The Purge of Babylon Series Box Set, Vol. 3 | Books 7-9
Author: Sisavath, Sam
Date: 2020-09-07 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post-Apocalyptic | Horror | Infected
Publisher: Road To Babylon Media LLC

Contents

The Completed Purge of Babylon Series

Also by Sam Sisavath

The Spears of Laconia

About The Spears of Laconia

Book One

1. Frank

2. Gaby

3. Lara

4. Keo

5. Gaby

6. Lara

7. Gaby

8. Keo

9. Gaby

10. Frank

Book Two

11. Gaby

12. Keo

13. Gaby

14. Frank

15. Keo

16. Lara

17. Gaby

18. Keo

19. Lara

20. Gaby

Book Three

21. Keo

22. Gaby

23. Keo

24. Frank

25. Keo

26. Gaby

27. Keo

28. Gaby

29. Keo

Epilogue

The Horns of Avalon

About The Horns of Avalon

Prologue

Book One

1. Keo

2. Lara

3. Gaby

4. Keo

5. Gaby

6. Keo

7. Lara

8. Gaby

9. Frank

Book Two

10. Lara

11. Gaby

12. Lara

13. Gaby

14. Lara

15. Gaby

16. Lara

17. Gaby

18. Frank

Book Three

19. Keo

20. Lara

21. Keo

22. Gaby

23. Keo

24. Lara

25. Keo

26. Lara

27. Keo

28. Gaby

Epilogue

The Bones of Valhalla

About The Bones of Valhalla

Acknowledgements

Book One

1. Lara

2. Will

3. Gaby

4. Lara

5. Will

6. Lara

7. Gaby

8. Lara

Book Two

9. Keo

10. Gaby

11. Lara

12. Keo

13. Gaby

14. Lara

15. Gaby

16. Keo

17. Lara

18. Keo

19. Lara

20. Gaby

21. Keo

22. Will

Book Three

23. Keo

24. Gaby

25. Lara

26. Keo

27. Gaby

28. Keo

29. Will

30. Keo

31. Will

32. Lara

Epilogue

The Completed Purge of Babylon Series

The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

The Gates of Byzantium

The Stones of Angkor

The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)

The Fires of Atlantis

The Ashes of Pompeii

The Isles of Elysium

The Spears of Laconia

The Horns of Avalon

The Bones of Valhalla

Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)

Also by Sam Sisavath

The Road to Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

Glory Box

Bombtrack

Rooster

Devil’s Haircut

Black

The Distance

Hollow

Daybreak

The Ranch

100 Deep

The After The Purge: Vendetta Trilogy

Requiem

Tokens

Remains

The After The Purge: AKA John Smith Series

Mist City

Run or Fight

Shoot Last

The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series

Hunter/Prey

Saint/Sinner

Finders/Keepers

Savior/Corruptor

The Red Sky Conspiracy Series

Most Wanted

The Devil You Know

The Fall Man Post-Apocalyptic Series

The Break

Homefront

Firebase

About The Spears of Laconia

Copyright (c) 2015 Sam Sisavath

Sometimes you have to make a stand.

They’ve been relentlessly hounded ever since The Purge decimated the world, and every day since has been a struggle to stay one step ahead of the enemy.

Keo has returned, claiming to have information that can turn the tide of war against the ghouls. Lara wants nothing more than to strike back, but she has other problems: Will has yet to make contact, and a team she’s sent on an important mission has gone off the radar.

Meanwhile, Texas becomes a battlefield as a new force rises to challenge the rule of the ghouls and their human collaborators. Led by a mysterious leader, this new threat has the firepower to cripple the enemy, but their cure might be worse than the disease.

Caught between two destructive forces, Lara, Keo, and their friends will have to make a choice—fall in line or forge their own path—before the decision is made for them.

A year after The Purge, any chance of victory will rest on the tips of the Spears, and those fearless enough to wield them…

Book One

Rest Your Weary Head

1

Frank

“You can’t win.”

He ignored the voice. It had become easier with time, and like everything else about his new existence—this thing he called life after death (Re-life?)—it was about balancing acceptance with resistance, trying to hold onto the past while not neglecting the present. Because the here and now was where the danger lurked; it was also here that the answer to the future was within his grasp.

“You must know that by now. After all you’ve seen, all you’ve learned.”

There was something odd about the voice these last few weeks, a guarded hesitation that hadn’t been there when it first spoke to him in the early days. It wasn’t fear—no, he wouldn’t go that far—but it didn’t sound nearly as certain as it once had been, either.

“She understood. Why did you think she came over? She opened the door, remember?”

Yes, he remembered. Kate had opened the door, dooming them. Almost.

Whatever happened to Kate?

Oh, that’s right. He had killed her, that night outside the gas station. How long ago now? He couldn’t remember at the moment, but it would come to him. It always did, eventually.

“Talk to me.”

It was growing annoyed, the warning tone of a parent cajoling an uncooperative child while at the same time letting him know that it was losing patience. It wanted him to respond, because that was how it would track him. It had taken him a long time to learn how to erect the barrier inside his mind. But he had adapted. He always did.

Letters. An acronym. SE…something.

Memories came and went, sometimes garbled, other times clear as the crystal blue of her eyes, the glint of the sun against her blonde hair.

It helped to think of her. To concentrate on the smoothness of her skin. He longed to touch her again, to press against and taste her lips...

“Whatever it takes,” he had said, “whatever happens, you won’t have to face another night alone.”

He’d said that to her, one of many unkept promises that haunted his nights and terrorized his days. He’d failed her then, but he could make up for it. He could save her; save everyone.

And all they had to do was find him.

Mabry.

He was the key. The beginning and the end. He was the voice in all their heads. In his head.

Mabry was the one constant. He was the eternal. Everywhere, and nowhere.

“I’ll find you,” Mabry said to him now inside his head. “You can’t run forever.”

He focused on the surrounding blackness, on the things that moved and thrived within the endless folds of darkness that he wouldn’t have been able to see before. They were out there, swarms of them, clear as day—even though he had forgotten what day looked like, or the warmth of the sun against his skin.

They had been on his trail for months now, but their pursuit had increased in intensity in just the last few weeks. It was as if Mabry knew what he was trying to do. Was that possible? Were there holes in his barrier that he hadn’t detected? Was Mabry burrowing around inside his mind this very second?

No. He couldn’t afford this right now, because doubt was the enemy. He had to forge ahead, follow the original plan, because there was no victory without a plan…Z?

It came from somewhere in the recesses of his mind, deep, deep down in that place where pieces of his past slumbered, waiting to be resurrected.

Something about plans. Letters. A through Z…

He shook the jumbled thoughts away. It would come to him later.

Back to the present. Back to the now.

He could smell them all the way up here, the stench of their existence carried upward by the breeze that washed across all the rooftops from the ocean beyond the city limits. He could almost taste it, the bitter salt water against the tip of his tongue, sending strange sensations (fear?) through every inch of his body.

Their dark shapes vanished and reappeared out of office buildings, stores, and apartments. They were little more than tiny dots, like insignificant ants against the moonlit night. He had higher ground and could glimpse the entire city from up here. Safe on his perch, though he knew very well he would never be entirely safe. None of them were, so long as he was out there.

Mabry.

He was the key. The everything and the nothing, the beginning and the end; at once nowhere, and everywhere…

A soft click as the man came out of the rooftop access door and moved across the gravel floor toward him. The attempt at stealth was laudable, but he might as well be dropping firecrackers with every footstep. That, and the aroma of medical ointment over old wounds was impossible to ignore.

The rustling of a thick jacket as the man lay down on his stomach next to him and peered off the edge of the rooftop with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Mist formed in front of his partly covered face with every word, the taste of beef jerky still lingering on his lips even though the man probably couldn’t smell it.

But he could smell it just fine, just as he could hear conversations multiple floors below or above him, or feel the rough or smooth texture of things without touching them. Everything was hyper-realized, all his senses razor sharp. They were the gifts that came with the curse, that made him more than what he was, though he would forego them all without hesitation if it meant he could be what he once was.

“Can you see them?” the man asked. “They were supposed to have arrived by now.”

“No,” he hissed.

He hated having to talk, hated the noise that came out with every single word. They were just another reminder of what he was. As a result, he tried to say as little as possible, which was difficult because communication with the man was necessary.

“Can you see that far?” the man asked.

“No.”

“I thought you had super everything. I guess laser beams are out of the question, huh?”

He didn’t bother to answer that one.

“You ever get cold?” the man asked.

“No.”

“I guess you wouldn’t. Being both hot and cold. How does that even work, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ever think about it?”

“No.”

It was a lie. He often thought about what the transformation had done to him, but it always ended in frustration. He knew that it did things to him at a cellular level, but the details were beyond his understanding. He was a grunt before, and he was one now. Maybe she would know. Maybe he could ask her when he finally saw her again.

The man adjusted his position, his clothes scratching against the rooftop. “Looks like a party down there. How many?”

“Too many.”

“How the hell do they keep finding us?”

“I don’t know.”

“You?”

“Maybe.”

“Or us?”

“Maybe…”

The man pushed himself up into a sitting position, then opened a pouch along his cargo pants and took out an almost empty bag of beef jerky. He pulled out a stick and chewed (too loud) on it for a moment.

The stink of preserved meat made his nostrils twitch and reminded him that he no longer yearned for food as he once had. There was enough blood (Mabry’s) flowing through him that he could survive for months, maybe even years. When he did thirst, it was easily satisfied with animal blood. Two cows in Louisiana, a pair of horses in Texas…

“You thought this through?” the man said after a while. “You’re not who you once were, you know. What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”

“You’ll convince them.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” A brief pause, with only the man’s soft breathing and calm heartbeat from under his clothes to fill the void. “Did you ever wonder that maybe it’s better for her—for all of them—if they stayed away from Texas?”

“She has to know...”

“So you keep saying, but she’s not the woman you remember.” Another pause. “I’m just saying, this reunion might not work out the way you hope.”

Another stick of jerky, followed by crunching and swallowing.

He looked down at the silhouetted forms racing back and forth below. They were free to roam and explore, to search every hole for him. But, like him, they would soon have to seek shelter, because the sun would be here.

How long had it been since he’d seen the sun? Months. It had been months, even though it felt like centuries.

