The Isles of Elysium

CHAPTER 12

The temporary base Jordan took him to was a YMCA building, about half a kilometer from the long and empty stretch of I-45 in the distance. It was part of a business center, but had its own separate area. Two empty swimming pools greeted them as they stepped out of the woods and trudged through thick, overgrown grass that covered the backyard.

Keo followed Jordan while the rest of Tobias’s people emerged out of the tree lines around them. Wyatt was among them, along with the two familiar scouts. They were greeted by sentries along the rooftops of the YMCA. One of them waved, and Jordan returned it.

Keo checked his watch again. 4:41 P.M.

“How long have you guys been here?” he asked.

“Two days,” Jordan said. “Counting today. Can’t afford to stay in one place for too long. Like I said before, it’s not the soldiers we have to worry about. They usually don’t wander out this far unless they come with everything they have. You saw all the boats they have back there? They can afford to stick to the river, use it to go back and forth from the Gulf. This far from T18, it’s just the crawlers we have to stay one step ahead of.”

“It must be tough, fighting a two-front war.”

“It’s not easy, no.”

The YMCA building was only one-story, but it was spread out with multiple wings. There was a shooter on three of the rooftops, possibly even the same men that had been at the strip mall earlier.

“I usually try to steer clear of big buildings,” Keo said.

“So do we,” Jordan said. “They like using them for nests. But this one’s secure, for now.”

They skirted around the bigger of the two swimming pools and entered the main building through a metal back door guarded by a man with an M4.

Jordan nodded at him. “Hey, Tim.”

“Welcome back,” Tim said. “I heard things went sideways out there.”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Who’s he?” the guard asked, looking at Keo.

“Keo.”

“What kind-”

“Don’t,” Jordan said.

Keo smiled and followed her into a back hallway. It was surprisingly bright inside, thanks to a series of high ceiling windows flooding the room with sunlight. He could hear activity on the other end even before they stepped out into a large cafeteria where Tobias’s men were gathered.

Pita was there, moving through the wounded men that had traveled here earlier by vehicle. Three of them were unconscious while a fourth drank from a bottle of water as Pita undressed his bloody bandages and grabbed a fresh roll from a teenage girl who was acting as her helper.

He counted about two dozen men in all, including Wyatt and the others that had arrived with them. The three or four men who hadn’t had to brave Steve’s ambush were easy to tell apart from the rest-they were the ones without blood on their clothes. Besides Pita and the girl, there were only two other women in the place. Like the men, they wore gun belts, but unlike Jordan, they didn’t look very dangerous at all.

Keo looked around but couldn’t find Tobias anywhere. Maybe he was in a back room, trying to come up with a plan to regroup after the shellacking they had taken. No one went toe-to-toe with an M60 and came out unscathed.

“Is this it?” Keo asked.

“There was a lot more this morning,” Jordan said quietly. She grabbed a man with a thick red beard as he was walking past them. “Where’s Tobias?”

“Back office with Reese,” the man said.

“Thanks,” Jordan said. Then to Keo, “Come on.”

He kept pace with her through the cafeteria, which looked abandoned despite the company of men and women moving around it at the moment. The cavernous feel, he guessed, was because the room was designed for a large army of hungry teens and not the two dozen or so people eating MREs or talking quietly among themselves. They all looked beaten and whipped, and he wondered how long Tobias was going to be able to keep this fight up after today.

“Where’d you get all the MREs?” he asked.

“Same place we get most of our weapons. T18.”

“You have an inside man.”

“We have inside men. One of them supplies us with as much nonperishables as he can get his hands on.”

“Where does he get them?”

“T18 has a storage warehouse filled when the Millers raided the surrounding areas. One of them sold mail-order civilian versions of Army MREs. Prepper food. That’s what we’ve been living on for the last month or so. Before that, we were surviving off the land.”

“Hunting?”

“Hunting, fishing, whatever it took. It’s a big river. They can’t guard every inch of it twenty-four hours a day.”

“They seem to go back and forth along it just fine in those boats.”

“That’s because we don’t attack the riverbanks if we can help it.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t see you them?”

He was going to ask who, but he remembered the women and children along the banks washing laundry and swimming.

“Civilians,” he said.

