The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (17 page)

You’ve gone soft, pal. Real soft.

“I’m sorry about Mark,” he said after they had been walking in silence for a while.

“Yeah, me too,” Jordan said.

She was slightly in front, the handle of her holstered Glock staring invitingly back at him. It was tempting. So, so tempting.

He thought about Gillian. He could do it for her if he had to. Finding Gillian again after all these months was a minor miracle, and all he had to do to be permanently reunited with her was kill Tobias and return to T18. But to do that, he needed guns, such as the one staring back at him right now…

“What happened to you?” Jordan asked, looking over her shoulder at him. “After the cabin, we were pretty resigned to you and Norris being dead. Even Gillian. She kept waiting for you to find us, you know. After Santa Marie Island, and even when we were at T18. I would catch her staring off at nothing for long stretches until it occurred to me she was looking for you. Waiting for you to show up to rescue her.”

“Norris and I ran into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that kept me away for almost six months.”

He told her about Pollard. About Joe. About running for his life in the woods of Louisiana and not knowing where the hell he was going, until he finally ran out of room. He skipped the part about Allie but told her Norris had found some survivors to stay with and that he was probably still safe right now, living out his remaining years.

Then he told her about Song Island. About Lara. And about the soldiers.

“Jesus, how many of them are out there?” she asked.

“My understanding is that they’re everywhere. Every state. Maybe every country. Who knows?”

She was speechless for a moment. After a while, she shook her head. “I guess it makes sense. Everyone we knew in the camp was either from Texas or Louisiana, so we didn’t get any information about what was happening in the rest of the country. Talk about a myopic view of the world, huh?”

“The big picture is overrated.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

They walked on for another few minutes in silence before Keo said, “Are we almost there yet?”

“What are you, ten?”

“It’s going to get dark soon, Jordan.”

“We’re almost there. The base is temporary because we never stay at one place for too long. Sooner or later, they find us.”

“The soldiers?”

“No.”

She’s talking about ghouls.

He thought about his guns again, about the silver ammo inside them…

“What are you carrying?” he asked.

“About five pounds lighter since the last time you saw me,” she said, grinning back at him. “I like to think I’m at my perfect fighting weight.”

He chuckled. “You got funnier.”

“You think?”

“Uh huh.”

“I try.”

“What about silver?” he asked. “Do you guys know about silver?”

She stopped and turned around, then stared at him curiously for a moment. “Do you?”

“About silver?”

“Yeah.”

“I know a lot about it.”

“What do you know?”

“The people I told you about, on Song Island? They’re the ones who sent out those broadcasts about the silver.”

“No shit? We picked up their broadcast over a month ago. We didn’t believe it at first, but we tested it out and now we’re believers.”

She pulled out a spare magazine from her pouches and tossed it to him. Keo thumbed off a round and held it up to what little light managed to pierce the canopies, easily making out the silver tip.

“Silver bullets,” Keo said.

“The problem is finding enough silver lying around out there.” She took the magazine back. “I just have the one for the Glock. Everyone has just one, too. Everything else is loaded with regular ammo. We put them in at night and never before. They’re more valuable than gold these days.”

He kept his mouth shut about the silver loaded in his weapons that one of her people was carrying around out there. Chances were the man hadn’t inspected his belongings very closely, so he could still retrieve them later. Hopefully. The last thing he needed was to “share” the valuable bullets with strangers he was planning to double cross as soon as he got Tobias in his crosshairs.

“What else do you know?” Jordan asked. “Do the other things the islanders mentioned actually work? Bodies of water? Ultraviolet lights?”

“The bodies of water, yeah.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. I just know it works.”

“You saw it?”

“I saw it.”

“What happened?”

They turn to stone and drown,
he thought about telling her, but it sounded crazy even in his own head.

“It works,” he said instead. “I don’t know how. Just like I don’t know how shooting or cutting them with silver works. It just does.”

