The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 16

He reached the bridge, and he was still alive, so he kept walking.

Steve watched him coming, but Jack and the other soldiers were scanning the area with binoculars. Even the two perched on the water tower to his right were focused on the bridge. One or both probably had their rifles pointed at him at this very moment, though they were too far downriver for him to be sure. He’d rather not know anyway.

He hoped Jordan had found a decent spot to shoot from if this whole thing went sideways. What the hell was he thinking anyway, putting his life in the hands of a man like Steve? The guy had sent him out there to kill his best friend. Okay, former best friend.

Of course, that wasn’t entirely true. Steve had sent him out there more as bait to lure in Tobias’s fighters, who he knew were hiding in the area. That was clever, and exactly the kind of thinking Keo was relying on: a man who could make that kind of tactical decision would see the value of keeping someone like him alive and working for his cause. How different was Steve from all the men Keo had worked for in his ten-plus-year career with the organization?

If the answer was a lot, then this was going to be a very short walk.

But he had made it onto the bridge, and a full minute later, he was still alive.

Definitely a good sign.

If Steve was going to kill him, he would have done it by now. Probably. Instead, the man stood perfectly still, hands on his hips, and squinted across the steel structure at Keo as he walked toward him.

Keo looked from Steve to the two behind the M60. One of the soldiers was permanently fixed behind the machine gun while the other held the ammo belt, waiting to feed it into the black metal monster. The other four guards continued moving around, looking for danger around and under them.

He walked with his hands at his sides, the MP5SD behind him. There was a good chance he could draw the Glock in his hip holster if someone started shooting, but it was unlikely he was going to hit much of anything from this distance. Especially when those two behind the sandbags started unloading.

“You look good for a dead man!” Steve shouted. “A little worse for wear, but apparently still in one piece! What happened to your face?”

“A painful birth!” Keo shouted back.

Steve said something to Jack, and they both chuckled. Then, back at Keo, “I didn’t think you’d survive the ambush!”

“Yours or theirs?”

“Either/or!”

Keo was close enough to the middle of the bridge now that he didn’t have to shout when he said, “You couldn’t have given me a heads up about that?”

“I could have, but then you wouldn’t have walked so casually into their sniper fire.”

“You saw that.”

“Not me, but guys I snuck into the area before you even showed up.”

“You had it all planned out.”

“I’ve been fighting Tobias for a while now. You have to understand the enemy in order to defeat him.”

“Now where have I heard that before?”

Keo finally stopped a meter in front of Steve.

“Let’s see it,” Steve said.

Keo fished out the ring and tossed it over. Steve caught it and held the jewelry up to the light. The sun glinted off the diamonds and washed over the shape of the Lone Star State in the middle.

He took a moment to look up at the sky. Jordan was right; it did look like rain. Not quite here yet, but he guessed before the night was over T18 was going to get a lot of extra water. Maybe they could hang the clothes out and save themselves a day at the riverbanks tomorrow.

Steve had all but ignored him and seemed focused entirely on the ring. If Keo didn’t know better, the older Miller looked almost…sad?

“They were friends, you know,” Jordan had told him. “They were friends for a long time after everything happened. They were in the camp together, then one day they were running things…”

“He loved this,” Steve said, then smirked. “I don’t know why. It’s ugly as fuck. What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it,” Keo said.

“Yeah, me too.” Steve pocketed the ring. “But I’ll keep it anyway. In memory of him.” Then he fixed Keo with a suspicious look. “How did you do it? Take out Tobias?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’d like to know.”

“I shot him in the back of the head.”

“How did you know about the ring?”

“I didn’t, but I figured it was better than dragging his entire corpse back here. The ring was the most obvious personal possession he had on him.”

He expected more of an interrogation, but Steve just nodded. “Come on, I think I still have a bottle of spirits stashed somewhere in my office.” He turned to go, but then suddenly stopped and looked back at Keo. “Oh, just for your safety and mine, give Jack your weapons.”

