The Walls of Lemuria (31 page)

“Well?” Jordan said. “Are you going to shoot us now or later?”

“I like this one,” Norris chuckled behind them.

“Oh, shit,” the man said. He was looking over at the fireplace, at two large channel catfish spit roasting over the fire. Both fish were turning black.

Keo slung his weapon. “Let’s feed you first. Then we can talk about who gets to stand where on the firing squad.”

Being invited back
to the house for breakfast after being held at gunpoint was probably not what the three newcomers had expected. It took them a few seconds to absorb the offer, then another few minutes to talk amongst themselves while Keo and Norris waited outside the bungalow. Eventually, they decided they had nothing to lose. Or Jordan decided. If he thought she was the leader when he only heard their voices, he was proven correct when he saw them together.

Afterward, Jordan and her friends, Mark and Jill, followed Keo and Norris back to the house. Keo had already called ahead on the radio, and by the time they arrived, Gillian and the others had the food laid out and waiting for them. Breakfast was MREs and canned goods that Earl and the others had raided from the same pawnshop where they got most of their weapons. There were large crates of the stuff stacked in one corner of the basement.

Jordan tackled a bag of MRE when she wasn’t trying to drink them dry, while Jill and Mark hungrily spooned up fruits dripping with artificial syrup out of cans. All three looked as if they hadn’t eaten anything in days, which prompted Keo to wonder what they had been surviving on all this time. They didn’t look malnourished exactly, but not entirely healthy, either.

He and the others sat and stood around the newcomers, watching them devour everything put in front of them. It had been such a long time since they’d interacted with anyone from outside the house that the three friends’ presence created a noticeable spark of energy. If Jordan and her friends noticed the attention, they didn’t react to it. Then again, they were probably too busy eating and drinking.

“How long have you guys been staying here?” Jordan asked.

“We got here a few days after all of this began,” Keo said. “We’ve been here since.”

“I don’t blame you for not leaving this place. I mean, look at it. Besides supplies, you’ve got fish in the river and hunting grounds, right?”

“Not so much the hunting grounds.”

“No?”

“We think the creatures fed off most of the land-based wildlife. The ones that can’t climb, anyway.”

“You guys must be really hungry,” Gillian said with a smile.

Jordan blushed a bit. “We ran out of supplies about a month ago. We’ve been traveling up the river since, picking up useful things where we can and staying on land occasionally. But most of the time we stay on the boat. We have some fishing poles onboard that we use to catch fish along the banks.”

“How do you sail upriver?” Keo asked.

“If there’s enough wind blowing in the right direction, you can sail anywhere,” Mark said.

“Mark’s the expert,” Jordan said. “You have any boat questions, you should ask him. Jill and I are just along for the ride.”

“Where did you guys come from?” Gillian asked.

“We were at Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans when all of this happened,” Jordan said. “The only reason we’re still alive is because we were on Mark’s boat when it started.”

“The boat belongs to my dad,” Mark said. He tilted his can and sucked down the remaining juices, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’ve been boating with him since I was ten.”

“The river comes all the way up here?” Keo asked.

“It goes everywhere,” Jordan said. “There are dozens of large and small veins. We just followed it north as far as it would take us.”

“Why north?”

“South’s the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Ah.”

“We wanted to find out if anyone else was still out here, and going inland seemed the best option.”

“Those first few weeks were rough,” Mark said. “We kept waiting to hear about what had happened. Waited for the state or the government to come in and tell us what to do. But they never did. And the city…”

“Have you ever seen a city like New Orleans empty in the middle of the day?” Jordan asked.

“Can’t say I have,” Keo said.

“It’s spooky. Like walking through a cemetery.” She paused for a moment. “They almost caught us the first night…”

“They got Rick and Henry,” Jill said. Her voice was squeaky, as if she was afraid to talk too loudly. Keo guessed that was a habit from being “out there.”

“Yeah,” Jordan said, and went back to her MRE bag of beef stew without elaborating.

Keo exchanged a brief glance with Norris and Gillian. No one had to tell them what had happened to Rick and Henry. Everyone knew. They still remembered the first night vividly, almost half a year later. It was hard to forget when you discovered everything you thought you knew about the universe was wrong.

Jordan stood up from the living room couch where she had been sitting with the others and walked over to one of the windows. She rasped her knuckles on the thick block of wood on top of it. “This is how you keep them out?”

Keo nodded. “That and the bars.”

“I’ve seen them break down doors, but this stops them? The burglar bars and this block of wood?”

“We’ve been here since November of last year. So yeah, they work pretty well.”

“It’s a hell of a place you guys got here. I can see why you didn’t keep moving.”

“Definitely more leg room than in Mark’s boat,” Jill said.

“Speaking of the boat,” Rachel said. She had kept quiet all this time that the sound of her voice surprised Keo a bit. “Have you ever heard of Santa Marie Island?”

Mark looked up from rooting around his empty can of fruit. “Santa Marie Island? Near Galveston?”

“Yes!”

“My dad took me sailing around the Gulf of Mexico when I was fifteen. We stopped by Galveston for a while. One of the islands we passed along the way was Santa Marie. It looked like a nice stretch. Plenty of marinas to dock.”