She nodded. “Where’s a scientist when you need one, huh? An explanation would be nice.”

Keo glanced at his watch again. 3:14 
P.M.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said.

“Relax, we’re close. This isn’t our first rodeo, you know. We have this entire area mapped out. We know where everything is.”

“And yet T18 still managed to ambush you.”

Her entire body flinched, and Keo instantly regretted saying it.

“Sorry,” he said. “Were some of them your friends?”

“A lot of them were my friends.”

“I’m sorry, Jordan.”

She sighed. “Whatever.”

“I mean it.”

She nodded but began walking faster in front of him. He had to pick up his pace to catch up.

“Have you come up with a better story yet?” Jordan asked after a while.

“I’ll just tell him the truth,” Keo said. Then, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Can I stop you?”

“Probably not.”

“Then go ahead.”

“What are you still doing here? You, Tobias, and the others. Why are you guys spending your days making life miserable for T18?”

She didn’t answer right away.

“Jordan?”

“These guys helped me escape,” she said finally. “I’m paying them back.”

“That doesn’t explain why they don’t just pack up and leave. Why is Tobias keeping the others here?”

“Almost all of them still have friends and family in town. They won’t leave until they get everyone out.”

He recalled seeing the soldiers along the riverbanks, at the marina, and riding around on horseback. It wasn’t just their numbers or their weaponry that Tobias’s people were going up against, but the enemy also had the night, not to mention the creatures inside them, at their side. Steve and his brother had all the advantages.
All
of it.

Keo had seen lost causes before, but this was ridiculously unfair.

“Jordan,” he said.

“What?”

“How many did you lose back there?”

“Seven.”

“How many do you have left?”

“Not enough,” she said quietly. “Not nearly enough.”

The temporary base
Jordan took him to was a YMCA building, about half a kilometer from the long and empty stretch of I-45 in the distance. It was part of a business center, but had its own separate area. Two empty swimming pools greeted them as they stepped out of the woods and trudged through thick, overgrown grass that covered the backyard.

Keo followed Jordan while the rest of Tobias’s people emerged out of the tree lines around them. Wyatt was among them, along with the two familiar scouts. They were greeted by sentries along the rooftops of the YMCA. One of them waved, and Jordan returned it.

Keo checked his watch again. 4:41 
P.M.

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

“Two days,” Jordan said. “Counting today. Can’t afford to stay in one place for too long. Like I said before, it’s not the soldiers we have to worry about. They usually don’t wander out this far unless they come with everything they have. You saw all the boats they have back there? They can afford to stick to the river, use it to go back and forth from the Gulf. This far from T18, it’s just the crawlers we have to stay one step ahead of.”

“It must be tough, fighting a two-front war.”

“It’s not easy, no.”

The YMCA building was only one-story, but it was spread out with multiple wings. There was a shooter on three of the rooftops, possibly even the same men that had been at the strip mall earlier.

“I usually try to steer clear of big buildings,” Keo said.

“So do we,” Jordan said. “They like using them for nests. But this one’s secure, for now.”

They skirted around the bigger of the two swimming pools and entered the main building through a metal back door guarded by a man with an M4.

Jordan nodded at him. “Hey, Tim.”

“Welcome back,” Tim said. “I heard things went sideways out there.”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Who’s he?” the guard asked, looking at Keo.

“Keo.”

“What kind—”

“Don’t,” Jordan said.

Keo smiled and followed her into a back hallway. It was surprisingly bright inside, thanks to a series of high ceiling windows flooding the room with sunlight. He could hear activity on the other end even before they stepped out into a large cafeteria where Tobias’s men were gathered.

Pita was there, moving through the wounded men that had traveled here earlier by vehicle. Three of them were unconscious while a fourth drank from a bottle of water as Pita undressed his bloody bandages and grabbed a fresh roll from a teenage girl who was acting as her helper.

