The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 23

Maybe it was the rain, the frequent thunderclaps, or his inability to stop his teeth from snapping, but Keo barely heard the gunshot.

Or the second, or the third one.

It only took one round to fall the soldier walking toward him, though Keo shot him again anyway as the man was going down just to be sure.

He stopped the golf cart and turned off the engine and hopped out just as a second guard stood up inside the booth and looked out the window. The light from inside illuminated his face and the man was still turning his head when Keo shot him in the face, shattering the glass at the same time.

Keo rushed toward the guard booth.

Three shots and no return fire. Three very wet, very loud gunshots that someone had to have heard. If not the guys in the water tower, then the ones on the other side of the gate, in the marina. There was no way someone would not have heard, even in this driving rainstorm-

Thunder, twice in a row, boomed across the skyline behind him. They were at least five times louder than his gunshots. Or maybe someone did hear the gunfire but just didn’t care, because everything else about the night was just so much, much louder.

That’s right, pal, think positive.

Keo had the Glock aimed at the broken window, waiting for a second head to pop up. He was still waiting when he finally reached the booth and kicked the door open and looked in at a lone body crumpled on the floor.

Two soldiers. That was it. Maybe he really had gotten lucky. Maybe Steve really had committed most of his forces to searching the subdivisions. Or maybe Steve just didn’t realize how uncommitted his men were and most of them were hunkered down from the rain at this very moment.

He looked back toward the golf cart in time to see Dave climbing out with his rifle.

“Wait for my signal!” he shouted.

Dave nodded back. Or Keo thought he did. He might have just been shaking under the unforgiving cold.

Keo scanned the marina on the other side of the gate, which was really just a long metal pole across the wide lane. He could see the docks at the very end, and for whatever reason the pounding rain sounded much louder out here.

He expected to see men rushing in his direction, soldiers on horseback charging through the storm. Was it really possible Steve had concentrated the bulk of his forces to searching the houses? Yes, because there were a lot of houses. Five subdivisions worth. Even the military ones would be searched. That kind of canvassing required a lot of manpower.

Keo was starting to feel good about his chances again (Fifty percent?) as he grabbed the gate and unlatched it, then swung it out of the way. It was heavy against his wet and slightly numbed hands. When he had the gate open, he unslung the rifle and went into a slight crouch, sweeping the marina just to be sure.

There was absolutely no movement from the wide parking lot in front of him, and no sound except for the consistent pak-pak-pak of rain. The water was flowing down the incline floor and into the river on the other side, and at this rate it wouldn’t be long before this part of T18 was submerged in water as the river overflowed.

The bulk of the marina was dark except for lights coming from his left, from one of the offices along the administrative buildings. He recognized Marina 1, where he had met with Steve twice now. He glimpsed figures on the other side of the windows milling about. Soldiers trying to stay out of the freezing rainstorm.

Keo got up and jogged through the parking lot toward the docks. He could see the boats in their slips being tossed around by the swells of the river. If not for the lines holding them in place, they would have been gone by now. Hell, he might not even need to use the motor; just untie one of those boats and let the current carry him back to the ocean-

A figure, moving at the end of one of the docks in front of him.

Keo slid to a stop and went into a crouch. There were no vehicles to hide behind, so he was stuck out in the open. At least he didn’t stand out too much in the night dressed in the black raincoat. Even the M4 was black, which meant if the man didn’t stare too closely-and given the distance, that was unlikely-then Keo was for all intents and purposes invisible.

The guy was walking from the end of the dock toward the middle, appearing for just a brief second in a small pool of light when Keo first saw him. Now that the man had continued on, he morphed into a moving black (and shivering) silhouette. Keo could just barely make out clouds of mist with every breath the man took and wondered if he was producing the same kind of telltale signs.

He took a moment to sweep the other docks. Were there more men walking or standing around trying not to freeze to death on those other platforms? If there were, they were doing a hell of a good job hiding themselves. Was it possible they would only leave one unlucky bastard out here while everyone else kept warm inside Marina 1?

Anything was possible, especially on a night like this. It wasn’t like he was dealing with real soldiers here. These weren’t men who had been whipped into shape by Boot Camp and demanding drill instructors. They were civilians playing dress up, many of them just barely worthy of the weapons they were carrying.