“You miss it, don’t you?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“You ever tempted to just say ‘Fuck it,’ and step into the light, so to speak?”

Tempted? Yes. It was worse in the early days, like an itch he couldn’t scratch, a siren’s call beckoning him to let it all go, to let her go. But he couldn’t. He had failed to keep his promises, but he could still save her, even if it meant prolonging this miserable existence.

“Whatever it takes,” he had said, “whatever happens, you won’t have to face another night alone.”

“No,” he hissed.

“I don’t believe you,” the man said.

“Believe what you want.”

“Gee, thanks, I’ll do that.”

Another click as the woman came out to join them. He had smelled her when she was still in the stairwell and heard her soft, careful footsteps from five floors down. Her heartbeat accelerated slightly under her winter clothing as she emerged into the open night, but he knew it wasn’t the cold air—it was the sight of him.

It was why he wore the trench coat when he was around them, with the hoodie covering most of his face, only his eyes peering out from under the frayed brim. It seemed to work with the man, but then the man was an odd one. Weeks later, and the woman was still trying to get used to being around him.

“Did they show up yet?” she whispered to the man. He didn’t know why she was whispering. Up here, the black eyes wouldn’t be able to hear them anyway.

“Don’t know,” the man said.

“He can’t see the ocean from here?”

“Apparently he can’t see that far.”

“Hunh.”

“What I said.”

“What about our other friends?”

“I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon, but they’re definitely tracking us.”

“How?”

“Haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do.”

“That might take a while.”

“Goes without saying.”

The man snorted. “Anything going on downstairs?”

“I didn’t hear anything. We locked all the doors, right?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure we did.”

“You’re always so comforting, Keo.”

“I try.”

The woman leaned over the edge, her short blonde hair moving against the breeze. “Jesus, look at them. If they find us in here…”

“That’s it, positive thoughts,” the man said.

She sighed. “We should have made a run for the beach. They don’t like the water, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“We should have made a run for the beach,” she repeated.

“Lara and the Trident aren’t here yet. We’d just end up waiting for them down there anyway. At least here we have a lot of floors between us and them.”

The woman glanced over at him, brown eyes focusing as if she could make out his face behind the hoodie. “How many?” she asked.

“Too many,” he hissed.

“Can you be more specific?”

“No.”

“But you can see them down there.”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes…”

The man chuckled. “Chatterbox, this guy.”

* * *

The man and woman had names, but it was easier to think of them as just the man and the woman. They were somewhere on the twentieth floor above him, their voices reaching down through the vibrations that traveled along the steel and concrete and glass of the building. Though he couldn’t hear every single word they spoke, he could hear just enough.

“…going to get us killed,” the woman was saying.

“Relax,” the man said.

“‘Relax’?” She might have laughed, but that kind of nuance was lost on its way down the stairwell. “We’re inside a building with a blue-eyed ghoul, Keo. And you want me to relax?”

“You don’t have to be here. Tobias—”

“Screw Tobias.”

“I thought you said there was nothing between the two of you?”

Silence. Then, two seconds later, the woman said, “You’re an asshole.”

The man laughed softly. “So that’s a no?”

“I told you, there was never anything between us.”

“All that time…”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“All that time alone, looking for us. Did you ever…?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you. Even with that ugly scar, there are still plenty of desperate women out there.”

“Ouch,” he said.

This time he was sure she did laugh. “No offense.”

“Oh sure, why should I take offense to that?”

The woman answered, but he had already gotten up and slipped out of the stairwell and into the darkened lobby before her words reached him. He sat inside the shadows, feeling at home among the forgotten relics of an old world.

A stubborn pool of moonlight managed to filter in through the glass walls across from him, the sidewalks and streets on the other side dull and gray. He wasn’t worried about being exposed, because the black eyes had no special ability or heightened senses. But the creatures did have eyes and some measure of intelligence, enough that they could recognize the disturbances in their surroundings.

Dead, not stupid, someone once called them.

Who had said that? He couldn’t remember, but it would come to him eventually. It always did, usually when he least expected it.

Flickers of movement as a dozen of the creatures emerged out of the darkness and moved up the sidewalk. He expected them to keep going past the building, because surely they hadn’t left any clues to their presence outside, had they? He was sure of it, but then one of the black eyes stopped and cocked its head. He realized it was just glaring at its own reflection in the glass wall.

He was relieved, until the skeletal thing moved forward and grabbed the handle of one of the twin glass doors and tried pulling it instead of continuing on its way. The door didn’t budge. Its black eyes looked confused for a moment, and then it tried pulling a few more times.

If it had stopped, that might have been the end of it, except the damn thing seemed suddenly determined to get inside. Its activity attracted the attention of the others, and a second—then a third—of the ghouls stopped and grabbed the other handle and began pulling at it, too.

But the doors held, just as he knew they would.

Two others clacked their way along the length of the glass wall and peered inside. He didn’t move or react, because he knew they couldn’t see him. Not through the darkness, with just the barest of moonlight to illuminate their search. One smashed a right arm that was little more than a stump into its section of the window, producing a dull thud and little else.

He watched the creatures give up and move on, one by one, until there were just two left behind, still fighting with the doors. They were gaunt things, almost like deformed children with pruned flesh. They abandoned the doors and moved along the walls, angling their bodies in an effort to spy on the darkened corners inside the lobby.

A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, and he wondered if he looked like these twisted and blackened remnants of what once was. Besides the blue eyes, what really made him stand out? There wasn’t very much. The trench coat was just a façade, a vain attempt to hold onto a lie.

“You’re not who you once were, you know,” the man had said earlier on the rooftop. “What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”

The words stung because they were honest and true. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t a man at all.

He watched the creatures pressing themselves into the glass, smearing sections of it with thick, coagulated fluid that could be anything from blood to drool or pus. This was him now, and no amount of clothing would change that. How did he ever think he could convince her of anything? When they saw him, this was what they would see—a dark, blackened thing that had once been human, but was no longer.

“You’re not who you once were, you know…”

Of course he knew. He’d always known, but he had managed to delude himself anyway, told one lie after another until he believed it, because he wanted so badly to save her, to make up for all the failures of the past. Because Mabry had to be stopped, and he knew how—

It fell from the sky and splattered against the concrete walkway, the loud crunch audible even from inside the lobby. A wave of thick black blood sprayed a nearby section of the glass wall in the aftermath.

Before he could recognize what it was—a black-eyed ghoul falling from above and obliterating itself against the pavement—another, then another, then still another fell like raindrops. They smashed into the sidewalk and road one by one, covering more sections of the outside wall in blood and flesh and pulverized bone—

Ghouls. Falling. From above.

The loud, unmistakable crash of breaking glass, followed by gleaming shards plummeting outside the building.

No, no. They were inside the building. How did they get inside the building?

He raced along the length of the shadowed back wall and slipped into the stairwell, and went up. He was almost floating in the air, his bare feet barely touching the cold concrete steps. He once considered wearing shoes because that would have added to the façade, but shoes were cumbersome and he had come to rely on his speed. More than once, it had been the difference between life and (re)death.

He was rounding the third floor when—

Bang! A gunshot from above, coming from the twentieth floor.

The taste of silver drenched his tongue all the way down here. Silver bullets. Either the man or the woman had fired. It didn’t matter who, because they had just alerted the entire city to their location, and they wouldn’t have done that unless they absolutely had to.

Sixth floor…

A short, startled scream. The woman.

Eighth floor…

The pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire began blasting through the building, and his skin rippled from head to toe as more silver was exposed to air.

Tenth floor…

He pushed harder as the shots came faster and louder. Every inch of him wanted to flee in the other direction, the growing proximity to silver nauseating. The metal wouldn’t kill him unless it struck his brain, but it still hurt everywhere else. A lot.

He pushed on.

Fifteenth floor…

The man was shouting, telling the woman to run, run, run.

Sixteenth…

A constant stream of pop-pop-pop now. So much silver that he wanted to retch just to get it out of his system, but he couldn’t remember how.

Twentieth!

A loud bang! as the stairwell door flew open and the woman stumbled into it back-first, fire spitting back into the floor from the barrel of her rifle. She heard him, spun around, the brown of her eyes widening—

Recognition flashed across her face, and she spun back to the open doorway and continued firing into it. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “It’s here!”

“Fuck!” the man said as he stumbled into the stairwell, firing his entire magazine into the floor at full-auto. The man spun around, saw him, and shouted, “We’re fucked, pal!”

“Go,” he hissed.

“Go where?”

“Down.”

“Down?”

“Down!” he shouted, grabbing the man by the jacket collar and jerking him down the steps. It took all of his self-control not to throw the man like a sack of useless flesh, because it would have been so, so easy.

The woman didn’t need any encouragement; she raced down the steps, and they locked eyes for half a heartbeat as she passed him.

“Go,” he hissed.

She went, reloading from a pouch around her waist as she did so.

“Come on!” the man shouted from below.

“Go!” he hissed.

The man gave him a confused look.

“We’ll meet again!” he shouted.

The man might have nodded, but by then he had turned around to face the open door and the twentieth floor beyond.

They had broken through the windows—or, at least, the ones who had survived the climb up the side of the buildings. How many others hadn’t made it up and were still falling, splattering one by one against the sidewalks below? The survivors were now crawling over their dead and toward him.

“There you are,” the familiar voice said inside his head.

He grabbed the first black-eyed ghoul that reached him around the neck and smashed it into the wall, its frail bones crumbling under its skin like twigs. He felt no satisfaction in hearing the crack of its limbs, the snap of its neck. There might have even been some strange surge of sadness, but he passed that off to Mabry invading his mind, trying to slow him down with his words.

“I told you I’d find you again.”

He used the flopping creature as a weapon, hitting one, two, three more of the monsters as he pushed into the floor, leaving the stairwell behind. The taste of silver lingering in the air—still embedded in the twisted bodies of dead ghouls on the floor—threatened to overwhelm him, but he thought of the alternative and kept going.

“There is no safety. No sanctuary.”

He waded through the throng of flesh and bone and squealing things, striking and pushing and punching and kicking what he could. They were like children, grabbing at his legs and trying to cling to his arms. Bony fingers clutched at his elbows and knees and snaked around his throat in an attempt to impede his progress.