“Yeah. We’re trying to save them, not get them killed. So we do our best to keep the fighting contained to just us and the soldiers. It’s not always ideal, but no one said this would be easy.”

Keo wanted to tell her that he had seen a little bit of what Steve had at T18, and that “this” wasn’t just not going to be easy, it was going to be downright impossible. But that would have antagonized her, and right now he needed at least one ally at his side.

Even so, Keo kept close enough to Jordan that he was within easy lunging distance of the Glock in her hip holster. If she noticed or was uncomfortable with his closeness, she didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how he was going to kill Tobias and somehow keep both him and Jordan alive when she opened a door marked “Director.”

He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps inside when he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his right eye. Keo turned, started lifting his hands to ward off an attack, but the man was faster and pain exploded across Keo’s face as the butt of a rifle smashed into his forehead.

The blow would have done more damage if he hadn’t seen it coming just in the nick of time and turned slightly. The result was more of a glancing blow, but it was enough to stun and stagger him.

He glimpsed a buzz cut as the man followed, pressing his attack, even as Jordan shouted, “What the fuck, Reese?”

The man ignored her and swung his weapon at Keo’s face again, but Keo managed to dodge the oncoming strike this time. The wooden stock flashed across his face for a split second before Keo grabbed the barrel with one hand, pulled his attacker off balance, then slammed his cocked elbow into the back of the man’s neck.

He heard a satisfying, pained grunt.

Keo followed his attacker-turned-victim, hoping to finish this as soon as possible (and that rifle, he could definitely use that rifle), when something rammed into the small of his back. He might have screamed; he couldn’t be entirely certain. But he definitely felt the boot stepping on the back of his left knee and dropping to the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder just in time to see Tobias, all six-three of him hovering with an M4 clutched in both raised hands. Tobias didn’t look happy or sad, he just looked like a man doing a job.

It was the last thing Keo saw before the collapsible stock of the carbine hit him in the face and he dropped like a sack of meat.

*

“Jesus, your face looks like shit,” Jordan said. She was whispering and looked concerned as she dabbed his face with a wet…something. “That throbbing pain? That’s your forehead. It was bleeding so much even Pita thought you were going to bleed out. Lucky for you, it stopped.”

Yeah. Lucky. That’s me.

He grimaced and fought the urge to reach up to touch his forehead, where the strong odor of antibiotic ointment was coming from. Someone had been very generous with it. He guessed too much was better than not enough when you were dealing with possible infection.

His entire face hurt. At least both Tobias and Reese had aimed straight for the noggin and spared his nose. Having it broken once was enough, especially now that it had all but healed. Well, mostly, anyway.

He was lying on a cold, hard floor and staring up at a patch of moonlight spilling in through a high ceiling window. Something soft, probably cotton, was rolled up underneath his head, allowing him to turn it with minimal effort and take in his new surroundings.

He and Jordan were inside some kind of classroom, and they weren’t alone. One of the women he had seen in the cafeteria was sitting against the opposite wall next to one of the wounded men; her eyes were closed and she was stroking his forehead while he snored. Pita and her teen assistant leaned against each other in another corner; they were both asleep. Unused school desks were scattered around them, some lying on their sides.

Nightfall.

There was barely any noise inside the room except for their breathing and the light snoring around them, as if everyone just knew not to be too noisy. Maybe a survival instinct kicking in unconsciously after a year of living in a post-Purge world.

What was that Lara liked to say? “Adapt or perish.”

These people had clearly adapted. You didn’t survive this long without understanding the rules. Making a sound in the middle of the night (What time is it?) was one of those things to be avoided at all costs.

It was impossibly quiet outside. Even the birds were afraid to make any noise. He was relieved to discover that the window in the back of the room was closed tight. He and Jordan, along with everyone in the room, were sitting along the sides, with Pita and the girl underneath the window. Even if one of the ghouls had crawled up there, they wouldn’t be able to see them.

Hopefully.

Next to him, Jordan put down the balled T-shirt she had been using on his face and leaned tiredly back against the wall. It wasn’t just the day’s events pressing down on her-the ambush, the losing friends-but his arrival probably hadn’t contributed to her peace of mind. What should have been a happy reunion for both of them had instead kicked off a bloody and challenging day for her.

