The Fields of Lemuria (7 page)

Or maybe it was just a dumb, furry thing chipping away at an acorn with its teeth.

I’m trying to understand the motivations of a squirrel while sitting on a tree branch and trying not to fall off and die a grisly death (or worse).

Does life get any better than this?

*

He couldn’t go
to sleep. He couldn’t afford to. The branch was wide enough to sit on, but it wasn’t going to catch him if he flopped over the side while dozing off. He couldn’t allow that to happen, so Keo tried every trick in the book to stay awake.

It was easy the first few hours, but his eyelids started to get heavy around ten. He had to resort to all those years of experience, all those hours of sleepless nights when staying awake meant the difference between life and death, getting paid and…well, dead people didn’t care about bank accounts anymore, did they?

He drank the remaining two bottles of water he had left in his pack. Dehydration caused fatigue, and fatigue caused drowsiness. He managed to space the liquid out until midnight when he finally tasted the last drop.

Around one, he began pulling on his earlobes and rubbing the back of his hands between his thumb and index finger to keep alert. When that lost its effect after about an hour, he lifted his legs and pressed against the back of his knees. After a while, he resorted to pinching different parts of his body.

When he started to become immune to those acupuncture tricks at around two in the morning, he did stretching exercises with his arms, reaching up, sideways, and twisting his torso in every direction possible. He couldn’t do much with the limited space and the fragility of the branch under him, but they were enough to keep him active and stave off sleep for a little while longer.

He moved onto breathing exercises around four o’clock, sucking in air through his nose and pulling in his abdomen toward his diaphragm with every exhale. He did it just quickly enough to make the exercise effective while still not making too much noise.

Because he could still hear them down there. They weren’t moving directly under him anymore, and they were more spread out now, but the woods were so quiet (even the birds knew better than to make too much noise up on their high perches) that it was easy to pick out their scratching movements from long distances.

It occurred to him a few hours ago that the creatures weren’t running blind around the park. They were, in fact, surging in the same direction all throughout the night—northwest. There was a reason for that. Pollard’s people were in that direction, gathered at the park visitors’ building. Fiona had told him that, and the creatures always seemed to just know where people were hiding, especially in large clusters.

The cities. I wonder what the cities were like in the early days…?

His brief happiness that the monsters were potentially, right now, cutting into Pollard’s numbers went out the window when he waited and waited and didn’t hear a single gunshot. There should have been a lot of it, because there was no way in hell Pollard’s well-armed little paramilitary unit would go down without a fight. So what did the silence mean? Maybe the creatures did find Pollard’s group but couldn’t get to them. Pollard’s men, in turn, might be too disciplined to shoot unnecessarily.

All the while, he was stuck up a tree, desperately trying not to fall asleep.

It was five in the morning when he glanced down at his watch for the tenth time in the last two hours.

That was the good news. Sunrise came early during the summers. All he had to do was stay awake for two more hours…

*

Shit!

He snapped awake, reaching blindly out to grab at something—
anything—
and just barely managed to wrap his fingers around a thick branch directly above him while his other hand was flailing wildly in open space. The MP5SD had fallen off his lap during his little almost-drop, but luckily the strap had kept it from dropping to the ground below; instead, it just dangled from his shoulder.

Sonofa
bitch.

He righted himself, sucking in a deep breath.

He had almost died. Almost fallen right off the tree and died. Because there was no way he was going to make it back up if he fell. The noise alone would have brought at least a dozen
(hundreds)
of the bloodsuckers still
crunching
and
snapping
along the woods all around him. It was so quiet they would have easily heard a big dummy like him landing on the ground.

Close. Real close one there, pal.

He looked down at his watch again: 5:16 
a.m.

Christ. It hadn’t even been much of a nap. A few minutes, at the most. A few more seconds and—

He pulled the submachine gun up by the strap and placed it back in his lap, then stared off at nothing. For some reason, his mind wandered back to Fiona.

Was she back with Pollard now? Probably. There was no reason for her not to go back. Would he punish her for getting captured? Maybe. Ironically, the fact that Keo had shot her in the shoulder might have saved her life. It was hard to blame someone for getting snatched after they had taken a bullet while executing your orders. Hard, but not impossible. Given what Fiona had told him about Pollard and what had happened to the man’s former second-in-command, the ex-officer apparently didn’t take failure very well.

Screw you, Pollard. Your kid had it coming.