“Nowhere that I can’t find you again and again and again.”

They had stopped trying to reach the stairwell behind him, their pursuit of the man and woman forgotten because he was their singular purpose, their goal. Mabry’s voice rushed through his head as it did theirs, because his blood flowed through all their veins. What they saw, he saw. What he commanded, they did.

“Embrace what you are. What you’ve become.”

He grabbed another one by the throat and began using it as a battering ram. He smashed skull into skull, leaping over grasping arms, and snapped limbs as he landed. A chest caved under him and covered him in black liquid from head to toe. His vision began to darken as fluids that weren’t his own splashed his eyes.

“You have so much potential. We could do so much together in the years to come…”

Bony fingers continued scraping against the brick and mortar outside the building, signaling that more of them were coming. Too many. Always too many. Hands appeared out of the darkness and grappled onto the windowsills, pulling up rail-thin creatures with accusing black eyes.

“The decades to come…”

Blood gushed around him, splattering every part of his moving form in thick chunks. Theirs. His. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

“…the centuries…”

His vision had all but disappeared, forcing him to glimpse the far wall across the floor through a black fog that was quickly darkening further and further still.

“You can’t save her. You can barely save yourself.”

He wanted to give in, to let Mabry’s voice wash over him. Every ounce of his being longed to embrace the everything, and the nothing. It would be so easy; all he had to do was stop moving, stop snapping the necks of the weak things pushing against him. All he had to do was stop punching his fists through their skulls and caving in their already shrunken chests. They screamed soundless words as he tossed them aside and kicked them across the room.

“Give in,” Mabry said, his voice soothing, comforting.

And still they came, an unrelenting tide of shriveled dark flesh and dead black eyes. They filled the floor, scrambling over cubicles, the stampede of bare feet tap-tap-tapping against the bloodied tiles.

“Come home.”

He dropped the shattered bones he’d been using as weapons and leaped. Outstretched fingers brushed against his legs and arms, every one of them inches from finding purchase, just before he smashed into the top half of one of the windows and burst out into the night air.

The kiss of the wind, cool against his flesh, made him gasp with surprise.

It had been a while since he actually felt the weather; it was always a constant balance of cold and heat, the incongruity fighting for dominance over him. Inside him. Outside him. Everywhere. It was easier not to feel at all.

But it was different this time. Tonight. Because he was flying, and the building across the street appeared, rushing toward him in a blur.

How far?

Close.

How did it get so close?

Then a figure flickered against a long stretch of glass curtain wall, a bright pool of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds above him at last, highlighting a bony creature of black skin and gleaming blue eyes, the dirty and torn fabrics of a faded brown trench coat fluttering behind it like some kind of cape.

For a second—just a split second—he remembered how to smile, before shattering glass filled his eardrums and pain stabbed through him like a thousand spears.

Pain. Overwhelming, glorious pain.

“Pain lets you know you’re still alive,” someone had once said.

He couldn’t remember who had said it, but it would come to him eventually, like it always did.

2

Gaby

It was pitch dark and she could barely make out Nate’s outline on the bench next to her, though she could hear his soft breathing just fine. And there was his scent, which she had become familiar with over the last few weeks. It would have almost been romantic if they weren’t squeezed into the back of a van parked out in the open along a curb in a Texas town that was, at this very moment, infested with ghouls.

Across from them Danny was whispering, small clouds forming around his outline with every word.

“…he stops at a Wallbys pharmacy and runs up to the counter and says, out of breath, ‘Mister, mister, you got any condoms?’ The pharmacist smiles knowingly and grabs a pack and rings it up. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ he asks. ‘Girl?’ the guy says. ‘There’s no girl.’ The pharmacist looks confused, then realizes, ‘Ah! It’s the twenty-first century!’ ‘Lucky guy, I mean,’ the pharmacist corrects himself. To which the guy flashes an embarrassed grin and says, ‘It’s just me, I’m afraid.’ ‘But what do you need the condoms for, then?’ the pharmacist asks. ‘Well, I believe in safe sex,’ the guy answers.”

“I don’t get it,” Nate whispered.

“Because he believes in safe sex,” Danny said.

“I still don’t get it.”

“No?”

Nate shook his head. Or, at least, Gaby saw the shape of his head moving slightly left then right as he did his very best to move as little as possible.

Danny looked over at her, blue eyes barely visible in the suffocating darkness. “You get it?”

Gaby smiled back at him. “I got it.”

“That’s my girl. What say we ditch this buzzkill? He’s really bringing me down.”

“He’ll come around.”

“Yeah, I’ll come around,” Nate said. Then, softly, “As soon as you get funnier.”

“I heard that,” Danny said.

“You were supposed to.”

Nate’s head was turned in her direction, and they exchanged a smile. They were close enough that she was reasonably certain he could see her response. Of course, it was so dark in the back of the van with the grime covering up the front windshield to their right and the two smaller back windows behind them, that it was entirely possible she was wrong. It didn’t help that all three of them had taken up positions in the darkest parts of the vehicle.

A van. They were riding out the night in a van. She would have preferred a stronger hideout. Anything, in fact, but a vehicle in the middle of an open street. Not that they’d had any choice. Fleeing Hellion with daylight running out hadn’t helped; neither had all the movements inside the buildings they’d checked. It seemed as if there was a ghoul inside every single one of them.

So it was a van or nothing. She just hoped it was enough to avoid—

Whump! as something landed on the rooftop above her. That was quickly followed by the tap-tap of bare feet moving from the back of the van toward the front. Slowly, as if it had all the time (night) in the world.

Gaby slowly—oh so slowly—extended one finger and flicked off the safety on the M4 rifle in front of her. The soft click! sounded so much louder inside the close confines of the vehicle, though she passed that off as her imagination playing tricks with her.

Probably.

She slipped her left hand around the pistol grip underneath the carbine’s barrel and tightened it, feeling the leather fingerless gloves constricting against the cold object. Next to her, just a few inches down the bench, Nate’s breathing picked up slightly. Not a lot, but enough that she noticed. She couldn’t tell what Danny was doing across from them, but his head looked slightly tilted up toward the ceiling, so he had heard the creature landing and moving around up there as well.

There was a clicking sound in her right ear, followed by Danny’s voice, whispering through the earbud connected to the radio clipped to her hip. “Just one. We’ll sit still as mice and let them pass us by. No muss, no fuss, you can keep your virgin daughters, Gus.”

She uncurled her fingers from around the pistol grip and moved it a bit to the left, found the Push-To-Talk switch, and clicked it with as much deliberate speed as she could muster. “Roger that.”

She glanced over at one of the two back windows—one-by-one foot glass panes covered in a thick film of dirt and time and the elements. Without anything brighter than the moon outside, there was no chance of seeing out, and vice versa. She flexed her fingers to keep the blood circulating, because the last thing she needed right now was to go numb—

Whump! as the creature leaped off the roof and there was just the silence again.

Close one.

They waited to hear more sounds of ghouls outside. The creatures traveled in groups, and where there was one, there were usually more. Sometimes a lot more.

One minute became two, then three…

…five…

Click, then Danny’s voice in her right ear. “Well, that was a close one. Now, as I was saying, why don’t we dump the Natester here? He’s just dragging us down, what with his inability to understand a perfectly serviceable joke and that stupid haircut.”

“Hey,” Nate said.

“No thanks, I already ate,” Danny said. “Also, I’m not a horse, though I’ve been confused with an ass once or twice…”

* * *

Wilden, Texas, was 240 square miles of unincorporated land and sat peacefully under the morning sun. To look at it from a distance, as they had while rushing by it on State Highway 105, thankful to just be alive after the mess in Hellion, she hadn’t thought there was anything worth salvaging. The hour or so they had spent looking had proven her correct. Not that they’d actually gone into most of the buildings; there were plenty of signs that they were occupied, and had been for the better part of a year.

The town was dead in more ways than one, but there was nothing wrong with the embracing warmth of morning. She spent a moment basking in the rays of sunlight, thankful to be in Texas. The state was never known for its cold winters, but the temperature dropped enough at night that she was glad for the extra thermal clothing they had on under their vests, and there was enough of a constant breeze in the daylight that she remained comfortable without having to add or remove layers.

Last night’s impromptu refuge was parked on the curb of FM 163, a long stretch of two-lane road (with a very generous middle) flanked by the occasional houses, and surrounded by vast farmland. In another few years, the grass would overtake the man-made structures and there wouldn’t be much of Wilden left for passersby to see. In time this place would be forgotten, and maybe them with it.

That’s it, happy thoughts in the morning. Way to go, girl.

The van creaked up and down behind her as Danny climbed out. He stretched, making way too much noise, then rubbed his eyes before taking a long drink of water from a refilled bottle.

“Are we there yet?” he asked.

Gaby pulled a map out of one of the pockets along her stripped-down assault vest and held it up to the sunlight. “We should be there within the day. You said the road gets bumpy when we’re closer?”

“Sure, bumpy, as long as your definition of ‘bumpy’ is ‘potholes from hell.’ Then yup, it definitely gets a little bumpy.”

“I guess we should add better suspension to the list of things to look out for,” Nate said, appearing from the front of the van. The sight of his absurd Mohawk never failed to make her smile, and a part of her thought that was why he insisted on keeping it.

Nate wore the same rig as Danny and her—vest over long-sleeve thermal clothing, loose cargo pants to hold more than just the essentials, and all-purpose boots. They had brought along pump-action shotguns to complement their M4s, with the rest of their load devoted to ammo, though they had less now than when they had started off. She hoped they wouldn’t need the remaining rounds, but someone once told her to always hope for the best and prepare for the worst, a mantra she’d found immensely useful these days.

Danny reached back into the van, pulled out his tactical pack, and swung it on. “Sounds about right. Start looking around for Grave Digger, kids.”

“Grave Digger?” Gaby said.

“The monster truck?”

She shook her head.

“It’s famous,” Danny said. “Like, world famous and shit. It crushes cars and opponents’ spirits. Like me.”

Gaby and Nate exchanged a blank look.

“Ugh, kids,” Danny grunted. “Get off my lawn.”

* * *

“How much of the sweet stuff we got left, kid?” Danny asked as he climbed out of the Dodge.

