the main highway that connected to Corden nearby. The smaller the roads and more isolated the homes, he found, yielded the best opportunities. Like with the cabin back at the RV park, the creatures seemed to ignore far-flung locations, which made some sense.

They feed on humans. Of course there would be more of them where humans are.

Which meant the cities, of which there weren’t a lot of out here. Earl’s house, as far as Keo knew, was the only occupied home for miles in every direction.

They also traded up their vehicles, swapping Jake’s bullet-riddled Chevy for a year-old Dodge Ram 1500 and Rachel’s equally damaged SUV for an off-road four-door Jeep Wrangler. They stumbled across a Nissan Frontier about five kilometers from the house and added it to their collection.

Over the next few weeks, they taught Gillian and Rachel how to handle a weapon and shoot. The women were introduced to the G42, a smaller version of the Glock he and Norris were using. They didn’t become Annie Oakley overnight, but they got good enough with the .380 caliber handguns that Keo felt comfortable giving them gun belts.

One week became two, and two became a month.

The creatures returned night after night, but they had stopped trying to break their way in. Not that there was much left for them to break. The windows remained broken from that first night and they had never bothered to fix them. They tried putting mesh screens in place of the broken glass, but the creatures kept destroying them, so they stopped doing that, too. There was no point anyway, with the burglar bars on the outside and the reinforced barricades inside. Closing every window and door an hour before nightfall became everyone’s job, and they took it seriously.

Even in the daylight, the bloodsuckers’ continued presence around the house was everywhere he looked. At night, all he had to do to was peer out the window if he forgot. They hid in the darkness of the woods, watching him back like stone sentries. And they could afford to wait because the night was theirs. He didn’t even know if they could grow old and die. Did age still matter when they could exist without half of their heads?

The girls spent their nights reading books and magazines collected from supply runs, while Keo and the men either played cards or joined the others with board games. Rachel also talked about her family’s home on Santa Marie Island, where she and Christine had been heading before their trip was cut short by the end of the world.

“It’s beautiful there,” Rachel said wistfully. “The most gorgeous place on Earth. Except during hurricane season, I mean, but you can usually ride those out unless it’s a really bad one, and those are pretty rare.”

“Where is it, exactly?” Keo asked.

“It’s within walking distance from the main Galveston Island. You need a ferry to get there from land, unless you have a boat.”

“Is it a big place?” Gillian asked. “I’ve never been outside of Louisiana.”

“It’s about five miles long, give or take,” Rachel said. She looked over at her daughter with some regret. “Christine could be on the beach right now if I hadn’t insisted we drive through every state in the union.”

“They might be there, too,” Keo said.

“Who?”

“The bloodsuckers.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Way to be a buzzkill, kid,” Norris snorted.

Keo sighed. “I’m sorry, Rachel.”

“No, you’re probably right.” She gave him a pursed smile. “It would be nice to find out, though. Maybe my family is still there…”

“I could imagine spending the rest of my life on a beach,” Gillian said. She smiled at Keo. “What about you?”

“As long as you’re there,” Keo said.

“Oh, barf,” Lotte said.

The girls laughed, and Norris and Levy chuckled.

Keo smiled, but he looked across at Gillian. She had stopped laughing long enough to meet his gaze before returning his smile.

*

“We’re all going
to die,” Gillian said the next morning.

She hadn’t said a word before then, ever since they left the house. Keo usually walked the woods in the early mornings by himself. He always used different routes, having memorized almost every inch of the immediate area by the first month. The familiarity with their surroundings allowed him to recognize broken tree branches that weren’t there the morning before, or a patch of ground that looked softer this morning because of heavy foot traffic from the previous night.

They’re around. They’re always around. Even when they don’t attack the house, they’re out here.

Keo still carried the MP5SD and Glock .45, and had added a Ka-Bar knife he had found in the basement. It was a good knife. Sharp as hell and well-balanced. He had one of the two-way radios they used to keep in constant communication when someone left the house clipped to his left hip. Levy and his friends had liberated a half dozen of them from a Radio Shack in Corden before they left town after the first night.

This morning, brittle leaves and twigs snapped loudly under Gillian as she walked beside him. The natural silence was usually one of the reasons why he came out here alone, though he found that he didn’t mind all the noises she was making. Not too much, anyway. He decided to concentrate on enjoying her company instead, the way she smelled.