The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 5

Once upon a time, he was trapped inside an attic listening to the creatures as they tap-tap-tapped below him. This time he was inside a second-floor bathroom. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, apparently.

Gene had heard the sudden movements-like scratching-from outside the house too, and his entire body stiffened. Keo could just make out the teenager’s dirty sweatshirt in the semidarkness. He sat inside the bathtub with his back against the wall, the only window inches to the left of his head. The kid’s eyes kept darting between Keo and the window and Miller, sitting against the glass shower stall to Keo’s right. A large swath of moonlight illuminated half of the room in a strangely serene baby-blue tint.

Keo tightened his grip on the MP5SD resting in his lap. He felt better knowing the bullets were silver, but that might not do him a lot of good if there were a lot of them out there right now. Sooner or later, he would use up his spare magazines, and then what? He remembered seeing Danny carrying a silver knife around with him. Smart. Guns ran out of bullets, but knives didn’t.

I need to get me one of those. Maybe a sword.

“Hey,” Keo whispered across the room at Gene. When the kid glanced over, “How many of them are out there?”

Gene didn’t look like he understood the question. Or maybe he couldn’t hear him.

Keo raised his voice a bit (but not too much). “The island. How many ghouls are on the island? How many houses? Ballpark figure.”

“Fifty or so, I think,” Gene said.

Fifty or so. Assuming at least two people to a house and four maximum would give him one hundred at least, and two hundred at the most. Probably somewhere in the middle to account for the loners, the retirees, and the divorcees. Somewhere around 150. Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little less. And that wasn’t counting however many bloodsuckers had invaded the island during The Purge.

That was a hell of a lot more targets than he had bullets for.

Outnumbered again. So what else was new?

He looked over at the doors. Solid wood. Tough. He wouldn’t have been able to physically hammer them down with his body. He’d need a sledgehammer at least. So Gene had chosen wisely by bringing them here. Would 150 (or so) ghouls be able to batter their way through in a single night?

Maybe. Maybe not.

He turned back to the window. His instincts were to barricade it or at least cover it up with something, but Gene had said he’d found it that way. And the kid had been surviving on the island by himself for months now, which meant he knew what he was doing. Keo hoped, anyway.

“How many?” Gene whispered.

“Hmm?” Keo said.

“How many are out there, you think?”

“One-fifty, give or take a few dozen here and there. Could be less. Could be more. I’m just spitballing numbers.”

“Sounds about right,” Gene said. He had Deuce between his legs, the barrel pointed up at the ceiling.

Keo glanced at Miller in the corner. The man’s eyes were closed, as if he was trying to sleep, but Keo could tell by the rise and fall of his chest that the soldier was still wide awake.

“What do you think?” Keo asked him.

Miller opened his eyes. “About what?”

“How many do you think are out there?”

“I don’t know. One-fifty sounds about right.”

“What are the chances they’ll leave you alone if you go outside in that uniform?”

“I don’t know.” Miller looked suddenly very uncertain. “There were always others with me when I’m out at night, and we were always on missions.”

“What kind of missions?”

“Finding stragglers. People hiding out in the hills or the cities. Bringing them back to the towns.”

“And here I thought everyone went there voluntarily.”

He shrugged. “What can I say? There are a lot of stubborn people out there. You should know a thing or two about that.”

“You saying I’m stubborn?”

“Maybe I’m wrong. It’s been known to happen.”

“Why don’t you just leave them alone?” Gene said. There was an edge to the kid’s voice, and Keo saw him flexing his fingers around Deuce.

“It’s not my call,” Miller said, and smartly didn’t meet Gene’s accusing eyes when he said it. “I just follow orders, sport.”

“So you’ve been out there at night in those uniforms, and nothing happened?” Keo asked.

“Uh huh,” Miller nodded.

“Interesting.”

“How so?”

Keo shrugged. “Just wondering if that uniform will fit me.”

Miller’s eyes widened a bit, and he opened his mouth to say something when-

Crash!

He froze. And so did Gene and Keo.

Broken glass from downstairs. The living room windows; Keo was sure of it. The island was so still, the silence so complete, that the noise might as well be cannons going off right under them.

“Oh, shit,” Gene whispered. “I don’t understand. We didn’t leave any clues down there. They should have just run past the house like all the other times.”

Maybe they can smell us.

He didn’t know if they could or not, but what else could it be? They had left the front of the house exactly the way they had found it this afternoon. They had even left the bathroom window curtainless for fear of messing with the status quo.

So how the hell did they know?

“Give me a gun,” Miller said. He was fidgeting in his corner. “I need a gun.”