He suddenly felt very generous, and Keo hiked his chances of surviving the night to a whopping sixty percent.

He stood up and slung his rifle, then began walking toward the middle dock, the one where he had seen the soldier walking back and forth on. The man spotted him almost right away, but instead of going for his weapon, he stepped into a weak halo of light and rubbed his hands together and blew into them.

It was the raincoat. Of course it was the raincoat. Just like the soldier at the T18A1 gate could only see the golf cart, this one saw the raincoat and rifle and thought Keo was one of them, too. And why wouldn’t he? Keo didn’t just look like he belonged, he walked like it, too.

He stepped onto the dock and continued toward the sentry. Water from the surging river splashed his boots and pant legs, though by now he was already so soaked from head to toe that he hardly felt the additional wetness.

“Can you believe this fucking night?” Keo shouted.

The guy nodded back and tried to peer through the sleets of rain at him.

Good luck with that, Keo wanted to tell him.

The soldier was standing under an LED bulb and Keo couldn’t even see his face under the hood, so there was very little chance the man could see Keo with nothing at all to illuminate him. Of course, all that was going to change when he got closer. What were the chances the soldier recognized the faces of every soldier in town? It was possible. After all, Ronny had recognized Grant in Gillian’s house. Or had he just gone with the name on the uniform?

“Where is everyone?” Keo shouted. “I can’t see shit!”

“Nothing to see!” the soldier shouted back. “You my replacement?”

“Yeah!” Keo continued walking toward the man, letting his right hand drift casually toward the fold of his raincoat. “Go on, I got this!”

“Halle-fucking-lujah!”

The man began walking quickly toward him, still rubbing his hands desperately together. Keo calmly slipped his right hand into the folds of his coat and reached for the Glock in its holster-

“Hey,” a voice said, freezing Keo in place.

Keo looked to his right at the nearby platform as a second raincoat-cloaked figure emerged out of the darkness and into another small pool of light.

“What’s going on?” the second man asked. “We finally getting replacements?”

Keo finished wrapping his fingers around the Glock and pulled it out and shot the soldier in front of him in the head, then spun slightly and shot the other one in the chest-just as lightning pierced the blackened night above them, lighting all three of them up for a brief moment…then it was gone again.

The second soldier was stumbling, trying not to fall, when Keo shot him a second time in the chest, just as the thunder that had been promised a second ago finally reached them and boomed across the skyline.

The one in front of Keo collapsed to the dock while the second soldier fell into the water, the moving river quickly grabbing onto his body and dragging him into its current. The speed of it surprised Keo, and he was still looking after the body when a second lightning bolt struck and-

Eyes.

An army of blackened eyes on the other side of the river, looking back at him from the banks, gleaming rain-drenched dark flesh writhing between the throng of trees.

Jesus Christ.

They weren’t so much as hiding from him as they were trying to stay away from the powerful currents splashing against the riverbanks, threatening to overflow and flood the woods. There were so many of them that he couldn’t have begun to count even if he had wanted to. Their numbers stretched from one side of the woods to the other, an endless multitude of moving black flesh and hollow eyes and herky-jerky movements, completely unnatural and surreal against the rain.

The river. They couldn’t, didn’t, or wouldn’t cross the river.

“Relax,” Steve had said. “They don’t come into town. There’s an invisible line that they don’t cross. When I decide I can fully trust you, I might tell you how it all works.”

An invisible line that the creatures didn’t cross. Like the river. Or the tree lines. Or maybe those flimsy six-foot fences that surrounded the subdivisions.

Whatever it was (maybe all of it), the ghouls didn’t cross.

He should have felt good, even safe at the sight of them wanting (desperately) to cross the river but holding back, but he shivered from head to toe instead.

It was only thanks to the returning darkness once the lightning disappeared that he was able to push down the overpowering need to run and hide. He couldn’t see them anymore and that somehow made it better, even though he knew they were still out there watching his every movement.

He forced himself to move again, crouched, and rolled the dead soldier into the water, then walked the brief distance over to the first slip. The boat inside was a twenty-footer with a single motor in the back, thin and sleek with a T-overhead canvas. It didn’t look nearly powerful enough to outrun most of the boats tied up around him, but he didn’t need a fast vessel right now; he just needed one that would run. The currents would make up for any speed deficiencies.

