The Fields of Lemuria (6 page)

Keo turned and continued west along the shoreline.

There was some good news. The man had said into the radio,
“We’re looking for them now, sir.”
That meant they hadn’t captured Norris yet, so the old-timer was still out there somewhere.

Keo smiled. Sometimes he didn’t give Norris enough credit. Of course, reuniting with the ex-cop might be a problem. But that was for another day.

He glanced upward. The woods were thick and the tree crowns were dense, but he could make out the sun. It was still high up, but it wasn’t going to stay that way for very long.

His watch confirmed it: 5:24 
p.m.

The man on the radio was right. Time was running out, a thought that made him walk with more urgency without even realizing it.

There were possible shelters all around him in the form of the other houses. All he needed was one of them. The problem with that was Pollard’s people could easily deduce that would be his goal (it wasn’t rocket science, after all), which meant they could use their overwhelming force to check every house in the vicinity. If he picked the wrong one, they would start this little gunfight all over again, and this time he would be alone. He didn’t like his chances of surviving that at all.

As he trudged on, keeping his ears open and still trying to blink out whatever the hell he had gotten in his eyes, Keo thought about what else Fiona had said about Pollard. She all but confirmed that she followed the ex-Army officer out of basic necessity. He didn’t blame her one bit. He had spent most of his life looking out for himself, but these days you needed someone to watch your back. He’d been lucky all these months with Norris.

Not anymore.

He kept moving, and with each step, he expected to hear hints that Norris was still out there somewhere.

A gunshot. A scream. Voices.
Anything
.

The utter peace and tranquility of the park, for some reason, depressed and filled him with pessimistic thoughts.

So this is
what it’s like to be a squirrel.

The thought flashed across his mind as he leaned back against the massive tree trunk and tried to balance himself on the large branch. It was the widest thing he had been able to find after thirty minutes of searching, keeping one eye on the dwindling sunlight around him at the same time.

Sunlight, sunlight, don’t go away…

The coming darkness had always felt like a tightening noose even when he was with Gillian and the others at Earl’s house. But now, running for his life through the woods, it was even more pronounced, the rope thicker and more unyielding. The overwhelming need to constantly look for shelter, even when it was still morning, had dominated every waking hour since he and Norris began fleeing Pollard’s people.

Pollard’s people.

It was a curious sensation to finally have a name to go with the black assault vests and painted faces. He used to just refer to them as
assaulters
in his head, but now he had a name and a history, even a voice if not a face. But that was coming. Keo didn’t have any delusions that Pollard was going to give up the search now. Not when he was so close. The man had to know there were no places for Keo to go except north out of the park.

That was the point of pushing him and Norris down here in the first place. They had been herded like cattle all this time; they just hadn’t known it.

Maybe I can build a boat. Or a canoe. Like on
Gilligan’s Island
. Where’s the Professor when you need him? Hell, right now I’d settle for Mary Ann. Maybe use her as bait…

His watch ticked to 7:22 
p.m.

Not that he needed the confirmation. He was up high enough that he could see past most of the canopy and at the darkening skies beyond. He would have called it cloudy, except there hadn’t been any rain in four to five days.

He tightened his grip on the MP5SD resting in his lap and watched the squirrel staring back at him from a much thinner branch across the open space. The animal looked intrigued by Keo’s presence, perhaps wondering what a human was doing all the way up here in its domain. It sure didn’t look scared of him. Then again, after what it had probably seen racing around down below, a regular ol’ man probably didn’t rate very high on its list of “things to fear.”

Keo thought about shooting it. He hadn’t had squirrel meat in months. The last time was when Levy shot a couple of the furry critters and brought them back to the house. They had made squirrel stew that night. The animal was surprisingly tasty, but then again, maybe it was just how Levy cooked it.

Levy.

When was the last time he actually thought about him in any detail? It had been a while, so long that he couldn’t recall.

Levy was dead. Along with Lotte and Jill.

What about Gillian? And Jordan and Mark? Rachel and her daughter, Christine?

Are you still alive out there, Gillian? Are you still waiting for me, or have you given up?

He wished he knew if she had ever made it to Santa Marie Island. His one comforting thought was that Jordan was with her, and she was as competent a survivor, man or woman, as Keo had come across since the end of the world. She had single-handedly kept her friends Mark and Jill alive for months. The only person he would have trusted Gillian’s life with more than Jordan was Norris, and Norris was…out there somewhere.

Maybe dead. Maybe alive.

Maybe. Too many maybes. That was the problem. That was always the problem. The uncertainty of it all. Where he was going, what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what the hell was happening out there in the rest of the world.

But he couldn’t think of all that right now. He had to stay in the present. And right now, the present was precarious.

He glanced down reflexively at his watch again: 7:39 
p.m.

Time flies when you’re sitting in a tree, having a staring contest with a squirrel…

*

He was thirty
meters up from the ground, give or take a couple of meters. It hadn’t been an easy climb, but then his mom always did call him
wonsungi
(or “monkey,” as he later found out) for a reason. When you were an Army brat living on strange bases around the world, it helped to be able to entertain yourself. A tree was a lot easier to find and befriend.

