The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (39 page)

Or was that just him trying to be overly optimistic?

“Maybe,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question. Would they still come after us if Steve’s dead?”

“I don’t know. You’ve known the guy longer than I have. Would he?”

“I’ve seen him, and Tobias has talked about him a lot, but I never sat across a desk from him drinking shots of whiskey. You have.”

Another good point. Jordan was full of good points today.

“Steve’s the boss,” Keo said. “He would move Heaven and Earth to find and snuff out Dave for killing Jack. Without him, the town—and the soldiers running it—might not consider us important enough to commit the manpower. I wouldn’t, in their shoes. What’s two or three more stragglers when they have an entire town to watch over?”

“So there’s a chance no one’s coming.”

“There’s a chance, yeah.”

She cocked her head, scrutinizing him with her one good eye. In a day or two, she would probably be able to see out of the right side just fine.

“What?” he said.

“You’re telling me what you think I want to hear, but you don’t actually believe any of it, do you?”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Jordan sighed. “You know what’s ironic about all of this?”

“What’s that?”

“This place.” She looked around at the empty streets and the houses around them again. “We’ve been trying to get here all this time, and here we are, finally. Is it everything you thought it would be?”

“Not quite.”

“Yeah…”

He glanced down at his watch. 5:11 
P.M.
“It’ll be dark soon. We need to find a place to hole up for the night.”

“And maybe find some food. Did I tell you I was starving?”

“Maybe a time or two.”

“I thought I’d just remind you in case you forgot.” As if on cue, her stomach growled. “See?”

He stood up. “Let’s go get Dave.”

“You think he’s hungry, too?”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Because I’m starving.”

“You don’t say…”

*

Dave heard them
coming behind him and glanced up from the boulder where he was hiding, overlooking the eastern marina on the other side.

“I don’t think they’re coming today,” he said.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Keo nodded.

“That’s good news for us, right? Maybe they won’t come tomorrow, either.”

And maybe monkeys will fly out of my ass,
Keo thought, but said, “Maybe. For now, let’s find someplace to bunk down for the night. This island might look empty, but it’s far from it.”

Dave looked up at the sky, and Keo thought he might have shivered involuntarily.

“Been awhile?” Keo asked.

“What’s that?” Dave said.

“Since you’ve been out here.”

Dave tried to smile. “Something like that.”

Keo thought about saying something reassuring. Not just for Dave, but for Jordan standing next to him, but with the night creeping up on them and Steve coming
(You’re out there, aren’t you? I know you’re out there.)
sooner or later, whatever he said would have just sounded hollow.

“Let’s try to stay alive tonight first, then worry about tomorrow, tomorrow,” was all he could think of to say.

*

Choosing a place
to stay the night was a no-brainer. The two-story white house on the hill in the middle, where he had found the guns, was the first and last choice he considered. From up there, he could keep an eye on the entire island, including both marinas. The house was also in a perfect spot to, even with just three people, hold off a lengthy assault.

He didn’t like the idea of getting into another standoff with very few outs, but Keo had learned long ago that what he wanted and would rather do was usually not what he had to do in order to survive. Pollard, Song Island, and T18 were proof of that.

“Adapt or perish,”
as Lara and the folks on the
Trident
were fond of saying.

The house was flanked by a half dozen others, with a long, winding driveway that connected it to the streets. A ten-foot-tall metal fence surrounded the property, with an extensive front and backyard, and an electronic gate that they left the way Gene had found it—open. Gene might have just been a sixteen-year-old kid, but he had survived on the island by himself for months; he had done that by not attracting the ghouls’ attention, which meant leaving things as he found them, including the doors, windows, and front gates.

Inside the house, they found five bedrooms, with two on the second floor, including the master. It had an attic but no basement. He found plenty of boxes (open, which probably meant Gene had gone through them already) in one half of the garage, but no car or food. Gene had once told him he had bug-out bags all around the island, but apparently the two-story house wasn’t one of those places. Or if it were, Keo couldn’t find where the kid had hid them.

His stomach was growling when he came out of the garage and headed back to the house. He gave the street beyond the gate a last look, then peeked up at the darkening skies before slipping back inside.

Jordan was leaning against the kitchen’s island counter, looking somberly at her reflection in the steel refrigerator across from her. She and Dave had gone through the cabinets, opening every door they could find in hopes of locating food that hadn’t spoiled or gone bad, while he was outside. By the expression on her face, he guessed they had come up empty, too.