He hurried back to the same metal box in front of the docks, the one that housed all of the keys to the boats. It was still unlocked and inside were the keys, designated by slip numbers. He found the one he needed and pocketed it and slammed the lid shut-

He didn’t hear the gunshot, but he felt it buzz past his head just before the bullet pinged! against the metal box, leaving behind a large dent.

Keo spun around, quickly tracing the trajectory of the bullet back to-

The water tower.

If it wasn’t for bad luck…

He would have unslung the M4 and fired back if he thought it would do any good. But it wouldn’t have, because the tower was too far away and he would be essentially shooting into the darkness, because although he could just barely make out the rocket-shaped structure, he had absolutely no clue where the shooter was.

Buzz! as a second bullet passed over his head and disappeared into the parking lot behind him.

Just as he had predicted, shooting in this condition was hit and miss, and right now, thank God it was two in the miss column and none in the first. It wasn’t just the distance and the suffocating darkness, it was also the wind and the cold adding to the difficulty scale.

The problem was, although the first bullet had nearly taken Keo’s head off and the second had gone long, it was only a matter of time before the sniper adjusted and found just the right distance. Either that, or until he radioed-

Someone opened fire with an M4 behind him, and he turned just in time to see a figure at the front gate firing-but not at him. The man was shooting at the group of office buildings across the marina, the muzzle flashing, lighting up the guard booth nearby with every pull of the trigger.

Dave.

A man running out of Marina 1 stumbled and fell, his body illuminated by bright lights from inside. Other figures were moving visibly on the other side of windows, scrambling for cover as glass around them exploded from Dave’s barrage.

Keo started lifting his rifle to help Dave out when another bullet slammed into the key box inches from his head-ping! — and ricocheted into the pavement.

He scrambled away from the box, hoping that taking himself away from the stationary object would make him a harder target to reacquire. Then again, if the guy had some kind of night-vision-capable scope, than it probably didn’t matter how far Keo moved-

Buzz! as another round hit the parking lot a foot to the right of him, spraying water and concrete chunks on impact.

Keo would have gotten up and ran away if he had the time, but he didn’t. Men were pouring out of the offices across the marina, and Dave had stopped firing. Either he had run out of bullets and was changing magazines, or something else had happened. Keo flicked the fire selector to burst fire and unleashed half of his rifle’s magazine into the source of light across the parking lot.

He wasn’t trying to hit any specific target, but simply firing at where the lights were the brightest, which at the moment was the single wide-open door that a pair of figures were rushing out of. The distance was fifty meters, and it was a little hard to miss when you were just shooting into the only source of light in, at that moment, the entire world.

His aim was true enough that both men fell out of the door and didn’t get back up.

Keo spotted a tall silhouette behind one of the broken windows, looking out, and he put another burst in that direction. The man ducked his head just in time, and two others behind him scrambled for cover behind a desk.

He was waiting for more soldiers to come out of the other offices, but the windows behind those remained blackened. Which meant all the soldiers had, for whatever reason, congregated in one place. That was good for him and Dave.

That is, if Dave was even still alive.

He was standing up, looking at the gate to make sure Dave was still there, and at the same time realizing that he had stayed at the same spot for way too long when instead of a buzzing sound, there was instead a sudden sting and his right leg buckled slightly under him. Keo knew what had happened before he saw the blood pour out of the right side of his thigh and flood down the parking lot along with the rain, as if drawn irresistibly to the river.

He pushed himself back up, turned around, flicked the fire selector on his rifle to semi-auto, and squeezed off everything he had left in the magazine at the water tower. He aimed for the largest target-the barely visible tip-while knowing full well he wasn’t going to hit anyone from this distance, but hoping he did just enough to distract the guy. He imagined he could hear the ping! ping! of his bullets bouncing off the metal tower, but of course that was impossible given the pounding rainstorm around him.

He moved left while shooting, angling back toward the docks. Keo sent off his last round and dropped the magazine and slammed in a new one, turning around almost simultaneously as two men in the office opened fire-except not at him. Maybe they couldn’t see him very well, but they certainly had no trouble seeing the golf cart as it rumbled slowly (Christ, that thing is slow) across the parking lot.

