The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 7

They had taken over a small city called Wilmont and turned it into T18. The place was separated into two parts, with a residential district and a commercial area connected by a wide steel bridge further up the river. As far as Keo could tell, the left side of Wilmont was abandoned, with the civilians (and Steve’s men) congregating entirely on the right side.

And among those civilians was Gillian.

She had seen him too, he was certain of it. They might have locked eyes for just a brief second or two, but the way she had looked back at him, following the path of the boat, he could tell she recognized him.

Gillian.

The fact that she was still alive, after all the ifs and maybes of the last six months, was the best news he could have hoped for, especially after the disaster that was Santa Marie Island. The problem was, he was still in zip ties and being boated away from her.

That left Keo to focus instead on his new surroundings.

The marina where they docked was tiny compared to the shipyard they had passed earlier, but it had a full complement of boats, anywhere from thirty to forty of them (So that’s where all the boats went), occupying almost all of the available slips. Heavily armed soldiers stood watch, with two stick figures moving along a walkway that ringed the top of a rocket-shaped water tower in the near distance.

They were led up the dock, with Taylor and Donovan (still carrying the MP5SD and Keo’s pack, with all the silver bullets) up front. Keo watched Steve stop momentarily at a stainless steel metal box resting on a long pole just inside the parking lot, in front of the docks, and opened it. He took out the boat keys and hung them inside, then closed it-there was no lock, just a latch-and continued on.

Keo made a mental note of the box’s location and, more importantly, its contents.

He saw mostly men standing guard along the length of the marina, and the last time he had seen this many near a shoreline, he was lobbing grenade rounds at them. When Keo saw men on horseback moving back and forth along the banks nearby, he nearly did a spit-take.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like horses?” Steve asked.

“I like horses just fine,” Keo said. “It’s the guys on top of them that bother me.”

“Welcome to the new world order. You hear that?”

Keo listened for a moment. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”

“Nature. That’s the whole point of this, you know. We’re going back to our roots. That’s what they want.”

Keo didn’t have to ask who “they” were. Different people might have different names for them-ghouls, nightcrawlers, bloodsuckers, creatures, even monsters-but they were always the same. They. That was all you really needed to say.

“You ever wondered why they want it like this?” Keo asked. “Taking us back to the Stone Age?”

“I know exactly why, and I’m good with it.”

“It must be nice to care so little about your fellow human beings.”

Steve chuckled. “Don’t make me slap you again, Keo.”

“We wouldn’t want that now, would we? Especially me.”

“That’s a good boy.”

They walked through a wide-open (and very empty) parking lot that took up a huge chunk of the marina and toward a pair of buildings to the right side of the grounds. Men milled around inside one of them, visible through open doors and windows. A large warehouse that looked like it could hold a handful of boats at one time squatted to one side of the buildings. Keo wondered what was inside. It probably wasn’t boats…

“Expecting trouble?” Keo asked, looking around him at the armed men.

“You never know when you’ll run into someone with a fancy German submachine gun,” Steve said.

Keo grunted. “It’s not that fancy.”

“What’s the matter, an American gun like the M4 isn’t good enough for you?”

“I didn’t know you were so patriotic, Steve.”

“Rah rah, and all that jazz.”

They were heading toward one of the two buildings next to the warehouse. Someone had spray painted “Marina 1” and “Marina 2” on the walls.

“Your boys look a little on edge,” Keo said.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Steve said. They stopped in front of the buildings and Steve nodded at Taylor and Jack. “Take the kid to Processing.” And to Donovan and Horace, “The two of you with me.”

Steve pulled open the door and stepped inside Marina 1.

Behind Keo, Taylor was leading Gene away while Jack waved one of the soldiers on horseback over. Gene looked over at Keo, and if he expected to see fear in the teenager’s eyes, he would have been disappointed. Gene looked almost happy, as if he had come home.

“See you around, Gene,” Keo said.

“Yeah, see you around, Keo,” Gene said.

Jack had traded places with the horseman and had tossed his crutches to Taylor. “Save them for me, just in case.” He looked over at Keo. “Don’t worry about the kid. Look at him. Once he sees what T18 has to offer, he’s never going to want to leave. They never do.”

Jack turned the horse around and galloped off, while Taylor led Gene after him.

“Come on,” Donovan said, and poked Keo in the back with the M4 again.

Keo followed Steve into Marina 1.

It was an office suite, with a big desk where a secretary would have sat and a row of empty cheap plastic chairs along the walls for the guests. A dead plant draped over the side of a faded brown pot and magazines were strewn along a chipped table. Keo walked across dirty, heavily mud-caked tiled flooring and into a back hallway that Steve had disappeared into earlier.

They walked all the way to the end before Donovan said, “Inside,” and gave him another shove in the back with the same barrel.

He stepped inside, expecting Donovan to follow, but the man instead turned around and headed back to the waiting area.

Steve had already made himself comfortable inside a nice big office. The place looked heavily lived in, with a blanket and pillows on a pullout sofa along one wall and empty plastic bottles of water littering the corners.

The older man was pulling up the lone window, letting the cool breeze from the river rush inside. He looked comfortable, like a king in his (shabby) throne room. “Have a seat, Keo.”

