The Spears of Laconia

CHAPTER 21 KEO

“Get the girl. Lose her. Go back for the girl.”

It wasn’t exactly the best plan in the world, but then things had a bad habit of going sideways these days. Surviving The Purge had been a crapshoot, but the year afterward had become one big blur of gunfights and near misses. He supposed when he really thought about it, riding back to Gillian, a woman who had already spurned him once (or was that twice now?), was about par for the course.

It wasn’t like anything else had worked out these last few months. He would have been perfectly happy to hop back onto the Trident and ride the waves to the Bengal Islands with Lara and the others. Carrie would be there, and of all the women on the yacht, she was always the best reason not to go look for Gillian. And there was also Bonnie…

He must have sighed out loud, because Jordan said, “That’s a pretty big sigh right there, mister.”

“Just thinking,” he said.

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah.”

Jordan was watching him while leaning against the front passenger door of the truck. After about ten minutes with a T-shirt between her and the bloody stains on the seat, she had gotten over being squeamish. At the moment, there was nothing but undeveloped land rushing by outside the open window behind her.

“What?” he said.

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” she said.

“You’re trying too hard.”

“You’re more than you let on.”

“Like I told Lara, I’m just a guy with a gun. It’s not that complicated.”

“I don’t believe that. Bonnie doesn’t believe it, either. We had a little talk back at the beach. Are you curious what she said?”

“No.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that.”

He sighed. “What did she say?”

“Sorry, private conversation.”

He flashed her an annoyed glance, but she just smiled back at him.

They drove on for a few more minutes in silence, the cool wind blasting against his face through the windowless driver-side door. December in Texas was so unlike anything he had experienced in other parts of the world, and he still hadn’t decided if he liked it or was disturbed by it. Maybe a little of both.

They had left Sunport behind a while ago, and there was just empty farmland around them now. A red barn popped up every now and then, along with fenced off property devoid of cows or other livestock. Texas State Highway 288 was a low-to-the-ground two-lane road that connected Sunport and Angleton, and they were on the northwest-bound lane with the southeast-bound thirty meters over to the left. Both long, gray stretches of pavement were barren, with no other vehicle within sight.

“How close are we to the turn-off?” he finally asked.

Jordan took out the same map he had liberated from Gregson’s tank and unfolded it in her lap, then traced the route with her forefinger. “We’re closing in on Angleton. About five more miles. From there, take State Highway 35. That should take us to Alvin, then I-45 after that.”

“You sure he’s going to be there?”

“I’m sure. The question is, will he welcome you back?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I think I made a pretty good first impression.”

She might have rolled her eyes when she said, “You tried to kill him.”

“I was sent to kill him, but I didn’t. Big difference.”

“Let’s hope he makes that distinction.”

“I’m sure he will. Question is, do you think Captain America will help us?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will once I explain what’s happening out here. The Tobias I know wouldn’t be able to sit by while Mercer’s people are butchering civilians. It’s not how he’s wired.”

“What about the others? Would they come along, too?”

“I don’t know about the rest, but Reese will. He looks up to Tobias. There’s a good chance the rest will follow, too. The ones that can still fight, anyway. They were pretty banged up the last time we saw them.”

“So, at least two more guns,” Keo nodded. “Four against an army. A mobilized army on high alert, waiting for an impending attack.”

“Doesn’t sound quite as good when you say it out loud.”

“Are you kidding me? Those are the best odds I’ve had in months.”

She gave him an unconvinced glance.

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” he grinned back at her.

“I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

“Like a stroke,” he said, when he saw it a second later and thought, Oh, fuck me.

He didn’t hear it, but he imagined it was there somewhere outside the vehicle — the telltale swoosh! — as the sun glinted off the dull olive green of the rocket-propelled grenade as it flashed across the windshield, entering the periphery of his vision from the right and disappearing out of the left.

Keo didn’t have time — didn’t waste time — tracking the rocket’s trajectory as it missed the truck by a few feet and kept going. A civilian might have slammed on the brake in shock, but Keo wasn’t a civilian. He floored the gas pedal and the Ford F-150 lurched forward, gaining even more speed as it went.

“Keo!” Jordan shouted as her body was thrown back against her seat by the sudden acceleration.

“Hold on!” he shouted back.

He had both hands on the steering wheel to make sure the truck didn’t do anything he didn’t want it to. His eyes shot left then right, to the rearview mirror and forward, always moving, even as he willed the truck to go faster, faster, faster.

They had been moving at forty miles an hour before, but he was already up to sixty—

— seventy—

— ninety—

“Keo!” Jordan shouted again, clutching to the handhold over her door with one hand, the other gripping her M4 by the barrel.

“Ambush!” he shouted back. “Hold on!”

He zeroed in on the rearview mirror as a man-sized lump — no, two—stood up to the right of the highway, where they had been hiding among the sunburnt fields. They were wearing dark-colored uniforms.

Collaborators?

He expected pursuit at any moment — vehicles to burst out of the grass like some wild animal — but each time he stole a quick glance at the rearview mirror the road behind him remained empty, and even the two that had stood up were just looking after them—

A loud boom! shattered his eardrums, and a second later the steering wheel was fighting his control and the truck was, impossibly, starting to turn sideways. Then he went from looking at the gray stretch of pavement out the windshield to staring at the cloudless sky to seeing the sun-bleached grass twirling in front of his eyes.

They were flying. The Ford was flying through the air.

But not for long. They came back down to earth, and there was an earsplitting blast as the glass around him shattered, drowning out Jordan’s screams. The cacophony of natural and unnatural sounds was followed by the loud crunch! of metal as the car smashed, rolled, and smashed again into the abandoned farmland.

The engine was still turning when he opened his eyes, very aware of the seatbelt strap pinning him to his seat. He pushed past the thrum of pain and concentrated instead on the heavy tap-tap of footsteps in the background. Something wet streaked across his forehead and into his hair and drip-drip-dripped down to…the ceiling?

Combat boots appeared outside the shattered front windshield before he could unlatch himself from the seat belt and reach for his weapon. The legs were upside down for a reason. Oh, right, because he and the truck were overturned.

“Holy shit, they’re still alive,” someone said.

“Not for long,” a second voice said.

The familiar sting of cold metal pressing into the side of his temple was enough to make Keo forget about the pain. He couldn’t quite turn his head all the way around, so he couldn’t see who was crouching just outside the driver-side door.

“Close enough for ya, Tanner?” the first voice asked with a laugh.

“Just about,” the second man, Tanner, said, followed by the very clear click of a gun hammer being pulled back.

“Well, do it already, before she—”

A loud squawking noise cut him off, followed by a muffled female voice. “What’s the body count?”

“—too late,” the first voice finished.

“Sonofabitch,” Tanner said, and Keo felt the barrel depress slightly against his temple.

“Give me a sitrep,” the female voice said.

He heard another click as someone keyed a radio’s transmit lever. “They’re still alive,” the first man said.

“I’m on my way. Don’t do anything until then.”

“Tanner wants to—”

“I said, don’t do anything until I get there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said, though Keo detected obvious derision and wondered if he had transmitted that last part or said it to empty air. “You heard her; don’t pop them yet.”

“Fuck,” Tanner said.

Rough hands grabbed and pulled him out of the overturned Ford and deposited him on the ground on his back, allowing him a great view of the wide-open skies above. It was a very bright afternoon, the kind that would have looked perfect from the aft of the Trident.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.

“Look at that face,” the man named Tanner said. “Shit, man, looks like you’ve been through the wringer. Made you real pretty.”

“Girl looks pretty good, though,” the other one said.

“She still alive?”

“I think so. She’s moving. I’ll go check…”

Footsteps, fading.

Then Tanner’s voice again, somewhere in the background. “How’d you dodge that first rocket?”

Rocket? What — Oh. That rocket.

“You must be the luckiest sonofabitch I know,” Tanner said when Keo didn’t answer. “Harry never misses. That guy’s like a savant with an M72. Good thing Doug was a better shot, or you’d still be hauling ass down the road. Too bad for you, chum.”

An M72 LAW rocket launcher. Uncle Sam’s version of an anti-tank weapon that apparently was just as good against a moving truck going, what, ninety miles an hour? He tried to imagine what the F-150 must have looked like when it was hit. The round probably struck the back first, which accounted for the booming sound, before sending the Ford shooting forward and upward like a launching missile. He would have approved of the sight if he wasn’t the one inside the target at the time.

A new pair of footsteps approached before a familiar female voice (this time unmuffled) said, “He’s not wearing a uniform.”

The same woman who had ordered Tanner not to kill him through the radio. His savior. In the flesh, she had a just barely-there Hispanic accent.

“No, but that’s definitely one of our trucks,” Tanner said. “Goran and Paul took two of them out to track down that tank from yesterday.”

“Sunport?”

“Yeah.”

A brief moment of silence.

“We should finish them off,” Tanner said, slightly agitated. “Look at the blood inside. That’s not new. They killed Goran and Paul, and who knows how many, for their vehicle.”

The woman still didn’t say anything.

“We should—” Tanner pressed.

“No,” she cut him off.

“Why the fuck not?”

“If they came from Sunport, then they might know something about who’s launching these attacks,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were in the tank. My guess is it’s run out of fuel and they had to commandeer Goran and Paul’s truck. Right now, we need intel more than we need two more dead bodies. Go and bring the truck over.”

“I’m telling you, Marcy, this is the wrong move—”

“And I said, go and bring the goddamn truck over,” Marcy snapped.

I guess we know who wears the pants in this family, Keo thought, wishing he could see the woman’s face.

Footsteps leaving. Tanner, huffing and puffing as he went, probably.

Dumb bastard. Pushed around by a girl.

“You got a name?” the woman asked.

Was she talking to him?

The crimp in his neck had lessened, the throbbing pain starting to numb, and he was finally able to turn his head slightly to the left, just enough to see a woman with curly black hair staring down at him. She was in her thirties, wearing a black uniform with a patch of Texas over one shoulder. The name “Marcy” was stenciled across a name tag, and a pair of binoculars hung loosely off a long neck.

Collaborators. Just my luck.

Brown eyes peered back at him. “Name. You got one?”

“Keo,” he said.

“Keo,” she repeated. “What kind of name is that?”

“José was taken.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Funny, you don’t look Hispanic.”

“It’s my disguise.”

Pale lips curved into a smile, but there was no genuine trace of humor. “All right, funny guy. Let’s find out what you know. Then I’ll decide if I’ll do you a favor and kill you and your friend fast, or take my time.”

They didn’t have to carry him very far because the truck was parked nearby. He was put into the back, his ankles and arms zip tied, but at least they didn’t blindfold him, which allowed him to keep an eye on the amazingly bright sky. Of course, some of that great view was marred by a man in a black uniform manning a machine gun standing above him. The welding that connected the MG’s tripod to the cab looked rushed, which made him wonder if they had put the technical together only recently, possibly in response to Mercer’s attacks yesterday.

He turned his head until he could see Jordan’s unconscious body next to him. She was also bound, strays of short blonde hair matted to her forehead by small clumps of blood. She looked okay — or as okay as you could look after getting tossed off the road by a rocket strike, anyway.

The back of the truck closed with a bang!, and then they were back on the road.

The soldier manning the machine gun was alert, swiveling the weapon around as they moved. It looked like an older model squad automatic weapon, but even an aging piece was still dangerous when you could throw a few hundred rounds a minute downrange without having to reload.

Why was he so surprised the collaborators were all over the highway? Maybe he had expected them to remain around the towns to protect the inhabitants instead of spreading out into the countryside. How many other groups were out there between him and Gillian, waiting to ambush whoever was stupid enough (like us) to be driving out in the open?

Of course, he wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for Mercer. Hell, he’d probably be on the Trident right now, maybe even watching Bonnie and Carrie swimming in bikinis at the back of the anchored boat. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Coulda, woulda, but didn’ta, pal.

The soldier standing near his head shuffled his feet, the dried dirt caking his boots flaking off with every movement.

“Hey,” Keo said.

The man ignored him.

“Hey,” Keo said again.

The man looked down. He was wearing dark shades and Keo got a quick glimpse of himself in the reflective lens, lying on the truck bed. There was blood along the side of his face and in his hair, but he concluded that they looked worse than they actually were, since it certainly didn’t feel as if he was bleeding to death at the moment. Probably.

“What?” the man said.

“Where we going?”

“Base,” the man said, and returned his attention to the road.

“Angleton?”

“Angleton’s dead,” the man said. “Been dead for a year now.”

“So where’s base?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

Keo hadn’t been able to glimpse the man’s name tag, with the soldier’s back to him most of the entire time. “You got a name?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the man said.

Keo smiled. A man after his own heart. “I’m Keo.”

“Good for you. Now shut up.”

“Just trying to pass the time. Seen any tanks lately?”

That got the reaction Keo was looking for, and the soldier stared down at him for three very long seconds. “Keep it up. I got a shit-stained rag in my back pocket that’s looking for a mouth to call home.”

“Fair enough.” Keo glanced at Jordan instead. “Jordan.”

She didn’t move.

“Jordan,” he said again, louder this time.

She finally opened her eyes and grimaced up at the sun for a moment.

“Over here,” he said.

She turned her head slowly and blinked at him. There was a cut along her right temple, but it looked minor next to the contusion in the middle of her forehead. “This is not good,” she said, her words slightly slurred.

“Hey, we’ve been in worse situations. Remember Santa Marie Island? Or yesterday? Or all of this week?’

“I’m trying not to,” she frowned.

“How’s your head?”

“Like someone’s hitting me with a sledgehammer. Repeatedly.” Her eyes darted upward, toward the collaborator hovering over them. Then, after a moment, “Is there something sitting on my forehead?”

“Looks like you hit it on something during the crash.”

“I don’t know how that’s possible. That seat belt almost cut me in half.”

“We flipped.”

“We flipped?”

“The truck. It flipped.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

“They hit us with a LAW,” he said.

“Law?”

“Light Anti-Tank Weapon. I guess they came fully prepared to take out a tank. Can’t say I blame them.”

“Oh.”

“We’re lucky,” he said.

She frowned again. “One of these days we need to sit down and have a really long talk about your definition of lucky, Keo.”

They drove for another ten minutes or so before the vehicle abandoned the smooth, paved highway and turned right onto a dirt road. Dust enveloped the truck, making him cough. The machine gunner, well-prepared for this part of the trip, pulled a handkerchief that was wrapped around his neck over the lower half of his face. Keo could only close his mouth and try not to breathe in the swirling dust. Jordan did the same next to him, squinting her eyes like she was gagging.

The loud squeal of brakes as the truck, and the ones behind and in front of it, stopped. Doors squeaked open and heavy boots pounded the ground.

The soldier behind the machine gun pulled off his handkerchief and looked down at Keo. “Welcome to base.”

“I call first dibs on the Jacuzzi,” Keo said.

The man grinned, but said nothing. He stepped over Keo, and the truck dipped slightly before rising again as he leaped down the back without bothering with the tailgate.

Keo turned his head and found Jordan looking back at him.

“Another opportunity for that golden tongue of yours to get us out of trouble,” she said. “Start wagging.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t let me down.”

“When have I ever?”

She sighed. “God, you’re going to get us both killed.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

But they didn’t give him a chance to talk his way out of it. Instead, a pair of armed men led Jordan and Keo from the truck and across the large front yard of a farmhouse. They were surrounded by technicals, and armed men stood guard on the rooftops of a two-story white house on one side and the bright red barn in front of them. The highway was somewhere to his right, but Keo couldn’t spy even a tiny glimpse of it at the moment.

The farm was surrounded by vast fields of sun-bleached land, and if something had been growing out there once upon a time, they were long dead, replaced by empty stretches of brown earth. He could probably scream all day and no one would hear, or care, if they heard.

The zip ties around their legs had been removed so they could walk, but the ones around their wrists remained in place. Not that Keo had any intentions of making a run for it. There were too many men in black uniforms with guns, and the ones on top of the barn were watching them like hawks. There were no signs of Marcy, the obvious leader of the pack, and the men walking them didn’t seem interested in conversation.

Keo spotted a dozen vehicles, including the three that had returned from the ambush, before they were escorted through the barn’s open doors and his entire universe suddenly boiled down to rotting wood and the aroma of stale feed and hay, overlapped with old urine and manure stains.

Jordan made a face. “Jesus…”

“Never been inside a barn before?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“Once or twice.”

“Do they all smell like this?”

“This one’s special. A year’s worth of abandonment.”

“I feel so privileged.”

There was no one inside the barn but them, which he guessed made sense; who wanted to spend all their time in here, with the smells? Their escorts led them to their destination: a metal cage at the back. It looked like some kind of kennel, about ten feet high and just as wide.

One of the men used a key on the cage’s padlock, then pulled the door open. “Inside.”

Keo and Jordan stepped through, crunching year-old hay (and other things he’d rather not think too much about) as they did so. The door clanged shut and the collaborator slipped the lock back through the latch, snapped it closed, then pocketed the key.

“Hands,” the man said.

Keo squeezed his bound hands through the bars, and the man took out a pair of pliers and snipped the restraints. He did the same to Jordan’s zip ties.

“We could use some medical attention too,” Keo said, rubbing at his wrists.

“Tough nuts,” the man said.

“Maybe later, but just the medical attention for now.”

The man grunted. “If it was up to me, I’d keep the both of you hog-tied and rolling around in there.” Then he turned and walked off.

Keo leaned against the cage, feeling like a prisoner in a bad movie, and watched his guards leave. They didn’t go far, though, and stood guard in front of the open barn doors underneath the bright sun. Well, it was bright for now, but it wasn’t going to last forever, which was the problem.

“I thought you were going to talk us out of this?” Jordan said.

“I didn’t exactly get an opportunity.”

“Excuses.”

“Maybe when Marcy shows up…”

“Who’s Marcy?”

“The one running the show.”

“When did you two become buddies?”

“While you were unconscious.”

“Figures,” Jordan said. “I close my eyes for one moment, and you’re already chatting up a new girl.”

Sunlight streamed in around them, through the holes and boards that made up the barn’s walls, and Keo’s eyes were drawn to the ceiling, where he could hear the slight creak each time one of the two collaborators up there moved around, which was about once every thirty seconds or so.

Nervous in the service, boys?

He focused on the bars, then gripped them and tried pulling. They didn’t budge, of course, especially with one end buried in concrete. The individual metal rods themselves were too close together to slide through and he could just barely get his entire arm out, never mind the rest of him.

“What is this thing?” Jordan asked, pulling on the bars on another side of the cage.

“Probably a kennel for wild animals,” Keo said. “Or two innocent travelers, in this case.”

“Innocent, huh?”

“Innocent-ish.” He glanced at the sentries above them again. “Looks like they’re on high alert.”