Keo switched his fire over to the office, again using the lights as his target finder. He stitched the two rectangle-shaped windows, forcing the two figures firing out of them to stop shooting and duck for cover.

He was still shooting when Keo heard the buzz! as the bullet tore through the left sleeve of his raincoat and took away a chunk of his flesh underneath. Blood poured out, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as when he had gotten hit in the thigh. Maybe it was the cold numbing his flesh or the fact that he knew stopping to dress his injuries now meant death, but Keo managed to grit his teeth through the shoulder wound and turned around just as Dave appeared, the golf cart flying in his direction like an out-of-control lumbering beast.

“Take the first boat!” Keo shouted. “Go go go!”

Dave slammed on the brake and climbed out of the golf cart as Keo turned around and took a step sideways and squeezed off a round at the water tower. He took another step and fired again, and kept repeating the process until he heard Dave running past him, gasping for breath as he went.

Keo glanced back in time to see Dave make the docks and run up it toward the twenty-footer, Jordan’s body a big black unmoving clump draped over his shoulder.

He glanced back at Marina 1. Lights poured out of the windows and the open door, but he couldn’t detect any signs of movement. Maybe they had finally had enough and didn’t think it was worth it to get their heads blown off-

Buzz! as another bullet came within an inch of Keo’s right ear.

Sonofabitch.

He ran after Dave and Jordan, grabbing the third and final magazine from his pouch as he did so. A hole appeared in the plank in front of him, splintering wood, as the sniper fired again. The bullet disappeared into the water below, and Keo ran past the newly created hole without wasting a precious half-second contemplating the near-miss. His entire night had been a series of near-misses. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had two holes in him as proof of that.

Dave had already climbed into the boat and placed Jordan’s body across a long bench in the back while scrambling to one of the two lines keeping the boat in place. Dave glanced up as Keo ran over. “The key!” he shouted.

“I got it!” Keo shouted back.

He reached into his raincoat pocket and fisted the key. He would have tossed it to Dave, but he didn’t have any faith in either one of them making the exchange in this weather. So he ran the whole distance and leaned over and handed it to Dave instead, then ran back to unwind the bowline.

All of that took three precious seconds, enough time for the sniper to reacquire them, and there was a sharp ping! as a bullet drilled into the portside of the boat. Dave either didn’t see or hear the impact, or he was too focused on putting the key in the ignition to do anything about being shot at. The boat’s motor roared to life at about the same time Keo got the line free and tossed it into the back.

That was also when he heard the familiar clop-clop-clop of horse hooves and looked back and saw the elongated, shadowy forms of men on horseback coming through the marina gate. While the distance and darkness made making out their exact numbers impossible, he managed to distinguish three, maybe five forms out of the moving blob, though he had no illusions that that was all of them.

“Come on!” Dave shouted behind him.

Keo hopped into the boat just as something buzzed! past his head and hit the water a few meters off starboard. He pretended it was a fly instead of thinking about how close he had just come to having his brains splattered in the river.

Think positive!

He almost laughed as he landed in the back of the boat next to Jordan’s swaddled form resting on the bench to his right. Dave was already reversing out of the slip, having also seen the horsemen coming in their direction, the clop-clop-clop of hooves somehow managing to pierce through the rain’s stranglehold on sounds.

Then boom! and Keo cursed.

Three to five? If only he was that lucky. There had to be at least a dozen of them, men in wet raincoats, pulling up as they reached the end of the parking lot and began unslinging their rifles. They were almost right in front of him, so close that he could see mists flooding out of the nostrils of their mounts as the animals reared to a stop.

Keo opened fire into the marina, and one man fell off his horse just before the lightning vanished and darkness swallowed the world up again, the soldiers returning to their formerly indistinguishable black forms.

He pulled the trigger again and again, even as Dave spun the steering wheel and Keo had to turn around in order to keep shooting into the parking lot. He was still firing while simultaneously gritting his teeth in anticipation of return fire. The sniper had also either stopped shooting, or his shots were going wide and Keo couldn’t hear it over the pouring rain and his own gunshots.

At first Keo thought the lack of return fire from the marina was because he was dropping the horsemen, but that couldn’t have been it. Without any lights in the parking lot and his vision hindered badly by the rain, all he could see were indecipherable shapes moving in front of him as he waited for the inevitable.