Keo sat down on a surprisingly comfortable chair in front of a desk, its laminated surface covered with a large and heavily annotated map of the area that finally allowed him to see T18/Wilmont in relation to the rest of the Gulf Coast. They were on the outskirts of League City, on the other side of the I-45 highway. A long river, like the slithering body of a snake, stretched from T18 all the way to Galveston Bay.

Steve walked back over. “I saw that.”

“What’s that?”

“You looking at the map.” He smirked. “You think you’ve committed enough important details to memory?”

Keo smiled. “You give me too much credit. My memory is shit. I was just trying to figure out where I was.”

“Ah,” Steve said, though he clearly didn’t believe a single word Keo had said.

The man sat down on an executive chair and opened one of the drawers and produced a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels, then grabbed two shot glasses from another drawer. Keo watched him expertly pour the Tennessee whiskey into both glasses before sliding one across the desk.

“To your health,” Steve said, and downed his.

Keo hissed as his went down. Even as he was tilting the glass to his lips with his still zip-tied hands, he briefly considered using it to bash Steve’s head in and grab his weapons, including the M4 Steve had leaned against the wall behind him.

“It’s been a while, huh?” Steve said with a grin, watching him closely. Too closely. It was going to be tough to catch Steve off-balance.

“I’m more of a brandy man.”

“I can see that. A world traveler like you.”

“How you figure?”

“Oh, come on. You’re not from around here, we both know that. You couldn’t find Pearland on a map if I put a gun to your head.”

“What is that, a city made of pears?”

“Cute.” He poured himself another glass and offered Keo another one too, but Keo waved him off. “You should learn to appreciate American whiskey. There’s nothing like it, especially now. Soon, there won’t be Americans anymore. No Europeans or Asians or blacks and whites and Mexicans, either. They’ll just be humans and nonhumans.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I think they’ll always be Asians and blacks and whites to some people.”

“Neanderthals,” Steve said, and emptied his second glass with a flick of his wrist.

“I didn’t know you were such a progressive fella, Steve.”

A chuckle. Keo couldn’t tell if that was the whiskey talking or if Steve really was an easygoing guy. Of course, that easygoing guy had given him a nice slap last night for absolutely no reason. Okay, so there was a reason, but it was far from justified.

“I’m pragmatic,” Steve said. “It’s just us and them now. The faster the human race accepts our new position on the totem pole, the easier it’ll be for us as a species to move forward. We’re obviously the second-class citizens at the moment. All of us. That’s fine, someone has to be. But there are classes within classes. People who embrace that get to keep on keeping on.”

Keo looked out the window as two armed men in black uniforms walked the riverbanks behind Steve. “You need that many guns to keep on keeping on, Steve?”

“Can’t be helped. We have a bit of a problem, you see.” Steve leaned slightly across the table. “You wanna hear about it?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Steve shrugged.

“Gee, Steve, what kind of problem do you have?” Keo asked, with all the enthusiasm of a man being forced to recite a line at gunpoint.

Steve smiled. “I like you.”

“I don’t blame you. I’m a likable guy.”

“Was that before or after this?” he asked, tracing the left side of his face with his finger.

“Scars give a man personality. You should try it.”

“I’ll stick to looking handsome.” He leaned back in his chair. “So, this problem of mine. You see, everyone here’s gotten with the program, but not everyone out there has. I still have people running around causing trouble.”

“Like me?”

“Nah, you’re just a straggler.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“I put people who haven’t gotten with the reality of our situation into two categories: The ones that don’t know any better, and the ones that are determined to make things miserable for everyone else. You belong in the former category.”

“Yay for me.”

“Then, of course, there are the ones in the latter category. They’re the reasons my men have to guard the marina and the bridge and the surrounding areas every second of daylight. Obviously we don’t have to worry about the nights.”

“Obviously.”

Steve offered to pour him another glass, but Keo turned it down again. “So that’s my dilemma,” Steve said, pouring himself a third shot. “I have people I need to take care of-the ones here, who depend on me and my men-but there are troublemakers out there making it difficult. That’s where you come in.”

“I didn’t know this was a job interview.”

“It is. Consider it your last job interview.”

“How so?”

“If you don’t pass, I shoot you.”

Keo smirked. “I guess I better pass, then.”

“I would think so.”

“So what’s the job?”

“Jack told me what you did on that island. That was impressive.”

“I had help.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah.”

“The kid shot Jack from the ridge when no one knew he was up there. I saw that scope on his rifle. A half-blind coal miner could have made that shot. And he actually missed. He was aiming for Jack’s chest. You, on the other hand, went at two of my guys straight on with nothing but that German gun. That takes a lot of guts. And skill.”

“You don’t care that I killed two of yours?”

“I care, but I can respect that you did what you had to do. Besides, plenty more where they came from.”

“Classes within classes, right?”

Steve nodded while eyeing Keo over the rim of his glass. “That’s right. And right now, I need a man like you, Keo.”

“To do what?”

“To do what you do.”

“You’ll have to be a little more specific. I do a lot of things. Some of them even involve whipped cream.”

