The Fields of Lemuria (3 page)

Daebak. Today’s looking up!

The thought hadn’t finished reverberating in his head when the loud pounding of footsteps coming from the living room snapped him back to reality.

The two from the patio.

The wounded black-clad man was trying to get back up when Keo slid behind him and hooked his left hand around the man’s throat, pinning the back of his head to his chest, and shoved the barrel of the Glock against a trembling temple.

“Don’t come any closer or your friend’s dead!” Keo shouted into the white smoke.

The footsteps stopped.

Keo tightened his grip on the man’s throat and leaned forward. “Tell them.”

“Don’t come any closer!” the man shouted.

Wait, what? That wasn’t a man’s voice—

Keo jerked the head back slightly and looked down at a woman’s face. Bright blue eyes, made somehow brighter against the camo paint, peered defiantly back up at him. Late twenties, maybe early thirties—it was hard to tell with all the gunk on her face—and she had black hair in a ponytail.

“Fiona?” a male voice shouted from somewhere in the living room.

“I’m sorry!” the woman in front of Keo shouted back.

“Come any closer and her brain gets splattered on the walls!” Keo shouted.

He heard loud, grumbling curses, something that sounded like a brief argument, before the heavy footsteps echoed again—except this time they were fading, retreating back into the living room.

Jesus, I can’t believe that worked.

He reached down and pulled a handgun out of the woman’s hip holster and shoved it behind his waist. Then he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up with him. She let out a scream.

“Sorry about that,” Keo said, switching his grip from her injured left arm and over to her right.

“Go fuck yourself,” she snarled back at him.

*

Norris cleaned, disinfected,
and then bundled up the woman’s shoulder using the first aid kit from his pack. It wasn’t much of a wound—barely a graze, really—compared to what he had been carrying around through the woods of Louisiana for the last few months. Not that the woman seemed to appreciate her good fortune, or Norris’s efforts to wrap her up.

He was back on the second-floor living room, with the stairs between him and Norris, finishing up with the woman on the opposite wall. The window was to his left, the stairs to his right. Keo had briefly considered retreating all the way into the bedrooms, but he didn’t like the idea of being trapped in there. Out here, if they could hold the stairs, they had some options left. Not a lot of good ones by any means, but some shitty options were better than none.

He glanced down at his watch. 3:54 
p.m.

Still plenty of time…

They had been waiting for her friends to attack for the last thirty minutes, but the three men moving around somewhere below them hadn’t shown any willingness to come up the stairs. Every now and then Keo expected them to just toss another grenade up here and kill them all, but that would have taken out Fiona, too, and they had already shown an unwillingness to harm her. So that was something he hadn’t expected from their pursuers. Loyalty.

Fiona’s eyes were locked on Keo, as if she thought she could kill him if she stared long and hard enough. He was almost tempted to hand her a gun and tell her to try it, but at the moment she was the only reason they were still alive.

“Give it a rest,” Keo said.

“Which part of ‘go fuck yourself’ didn’t you understand?” she said.

Norris chuckled. “Hey, look, she’s just like you, kid. A hard-ass.”

The ex-cop finished up and stuffed the first aid kit back into his pack before heading over to the bullet-riddled window and peeping outside from a safe angle. They didn’t know if the sniper was still out there or not, or if the man had joined his buddies downstairs.

Keo stared back at Fiona. She sat with her legs splayed in front of her, hands on her lap, gauze tape covering the upper part of her left shoulder. Her assault vest lay on the floor nearby, with the broken radio still dangling from it. The black clothes she wore didn’t do her any favors against the stifling heat, and neither did the camo that covered her face. Even with all that mess, he thought she was still reasonably attractive. Too bad she had been trying to kill him all day…

“You’re dead,” Fiona said, as if reading his mind. “Both of you. You know that, don’t you? Neither one of you is getting out of this house alive.”

“They’ll have to come up and get us first,” Keo said. “Apparently they care enough about you not to try it yet.”

“You think you’ve figured it out?” There was just the ghost of a smile on her face. “You haven’t figured out anything, dead man.”

“Since I’m already a dead man, then you won’t mind telling me who the fuck you people are.”

“Now what would be the fun in that?”

“How many of you are out there?”

“More than enough to kill two assholes.”

“So we’re the assholes?” Norris said. “That’s news to me.”

“Did you think you were the good guys?” she said, almost laughing at him.

“You’re the ones hunting us, lady,” Keo said.

“You have no idea, do you?” she said.

“Enlighten us.”

“Bobby.”

Bobby?

The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any Bobby.”

“Bullshit,” Fiona said. “You started this when you killed him.”

“I told you. I don’t know any Bobby. And I certainly never killed any Bobby. I would remember.”

“You remember everyone you’ve killed?” she snorted.

“Yes,” Keo said.

She stared at him in silence for a moment. Then, “How many people have you killed?”

You don’t want to know, lady,
he was going to say, but Norris interrupted him with, “That kid. Remember?”

Keo glanced at him. “What kid?”

“Back at the house. In the garage with Lotte? And Levy?”

Bobby.

Jesus Christ. The kid in the garage with Lotte. The one Levy killed?

“So now you remember him?” Fiona said. “Killing him started this.
You
started this.”

“We didn’t kill Bobby,” Keo said. It wasn’t a total lie, though the truth was more complicated.

“You did, someone else did, doesn’t matter,” Fiona said. “One of your people murdered Bobby. There were two others with him, but the way we heard it, that was a fair fight. Hell, for all I know, you killed Carl and Doug, too. That’s five bodies on your doorsteps.”