He had spent the last ten or so minutes inside, talking on the ham radio with the Trident, letting them know the three of them were still in one piece and that the “expedition,” as Lara called it, was still on track.

Gaby stood up in the truck bed, where she had been counting the remaining red fuel cans hidden underneath a heavy tarp. “Six left, five gallons per. So thirty in all. Should get us to Starch, but I don’t know about getting back.” She made a face. “Your math was off, Danny. We spent way too much fuel getting just this far.”

“Miss Candy always did say I sucked at math. It probably didn’t help we got bogged down in Hell Town.”

“Hellion.”

“Same difference.”

“So how are we getting back?”

“We’ll find a way. Ranger motto: ‘Always be prepared.’”

“Isn’t that the Boy Scouts’ motto?”

“That’s just what we let them think.” Danny put his hands on his hips and glanced around at their surroundings. “Could have definitely picked a better place. This must be what they mean when they say two-horse town. Minus the horses.”

“Could be worse.”

“How’s that?”

“We could be dead.”

“Sure, there’s that.”

She smirked. “What did Lara say?”

“They had to detour south temporarily, but they’ll be back in time to pick us up when we’re ready. In the meantime, we’re to proceed as planned.”

“Why are they heading south?”

“Keo.”

She smiled. “Good to know he’s still kicking around out there.”

“The guy’s like a cockroach. When you least expect it, he pops up and poops on your food.”

“Ugh. Thanks for the visual.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How’s everyone else?”

“They’re on a luxury yacht, kid. Don’t waste your time worrying about them. Spend it worrying about me. And your boyfriend with the funky haircut.”

She jumped down from the Dodge and looked around at the vehicles inside the parking lot of Wilden Middle School. Mostly trucks, and they had been sitting in the sun for the last year. All the evidence pointed to the town’s residents converging here when The Purge hit—not that it had saved them. Even though they hadn’t gone into the building, Gaby already knew what they would find if they did.

Leaving the Dodge here, half a mile from the van where they had spent the night, was a calculated move. Mixed in with the old cars it was easy to miss, unless the ghouls spent a lot of time counting vehicles. Could they even count? The creatures weren’t stupid or mindless; far from it, even if they appeared to be at times—especially when there were so many of them that they looked like a singular entity coming at you. There was a basic, almost primal intelligence to them that had allowed them to survive and thrive. They were “dead, not stupid,” as Will liked to say. Not stupid, no, but they could be fooled.

“Where’d your boyfriend run off to?” Danny asked.

“Looking for our ride.”

“Still?”

“It’s only been thirty minutes, Danny.”

“Feels like thirty-one.”

“What about these vehicles?”

Danny shook his head, then pointed. “That one’s too small, that one’s too big, and that one’s way too pink. Why would you paint your car pink in Hickstown, USA?”

“To be daring?”

“Stupid is more like it.”

She sighed. “We should have stayed clear of Hellion, Danny. Then the truck would still be in one piece and we wouldn’t need to look for a replacement.”

“We should have done a lot of things. For instance, dating a guy without a Mohawk. Personally, that would have been at the top of my list.”

“Nate has his moments.”

“Is one of them the Mohawk?”

“One of many,” she smiled.

Her (and Danny’s) right ear clicked, and they heard Nate’s voice. “Found one.”

“Speak of the devil, and he shall radio in,” Danny said.

Gaby ignored him and pressed her Push-to-Talk switch, said into her throat mic, “Where are you?”

“About a mile from your spot,” Nate said. “Past the VFW building. Got a couple of hogs here, too, in case you’re interested.”

“Yum,” Danny said.

“Not those kinds of hogs. Motorcycles.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.”

“What’s the replacement truck look like?” Gaby asked.

“Burnt orange, large tires, and a gun rack in the back,” Nate said.

“I think I’m in love,” Danny said. “Stay there; we’ll come to you.”

“Roger that.”

Danny grinned wryly at her. “I guess he’s not useless, after all.”

“Told you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She circled around the truck, passing a pair of bullet holes in the side, a broken taillight, and craters in the tailgate that hadn’t been there when they had found the Dodge back at Port Arthur. All of the damage had occurred as they passed a town called Hellion about thirty miles down the state highway.

Definitely should have steered clear of the place. Even the name sounds like trouble.

She tried to think of the bright side—they had made it out of there alive, for one—as she climbed into the driver seat, the door creaking badly as she pulled it closed. Danny slid in next to her, his boots crunching broken glass on the floor. Most of those shards came from his shattered door window, though plenty had fallen loose from the spiderwebbed front windshield.

Gaby turned the key and the ten-year-old Dodge struggled to turn over, and for a brief moment she envisioned the two of them carrying the six remaining five-gallon cans over to Nate’s position. And of course they’d have to take the car battery with them. All of that, while walking under the morning sun—

Vroom! as the car finally turned over.

“We’re on our way now,” Danny said, his voice echoing inside her ear and inside the cab. “You said burnt orange?”

“Yup,” Nate answered. “My dad had something like it back in Louisiana. Except his was white.”

“That’s all very fascinating, Natepoleon, but I didn’t ask for your life story,” Danny said.

“Cut him a break, Danny,” Gaby said.

“Oh, relax. I’m just busting his balls so you can ride in and massage them for him.”

“Ugh,” she said.

“Yeah, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth, too,” Danny sighed.

* * *

Nate had found a Ford F-150 truck in the parking lot of a feed store further up FM 163. The morning was crisp and cool enough that Gaby was glad she couldn’t smell whatever was being stored in a pair of red barns behind the main building. If there was anything in there besides ghouls, anyway.

The truck still looked relatively new and Nate was sitting on the hood, shotgun slung over his back and M4 in his lap, waiting for them. He was beaming as she pulled off the road, turned around, and then backed up until she was parked parallel to the Ford.

“What do you think?” Nate asked, hopping down.

“Not bad, for an idiot with a Mohawk,” Danny said.

“Lay off the hair. Chicks dig it.” He smiled at her. “Right?”

“Eh,” Gaby said, climbing into the back of their truck.

Danny began transporting their equipment from the Dodge over to the Ford, including switching the battery over, while she lowered one of the gas cans down to Nate, who poured it into the F-150’s gas tank. It took thirty minutes before they could pile into the new truck, ready to leave Wilden behind.

Gaby settled in behind the wheel and adjusted her driver-side mirror, then rolled down the window. She put the car in gear and maneuvered out of the parking lot and back onto the road, heading west. Danny occupied the front passenger seat, while Nate sat in the back with their supplies. They had brought enough to get to Starch and back, and a little bit more just in case they ran into trouble.

Another one of your lessons, Will. ‘Just in case.’

“Starch?” she asked.

“Starch,” Danny nodded.

He unfolded a map in his lap, though she didn’t know why. From here, it was as simple as locating the state highway and driving until they ran into US 59, after which it was a straight shot up to Starch. She had eyeballed her own map so many times she was sure she could reach their destination by memory.

“Are we still sure it’s going to be there when we show up?” Nate asked from the backseat.

“It’s an underground bunker,” Danny said. “It’s not going to dig itself up and fly off.”

“I’m more concerned about what’s inside it. Who’s to say someone else didn’t stumble across it after you left? It’s been, what, a year since you guys abandoned it?”

“Give or take.”

“Yeah, so, what if all of this is for nothing?”

Danny folded the map back up and put it away. “Then you’ve just been on the best field trip of your life. You’re welcome.”

Nate grunted, and Gaby smiled.

“Should have brought marshmallows,” Nate said.

“That’s the spirit,” Danny said. He leaned around in his seat and smiled back at Nate. “Wanna hear a joke?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Old man is sitting in the park one day,” Danny said, as if Nate hadn’t said anything, “waiting for someone to play chess with him. This super hot woman in a red dress walks by and the old coot shouts at her, ‘Hey, hot thing, you wanna play chess?’ The woman stops and looks at him, puts her hands on her hips, and says—”

Danny stopped in mid-sentence.

“What?” Nate said. “What did the woman say?”

“Shhh,” Danny said, holding up his hand.

Nate went quiet.

“Stop the car,” Danny snapped.

Gaby stepped on the brake, but Danny had already unbuckled his seat belt and jumped out of the F-150 before she had come to a complete stop. She glanced back at Nate and saw him looking after Danny’s figure as he raced from the front to the back.

Nate turned back to her. “What the hell?”

She shook her head and threw open her car door, Nate doing the same behind her. She hadn’t taken a complete step out of the truck when she heard it. Or maybe she felt it first. It could have very well been both simultaneously.

The country road actually seemed to be vibrating as it appeared, and it was impossible to miss its gray belly against the clear morning sky.

A plane.

Not just any plane, but a warplane.

It blasted overhead, the sound unlike anything she remembered—until she realized it had been almost a year since she’d seen a plane in the sky, much less been close enough that her teeth chattered slightly as it went by. By the time she had turned her head, it was already behind her and getting smaller. If the pilot had seen her or Nate, or Danny at the back of the F-150, it hadn’t shown it by stopping or turning.

She unslung her rifle on instinct and flicked off the safety, belatedly realizing how dumb the move was. What exactly did she think she was going to do against that? Shoot it?

The plane was fast, but her perception of its initial speed was off because it had been such a long time since she had seen planes in the air. All this time, they had wondered what had happened to the U.S. Air Force. Or the Army. Hell, all those weeks on the ocean without a single sign of the U.S. Navy had been disheartening for everyone, so much so that they simply stopped talking about it one day because the conversation always became so depressing.

And she was definitely looking at some kind of military plane. Even a civilian like her, who had never been anywhere close to a warplane, could make out the very distinctive shapes of bombs under the craft’s fixed wings. Or were those missiles of some type?

“Shit,” Nate said. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Warthog,” Danny said, walking back to them.

“I’ve never seen one of those live before.”

“Warthog?” Gaby said.

“A-10 Thunderbolt,” Danny said. “I haven’t seen one since Afghanistan. Word of advice: If you hear something that sounds like Godzilla blowing a massive fart, run and hide while you still can, though the chances are it’s already too late.”

The plane had kept going until she could barely make out its shape in the distance. Gaby wasn’t entirely sure what she was feeling at the moment. Maybe elation at the sight of the aircraft, quickly followed by massive disappointment that it had kept going as if she, Nate, and Danny didn’t exist at all.