Piles of utensils covered the counters—spoons, forks, and butter knives. Besides food, Jordan and Dave had been looking for anything silver, but by the way the cutlery was tossed around, that search had come up just as empty.

“Any silver?” he asked anyway.

She shook her head. “Fake. They’re all cheap fakes. How is it possible people who live in a house this big, that probably cost more than I’ll make in a lifetime, don’t have one single real piece of silver lying around?”

“Maybe that’s how they got to be rich in the first place. They’re frugal with their money. Why buy real, expensive silver when you can just use the cheap stuff? Most people don’t know the difference, anyway.”

“So that’s the secret?”

“One of many, I’m guessing.”

He started to open the refrigerator, but Jordan said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, there’s something in there, all right. You just can’t eat it. Well, you could if you wanted to, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

He gave up on the refrigerator and walked back to her. “Nothing at all? Not even a nibble?”

“Not even rat droppings. You’d think there would be rat droppings, right? Are there even any animals left on the island?”

“The birds.”

“Land animals, I mean.”

“Probably not. Once they turned the population, they’d have to resort to other things for blood.”

“And here we are…”

“And here we are. Did Dave find anything on the second floor?”

“If he did, he didn’t say anything. Maybe he’s hoarding the food all for himself.” She laid her forehead against the counter and sighed. “We should have gone to Galveston Island, Keo. There are more houses there, more supplies…”

“We’ll go there tomorrow. Find some gas, load up on some food, and get the hell away from here for good.”

She gave him a wry smile. “When did you become such an optimist?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“For one, you lost the woman you love to some guy. To add insult to injury, she’s carrying his child.”

“Yeah, but other than that, things have been going pretty swell.” He sat down on a stool. “You know what the funny thing is?”

“You mean there’s something funny about all this? Please enlighten me, because I can use a good laugh right about now.”

“Back at the marina—at T18—I saw something that I’m still not entirely sure I actually saw.”

“That sounds overly complicated.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

He ran the memories back in his head. Keo had lost count of the number of times he had relived last night. And like all the other times, nothing he saw—or
thought
he saw—still made any sense.

“What happened?” Jordan asked, looking at him curiously with her good eye.

“I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”

“Even after everything that’s happened?”

“Even after everything that’s happened,” he nodded.

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, feel free to tell me about it later. Right now, there’s a very good chance I’m too tired to care anyway.”

They heard footsteps behind them as Dave came back down the stairs.

“Anything?” Keo asked him.

Dave shook his head. “Nothing that you didn’t already find earlier. You?”

“Nope.”

“Figures.”

Keo got up and turned toward the window facing the backyard. It had gotten noticeably darker since the last time he looked.

“Let’s get ready for tonight,” he said.

*

Silver bullets. That’s
what he needed right now, even more than food.

Christ, he wished he had silver bullets.

It didn’t take very long before they came out. He saw just one at first, darting across the street in front of the house. It had come out of the ugly blue building next door and made a beeline straight for the western marina.

Then another, and another…

“One fifty, give or take a few dozen here and there. Could be less. Could be more. I’m just spitballing numbers, though,”
he had told Gene when they were trying to guess how many ghouls were still on the island.

As he watched them coming out of the homes around him, their strained dark flesh reflecting back the bright moonlight, he probably hadn’t been too far from the truth. He had stopped counting around fifty, and there were definitely more than that.

Maybe a hundred. Maybe almost 200.

“Could be less. Could be more.”

What mattered was that there were too many. There were always too many, but even more so now because he didn’t have a single silver bullet to go around. Hell, he would have made do with a silver butter knife. Or a fork. Anything, as long as it was silver. Was it possible the entire island was barren of the precious metal? One of the houses around him had to have what he needed—a candleholder, a picture frame, or maybe if he was really lucky, a sword made entirely of silver. Oh, the things he could have done with that…

Except there hadn’t been time to do a thorough search of every single house, because they had wasted most of the day waiting for Steve to finally charge across the waters. Which meant he had screwed up. Maybe he had even overestimated Steve’s determination to avenge his brother’s death.

Or maybe, just maybe, Steve really was dead. Maybe the man really had been one of those soldiers either he or Dave had shot back at Marina 1.

Was that possible? Yes. Likely? Maybe…

Daebak. My entire life is a series of maybes these days.

He focused on the western marina from the sanctuary of the master bedroom, keeping out of view behind the back window. Somewhere outside the room on the second floor, Dave was keeping watch out the front window at the eastern marina on the other side of the island. An approaching vehicle, even one that was powered by trolling motors, would be noticeable against the glistening dark ocean.