The Walls of Lemuria (41 page)

His eyes were open and he saw that he was leaving tendrils of blood in his wake. A lot of blood.

Jesus, he was literally bleeding to death in the river.

There was a bright side to all of this, though. He was probably going to drown before those two bullet wounds finally got the better of him, so there was that.

Norris fished him
out of the river, though Keo didn’t know how or when exactly, since his entire body had gone numb from the cold and he had trouble clinging to any specific thought, much less pay attention to his environment. The bleeding and pounding pain from his toes to his head didn’t help, either.

He woke up sporadically throughout the day, first on a muddy bank with Norris pumping on his chest. When he opened his eyes a second time, he was traveling through the woods, hoisted over one of Norris’s broad shoulders. The ex-cop might have been grumbling the whole way, but Keo couldn’t really be sure since he could barely keep his eyes open.

He was also only dimly aware of the sun setting in the distance.

That’s not good,
he remembered thinking.
That’s not good at all.

The third time he opened his eyes, he saw only darkness. Alarm bells went off and he willed himself to sit up, but he couldn’t move a single part of his body.

Slowly, the darkness gave way to light—or well, sort of light. He could make out dirty scarred gray walls, and the ground under him was hard and cold. A concrete floor. He was in some kind of room. A dark room, but it wasn’t necessarily dark outside…yet.

“Still alive?” a voice said.

Keo managed to turn his head toward the sound of the voice. Norris, sitting against a wall, watching him with a grin. He looked dry, which meant they had been here a while. Norris still had his M4 across his lap and Keo’s MP5SD slung over one shoulder. His left leg was wrapped with what looked like strips of fabric.

“Thirsty?” Norris asked.

Keo nodded.

“Well, too bad; we don’t have any water,” Norris said and chuckled. “Of course, I think we’ve both had enough of water to last us a lifetime. You’re still alive, though. That’s good, right?”

Keo managed to sit up. He was close enough to a wall that he only needed to scoot back a few inches. Which was good, because any farther and he wouldn’t have made it. His right leg had a tourniquet wrapped around it. It looked like a piece of a shirt. Another tourniquet was tied tightly around his left shoulder, which probably explained why he could barely move it, even though he could feel the pain from it just fine.
Too
fine, in fact.

“Where are we?” he asked. His throat was parched, which he found surprising. He was sure he had swallowed most of the river earlier in the day.

“Remember that house we searched about a month ago? The one with the swing set out back?”

“Yeah…”

“We’re in the basement. Got lucky. It only took me carrying you for an hour to find it again. Luckily, I haven’t gone senile yet. Well, not entirely.” He grinned, white teeth visible in the semidarkness. “It’s a good thing you’re taller than you weigh, kid, or I would have dumped your ass back at the river bank.”

Keo glanced down at his watch. It was still ticking after being drowned in water for…how long?

5:16
 
p.m.

“Any pursuit?” he asked.

Norris shook his head. “We floated down the river pretty far. I almost didn’t catch you when you flew by, you know. It’s a good thing I’m pretty fast even with this bum leg.”

“Thanks,” Keo said. “You saved my life.”

“Hey, you saved my ass first. Just returning the favor.”

Keo laid his head against the wall. The basement smelled of abandonment, but it looked secure, with a door to his left at the top of a flight of stairs. He remembered checking the house with Norris before and finding the place empty, with the basement door held tightly shut with a padlock, which meant none of the creatures were waiting inside when they opened it.

It was a good thing Norris remembered how to get back to it.

“Go to sleep, kid,” Norris said from across the room. “Door’s locked. They can’t get in. We’ll look for food and water tomorrow. Until then, let’s try to just survive the next twenty-four hours. It’s been a really shitty day.”

Keo couldn’t disagree with that. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to slink back down to the floor. He was tired. He didn’t think he could actually sit back up if he tried. Or at least, not on the first try.

Maybe on the sixth…

He was asleep again in seconds.

*

A week after
the firefight at the house, they were still following the river down south toward New Orleans, keeping in mind that Mark and Jordan had sailed the others upriver to them from the same fork.

Traveling on foot was a pain in the ass, especially with their wounds. They hobbled more than they actually walked, and they made pathetic time. It seemed as if they had been walking for months without seeing any signs of civilization, a reminder again that while they were hiding out back at the house, there was still a very big world beyond the woods.

They broke away from the river only to find shelter and food, which further cut into their progress. Even then, they didn’t move very far from the river because Keo didn’t trust that they could find it again if they ever lost sight of it. Neither one of them had a map or knew where the hell they were going. Every tree they came across looked like the last hundred (or thousand) they had already passed in the last seven days.