“You think it saw us?” she asked.

“Definitely,” Danny said. “We’re the only things moving down here for miles. The pilot’d have to be blind not to see us, and last time I checked, Uncle Sam doesn’t let blind folks fly his warplanes.”

“Uncle Sam,” Nate said, looking at Danny. “You don’t think…?”

“That the U.S. government’s back in play?” Danny shrugged. “I’ll be honest with you kids. I don’t know if I want that to be true or not.”

“Why not?” Gaby asked.

“Because it’s been a year since everything went tits up, and the Uncle Sam that shows up now isn’t going to be the one I remembered. Or necessarily want.”

Gaby pulled out her map and laid it on the truck’s warm hood, the engine still churning underneath the paper. She glanced down at it, then in the direction the plane had gone.

“Where’s it headed?” Nate asked. “Starch?”

“If it keeps going in that direction and turns right,” Gaby said. “But why would it be headed there? No one knows we’re out here.” She looked back at Danny. “Right?”

He nodded. “Last time I checked.”

“So what’s it doing out here?” Nate asked, looking in the direction of the plane.

Danny opened his mouth to answer, but he hadn’t gotten a word out when they heard something that sounded like a mechanical roar in the distance. It was a long string of noises, so distinctive and loud that even though it had clearly originated miles away, they could still hear it as if it were right in front of them.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

“Danny,” Gaby said, breathless. “What the hell is that?”

“The Warthog,” Danny said, looking off into the distance. “That thing I said about Godzilla farting? That wasn’t a joke. That’s it right there. That’s the sound of an A-10 raining death and destruction with 30mm Gatling guns.”

The pavement under her trembled as another long string of brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! filled the sky, like the bellowing of a great beast that had finally awakened after a long slumber.

3

Lara

“Lara.”

Will was back. Finally. After all the days and weeks of fearing the worst and almost giving up, he was finally here and calling her name, just as she knew he would if she waited long enough. It was all about faith, after all; not so much in things working out, but in Will keeping his promise because she knew he would if there was even an ounce of strength left in his body.

Thank God you’re back. You had me worried there for a moment.

“Lara, you there?”

No. It wasn’t Will. It was familiar, but it wasn’t Will.

She opened her eyes and blinked against the bright sunlight pouring through an open window. She had rolled into the rays’ path, somehow moving from one side of the bed to the other during the night without realizing it.

“Lara.”

She glanced at the two-way portable radio sitting atop the nightstand.

“Lara,” Blaine’s familiar gruff voice said through the radio. “You awake yet? There’s something you need to see.”

She leaned over, picking up the radio and pressing the transmit lever. “What is it?”

“It’s a body.”

“Did you say a body?”

“Yeah. Showed up along with this morning’s currents.”

“I’ll be right there.”

She threw the covers off and stumbled out of bed with the radio in one hand. A cool breeze from the window kept her from (mostly) having to smell yesterday’s clothing, still clinging to her. Falling asleep fully dressed was nothing new; if anyone ever noticed, no one said anything.

“Has Keo made contact yet?” she said into the radio while standing between the bed and the small bathroom on the other side of the captain’s cabin.

“Haven’t heard a peep from him since yesterday,” Blaine said. “Bad sign?”

“It’s still early.”

In the bathroom, she splashed her face with cold water from the sink, then gave herself a quick glance in the mirror. Puffy eyes. Dry hair. Pale and slightly cracked lips to complement dangerously tanned skin. Even the blue of her eyes looked duller than usual.

The boat was quiet around her, like it always was early in the morning. Even more so these days with Danny, Gaby, and Nate gone.

Because I sent them out there. Would you have done the same thing, Will?

She wiped her face with a towel and left the cabin. She found Blaine at his post inside the bridge, standing behind the helm even though the Trident was anchored in place.

Lara shivered a bit despite her thermal clothing, the December air ventilating from the open sky roof much chillier than the breeze inside her cabin. Fortunately there was always plenty of sun up here in this part of the boat. Blaine, who practically lived on the Upper Deck these days, didn’t seem to mind or even feel the lower temperature.

“Showed up a few hours ago,” Blaine said. “I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but the waves kept bringing it closer.”

Lara picked up a pair of binoculars from the dashboard and peered through it. She had to take a couple of steps to one side to see past the holes that dotted the windshield, the result of stray buckshot. One of these days they’d get around to replacing the glass, but that day was still far off.

“See it?” Blaine asked.

It was hard to miss even from a distance, because it was the only black thing in the clear blue Gulf of Mexico waters for miles around. The body was wearing some kind of black uniform. Now where had she seen that before?

“Collaborator?” she asked. “I can’t make out the pattern of the uniform from here.”

“Could be.”

“Danny said the ones in Texas wear black. That looks black to me.” She lowered the binoculars. “How far are we from the coastline?”

“Still twenty miles out. But it didn’t come from Sunport.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. It’s been steadily drifting westward—from the east.”

“Farther out to sea?”

“Uh huh.”

“Could be part of a long-range boat patrol. Maybe it capsized. What was the weather like last night?”

“Like this morning, but just a bit windier.” He paused for a moment, maybe replaying last night’s conditions in his head to be sure. “Even if Mother Nature did that, it doesn’t explain what it’s doing this far out.”

Blaine’s voice was calm, as if seeing a uniformed body floating all the way out here, with no obvious point of origin, happened every day. It didn’t, but after all she—they—had been through, this wasn’t even at the top of their WTF list.

She watched the corpse drift nearer, completely at the mercy of the waves that kept it afloat. If the Trident hadn’t been anchored, it might have washed right past them. It certainly would have last night in the dark. If she had learned one thing since being out here, it was that the vastness of the ocean was not to be underestimated.

“If there was a collaborator boat out here last night, they might have been communicating through the radio,” she said. “Did you hear anything?”

“Not a peep.”

“You were up here all night?”

“Maddie relieved me after midnight.”

She stared at the blackened body in silence for a moment, its presence triggering alarm bells. They had done everything possible to avoid running across civilization since Song Island, opting instead to keep their heads down. Sending Danny, Gaby, and Nate back out there hadn’t been easy. It had cost her a lot of sleepless nights, and she wasn’t the only one suffering.

“Speaking of the radio,” Blaine said, “not a peep from the expedition yet.”

She glanced down at her watch: 7:45 a.m. “They’ll radio in when they’re awake.”

“You think they’re still asleep?”

“Time works differently out there.” She unclipped her radio and pressed the transmit lever. “Maddie.”

“What’s up?” Maddie answered.

“You see it?”

“Hard to miss. That’s a uniform, right?”

“Looks like it. Grab Benny and bring it in.”

“Sweet,” Maddie said. “A can of SPAM for breakfast, and I get to fish a body out of the water. Best morning evah.”

* * *

Lara stood at the back of the Lower Deck, bracing against the bite of a hard wind and trying not to catch the cold that Elise and Vera had come down with a few days ago, a condition that kept the girls mostly confined to their rooms on the Main Deck. She watched Maddie deftly maneuver the inflatable boat toward them, with Benny sitting at the stern and the body they had fished out of the water just a black, indistinguishable lump around his legs. The tender was nineteen feet long, and it bounced against the active waves.

“Ah, the smell of rotting corpses in the morning,” a voice said. “Now this is the life.”

“Don’t exaggerate; it’s just one corpse,” Lara said.

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” Carly said, walking up next to her.

Her friend shaded her eyes and peered at the approaching boat. Carly’s hair had turned a darker shade of red since they had begun living on the yacht, and, like everyone else, she had developed a noticeable tan.

“By the way, when was the last time you changed clothes?” Carly asked.

Lara sighed. “Don’t start with me.”

“I’m just saying. As our fearless leader, you should at least comport yourself in a more scent-friendly manner.”

“‘Comport’?”

“What, didn’t I use it correctly?”

“Eh,” she shrugged.

“Give me a break; I didn’t have any fancy educumacallit,” Carly said. Then, “Speaking of illiterate ne’er-do-wells, when are we picking up Keo?”

Lara smiled. “He hasn’t radioed in yet.”

“That’s not good.”

“That seems to be the consensus.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions. He said they had a good place to stay last night. He could have just run into some trouble making his way to the beach this morning. Maybe a dead battery or something minor like that. The small things have a way of ballooning into big deals these days.”

“I guess he deserves the benefit of the doubt, being that he sort of saved our bacon a few times and all.”

“He said he’s been taking a lot of precautions since Galveston.”

“Undead trouble?”

“Them, too.”

“That’s K-pop for ya. Guy knows how to get himself into trouble, doesn’t he?”

“He’s not the only one.”

She owed Keo. They all did, but her in particular. In the first few weeks after Song Island, there were times when she hadn’t thought she would be able to keep it together, keep everyone together. Danny’s condition, Will’s absence, and the chaos of the gun battle had all made her doubt every decision she made. If Keo hadn’t been there…

You would have liked him, Will.

“You think it’s a good idea bringing it onboard?” Carly asked, squinting her eyes at the tender as it drew closer to the Trident’s aft. “What if it has diseases or something? The kids are already sick.”

“We’ll keep it away from the others, find out what we can, then toss it back into the ocean when we’re done.”

“Tough boat,” Carly chuckled. Then, turning around, “You kids have fun. I’m going to the bridge to wait for Danny to call in.”

* * *

“That’s a shark,” Zoe said, pointing at what was left of the man’s right leg—a stump that ended at the knee. “The missing fingers are fish nibbles. And these two—” she pointed first at the man’s cheek, then his neck “—are your department.”

“Gunshot wounds,” Lara said, looking down at the two small holes barely visible against the rest of the man’s bloated flesh, which was pretty much every part of him that wasn’t covered up by clothing.

The man wore some kind of urban assault vest, and water still drained from his empty ammo pouches long after they brought him on deck. A tactical gun belt with an empty holster sagged against his waist and thigh, the Velcro starting to lose its effectiveness after being drowned in the ocean for so long. There were two hollow slits where his eyes used to be, though he still had most of his left ear and the bridge part of his nose. There was a knee guard on his remaining leg and his black cargo pants were shredded, the tears revealing glistening pale skin on the other side.

“He’s not dressed like a collaborator,” Maddie said. “No patches or name tags.”