Because he knew it was coming-a fusillade of lead that he or Dave had no hopes of surviving. They were still backing away from the docks, trying to reach a part of the river where they could use the motor and were, for all intents and purposes, sitting ducks for a good ten, twenty seconds.

“Get down!” he shouted when it finally came-the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire that wasn’t his, muzzle flashes lighting up the wide open spaces in front of him.

Except the horsemen weren’t shooting at him or Dave or Jordan.

What the hell?

Maybe it had something to do with the dark shape moving between the horses, inciting the animals to let out loud furious whines and scramble about the wet concrete pavement. The thing was fast, and something-a long coat? — was fluttering around it, visible for brief half-seconds against the staccato bursts of gunfire as it moved through the throng of men and beasts.

Any hopes Keo had of seeing details were rendered impossible by the night and rain. The figure in the long coat was on the ground, then it was in the air, then it was on the ground again. It was moving so fast Keo could barely keep up with it. He didn’t know when he stopped shooting, but time seemed to slow down as he stood there and watched the figure grabbing men off their horses and throwing them across the parking lot.

Something sailed through the air, and Keo instinctively ducked even though he didn’t have to. A black-clad soldier, hands and feet flailing, hit the river just five feet off the starboard and was sucked under.

Then the boat’s stern dipped slightly, and a motorized roar shattered the shrill wind and falling rain. Keo didn’t know when Dave had turned them around, but suddenly they were blasting downriver and leaving the docks behind.

Keo hurried to the stern and looked back toward the marina as gunshots continued to ring out and muzzle flashes lit up the parking lot again and again and again. He waited for bullets to zip past his head or punch into the hull of the twenty-footer, but none of those things happened. The soldiers on horseback-and some on the ground now-were firing at something among them. Something that wasn’t him or Dave or Jordan. That same something that Keo had seen earlier, moving with a ferocity he didn’t know was possible.

Slowly, the flashes began to disappear one by one until they had ceased completely. There was a brief pause before someone screamed. A shrill cry, dripping with fear instead of pain, and it burrowed its way through the cold and night and rain and into Keo’s gut.

The docks were still fading fast behind him when Keo thought he saw something that shouldn’t have been there, that shouldn’t have been possible.

Eyes.

Blue fucking eyes.

They were looking after him, the twin orbs pulsating against the rain and darkness. He shouldn’t have been able to see them through the night and distance, but there was something vibrant about them, full of life, and they drew him in like lighthouse beacons.

“Christ, you’re bleeding!” Dave shouted, his voice breaking through Keo’s temporary stupor.

He looked back at Dave, and by the time he turned back around, the marina had vanished into the darkness.

And with it, the eyes.

What the fuck…

It had attacked the soldiers. He knew that for a fact. It had come out of nowhere and waded into Steve’s horsemen before they could open up on him and Dave. At that range, with that many guns, and with the boat in such a vulnerable position, they would have been shredded and sank in a hail of bullets.

…just happened?

He had heard the stories. From Lara and Carly, from Gaby and Danny. But he hadn’t believed it. It was too much. Despite everything he had been through and seen, the idea that there was something out there more horrific than the black-eyed ghouls…

Blue eyes.

Jesus fucking Christ.

He sat down and leaned back against the starboard hull, then squinted up at Dave’s silhouetted form. “You know how to drive this thing?”

“Better than you!” Dave shouted back over the roar of the motor.

Keo grinned. That was good to hear, because with the hole in his thigh and the other one in his left arm, he wasn’t entirely sure he could have stood behind the steering wheel and fought against the currents and the storm at the same time.

“Hey,” Keo said.

Dave looked back at him. “What?”

“Don’t run aground.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

But Dave did want to know, and there was a click as he turned the button that powered on the spotlight at the front of the boat. They must have been everywhere, just like the last time he saw them, because it didn’t take Dave very long to see them.

“Oh, fuck me,” Dave said.

“Yeah,” Keo said.

He closed his eyes, the pak-pak-pak of rainwater against his forehead, eyelids, and face fading into the background. Even the cold had ceased to matter as Keo relived the last few seconds.

Blue eyes.

He couldn’t get over it. The image of it, looking after him, bounced around inside his head like a sledgehammer.

It had blue eyes…and it had saved his life.

Dae-fuck-me-bak.