“And here I thought I’d earned some trust,” Keo said.

Steve smiled. “You have. But you can never be too careful these days.”

Keo unslung the submachine gun and unclasped his gun belt and handed them over to Jack. “You’re looking spry.”

“Feeling spry,” Jack grinned back. “Won’t be running around for a few more weeks, though. But hey, things will be calming down with Tobias out of the way. Looks like they turned tail and ran from what our scouts saw back at the YMCA building.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was out of there by first light.”

He followed Steve off the bridge, but not before sneaking a look back at the woods on the other side. Jordan was there, somewhere, among all the green and brown. Of course he couldn’t see her, but he could feel her watching him back.

He turned to Steve. “So where’s Gillian?”

“You in a hurry?” Steve asked.

“I haven’t seen her in half a year, so yeah, I’m in a little bit of a hurry. I want to make sure she’s fine.”

“She’s fine. I saw her this morning.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you seeing her this morning?”

Steve shrugged. “It’s a small town, Keo. Don’t read too much into it.”

Keo didn’t believe him, but he said, “How did she look?”

“Definitely worth killing a guy for.” He walked on for a moment, before adding, “So, six months without any action?”

“I’ve seen plenty of action.”

“But no sexy times.”

Keo didn’t confirm or deny. He said instead, “When do I get to see her?”

“After you and I have a little chat.”

“About what?”

“Where we go from here,” Steve said, “and whether you’re more useful to me dead or alive.”

Keo sneaked another look at the woods on the other side of the river, wondering if it was too late to signal Jordan to take the shot.

*

“He was a star football player, but you probably already guessed that,” Steve said.

He was pouring from the same bottle of Jack Daniels from yesterday, though there was, at most, just three to four more pours left. He pushed the shot glass across the table and Keo took it, then cringed at the burn as the whiskey went down.

“I think our schools might have even played each other’s once or twice, but I can’t remember,” Steve continued. “Way before your time, obviously. What are you, late twenties?”

“Sounds about right,” Keo said.

“You’re pretty impressive for a guy that young.”

“I didn’t have a lot of choices.”

“Hard life?”

“Hard enough.”

“I can respect that. Jack and I were the product of divorced parents; we were raised mostly apart when we were younger. Barely saw each other until our parents kicked off. I can understand having to do what you have to in order to get by. That’s what we’re doing here.”

They were back in Steve’s office in Marina 1. Keo hadn’t been certain he was going to make it off the bridge alive, but that turned out to be his paranoia getting the best of him. Steve seemed happy to keep him breathing, at least for the next few minutes.

“He was good,” Steve was saying. It took Keo a moment to figure out that he was still talking about Tobias. “Got himself a scholarship to UT in Austin. Didn’t play much there, though. As fast and big and skilled as you are, there’s always one or five other guys faster, bigger, and more skilled.”

Steve nursed his drink, staring at the glass as if he expected to find some kind of revelation swimming among the golden honey liquid.

“They were friends, you know,” Jordan had said.

And yet, he still sent me out there to kill his friend.

“What happened between the two of you?” Keo asked.

He couldn’t care less about the answer, but it was obvious Steve wanted him to ask. Keo didn’t give a shit, but he knew an opening when he saw one, and anything that kept him alive long enough to see Gillian and figure a way out of here was worth enduring the regretful ruminations of a man like Steve.

“We just couldn’t agree on the direction to take Wilmont,” Steve said. “That’s the old name, before we changed it to T18.”

“Who came up with that?”

“No idea. It’s just temporary, anyway. They say in another year or two, maybe we’ll get a real name.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

Steve grinned at him over the brim of his glass. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You’ve only seen the black-eyed ones, right?”

“There are others?” Keo asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“Oh yeah,” Steve said. “They can do things. Crazy things.” He put the glass down with half of the whiskey still inside. “It’s hard to explain. One of those things you have to see for yourself in order to believe.”

