The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 29

“Run! Don’t look back! Just run!”

She was glancing back at him while still in mid-stride, her face covered in sheets of sweat despite the chilly night air, the gust of wind coming from the ocean and over the ridgeline and between the houses before finally pouring into the street around the both of them.

“I said, don’t look back!” he shouted, just before he spun around and fired, the flame from the shotgun stabbing forward and lighting up two ghouls as they were shredded by buckshot.

He racked the Mossberg and fired again even before they had a chance to pick themselves up from the pavement. His second shot obliterated the legs out of one of the creatures, and his third blew the right arm off the other one.

Behind him, Jordan’s own shotgun roared once, twice, three times.

It wasn’t going to be enough. He knew that without having to think too hard about it. It wasn’t even close to being enough. Sooner or later, they were going to run out of steam, or run out of bullets, or just plain run out of space.

Should have hid. Should have found a basement and sealed it tight.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, but didn’ta, pal.

They hadn’t gone more than twenty meters down the sloping hill when the first creatures appeared. His first shot was like thunderclaps across the island, and he might as well have lit a torch and carried it down the street with him because after that they came out of everywhere.

Then they were running and shooting, and they were still too far from the marina. Much, much too far.

Both his legs were already burning, not just the one with the bullet hole. And he had only been running for about three minutes. What would happen at the five-minute mark? The ten?

Curiously enough, he barely felt any pain in his left shoulder. Either the entire arm had numbed over, or he was doing a very good job of ignoring it. Of course it didn’t help that he hadn’t eaten anything in…how long had it been? Too long, which explained why he was already sapped of energy. Normally, he could run for much longer than this.

Excuses, excuses.

The only positive that he could come up with was that so many of the ghouls had gone into the two-story house that the ones left behind were sporadic in number. Instead of hordes coming out of the homes around them, there were pockets of one and two, but mostly one at a time. That, more than anything, allowed them to make steady progress down the street toward the marina, shooting the entire way.

Jordan was in front of him, firing and racking and reloading as she ran. He was doing the same thing while keeping the creatures from overtaking them. As they got closer and closer to the marina (he could smell the ocean, and God, was the scent intoxicating, calling to him), there seemed to be less and less of them, allowing him more time to reload.

They had to keep moving. Always moving. They couldn’t stop. Not for a second. Not even to breathe.

Shooting them didn’t kill them. No surprise there. But it did slow them down. The buckshot was effective, the concussive force like a sledgehammer. It was even better when he aimed for the legs. It was hard to run without legs, though that didn’t seem to stop them from crawling after him anyway.

It was difficult to see exactly how far the marina was with just the moonlight to guide him. Fortunately, the street and sidewalks stood out from the lawns, giving him a visible clue of where to go. All he had to do was keep south-

Oh, shit.

He made the mistake of throwing a quick glance over his shoulder, because that’s when he saw them-all of them. It looked like every single ghoul on the island, which meant they were now coming from the two-story house. Which in turn meant Ol’ Blue Eyes was either dead (if it could even still die-again?) or out of commission.

The sight of them pouring down the street, racing around homes and catapulting over fences, took his breath away. He might have kept on staring like an idiot if a shotgun blast didn’t roar behind him and pull him back.

He spun around just as Jordan was leaping over a ghoul whose legs she had cut out from underneath it. Keo mirrored her movements even as the creature groped for him, fingers clawing at empty air.

“Faster!” Keo shouted. “Faster, Jordan!”

She looked back, then past him, and saw for herself. Her right eye had improved, but it was still too bruised to fully open.

“Don’t look!” he shouted. “Run! Just keep running, whatever you do!”

She might have nodded, or just turned around. He couldn’t be certain.

Keo was too busy reaching into his pocket for another shell anyway when his fingers found nothing but empty spaces.

Empty!

He threw the shotgun to the street and unslung the M4.

The ghouls had stopped coming out of the houses around them. Instead, the entire nightcrawler population of Santa Marie Island was behind him at the moment, an unrelenting tide of black flesh and clacking bones, the tap-tap-tap of bare feet against the cold, hard road filling like mini explosions around him. If that wasn’t bad enough, their foul stench traveled downwind, the result of so many of them packed into so limited an area, and threatened to make him heave his stomach’s empty contents. Thank God he hadn’t eaten a single damn thing all day.

He hadn’t looked forward again for more than half a second before he spotted it: the entrance into the marina. It was coming up in forty meters-

Thirty-five-

“Faster!” he shouted. “Faster, Jordan!”

She didn’t look back this time. Instead, she actually started moving even faster, and it suddenly occurred to him that she had been running at a slower pace for his benefit. Because for all her wounds and bruises, Jordan was still more athletic than him before the world ended, and even more so now that he had two bullet holes in him.

Thirty meters-

She made a sharp right turn and disappeared behind a dirt and rock wall. From there, she would have to run down the incline parking lot, which would help her pick up even more speed on her way to the docks on the other end. Then Ol’ Blue Eyes’ boat would be waiting for them, next to the twenty-footer that was out of gas.

“Take my boat,” it had said. “It has everything you’ll need.”

Everything they would need? Besides gas, what else did they “need”? Silver bullets? Was it talking about silver bullets?

Two days ago that would have been ludicrous, but after everything he had seen, that word itself was absurd. Anything was possible, including a blue-eyed ghoul that had gone to great lengths to save his life not once, but twice now.

“I need him alive,” it had said.

Him. Keo. It needed him alive.

Ludicrous? There was no such thing anymore.

He spun around until he was backpedaling at full speed, or at least as fast as he could manage while moving backward. He should have been surprised by what he saw, but he wasn’t-they were almost on top of him.