“Looks like a commando or something,” Benny said.

Maddie and Benny had deposited the body on the slick swimming pool area at the back of the yacht. Zoe was crouched next to it now, holding a rag against her mouth and nose. Lara wished she had been that forward thinking. The body was bloated and had been in the water long enough that the face was deformed and fleshy and looked as if it would melt off if she so much as touched it. Zoe did all of her prodding with a pair of surgical gloves.

“How long do you think it’s been in the water, doc?” Maddie asked.

Zoe stood up, pulled the rag back, and took a breath of fresh air. “Hard to tell. The cold water probably kept it together longer than normal, and there’s still gas in the body, which resulted in floating, so if I had to guess…” She thought about it for a moment. “Anywhere from a few days to a week?”

“Why didn’t the sharks finish it off?” Benny asked.

“Contrary to what you see on TV, humans aren’t very high on a shark’s menu. There are a lot more manageable and easier-to-digest prey in the ocean. Imagine trying to eat a whole cow when there are burgers all around you.”

“Which still leaves us with a lot of questions,” Maddie said. “What happened to the poor sap, who was he, and where did he come from?”

“Well, Sunport’s the closest city,” Benny said.

“It didn’t come from Sunport,” Maddie said. “Blaine said it was moving with the currents from farther out.”

“It couldn’t have come from very far,” Zoe said. “When he was shot, he sank, then the gas raised him back up to the surface and the waves finally brought him to us.”

“A ship, maybe?” Maddie said. “We always wondered who else was out here besides us. I mean, it’s a big ocean. There’s got to be more people, right? Before us, there was Gage and his friends.”

“Maybe it’s the Navy,” Benny said. He sounded almost hopeful. “He really does look like some kind of commando. Maybe the U.S. Navy is still out there somewhere.”

“For some reason, he doesn’t look military to me,” Maddie said.

“Then maybe he’s from those Bengal Islands that Keo talked about. He said there were a lot of people there.”

“The clothes he’s wearing, the gunshots…” Maddie shook her head. “It had to have been one hell of a gunfight.”

“I still think it’s the military,” Benny said. “Blaine and I talked about it a lot, about what happened to all the Navy ships that were caught out here when everything went down. The aircraft carriers, battleships and destroyers, all those guys. They had to have gone somewhere.”

“It’s been a year,” Maddie said. “If they’re still out there, we would have heard from them by now, don’t you think?”

“What about the one in Colorado?” Zoe asked. “Carly said there was a colonel hiding in a mountain somewhere.”

“Beecher,” Maddie nodded. “We made contact with him on the radio.”

“What did he say about the rest of the military?”

“He knew as much as we did. Which wasn’t very much.”

There was a moment of silence until the others looked over at her. Maybe they finally realized she hadn’t said anything in a while.

“What’s the next play, boss?” Maddie asked. “It might be worth it to find out where this guy came from.”

“Maybe not,” Zoe said. “People with guns, wearing combat gear, running around out here shooting each other?” The doctor shook her head. “I’m not sure those are the kinds of people we’d necessarily want to cross paths with. Not now. Not after Song Island.”

“Doc’s got a good point,” Benny said.

They were still looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

What would Will do?

“Can you learn anything else from him?” she finally asked Zoe.

The older woman shook her head. “I don’t see the point. We know how he died. GSWs. Anything else he can tell us would be in his pockets.”

“Already went through them,” Maddie said. “Empty.”

“All right,” Lara said. “Throw him back into the ocean. Wherever he came from, however he got here, or what happened to him, let the Gulf keep his secrets. We have other things to worry about.”

* * *

She was in the captain’s cabin, looking at the same old heavily annotated map of the Gulf of Mexico spread out on a table, that she had been using since they boarded the Trident back on Song Island. She had circled Sunport, twenty miles in front of them at the moment, and Port Arthur, where Danny, Gaby, and Nate had made land a few days ago. If it hadn’t been Keo who had called, she would never have strayed far from Port Arthur. Just the idea of leaving the expedition behind to come south made her feel sick to her stomach.

This better be important, Keo.

If he was even still alive out there. The last time she had talked to him, he had given her the impression he and his companions were barely a step ahead of their pursuers. What if they had finally run out of luck?

She glanced at her watch. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but the silence from Keo nagged at her. Unlike Danny, who had already radioed in from some town called Wilden an hour ago, it was all quiet from the Keo front. The man was unpredictable and prone to rash decisions, but then again a lot of those questionable choices he’d made had been in her favor, so maybe she should be grateful—

A knock on the cabin door interrupted her thoughts.

“Come in,” she said.

Bonnie stepped inside in loose-fitting cargo pants and an olive thermal sweater, looking more like a soldier than even Benny or Blaine. Lara was still amazed by the transformation Bonnie had gone through since they first met on Song Island. Then again, she could probably say the same thing about all of them, including herself, though the others didn’t quite look at home with an M4 slung over their backs and a gun belt hanging off their hips. Bonnie did, and even managed to pull off the short haircut.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I heard Keo still hasn’t called yet,” Bonnie said.

“Not yet.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Bonnie walked over and leaned against the table, then stared down at the map even though Lara could tell it wasn’t her chicken scratch notes that were on the ex-model’s mind at the moment.

“What is it, Bonnie?” she asked.

“Carrie’s worried about him,” Bonnie said.

“Keo can handle himself. I’m more worried about the others.”

“The—what do you call it?”

“Expedition.”

“Right. The expedition. Are they okay?”

“Alive and well. I talked to Danny earlier.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“How’s everyone doing? I know I haven’t been moving through the decks as much as before.”

“Everyone’s good, doing their part. Don’t worry about us. You already have a lot on your mind.”

“So no secret meetings about overthrowing my rule?”

Bonnie chuckled. “Not since two weeks ago. You’re safe for at least another few days.”

“Good to hear.” She walked over to her small fridge in the corner and came back with two cold water bottles, handing one to Bonnie. “So why did you really come here?”

“That obvious, huh?”

Lara shrugged.

“It’s Gage,” Bonnie said.

Of course it would be Gage. She knew the man would come back to haunt her eventually. She had been dreading it, but at the same time knowing it was inevitable, that the sooner she dealt with it the easier she would be able to sleep at night.

Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.

“What about him?” Lara asked.

“After Carrie asked me to come see you about Keo, she told me that when she took Gage his breakfast this morning, she left his room with a bad feeling.”

“What did she say exactly?”

Bonnie paused for a moment. Then, “She couldn’t put it into words, just that he didn’t seem right. Like he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She left as soon as she could, but she hasn’t been able to shake it.”

She sighed.

Gage. The Trident’s former captain.

What would Will do?

“He’s been down there for a while,” Bonnie continued. “Long enough that I think he’s figured out by now we don’t need him to run the yacht anymore.”

She nodded, remembering the look on the man’s face when she took him off the bridge and gave the helm to Blaine. He knows, she remembered thinking at the time. His usefulness has come to an end, and he knows.

“What are you going to do?” Bonnie asked. There was a slight wavering in her voice, as if she was afraid to hear the answer.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lara said.

4

Keo

Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into. Shoulda taken the easy way out when you had the chance, pal. And you had a lot of chances, didn’t you?

Live and learn…maybe.

He expected ghouls in the shadows, but the floor was empty when he took his first tentative step outside the janitor’s closet at the end of the hallway, silver bullet-loaded M4 in front of him and one eye fixed behind the weapon’s red dot sight. The trigger felt good against his finger, and the warmth of morning sunlight was like a comforting embrace. The pain in his leg—the result of a bullet hole—had resurfaced thanks to last night’s mad dash; running for your life, apparently, didn’t contribute to the healing process.

Jordan moved quietly behind him, watching his six. They weren’t quite moving in stacking formation, but he could feel the fabric of her sweaty clothes every time she turned too quickly to sweep an open door or one of the (too many) hallways to their left and right. He was doing the same, watching and listening for signs of something to shoot, watching for things that didn’t belong, and doing his very best to shut out her persistent haggard breathing.

It took much longer to reach the stairwell than he would have liked. Either the floor had widened sometime last night, or they were moving very, very slowly. The feel of sunlight through the (Still intact, so that’s a good sign) windows to their right made him breathe just a little bit easier with every step.

The tiled floor showed signs of the dirt they had tracked in here last night and the cubicles they had run past still looked in one piece this morning. More importantly, he couldn’t smell them in the air. Even a floor this large wouldn’t have been able to hide the creatures’ stench, especially if there was more than one of them around, and there had definitely been more than one of them around last night.

So far, so good.

Keo couldn’t help it and grinned to himself.

Famous last words there, pal.

They remained silent (or at least they didn’t talk, but it was hard to stay completely quiet; their boots’ soles squeaked every so often against the dust-caked floor) during the trek until they finally arrived at the stairwell door.

Keo glanced back at Jordan, standing behind him pulling security. She looked over her shoulder, saw him, and nodded. Just a week of running around out here with her and they were already working like an (almost) well-oiled machine. In another month, he’d probably know what her sweat tasted like.

He turned back and pressed one ear against the warm stairwell door.

Five seconds…

Ten…

Nothing.

There was just stillness on the other side.

He looked back at Jordan, and she mouthed, “Anything?”

He shook his head before turning back around to the door. This time he put one hand on the doorknob, finding courage in the streams of sunlight splashing all the way across the floor and over half the door. It was surprisingly warm inside the building at the moment, but that could have just been thanks to his thick winter clothing.

“Go,” Ol’ Blue Eyes had hissed at him last night inside the stairwell.

“Go where?” Keo had responded.

“Down!” he had shouted.

And that was where he and Jordan had gone. They went down the stairs, expecting ghouls to appear from below at any moment. He kept waiting and waiting, but black eyes and the terrifying noise of stampeding bare feet never filled the enclosed space around them. There were only his and Jordan’s labored breathing and their pounding boots all the way down to—

The third floor. He didn’t know why he had chosen it. Maybe he didn’t trust his luck to last for thirty more feet. Or maybe he instinctively knew there wasn’t anything good waiting for them in the lobby. Certainly no escape from the building. If there were already ghouls inside, then there would be even more outside. A hell of a lot more. Every single creature that had been sniffing their trail for the last week ever since Santa Marie Island would be converging on the single building as soon as Jordan fired that first shot.