Carl and Doug?

He knew a Doug. Keo had shot a man who called himself Doug months ago when they had encountered him, along with a second man at an abandoned strip mall outside of Corden. Norris had shot the other one (
Carl, I presume)
.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Did I what?” Keo said.

“Kill Carl and Doug, too?” She was watching him closely, trying to read his reaction. “We never found their bodies, so we were never sure what happened to them…”

“I don’t know who Carl and Doug are,” Keo lied. “What makes you think we’re the only people running around with guns out there? You seemed to have plenty of them yourself. What are you, ex-soldiers?”

“Nice try, but it’s not going to be that easy.”

“You don’t look ex-military. Probably a wannabe.”

“So that’s your point of attack? Insult me and hope I’ll blurt out something valuable when I indignantly try to defend myself?” She smirked then looked at Norris. “Is this guy calling the shots? If so, you’re screwed, old man.”

Norris grunted. “I’ve been telling myself that for the last nine months, girly. It’s nothing I don’t already know, so you can save your breath.”

Keo looked down at his watch. “I don’t have to survive your friends downstairs. I just have to outlast them until nightfall. I’m willing to bet those bedroom doors with a little furniture reinforcement will last a lot longer against the bloodsuckers than what your pals have to work with. What do you think?”

Her face was placid, almost…pitying? “You think the bloodsuckers are your biggest worry? They’re not. It’s not even me or my friends down there that you have to worry about. When you killed Bobby, you started something that can’t be stopped. There’s a man out there, and he’s going to hunt you down to the ends of the Earth.”

“‘Hunt you down to the ends of the Earth’?” Keo said. “Jesus fucking Christ. Who the hell are you people?”

For a moment, he thought she was going to laugh, or maybe mock him. But instead, she just shook her head. “You’ll find out soon enough, because I’m one hundred percent certain he’s on his way here now.”

“Who?” Norris said. “
Who
is on his way here?”

She glanced back at Norris, then across the room at Keo. “You really don’t know why any of this is happening, do you?”

“Not a goddamn clue, girly,” Norris said.

“Well, that makes it kind of fucking tragic, doesn’t it?” She sighed. “His name is Pollard. Bobby was his nephew.”

“This is all because he blames us for killing Bobby?” Keo said. “Good old-fashioned revenge, is that it?”

“Not because of Bobby. Pollard liked the kid, but he didn’t like him
that
much.”

“What, then?”

“There was another boy with Bobby the day you killed—”

“We didn’t kill him,” Keo interrupted.

She shrugged indifferently. “The day he died, then. Better?”

“It’s the truth,” Norris said. “That used to count for something.”

“Yeah, well, those days are long gone.”

Norris grunted. “Tell me about it.”

“If it matters to you, I believe you,” she said.

“Why?” Keo said.

“Why?”

“Why do you believe that we didn’t kill Bobby?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Fiona said. “But it doesn’t seem like you’d have a reason to lie now. I mean, it’s not like it’s going to matter when Pollard gets here. He’s still going to kill you because he blames you for it.”

“But it’s not for Bobby’s death?” Norris said.

“No. That kid’s death led to something else that matters more to Pollard than life itself. When Bobby died, there was another boy with him. Do you remember?”

That sonofa
bitch.

Keo knew the name before she even said it. Somehow, he always knew the little bastard was going to keep haunting him for whatever little time he had left. All because he made the wrong decision in a moment of weakness, and for all the wrong reasons. It had been for Gillian, for the others, even Norris. He wanted to reward their faith in him. The world had ended, and he wanted desperately to be something new, someone other than what he had always embraced in the ten years prior.

“Joe,” Fiona said. “The kid’s name was Joe. Pollard, the man leading this hunt for you, is his father.”

Fucking Joe.

He had no one to blame but himself. The Keo from October of last year would have put a bullet through the kid’s head without wasting a second thinking about how it would make him feel later. But that was before he met Norris, Gillian, and the others. That was before the world ended.

Goddamn you, Joe, you little twerp.

Norris was probably thinking the same thing as he looked across the room at him, though there was something else in Norris’s eyes, a
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, kid”
that the ex-cop often gave him from time to time. Of course, Keo could just be seeing what he wanted to see at the moment, a pitiful attempt to lessen his own guilt.

I got soft. Jesus, when did I get so soft?

He returned his gaze to Fiona. She was watching him back with an almost curious expression. He imagined that she had been hunting him and Norris for so long she might have expected him to grow fangs and try to bleed her dry when they finally met. The enemy was always easier to put down when you saw them as less than human. He knew that personally. Maybe she had even convinced herself that he was like the creatures that came out at night.

That thought prompted him to look down at his watch again: 4:31 
p.m.

Getting close…

“What now?” Fiona said.

Keo unzipped his pack and pulled out a sweat-soaked handkerchief that he tossed over to her.

She caught it with her good hand. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“You really want to sit there all day with crap on your face?”

“Thanks, I guess.”

Norris took out a bottle of water and tossed it over to her. She wet the rag and cleaned off the black and green paint. She wasn’t bad looking, but Fiona was no Gillian. Then again, few people were even before the world ended, and there were even less of them now.

When she was done, Fiona turned the handkerchief over and cleaned the grime off her neck and wiped some of the blood off her left arm, careful not to touch the dressing. Then she drank the rest of the water.

“You’re not what I expected,” she said, looking across at him.

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. Something else.”