Eventually, the sun would always begin its descent, which meant they had to find safe haven for the night. At first they carved out an hour at the end of every day just for that, but when that proved too risky and they almost got caught outside on Day 3, they decided two hours was the better number.

By their first week in the woods, they were looking for shelter at around noon. That really cut into their time, too.

Norris never said anything about whether the girls and Mark had made it to Santa Marie Island or not. He seemed just as content as Keo to keep moving, pushed on by a shared goal. The fact that they hadn’t encountered wreckages along the river in the first few days was a good sign. Of course, Gillian and the others would be moving faster on a boat powered by a combination of outboard motor, sails, and going downriver with the current. They might have already reached New Orleans by now and slipped into the Gulf of Mexico on their way to Galveston, Texas.

He hoped, anyway.

Keo was trying to convince himself that Gillian and the others were safe and sound, either on their way to Santa Marie Island or already there and sitting on the beach waiting for them, when the
crack!
of a rifle shredded the branch an inch in front of his face.

“Run!” he shouted.

Not that he had to. Norris was already ahead of him, moving surprisingly fast for a man in his fifties with a wounded leg.

Keo unslung his MP5SD as he ran, keeping as low as possible while still maintaining his speed as rifle fire shattered the woods behind him. Bullets
zinged
past his head and one came dangerously close to putting another hole in his body, this time much higher up than his leg but below the one already in his shoulder.

He kept running, telling himself not to look back.

The gunfire was hellacious, which meant more than one shooter.

Run. Don’t look back. Keep running!

But he couldn’t help himself, and Keo threw a quick look over his shoulder.

He glimpsed black clothes, assault vests, and painted faces emerging out of the woods all around them. At least three that he could see, possibly more.

Who the fuck are these guys?

Norris looked back at him.

“Don’t stop!” Keo shouted at him.

Norris didn’t stop, and neither did Keo, even though his leg and shoulder and every inch of his body was killing him.

Around him, the woods continued to explode as if they were being bombarded with heavy artillery shells. Keo had never seen anything that could be mistaken for a full-blown battlefield, but he imagined it had to look and feel and sound just like this.

Who the fuck
are
these guys?

*

They ran for
hours, stopping to rest whenever they could, then ran some more.

Keo wasn’t sure what direction they were going; he was only aware that soon he couldn’t hear the river anymore, which meant they had unwittingly run
away
from it. He told himself they could locate the river again later. It was a long stretch of water, reaching all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was difficult to lose track of something that long. Sooner or later, even just stumbling around, they’d eventually run across it again.

He hoped, anyway.

By nightfall, they had found salvation on a wooden platform about twenty meters off the ground. It was a hunting perch, high enough that they could see most of the woods even lying down on their bellies so they wouldn’t be seen from below. In the months since someone had used the basic construction to stalk wildlife, the branches had grown back, providing enough cover that they had almost missed it when they walked across it during the day.

Keo hated the idea of being outside at night, but there wasn’t much of a choice with no signs of a possible building to take shelter in. Thankfully, it was a cloudy night, and what little moonlight there was wasn’t enough to illuminate them on the scaffolding. He could barely see Norris lying a few inches from him, so he assumed they were safe from prying eyes on the ground.

The coming nightfall had also sent their black-clad pursuers into hiding. He wondered if they had gotten caught by the darkness and kept waiting to hear desperate gunfire, and was disappointed when he didn’t hear a single thing throughout the night and early morning.

There were also no signs of the creatures below or around them, which wasn’t too much of a surprise. There was no humanity around here, and if he had learned anything, it was that the bloodsuckers always seemed to know where people were hiding, and they flocked there like moths to a flame.

He drifted off to sleep thinking about Gillian and the sandy beaches of Santa Marie Island…

*

He woke up
in the morning to Norris elbowing him in the gut.

“Wakey wakey, Sleeping Beauty.”

He opened his eyes and rolled over onto his back, staring up at what parts of the sun he could see through the thick canopy above him. He took in the brightness and let last night’s dream slowly drift away.

They didn’t say anything for a while, and Norris was content to stare down at the ground below, his carbine in front of him.

Finally, Keo said, “You know what this means, right?”

“What’s that?” Norris said.

“They’re not going to give up.”

“I kinda figured that.”

“They followed us for a week, for God’s sake. That’s some goddamn determination right there. Makes me wonder if Joe lied about those three back at the garage being his only living relatives.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure the little bastard lied about a lot of things. All he did was run back for his pals.”