“I’ve seen a lot in my time. I couldn’t explain most of it, either.”

“I bet you have. Seen a lot, I mean.” Steve took out Tobias’s ring and spun it on the desktop like a top. For something so gaudy, it was well-balanced and kept turning for a long time. “The kind of man who accepts a contract killing, then comes back after everything that’s happened, is a dangerous one.”

“Or useful.”

“Is that why you killed one of my guys in the woods? To make yourself more useful? That’s three you’ve forced me to replace now.”

“They all had weapons when I took them out. They had just as good of a chance to put me down as I did them. The way I figured it, I was faster and shot straighter. You should thank me for having enough self control not to plug the kid, too, or else you’d be replacing four instead of just three.”

Steve chuckled. “I should be thankful, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’re probably right. Besides, I got ten volunteers for every soldier I lose, anyway.”

“Everyone loves a winning team.”

“Very true.” He paused, eyeing Keo over the desk. “I know exactly why everyone is here, why they can’t volunteer fast enough when we ask for names. But what I’m curious about is you. What makes you tick?”

Keo leaned back, then met and held Steve’s hard gaze. “You’re overthinking it. I don’t give two shits about you or this town of yours. I’m a survivor. I’ve always been. I got through all this by telling myself there was something on the other side, waiting for me.”

“And what would that be?”

“Gillian.”

“What if she wants to stay?”

“Then we’ll stay.”

“Just like that?”

“I’m not fussy. And like I said, I’ve been out there for a year and it’s nothing to write home about.” He let a ghost of a smile cross his lips. “You look like you have a good thing going on here. My guess is, while you insist everyone do their duty with the blood stuff at night, you and your soldiers exempt yourselves. Am I right?”

“Perks of the job. One of many.”

“So what’s not to like? Free food, a steady job, and Gillian. Sounds pretty good to me.”

“And you’re not holding a grudge about what happened yesterday?”

“As long as you’re not holding a grudge about me killing three of your guys.”

Steve shrugged.

“So that’s that,” Keo said. “Am I pissed off about yesterday? Yeah, sure. But I understand why you did it. Hell, I can even respect it. It was clever, and a win-win situation for you however it ended up.”

“You could have died yesterday.”

“Same shit, different day. I could have died a thousand times in the last year, so there was nothing special about yesterday.”

Steve chuckled before snatching up Tobias’s ring and spinning it on the desktop again. He didn’t say anything and just watched the jewelry go round and round in front of him.

Keo waited.

Had he been convincing enough? The Keo from one year ago wouldn’t have had any problems selling Steve on what he’d just said, because it would have been the truth. But this version of him, this Keo who had voluntarily stayed on Song Island even when he didn’t have to, then stayed even longer on the Trident, was less predictable.

Finally, Steve picked up the ring and put it away before standing up. “Come on.”

“Where we going?”

“It’s a surprise. You like surprises, don’t you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” Steve grinned back.

*

There was a plain white golf cart waiting for them outside Marina 1 that wasn’t there when they first entered the building. It had solar panels on top and at the back and looked pretty well-used.

Steve climbed behind the steering wheel. “Hop in.”

Keo walked around and slid in the front passenger seat. There were two seats in the back and more space where the golf bags were supposed to go. Dry mud caked the floors and fell off as Steve started the electric engine and maneuvered them through the marina, then toward the exit Keo had only seen but never gone past.

“How many of these do you have?” Keo asked.

“Three,” Steve said. “Solar panels don’t charge for shit, and it takes weeks just to get enough juice to power the batteries, so I usually end up having to switch between them.”

“Sounds like a tough life.”

Steve grinned. “Everyone’s gotta make sacrifices for the greater good.”

“I hear that. So, you wanna tell me where we’re going?”

“Relax. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. The only reason you’re still alive is because you’re right. I can use a man with your particular set of skills. You’re going to be my personal Bryan Mills.”

“Who?”

“Liam Neeson’s character in Taken.”