He squeezed the trigger and swept the M4 from left to right and watched pruned flesh writhing as bullets punched through them, the only sound the occasional ping! of his rounds ricocheting off bones. The ones up front stumbled from the impact and fell and were immediately swallowed up by the stampeding herd.

Two shotgun blasts roared behind him, one right after another. Jordan, inside the marina. Apparently the docks weren’t as empty as they had been hoping-

Click!

He tossed the M4 and spun around and picked up more speed. Or tried to. At this point he wasn’t entirely certain if he had any more speed to draw on. If his tank wasn’t already empty, it was pretty damn close. He could practically envision the needle scraping against the E and an alarm going off to remind him of that fact.

Faster. Faster!

He drew the Glock with one hand and unclasped the gun belt with the other. He still had spare magazines in the ammo pouches, and when it slipped off his waist and clattered to the ground, he was instantly lighter and faster. He might not actually be moving any swifter than seconds ago, but it sure as hell felt like he was.

The entrance!

He was making the turn into the marina when he was greeted by the ferocious roar of boat motors powering up from the other side of the wide parking lot. A spotlight had snapped on, and a thick beam of light was cutting across the slanted concrete floor.

He completed the turn and glimpsed a figure (Jordan!) on Ol Blue Eyes’ boat, though at this distance Keo couldn’t tell what kind of vessel it was. Not that it mattered. Right now, it was the one with gas (“It has everything you’ll need.”), and Jordan was revving the motor, maybe trying to direct him over to her, not that he needed the extra attention or the encouragement.

Keo ran right for her-or really, for the light-while dodging a ghoul as it attempted to grab at him. Its legs looked like broken wooden baseball bats, and he expected to see a second one (hadn’t Jordan fired twice?), but there were no signs of it, if it ever existed.

The smell hit him, and Keo couldn’t help himself and he looked back-

A wave of black flesh and rotting teeth was collapsing on top of him.

Jesus Christ! When had they gotten so close?

He stuck out the Glock behind him and squeezed off a couple of shots. Even the handgun began feeling too heavy, and after six shots, Keo threw it away and picked up even more speed as a result.

Or, at least, that’s what he told himself.

Faster!

He was halfway through the parking lot now, his breath crashing out of his lungs, every part of him burning from inside out.

Faster! Faster!

The clacking of bones, the tap-tap-tap of bare feet, and that foul pervading stench pressing up against the back of his neck like a living physical thing, unlike anything he had ever experienced before and never wanted to again-

Faster! Faster! Faster!

Jordan, standing tall in the middle of the boat, behind the steering wheel, was backing the vessel away from the slip. Smart girl. He would have told her to do exactly that if he thought he could shout loud enough to be heard over the roar of the motors.

And there, the edge of the marina, coming up fast. Almost there.

The water glistened under the moonlight, waves sloshing back and forth against the docks. Calm, welcoming, calling to him. He imagined he could hear it moving despite the roar in front of him, the noises of the creatures stampeding behind him, getting closer and closer, louder and louder…

Almost there.

The stench of the creatures continued to fill his nostrils, the manic tap-tap-tap of their bare feet invading his space even further.

He wasn’t going to be able to run fast enough. He knew that now. He would never reach the water before they got to him. Unlike at Song Island, when he could just leap for it, here he was still too far away from the water.

So close, and yet so, so far.

“Half-dolphin, this guy,” Danny had once said about him.

Too bad dolphins can’t fly.

Then he saw it out of the corner of his right eye, the thing he had been waiting for. It was just a single, long bony finger, but it was a harbinger of what he knew was coming. The black-fleshed digit brushed against his shirt, sending an electric sensation through his entire body. It started to curve, to grab onto him, when-

Something sailed over his head.

Keo didn’t hear it coming (the boat’s motor was too powerful, the relentless pounding in his chest, the patter of death behind him), but he actually felt it rippling through the air.

He tried to turn his head, to follow its trajectory, but he might as well be moving on quicksand compared to its speed. A heartbeat later there was a loud BOOM! and the ground shook. The wall of ghouls behind him let out one long singular shriek, the sound of things dying (again). Keo had seen shrapnel rip into flesh before, but he’d never seen what they could do to an entire wall of them.

The concussive force slammed into him from behind like a sledgehammer and Keo was picked up and launched through the air as if he were little more than a rag doll. He was trying to orient himself, make sense of what had just happened, when a second BOOM! shattered the night. His eardrums rang and the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. His bones shook from the vibrations, but his ears were still ringing from the first impact, so this second one was more of a dull THOOM instead of the familiar blast of a grenade impacting.

The screams behind him, like the wails of dying animals, somehow managed to pierce through the internal thrumming slashing up and down his body. Then he shut everything down and missed the wooden bulkhead that separated the marina from the ocean by barely a foot and hit the water headfirst and went under like a stone.

Maybe it was all those days and nights and months on the San Diego beaches, but he had enough awareness and ability to fight through the pain and spin around even while he was crashing through the water until he was looking up again. The moonlit night sky stared back at him on the other side of the surface, just before the air began filling with a red and orange glow. It was beautiful and inspiring, and he found himself gazing up at the spreading color and smiling, or thought he was, anyway.

He wanted to look at it forever, but for some reason he was still free-falling, going deeper and deeper into the Gulf of Mexico.

Keo was a strong swimmer. He’d always been, and those skills had come in handy the last few months. But for some reason, he couldn’t call on them at the moment. His legs didn’t move, and neither did his arms. There was a continuous throbbing pain from behind him, as if someone (or a hundred someones) were repeatedly stabbing him in the back, over and over and over again.

He didn’t want to go anywhere, anyway. He found himself incredibly content to stare at the blooming spectrum of colors beyond the surface and wondered if this was what it was like to witness the birth of the universe.

Daebak, he thought, and smiled up at the sight of the night sky burning. It was glorious.