The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (28 page)

“How are you going to stop it?” Keo asked.

“Easy. I outlawed radios.” Then he smiled. “Anyway, let’s go wash up. The chicken smells ready.”

On cue, Lois called from outside in that much-too-June-Cleaver voice, “Come and get ’em, boys!”

*

Lois was pretty
and lively, and while she was bringing the plates of fried chicken, beans, and corncobs over, Steve leaned over to Keo and whispered, “She wants to get pregnant—you know, do her part for the town—but I won’t let her. I don’t know about you, but I prefer them slim and hot.”

Keo smiled and nodded, but all he could think about was Gillian. She was pregnant right now with another man’s baby. Four months pregnant. What was he doing four months ago? He couldn’t even remember. Somewhere in the Louisiana woods, trying to survive Pollard’s small army of paramilitary assholes, probably.

Steve had grabbed the biggest piece of chicken thigh on the plate and was about to wrap his mouth around it when his radio squawked, and a male voice said, “Sir? It’s Grant. Come in.”

Lois sighed. “Honey, why do you still have that thing turned on? It’s dinnertime.”

Steve ignored her, put down the chicken, and unclipped the radio from his belt. He keyed it, said, “What is it?”

“Uh, sorry to disturb you, sir, but I have some bad news,” Grant said.

“Steve,” Lois started to say, but she froze when Steve shot her a hard glance. She looked down at her plate of beans instead.

“Go on,” Steve said into the radio.

“It’s, uh, your brother, sir,” Grant said. He sounded nervous.

“What about Jack?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

“What the
fuck
do you mean he’s dead?”

Steve shot up from the table, nearly knocking it over. Lois gasped and grabbed onto a corncob as it rolled off a plate.

“The woman,” Grant said, and Keo thought his voice was trembling slightly. “She’s gone. Someone busted in on Doctor Bannerman’s place and took her. They, uh, shot Jack while they were escaping.”

Keo thought he was ready for it, but even he was surprised when Steve punched the table so hard that everything—the dishes, the chicken, and the corncobs—flew everywhere. Lois screamed and stumbled to her feet while Keo managed to grab onto a chicken leg as it bounced into the air.

“
Fuck!”
Steve screamed.

Keo didn’t say anything. He took a bite out of the chicken leg. It tasted good, but then he hadn’t had fried chicken in years, so Lois could have actually been an awful cook and he might not have noticed.

Besides, he needed something for his mouth to do, otherwise he might have burst out laughing uncontrollably at the sight of Steve raging in front of him.

Keo still had
the taste of chicken in his mouth, and maybe a small piece of meat hidden somewhere between his molars at the back, when he was driven over to T18A2, next door to Gillian’s subdivision, and climbed out of the golf cart in front of a squat one-story house. There were already five soldiers standing in the driveway, with a horse grazing on the lawn nearby, oblivious to the activity.

One of the men hurried over. He was sweating even in the chilly air and with storm clouds continuing to gather above them. With thirty minutes before nightfall, it already looked pitch-dark outside, and most of the streetlights (and the few sprinkled among the lawns) had come on all around them.

“What the fuck happened?” was the first thing out of Steve’s mouth.

“Someone helped her escape,” the man said. Keo recognized his voice from the radio.
Grant
.

“How many?”

“Bannerman said there was just one.”

“And Jack?”

“He’s inside.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly, sir. He was inside the garage with Bannerman and the woman when it happened. They shot Roger on their way out.”

Steve brushed past Grant and made a beeline for the door. The other soldiers hurried out of his path. They were all wearing gun belts and cradling M4 rifles, and Keo kept count of all the others around the area. Counting these five, there were the two standing guard at the gate and a half dozen more he had seen on his way over here.

Too many. Always too damn many.

Unlike Steve’s house, the interior of Bannerman’s was sparsely lit by a pair of LED lamps, one resting on the kitchen counter and another in the living room over the fireplace. It almost looked as if no one lived here, but of course the blood on the floor and a dead soldier lying facedown on the carpet said differently. Keo stepped around the blood and followed Steve to the back of the house.

Steve marched straight to a door that opened into the garage,
crunching
heavy tarp covering every inch of the concrete floor as he did so. The room had been converted into some kind of operating room, though it looked and smelled more like a butcher shop. A pair of metal tables sat in the center, flanked by steel trays with surgical instruments; one had been upended, its contents tossed liberally across the room. One of the tables was covered in blood and there were fresh, bloody footprints all over the place.

A man in his sixties, wearing white hospital scrubs, sat in a comfortable-looking armchair in the corner, cradling his arm in his lap. Someone had bundled the arm up with gauze and the man looked tired, wiping sweat from his face. The garage door was closed—and didn’t look capable of opening—and there was very little ventilation, which probably accounted for the old man’s perspiration.

The lack of circulating air also kept in the smell of the blood that pooled underneath Jack. The younger Miller sat awkwardly against the far wall, his head lolled to one side, eyes open, as if he had simply decided to sit down to rest and could stand up at any moment.

Steve ignored the old man and walked straight to Jack. He kicked a surgical scissor in his path and it skidded across the room. He crouched in front of his brother and held Jack’s sweat-slicked face in his hands, staring at him in silence.

Keo looked over at the old man, Bannerman. “What happened?”