“Mercer.”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen nine technicals in the same place before. Combine that with the LAWs, and it looks like we just stumbled into the middle of a full-fledged war. What they have going on out here with Mercer’s people is going to make what you and Tobias had to deal with back at T18 look like child’s play.”

“Wow, why is it every time you open your mouth, I feel less and less like we’re going to survive this?”

“Sorry.”

Jordan leaned against the bars next to him and tried to get a better look at the open doors to their left. “How’s your leg?”

“Still attached.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s fine.”

“Is that you being a tough guy?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, tough guy, so what do we do now?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“They kept us alive to find out what we know. Marcy’s deduced that we’re a part of Gregson’s tank crew, trying to go incognito.”

“‘Deduced’?” Jordan said with a wry smile.

“She figured,” he shrugged.

“So, what do we know?”

“Hopefully enough to convince them to keep us alive, at least long enough to make our play.”

“Which would be?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That doesn’t sound very reassuring.” She walked to the back of the cage and sat down on a pile of old hay. “I should have taken Lara’s offer. The Trident’s looking pretty good right about now.”

He smiled to himself. How many times had he said that in the last few weeks?

“I don’t want to say I told you so,” he said, “but I told you so.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She was suddenly very quiet, and Keo looked back at her. “Jordan…”

“What?” she said.

“Jordan,” he said again.

She looked up and stared back at him. “What, Keo?”

“We’ll be okay.”

“Bullshit.”

“I promise.”

She didn’t say anything, and he wasn’t sure if she believed him. Hell, he wasn’t certain if he believed him.

“Okay,” she finally said, and leaned back against the bars and closed her eyes.

He turned back around and glanced toward the open barn doors, wondering how exactly he was going to make good on that promise.

CHAPTER 22 GABY

Didn’t we just do this?

Nate sat across from her in the pitch darkness, Danny’s still form to her right. The ex-Army Ranger was asleep and snoring lightly, his head tilted to one side, the carbine he had gotten from Taylor’s stash lying across his lap. Nate was wide awake and looking back at her. Or she thought he was, anyway. It was hard to tell, because she couldn’t quite make out the blue of his eyes despite there only being five feet or so of open space between them.

It wasn’t fear that moved through her at the moment. Or, at least, not the familiar paralyzing effects that usually accompanied the onset of terror. She could breathe just fine, clench and unclench her fingers against her rifle without difficulty, and she had no problems feeling the slight vibrations that ran through the rotting wooden floor underneath the stained carpet as they moved around below her.

Tap-tap-tap.

Nate had heard it too, because his outline went suddenly rigid.

Tap-tap-tap.

They were traveling across the same places she, Nate, and Danny had less than an hour ago. There was no mistaking the patter of their bare feet moving over dirt-stained slate tiles, the clicks and clacks as they randomly bumped into items hanging off shelves or that had toppled in the year since customers stopped coming.

She slid one hand along the length of her AR-15 and slipped her forefinger into the trigger guard. The weapon felt overly bulky, but she knew that was only because she wasn’t used to it yet.

There wasn’t a lot of space in the attic, and most of it was already taken up with crates of plumbing fixtures, empty water cooler bottles, and unopened boxes of cheap plastic Christmas trees. The only thing they had found to be any use when they had searched it earlier, back when there was still enough light to see with, were two stacks of duct tape. And you could never have too much duct tape—

Concentrate!

The creatures were smart, but they could be fooled. Which was why they had parked Taylor’s truck six buildings down the street, then walked to the hardware store and climbed up to its attic. She would never have known the room existed if Danny hadn’t remembered it from all those months ago when he had raided the place for supplies with Will.

The bang! of the store’s front glass door slamming, followed by silence.

Five seconds became ten…then twenty…but she didn’t let herself relax until a full minute had gone by without the familiar tap-tap-tap coming from directly below her.

Close one. Real close one.

The sound of rustling clothes as Nate got up and slipped from one side of the attic to the other before sitting down next to her on her left.

“Sounds like we’re in the clear,” he whispered.

“Sounds like it,” she nodded back.

“Tired?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Just a little bit.” He leaned around her to look at Danny. “Is he really asleep?”

She nodded. “Like a rock.”

“A snoring rock.”

She managed a smile.

“You should go to sleep, too,” he said. “I’ll stay up, and you can relieve me around midnight.”

She glanced over at Danny, still snoring lightly to her right. He looked amazingly at peace, as if he were back on the Trident and not trapped in Starch waiting for sunlight as ghouls flooded the streets and buildings around them.

“Wake me up at midnight,” she said.

He nodded.

“I mean it,” she said. “Don’t pull any of that chivalrous crap on me.”

“Midnight. Got it.”

“Nate…”

“Hey, I want to get some sleep, too, okay?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted of sweat and dirt, but somehow, still sweet at the same time.

When she pulled back, he was smiling at her.

“What?” she said.

“I wish we were back on the Trident…”

She rolled her eyes. “They’ll be plenty of time for that later, lover boy.”

“Have you talked to Lara? About getting us our own cabin?”

“We’re not the only two people on the yacht, Nate. Everyone has to share.”

“There’s that room behind the engine…”

“The one we’re holding Gage in?”

“It’s about time we throw that guy into the ocean anyway.” She must have been unable to hide her surprise, because he added, “Being out here, with all that’s going on, it’s given me a new perspective.”

“I’ll talk to Lara.”

“Good. Now, go to sleep. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to think about all those other sexy times while you’re doing that.”

“You have my permission,” she smiled, and laid her rifle across her lap, before leaning against Nate’s shoulder.

For whatever reason, the steady rise and fall of his heartbeat to her left and Danny’s impossibly calm breathing to her right lulled her into a strange sense of serenity. Her bones ached and her muscles were sore, and she didn’t realize just how emotionally and physically draining the last few days had been until she closed her eyes and didn’t want to open them again.

“Gaby.”

She was asleep, but also awake at the same time. Like floating in a bathtub filled with warm milk, bubbles caressing the bottom of her chin. Soothing and calming, but at the same time dangerous, with the threat of drowning hovering over her head.

“Wake up.”

There was something familiar about the voice, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Like a faded echo, tempting her closer to the surface.

“Gaby.”

She opened her eyes to darkness and Nate’s outline in front of her. He was crouched on one knee, his arm extended forward and shaking her awake.

“What—” she started to say (Too loud!), when Nate’s hand clasped over her mouth.

His other hand was already gripping his rifle and he lifted it now, pointing it across his body at the attic door. She had to look past Danny, still snoring quietly next to her, his head lolled to one side. He looked as if he might fall down at any second, but somehow remained upright despite the odds.

She didn’t dare move a single muscle as she listened while staring at the long rectangular-shaped trapdoor. Maybe she was still groggy and her senses weren’t up to full speed yet, but she couldn’t hear anything.

She glanced back at Nate for confirmation. He must have read the doubt on her face, because he gave her a slight nod.

“Are you sure?” she mouthed.

“Yes,” he mouthed back. “Downstairs.”

She reached down and picked up her AR-15 with one hand and pushed Danny with the other. His eyes snapped open almost as soon as she touched him, and they darted in the direction of the attic door before swiveling over to her.

“They found us,” she mouthed.

His lips moved as he began to mouth something back, but he hadn’t managed to form a single soundless word yet when there was a crash! from below, like a gunshot against the deathly silent night, but not quite as thunderous.

Danny snatched up his carbine and turned toward the door while Nate took up position in front of it with his bolt-action rifle. Gaby crab-walked backward, keeping as quiet as possible even though every step sounded like mini-explosions to her ears. She had always been thin, but the end of the world had excised any fat she might have had held onto from high school. Despite that, she was convinced she was moving with all the grace of a bloated whale as the three of them spread out to give each other as much room as possible in the already cramped attic space.

She didn’t stop backing up until she bumped into the boxes of Christmas trees, thankful there were no decorations inside to jingle or clink on contact. She positioned the rifle in front of her, and out of pure habit reached down with a finger to make sure the fire selector wasn’t stuck on safe.

Danny glanced over his shoulder and flashed her a wry smile. She saw it easily in the semidarkness, so maybe her eyes had finally adjusted to the conditions after all.

She nodded back at him, as if to say, “I’m fine,” but of course he knew better.

Danny returned her nod anyway before turning back to the door. “Hey, Nate Archibald,” he whispered.

Nate looked over, and matching his pitch, “What?”

“Switch places.”

“Why?”

Danny held up his rifle. “I got more firepower.”

“Oh.”

Nate scooted back while Danny went forward to take his place. They were incredibly quiet for two people moving around in heavy combat boots while slightly hunched over. Danny was settling in front of the door when he froze in place.

Shit, she thought, when the very loud clump-clump of heavy boots moving around in the store below reached them clear as day. If the creatures hadn’t been able to conceal their presence while moving on bare feet, there was no chance at all whoever was down there could while stomping around in boots.

Voices drifted through the floorboards, but they were muffled for some reason, and she could barely make out the words. She did know with absolute certainty there was more than one person moving around (very loudly) below them. It could have been collaborators or some of Mercer’s people, though she guessed it was more likely the former. Only collaborators would so nonchalantly walk around at night these days.

Danny had moved again while she wasn’t paying attention and was now crouched on the far side of the attic door. He laid his rifle down and slowly, very slowly, flattened himself against the floor, pressing his ear against the dirty carpeting.

The voices from below were getting louder — but not necessarily clearer — as they drew closer. She wondered what Danny was hearing at the moment. Maybe he could actually discern what the men down there were saying.

Cla-ching!

She recognized the sound without having to think about it, because she had spent an entire summer behind one of them. That was a cash register opening.

“Dude, really?” someone said below them. It was a man’s slightly high-pitched voice and it was very clear that time. “What exactly is your dumb ass gonna do with all that cash?”

“I always wanted a new car,” someone else said, chuckling. “I should have enough to buy the whole thing cash on the barrelhead by the end of the night.”

“Leave that shit alone,” a third voice snapped. Another male voice, this one filled with authority. For a moment she thought it might have been Mason (Nate’s right; we should have dealt with that prick when we had the chance), but no, this voice was much deeper.

“I’m just fucking around,” the second voice said.

“Do it on your own time,” the leader said. “Clear the store. We’re running out of night.”

“We’re never going to run out of night, man,” the first man said. “Always gonna be another one tomorrow, and the day after that, and day after that…”

“No, but I’m running out of patience, so get the fuck back on the clock. This ain’t no fucking vacation. You forgot about what happened yesterday?”

Gaby recalled the layout of the store when they were moving through it earlier, doing their very best not to touch anything. They’d even left the door unlocked and the windows uncovered, because the creatures knew if you moved something. She didn’t know how, but somehow they just knew.

Dead, not stupid, right, Will?

The store had a simple floor plan, with the front door opening onto four aisles of products. The cash register was at the very end, behind a counter, and the attic entrance, also behind the counter, was five feet from the register. She guessed that was so only employees could access it. The upstairs room was as long as the employee area below, and they were safe up here as long as no one spotted the outline of the door against the ceiling, even though Danny had made sure to bring up the pull rope.

She listened to the clump-clump of boots moving around below them, then the loud crash of a door being kicked in. That would be the bathroom door in a hallway to their left. More voices, once again garbled by distance and…something else.

Nate, in front of her, hadn’t moved, and neither had Danny across the room. The ex-Ranger still had his ear pressed into the carpeting, doing a very good job of ignoring the smell and filth that clung to every fiber of the rug. She hadn’t noticed it before, but it was cold enough inside the attic that she could see mists forming in front of her lips as she breathed in and out, in and out.

More garbled voices, mingling with the clump-clump of footsteps as the men below them started to drift into the background. Moving away, possibly toward the front door, but definitely away from them.

That’s right, go. There’s nothing here. Just keep going. Search the next building.

Keep going…

As if reading her mind, Nate glanced over his shoulder and smiled. The blue of his eyes was like a beacon drawing her in and calming her nerves. She guessed that he knew it, too, and was doing this for her benefit.

She returned his smile and thought about his request to get them their own cabin on the Trident. It was something she’d been thinking about too, especially since spending time with him meant sneaking around when everyone else was occupied elsewhere. But if Lara finally dealt with Gage, then that would open up an extra room below deck. She could even learn to live with all the engine noise.

“Almost home free,” Nate mouthed to her now, except he was only halfway through “free” when there was a bang!, and the floorboard an inch from his body splintered and a bullet zipped through and punched a hole into the ceiling above him.

A small sliver of moonlight spilled through the hole instantaneously, highlighting a part of Nate’s suddenly pale face as he scrambled away from the spot even as the pop-pop-pop! of someone letting loose with a three-round burst from below shattered the silence.

“Fuck!” Nate shouted, launching himself away from the exploding floor with wild abandon. Splintered wood flooded the attic as he hugged the wall, pieces of shredded carpeting billowing around him like insects.

The first shooter hadn’t even stopped firing when someone else joined in. The second shooter strafed the ceiling, clearly trying to cover as much ground as possible, maybe somehow even tracking Nate’s footsteps. God knew Nate wasn’t exactly being quiet about his movements as he dodged the chasing bullets.

“Shit!” Nate shouted again.

Gaby scooted slightly forward, took aim with her rifle, and fired into the floor. She grouped her shots around the visible bullet holes in the carpeting, hoping to hit whoever was down there even as they continued firing up at them. She pulled the trigger again and again, the hammering of her gunshots like thunderbolts in the closed confines, each empty brass casing flickering and disappearing into the jungle of carpet strands. The crush of each discharge boomed inside her ears, but after a while they became little more than a buzzing noise in the background.

She was still shooting, spacing her shots across the floorboards, when there was a sudden flood of cold air. She looked up just in time to see the attic door swinging up, then a figure lunging toward the opening.

Danny!

He was there one second and gone the next, disappearing through the rectangular slot before she could even form his name in her head, never mind actually calling it out loud.

Danny’s disappearance was followed by a single pop! from below, then two more shots—pop! pop! — coming in such quick succession that all three rounds had to have been fired in the space of less than two seconds.

Then…nothing, except for her own ragged breathing to fill the silence. She kept waiting for more shooting, noises—anything.

Nate had pushed off the wall and was trying to peer through the dozen or so holes that the shooters below had created and she had added to. She couldn’t tell if he could make out anything despite the streams of moonlight pouring through from the bullet holes below and above them.

“Anything?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “Can’t see shit.”

“Danny’s down there.”

“I know.”

Two more quick shots, followed by the very obvious clatter of a rifle skidding against the tiled floor below.

Danny!

Gaby scooted forward and spent a second trying to look through the bullet holes in the floor the same way Nate had done earlier, but the carpeting was too thick and they still covered up too much for her to spy anything on the other side.

When she looked up, Nate was already at the door looking down. He glanced over, saw the question on her face, and shook his head. “It’s too dark,” he whispered.

She hurried over to him, no longer caring about making too much noise. At this point, everyone (everything) who was in the area already knew where they were. She looked down the opening, realizing that Danny had never unfurled the ladder before he took the plunge. He had simply jumped down like an idiot, not knowing what was waiting for him down there.

Carly’s going to kick your ass if you die, Danny.

The silence inside the store below her had lengthened to thirty seconds…

…forty…

“Danny,” she whispered.

There was no reply.

She exchanged a look with Nate.

He didn’t say anything, but nodded back as if reading her thoughts and saying, without actually saying the words, “Go for it.”

She smiled back at him, reveling in the fact that they could have a conversation without having to say a word. The last few weeks on the Trident had been some of the best nights of her life, even if they did have to sneak around most of the time. Not because the adults didn’t already know, but because there were also a lot of kids on the boat.

Looking at him now, his blue eyes calm and understanding despite the harrowing last few minutes when it probably felt like every bullet in the world was trying to kill him, gave her a flush of pride.

She returned her focus to the opening, to the sea of black on the other side.

Nate put a hand on her shoulder. The feel of his skin against hers, even through the thermal clothing, was warm and soothing, and a silent promise that he would be there, no matter what awaited them on the other side.

She took a deep breath and jumped down.

CHAPTER 23 KEO

“How’s the face?” Keo asked.

“I don’t know,” Jordan said. “Is there still an 800-pound gorilla sitting on my forehead?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Then I guess it’s better than the last time you asked. Which reminds me: stop asking.”

“I’m just worried about you.”

“Hey, it’s nice that you care, but once every hour is enough, don’t you think? Especially since we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. If we ever get out of here at all, which in this case is looking unlikely.”

“There you go, being all positive again.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I try.”

“Try harder.”

“Whatever.”

Keo pressed against the cold metal bars and glanced toward the closed front doors, their rectangular frames illuminated by the dipping sun on the other side. They had sealed off the barn an hour ago, followed by a flurry of activity outside. He had heard more than a few of the vehicles roaring to life before taking off.

“It’ll be dark soon,” he said, glancing down at his watch: 4:24 P.M.

“How long have we been in here?” Jordan asked from the other side of the small cage.

“Three hours and change.”

“It feels longer.” She paused for a moment, then added, “What do you think they’re doing out there? Why hasn’t anyone come in to talk to us yet? I thought they were going to interrogate us for information.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and looked up at the ceiling. He could just barely make out the lone, silhouetted form through the wooden slabs. He wasn’t sure where the other one had gone, or when.

“I wish they’d get it over with,” Jordan said. “The wait’s killing me.” Then, “Sorry, wrong choice of words.”

“You’re right; they should have started in with the cattle prods by now. The fact that they’re leaving…” Is worrying, he thought, but said instead, “…doesn’t make any sense.”

“Cattle prods? They use that for interrogation?”

“Among other things.”

“Have you?”

“Among other things.”

“Jesus, Keo.”

“Yeah.”

“Remember how I was curious about what you used to do before all of this?”

“Uh huh.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Smart.”

She went quiet for a moment. Then, “Maybe they know we’re not who they thought we were. Maybe they found out about what you did at T18.”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. Communication isn’t what it used to be. Nothing’s instantaneous anymore. You don’t realize how futuristic we had things back in the good ol’ days, until it’s gone. Remember when they switched out textbooks for tablets in schools?”

“You kidding? I was ecstatic. No more lugging around five textbooks that weighed more than me combined across campus.”

He glanced back at her, leaning against the bars with her eyes slightly closed. She looked almost content — that is, if he didn’t know any better. Sometimes he forgot how young Jordan was. Like everyone he’d met on the road, she’d had to grow up too fast.

He turned away just as she opened her eyes.

“You think he’s still alive?” she asked. “Gregson?”

“I stopped giving a shit about his well-being the second he closed his mouth.”

“You’re all heart, Keo.”

“It’s my weakness.”

“Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

“That’s easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Just don’t try to shoot me.”

“That’s all it takes, huh?”

“Yup.”

“Good to…” she said, but didn’t finish.

He glanced back and saw her leaning a little bit too much to the right, as if she might have fallen asleep in the middle of her sentence. He hurried across the cage and crouched in front of her, then held her chin with one hand and righted her head.

“The hell?” she said as her eyes flew open. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you might have lost consciousness,” he said, letting go of her chin. “You okay?”

“Didn’t we already talk about that?”

“Are you?” he pressed.

“I’m fine. The head’s pounding just a little bit. Okay, a lot.” She kneaded her forehead with both hands. “You said the truck flew after it got hit?”

“It flew, rolled, and crashed.”

“Yeah, I remember the crashing part. Well, not really remember it, but I can definitely still feel it…”

He put his hand on her forehead and felt the bump. It was more pronounced than last time, which meant there was a very good chance of a concussion. He pulled the strip of cloth he still had inside his back pocket, spat on it, and scraped at some dried blood clinging to the side of her temple.

“Ugh,” she said.

“Sit still.”

“It stinks.”

“It’s just spit.”

“I know, and it stinks. Did you brush your teeth this morning?”

“No, but I used mouthwash.”

“Really.”

“No.”

“Right.”

She stopped talking and stared back at him as he cleaned her. Maybe it was the lack of light inside the barn, but the brown of her eyes was surprisingly lively.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You about done?”

“Close.”

“Hurry up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled.

“What?” he said again.

“Nothing,” she said, but he noticed she hadn’t stopped smiling.

Night came early in winter, and by 5:30 P.M. there was just the moonlight sneaking through the cracks along the wall and roof to keep Keo and Jordan from completely sitting in darkness. It took a few minutes before his eyes assimilated to the new environment and he was able to make out Jordan next to him, their backs pressed against the cage with the barn wall on the other side. Cold wind seeped through the rotting wood, and though he listened for it, Keo couldn’t (yet) hear the sound of bare feet against the empty earth outside.

He found himself eyeballing the distance separating the bars of their cage again. Five inches, give or take. Five whole inches. Was that enough for a creature of skin and bones to squeeze its way through? Maybe. Of course, he and Jordan wouldn’t exactly be standing by, mouth agape like slack-jawed morons, as the creatures assaulted the cage.

How much force would it take to cave in a deformed skull? He had a feeling he was going to find out sooner rather than—

Creaaaak! as the barn doors were pushed open.

Keo shot up to his feet and moved to the front of the cage, Jordan keeping pace beside him. The large twin doors had swung open, and a lone silhouetted figure walked purposefully, as if it had all the time in the world, toward them.

He recognized wide hips and the gait of a woman, and he guessed Marcy (And so it begins) before she actually revealed herself in a pool of moonlight about ten steps later. She stopped on the other side of the cage, bundled up inside a black leather jacket that had a patch of Texas on the shoulder. She was holding a dirty white plastic bag in one hand.

“Hungry?” Marcy asked.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Keo said. “I don’t wanna be one of those guys, but service in this place is lacking.”

Marcy smirked and pulled something out from her back pocket. His titanium spork. She tossed it into the cage, and the heavy utensil clattered loudly across the concrete floor to the other side.

“Thought you might want this back,” Marcy said.

“Couldn’t you have just handed it to me?” Keo asked.

“No,” Marcy said, and reached into the bag and pulled out an unlabeled metal can.

This time, she did aim it at him, and Keo caught it. Behind him, Jordan had picked up the spork and was cleaning it off using her shirt.

“You know there are two of us, right?” Keo asked, holding the lone can up.

“I’m being generous giving you the spork back,” Marcy said.

“Scork, actually.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah, I’m not a fan of the word, either.”

The can had a pull tab, so he didn’t need the spork to open it. Jordan was practically drooling by the time he tossed the lid away, revealing mushy tuna inside. The smell was indescribable, and Keo couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. It did overwhelm most of the aroma in the place, so that was a plus.

He handed it to Jordan. “Split it with you?”

She grinned, then took the can and dug in with the spork.

Keo looked back at Marcy, watching them from the other side of the cage. “Thanks,” he said. “For the utensil, too.”

“It’s your last meal,” Marcy said. “Thought you deserved to eat it with some dignity, even after what you did to our guys at the beach.”

Shit, Keo thought, but he said, “What is it that you think we did?”

“I know what you did. We found the other guy, too. The one next to the tank.”

Gregson.

Marcy’s face was stoic, lacking anything that he could have interpreted as either happiness or sadness. “He’s been dealt with, in case you’re wondering. And you will be, too, tonight.”

“I thought you wanted to ask us questions,” Jordan said between mouthfuls of tuna.

“Change of plans.” Marcy’s eyes focused on Keo. “Want some advice?”

“Does it involve us getting out of here?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Gee, how about some advice, Marcy?” Keo said in the flattest voice he could manage.

“Don’t resist,” the collaborator said. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.” She pressed her forefinger against her own temple. “They can get inside. You don’t want them rummaging around in there, because once you open the door and let them in, there’s no way to close it. They’re inside for good and it can get a little…maddening at times. I’ve seen…” She stopped.

“What?” Keo said.

“You don’t want them in there for too long, that’s all,” Marcy said. “So don’t fight it. Just don’t fight it.”

They watched Marcy turn around and walk back to the doors.

“Marcy,” Keo said after her. When she didn’t respond or stop, “Marcy, where are you going? Where’s everyone going?”

The woman kept walking before stepping outside through the doors. Two men in jackets pushed the doors closed with a solid thunk.

“What was she talking about?” Jordan asked.

“Hell if I know,” he said.

“Here,” Jordan said, and scooped some tuna and held it out to him.

It was too salty and covered in a thick film of something that he preferred not to think too much about, but most of it was lost in the metallic taste of the spork anyway. But like Jordan, he was hungry and swallowed it down despite the rank smell.

“Not bad,” he said.

She gave him a wry smile. “It tastes like donkey shit, but at least it’s food.”

“Yeah, that too.”

They spent the next few minutes eating in silence. He held the can while Jordan sporked the food between them. Despite the strange liquid that covered the tuna, he was dying for something to drink when they were done. They kept their eyes on the barn doors the entire time, expecting them to open at any moment.

“Don’t resist,” Marcy had said. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.”

“They”? Who was “they”?

Jordan scooped the last piece of tuna and held it out to him.

“Finish it,” he said.

“I’ve eaten more of it than you have.”

“Jordan…”

“Shut up and open your mouth.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he grinned.

“Just do it,” she snapped.

He opened his mouth and had to force himself to swallow down the last piece of tuna. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

He flicked the empty can through the bars and watched it vanish into the shadows along the far wall.

“Your spork,” Jordan said, holding up the utensil. “You think she forgot it on purpose?”

“Doubt it. It’s a little ol’ spork, and they have guns. They’re probably not too worried about us feeding them tuna to death, though given how bad it tastes, that might actually be worse than getting shot.”

He took the titanium spork from her and cleaned it against his pant legs, then put it back into one of his pockets.

“How’s your head?” he asked.

“Like someone’s piping Für Elise directly into my brain, and it’s not nearly as soothing as it used to be when I was younger.”

He put his hand on her forehead again. The good news was, the bump seemed to have lessened in the last few hours, but there was a definite hard-to-miss bruise in its place.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“What?”

“I like it when you touch me.”

He raised both eyebrows. “It’s official; you’re delirious.”

“I’m really not.”

“No?”

“No,” she said, and leaned forward and wrapped both arms around his neck and kissed him.

It caught him by surprise — he saw her coming, the purposeful look in her eyes, but didn’t process what was about to happen until he tasted her lips against his. He kissed her back because he didn’t know what else to do, and because he was a man.

But then she pulled away, her breath slightly ragged. “Jesus.”

“No, just Keo,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “I meant the tuna.”

“Tuna?”

“I can still taste tuna on you, and it reeks.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sit down.”

“What?”

“Sit down.”

“Why—”

“Just do it,” she snapped.

He slid along the bars until he was sitting down on the hard concrete floor. “Jordan,” he got out in the half-second before her mouth covered his again, and he forgot what he was going to say next.

She sat down in his lap, legs wrapping around his waist, and her kiss grew in intensity, her mouth so warm and her lips so soft and welcoming that he couldn’t have resisted even if he wanted to.

And he certainly didn’t want to. Christ, he didn’t want to.

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her body tighter against his. She groaned against his mouth and he inhaled her scent, which made it easier to ignore the strong odor of old hay and spoiled feed and mold, not to mention the stink of the bad tuna both of them had just eaten.

For some reason, she pulled back a second time — causing him to groan in annoyance — but like last time, she was still so close he could have kissed her again without barely moving. She looked strangely sad, but her brown eyes were bright in the semidarkness and he couldn’t turn away.

“Keo,” she whispered.

“What?” he said, suddenly aware of his own slightly labored breathing, mirroring hers.

“What are we doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Gillian?”

“What about her?”

“Do you still love her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should stop until you do know.”

“Maybe.”

She sighed. “But we’re probably going to die in here.”

“Probably,” he nodded.

“Soon.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to regret not doing this. Even here, in this stinking barn. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now, but with everything that’s happened…”

“Gillian.”

“Yeah. Gillian.”

She started to get up, but he tightened his grip around her waist and didn’t let her.

“Keo,” she said softly.

“No.”

“We should wait.”

“Why?”

“For some place better. Less…disgusting.” She glanced toward the other side of the cage. “There are people outside the building.”

“Screw them.”

“Pun intended?”

He grinned. “You’re right; we’re probably going to die soon.”

“Probably.”

“So…”

“So…” she whispered.

She leaned forward and kissed him again.

He didn’t bother with her shirt and reached for her belt.

“Keo,” she whispered against his mouth. “Keo, Keo, Keo…”

There was something different about the barn, something not quite right in the way the air smelled or even flowed. The change wasn’t just inside the cage, either. He became aware of the strange shift even as he sat against the bars, Jordan’s body curled up in his lap, his jacket and hers covering her in a makeshift blanket.

He opened his eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t need to know my name, meat,” it said from the darkness. No, it didn’t say — it hissed. “You don’t deserve to know.”

It looked like Frank, but it wasn’t. He knew that from the sound of its voice — similar to Frank’s, but there was a noticeable difference. This was what Frank looked like underneath that trench coat and that hoodie he always kept on, as if afraid someone might notice he was no longer human.

Keo should have been afraid — even terrified — but for some reason he wasn’t. He felt a strange calmness that he couldn’t explain.

What the hell is wrong with me?

It was nude, pruned black flesh gleaming against a spill of moonlight. Its legs carried it out of the shadows with that same preternatural gait that always made him stare for just a half-second too long every single time, trying to decide if it was real or a figment of his imagination. It moved with its back slightly arched, its blue eyes (like Frank’s) throbbing against the blackness that seemed to shift around its form as if seeking to avoid it.

He thought about waking Jordan up, but she was snoring lightly in his lap with just that ghost of a smile on her lips. He decided to let her sleep through this. It wasn’t as if the both of them being awake was going to make a damn bit of difference. He’d seen Frank tear apart a marina full of soldiers, seen him hold back an ocean of black-eyed ghouls. If this blue-eyed monster was anything like Frank, then there was absolutely nothing Keo could do at the moment, with just his hands and feet, and year-old hay scattered around him, to keep them alive.

It stopped at the bars, long arms (much too long) hanging at its sides. He expected to see the ebony eyes emerge out of the blackness in the background, revealing themselves after having somehow sneaked into the barn while he wasn’t looking, while he was asleep. How the hell had this thing managed to slip inside without him noticing, anyway?

“I can smell him on you,” the creature hissed. “Is he there right now? Looking through your eyes?”

‘He’?

“Call him,” the creature said.

“Who?” Keo said.

It smiled. Or tried to. Thin lips, like purple drawn-in lines, creased into something that resembled almost a smile. Almost.

“Call him,” it hissed, louder this time.

Jordan stirred and shivered in his lap. Something about its voice must have dug all the way into her subconscious. Keo stroked her hair to calm her. If they were going to die tonight, he’d rather she didn’t see it coming. He wished he could have taken that option himself.

Hell, he was wishing for a lot of things at the moment. Though, for some reason he still couldn’t explain, he wasn’t afraid.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said to the creature.

The blue-eyed ghoul cocked its head to one side. Reading him? Maybe trying to gauge if he was lying. The “smile” had vanished in the meantime.

“No,” it said. “You don’t know, do you? Because he’s spared you.” It might have laughed; it was an unnatural and choked sound that could, in the right circumstances, be mistaken for laughter. “He’s still trying to hold onto his humanity, trying to deny his real nature. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still use you to bring him to us, meat.”

Frank. It’s talking about Frank.

Maybe he was still alive out there after all. Why was he so surprised? He had seen Frank survive a lot of things. What was one more impossible situation?

Frank. You out there, pal? I could really use your help right now.

But it wasn’t Frank who was gripping one of the cage bars in front of him. Keo could actually hear its bony fingers tightening against the metal — just before it gave a swift pull and the padlock broke off, and the door swung open.

“I won’t be nearly as gentle,” it hissed as it stepped inside the cage.

CHAPTER 24 FRANK

He’d tracked them from the hangar and into the woods, then to a cottage with two girls sleeping inside, and finally back here, where, in so many ways, his old life found its real purpose. The trees were just as thick as he remembered; the ground as unruly; and there, on the other side of the woods, the bitter wetness of lake water against his tongue. They were using an old truck, and it had been leaking motor oil and a variety of other fluids all the way from Larkin.

As he sat perched on a tree, hidden in a fold of darkness, he could smell them all around him. The woods were teeming with them. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The canopies so thick and high they sheltered them from the sunlight even in the daytime.

He jumped down now and picked his way through the shadows, slipping and hiding when necessary. He knew where it was. The town. He’d been through it so many times with Danny in the past. It was just as deserted now as when they’d first found it almost a year ago. Even the surrounding areas had been raided, the few survivors plucked from their holes and basements and fed to Mabry’s machinations.

He moved cautiously through the heart of Starch, darting between homes and buildings and apartments, picking his way around the shadows and alleyways and always staying one step ahead — or behind — the black eyes. They were out there, searching among the town, beyond it; all across the state. He could sense the anxiousness in them, in the voices that echoed inside his head.

“Find them, kill them,” the voices said. “These humans have to be taught a lesson. This is our world now.”

The man named Mercer had done that. He and his army of silver-armed killers. His attacks yesterday had been unexpected, the first time Mabry was ever caught off guard. It was less the destruction, the deaths, and the waste of resources that had bothered Mabry; it was that he hadn’t seen it coming. They’d had it so easy this last year. The humans were cooperating, the towns were thriving, and the blood was flowing freely.

And then, and then, a wrench in the cog named Mercer.

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said to him.

Perhaps not. Perhaps not, after all…

He had to be very careful because there were blue eyes in the area. Not in Starch, but close enough. He could feel their close proximity in the way the air shifted. They could easily converge if he was exposed, so he couldn’t be seen.

Then something else — a new smell. Sweat against dirty skin. Humans.

He paused to listen in the shadows. They couldn’t see him, because human senses were limited. They were bundles of nervous energy tonight, their hands slicked with perspiration even in the cold weather. The months had been too good to them, and they had reverted to their old selves — fat, lazy, and privileged — and they were no longer used to being in the darkness at the same time as the black eyes.

They turned their heads too fast and kept their voices low as they talked amongst each other, as if afraid of being overhead. Their words were muffled by the various-shaped gas masks snapped too tightly over their faces. Why the masks? Because they were told to, in order to make it easier on the black eyes to tell the difference between the uniforms, because Mercer’s people wore uniforms too, and the black eyes were easily fooled.

“Stay away,” the voices had said. “Stay away from the soldiers with masks.”

They were searching the buildings along Main Street, yet another part of the town he was familiar with. He had gone into every building and checked every room with Danny and the others. A long time ago now. Was this where Danny had gone? He had lost their track somewhere in a parking lot a few streets back, where they had abandoned the leaking vehicle.

Beams from flashlights sliced across the endless waves of darkness. The crackle of radios back and forth, the loud crunch of heavy boots. And every now and then, nervous conversation between the small group. He was so close to them he could have reached out and snapped their necks. It was tempting. So, so tempting.

“The airfield,” one of them was saying. “Shit, it was a fucking massacre. Everyone’s fucking dead.”

“How many?” someone asked.

“Hundreds. I lost count. We didn’t even bother to pull out the bodies.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No, man, I’m telling you, the whole airfield was just gone. Bodies everywhere under all that mess. I think they rigged the ground with bombs or something.”

“Jesus,” someone else said.

“Maybe we’re on the wrong side,” the second one said, dropping his voice to barely a hushed whisper.

The first one laughed softly. Or tried to. It came out choked and desperate to be convincing. “Look around you. It doesn’t matter how many tanks or planes they have, or how many bombs they drop. They’re never going to beat this. Trust me: we chose the right side.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” the second one said. He had a bit of confidence that time. “The planet’s theirs. Nothing we can do about it now.”

“How’s Rachel coming along?”

“Good, good. Two more months and she’s gonna pop that kid right out.”

A brief exchange of nervous laughter before they moved on, entering a new building as a group. Quick and efficient movements, clear signs they had practiced this. He was almost impressed.

A bang! tore through the street, so loud he would have heard it from across the city.

The soldiers that had gone into the building rushed out, their heavy boots pounding against the pavement like explosions.

“What was that? Who fired?” someone shouted. “Where’d that shot come from?”

The squawk of a radio, but by then he was already pushing up the side of a brick apartment and blocking out the voices. He reached the edge, pulled himself up, then raced across the rooftop.

The air around him shifted as the black eyes, somewhere in the outskirts of the city, reacted to the sound.

More gunshots, like rolling thunder, poured up the street one after another. Automatic rifles.

There, a hardware store in a strip mall. It looked familiar…

The gunshots got louder as he neared. One after another, after another. Like a ringing dinner bell to every set of black eyes in the area. The blue eyes had noticed too, but they hadn’t converged. Why not? Because random gunfire wasn’t something they concerned themselves with. Besides, the humans were here. They’d take care of it. And if they couldn’t, the black eyes would.

Good. That would give him some time.

He flung himself off the roof and landed in the parking lot, then raced toward the store. Silhouetted figures moved on the other side of the windows, the staccato flashes of discharging weapons blinking on and off inside the darkened building.

A blast of warm air as he entered the store and skipped over a rotating rack that had fallen, spilling cheap trinkets across the floor. One of the three figures turned around, sensing him. Wide eyes attempted to focus on his moving form as he slipped between two aisles. The man was confused by his presence — or maybe the trench coat that fluttered around him, or possibly the sight of the hoodie draped over his head — and didn’t know whether to shoot or welcome him.

Before the collaborator could decide, three shots exploded behind him. One after another. Evenly spaced, clearly from the hands of an expert.

The sounds of crumpling bodies followed by…silence.

“Fuck me on a stick,” a voice whispered.

Danny.

Boots squeaked as Danny turned, trying to track him with a rifle. All it would take was a single headshot. Danny was good, and fully capable.

He swerved around the racks, but Danny didn’t shoot. Not yet. He wouldn’t commit until he had a target—

Bang!

His left ear disappeared against the bullet, but he kept moving.

A second shot. This one sailed harmlessly past him while he was in midair.

Faster!

He landed on top of Danny, grabbed the rifle by the barrel, and threw it away. Danny let out a startled gasp, but that didn’t last, and his right hand reached down for the handgun stuffed into his front waistband.

He grabbed Danny’s wrist and pinned it to the floor. An unceremonious grunt, but no screaming. Not from Danny, whose own blue eyes glared up at him, daring him. But these blue eyes were filled with life and humanity, unlike his own.

Danny swung, hitting him in the side of the face with a balled fist. He barely felt it the first time, the second time, or the third time.

“Stop it,” he hissed.

Danny stopped punching him. He stopped moving completely.

He could see it in those very human blue eyes — the confusion, the realization that once again everything he thought he knew about the universe had changed.

“They’re coming,” he hissed. “The uniforms and gas masks. Put them on. Let them see you. It’s the only way.”

More confusion swept across Danny’s face.

“It’ll work,” he hissed, hating the sound that came out of his mouth, the unnaturalness of every word.

He wrestled the gun out of Danny’s hand and climbed off, bounding over the counter. He dropped the gun on the floor as he went and pushed through the door.

Cold air attacked him at the same time as the jungle of arms and legs and teeth. He’d misjudged their distance. The black eyes had been much closer and converged much, much faster than he had anticipated.

“There you are.” Mabry’s voice, echoing triumphantly inside his head. “I told you, sooner or later I’d find you.”

He fought through the limbs collapsing all around him, but there were too many. They climbed over him and dragged him down to the street, pummeling him to the pavement with their sheer numbers.

“I always do.”

He grabbed the closest creature and snapped its neck, then detached the head from the spinal cord with a soft pop! He dug two fingers into its eye sockets and swung it like a bowling ball. A head cratered, another jerked out of his path, but still they scrambled over him, biting and clawing and holding on.

“Haven’t you tired of running yet?”

He swung and punched and kicked. Clumps of black blood erupted and savaged the air, covering him. He drove his fist through a sunken chest, the resistance like flimsy plastic wrap, and speared flesh and bone with his sharp elbows.

“You can’t save them. You can’t even save yourself.”

The skull in his hand turned brittle and fell apart. He let it go and grabbed two of the black eyes and whipped them right and left, then forward, before pushing, pushing with both feet and for all he was worth.

“All your plans. Your Plan Z’s. What good are they now?”

Push. Don’t stop. Push. Push! Push!

“Look at you. You’re pathetic.”

Finally! He was out of the pile and racing up the street. Except they were everywhere, reaching for his arms and legs and head. They were doing whatever they could to stall him until the blue eyes could arrive. And they were coming. He could feel their drawing presence in the air.

“Why do you keep fighting me?”

Fingers cut into his flesh, and bone cracked against him as he leapt onto a vehicle, the roof caving under him as he landed. He didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, and immediately jumped again and grappled onto the streetlight above. He had momentum on his side and flung himself up toward the edge of a nearby rooftop. Reached out — and almost missed the edge!

“Why won’t you admit the truth?”

He pulled himself up, the loud patter of footsteps around him like thunderbolts. They were already inside the building and racing up the stairs. There were even more climbing up the wall below him.

“You can’t win. You could never win.”

He didn’t look down the side of the building to see how many of them were coming up. The answer would be too many. There were always too many. So he ran instead.

“There are no second chances. No happy endings.”

He ran faster. Faster. Faster!

“Not for you.”

Another leap of faith, the wind brushing against his face, the flaps of the trench coat fluttering behind him as he cut through the night air like a spear, unencumbered by all the things that used to make him human, that once limited what he could do.

“Wherever you go, however far, I will always be there. Always…”

He closed his eyes and plummeted headfirst into the dark woods. He could already sense them below — an ocean of black eyes — waiting for him with open arms.

CHAPTER 25 KEO

“Shibal,” Keo muttered under his breath.

It stopped for a moment — a brief half-a-heartbeat, anyway — to let what he had said sink in, but apparently deciding it wasn’t important enough to dwell on, the creature resumed stepping inside the cage.

Keo scrambled back, managing a single step (Too slow, pal!) before it was standing directly in front of him. The speed with which it had moved left him breathless, and Keo was still trying to grapple with the physics of it when cold, bony fingers slithered around his neck and, perhaps just as a demonstration that it was in full control, pulled him slightly forward only to shove him back against the bars. The metal rods had been cold all day and were even colder now that night had fallen, but it was nothing against the wicked surge of temperatures flooding Keo’s senses like wildfire.

Frank hadn’t been this cold. Then again, Frank had worn that ugly trench coat and kept that hoodie over his head almost the entire time they were traveling together. Maybe that wool fabric did more to absorb his natural (Ha! “Natural.”) body temperature than Keo had realized. He wondered if Ol’ Blue Eyes had done that for his benefit or its own. He guessed he would never find out the answer to that one, among other things he’d never get to do again.

The one bright spot he could see — while the blue-eyed ghoul tightened its grip around his throat, threatening to crush his windpipe with a simple flick of its wrist — was that Jordan was still asleep. She lay on the floor where he had left her, warm underneath a pile of their jackets. She was curled up into a ball, just the top half of her face visible under his coat. She looked peaceful and beautiful, and he regretted all those nights when he never realized it.

“I can smell his scent on you,” it hissed, razorblade lips forming a sneer as it sniffed the air between them. “It lingers like a disease. Is he nearby? Tell me, meat, is he coming to rescue you right now?”

It was referring to Frank again. The other blue-eyed ghoul in Keo’s life. The thought made him want to laugh — if only he could at the moment.

I went looking for a girl, and all I got were blue-eyed monsters. Daebak.

Of course there was nothing awesome about this, with the metal bars against his back. He had to exert every ounce of strength just to suck in enough air to keep breathing, and that was probably because the creature still wanted to keep him alive…for now.

It cocked its head to one side, long neck flexing with a grace that shouldn’t have been possible for something so unnatural. It looked him up and down, as if trying to figure out what made him tick, or special. Keo could have told it there was absolutely nothing unique about him, though he got the impression the monster wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

“Call him for me,” it said, caressing Keo’s face in a plume of hot and cold breath, “so I can take him home, where he belongs.”

‘Call him’? I would if I could, pal. I’d call him to come here and kick your ass. Or at least tear your head off. I’ve seen him do it…

“You’re running out of time,” the creature said. It turned its head to look at Jordan’s sleeping form. “Both of you.”

Leave her alone, you fuck.

“I can smell her all over you, too,” it hissed, that bad attempt at a smile again. “Lovers rutting in a barn. How animal of you.”

Better than dead, assfuck.

“I wonder if she’ll scream for me, too,” it asked.

He clenched his teeth and managed to wheeze out a sound. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as he had planned it in his head. But then, it was taking everything he had just to keep breathing, to suck air into his lungs.

The creature turned its gaze back to him, eyes like a siren’s call drawing him in. Goose bumps raced up and down Keo’s flesh.

“We’ll keep her alive for a while,” it hissed. “We’ll have fun with her. Play our little games. And when we’re bored, we’ll put her out of her misery. But until then, she’ll wish she was dead. Now call him.”

Keo shook his head. Or tried to. He mostly just wiggled it left, then right, then left again. He wanted to shout, “I have no fucking idea how, you piece of shit!” but he couldn’t.

God, why was it so hard to just breathe?

Then, unexpectedly, the creature’s fingers (he swore he could feel every single joint in the thing’s hand) unfurled slightly. Not enough for Keo to convince himself that he might survive tonight, but just enough that he could suck in a lungful of precious air.

“I…don’t…know…how,” he managed to gasp out.

The creature cocked its head to the other side, pulsating blue eyes watching him closely. It was reading him, trying to gauge his truthfulness.

“It’s…truth…” he croaked out.

The taut flesh over its improbably smooth domed head seemed to wrinkle in response. “No, you can’t, can you?”

Did it just sound…disappointed?

Tough nuts, pal.

“But he’s left his imprint on you,” the creature said. “He’ll be able to find you…eventually. And when he does, we’ll be there waiting. You’ll still prove useful after all, meat.”

Hey, use away, as long as you keep me alive, Keo thought, but could only get out, “Ack.”

“What was that?” it said, lips forming something that could almost be mistaken for a smile if viewed at just the right angles. “I can’t hear you. Speak louder.”

“Ack,” Keo said again.

“What was that?” It leaned forward, then turned its head, presenting a useless stump that used to be an ear to him. “Louder, meat. Convince me I should let you keep all your limbs. After all, I don’t need all of you, do I?”

Closer.

Its eyes bored into him like twin moons. “Did you say something?”

I said closer…

“I can’t hear you,” it hissed. “Speak up.”

There. That’s close enough.

He tightened his grip around the metal handle of the spork, the same one that Marcy had given back to him to eat the tuna with. The thing that was technically a scork, but he hated that name. He had palmed the utensil as the creature entered the cage, wasting a precious second when it couldn’t see where his hands were, hidden under the jacket covering Jordan’s body. He hadn’t used it yet because it was too far, and because it would have taken him at least a second to swing his arm up, then left toward his target: the creature’s head.

“They’re smarter than the rest,” Danny had said. “If you see them, run the other way, Obi-Wan Keobi. Or shoot them in the head. That seems to work pretty well.”

Shoot them in the head. Right. If only I had a gun, and it was standing perfectly still.

But at least I have a scork. Ugh, I hate that word.

He almost laughed, because it was that absurd. He was going to die trying to stab this blue-eyed freak in the head with an eating utensil. The combination fork/spoon/can opener was titanium and strong as hell, so at least there was that. All he’d have to do was punch hard enough to break skin and get it through the bone. Of course, before he could do that, he had to make sure it didn’t see him striking.

Yeah, no sweat—

“Oh, shit,” a breathless voice said, before he could finish his thought.

The creature, just as surprised by the voice as Keo, twisted its head to find Jordan scrambling up from the dirty barn floor, the coats falling off her. She stumbled backward until she bumped against the bars on the other side of the cage. She had gone the wrong direction, Keo saw; if she had gone right instead of back, she could have easily escaped through the open door.

If she was still groggy from sleep, she was wide awake now, and her eyes snapped from the ghoul to him, where they remained.

“Go!” he croaked. “The door!”

Her eyes flashed from him to the creature, then to the open door. There was nothing to stand in her way. It couldn’t grab her and keep its hold on him at the same time. The question was: Which one of them did it want to keep inside the cage more? Of course, he already knew the answer to that one.

“But he’s left his imprint on you,” it had said. “He’ll be able to find you…eventually. And when he does, we’ll be there waiting.”

It didn’t need her, except as leverage against him. And right now—

“Go, goddammit!” he managed to get out. It wasn’t nearly as forceful as he had intended, but it was all he could muster with the creature’s fingers still wrapped around his throat like a metal glove.

But for whatever reason, Jordan didn’t move toward the door. She had seen it, and she was smart enough to know there was no way the creature could stop her. So why hadn’t she moved, for God’s sake?

“Jordan!” he said again, the effort of shouting (or trying to) making every inch of him tremble with pain. “Get out of here!”

Instead of running for the door, Jordan stood where she was, as if her feet were planted to the concrete floor. Then she did something he hadn’t expected — or wanted, for that matter. She ran right at them.

No, not at them, but at the creature.

Oh hell, Jordan, he thought as the ghoul’s ghost-thin lips slithered into a mock smile. It held him steady against the bars with one hand and began lifting the other one—

Keo pulled out his right hand, the one with the spork, out from behind his back.

Go for the head! Go for the head!

But even as he told himself what he had to do, his mind judged the speed and distance and what it would take — a wide, exaggerated arc from bottom to top, right to left, because there wasn’t any other way to get it from behind his back and to the creature’s temple where it had to go, because anywhere else was pointless.

Not enough time. Not nearly enough time.

What was the lesson he’d been taught in school? Oh, right. The fastest path to a target was a straight line. Like a bullet. Or, in this case, a goddamn spork.

So Keo jerked the titanium utensil upward and toward the ghoul’s exposed chin instead.

He felt a flush of triumph at the sight of the spork’s teeth breaking flesh, could feel the resistance from its jawbone on the other end, but he kept pushing and pushing, putting everything he had into it, until finally (Eureka!) the tines broke through bone.

It let him go then, and even as it did so, Keo pulled the spork back out, the slurp as thick black blood splashed on the ground, leaving a trail as the creature stumbled backward. Keo couldn’t tell if he had hurt it or if it was just shocked. Either way, he was free and he could breathe again, and Keo took the next few seconds to gasp for breath like a drowning man.

“Oh, Jesus!” Jordan shouted. She had frozen halfway to them.

The blue-eyed ghoul was touching its chin, thin trickles of blood oozing through its fingers. Keo couldn’t figure out if that flicker of something on its face was hurt or anger (or curiosity?), and he didn’t waste another breath thinking about it.

Air filled his lungs, and he felt renewed strength as he launched himself forward and smashed into the creature, catching it full in the chest. It was like hitting a sack of flour, and Keo couldn’t reconcile its unnatural strength with how weak its body was pushing back against him. He drove it back, back, until there was a satisfying clang! as the monster’s rail-thin form collided with the metal bars.

Keo pulled back slightly and shoved his forearm against its throat. Its neck was slick because it was covered in its own blood, but he ignored the nausea-inducing sensation and pressed harder. He pinned it to the cage with his left hand while cocking back his right, tightening his grip on the handle of the spork, just before sending it flying forward for the killing blow—

No! his mind screamed as the creature snatched his right hand by the forearm and grabbed him by the shirt collar with its other hand and, as if it were dealing with a petulant child, threw him back. He crashed into the metal bars, felt rather than heard the entire cage rattling on impact, just like what every bone in his body was doing.

He stumbled forward, but his legs were wobbly and he couldn’t focus. He did managed to see the floor rushing toward him just in time to somehow stick his hands out before he hit the hard pavement, saving his face from a painful collision.

Get up! The voice inside his head screamed. Get up, get up, get up.

He pushed himself up from the floor, every inch of his body screaming with pain, begging him for rest. His arms had doubled in weight for some reason. Keo managed to turn his head, looking up as the creature hovered over him.

“Human,” it hissed, the act of talking (hissing), of moving its jaw up and down, sending black blood dripping to the floor a few feet from Keo’s head. “You’re only human.”

So close. So goddamn close.

It ran its ice-cold fingers through his hair, got a firm grip, then dragged him up. Keo let out an excruciating howl as his scalp burned and threatened to tear from his head, and it was all he could do to scramble to get his feet under him and stand up so he wouldn’t be completely at the creature’s mercy.

“I’ve decided,” the creature hissed, “that you don’t need your arms.”

It pushed him back into the bars, and Keo only managed to get out a grunt even as the ghoul let go of his hair and grabbed both of his arms and grinned at him.

God, that grin. For as long as he lived — however short — he would never forget—

The spork.

Shit, he’d lost the spork. It wasn’t in his hand anymore, and Keo didn’t remember when he had dropped it. Probably somewhere between being thrown around the cage like a monkey and having his hair yanked like he was someone’s bitch. Not that it would have mattered anyway, because the ghoul was tightening its fingers around both his forearms, and there was no way in hell it was going to let go this time.

It leaned forward until it was so close it could have stuck out its tongue and slipped it into his mouth. Keo almost retched at the imagery.

“This is going to hurt,” it hissed. “But don’t worry. You won’t die. We have ways to stave off death. You’ll thank me.”

It cocked its head, and again, that goddamn grin. He hated the fuck out of that goddamn grin.

“Or not,” it hissed.

Then the blue-eyed ghoul did an odd thing. It was pulling back — to get into a better position to render his arms from their sockets, he assumed — when its eyes suddenly abandoned Keo’s face and snapped left—

And Keo thought, Wait, where’s Jordan?

There was a dull thunk! from somewhere in the cage, and the ghoul released both his arms. The sudden absence of its impossibly strong grip was so swift that Keo was sinking to the floor (Again? Jesus, I can’t stay off this floor.) before he could wrap his mind around what had happened, what was happening, and why both his arms were flopping uselessly to his sides instead of lying on the cage floor in a pool of blood.

Fortunately, he was staring forward the entire time, even as he was dropping to his knees. Keo saw the ghoul let out something that sounded almost like a guttural squeal before it vanished out of his peripheral vision. There was another loud clanging! as something bounced against the cage bars yet again. Except this time, thankfully, it wasn’t him.

Keo found the strength to turn his head until it settled on the ghoul, which was sitting on the floor with its back against the rods. Its eyes were wide open and staring forward, as if it was still trying to focus on something and having a difficult time. But of course it wasn’t, because there was a metal object sticking out of the center of its forehead between its eyes.

So that’s where the spork went.

The shiny metal had gone in deep, its handle buried halfway in the creature’s skull after having penetrated not just bone, but whatever was still back there. Small rivulets of blood poked through the point of impact and dripped along the titanium eating utensil.

A figure was crouching on the other side of him — Jordan, her face flushed with worry, brown eyes focused entirely on him. “Keo…”

“Shit, Jordan,” he said. Or croaked. Or coughed the words. One of those.

“You dropped the spork,” she said, barely managing a smile, even though he could see her lips quivering and her hands were shaking uncontrollably as she stroked his cheeks.

He smiled back at her before he saw it. The cage door. It was wide open, and the padlock was lost somewhere in the darkness of the barn.

Darkness. The barn. Night.

“Jordan,” he said.

“Shhh,” she said, peering at him. “I can’t even tell what color your neck is at the moment. Did it—”

He shook his head. “Outside. The barn. Night. Remember?”

It took a second — just a second — before she understood. Her eyes flew open, and she glanced back at the open cage door. “Oh, God. What do we do?”

“Danny told me a story,” he said, looking at the dead ghoul. “It’s about a farmhouse in Louisiana…”

They didn’t have ropes or duct tape to tie the creature up, but its bony arms and legs were pliable enough for them to shove the limbs through the bars and pull and prod them into position, at least enough to keep it in place. For something that had been unfathomably strong, its body was light enough that Jordan did most of the carrying, while he helped out the best he could with arms that had all the strength of spaghetti strings.

If it were only his arms or aching body, he would have been happy. His throat throbbed too, the windpipe bruised, and God knew what other damage he had suffered. He took some comfort in the fact he could still breathe, so at least he wasn’t wheezing anymore.

“You think they’re out there?” Jordan asked.

She sat next to him at the back of the cage, both of them wearing their jackets. She had helped him put his on, Keo flinching with pain the entire time. The spot gave them a perfect view of the dead (again?) blue-eyed ghoul’s malformed ass and back. Its head was tilted to one side, the way it had done more than once during its interrogation of him. It almost looked as if it were embracing the cage, arms and legs wrapped around the bars, refusing to let go.

“Willie boy cut off their heads and stuck them on pikes,” Danny had told him. “I don’t know why, but they responded to it. The black eyes. They stayed away from the farmhouse all night.”

Gaby had confirmed Danny’s story. Not that Keo ever doubted it, though he had to admit that sometimes the ex-Ranger had a tendency to exaggerate. He hadn’t, that time.

“This is crazy,” Jordan said. “Why would they stay away just because we killed him? It. Whatever.”

He glanced down at his watch. 10:11 P.M. It wasn’t even midnight yet. There were still nine hours before sunrise.

Goddamn Texas winters.

Jordan moved closer so they could share their body heat. “It wanted him, didn’t it? Frank.”

He nodded.

“Does that mean he’s still alive?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said softly.

“Hopefully?”

“Maybe that, too.”

You out there, Frank? You still alive, buddy?

Can you hear me now?

He smiled.

“What?” Jordan said. When he gave her a questioning look: “You had a stupid grin on your face.”

He shook his head. “Just thinking of a joke—”

Tap-tap-tap.

He stopped in mid-sentence.

The sounds had come from above them. From the roof.

They both looked up in time to see a pair of figures flitting across the cracks, temporarily blocking the streams of moonlight. Next to him, Jordan’s body went rigid before she reached down and picked up the spork from the floor. Blood, like mud, caked the stumpy tines.

Tap-tap-tap.

That came from outside the barn.

Tap-tap-tap.

From all around them.

Tap-tap-tap…

He and Jordan sat in silence and waited. He could hear her accelerated heartbeat, the sound of her fingers tightening around the spork’s handle.

Saved by a spork, he thought. Never in a million years did he ever think he’d have to rely on an eating utensil to survive the end of the world.

They waited and waited, but the creatures never made any attempts to enter the barn, though he could hear them easily enough through the rotting barn walls. They sounded agitated and restless, and yet they never tried to come inside. Maybe they could see through the cracks and saw the dead blue-eyed ghoul hanging off the cage door. Or maybe they just, somehow, knew.

After a while, he noticed the ones on the roof above them had simply…left.

“This is freaky,” Jordan whispered.

Better than dead.

“I don’t think they’re coming in,” she added, just a trace of barely restrained hope in her voice. “God, I can’t believe we’re going to survive this. Jesus, Keo, Jesus…”

He looked over and was surprised to see her crying silently next to him. He reached over and brushed the wet drops off her cheeks, even though doing so made his entire arm feel like it was going to fall off at the socket.

She gave him a pursed smile and shook her head. “I’m ten years old again,” she said, alternating between choking back tears and laughing.

He smiled and put his arm around her, grimacing with pain, and pulled her to him. She came willingly, leaning her head against his shoulder. It hurt like a sonofabitch, but he didn’t let her know that.

In the semidarkness, with little to do and even less to hear, he found himself thinking about the last few weeks. It was funny how things had worked out. He had come to Texas to find Gillian, but had found Jordan instead.

He had to admit, it wasn’t an entirely bad trade. Not bad at all.

CHAPTER 26 GABY

She landed on the tiled floor with a loud thump! and, in a crouch, immediately sprang up. The suffocating blackness was the first thing she noticed, followed by the two figures lying on the floor in front of her, their outlines visible in what little moonlight had managed to punch through the front windows of the hardware store. Her forefinger tightened against the trigger and she almost pulled it but stopped herself just in time because neither body was moving.

She hadn’t stood up for more than a second before there was another thump! behind her. Nate, falling through the attic door after her. He was so close as he landed that he probably had to do some fancy maneuvering at the last second to avoid crashing into her. It was her fault; she had forgotten to move out of his way.

She did that now, taking a step forward, the rifle in front of her. She swung it left, then right, scanning the darkness.

Christ, it was dark.

“Danny!” she hissed.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” a voice said, just before a lone shadow appeared from around one of the many shelves that separated the back of the store from the front. If she hadn’t heard his voice first, Gaby might have fired because she could only see a dark specter blanketed in shadows, moving toward her.

“Jesus, Danny,” she said.

“No, just Danny.” He stopped and crouched before reaching her.

“What are you doing?”

“Those other two — start stripping them.”

“What?”

“Their clothes. Grab them quick, before they come back.”

“Before who comes back?” Nate said behind her.

“Spider-Man and his amazing friends, who else?”

She glanced back at Nate, who was slowly lowering his rifle. She could just barely make out his soft blue eyes in the darkened store.

He met her gaze and shrugged. “I should have known he was too stupid to die.”

“I heard that,” Danny said.

“You were supposed to.”

The dead man closest to her was lying on his stomach, his head turned to one side so that the protruding breathing apparatus of a gas mask over his face was easy to make out. He had on a brown jacket, and a rifle lay next to him, within reach of his extended fingers. Gleaming brass casings surrounded him like a police chalk outline.

When she turned the dead man over onto his back, he had on a black uniform underneath. There was a name tag, but she didn’t waste the second it would have taken trying to squint out the letters. He was a collaborator — a dead one — and that was all she needed to know.

Nate moved past her and toward the second body. He crouched and pulled off the man’s jacket to get at the uniform underneath. He glanced back at her before the two of them looked over the counter at Danny on the other side. He was already unbuckling the third dead man’s gun belt while keeping one eye on the front door.

She followed his gaze, but couldn’t see anything out there.

“Danny,” she said.

“Less talk, more stripping,” he said.

“Is this going to work? The uniforms?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Danny…”

“Sure,” he said, his grin just barely visible in the semidarkness. “Put everything on. Uniform, gun belt, and gas mask — the works.”

She wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if he even believed it himself, but she turned back to her man anyway. Her fingers were trembling slightly as she pulled down the jacket’s zipper.

The collaborator was younger up close, probably in his mid-twenties, with short black hair and hazel eyes. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead, where blood pooled. His face looked frozen in a state of shock.

Better you than me, she thought, and pulled off his jacket.

The pants and shirt were a size too big for her, but she fixed both at the same time by tucking the hem of the shirt into her waistband and tightening the gun belt another notch. There was surprisingly little blood on the clothes. At least, in the darkness of the hardware store. It would probably look different in the morning.

If she was still alive to see morning.

Nate hadn’t been quite as lucky. His man had bled out so much he made a face the whole time he was pulling the shirt on, then zipped up a jacket over it. He picked up a gas mask from the floor next. “Is this really going to work?”

“I don’t—” she started to say.

Danny interrupted her, snapping, “Put them on now,” from the other side of the counter.

She glanced over, surprised by the edge in his voice, but something else drew her eyes past him, and she saw the silhouetted figures moving outside the store on the sidewalk, their emaciated forms like dancing shadows against the moonlight.

Ghouls.

She sucked in a large breath and pulled her gas mask on, then grabbed the dead soldier’s M4 she had laid on the counter. The ammo pouches around her waist were full again after combining the leftover magazines with the ones she had been carrying since this morning. She touched the butt of her Glock, just to make sure it was still in the holster along her hip.

Nate had wandered over to stand next to her, clutching his own stolen M4. His appearance, with his lengthening Mohawk sticking out above his gas-masked face, made for a menacing sight, like something out of a bad post-apocalyptic movie.

“Stay here,” Danny said, taking a step forward.

“Where are you going?” she asked, wondering if her voice sounded as odd as his did through the gas mask.

“Gotta let them know we’re in here, so they don’t come in for a closer look.”

“Danny…”

“Trust me.”

She sighed and clutched the rifle tighter, watching Danny walk toward the front of the store to stand about five feet from the windows. He had stopped in a pool of moonlight, as if presenting himself to the swarm of undead things outside.

God, Danny, I hope you know what you’re doing.

His presence didn’t go unnoticed, and the creatures surged toward the store seconds later. The sight of them rushing forward made her catch her breath, and it took everything Gaby had to fight the instinct to retreat. She didn’t, because there was nowhere to go. The only escape was up, back into the attic — and then what? Could they really survive up there all night?

“I think it’s working,” Nate whispered next to her.

The ghouls were pressing themselves against the glass panes, some sliding their bodies back and forth, leaving thick clumps of thick liquid in their wake. A bony elbow tap-tapped against another section of window, though she wasn’t sure if the creature was doing that on purpose or if it just couldn’t help itself because of its mangled arm. They hadn’t made any attempts to enter the store through the lone door yet, which was the best indication Nate could be right, that this might actually be working—

One of the creatures glared past Danny and straight at her.

Her legs might have wobbled slightly, and when her hands showed signs it might follow suit, she tightened her grip around the rifle to keep them busy. The sight of them rubbing themselves against the glass and peering in at Danny (and her) made her skin crawl. She willed the rest of her body to remain still, and slowly, very slowly, they obeyed.

Then, one by one, the creatures pried themselves from the windows and raced off up the street. The sight of them, simply pulling back and disappearing one by one by one, leaving thick films of brown and white (and yellow?) liquids behind to mark their presence, made her breath quicken even more so than when they were staring in at her.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said breathlessly next to her.

Danny turned around and began walking back to them. He looked calm, as if he hadn’t just been playing who-will-blink-first with a swarm of ghouls, with just a thin wall of glass between them a few seconds ago.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Nate said.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Danny said.

“It must be the uniforms and gas masks. They’re using them as some kind of identifying markers. Like dogs.”

“Like dogs?” she said.

“That’s what they are, when you get down to it. Just animals. Not any smarter or dumber. And it’s pretty easy to trick an animal, even one that runs on two feet.”

Danny finally reached them and pulled off his gas mask.

“I never doubted you for a second,” she smiled at him.

“Not even a second?” he smiled back.

“Okay, maybe just a pinch,” she said, pinching her fingers in front of her.

Danny grinned, and from the look on his face, he probably had a clever comeback ready, but he was interrupted by a loud squawk that blared across the store, followed by a muffled voice from somewhere in the darkness.

“Come in, Perkins,” the muffled voice said. “You still there?”

“That’s a radio!” Nate said, dropping his voice to almost a whisper for some reason.

“Find it!” Danny said.

Nate searched behind the counter while she looked on the other side, and Danny went through the aisles, scanning the floor.

“Anything?” Danny called.

“Nothing,” she called back.

“It’s not back here,” Nate said.

“Keep looking!” Danny said.

Another squawk from somewhere in the darkened store, followed by, “Perkins, come in.”

The voice sounded clearer (and closer!) this time, and she hurried toward a corner, feeling like a blind man groping for a clue.

There!

She snatched it up from the floor, said, “Got it!”

Nate and Danny hurried over as the radio squawked again, and this time a new voice said, “If they’re not answering, it means they’re dead.”

“All of them?” the first voice asked.

“What do you think, genius? If the others are still around, they’d answer, wouldn’t they?”

“What now?” a third voice asked. “Do we go in after them?”

“We don’t even know where they were when the shooting started,” the second man answered.

“Somewhere in the middle of town,” the first said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

She knew leaders when she heard it, and there wasn’t one among the three they were listening to now. There was too much doubt in their voices and too little certainty. You couldn’t hope to lead men with that kind of wavering. She had learned that much just watching Will at work.

“Can’t go in there now, not with all that activity,” the second voice said. “Nightcrawlers are all over the place like fucking cockroaches in heat. They must be chasing something big. I don’t wanna get in the middle of that.”

“So what, just leave them in there?” the first one asked.

“It’s risky, that’s all I’m saying.”

“We should wait till morning,” the third man said. He was trying to sound confident, and failing. “We’ll get reinforcements then. That’s assuming whoever’s in there is still alive after tonight. That’s a big if.”

“Yeah, I like that idea even better,” one of the other two said. She was losing track of who was who; there was a mechanical distortion through the handheld radio that made the voices start to blur together.

“Tomorrow,” someone else said, clearly relieved.

They waited to hear more conversation, but the radio remained quiet.

After a while, Danny grinned at her and Nate and said, “See? Told you. Easy peasy.”

Then he let out a big sigh.

Just in case the dead soldiers’ friends decided to risk entering the town anyway, they dragged the third body behind the counter and deposited it in a pile with the other two. They left the attic door open with the rope connected to the ladder dangling down, in case they needed it in a hurry. She didn’t like the idea of being cornered up there again — the brief but hellacious gun battle from earlier still fresh in her mind — but it was preferable to facing the snake pit of ghouls gathered outside the store at the moment. She could still see them occasionally moving back and forth across the store’s glass walls.

Danny had locked the front door just to be safe, not that any of them thought it was going to do a hell of a lot of good if the creatures decided to assault the building anyway. The glass windows weren’t going to hold for very long, at least not between now and morning. The lock was more for the benefit of any humans that might be poking around. If nothing else, it would provide them with an early warning.

They crouched behind the counter with the bodies a few feet behind Gaby. She did her best to ignore their presence, which was difficult because it seemed like her boots squeaked on their blood or she kicked a stray brass casing whenever she moved. Nate was on the other side of the back counter, and Danny had taken up position in the middle. Danny sat against the back wall now, another one of the dead soldiers’ M4s in his lap. His recently acquired jacket was zipped up all the way to his neck, and he looked like a turtle with its head stuck out of the opening.

They had all removed their gas masks for the sake of comfort, though at the moment, with the stink of the bodies nearby, she was having second thoughts.

“What happened?” she asked Danny. She wasn’t quite whispering, but she kept her voice low enough that she could be heard and still hear anything approaching the store.

Danny looked over. “When?”

“After you jumped down.”

“I shot them.”

“All three?”

“I got lucky. It was dark and they were preoccupied with trying to pinpoint where you and Nate Dogg were up in the attic. That, and they probably didn’t expect me to jump down the way I did. You know, all idiot-like.”

“You fired two more times after that. What were those for?”

Danny’s face changed slightly, from relaxed to something she hadn’t seen in a while, not even when they had discovered that their expedition to Harold Campbell’s facility was for nothing.

It looked like…uncertainty.

“Danny…”

He shook his head. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you, kid.”

“After all we’ve been through? After last night in the hangar?”

He grinned, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it.

“What was it, Danny?” she pressed.

“Remember back at the farmhouse?”

“What about it?”

“The blue-eyed ghouls?”

“Wanna play?” the creature had asked her, the sound of its voice burying itself so deep into her soul that she would never be able to forget it for as long as she lived.

“What about them?” she asked.

“One of them was here tonight. Earlier.”

Nate’s shadowed outline stiffened at the other end of the counter. She should have reacted the same way, but she was surprisingly…calm. Maybe it was the last few days, or last night back in the hangar at the Larkin airfield, but for some reason she couldn’t quite summon the fear that should have been natural when told there had been a blue-eyed ghoul inside the store with them earlier tonight.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I can’t explain it,” Danny said.

“Try.”

“It told me to put on the uniform and gas mask. Told me they would work to keep the ghouls out.”

She didn’t reply. Neither did Nate. How do you respond to something like that?

“Jesus, Danny,” was all she could manage.

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” Danny chuckled. “Hell, I still don’t believe it, and I actually lived through it. Unless, of course, this is all one big dream, in which case where are the bikini-clad girls? In my dreams only, you understand, so don’t be running off half-cocked and blabbing that last part to Carly without proper context.”

“You said it told you the uniforms would work?” Nate asked.

“Uh huh.”

“Why would it do that?”

“I haven’t a clue, kid. Not a clue.” He paused, then added, “There was something weird about it…”

“You mean besides the fact that it was a blue-eyed ghoul and it was talking to you, while simultaneously not trying to kill you?”

He grinned. “Yeah, that too.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Something…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know how to explain it. Hell, I might have just imagined the whole thing. It was pretty danky up there in the attic with you two. Lots of bad BO going around.”

Despite the jokes, she could see it on his face: Danny was at a loss for words, something she couldn’t say with any regularity. But whatever had happened before she and Nate came down the attic, it had struck him speechless. More than that, it had left him confused and unsure of himself.

“I’m still not convinced this isn’t a dream,” Danny said.

“It’s not,” Gaby said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Ditto,” Nate said.

“Well, shit,” Danny said, “if I can’t trust you, who can I trust, Nathaniel Ramsey? You are, after all, a war hero.”

“I still don’t know who that is,” Nate said.

“You should pick up a book sometime. Books, in case you crazy kids and your wacky Internets don’t know, are these heavy things made of paper and bound into a big boxlike object that you can also employ as a rat beater. Very useful.”

“Did it, uh, say anything else?” Nate asked. “This…thing?”

“Nope. It said to put on the uniforms and gas masks, then to show myself to the looky-loos outside.” He shrugged, and Gaby thought he might have reached down instinctively to clutch the M4 in his lap just to be sure it was still there. “Figured, what the hell. The damn thing had me by the balls and it tells me how to save myself, then just runs off? Didn’t think I had much to lose after that.”

“Jesus Christ, Danny,” she said again, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Yeah,” he said, and stared into the darkness again.

She wondered if he was replaying the moment with the blue-eyed ghoul over and over in his head, still unsure of everything he had seen or heard even now, long after the creature had gone. God knew her own encounter with one of those things had been traumatic enough, and hers only wanted to kill her. This one wanted to…save them?

And here she thought things were finally starting to make some sense. Returning to Texas had completely undermined that belief. First, there was the insanity at the airport hangar, and now this. Whatever “this” was. She still wasn’t entirely sure, and judging by the continued confused expression on Danny’s face, neither did the ex-Ranger.

We should have stayed away. We should have stayed out of Texas. God, why did we ever come back? For lights?

They didn’t say anything after that for the entire night. No one knew what to say. Not Danny, not her, and not Nate. Instead, they sat in silence and watched the shadows with suspicion, and waited for an attack that never came.

In the morning, it was a different story.

CHAPTER 27 KEO

Hey, Frank, you out there? Someone was looking for you last night. Give me a call back when you get this, pal. We gotta have a nice, long talk.

“You’re looking thoughtful,” Jordan said.

“Do I?” he said.

“I’m guessing you’re either thinking about Gillian or Frank.”

“It’s not Gillian.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t thought about Gillian all night.”

“Was it something I said?”

“Something you did.”

“Ah,” she said, and he thought she looked pleased with his answer.

“You did it very well,” he said.

“I’ve had practice. Though probably not nearly as much as you.”

“Are you calling me a whore?”

“Adventurous,” she smiled.

“Sounds better,” he smiled back.

“The arms?”

“Like a fat man’s sitting on them.”

“Try not to move them.”

“Sound advice,” he said, peering through the half-an-inch of viewing space between the door and the side of the barn.

He could see just enough of the farmhouse’s front yard to know that all the vehicles that were still capable of moving had done just that last night, taking along with them any visible signs of soldiers on the premises. There also wasn’t any of the familiar aroma of vaporized flesh outside, unlike behind him and Jordan at the moment.

They had opened their eyes to the sight of the blue-eyed ghoul, still fastened over the cage door, slowly turning to ash as morning sunlight claimed it. The creature had simply wasted away, leaving just bleached white limbs to continue clinging to the bars.

A few minutes after that and they were running through the barn, trying to figure out how they were going to fight their way through men with guns who already thought they were a part of Mercer’s murderous brigand. Except they didn’t have to, because the collaborators really had abandoned the place last night, which was probably also why Marcy had never come back for the spork.

“Don’t resist,” she had said last night. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.”

Keo got the feeling Marcy didn’t expect to ever see him again after last night. He didn’t blame her; he wasn’t even sure how he had survived himself. But all he had to do was look across the barn doors at Jordan, leaning across from him and peering out at the empty front yard, for his answer.

“What?” Jordan said.

“Just thinking—”

“Uh oh.”

“—how you saved my life last night.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, “What did you come up with?”

“I’m glad you were here.”

She chuckled. “Because I saved your life?”

“Yeah, that too.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are we talking about the sex again?”

“It was very good sex.”

“Save it for later, Romeo.”

“The sex, or talking about it?”

“Both. For now, what are our options?”

“What options? I just see one. They’re not out there right now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come back.”

“You think they’re coming back?”

“I don’t see why they’d just abandon this place.”

“I don’t, either.” She paused for a moment, then, “Are you sure you can do this in your condition?”

“I’m fine,” he lied. He reached into his back pocket and produced the spork. “Besides, I’m in possession of a very lethal weapon.”

“Watch where you’re pointing that thing.”

“Are you talking about the spork?”

“Cute.” She looked back at the door. “Ready?”

“On five?”

“On five,” she said.

He faced the door and began silently counting down from five. On one he pushed his door open, Jordan doing the same to hers.

He had put on a game face when Jordan asked if he was all right, but pressing his shoulder into the door made him wonder if the blue-eyed bastard hadn’t actually broken every single bone in his body last night, given the relentless throbbing and wobbly knees that suddenly made their presence known. He grunted through the pulsing pain and kept pushing, until the warmth of the sun surrounded him and he blinked up at the wide-open skies.

He had the spork gripped tightly in one hand and ready to fight, as if it was going to do a damn bit of good if someone with a gun was standing outside waiting for them. Then again, he bet the dead blue-eyed ghoul probably hadn’t thought the eating utensil was much of a weapon, either, but it had since learned otherwise.

Fortunately for both of them, the farmhouse was just as deserted as it had appeared from inside the barn. The only reminder that there had been men and women here yesterday was a white pickup truck parked at the edge of the wide clearing. Keo hurried over to it, but he already knew what he’d find — or not — before he even reached it.

There was no convenient car key dangling from the steering wheel, and when he opened the hood, there was no battery. He lowered the hood back down, careful not to let it slam, just in case there were people in the area. Sound traveled these days.

“Can we use it?” Jordan called from the front porch of the main house. She had been peering through the windows but hadn’t tried to go in yet.

“They abandoned it for a reason. Anything over there?”

“It’s too dark inside, but I’m pretty sure I saw something moving in the back hallway. Maybe we should risk it. There might be weapons, food…”

“Move on. It’s too risky.”

She gave one of the windows another quick glance before hopping off the porch and walking back to him.

Keo had climbed into the pickup, in search of something, anything, he could use. He found a rusty tire iron on the floor and pulled it outside with him. It wasn’t a gun or a knife, but he wasn’t going to complain about a melee weapon. If nothing else, it had better reach than the spork.

“Whatcha got there?” Jordan asked.

He tossed the tire iron over to her.

“Ah, you shouldn’t have,” she said, catching and turning the rusted object over in her hands, before wiping some (though not all, by any means) of the rust off on her pants. “Could be a little cleaner.”

“Could be a gun, too, but we can’t always get what we want.”

“No kidding. I was hoping to wake up on a nice comfy bed this morning.”

“Such an optimist.”

“And someone with less scars on his face.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Eh, I’ll live.” She smiled at him, before her eyes dropped to his feet. “What’s that?”

“What?”

She pointed and Keo looked down at a white piece of paper, about half the size of normal writing paper, trapped under one of his boots. He took a step back and picked it up. It would have been pristine if not for his boot print, and there was lettering on it in big, blocky capital letters, as if it had been cranked out by a printer.

Jordan leaned in to get a better look. “What’s it say?”

It read, in three separate rows:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

Keo read it out loud, then handed her the paper. Jordan peered at it, as if she could see more than what was printed on the page. He walked over and glanced into the back of the pickup and saw two more identical pieces of paper inside.

He scooped them up and walked back to her. “Saw them back there earlier, but I thought they were just litter.”

“Mercer?” Jordan said.

“I’d bet my spork on it.”

“So, what, they’re driving around throwing these things out of their car windows? I hope they’re getting good gas mileage, because it’s a big state.”

“They wouldn’t need to hit the entire state; just the areas where they’ve struck. Remember the map from Gregson’s tank? The towns they were attacking were almost entirely clustered around the southeast.” He glanced up at the clear skies. “Besides, maybe they have a better delivery system.”

“Planes?”

“It would take a lot to hide planes from the collaborators for all this time, but they managed exactly that with the tanks and themselves, so maybe…”

Jordan turned the paper over, but it was blank on the other side. “So this is some kind of propaganda?”

“Gregson did say Mercer has a plan. I guess this is part of it.”

“What’s that? Bomb the shit out of people, then ask them to join you?” She stared at the paper. “It says to ‘pick a side,’ but doesn’t say how, or where to go.”

“Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll run into more of Mercer’s people between here and T18, and you can ask them for all the details.”

“Again with the warped definition of luck.” She crumpled the flyer and flung it across the yard with everything she could muster. “So what do you think?”

“About?”

“‘Pick a side.’ What happens if we don’t?”

He didn’t answer right away. Keo had never had any problems choosing sides — it was usually the people who paid him the most. But that kind of no-brainer decision wasn’t going to work anymore. Which was too bad; he liked it better when things were simpler.

“We might not have a choice,” he said. “The people who get hurt the most in a war are usually the ones caught in the middle.”

“Like the civilians in the towns. Like Gillian.”

He nodded.

“There’s some sense to it, I guess,” Jordan said. “What Mercer’s doing. The townspeople would have heard about what had happened to the other places by now. Even if the ones in charge of the towns managed to stick all the survivors from the attacks into a dark room somewhere, there’s still the soldiers. They wouldn’t be able to stop blabbing about it. That’s how it is in T18, and I’m guessing in the other settlements, too: the soldiers are just civilians with uniforms. Most of them are married or living with someone. You’re encouraged to, because being a couple means getting out of the dorms and into your own house.”

“Coupling plus sex plus babies?”

“Pretty much. Anyway, you can’t hide something like this. This kind of news will spread like wildfire.” She paused, then, “What was that Gregson said? Something about letting everyone know there were other things out there scarier than the ghouls? He was talking about them. Mercer’s troops.”

“Sounds like it.”

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About everything. Mercer. This plan of his. The war with the collaborators. All of it.”

Keo shook his head. “I think this Mercer guy knows exactly what he’s doing. Either that, or he’s fucking insane.”

“Can’t it be both?” Jordan asked.

He chuckled. “Definitely.”

His instincts were to leave as quickly as possible, just in case Marcy and the others did return, but there was still too much of the place left to explore for potential weapons. The optimism in him was hoping to find something useful the collaborators might have forgotten or left behind, maybe either because they were in a hurry or were just clueless. He was, after all, just dealing with, when you got right down to it, conscripted soldiers.

They spent half an hour searching the parts of the farmhouse that they could be sure didn’t have any ghouls hiding inside, including a storage shack in one corner of the property. Inside, Keo found a lot of tools, an old tractor that might have still worked if there were gas, and enough parts to probably make two more of the machine. He also discovered an old, rusted over machete on a shelf near some piles of lug nuts and spare tires.

“Got a knife,” he said when he came back out of the shack.

“Looks more like a sword,” Jordan said.

“Technically a machete.”

“Can you even cut anything with that?”

“Sure, if you hit them hard and often enough,” he said, and switched the machete for her tire iron.

“Aw, you get me all the bestest gifts, Keo.”

“I like to show my appreciation when a woman does me the honor of boinking me in a barn.”

“If I knew boinking guys in barns would get me this much gratitude, I’d have done it throughout college.”

“I have a feeling you didn’t have a lot of problems getting guys to do what you wanted in college, Jordan.”

She smiled at him. “You don’t have to kiss my ass anymore. You already got in my pants, remember?”

“It never hurts to lube up.”

“Sounds like the prelude to something painful.”

He chuckled. “We’ll see.”

“Promises, promises.”

She gave the machete the once-over, then put it through a few practice swings. In the sunlight, the blade was more rusted over than it had looked inside the building, but it was still a decent weapon. Even if that edge couldn’t cut as well as it used to, it was nevertheless going to hurt coming down on an arm or a leg.

“Not bad,” she said when she was done. “If I can’t kill someone with this thing, I can at least give them tetanus.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“So,” she said, fixing him with a serious look. He could tell she had been thinking about it ever since they woke up this morning, and even more since. “After everything we’ve seen — Gregson, those collaborators yesterday, that blue-eyed thing last night — what are the chances we’re going to even make it to Gillian alive, much less actually be in a position to save her when we get there?”

Good question, he thought, and looked around at their surroundings.

It was the same now as the last time he had checked: A flat and open land, and somewhere out there was the highway. The problem wasn’t finding it — just follow the dirt road connected to the house. It was the very long road (and when you were moving on foot, everything took too long) between here and T18 that was going to be a problem.

Marcy and her collaborators were on high alert, if all the firepower he had seen yesterday was any indication. Besides the technicals, they were carrying around LAWs, no doubt as a response to Mercer’s tanks. What were the chances he and Jordan could make it to Tobias, and then Gillian, without ever running across another group of well-armed men with itchy trigger fingers?

You just walked right back into a warzone, pal. Congratulations.

He sighed out loud.

“I take it the chances are pretty piss poor,” Jordan said.

“I’ve been in worse situations,” he said. “Come on; let’s find the highway.”

“There are people with guns and rocket launchers on the highway, remember? Maybe we should stay out of the open as much as possible.”

“Look at you, being all tactical.”

She smirked. “I just don’t wanna get blown up again.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t very fun, was it?” He glanced in the direction of the highway. “I guess we start walking.”

“That’s your big plan?”

“We’ll figure it out between here and there, wherever ‘there’ ends up being for now.”

“I could have come up with that plan,” Jordan said.

“Yup,” he said, and started off.

Jordan followed behind him, and they didn’t say anything for a while. He was hoping it would stay that way, but of course he should have known better.

Less than thirty seconds later, Jordan said, “What are you going to tell Gillian?”

“About what?”

“You and me. Is there a you and me?”

“After last night, you still have to ask?”

“Yes.”

He stopped and looked back at her. “I gave up on Gillian a week ago.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes,” he lied.

He wasn’t entirely sure if she believed him, but she gave him a pursed smile anyway. “I should tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“I expect a promise ring.”

He chuckled. “Will you settle for my letterman jacket?”

“Depends. What did you letter in?”

“Pure badassness.”

“Impressive.”

He smiled and turned around and continued walking. She followed, picking up her pace until she was walking beside him stride for stride.

“It’s going to be a long walk,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working car on the road.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Of course. How do you think I finally landed you?” she said, and smiled at nothing in particular.

CHAPTER 28 GABY

“I see two vehicles,” Nate said. “How many do you see?”

“Two, too,” she said.

He chuckled.

“This isn’t funny, Nate. We’re probably going to die in the next few minutes.”

“Sorry.”

She was crouched beside one of the windows at the front of the hardware store watching the vehicles coming up the street. Nate mirrored her pose on the other side of the building, his breath fogging up the glass surface in front of him. She flexed her fingers around the pistol grip under the barrel of the M4 to keep it from going numb. The weapon had a red dot sight, which was more than good enough for daylight fighting. The dead collaborator she had taken it off had been carrying two extra magazines, and counting the two she already had for the AR-15, gave her a total of five. She’d had to make do with much less.

“Maybe they’ll pass us by,” Nate said.

“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe it for one second.

They were close enough that she could have heard him (and vice versa) even if he were whispering, which he wasn’t because he didn’t have to. The soldiers were still a good hundred yards down the street, and they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

She paid very close attention to the four figures moving on foot as they peeked into windows and kicked in doors on both sides of the street. The vehicles stopped each time they made entry, then resumed when they re-emerged. At this rate, she didn’t think they would reach her and Nate for another half an hour.

They don’t have to rush, because the night belongs to them. They can take all day if they want to.

There was a lone woman among the soldiers, and Gaby watched her breaking a window with the stock of her rifle before peeking inside. It wasn’t much of a search on her part, but she seemed satisfied with it and jogged over to rejoin the others. Gaby didn’t blame her for wanting to stick as close to the weaponized trucks as possible.

“Technicals,” Danny and Will called them. The ones she was looking at were blue and red, and both had machine guns mounted in the back, each one manned by a soldier. They weren’t wearing gas masks, but she could see the breathing apparatuses hanging from their belts as they moved about. She guessed they didn’t need them in daylight, without the ghouls around to mistake them for the enemy.

She was glad to be rid of the mask herself. It sat somewhere on the counter behind her now, along with the uniform of the dead man she had put on last night. All three of them had swapped back into their old clothes, though they had kept everything else, including the rifles, gun belts, and supply pouches. It was more than they’d had even after the trip to Taylor’s cottage outside of Larkin.

“We should have brought lunch,” Nate said.

“I never asked, but can you cook?”

“Hell no. What about you?”

“Why? Because I’m a woman I should know how to cook?”

“Well, yeah.”

She smirked, and he chuckled.

“They sure are taking their sweet time, though,” Nate said, focusing back on the street.

She wasn’t at all concerned with the deliberate speed of the soldiers. It was those machine guns that made her wary. She had seen what kind of damage those things could do up close. Bonnie had become very good with the M240 they had onboard the Trident, and she’d seen the ex-model obliterating targets in the water with one pull of the trigger.

The soldiers were less than fifty yards when she said, “Get ready.”

“Danny?” Nate said.

“Soon.”

“When?”

“He didn’t say. But soon. Just be ready.”

Nate stood up, his body sliding against the wall next to the glass window, and stretched his legs. She did the same thing on her side, extending first her right leg, then her left. Her hands had numbed a bit while waiting, and she forced blood to circulate along the rest of her limbs now.

She zeroed in on the men inside the two vehicles. Only the blue one had another soldier in the front passenger seat besides the driver, and that man was talking into a radio. When he was done, he put it on the dashboard and said something to the man behind the steering wheel. The fact that she hadn’t heard the radio clipped to her hip squawk when the man was using his told her they had, smartly, switched channels after last night.

There were nine of them that she could see—“could see” being the operative phrase. Who knew how many more were further up the street or in other parts of Starch? How many were waiting on the outskirts of town right now, ready to swarm once these nine located their targets? How many were the collaborators committing to flushing them out? Or maybe the better question was, how many could they afford to commit, with Mercer’s people still running around out there?

Even if this was it, nine was still a lot for them to kill. For her to kill. And they’d have to do exactly that to get out of Starch alive. The Trident was waiting for them somewhere out there. They’d never leave until they had exhausted every effort to find them. Danny was right about that. She had seen how long Lara was willing to wait for Will; her friend would never just abandon them after a few days. A few weeks from now might be another story, though.

“Holy shit, is that…” Nate said from across the store.

She turned to him and was about to ask what “that” was when she heard it, too.

It was a slight buzzing sound that came out of nowhere and gradually increased, until she knew exactly where it was coming from: Outside, but more importantly, from above.

Gaby glanced out at the street and saw the soldiers jumping up the sidewalks and seeking shelter against building storefronts. Their heads were upturned and following the object as it glided across the open skies. It was hard to miss, because it was the only unnatural thing up there.

It was a plane.

Round and fat and gray as it moved high above them.

Gaby’s first instincts were similar to the collaborators: Run and hide. She was already hiding, but how much cover would the hardware store provide when that plane started dropping bombs? Or, if it was anything like the Thunderbolts that had laid waste to T29 and the Larkin airfield, started its strafing runs? Anyone outside would be most vulnerable—

Danny.

He was out there, in the open, and was a sitting duck to any type of aerial bombardment. She looked anxiously up at the ceiling, wondering if he had come to the same conclusion as she had, and waited to hear him scrambling around up there, where he had taken up position ever since sunrise filled out Starch.

Except the plane didn’t shoot, even if it did seem to be dropping something out of its belly. White…something was falling in long, jagged lines down to earth from the craft. More than a few of them landed on the rooftops in front of her, some on the streets. One fluttered almost majestically to the sidewalk—

Crack!

The shot had come from above her, from the hardware store’s rooftop.

Danny!

She almost smiled. Of course the ex-Ranger would be the only one to realize the perfect opportunity to strike, while everyone (including her and Nate) were distracted by the appearance of the plane.

She focused back on the street just in time to see the soldier standing behind the machine gun on the blue technical collapse into the truck bed. The weapon he had been manning swiveled as he released it, the muzzle aiming harmlessly up at the cloudless sky.

“Now, Nate, now!” she shouted.

She stepped away from the wall and lifted the M4, lining up the red dot with the soldier standing in the back of the red truck. He was in the process of taking aim at the rooftop of the hardware store with his weapon and was crouching slightly to get a better angle.

Forty yards. Easy shot with a carbine.

She fired, the bullet smashing the window in front of her, and a split-second later the machine gunner disappear out of her scope.

Then Nate was firing to her left, unloading downrange with three-round bursts. Gaby blocked out his shots and zeroed in on the driver of the red truck. The man had slammed on the gas because the vehicle started lurching forward, picking up speed as it went. Her second bullet drilled through the windshield, spiderwebbing it, and—missed!

Shit!

She scrambled to line up the sight, but before she could squeeze off a frantic make-up shot, the truck’s windshield spiderwebbed again, but this time directly in front of the driver. The man slumped forward into the steering wheel and a loud blaring sound — the horn — filled the air. She waited for the vehicle to stop, but instead it kept coming—straight at her.

“Nate!” she shouted, trying to be heard over his three-round bursts. “Incoming!”

He pulled his eye away from his scope just in time to see the truck. She was already moving even before he did and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that Nate was too smart to stand there and gawk at the technical as it barreled its way up the street at them. She hoped, anyway.

She gripped her rifle with both hands as she swerved around the aisles until, finally, saw the counter at the back. She thought about grabbing the attic door and going up, but there wasn’t going to be enough time. She could already hear the loud roar of the truck’s engine (was it revving?) as it approached the front windows—

The massive crash! she had been waiting for, as the vehicle’s front fender took out the remainder of the glass curtain wall that she and Nate hadn’t already obliterated, along with the door. Her ears rang, even as she heard the continued pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from above her, from Danny as he continued raining fire on the soldiers in the street.

Now, now, now!

She dropped and slid the last few feet along the dirty floor, flinching at the gross image of leftover blood from last night that she was soaking up with her clothes like a sponge. Her slide was true, and she disappeared through the entrance of the back counter at the same time all hell broke loose behind her. Her forward momentum carried her past the counter and she tucked her body into a ball, the rifle clutched against her stomach, and careened into the wall with the back of her neck.

As she unfurled, she found herself with a perfect vantage point to see Nate as he was hopping over another part of the counter in some kind of parkour move she had only seen in the movies. She wasn’t prepared for that. She always knew Nate was athletic and in excellent shape, but she didn’t know he could do that.

Nate landed facefirst, somehow managing to stick out his hands in time before impact, but his rifle wasn’t so lucky, and it clattered loudly as it struck the floor and skidded away. He scrambled to get as far under the countertop as he could manage as glass shards and nails slammed into the wall and fell around them. She thought he had the right idea and scooted forward to be next to him.

He glanced over as the last few items inside the hardware store settled around them, and grinned. She returned it, but their moment was short-lived because gunshots were still ringing out from the street as well as above them, where Danny was still perched — which meant the truck crashing into the building hadn’t brought down the roof.

Thank you, Jesus.

She scrambled up to her knees and looked over the debris-strewn counter. The red technical was buried halfway into the building, tossing shelves and all the abandoned tools on them everywhere. The driver had finally taken his foot off the gas and was nowhere to be found.

“Danny?” Nate said.

She craned her neck as two shots boomed above them, as if on cue.

“Still kicking,” she said, and got up and ran back through the store, skirting around the vehicle that had claimed a large piece of the interior. The crunch-crunch of objects under her boots and from behind her sounded as Nate followed on her heels.

There wasn’t anything left of the storefront, a fact that occurred to her just as she slid to a stop, about the same time a bullet buzzed! past her head and pinged! off the tailgate of the truck behind her. She was standing out in the open with absolutely nothing to hide behind, like an idiot, and Gaby would have dived to the floor for cover if it weren’t covered with sharp chunks of brick and mortar and an ungodly amount of broken glass.

Instead, she turned around as—ping! — another bullet nearly took her head off, but hit and ricocheted off the truck a second time instead.

Pop-pop! from the other side of the truck as Nate opened fire into the street.

She smiled to herself (He’s covering my retreat. God, I think I love this man.) as she ran back to the driver-side door and opened it. A body fell through and slumped on the floor at her feet, but she ignored it and moved behind the broken window. On the other side, Nate had slowed his shots now that she was safe.

She spied a figure moving behind the blue technical still parked in the middle of the street. There were bullet holes in the front windshield, either Danny’s or Nate’s doing, but no signs of the driver. The figure stuck its head out from the back bumper. It was the woman Gaby had seen earlier, and she was lining up a shot at Nate.

Gaby fired twice in the woman’s direction, both rounds hitting the side of the truck, one smashing the back lights. It was enough to drive the woman behind cover before she could pull her own trigger.

The crunk! of a car door opening as Nate followed her example on the other side of the useless vehicle. She looked across the bloody front seats as he slapped a fresh magazine into his M4.

“You okay?” she asked.

He glanced over. “Yeah. You?”

“One piece, thanks to you.”

“Just don’t let it happen again.”

She smiled. “I’ll do what I can.”

When she looked back, the street outside had grown eerily quiet, though she might have heard faded scratching from above her. Danny, maybe moving around for a better shot. He had the high ground because Danny was smart and this was what he did. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have to face him and Will at the same time.

She focused out the smashed front wall of the hardware store and concentrated on the two bodies next to the blue truck — one was on the sidewalk; the other lay almost perfectly in the middle of the two-lane road. Two bodies that she could see, but more that she couldn’t. She knew for a fact there was one body in the back of the red truck she was hiding behind at the moment, and another one at her feet.

Two plus two made four collaborators accounted for.

Then there was the blue truck’s driver and the dead machine gunner in the back.

Two plus four made six.

“Take out the machine gunners first,” Danny had said this morning. “Those bad boys are going to chew us up and spit us out in little vomit chunks if we let them get going.”

So she had waited for Danny to take out his man before she targeted hers while Nate sprayed the street to sow confusion. One of those bodies on the streets might have been his — not that any of them were going to be taking a tally after this.

That left them with three live bodies to account for, including the woman. Unless the passenger of the blue technical was already dead and somewhere on the floor of the vehicle. Then that would leave two. Two or three.

She had to admit, she liked those odds.

Gaby watched and waited. What were the remaining two (or three) going to do now? If they were smart, they’d stay right where they were and radio for backup. Which meant…

She looked into the truck and saw the two-way, covered in blood, on the front passenger seat. She waited for it to squawk, for the soldiers outside to radio for help, because there had to be other collaborators outside Starch at this moment, right? These nine couldn’t possibly be all there were. Maybe—

A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned around in time to see a figure — a man — leaping up the back of the blue truck. He was going for the machine gun. That was the plan, anyway, but the man hadn’t finished throwing his other leg over the tailgate before a shot rang out and he stopped his forward momentum. A second later, he collapsed and disappeared over the back.

“So much for that idea,” Nate said. “One left?”

“Maybe two.”

“You saw two?”

“No, there might be two, but definitely one more. The woman.”

“What’s she going to do now?”

“The smart thing would be to call for help.” Gaby glanced back at the silent radio again.

“You’re assuming they’re sm—” Nate started to say, but he ended up shouting “Shit!” instead as two figures made a run for it on the street.

She stepped sideways, away from the door, and tracked them. She ended up filling her optic with the back of the woman, and fired — and missed again! Her bullet went high, and the woman ducked and turned left — toward the mouth of an alley.

Gaby took her time and fired a second bullet and saw the woman spin in mid-stride.

Gotcha!

Next to her, Nate was shooting, his bullets raking the wall behind the woman, who was still moving despite her wound. A second later the figure disappeared from the sidewalk.

Or not, she thought when there was a single crack! from above them, and the man who had taken off at the same time as the woman stumbled and dropped to the opposite sidewalk, about eighty yards up the street.

“Gaby!” Danny shouted from above them. “Secure Speed Racer!”

Gaby raced out of the building. Nate, as always, was right behind her.

She jogged up the street, waiting for the man to make a move, but he never did. He must have known he wouldn’t have gotten far even if he managed to pick himself up. Gaby peeked at the alleyway where the woman had disappeared just as she ran past it. Splashes of blood on the sidewalk, but no signs of the collaborator.

Pieces of paper, the objects she had seen falling out of the plane earlier, reflected back the sunlight around her, littering the streets, but she didn’t have time to stop and pick one up.

“I got the alley!” Nate shouted behind her.

She continued on toward the wounded soldier alone.

He was lying on the pavement on his back, clutching his right leg. Danny’s shot had gone through his thigh and the collaborator was grimacing in pain. His teeth were clenched, and Gaby wasn’t sure if he was going to curse her or scream for help when she finally reached him. A pool of blood gleamed under him.

“Fancy meeting you here, beautiful,” the man said. “I should have known it’d be you and your little friends running around out here causing trouble again.”

Mason.

Of course he was still alive. The man really was like a cockroach, showing up whenever they least expected him.

“You’re looking well,” he said as she picked up his rifle lying a few feet away. He held his hands up in surrender as she pulled his handgun out of its holster and stepped back.

“Clear!” she shouted.

She took a moment to scan the streets. There was no way someone within miles of them hadn’t heard those back-and-forth volleys. If there were more collaborators around, they would be here within minutes. The fact that they hadn’t shown up yet put her slightly at ease. Maybe Mercer’s attacks had spread them out thinner than she had imagined.

Footsteps behind her, followed by Nate’s voice. “The woman’s gone. You got her good, though. She bled all the way to the back of the alley where she went over a fence.”

“I guess I should have gone left instead of right, huh?” Mason said.

“Guess so,” Nate said. Then, recognizing the man, “Sonofabitch. You again.”

“I’m like Steven Seagal. Hard to kill, even though I’ve been marked for death, under sieged, and have stood on deadly ground many a times before. Get it?”

“Get what?”

“Never mind,” Mason sighed.

More footsteps behind her, then Danny’s voice: “How was my shot?”

“True,” she said.

“That’s how I likes ’em. The other bird?”

“Flew the coop,” Nate said.

“Well, that’s disappointing. I guess it’s true what they say: You want someone dead, you gotta shoot them yourself.”

“What do we do with him?” Gaby asked.

“Good question,” Mason said.

“Shut up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Blue truck’s still good,” Danny said. “We’ll grab Doogie Howser, M.D. here and boogie before more of his friends show up. Nate, salvage what you can.”

Gaby hadn’t looked away from Mason. A part of her thought he might vanish if she turned away for even a second. He had struggled to sit up and was still clutching his leg.

“Why?” Gaby asked.

“Why what?” Mason said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.” She looked back at Danny. “Why are we wasting our time dragging this piece of trash along with us?”

“Hey, come on now, no need for that kind of language,” Mason said.

“Shut the hell up,” she said, and pointed her rifle at him.

He stared defiantly back at her. She could almost believe he wasn’t frightened, but she knew better. He was putting on a good front, but men like Mason didn’t want to die.

“Because he’s still got friends out there,” Danny said. “What are the chances we’re going to get around all of them? Unlikely, and you know how optimistic I can be. But I bet our new friend here’s willing to point out all the ambush spots so we can go around them.”

“And why would I do that?” Mason asked.

“Because if we get caught, you’re going to be the first to go. And I ain’t talkin’ about the bathroom, short stuff. You comprehende my bad Spanishe?”

Mason grinned widely. “Well, you do make a persuasive argument.”

“See? We’re practically BFFs. That’s how I am. I live and let live. There’s even a word for that.”

“Magnanimous?” Mason said.

“No thanks, I just ate.”

Gaby sighed. She didn’t like it. The thought of having to spend another minute around Mason made her queasy, but Danny was right. They needed to get home, which meant making their way back to Port Arthur. There was a lot of highway between them, and with Mercer out there, more dangerous than when they had first traveled the same miles.

Her eyes drifted to the road around them, at the white pieces of paper strewn about, as if someone had dumped their office trash out of a second-floor window. “Danny. The plane. They were dropping paper.”

Danny snatched one up. “You guys littering now?” he asked Mason.

“Not us,” Mason said.

There were large, blocky capital letters on the paper in Danny’s hand, but she couldn’t make out the words over his shoulder.

“What’s it say?” she asked.

He skimmed it, then handed it to her. It looked like some kind of advertising flyer, about half the size of the paper she was used to back in school. The letters were clearly generated by a printer, and they read:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

She returned her gaze to Mason, still sitting on the pavement, either too hurt to try to get up or too afraid of being shot.

“Mercer,” she said.

“Would be my guess,” the man nodded.

“Looks like we got ourselves a regular Hatfields and McCoys situation,” Danny said. “Hide the relatives and pass the ammo. Me personally, I like to stay out of other people’s civil wars.” He looked back at Mason. “So the question of the moment is, how many more of your pals are out there beyond the town limits?”

“This is it,” Mason said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want.” He nodded at the flyer in Gaby’s hand. “We got bigger problems right now. They sent us back here just to see what happened to their friends.”

“Sent you?” Gaby said. “You used to be in charge of a whole town.”

Mason sighed almost wistfully. “Things change, blondie. We’re not in Louisiana anymore. New job, new position. That whole Song Island fiasco messed up my cred with the bosses. I guess you could say I’m back in the mail room.”

“So we won’t run into more of you out there?” Danny asked.

“I didn’t say that. The towns may be on lockdown, but the guys in charge aren’t just going to sit back and wait. It’s the Wild West out there — multiple kill teams running around shooting each other. Theirs and ours. Lucky for you, I know where our guys will be. I know their movements.”

“And Mercer’s peeps?”

Mason shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Danny,” Gaby said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t trust him.”

“We have to,” Danny said. “He gives us a better chance of getting home.” Danny tapped his Sig Sauer for effect when he added, “Of course, for someone with a ten-year-old girl’s body, he’s got a nice big juicy head. I bet I could plug that thing from fifty yards using this here handgun, easy.”

Mason swallowed, but smartly didn’t say anything.

Danny looked over at her. “Let’s go home, kid.”

“What if he’s lying, and he leads us right into a trap?” she asked.

“Then we’ll kill them, along with anyone else who gets in our way,” Danny said, and turned to go.

CHAPTER 29 KEO

They had been walking north for the last hour, keeping parallel to the highway about fifty yards to their right while staying out of the open. Unfortunately, that meant traveling across fields of farmland and grass that at times went all the way up to their knees. Fortunately, the land wasn’t fenced off, which saved them the trouble of having to go around each individual property. The extra precaution didn’t make them completely hidden from the road, but it was better than just walking around out there exposed, the way they had done in the truck yesterday. They’d eaten a rocket for that little bout of stupidity.

“Remember what that guy said about Angleton?” Keo said.

“Something about it being dead,” Jordan said. “For a year now. Why?”

“Might be worth looking for supplies there.”

“You really think they’ll be something useful after all this time?”

“Won’t know until we look.”

“But wouldn’t your friend Marcy and her pals have already raided it by now? I got the sense they were based around here.”

“My ‘friend’ Marcy?”

“She did give you back the spork.”

“She gave us back the spork. And as I recall, she threw it into the cage.”

“Probably her idea of foreplay.”

Keo glanced over, not sure if all of this was her way of teasing him or—

She was grinning.

Right. Teasing. Walked right into that one, didn’tcha?

“I’m just messing with you, Keo,” she said. “Have to keep myself entertained somehow.”

“Good to know.”

She shooed away a bug that had launched from one of the sunburnt blades of grass around them and landed on her forehead. “How long have we been walking, anyway?”

“An hour.”

“You sure? It feels like more. By the way, I’m hungry.”

“Too bad, because there’s nothing to eat.”

“Can’t you go, I don’t know, make a trap out of some twigs and catch us a rabbit or something?”

He wished there were something in the endless acres of untended farmland spread out to the left, right, forward, and back of them. He would have settled for a fruit or two. Jordan wasn’t the only one starving this morning.

“What am I, your servant?” he said instead.

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Well that’s disappointing. What kind of relationship can we possibly have if you won’t even go out there and hunt down food for me?”

He chuckled and whirled the tire iron in the air, listening to the whoosh-whoosh it made, the only sound other than their tired footsteps for miles around. The lack of anything made him wonder who the farmhouse they had escaped from belonged to, and why the people had come all the way out here, so far from another living human being.

“Jesus, where is everyone?” Jordan said after a while.

“We’re in the boondocks.”

“This isn’t the boondocks, Keo. This is Mars. Only drier.”

He looked toward the highway. It was flat and empty and cut across the fields, the only stubborn hint of civilization having even reached this far out into the countryside. Like Jordan, he wondered where Marcy and her collaborators had gone to. Was there a city nearby that he didn’t know about or hadn’t seen on the map when they still had one? It would make sense, assuming the machine gunner wasn’t lying when he told Keo Angleton was “dead.”

“I’m hungry,” Jordan said next to him.

“You already said that.”

“I’m starving.”

“I got the gist when you said you were hungry.”

She sighed. “Do something, Keo. Go find a cow and beat it over the head with that tire iron and cook me something to eat.”

He smiled. He would, if he could, but there was nothing around them but unfettered tall grass swaying in the morning breeze. What were the chances there was an animal or two hiding among them? Towns like T18 had their share, but they were far from T18 at the moment.

“Car!” Jordan half-shouted and half-whispered.

He went into a crouch even before Jordan had finished saying the word. She did the same next to him, clutching the machete, the dull brown-colored blade so rusted over he was afraid it might fall apart if she moved it too fast. He changed up his grip on the tire iron, but like the last hour, still found it incredibly lacking.

What’s that old saying? “Don’t bring a tire iron to a gunfight.”

Or something like that.

It was a white Ford truck, overturned in the ditch on the other side of the road, about forty meters in front of them. Its wheels were sticking out just above the grass line, sunlight glinting off their rims. He scanned the empty acres around them but came up as empty now as the last dozen or so times he’d searched for clues of humanity.

He glanced at Jordan. “I’ll go first. Don’t move until you see me reach the other side.”

He expected an argument, a variation of “If you can do it, I can too” girl power nonsense, but Jordan just nodded back.

He must have looked surprised, because she said, “What?”

“Keep an eye out around us, just in case,” he said, then got up and jogged forward, angling right as he went.

He bent over at the waist to lessen his profile as much as possible, but he knew it wouldn’t be nearly enough if someone was out there watching him. The fact that he was wearing dark clothes and moving through a mostly tan/brown sun-scorched field likely didn’t help. He stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Keo breathed easier (though not by much) when he finally reached the ditch on their side. He snapped a glance up, then down the road, saw pieces of glass, metal, and aluminum spread across the pavement, and burnt tire tracks. Sections of the truck had broken loose as the vehicle skidded off the road before finally landing on its roof on the other side. He sniffed freshly spilled gasoline and leaked motor oil, so whatever had happened hadn’t been all that long ago. Maybe even this morning.

He took a breath, then climbed out of the ditch and darted across the road, still keeping himself as low as possible. He waited for gunshots, but they never came. He finally reached the other side and hopped down, breathing with relief when he flattened his back against the cold dirt wall, because no one had fired a shot yet.

He started up the ditch, crunching glass hidden among the thick weeds. There were still no signs of people or blood in the ditch or on the road to his left, and he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad sign. Cars didn’t drive themselves, and they certainly didn’t lose control and overturn without a reason.

Keo stopped for a moment and peeked over the top of the ditch to see Jordan moving steadily from the fields and toward the other side. She finally got there and hopped into the ditch, then peered up and across at him. They exchanged a brief nod.

He continued toward the truck, trying to see as much of the vehicle as possible, but the angle was all wrong and he ended up staring at the bent back bumper and a Texas license plate hanging on by just one remaining screw. He was fully prepared to break someone’s head open with the tire iron should they lunge out at him from the wreckage, but he didn’t have to, no matter how much noise he was making with all the crunching glass under his boots.

When he finally reached the damaged vehicle, Keo sneaked a quick look into the shattered back passenger window by exposing his head for a brief half second before pulling it back and waited for the gunshots that never came.

Breathing easier now, he crouched and took a longer look this time. There was no one inside the back or the front seats. Shredded upholstery, more broken glass, and splashes of blood covered the driver’s seat and front passenger’s. He figured out where most of that blood came from when he spotted the two spiderwebbed bullet holes in the front windshield. There was plenty of evidence that whoever was in the vehicle when it ran off course hadn’t left unscathed, but there were no signs of the people themselves.

Keo stood up and looked around him again. This was the first time he had gotten a good view at the open land on this side of the highway, not that there was much of a difference; it looked just as brown and sun-bleached on this side as it had on the other.

He swept the immediate area around the truck, trying to find traces of where the driver and passenger had gone. There was a lot of blood in the grass around him, but no clear indications the men (or women) had been pulled out and then dragged away.

So where the hell were the bodies?

He turned back to the highway. “Clear,” he said, just loud enough for Jordan to hear.

She climbed out of the ditch. “Bodies?”

“They must have either been thrown clear or taken.”

“Who would take them?”

“I don’t know. But they bled all over the place.”

“I’ll see if they’re back there,” she said. “They might have things we can use, like real weapons.”

“Good luck.”

Keo watched her walking down the highway for a moment before crouching again and pulling open the back driver-side door and crawling inside. He had to pick his way through two dozen or so stray cartridges scattered along the ceiling just to find a couple of empty MRE bags. He could still smell their contents — lasagna in one, mashed potatoes and turkey in the other. His stomach growled at the aroma. Close, but no cigar.

There wasn’t much in the front except some empty water bottles and candy bar wrappers. He spotted more abandoned 5.56 rounds, but no hints of the weapons they were meant to load. The fact that he couldn’t find a single spent shell casing told him the truck’s owners hadn’t fired back when they were ambushed.

And this was definitely an ambush. The only thing that didn’t make any sense was the bodies. Where the hell were the bodies?

“There’s nothing back there,” Jordan said when he crawled back outside the vehicle. She was perched on the highway behind him. “Anything useful?”

“Not a thing.”

“Food?”

“See first answer.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I didn’t completely come back empty-handed,” she said, holding out a familiar piece of white paper — more of the flyers they had found back at the farmhouse, except this one had fresh tire tracks over it. “They’re going to get such a stern talking to when Texas finds out they’re littering out here.”

The white sheet had the same blocky capital letters as the others, and read:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

Keo climbed up from the ditch and stood on the highway. Jordan stretched next to him, then folded the piece of paper and slipped it into her back pocket.

“Are you collecting them now?” he asked.

“I’m going to take a look at them again later.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “There might be a secret code or something we’re just not seeing.”

“Seriously?”

She smiled. “It’ll give me something to do. Better than staring at your ugly face all the time.”

“Damn,” he said.

“Just kidding. Your face is beautiful. Even with all those unsightly things on it.”

She flicked some dirt off his forehead and leaned in and kissed him. She tasted of sun and day-old tuna, but that didn’t stop him from kissing her back. She rubbed her hands playfully against his butt, and he might have thrown her to the highway and had his way with her right then and there if she didn’t pull away, laughing as she did so.

“Let’s make a promise,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Next time, it has to be on a bed.”

“Not a lot of beds around here, Jordan…”

“So when we finally find one, it’ll be even more spectacular.”

“‘Spectacular’?” he smiled. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I never do,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips before looking back down at the truck in the ditch. “So what happened to it?”

He smiled, amused she could switch topics so easily when they were just making out like teenagers a moment ago.

“Bullet holes in the front windshield took out the driver and his passenger,” he said. “Or maybe just the driver, who lost control of the car and ended up there. Same difference.”

“So where are the bodies?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Maybe the animals took them?”

“That’s assuming there are still wild animals out here.”

“There has to be, right? There was that dog back at the beach outside of Sunport. Anyway, who do you think they were?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” He glanced up at the sun and shielded his eyes. “Angleton’s close by. We should hit it before nightfall, then figure out our next move after that.”

“So you’re saying we should be angling toward Angleton?”

She was smiling triumphantly as she said it, and Keo hated himself for not having noticed much, much earlier what a beautiful woman Jordan was. Or maybe he always knew? He remembered really liking her when they had first met outside of Earl’s cabin many months ago, but Gillian had been there at the time. Gillian was still around now, but it wasn’t the same.

He smiled back at her. “Been saving that one up, huh?”

“Just a wee bit,” she said, pinching her fingers together.

He exaggerated an eye roll. “Let’s get going before I throw you more softballs.”

“I love your softballs, Keo. But then, I’ve always had small hands.”

He groaned. “Seriously?”

She laughed. “Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to amuse herself. It’s really, really boring out here.”

“Can I at least be in on the joke, too?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and turned back up the highway.

She took one step, then two, when there was a loud, ear-shattering crack! and Jordan crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut. The painful thump! as her head hit the pavement at the same time he dropped to one knee and grabbed at, and caught, her limp body, the gunshot still echoing all around him—

A second crack! and a bullet zipped! past his head, so close that he swore his left ear was left flaming hot in the aftermath of the near miss.

He should be running, heading for cover, anything to get out of the open, but instead he dropped the tire iron and frantically slipped both hands under Jordan’s armpits and began dragging her sagging body backward. His body screamed with pain, and both arms threatened to fall off again. It seemed to take forever (Jesus Christ, how long was this goddamn road?) before he finally reached the other side, and he deposited both of them into the ditch, gasping for breath as he landed on the cold soft dirt, Jordan’s body twumping next to his.

He crawled over and grabbed her, suddenly aware that his clothes were clinging to his chest and sticky with blood. Was he bleeding? No. It wasn’t his. It was Jordan’s. It was all Jordan’s. She was struggling to breathe, her eyes blinking uncontrollably, fading brown eyes snapping frantically all around until they finally found his face.

He smiled down at her. Or tried to. “You’ll be all right. Gotta find the wound and patch you up. Give me a second, okay?”

She didn’t answer, even though her lips were quivering, as if constantly on the verge of making a sound but never succeeding. Her face was impossibly pale, every inch of her body trembling in his lap.

He couldn’t find the bullet hole in her jacket through all the blood, so he had to unzip it and pull it off her. There, the source of all the bleeding, just over her left breast. The bullet was still in there somewhere, pumping blood out through the single wound.

There was so much blood. Jesus, why was there so much blood?

Keo picked her jacket back up and pushed it against her chest. She seemed to seize up, maybe from the pressure he was putting on her, but he didn’t ease up because the bleeding needed to be stopped at all cost.

“Shoot for center mass. Then take out the brain to make sure.”

Everyone knew that, from the cops to the military grunts to guys like him. You always shot for center mass — the chest — to get the target down, then you finished him off with a head shot. It was SOP. Whoever was out there — whoever had taken the shot — had done exactly that.

Jordan continued to blink up at him, and there was a hollowness to her eyes that didn’t belong. The Jordan he knew — who had kept her friends alive after the end of the world, who had saved his miserable life last night — was full of life. But he didn’t see that right now. There was only sadness looking back up at him.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve stopped the bleeding. No one boinks me in a barn and gets to just run away.”

Her eyes widened, that familiar Jordan life coming back, if just for a split second, and her lips somehow managed to form a smile.

He returned it, or thought he did. He focused on her eyes, on her pained face, and forgot (and didn’t care) to react to the pounding footsteps crossing the highway, just a few seconds before a figure leaped into the ditch in front of him.

He heard similar sounds behind him and knew another one was back there.

“Shit, got one,” a voice said. Male. Young. Keo could practically feel the giddiness dripping from his every word.

He tore his eyes away from Jordan’s paling face and looked up as a man (boy) moved cautiously toward him. He had black, brown, and green paint over his face and was wearing some kind of Ghillie suit stuffed with brown straw and grass. He was cradling an AR-15 with a large scope on top, the weapon covered in the same camo pattern as his face. A gun belt, with a holstered sidearm, stuck out of his right hip.

“Don’t fucking move,” the man said. He was trying to sound menacing and doing a poor job of it. Despite the face paint, he couldn’t have been more than twenty.

Behind Keo, the second ambusher shuffled closer, too.

Keo looked back down at Jordan, at the thin smile frozen on her lips. There was a peaceful expression on her face, belying the fact she had just been shot in the chest and had bled enough for both of them.

The man in front of him leaned forward and peeked down at Jordan. “Dead center, Bill. Nice shot.”

Bill, the man behind Keo, said, “Told you. And yours went wide.”

“Not my fault; he dropped on me.”

“What’s that, two for me and one for you?”

“Sounds right.”

“You see a uniform on them?”

“Nope,” the one in front of him said. “Civilian?”

“Don’t take any chances. These collaborators can be sneaky.”

They’re Mercer’s men, Keo thought as he listened to their back and forth.

But even as his mind processed that information, he couldn’t take his eyes off Jordan, lying in his lap. Her body had gone completely still, but her face remained serene as he stroked her cheeks and brushed at strings of tears falling from the corners of her eyes. There was blood on her lips, and he thumbed them away gently.

He sighed and closed his eyes. Just for a brief second.

When he opened them again, he focused on his surroundings. The young one in front of him, the older-sounding one behind him. The soft wind blowing through the fields around all three of them, causing the grass to sway to his left and skirting across the highway to his right, picking up some of the debris from the crash. But most of all, the bright red of Jordan’s blood on his hands, sticking to his fingers.

“The flyer,” Keo said.

“What?” the young one said.

“The flyer,” he said again, pulling the piece of paper out of Jordan’s back pocket and holding it up. It was wet with her blood.

The one in front of him took two steps forward and snatched the paper out of Keo’s hand. He flicked it open, glanced at it once, then looked past Keo at Bill. “It’s one of ours.”

“‘Join the fight to take back Texas,’” Keo said. “‘War is here. Pick a side.’ That’s what we did. We picked a side.”

“The fuck is he saying, Luke?” Bill asked.

“It’s from the flyer,” the man named Luke said, holding the paper, covered in Jordan’s blood and tire tracks, up for the other man to see. “I guess he’s saying he came looking for us, to sign up?”

“Bullshit. It’s a trick.”

Luke had let both arms drop to his sides, including the right hand with the AR-15. “But that’s why we dropped them in the first place, right? To get recruits?”

“They didn’t say anything about bringing in recruits,” Bill said. “That’s not our job.”

Keo wondered how much older Bill was compared to Luke. Maybe he should interject, say something to help push Luke along. He had a feeling whether he lived or died was going to be decided in the next few seconds, and Luke was going to play a very big part of it.

“Yeah, but the flyer,” Luke said, holding it up again.

Bill sighed. “Shit.” Then, clearly annoyed, “You checked him for weapons?”

“He only had that tire iron, and he dropped it back on the road.” He looked down at Keo. “So, you wanna join up, huh?”

Keo ignored his question, and said instead, “I need help with her.”

“What for? She’s dead.”

“She’s still alive.”

“No way.” Luke leaned in to get a better look. He was close enough Keo could smell dirt and sweat on his body underneath the Ghillie suit. “You sure?”

“She’s still alive,” Keo said, looking up at him. “I stopped the bleeding, but I need to dress the wound. The bullet missed vital organs, from what I can tell. You got a first-aid kit?”

“Damn,” Luke said, and slung his rifle.

“What are you doing?” Bill asked, alarmed.

“Relax; I told you, he’s unarmed,” Luke said. “I was watching him the whole time, remember?”

“Be careful.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The young man knelt in front of Keo and reached into one of the pouches along his belt. He leaned in closer to get a better look at Jordan at the same time. “You sure she’s even breathing, man?”

“Dammit, kid, don’t get too close,” Bill said.

Luke might have been on the verge of saying something back, but he never got the chance because Keo brought out his right hand, the one with the spork, and jammed it into the side of Luke’s neck.

“Fuck!” Bill shouted.

Keo lunged forward while simultaneously pulling Luke toward him, using the handle of the lodged spork as leverage. He jerked his legs out from under Jordan’s limp form and slid behind Luke.

“Fuck!” Bill shouted again.

Keo slid one arm around Luke’s neck, clamping his struggling body against his own, while his right hand dropped to Luke’s hip, blood-covered fingers searching out the young man’s holstered gun among the grass and straws.

“Let him go!” Bill shouted.

Bill had lifted his rifle — another AR-15—and was shuffling his feet less than two meters away. Keo hadn’t realized how close the man had been to him. Bill was wearing a Ghillie suit that was almost identical to Luke’s, and his face was covered in the same camo pattern. He clutched and unclutched his rifle even as he swayed left and right, trying to line up a shot on Keo.

But Bill didn’t shoot, because Keo was using Luke as a shield and doing everything possible not to expose his head for a clear shot. Luke’s body spasmed uncontrollably in front of him, the younger man’s hands groping for the spork sticking out of the side of his throat like some cancerous appendage.

By the time Bill realized what Keo was doing, Keo already had Luke’s gun out of its holster. Bill finally fired—and struck Luke in the stomach. Keo didn’t give him the chance to pull the trigger again and shot Bill in the chest with the handgun. He didn’t stop shooting until Bill had collapsed to the ditch floor on his face.

Keo finally allowed himself to breathe again, the gun still pointed, and watched Bill’s body the entire time, in case the guy was wearing some kind of bulletproof vest underneath his suit and tried to get back up.

A second, then two — before Keo shot Bill in the top of his exposed head just to make sure.

Satisfied now that Bill wasn’t getting back up, Keo sat down and pushed Luke off him with one of his boots. The body careened forward and landed on its stomach, mirroring Bill’s posture in front of them. Keo lay down and stared up at the sun, and inhaled in and exhaled out the chilly winter air in silence.

He didn’t know how long he stayed down, blinking up at the clear skies. It could have been a few seconds, or a few minutes, or possibly a few hours.

Finally, he sat back up, then crawled over to Jordan and knelt next to her. She still had that strangely contented look on her face, and if not for all the blood and the balled up jacket crushed against her chest, he might have been able to convince himself she was just asleep.

He stole a quick look up at the sun again. He had plenty of hours left, but it wouldn’t last.

Nothing ever did, these days.

He left Luke and Bill in the ditch and carried Jordan into the fields about fifty meters from the highway before digging a shallow grave using two Ka-Bar knives he’d salvaged from the dead men. It took longer than expected, and his palms were raw and blistered by the time he was done. He buried Jordan and covered her up to keep any animals that might still be roaming around out there from getting to her, then sat down next to her grave for about half an hour, with just the silence and the wind to keep him company.

Afterward, he walked back to the bodies and went through their pockets. They were carrying identical AR-15s, each one mounted with a large scope for long-distance shooting. He slung Bill’s rifle, then threw Luke’s as far into the grass as he could. He had a feeling he had a long walk ahead of him, and each rifle was already at least seven pounds of extra weight. He slapped on a gun belt, then put the Sig Sauer he had taken from Luke in the holster. Keo pulled the spork out of Luke’s neck and wiped off the blood, then pocketed it. The damn thing had saved his life twice now; the least he could do was keep it around.

He couldn’t find any tactical packs on either men, which meant they had left them behind somewhere. Keo climbed back up to the highway and reoriented himself, remembering where he and Jordan had been standing when the shots came. Then he backtracked the source of the gunshots into the endless fields and kept walking until he found two camouflage packs among the grass about 150 meters away.

He unzipped them one by one, pulling out MREs, canned beans, and extra magazines. They were both too heavy to take, so he tossed most of the canned goods and extra ammo and kept just the MREs and the spare magazines he could carry without overburdening himself. The load was still too heavy, but he figured it’d get lighter as he used up the supplies along the way. If not, he’d just eject what he didn’t need, as needed.

He spent another hour looking for Luke and Bill’s vehicle. He was sure it was out there somewhere, like their packs. They couldn’t have humped all the way out here on foot, could they? It was possible, but where would they have stayed last night? He was obviously dealing with a two-man kill team. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn there were identical squads crawling all over Texas at the moment, making life miserable for the collaborators.

But despite his confidence, he didn’t find a vehicle anywhere in the vicinity. Either the men had hidden it too well, or they really had been dropped off. Both were possible, and neither one did him any good at the moment. He considered expanding his search range, but that would have taken much too long, and time was, as always, not on his side.

Keo walked about a mile up the highway, sticking to the ditch alongside it to stay mostly hidden, before finally stopping when his stomach growled again. He took a break and opened one of the cans, devouring the beans inside using the spork. He noticed there was still blood along one of the tines but ignored it.

He opened one of the pouches around his waist and took out the map he had spotted earlier while removing the belt from Luke. It was heavily marked, with collaborator towns circled in red ink, including T18 just outside of League City. The new map was almost identical to the one he had taken from Gregson, but with a few notable additions. One had a rough drawing of a star within a circle next to a town called Larkin, Texas. A second star-within-a-circle marked Lochlyn, about twenty miles northwest of his current location. As far as he could tell, Lochlyn was a small place in the middle of nowhere. Both new locations had crude drawings of planes next to them.

Airfields. That’s how they’re getting in and out of Texas. Using private, isolated airfields hidden in the countryside.

He glanced up at the sky, then down at his watch. Five hours of sunlight left. If he didn’t stop to rest again, he could easily make Lochlyn before nightfall.

And then what?

He had limited options, but one of them was to continue on to T18 and try to rescue Gillian, which would mean fighting his way back into a town he had already barely survived the first time. But she was in there, and she was in danger, and goddammit, he owed it to her and Jordan to get her out before Mercer’s people attacked again.

What was the alternative?

Go to Lochlyn, find Mercer, and kill him.

If the man was even there, and if putting a bullet between Mercer’s eyes stopped this — whatever “this” was. But then again, what was a snake without its head? If killing Mercer stopped the war, then Gillian would be safe. Her and the baby and (Fuck you) Jay.

Two possibilities. Two directions. They weren’t much, but there it was.

Lochlyn was closer, but what were the odds Mercer was even there? Fifty-fifty? Ten-ninety, against? Maybe he’d get to Lochlyn and there wouldn’t be anyone there at all. Those plane markers, for all he knew, could have just been doodling, Luke’s way of passing the time.

The odds that Mercer was even there, that killing him would change anything, was slim. On the other hand, getting back into T18—even with Tobias’s help — and rescuing Gillian while the town was on lockdown was going to be a hell of a feat.

Shit. It was bad odds either way.

But he’d had worse.

He checked his watch again.

Keo got up, tossed away the empty can of beans, and climbed out of the ditch, jogging across the highway.

Fuck it, he thought as he headed northwest.