“You can get there from New Orleans?” Keo asked.

“If it’s in the Gulf of Mexico, you can get to it by boat,” Mark said. “My dad and I have even crossed the Panama Canal once or twice and sailed the Pacific Ocean.”

“So you can sail to Santa Marie Island from here?” Rachel asked.

“It’d take weeks and we’d need a lot of supplies and good wind, but yeah, I don’t see why not. And if we could find fuel, we would get there faster using the outboard motor, but we try to limit it to emergencies.”

“Why the river?” Keo asked.

“What about it?” Jordan said.

“You guys said you’ve stayed on the river since New Orleans. Since all of this began, except for the occasional supply runs on land, or like back at the bungalow to cook the fish. So why the river?”

Jordan, Mark, and Jill exchanged a brief look.

“You don’t know?” Jordan said to Keo.

“Know what?”

“It’s the water.”

“What about it?”

“They won’t cross it,” Jordan said. “Even back at Lake Pontchartrain. We could see them on the shore, watching us at night, but they never tried to attack the boat. It doesn’t matter how close we get to land; as long as we’re on the water, they stay away. I think they’re afraid of it.”

“‘It’?”

“The water.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t a clue. They just are.”

“Sonofabitch,” Norris said. Then to Keo, “Did Levy say anything about Earl keeping a boat around here?”

“He said Earl didn’t,” Keo said.

“Speaking of which, where is Levy?” Gillian asked.

Keo looked around them. He swore he had seen Levy standing around and listening to the conversation just a few minutes ago. Where the hell did he sneak off to, and how did no one notice until now?

*

Keo walked with
Jordan back to the bungalow. She was wiping oily fingers from some potato chips she had eaten back at the house on already-dirty jeans, while well-worn sneakers caked in dirt and mud
crunched
the morning ground.

“Mark and Jill trust you,” Keo said.

“I guess,” she said, though she didn’t look comfortable admitting it.

“Was it always like that?”

“No. Rick was supposed to be it. We depended on him the first few days while trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But after he…what happened to him, happened, someone had to step up. I guess that was me.”

“You’re doing a pretty good job.”

“Maybe…”

“You’ve kept them alive all these months. That’s no small accomplishment.”

“Yay me,” Jordan said. She glanced up at the trees, at the birds in flight, and the animals perched on tree branches without a care in the world. “You said they’re feeding off the animals too?”

“I think that’s a fair bet. There hasn’t been a single deer in these woods, and Levy says there are supposed to be a lot of them.”

“Levy’s the one that snuck off when no one was paying attention?”

“Yeah.”

“Strange kid.”

“Kid?” he smiled.

She grinned sheepishly back at him. “I guess we’re about the same age.” Then she looked around her again. “Do you think they do to the animals what they do to us? I mean, turn them?”

“I don’t think so. At least, I haven’t seen one yet. Then again, sometimes it’s hard to tell what those things used to be once they’ve turned.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Once…one night I saw one of them come very close to us along the banks. It didn’t attack, because like I said, they never do, but this one was watching us very curiously. You know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Like it
knew
us. Or recognized us.” She went quiet for a moment, and there was just the sound of their footsteps. Then, “Afterward, I thought that it could have been Rick. Or Henry.” She shook her head. “But it couldn’t be. Like you said, once they turn, it’s hard to tell them apart, or if they’re even male or female.”

Keo couldn’t help but think about Delia. Or the thing that used to be Delia. If it was still alive, it was probably still out there right now, somewhere…

“Hey,” Jordan said.

“What?”

“What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

“Paul was taken,” he said.

*

The boat was
a twenty-two footer, just over six and a half meters long, with an almost two-and-a-half meter beam. The white paint had seen plenty of activity, including overlapping and month-old dirt-caked shoe prints along the deck stretching from bow to stern. Mud clung to the sides, and the cabin was visible through long windows on the sides and front. It was in reasonably good shape.

“It looks like a tight squeeze,” Keo said.

He stood on the bank looking down at the boat, anchored in place against the soft river current, just within climbing distance from land.

“The five of us spent a whole day in and around it before everything went to shit,” Jordan said, standing next to him. “It was a pretty tight squeeze, even with Mark and Henry spending most of the time on deck.”

“What about the motor?”

“We still have some fuel left for it. Not much, but some. We grabbed as much as we could from the marina back at Pontchartrain, but we don’t use it unless we absolutely have to. Mark is really good at sailing with just the wind.”

“Have the creatures ever tried to board the boat in any way?”

She shook her head. “I told you, they have a thing about the water. They’ll go right up to it—along the banks, like where we are now—but they never step foot
into
the water. There were times when we came so dangerously close to land that I was sure they might try to leap onboard. I mean, it wouldn’t have been much of a risk because they would have made it easily.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Never. Not once. I used to spend days and weeks trying to understand it. Now, I just accept it as a gift from the gods and move on.”

“So we now know they have two Achilles’ heels: sunlight and bodies of water.”

“What about that?” she asked, nodding at the MP5SD slung over his back.

“I’d like to tell you the thirty rounds make a difference, but they don’t. I emptied half the magazine into one of them at point-blank range. It just gave me an annoyed look and went on about its business.”