“I don’t watch a lot of movies.”

“You’re missing out. In the film, Neeson plays a badass ex-CIA agent with ‘a deadly set of skills.’ Some guys stole his daughter and he has to get her back. Never seen it?”

“Like I said, I’m not much of a cinephile.”

“We can change that. I have stacks of Blu-rays at my house. Just the first two Taken, though.”

“How many were there?”

“Three.”

“They took his daughter in all three parts?”

“They took his wife in the second part.”

“What about the third?”

“I don’t remember. It was kind of a shit movie. Anyway, you like classics?”

“Sure, why not.”

“One of these days you should come around and we’ll have a movie night.”

“You have electricity at your house?”

“Generator.”

“I thought the whole point of living in this place was to go back to our roots. Off the grid.”

Steve chuckled. “You believe everything you hear?”

“Apparently so.”

“You’ll learn, kid.”

The golf cart hummed toward the entrance, where two soldiers rushed out of a booth to manually raise a large metal slab blocking their path. They drove past the gate, and Keo finally saw what was on the other side.

He wished he could have been surprised, but he had heard the stories and expected something like it. Even so, he was still stunned by the scope of what he saw as they drove up a road flanked by wide fields to both sides of them.

T18 had a thriving farming community, with acres and acres of crops spread out as far as he could see, hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes moving among them. There was only the tree lines to his right and the river to his left to stop the rows of wheat swaying in the slight breeze. They drove past more fields covered in stalks of corn, along with dozens upon dozens of rows of plants, fruits, and red and green and yellow things he didn’t even know the names for.

The closest Keo had ever been to a farm was in the outskirts of Colombia a few years back, when he’d had to sleep inside a sugarcane field while waiting to kill someone. He’d grown up in San Diego, and before that on military bases around the world. As an adult, he’d spent almost all of his life in cities, working in jungles made of concrete instead of dirt. He couldn’t have grown a tomato if someone put a gun to his head.

The cart was moving slow enough that Keo was able to get a good look at his surroundings, and he wondered how long they had been at this. He could only spot a few soldiers, most of them on horseback moving among the fields. They were less guards and more security, which made sense because he wasn’t looking at prisoners forced to garden under a warm sun; these people wanted to be here, just like the women at the riverbanks.

“What are you growing?” he asked Steve.

“Everything,” Steve said. “Wheat, corn, vegetables, fruits… When was the last time you had fresh corn?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Or tomatoes? Potatoes? What about fresh from-the-oven bread? This is just one of our agricultural fields. We have two more on the other side of the subdivisions.”

“It’s…impressive,” Keo said, and realized that he actually meant it.

“This is what Tobias was trying to save them from. Now do you understand why he’d never have won? But that was something he could never understand. I tried to explain to him. I really did, but he just couldn’t fathom why this is a better life than running around out there scavenging and hiding from the crawlers. That’s no way to live.”

“You’re right. That is no way to live.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Steve said, and reached over and slapped Keo on the shoulder. “My brother Jack’s a good second-in-command, but he’s a little gimpy right now.”

“You offering me a job?”

“Why, you interested?”

“I’m not opposed to it.”

“That’s what I wanna hear. But not just yet. You did me a favor removing Tobias, but let’s wait and see how you feel tomorrow. After all, it’s probably going to be the biggest decision of your life.”

They drove on past the fields, which seemed to keep going and going around him. And to think this was just one of three in T18. Keo didn’t even want to imagine how much bigger the other two were, or how much manpower was working them.

“Around 4,000,” Jack had told him when he asked about the population of T18.

Eventually they passed the fields, and Steve turned into a subdivision blocked by a tall rolling gate. It had a sign across the front that once read “Wilmont Heights” but had since been covered up with a banner now reading, “T18A1.”

Like the marina entrance, this one also had a guard booth. A soldier rushed out as they approached and pushed the gate open for them. Steve drove through.

“There are five subdivisions,” Steve said. “One’s for military personnel only, and the rest are for everyone else.”