Bannerman picked up a bottle of water on a table next to him with his good hand and took a slow, drawn-out sip. “Some guy in a ski mask. Came in and shot Jack, then took the woman. I guess he shot someone else in the living room, too?”

“You didn’t go out to check?”

“He shot me, too,” Bannerman said, holding up his wounded arm as proof. “I thought it’d be more prudent to wait for help instead of running out there. I’m just a doctor.”

More like a butcher.

Steve stood up and ran his fingers through his hair for a moment. Keo waited for the outburst, the profanity, but instead Steve just whirled around and walked past Keo and back into the hallway. The man hadn’t spared a single glance at Bannerman, which, Keo guessed, the old man was grateful for.

Keo followed Steve through the living room, then to the front door. “What now?” he asked.

“Find her and kill her,” Steve said.

Oh, that’s all?

Grant hadn’t gone anywhere and was waiting for them in the driveway. For a man who was barely a few years younger than Steve, Grant looked overly small and frail and fidgeted back and forth nervously.

“There was gunfire,” Steve said. “Why didn’t anyone stop them?”

“No one heard gunshots,” Grant said. “I think he was using a silencer or something.”

“You think?”

“He must have,” Grant said, trying his best to sound more confident—and failing miserably. “It wasn’t until Pete stumbled across Roger’s body inside the house and called it in that we even knew what had happened.”

Steve didn’t say anything. Instead, he squinted up at the storm clouds continuing to gather en masse above them. There was a strangely serene expression on his face, as if he hadn’t just discovered his little brother was dead.

Keo glanced around him. Every soldier, even the ones across the street, seemed to know something bad had happened inside Bannerman’s house, something that was going to affect all of them. Like Keo, they looked as if they were waiting for the inevitable eruption from Steve.

Any moment now…

“It’s going to rain all night,” Steve finally said, sounding perfectly calm. “They have two options: Make a run for it, or hide. It’s too dark to go into the woods. The crawlers will be out by now, and they’d never survive for more than a few minutes in there. Anyone who has been here for a while knows that. So they’ll hide.” The man glanced at Keo and narrowed his eyes. “You have any ideas?”

“About what?” Keo said.

“Where they would be hiding.”

“You’re asking the wrong man. I didn’t even know they existed until yesterday.”

“They have inside help,” Steve said, looking around the streets. “I’ve always known that. Someone feeding them intelligence, stealing supplies for them. M4s and ammo going missing. That’s who we’re looking for. Someone who knows the town, knows where to hide. That means we have to look everywhere. Turn this place inside out, because they’re still here. I can fucking guarantee you that.”

An inside man? Right. What was that Jordan had told him?

“If this blows up in your face, there’s another way out of the town… His name’s Dave. I’ve never actually met him before, but Tobias seems to trust him. He works in the main cafeteria…”

Dave. Main cafeteria.

Maybe Dave had heard about Jordan being held at Bannerman’s. People would talk. Maybe one of the soldiers who liked eating with the civilians. Bragging, trying to impress some pretty young girl with inside gossip.

Not that it mattered. Dave, or one of Tobias’s other inside agents, had clearly saved Jordan, though Keo still hadn’t decided if that was a good thing or not. He would have eventually come up with a plan to rescue her himself. Heck, he might not even have to, since Steve seemed to have bought his line about Jordan wanting to re-assimilate back into town. The only certainty now was that someone had acted and Jordan was out there, somewhere.

And Steve was right. They would still be in T18 right now because there would be no other places to go. Certainly not out there. Not under the suffocating darkness.

“Someone who knows the town, knows where to hide.”

Keo was watching Steve’s face, the way he was scrunching his eyes and sweeping the streets, as if he could see through the walls of the homes, when something fell out of the sky and landed on Keo’s forehead. He held out his hand to catch a few more drops, as did some of the men around him.

The rain came slowly but quickly picked up momentum.

In less than ten seconds, Keo was soaked from head to toe.

Steve, standing next to him, didn’t seem to notice.

“Search every house!” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard. “They’re hiding in one of these houses! No matter how long it takes, search every single building and shack and room until you find them!”

*

Steve left Keo
in the driveway with Grant and rode off on the same horse that had been dining on the lawn when they arrived—it turned out to be Jack’s—along with a dozen other mounted soldiers. Keo guessed it was faster to travel by horseback than in the slow-moving, solar-powered golf cart.

“Come on,” Grant said. “I got orders to take you to Processing.”

Keo climbed into the cart with Grant and they motored off, raindrops bouncing against the solar panels on top of the vehicle. The streets were already showing signs of flooding, the multiple cracks of thunder in the distance followed by lightning flashes sounding as if the gods had finally decided to punish T18 for its trespasses.

“Does it usually rain this hard?” Keo asked, shouting over the
pak-pak-pak
of raindrops cascading around them.

“Not usually!” Grant shouted back as lightning crackled again. “Hear that? This is gonna be a huge one!”

They were driving through two to three inches of water by the time they left T18A2, and Grant turned south down the road—toward Processing, wherever the hell that was. Soldiers in raincoats had begun appearing on horses and on foot around them, many wielding flashlights. They looked coordinated, some moving in groups while others spread out among the subdivisions. Like a Western posse times ten, except these cowboys were carrying assault rifles.