Now, as Keo looked down at the horde of undead things moving below him, he wished he had climbed just a little bit higher. Maybe all the way to the top. Fifty meters. Maybe sixty would have been about just right. Or higher…

He stopped counting after the fiftieth creature glided under him and through the woods as if they didn’t even need to touch the ground. Of course, that was impossible. The bloodsuckers may be light on their feet, thanks to their skeletal frames and non-existent muscle mass, but they hadn’t mastered the ability of flight just yet.

At least, as far as he knew.

Who knew what they would be capable of in another year. Or ten years. Or a hundred. Could they even die? God knew they couldn’t be killed. He had seen plenty of them still moving even without a head. How was that even
possible?

Keo didn’t remember when he had stopped breathing, but he wasn’t aware of his chest rising and falling as he watched them flitting across the soft ground. If it was dark outside the park, it was nearly pitch-black inside, and all Keo could really make out were silhouetted, deformed monstrosities that shouldn’t exist but did. The loud
crunch-crunch
of leaves and the
snap!
of twigs were like hundreds of tiny firecrackers going off all at once.

Bloodsuckers. Creatures.
Things
that shouldn’t be alive, but were.

Where did they come from? Where were they hiding during the day? Some of them had to have been nesting inside the houses along the shoreline. How else could they have appeared so fast? The activity began almost as soon as night fell, the sound of their footsteps like stampeding animals getting louder as they got closer and their numbers swelled. At one point, he lost sight of the ground completely because there were so many of them, like a black ocean of tar swallowing up the world.

Should have kept climbing…all the way to the moon…

Mercifully, they were starting to thin out now, and he could finally see the dirt and trampled foliage again. There were still the occasional creatures racing across, trailing behind the others. He wondered if they had gotten lost somewhere. Or maybe they overslept. That made him smile despite himself.

Back when the woods were clogged with their unending numbers, he had been forced to pinch his nostrils against their smell. It was a pungent odor, undeniable and everywhere at once. Even breathing through his mouth became ineffective after a while.

Like rotting cabbage left out in the sun…then mixed with shit. Cat shit.

Climbing the tree instead of running to the closest house for shelter was a no-brainer, especially with everything he knew about Pollard. Not just what Fiona had told him, but what he had discovered about the man from his actions. There was no doubt in his mind that spending a night in any of the surrounding houses would have resulted in a gunfight or capture. So he did the unthinkable (some might even say
crazy
; Norris definitely would) and stayed inside the woods.

Or, well, above it. Mostly above it, anyway.

He liked to think he was smarter than a squirrel, and those creatures had figured out how to survive the nights.
Stay off the ground.
It was a simple enough concept, but one that he and Norris rarely embraced unless they absolutely had to, like the first night Pollard’s people chased them into the woods—

Keo froze in place. He might have also ceased breathing again.

Two of them had appeared out of the shadows and stopped a dozen or so meters from the tree where he was perched, unmoving. They were standing so close to one another—or were they hunched over? It was hard to tell from this high up—that for a moment they almost looked like lovers holding hands during a walk in the moonlight. Which was absurd, and he realized that quickly when one lifted its head and sniffed the air.

Can it smell me?

Why couldn’t they smell him, though? He could smell
them
just fine, even from a distance. Then again, he didn’t reek like they did. Or at least, he hoped he didn’t. When was the last time he took a shower? Or changed clothes?

Too long ago. Way too long ago.

Keo flicked the fire selector on the submachine gun to full-auto. It was an instinctive response, because he knew shooting them did nothing. It didn’t even slow them down, for God’s sake. But maybe if they started climbing he could knock them back down with a well-placed shot to the head. Or in the eyes. Could they still see without eyes? Oh, hell, of course they could. They could “see” without a
head
.

If all else failed, he could just smash their faces in with the stock—

One of the creatures took off, bounding out of his peripheral vision with surprising speed. The second one remained behind, still sniffing the air around it, as if it knew—somehow—that he was nearby, but was unable to locate him. Maybe that even frustrated it. Could they get frustrated? At times he had seen some of the creatures show something that looked like human emotions. Irritation, annoyance, and once, even fear.

Or was it all in his mind? Was he assigning them familiar human traits in an attempt to make them easier to understand? The mind did strange things when it was confronted with impossible realities. Maybe he was simply coping—

The creature raced off after the first one, the
crunch-crunch
of its footsteps fading into the darkening night.

Keo finally let himself breathe again.

Close one. That was a real close one there, pal.

He closed his eyes briefly. Not for long. Maybe a few seconds. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his heart rate and only allowed himself to relax when he was taking normal breaths through his nostrils again.

He heard a scratching noise and looked up and across from him.

The furry thing stood on its hind legs, on the same branch it had appeared on this evening when it engaged him in a staring contest. It had disappeared when the bloodsuckers started showing up, leaving Keo to wonder where it went. Apparently it had been triumphant during its absence, because the animal now had an acorn squeezed between two small hands. It was definitely the same squirrel from earlier, he was sure of it.

Probably.

He watched it watching him back across the small distance. Somehow, even though the semidarkness, he could see the animal clear as day.

What was it thinking now? Maybe once again trying to figure out what a human was doing trying not to fall asleep on a tree branch that could snap under him at any second and send him plummeting back down to the ground, to the black-skinned and deformed things that ruled the night.