“Jack told me you had 4,000. How do you control that many people?”

“Control?” Steve said, not even bothering to hide his amusement. “What makes you think we control them? They can leave whenever they want. But why would they? These houses are the only things standing between them and the crawlers at night. There’s nothing for them out there.”

Keo had gone through whole subdivisions during his trek across Louisiana, and the empty houses never failed to leave him utterly depressed. But he didn’t get that same abandoned vibe now as they cruised up T18A1. The streets were sparse but clean, and he found out why when they drove past the first of what turned out to be a dozen or so workers along the sidewalks picking up garbage and stuffing them into bags. They were all civilians, and he didn’t see a soldier in sight.

“What did these poor bastards do to get this job detail?” Keo asked.

“You ever heard the phrase, ‘People who can, do; those that can’t, teach’?” Steve asked.

“I may have run across it once or twice.”

“Well, these guys can’t even teach, so this is the price of staying in town. You get it now?”

“What’s that?”

“This is what they’ll do to stay here. That’s how valuable this place is compared to what’s out there, why Tobias would never have been able to ‘rescue’ them. Because they don’t want to be rescued.”

“Nothing wrong with picking up garbage for a living.”

“It’s not, but you don’t wanna know what the poor bastards who can’t even do this are doing to earn their keep.”

“Does it smell?”

Steve chuckled. “Boy, does it ever. But hey, someone’s gotta do the dirty work, right? That’s how the world runs. Everyone’s got a role to play. That includes you and me.”

There were row after row of homes around them. They looked almost identical, except for a few add-ons and color schemes. What caught him by surprise were the yards; they all looked as if they had been recently mowed, though they seemed to lack the uniform clean-cut look he was used to seeing in suburban neighborhoods before The Purge. Almost all of the windows were open, even if he couldn’t see any homeowners around. Keo guessed they didn’t have to worry about crime these days.

The golf cart was the only vehicle in the entire place, its mechanical hum drawing curious looks from the people along the sidewalks. Keo was used to seeing cars and trucks parked along curbsides in subdivisions, but there were none of those here. As a result, the streets looked wide and inviting and nothing at all like what a real neighborhood should look like. In fact, there was nothing “real” about T18A1, or T18 for that matter.

Steve finally slowed down and turned into the driveway of a house near the back of the street. It was a two-story building, but there was nothing extraordinary about it. At least, nothing that would indicate this was where a man of Steve’s position lived.

“Here we are,” Steve said, putting the cart in park. “Your stop.”

Keo climbed out. “Where are we?”

“Go knock on the front door and find out.” Steve put the golf cart in reverse and started backing down the driveway. “I’ll send someone to come get you later, but until then, I would refrain from wandering off.”

Keo watched Steve back into the street, spinning the steering wheel, then tipping a nonexistent cap to him before driving off.

One of the men picking up garbage across the street stopped what he was doing and waved at Keo for some reason. He was in his fifties, with a full white beard and looked like Santa Claus, if Saint Nick had lost a good hundred or so pounds. Keo wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so he waved back.

Then, he turned around and looked at the house. It had brick in the front but wood paneling along the sides and, he guessed, in the back as well. It had an attached garage like every other house up and down the street. There were no mailboxes, but there was evidence someone had attempted to grow flowers around the walking path.

Keo took that walkway now, up to the front door.

He was halfway there when the door opened and she looked out.

She had one hand on the doorknob, the slight breeze picking up her long jet-black hair. The months hadn’t dulled the brilliance of her green eyes, and Keo couldn’t have stopped the stupid smile spreading across his face even if he wanted to.

“Keo,” she said. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

“I promised, didn’t I?” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, you did.”

He was so focused on her face, on the way her hair fluttered behind her, that it took him a while before he saw the rest of her. She was clutching the doorknob with one hand-a bit too tightly, for some reason-while the other one was rubbing her stomach, which was a lot bigger than he remembered…