“We’ll meet again!” the blue-eyed ghoul had shouted. Or hissed. Though Keo sometimes thought the creature was making an effort to sound more human—

A nervous tap on his shoulder.

He glanced back at Jordan, who gave him a quizzical look.

“Ready?” he mouthed.

She retreated a few steps to give him room, then aimed her M4 at the door. Finally, she nodded. Keo took a long, solid breath, then made sure the sun was still splashing across the door. You could never be too careful when it came to sunlight these days.

Now.

He pulled the door open and swung it all the way to the side while he took three quick steps backward.

In the five seconds it took the door to fully open, hit the spring doorstop on the wall, and swing back in the other direction, a dozen ghouls piled inside the enclosed space in front of him had untangled their elongated limbs. He wasn’t sure if he saw surprise in their black eyes or heard squeals of delight, but he definitely smelled the acidic burn of vaporizing flesh as the sun hit them.

He fired into the door anyway—it was mostly just instinct, the need to shoot when presented with a target—and put a three-round burst into the center mass of the writhing blob of flesh. A round hit bone and ricocheted into another creature trying to come unglued from the mass around it. Ghouls shrieked as spilt black blood turn gray, then white, and limbs clattered to the hard concrete landing. The frontal half of a head vanished before his eyes—

The door closed back up with a solid click!

“Jesus Christ,” Jordan breathed next to him.

“Yeah,” Keo said. He wrinkled his nose at the stinging smell in the air and began breathing through his mouth. “I guess we’re not going in there.”

“Our supplies, they’re on the twentieth floor, Keo.”

“Uh huh.”

“The radio’s up there, too.”

“I know.”

“It took us forever to find that thing.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Goddammit,” Jordan said, and pursed her lips in frustration.

They took another couple of steps back from the door, just far enough to escape the gagging stench in the air, but still close enough to hear the movements from the other side. The sudden shift from deathly stillness to frantic activity seemed to be coming not just from in front of them, but also from below and above them, as if the entire building had come alive.

Despite the comforting feel of the sun against his back, Keo shivered unwittingly anyway. He never liked being this close to the undead things, and he didn’t think he would ever get used to it. He hoped he never got used to it, because the day that happened would also mean he was no longer operating at full readiness, and that was dangerous.

“Come on,” he said, and led her away.

They walked silently through two rows of cubicles, drawn irresistibly to the sunlight pouring in through the glass curtain wall on the other side of the floor.

“I guess it was too much to expect them to all follow Frank out of the building,” Keo said.

“‘Frank’?” Jordan said.

“Ol’ Blue Eyes.”

“You gave him a name? When did that happen?”

“Guy saved my life twice. The least I could do was call him something other than ‘it’.”

“Why Frank?”

“You know, because of what he is…was.”

Jordan looked blankly at him.

“Mary Shelley?” Keo said.

“Oh.” Then, “Not quite human anymore, but not quite…the other thing, either.” She flashed him an approving smile. “Clever. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

He shrugged. “It comes and goes.”

“Frank,” Jordan repeated. “I could think of worse names, I guess. It’s definitely better than Keo.”

“Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”

“You’re a tough guy, you can take it.”

“Still, everyone’s got their limits, Jordan.”

She snorted, then glanced up at the ceiling. “What did he say to you last night? When we were on the twentieth floor?”

“‘We’ll meet again.’”

“‘We’ll meet again’?”

“Uh huh.”

“That sounds…” She shivered instead of finishing.

“Yeah,” Keo said. “Still freaks me out a little, thinking about that promise.”

They finally reached the other side of the floor, where the windows were still in place, the creatures having somehow climbed all the way up to the twentieth floor while bypassing the rest. He guessed the brick-and-mortar walls outside had just enough handholds for things that didn’t care about falling. He remembered the surreal sight of them last night, plummeting out of the sky, arms and legs flailing, as he and Jordan raced through the floor in search of someplace to hide.

“You think he’s dead?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know. He’s survived before. T18, the island…”

“There were a hell of a lot more of them here last night, Keo.”

“He has a knack for surviving. It wouldn’t surprise me if he found a way out of here while we were hiding in the janitor’s closet.”

Keo pressed against a section of the dust-covered window and peered down at the sidewalks and streets below. Downtown Sunport was as quiet and still this morning as when they had reached its city limits yesterday evening.

He could see bones on the ground below—arms and legs, most of them still attached to the skeletal remains of ghouls that hadn’t been able to crawl their way out of the path of the rising sun after free-falling down the side of the building last night. The fall might not have killed them, but it had pulverized and shattered limbs, making escape difficult.

Jordan was staring back at the stairwell door across the floor. “How are we getting down?”

“We’ll improvise,” he said, and began backpedaling.

“What—” Jordan said, before realizing what he was doing, and hurried backward after him. “Geez, would it kill you to give me a heads up?”

“Heads up,” he said.

She smirked. “Jackass.”

Keo stopped about ten meters from the wall and stitched one of the windows with a three-round burst. He stopped firing and they listened to glass falling and shattering against the sidewalk below, the sound echoing across the city for a few seconds afterward. Cold wind flooded inside through the newly made hole, and Keo welcomed the fresh air into his lungs.

“Now what?” Jordan asked.

“Ladies first,” he said.

* * *

Three floors were better than twenty and were easily manageable once they pulled apart curtains from some of the offices and tied them together into a makeshift rope. He lowered Jordan down first, then followed.

The sidewalk was covered in bones, and the still-strong smell of vaporized blood and flesh stung his nostrils while he was coming down. It was worse once he reached the pavement, and he had to pull his shirt over his nose to stave off most of the stench. Jordan had already done likewise while waiting for him.

“How would we know if he made it or not?” she asked, her voice muffled through her shirt.

Keo walked into the middle of the street, maneuvering around a pair of stalled vehicles, including one with a caved-in roof from when a creature had fallen down on top of it, and looked up. He found the twentieth floor easily enough, thanks to the line of broken windows stretching from one end of the building to the other.

He tried to put himself in Frank’s shoes (bare feet?). Frank wasn’t limited by what a human body could do. Keo had seen that for himself three times now. The guy could take a beating, and the things he did defied the laws of physics. Hell, it defied the laws of nature.

The last time Keo had seen him, Frank was on the twentieth floor. Keo hadn’t understood what he was doing until he was squeezed into the janitor’s closet with Jordan, listening and waiting for an attack that never came.

It was Frank; it had always been Frank. They wanted him and Frank knew that, which was why he hadn’t followed them down. He gave the creatures what they wanted instead of leading them to Keo and Jordan. Himself.

That’s three times now you’ve saved my life.

Dammit. How do you even begin to repay someone who has saved your life not one, two, but three times? Keo wasn’t entirely sure he was looking forward to finding out the answer to that question.

“What are you looking at?” Jordan said behind him.

Keo eyeballed the twentieth floor, then turned and looked at the building facing it from across the street. The opposite structure was almost entirely all black marble but shorter at just fifteen stories.

Then he saw it and couldn’t help but grin.

“What?” Jordan said. “What are you grinning at like an idiot?”

“He fell short,” Keo said.

“Who?”

“Frank.” Keo pointed at a lone broken window on the fourteenth floor of the black marble building. “He was aiming for the rooftop but he had too far of a jump, and his trajectory dipped before he reached it. He’s fast—and shit, can he jump—but apparently even he has his limitations.”

Jordan stared at the single broken window on the fourteenth floor of the building across the street. “Are you saying he leapt from our building to that one? Keo, that’s—”

“Impossible?” Keo smiled. “Jordan, we’ve been walking around with a blue-eyed ghoul for the last week, trying to stay one step ahead of collaborators and undead things. ‘Impossible’ shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary anymore.”

* * *

Keo wasn’t surprised to find ghouls inside the lobby of the marble building. He could see them moving around in the shadowed parts through the windows, and he spent just as much time wondering how many were inside as he did ignoring the lingering smell of dead things in the streets around him.

“So I guess that’s out of the question,” Jordan said, standing next to him.

“Guess so.”

“What now?”

“How are you for ammo?”

She tapped the ammo pouches around her waist, then sighed.

“That much, huh?” he said.

“One more for the M4, and two for the Glock. You?”

“Same.”

She sneaked a look over her shoulder, back at the taller building they’d just climbed down from. “Our supplies are still up there, along with the radio.”

“The operative phrase being ‘up there.’”

“Maybe we can climb. Those things did.”

“And a lot of them went splat.”

“Good point.” She returned her gaze to the lobby in front of them. “You think he’s in there somewhere?”

“I don’t know. He had all night to fight his way out. He might not even be in the city anymore.”

“You really believe that?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Keo?”

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “How many were at Santa Marie Island? Two hundred tops? Last night was an entire city’s worth. That’s…a lot.”

“This thing, the one he calls Mabry,” Jordan said quietly, as if afraid the creature might hear her if she said the name too loudly. “It’s behind this. It wants him.”

Keo nodded. He didn’t like saying the name any more than she did. Hell, he didn’t even want to think it. The fact that Frank was uncomfortable saying the name out loud said it all.

If it can scare him…

He looked down the street, past the stalled vehicles and year-old trash left unattended by a city that had once been crowded with people. He could almost sniff the ocean water from here.

“They might be out there,” Jordan said. “Your friends.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working vehicle, so we won’t have to walk the entire way.”

Keo chuckled as they started up the street.

“What?” Jordan said. “One of us has to stay positive.”

“You’re doing a good job of it.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s your fault I’m here in the first place.”

“Hey, you didn’t have to tag along.”

“Right, like I had much of a choice after T18 and Santa Marie Island.”

“There was always Tobias.”

She sighed. “You’re right. I should have left with Tobias…”

* * *

Sunport, Texas, was an oil-based industry town, which meant groupings of oil refineries dotted the landscape as Keo and Jordan left the downtown area behind and took FM 1495 toward the beach. They had been walking ever since Santa Marie Island, picking their way south along the coastline. It had been a real pain in the ass with his gimpy leg, but eventually the wound became numbed enough on day three (or was it day four?) that he could walk without grimacing.