“What’s the matter?” Keo asked. “You don’t think that uniform’s going to save you?”

“I think I don’t wanna find out.”

“Well, tough nuts.”

“Come on, man.”

“Let me think about it,” Keo said. Then, a second later, “I’ve thought about it. The answer’s still no.”

Keo gave the window another quick glance before scrambling to his feet and darting across the pool of moonlight and onto the other side. Gene anxiously watched him slide against the thick double doors and press his hands and ear against the smooth and slightly cool mahogany finish.

He willed his heartbeat to slow down, then held his breath and listened.

Footsteps.

The familiar tap-tap-tap of bare feet against carpeted flooring.

At first they were distant, like faded echoes, but they quickly grew in volume. A lot of them.

Too many, racing up the steps to the second floor.

Growing louder, and louder-

Keo staggered away from the door as…

…silence.

He waited for the inevitable. The familiar pounding of flesh against wood. He had heard it before-too many times to count.

But there wasn’t any this time.

What the hell?

Behind and to the right of him, Gene had stood up inside the tub, his rifle gripped tightly in front of him. Miller was a statue in the corner, his eyes glued on Keo. They were both waiting for the relentless assaults against the door, too.

So where was it?

Keo pushed his ear back against the smooth, wooden surface. He listened for the telltale signs, the tap-tap-tap of bare feet moving around outside, but he could only hear…

Silence.

He’d heard them earlier, hadn’t he? Of course he had, because Gene and Miller had heard them, too. They had broken through the living room windows and raced up the steps and converged on the second floor.

So where were they now? Had they searched the main bedroom and finding no one, just decided to…leave? Without even bothering with the two doors on the other side of the room?

Yeah, right.

“Well?” Gene whispered behind him. “What’s out there?”

The kid looked rooted in the tub, and the sight of him clutching Deuce made Keo smile for some reason. He turned back to the door and leaned against it for the third time, listening to the overwhelming silence outside.

Finally, Keo shook his head.

“I told you,” Gene said, and although he did his best to sound confident, he couldn’t hide the slight trembling in his voice. “They’ll check the houses, but if they don’t see anything out of the ordinary, they’ll move on.”

“Are you sure there’s no other way inside?”

The teenager shook his head. “I checked. It’s just those doors and this window.”

Keo didn’t tell him about the last time he had been in a building that was supposedly secured. That time, the ghouls had found a way in through the-

“Vents,” he said.

“What?” Gene said.

“AC vents.”

He hurried away from the door and began scanning the ceiling, looking for grates designed to blast air into the room in the summer and heat in the winter.

There, just above the mirror over the long sink counter with the two faucets for him and her. Except it was small. Too small. Barely one-by-one-foot. Even the scrawniest ghoul was going to have difficulty crawling through that thing.

“What about the vents?” Gene asked from the bathtub.

“Nothing,” Keo said. “False alarm.”

But he didn’t completely breathe easier. They were still in a house and on an island teeming with ghouls. There were at least a hundred of the monsters outside right now, scouring the homes and buildings and parked vehicles for signs that someone stupid enough (like me) had arrived on Santa Marie Island and decided not to leave before sunset.

Dammit. He should have taken the twenty-two-footer back out and slept on the ocean like he had the last few nights. He should have risked the chances of running into one of Miller’s friends. At least out there he’d be able to hear trouble coming from miles away. And if push came to shove, he could have always gone into the water. He’d done it before.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.

“This is wrong,” Miller said.

Keo looked over at him. “Now you have something to say?”

“This is wrong,” Miller repeated.

“What is?” Gene asked.

“They’ve never been this quiet before,” Miller said. He was breathing hard for some reason.

“Never?” Keo said.

“Not when they know people are nearby. People that aren’t us. In uniforms. And they goddamn know you’re in here.”

“You don’t know that,” Gene said. “They’ve always passed the house over. Tonight’s no different.”

Keo thought the teenager was trying to convince himself more than he was Miller.

“They know,” Miller said with absolute certainty. “Trust me, they know. I’ve been around enough of them that I can tell when they know. And they fucking know.”

Keo and Gene exchanged a quick look.

“Then why-” Gene started to ask, but he didn’t get to finish before the crack! of a gunshot broke the island’s quiet and the window next to him shattered.

Gene ducked down, dropping Deuce and throwing his arms over his head.

Keo dived to the floor as a bullet slammed into the ceiling above him. He landed hard on the dirty and shoeprint-caked slate tiles, but even through the rain of glass shards falling into the tub around Gene, he heard the echoing ploompt! from outside.

Grenade launcher. That was a grenade launcher!

He expected an explosion, waited to be screaming in agony as fire and shrapnel ripped through him, but instead he looked up and saw a cylindrical canister appearing out of the night like a bulbous bullet, but slower and shinier. It slipped through the broken window and rainbowed from one end of the room to the other before bouncing off the counter behind him. The loud hissing filled the air even before the object had settled, telling him that he was wrong-it wasn’t a grenade, but a gas canister.

Keo grabbed his shirt and pulled it up and over his mouth and nostrils. His eyes stung immediately even before the smoke managed to engulf his side of the bathroom. When he had first seen the room he thought it was big, but now as he teared up and his lungs burned, he wished it was much bigger.

The sounds of Gene and Miller coughing up a storm in the room around him invaded his senses. Gene might actually have been crying, or that might have been Miller. Maybe both. Or all three of them, for all he knew.

He was trying to maintain his grip on the MP5SD when he heard the loud pounding of footsteps. Not ghouls this time, because these were heavier and showing all the subtlety of a stampeding herd of elephants. He wasn’t sure how long it had been-ten seconds? Ten minutes? — since he could barely keep his eyes open, and every time he took a breath it felt like someone was stabbing his chest with a spear, or a dozen.

The door. Someone was knocking on the door.

No, not knocking.

Banging.

It would take the ghouls hours, maybe days, to finally break through, he remembered thinking. The creatures weren’t known for their strength, and he had felt relatively safe inside the confines of the bathroom. They would need something like a sledgehammer, or maybe a car to get the job done.

Boom-boom-boom!

It sounded as if they had found one of those two things right now, because the entire room seemed to be trembling each time they smashed into the doors on the other side.

He had made it across the bathroom, alternating between breathing and trying to look past the gathering smoke. It was difficult enough trying to maintain his vision through the waterfall of tears and the sensation of someone dropping barrels of ground peppers into his eyes, but every step made him want to give up and fall down and scream until the pain went away.

Boom-boom-boom!

He spun around until he was facing the doors-or, at least, where he thought the doors were-and waited. He didn’t have to actually see to know where they were-he just had to follow the crushing sounds of blow after blow landing against the mahogany wood somewhere on the other side of the blanket of smoke.

The MP5SD was slippery against his hands, and someone was screaming to his right. Keo ignored everything and focused on what was in front of him, which at this point was smoke and…more smoke.

Soon, the tear gas would be sucked out through the broken window, but soon wasn’t fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.

Boom-boom-boom!

His vision started to blur. Or maybe that was all the tears flooding them. God, he hadn’t cried this much since…well, he’d never cried this much in his life. Of course, no one had ever locked him inside a bathroom with an exploding gas canister before, either, so it wasn’t like he had any experience here.

There was a final boom! before the very distinctive sound of wood splintering came from across the room.

There goes a door. Maybe both.

He sought out the window and saw a figure next to it curled up inside the large bathtub. Gene, trying desperately to make himself small and be spared the tendrils of crushing smoke gathering around him like tentacles. It wasn’t going to work. Poor Gene was alternating between crying and trying not to cough his lungs out.

The window!

What was that Gene had said earlier?

“Push comes to shove, we can always escape through the window.”

He hadn’t greeted that comment with much enthusiasm, and Keo still didn’t have a lot of it as he stumbled in that direction, but he had very little choice at the moment. Unfortunately for him, while his mind had declared that this was the correct path, his legs had somehow turned to Jell-O while he wasn’t looking, and he had to grab at the nearest wall to keep from falling down.

And his lungs. Jesus, his lungs were on fire.

He pushed off the wall-or was it a counter? — and braved the endless curls of smoke, using the window as a beacon of hope. If he could get to it, if he could climb out, and he could somehow crawl up to the rooftop…

Out there, he would be able to breathe again, to see, to not feel like every inch of his body was on fire.

He didn’t know how far he had actually gotten before something blindsided him and Keo went sailing across the room. He must have slammed into another wall and gone down in a pile. Not that he felt it. Any of it. He just knew it was happening. At that moment, the only thing he was intensely aware of was screaming pain from his insides as it threatened to turn all of him into a pool of liquid.

Keo was on his back and looking up as the thing that had assaulted him rose up from the floor. It was a minotaur, blackened and monstrous, and it peered back at him with glassy oblong eyes.

No, it wasn’t a beast from Greek mythology after all. It was just an asshole in a gas mask.

Pain exploded across Keo’s face as something struck him and his head snapped backward and slammed into the slate tiles. It hurt, but the blow wasn’t nearly as intense as the inferno raging inside his body, threatening to burst through his eyeballs.

Then, mercifully, there was just darkness.