“Unfortunately I’m all out of whipped cream, but I do have Gillian.”

Keo smiled back, doing his very best not to betray his thoughts. He remembered waking up on Santa Marie Island to find Gene and Steve talking. They had been for some time, too. Now he knew what the topic of conversation had been.

“You don’t look surprised,” Steve said. “I guess you saw us talking this morning. Don’t blame him; he’s just a kid. What is he, seventeen?”

“I thought he was sixteen.”

“Either/or. Doesn’t matter, I guess. These days, you have to grow up fast or you don’t grow up at all.”

Steve finished his third glass and put it down softly. The man’s hand, Keo saw, was steady. Too steady, even after three shots.

“Back to you and Gillian,” Steve said.

“What about me and Gillian?”

“That was her, wasn’t it? On the riverbanks while we were coming up? Come on, don’t deny it. The way you stood up and stared.” He put a hand to his chest and grinned. “It was so romantic.”

Keo remained as stone-faced as possible but internally cursed himself for giving it away on the boat. He should have known someone like Steve would have noticed.

He had to be careful around Steve. Very, very careful.

“The kid described her to me, and it was a no-brainer to put two and two together,” Steve continued. “I still remember the day she showed up. Hard to forget someone like that. Tall, black hair, and green eyes? Not a lot of those around these days. We caught her on a boat just off Galveston.”

“Just her?”

“There were others, but to hear the boys tell it, they tried to fight back and, well, bad things happen when you fight back. She survived, though, and we brought her here. That was…hmm…” He was either really thinking about it or was doing a good job of selling it. “Five months ago? Maybe six? Processing has all the information, if you’re curious.”

“Maybe I can ask her myself.”

“Maybe.” The man was watching him closely, reading every flicker of emotion on his face. “She’s gorgeous. I can see why you spent all this time trying to find her. I would, too.”

Keo leaned forward and pushed his glass back toward Steve, who smiled and refilled it.

“So what’s the job?” Keo asked.

“Right to the point? Fine. I need you to do something for me. Do this one thing, and you can either stay here with Gillian or take her and run off to…wherever. I personally don’t think there’s anything better out there, but hey, it’s still a free country.”

“Is it?”

Steve gave him a noncommittal shrug. Keo picked up the refilled shot glass and sipped the whiskey. It went down easier the second time.

“What’s the job?” he asked again.

“I need you to kill someone for me,” Steve said.

Keo smiled.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Even at the end of the world, there were still people who wanted him to take away other people’s lives for their own purposes. Except this time Gillian was the payment.

Hell, he’d done worse for less.

“Who’s the target?” Keo asked.

*

“What do you need?” Steve asked.

“My guns,” Keo said.

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m a very simple guy. Have gun, will assassinate.”

Steve chuckled. “So I was right about you. You were born for this. Even before the world went to shit.”

“Some people can play the piano, I can do this. So who’s the target?”

“His name’s Tobias. He’s the reason I have men on the bridge and at the marina, and sentries all around town. He’s a real pain in my ass.”

“He’s alone?”

“No. He has some men with him.”

“How many is ‘some’?”

“Maybe as few as a couple, and maybe as many as a dozen.”

“A dozen is manageable.”

“Is that right?”

“I’ve gone up against worse odds.”

“Well, shit, you really are a bad man, aren’t you?” Steve laughed. “Glad you’re on my side.”

For now, asshole.

“One thing,” Keo said.

“What’s that?”

“I want to see Gillian first.”

Steve shook his head. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You may have agreed to the job, but you haven’t earned my trust yet, Keo. You’re not going anywhere past this marina until I know I can absolutely trust you not to screw me over.”

“So tie me at the hip to Donovan.”

“You’ll probably kill Donovan if he ever got that close to you.”

Keo smiled. He had to admit, Steve had a good point. Given how many times Donovan had unnecessarily prodded him with the barrel of his rifle, Keo would have liked nothing more than to get him just a little bit closer and return the favor.

“At least let me talk to her,” Keo said.

“You already saw her on the riverbanks. She’s fine. Better than fine.”

“I see her in person, or no deal.”

Steve pulled out his sidearm-an impossibly smooth and polished Colt 1911 series semiautomatic-and laid it on the desk with a heavy thunk!, then glared across at Keo. “I have a better idea. You keep pushing me on this and I put a bullet in her leg. She doesn’t need two legs to wash clothes. What do you think?”

Keo stared back at him.

Steve didn’t move, didn’t look away, and didn’t flinch.

Fuck.

“Yeah, okay,” Keo said. “So where do I find your friend Tobias?”

Steve picked the gun up and slid it back into its holster. He didn’t laugh or grin like an idiot, and his face remained perfectly unmoved. Keo had absolutely no doubt the man would have shot Gillian just to spite him, which further convinced him that the only way he was going to survive T18 was over Steve’s dead body.

I can live with that.

“Jack will brief you on everything we know about him,” Steve said before glancing at his watch. “You have seven hours and thirty minutes to find Tobias, put a bullet in his head, and get back here before sundown.”

“What if I don’t make it back before nightfall?”

“Then I guess you better find a nice and safe place to hide until morning.”