The sight (and sounds) of so many collaborators along the roads had slowed their progress, and traveling by night hadn’t been a good idea since the world ended. But just because he was used to walking didn’t mean he wouldn’t trade it all for a working vehicle at the first opportunity.

Once past the Sunport city limits, they found themselves flanked by heavy industry to their left and almost entirely undeveloped land to their right, with small streams snaking around wetlands. Although they’d passed plenty of homes and subdivisions on their way into town, there was very little of that out here. It took a while, but eventually Keo managed to steal glimpses of sunlight dancing off the surface of water in the distance.

The Gulf of Mexico awaited. And, if he was lucky, the Trident was anchored somewhere out there, close enough that they would be able to see him. Because, of course, he’d been very lucky these last few days.

Riiiiiight.

The highway gave way to small roads and the occasional motels, while palm trees replaced power poles. They slowed when they reached a two-story blue building advertising seafood and beach rental supplies that had a couple of trucks in the parking lot. They checked both vehicles but came up empty.

They cautiously entered the building—a combo restaurant and general store—and checked every shadowy corner and crevice, and under every table and counter. There was no familiar smell of ghoul occupancy, but you couldn’t always count on that kind of tell. They found rotting food in the kitchen but struck gold with a 12-count case of unopened water bottles in a back closet. Keo scrounged up a faded gym bag from one of the pantries that he then stuffed with eight of the bottles while Jordan found plastic bags and carried the remaining four in them.

Assured they weren’t going to die of thirst—which would have sucked, with all that undrinkable ocean saltwater mocking them—they continued to the beach. It took another two hours before Keo finally saw welcoming white sand. He was surprised to see cars parked on the dunes, but otherwise no signs of another living soul for miles. Keo ended up wasting about half a minute watching a crab navigating around the points of his boots.

“Food,” Jordan smiled.

“Give him a break; the guy’s just trying to get home.”

“When did you get so soft?”

He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now.”

When the crab was finally on its way, Keo slumped down on the sand and sighed with relief. The long walk from Sunport hadn’t done his healing wounds any favors, but he was an old hand at pushing through lingering pain. He unlaced his boots, pulled off his socks and stuck both feet into the warm, mushy beach floor. There were no palm trees in any direction, which was odd because they had passed rows of them on the road over.

Jordan sat down next to him and began massaging her toes. She opened one of the warm water bottles and finished it off before flinging it toward a trash barrel nearby, but the wind caught it before it even had a chance to hit its mark.

“Don’t mess with Texas,” Keo said.

“Huh?” she said.

“Isn’t that the state motto?”

“Texas can sue me.”

“I hear tort reform’s a big thing down here.”

The beach stretched for miles to both sides of them, with the only buildings he could see sprinkled in the distance to his left. Their right was almost entirely barren except for a couple of abandoned vehicles parked dangerously close to the water. If he just stared forward, he could almost fool himself into thinking that civilization didn’t exist at all out here.

Keo leaned back on his elbows and soaked in the sun, watching the endless waves of ocean foam attempting to reach up the beach about thirty meters in front of him. Blue skies hovered over the Gulf of Mexico, and there were few clouds to obscure the scenery. It was a hell of a sight, and he wouldn’t have minded a house out here for summer vacations.

“What do you think those trucks were doing out here?” Jordan said after a while.

“Sightseeing?”

“You think it’s worth taking the time to search them?”

“Be my guest.”

“Maybe later.”

Keo closed his eyes and listened to her breathing softly next to him. Jordan was sticky with sweat, but he thought she smelled just fine against the fresh ocean breeze.

“I can’t help but notice that I don’t see a luxury yacht anchored anywhere out there,” Jordan said. “How about you? You see a boat out there, Keo? Maybe it’s me. My parents had cataracts. Maybe I’m getting them, too.”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t see them.”

“So we’re screwed.”

“Even if they’re out there, we couldn’t see them anyway. We agreed they’d anchor twenty miles out to stay out of view. I was supposed to radio them when we reached the beach so they could swing by and pick us up.”

“Ah,” she said, almost wistfully, “the best-laid plans and blah blah blah.”

“It’s not all bad.”

“No?”

“We’re the only two souls on a beach, staring at a glorious sky and listening to waves crashing. I could think of worse places to be right now.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you serious? This last week could have been for nothing, especially if Frank’s dead.”

Keo sat up and brushed sand off his elbows. “Jordan…”

“What?”

He reached into the gym bag and took out two bottles of water, opening them and handing one to her. “Salute,” he said, holding up his.

She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway and bumped his bottle with hers. “A tall glass and some ice would be nice.”

“How about a bottle of red wine while we’re at it?”

“Cabernet?”

“Of course.”

“Now you’re talking.”

He took a long drink before lying back down. He buried the bottle halfway into the sand next to him, then closed his eyes again. The warmth of the sun against his face was like a soothing pair of massaging hands, and Keo let himself embrace it. If he was going to die out here, right now, he could think of worse ways to go.

“Hey,” Jordan said after a while.

He didn’t open his eyes, but said, “Hmm?”

“What do you think Gillian’s doing right now, back in T18?”

Fucking Jay, he thought, and said, “I don’t know. Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Jordan…”

“What?”

“Shut up and enjoy the beach,” he said, letting his body sink deeper into the soft sand underneath him.

After a while, all he could hear was the sloshing waves in front of him and the soft, comforting sound of Jordan’s breathing next to him.

5

Gaby

It was a small town on the outskirts of Cleveland, Texas, hidden away from prying eyes, or anyone who might have been traveling along US59. Once upon a time it’d had a name, but it had since been given a letter and a number and been resettled with survivors—men, women, and children who had accepted that the world was no longer a safe place, that surviving was better than fighting.

The A-10, or Warthog, as Danny called it, had been thorough. If it had left survivors behind, she couldn’t see them from the hillside where she was crouched alongside Danny and Nate. The buildings that once lined an unnamed main street had been reduced to rubble, the result of the 30mm cannon she had heard belching out something that sounded like a creature from a monster movie. What the plane’s Gatling gun hadn’t obliterated, the air-to-surface missiles underneath its wings had taken care of. There were four large craters spread across the length of the resettlement from south to north, and thick plumes of smoke hovered above it like storm clouds.

Gaby thought about those old World War II documentaries her dad used to love watching, remembered marveling at the unreal sight of cities buried under the remains of buildings that once stood so proud. Despite all that property damage, she never saw the bodies, or the real carnage. Maybe her dad never allowed her to see the grisly footage or it had been edited out. The raw details had always remained hidden, but she couldn’t ignore them now.

She could see the bodies from the hillside—or, at least, parts of them. The arms and legs of victims jutting unceremoniously out of rubble as shredded clothing clung to jagged piles of brick and mortar. Skeletal shells of what used to be buildings somehow managed to remain upright, though it was difficult to tell what they used to be. Pockets of fire dotted the landscape, as if marking where the town began and ended. The air was thick with sulfur and she found herself breathing through her mouth to keep from gagging, despite the fact she was still far enough away that she shouldn’t have been affected by the smell.

Next to her, Nate and Danny had gone very quiet and still. Except for the occasional wind howling through the carcass of buildings below them, there was almost no other noise except for her shallow breathing and slightly accelerated heartbeat.

“We should go,” Nate said. He sounded almost breathless. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“He’s got a point,” Danny said. “That hog might come back. Or it might have friends.”

“Christ, how much armament does one of those things carry, anyway?”

“Depends on its objective. There’s a reason it was so goddamn effective in the Stan.”

Gaby stood up. She didn’t know what she was going to do until it was already too late to stop. Her joints popped as she moved, but she ignored them and gripped the M4 tightly in front of her.

“Gaby, wait,” Nate said.

“There might be survivors,” she said, and hurried down the hill.

“There’s nothing down there, Gaby. Not anymore.”

She kept going, her boots fighting for purchase against the sloping hillside, until Nate’s voice was lost against the scraping noises. Or maybe she had just effectively shut him out as she hopped the last few feet; it helped that her heartbeat had gone from slightly raised to hammering out of control against her chest.

* * *

“There might be survivors,” she had said, knowing what a terrible lie that was even as the words tumbled out of her mouth.

Reaching the beginning of the town just confirmed it. Nothing could have survived what she was looking at. The gun runs, as Danny called them, had been incredibly efficient. The Warthogs were effective at their jobs, he said, which was why they were so good at providing close-quarter air support. That was their specialty, after all.

She stepped around the craters that pockmarked the main street that ran through town, the curvatures of the unnatural holes still darkened with wet blood. The 30mm rounds that hadn’t landed on the buildings had instead dug gaping holes in the pavements and reduced the sidewalks into disorganized slabs. A sea of broken glass and small concrete chunks crunched under her boots with every step. Gaby held a handkerchief over her mouth to keep out the choking sting of smoke and blood.

The bodies were almost all hidden under the remains of buildings, charred wooden frames, and structural steel beams. The sight of an exposed belly, the pregnant mother’s head missing, inside what used to be a bakery, almost made her retch. She kept moving, pushing on, resisting the urge to look back at the body, telling herself the woman (and the child inside her) would still be dead if she looked a second or third time.

Her eyes stung and she fought back tears, too afraid of what would come out if she failed to suppress the emotions. The prospect of Danny and Nate seeing her break down was enough, and she pushed on. She couldn’t allow the men to see her be reduced to the Gaby from a year ago, the little girl who had to rely on Matt and Josh to keep her safe. That girl was long, long gone.

“Gaby.” Nate’s voice from behind her. “Wait up.”

She started to turn back when something emerged from behind a dead horse in front of her. Gaby tensed, raising the M4. She stopped when she saw bristling brown and white hair as a cat darted across the street. Its coat of fur was singed black, and there were parts of the animal that had been burned off, exposing flaring red skin underneath.

“What the hell was that?” Nate said.

“Cat,” she said.

“Jesus, I thought it was a giant rat or something.”

Gaby looked after the animal for a moment before turning back to the horse. Or at the figure trapped underneath it…still moving.

“I got a live one!” she shouted, before jogging forward with her carbine at the ready.

The earbud in her right ear clicked, and she heard Nate’s voice: “Danny, we got survivors.”

“How many?” Danny asked through the earbud.

“Just one so far,” Nate said.

“Be careful. It could be a trap.”

“Will do.”

But it wasn’t a trap, