The Fields of Lemuria (10 page)

He would have
liked to spend more time on the island, maybe get to know the other survivors and pick up supplies they might be willing to part with, but time wasn’t on his side at the moment.

Big surprise. Time, you’re such a bitch.

So he spent the next few minutes after lunch (or was it breakfast?) in the back room making sure the MP5SD was still working after it had been manhandled first by Shorty, then Granger. He dry fired it before loading it back up.

Allie came in while he was counting his magazines and checking the Glock. “Got enough bullets there?”

He smiled over. “You can never have too many bullets.”

“Good to hear. Wouldn’t want you to run up against this Pollard asshole without the proper tools at your disposal.”

“That would be a crying shame, all right.”

She hesitated, and he sensed she was about to say something but wasn’t quite sure how to do it.

“What’s on your mind, Allie?”

“You can stay here,” she said, “if you wanted.”

“I thought you were anxious for me to leave.”

“You can always come back later. As long as we stay under Pollard’s radar, he’ll eventually have to move on.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it, but I made a promise.”

“To your friend.”

“To him, and to someone else, too. That means heading south after all this is over.”
If I’m still alive,
he thought, but added instead, “But thanks for the offer. It’s tempting.”

“Too bad,” she said, then turned to go.

“How’d you know?”

She looked back. “About what?”

“The island. How’d you know the bloodsuckers couldn’t swim?”

“I didn’t. We needed a place to go and some of the people I was sheltering with in the early days knew about this place. We only learned later that they didn’t like the water. After that, it just made sense to stay here. We’ve been here for almost a year, and we haven’t run out of homes to raid for supplies yet. It’s going to be a long time before we even have to risk going farther inland.”

“It’s a good setup,” he nodded. “You guys have a good thing going here.”

“We were lucky.”

“I’ve been wondering since I arrived at the park, but whose idea was it to bring all the boats over?”

“All? You’ve only been to a small piece of the lake, Keo. The boats you see here don’t represent all the ones that were left behind. We only took the ones that we could use.”

“What about the rest?”

“We sank them.”

“All of them?”

“Haven’t you learned by now? The creatures are dangerous at night, but there are other dangerous species in the day.”

“Guys like Pollard.”

“Ding ding, give the man with the questionable name a prize.”

He chuckled. “Cute.”

“Hey, I’m a former divorce lawyer. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Divorce lawyer. Ouch.”

“Only if you weren’t one of my clients.”

“I was never the marrying kind myself.”

“No, but you’re the loyal kind. Going back there is suicide, but you’re doing it anyway. That’s impressive.”

“Thanks,” he said, “because I’m pretty sure I’m the biggest dumbass in the universe.”

She laughed. “Hey, there are no rules that say I can’t think you’re the biggest dumbass in the universe and still respect you.”

*

Shorty, like Zachary,
had changed into civilian clothes when Keo saw him again, though like his older companion, he was as heavily armed as the first time they had met. Both men were waiting in the canoe when he walked down the dock by himself and climbed in.

“You must have a death wish or something, San Diego,” Shorty said.

“He’s going to look for a friend,” Zachary said. “Can’t blame the man.”

“Sure I can. Just watch me.”

Keo settled into the same spot in the middle of the boat while Shorty pushed them off with his paddle. The two men turned them around then began stroking back toward land. Keo glanced over one shoulder and saw Allie on the deck of the houseboat looking in their direction. She wasn’t the only one. Curious strangers poked their heads out of tents, and some stood on boat decks to watch him go.

That’s right, boys and girls, get a look at the dumbest man in the known universe. He will wow you with his stupid decisions.

He turned around and faced the shoreline. The trees looked small in the distance, like blades of grass sticking out of an untended front yard. “Has anyone ever spotted the island from the shore?” he asked.

“It’s happened once or twice,” Zachary said. “It’s a lot harder than you’d think, even with binoculars, unless you know exactly where to look.”

No one said anything else for the next twenty minutes. The only noise was the soothing
whoosh-whoosh
of the paddles cutting through the water in front and behind, and to the left and right of him. Keo took the time to reorient himself with the shape of the park. It looked different when viewed from the middle of the lake. Longer and more expansive somehow. And it had felt pretty damn huge when he was racing through it before.

They were about 200 meters from land when Zachary said, “Stop for a moment, Shorty.”

Keo looked back at Zachary, who picked up a gym bag from the bottom of the boat and handed it to him. “Allie thought you might be able to use it. Just in case.”

Keo took the bag—it was heavy—and opened it. He looked in at an M4 rifle with a holographic gun sight on top. He also counted six spare magazines and two bottles of water.

“Those should keep you going for a while in case that German gun quits on you,” Zachary said.

“She must like you,” Shorty said from the front. Then, in a lower voice, “Maybe she’s not a lesbian after all.”

Keo ignored him and said to Zachary, “Thank Allie for me when you get back.”

“I’ll do that,” Zachary said. He picked up his paddle and dipped it back into the water.

Shorty did likewise, and the canoe started moving again, taking them closer to land with every stroke.

Back toward Pollard and his fifty men.

Back to Norris…if he was even still alive.

He knew where
the island was—or, at least, its general direction—but Keo still couldn’t see it with the naked eye no matter how hard he tried. He guessed it might be different if he had a pair of binoculars. He could see the canoe, though; it was a tiny dot in the horizon, with Zachary and Shorty two stick figures seemingly floating on top of the water.

Keo turned and hurried off the beach and into the woods, hefting the gym bag with the M4 over one shoulder, the MP5SD in front of him. It was still an hour before noon, but the heat was already making a menace of itself. He couldn’t imagine how much worse it would have been if he hadn’t taken a dip in the lake earlier and was still trudging around in his old dirt, mud, and blood-covered clothes.

He had to find Norris.

He didn’t know how. That was the problem. His best option—his
only
option—was to head back to the two-story house along the eastern shoreline and try to pick up the trail from there. Zachary had put him back on land about the same place they had taken off from, so all he had to do was backtrack and keep the lake to his right just beyond the tree lines.

If all else failed, he knew where Pollard’s base was. Of course¸ that was a worst-case scenario. As much as he wanted to find Norris—and save him, if he needed saving—the idea of going up against fifty (or so) men wasn’t exactly something he eagerly embraced. Keo was used to bad odds, but damn, these were
really
bad odds.

He walked for an hour, maintaining a steady pace, and only drank half the bottle of water he had transferred from the gym bag to his pack. If he had to run, the bag and the heavy M4 in it, not to mention the spare magazines, would have to go first. He would have loved to be able to carry both weapons, but if push came to shove, the MP5SD was always his first choice. No one made weapons like the Germans.

It was just past noon when he finally got close enough to the two-story house to spot its familiar white frame from a distance. He knew it wasn’t empty when he was still 200 meters away because he could hear voices. They weren’t being very quiet.

Keo went into a crouch and listened to a conversation in mid-stream. A man and a woman, less than sixty meters in front of him, hidden from him just like he was hidden from them (or at least, he hoped). It was a miracle they hadn’t heard his approach.

It took another ten seconds of listening before he realized they weren’t actually talking. The sounds he heard weren’t words, but moaning, grunting, and sighs of pleasure.

Daebak. Now I’m a pervert, too.

He stood up slightly and began to backtrack.

Soon, the sounds of sex drifted away into the woods. He hoped they at least used some kind of blanket before they got down to it. It would have been a shame if they got a rash, or an infection, or something equally regretful while doing the nasty.

End of the world, boys and girls. Get it while you can.

When he had put enough distance between himself and the lovers, Keo relaxed and turned north, and this time he was more aware of the noises he was making. He should have been more careful earlier, too. All it would have taken was one pair of attentive ears and he would have been a dead man back there. It would have been hard to rescue Norris with a bullet in his head.

That is, if Norris needed rescuing at all. He’d find out when he found the ex-cop. That, unfortunately, was easier said than done.

He took a quick look down at his watch: 12:24 
p.m.

At least he had plenty of time…

*

He circled the
clearing around the house, trying to pick up Norris’s tracks from when they had fled into the woods the day earlier while still keeping as far away from the tree lines as possible. The last thing he needed was to run into another amorous couple doing the nasty during their lunch break. He crossed a couple of limited hiking trails, two of many that snaked all around the park.

The world of green and brown and sunlight around him looked, sounded, and felt empty, as if he could walk for days without actually running across another human being.

It was a hopeless task, and he wondered how he ever convinced himself that this was even a possibility. There were no obvious signs of Norris, and whatever prints had been created in the soft ground the previous day had been trampled by hundreds
(thousands)
of bare feet last night. The creatures. The bloodsuckers. They were simply everywhere, though the fact that he couldn’t see them now, in the daylight, made him slightly nervous.

After a while, he decided to stop deluding himself and turned north, in the direction that he always knew he would end up eventually: the park visitors’ building at the entrance, which Pollard was using as his base of operations. With his fifty or so people…

Shit, that’s a lot of guns.

If Norris had been captured, he would be there right now, because Pollard wouldn’t kill him right away. At least, he hoped not. Which was an odd thing to be hoping for, but at the moment it was the better of two options.

If Norris wasn’t there, then that meant he was still roaming around the woods. That was a much better outcome, but problematic because it meant Keo would have to go looking for the old-timer. Still, Norris out there was better than Norris in captivity. Would Pollard care it was him, and not the ex-cop, that had killed his son? Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, he had to know for sure.

From his time in Robertson Park, Keo knew there were three main roads that forked from the entrance. The people who made use of the park were mostly hikers, fishermen, and the people who owned the lakeside homes. All the parking lots were located near the southern shore, and the rest were pretty much dense wooded areas—

Crunch-crunch!

Two figures. Black-clad. Walking across his path twenty meters away.

Keo slipped behind a tree, the gym bag with the rifle and spare magazines
clanking
against his back.