He counted about two dozen men in all, including Wyatt and the others that had arrived with them. The three or four men who hadn’t had to brave Steve’s ambush were easy to tell apart from the rest—they were the ones without blood on their clothes. Besides Pita and the girl, there were only two other women in the place. Like the men, they wore gun belts, but unlike Jordan, they didn’t look very dangerous at all.

Keo looked around but couldn’t find Tobias anywhere. Maybe he was in a back room, trying to come up with a plan to regroup after the shellacking they had taken. No one went toe-to-toe with an M60 and came out unscathed.

“Is this it?” Keo asked.

“There was a lot more this morning,” Jordan said quietly. She grabbed a man with a thick red beard as he was walking past them. “Where’s Tobias?”

“Back office with Reese,” the man said.

“Thanks,” Jordan said. Then to Keo, “Come on.”

He kept pace with her through the cafeteria, which looked abandoned despite the company of men and women moving around it at the moment. The cavernous feel, he guessed, was because the room was designed for a large army of hungry teens and not the two dozen or so people eating MREs or talking quietly among themselves. They all looked beaten and whipped, and he wondered how long Tobias was going to be able to keep this fight up after today.

“Where’d you get all the MREs?” he asked.

“Same place we get most of our weapons. T18.”

“You have an inside man.”

“We have inside
men.
One of them supplies us with as much nonperishables as he can get his hands on.”

“Where does he get them?”

“T18 has a storage warehouse filled when the Millers raided the surrounding areas. One of them sold mail-order civilian versions of Army MREs. Prepper food. That’s what we’ve been living on for the last month or so. Before that, we were surviving off the land.”

“Hunting?”

“Hunting, fishing, whatever it took. It’s a big river. They can’t guard every inch of it twenty-four hours a day.”

“They seem to go back and forth along it just fine in those boats.”

“That’s because we don’t attack the riverbanks if we can help it.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t see you them?”

He was going to ask who, but he remembered the women and children along the banks washing laundry and swimming.

“Civilians,” he said.

“Yeah. We’re trying to save them, not get them killed. So we do our best to keep the fighting contained to just us and the soldiers. It’s not always ideal, but no one said this would be easy.”

Keo wanted to tell her that he had seen a little bit of what Steve had at T18, and that “this” wasn’t just
not
going to be easy, it was going to be downright impossible. But that would have antagonized her, and right now he needed at least one ally at his side.

Even so, Keo kept close enough to Jordan that he was within easy lunging distance of the Glock in her hip holster. If she noticed or was uncomfortable with his closeness, she didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how he was going to kill Tobias and somehow keep both him and Jordan alive when she opened a door marked “Director.”

He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps inside when he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his right eye. Keo turned, started lifting his hands to ward off an attack, but the man was faster and pain exploded across Keo’s face as the butt of a rifle smashed into his forehead.

The blow would have done more damage if he hadn’t seen it coming just in the nick of time and turned slightly. The result was more of a glancing blow, but it was enough to stun and stagger him.

He glimpsed a buzz cut as the man followed, pressing his attack, even as Jordan shouted, “What the fuck, Reese?”

The man ignored her and swung his weapon at Keo’s face again, but Keo managed to dodge the oncoming strike this time. The wooden stock flashed across his face for a split second before Keo grabbed the barrel with one hand, pulled his attacker off balance, then slammed his cocked elbow into the back of the man’s neck.

He heard a satisfying, pained grunt.

Keo followed his attacker-turned-victim, hoping to finish this as soon as possible (and that rifle, he could definitely use that rifle), when something rammed into the small of his back. He might have screamed; he couldn’t be entirely certain. But he definitely felt the boot stepping on the back of his left knee and dropping to the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder just in time to see Tobias, all six-three of him hovering with an M4 clutched in both raised hands. Tobias didn’t look happy or sad, he just looked like a man doing a job.

It was the last thing Keo saw before the collapsible stock of the carbine hit him in the face and he dropped like a sack of meat.