Thinking about Fiona made him feel slightly guilty for some reason, so he thought about Gillian instead. The last time he had seen her, her hair was almost down to her waist. And those deep green eyes. She was back at Santa Marie Island right now. Or, at least, he hoped she was. If not, then all of this would have been for nothing.

5:32 
a.m.

Almost there…

*

He climbed down
with sunlight at his back. The warmth was as soothing now—maybe even more so—as all the other mornings. The growing heat around him was all the confirmation he needed to finally escape back down to solid ground.

He scooted down the length of the tree, surprised at his own speed and agility for someone who hadn’t slept all night. It was probably the adrenaline and the exhilaration of still being alive after almost dying more than once in the last twenty-four hours.

Keo hopped the last few meters and landed in a crouch. He stood up and immediately unslung the MP5SD.

Crunch!

He spun around, lifting the submachine gun, but it wasn’t halfway up when he saw the barrel of the rifle pointed straight at him and he stopped moving entirely. Another inch, and there would be a loud
boom!
and a hole would appear in the very center of his chest. Or head, if the guy was a really good shot, which at this distance, he didn’t really have to be.

The man behind the camouflaged rifle was leaning behind a tree twenty meters from him. Too close to miss, even if he was covered from head to toe in…
what the hell?
It took Keo a few seconds to realize the man was wearing a ghillie suit put together from materials abundant in the park, namely leaves, mud, and grass.

Keo was frozen in place. It would only take a split-second to raise his weapon enough to fire, but there were two problems with that. He didn’t have a split-second, because that was all the man needed to pull the trigger. The other, more important point was that the man’s rifle didn’t move at all, because the hands holding it were rock steady.

“We were wondering how you were going to get down from there,” the man said, and Keo saw something that looked like pale lips smiling behind the layer of mud and dirt that covered his face.

Wait. Did the man just say
we?

Snap!
A branch broke under a heavy boot behind him.

Keo didn’t turn around. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, not with the rifle pointing at him. Any little move, and he was likely a dead man. The fact that he was still alive was confusing. Why was he still alive? Did Pollard want him unharmed? What was that Fiona had said?

“Pollard was willing to just kill you when you were out there running around. But now that you’re cornered, he’ll want more. He’ll demand his pound of flesh. He’ll want to take his time with the two of you because he can afford to now.”

Keo could smell the second man before he heard or felt the barrel of his rifle tapping against the back of his neck. “You’re a long way from home,” the second man said. “You speak English?”

“Yeah,” Keo said.

“Say something else.”

“Something else.”

Chuckling. “Smartass, huh?”

Keo bit his tongue and didn’t answer that one.

“You got a name?” the man behind him asked.

“Keo,” he said.

“What kind of name is Keo?”

“Larry was taken.”

“What are you
doing out here, smartass?”

That was the smaller one, who walked behind Keo, while the bigger one led the way.

They had been going west for the last five minutes, and neither man was in any particular hurry. Keo couldn’t figure out how they had gotten the drop on him. From what he could tell, they had been in the woods for a while, given the ghillie suits both men were wearing. The mud and dirt on them also looked fresh.

Quiet as mice. With rifles.

Had they really been in the area all night, hiding in plain sight? It was a crazy thought
(absolutely bonkers)
, but what other explanation was there?

The one in front of him was about six feet tall, and the thick ghillie suit made him appear twice his size. He was cradling a rifle that looked like a modern version of the Browning light machinegun, but more importantly, the scope on top of it would have made shooting Keo at twenty meters child’s play. He couldn’t tell the man’s age with all the junk over his face, but he guessed he was somewhere in his forties. The man carried himself well, moving with a smoothness only possible for someone used to being out here.

The one behind him was younger by at least twenty years. Keo could tell that much from just his voice, never mind the annoying personality. Like the older one, the ghillie suit hid most of his features, but it didn’t hide the camo rifle he was pointing at Keo’s back from a meter away at the moment. That was just far enough to keep him from trying anything, but close enough that he could hear his captor’s breathing. The man had Keo’s MP5SD, along with the Glock .45 and the Ka-Bar, stuffed into the now mostly-empty pack.

He was in an impossible situation between the two of them, with a big unknown waiting ahead of him. Still, he might have taken his chances and tried to escape anyway…if they hadn’t bound his hands together at the wrists with zip ties.

The one bright spot that he could see was that they weren’t Pollard’s men. He knew that much right away. Pollard’s people had a uniform—black assault vests and camo face paint—but they didn’t do ghillie suits. These men hadn’t shot him on sight (another big plus), and they seemed almost amused by the fact that he had climbed down from the tree this morning.