Mom always did say my timing sucks.

“You okay?” he asked.

She gave him a wry look. “You’re the one with the big cut on your forehead. Did you always look this ugly?”

“Kick a man while he’s down, why doncha.”

“Sorry.”

“You look tired.”

“I am tired.” She sighed and looked at the window. “They’re out there, you know.”

“I know…”

She glanced back at him. “So, are you ever going to tell me what happened to your face? I mean, before this afternoon. That scar looks pretty nasty.”

“The guy I told you about?”

“Pollard?”

“Yeah. He tried to carve my face with a knife.”

“Damn.”

“That was after he stabbed me.”

“Jesus, Keo.”

“No, just Keo.”

She tried to stop it, but the smile came through anyway. He returned it, because he couldn’t help it, either. Jordan had always been a pretty girl, even with the short hair that made her look less “girly” than he remembered. The dirt on her face that she hadn’t bothered to clean since the road, the worry lines on her forehead, and the dry skin-none of those things took away from her.

He must have been staring, because she wrinkled her nose at him and said, “What?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re staring. Again.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay, but at least buy me dinner first, for God’s sake.”

He chuckled, and they went back to looking at the room and the window. He expected to see them out there at any moment crawling around like spiders, but there was just the bright moonlight. Instead of being relieved, it just made him paranoid. After so many peaceful nights on the Trident, being back on land left him overly anxious.

“You didn’t know Tobias was going to do that?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t.” She sighed, then, “He’s going to kill you tomorrow.”

“He said that?”

“Not in so many words, but I’ve been around him long enough to know what he’s thinking. He doesn’t trust you, and he’s already lost too much today. We all have. He’s not going to risk it.”

“Why didn’t he put me out of my misery after he knocked me out?”

“Because I wouldn’t let him. He wanted to, but I made it pretty goddamn clear that if he didn’t at least give you a chance to explain, then I was done, too. I’ve been loyal to him, and Tobias is a man who values loyalty.”

“So I have until morning.”

She nodded.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Around ten. You’ve been unconscious for half the day.” She looked down at him and narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here, Keo? I can’t help you if you won’t tell me the truth.”

“The guy in charge of T18 gave me a job. I wasn’t exactly in a position to say no.”

“Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“What was the job?”

“He wanted me to kill Tobias.”

Jordan didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t be sure if that was surprise or disappointment on her face. Maybe a lot of both.

“I’m doing this for Gillian,” he said.

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“In return for taking out Tobias, I get Gillian.”

“‘Get’ her?”

“He wouldn’t let me see her, or even talk to her, until I do this for him.”

“Does she know you’re here?”

“She was at the riverbanks when Miller was bringing me in. She definitely saw me.” I hope, he thought about adding, but decided he wanted to believe it, too, so he didn’t.

“And she looked okay?” Jordan asked.

“From what I saw, yes.”

She nodded. “We need to get you out of here.” She glanced across the room at the door. “There’s a guard outside. He has orders to shoot you if you try to escape. That’s why no one in here has a weapon, including me.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that Jordan was unarmed, but he saw it now. Her holster was empty, and she didn’t have the M4 he’d seen her carrying all day. Even her sheath was missing its knife.

“Tobias wouldn’t let me stay with you if I didn’t give up my guns,” she said.

“I thought he trusted you.”

“Not after I’ve been vouching for you all day.” She pursed her lips. “We had a pretty loud, knock-down, drag-out screaming match after he…love-tapped you.”

“What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter what he said.” Her face hardened, turning serious. “He’ll give you a chance to explain yourself tomorrow, but the truth is, it won’t matter. He’s already decided to kill you.”

Keo believed her, even if she was talking about a guy who looked like Captain America.

“Keo,” Jordan said, her brown eyes still focused on his bruised face. “You need to get out of here before morning, or you’re going to die.”

“I can’t go out there.”

“You have to. In the morning-”

“I’ll talk to him,” Keo said.

“There’s no point. I told you, he’s already made up his mind.”

“Then I’ll just have to make him change it.”

“How?”

He smiled and hoped it was at least partially convincing. “I got a plan. Trust me.”

She frowned.

He guessed he wasn’t all that convincing after all.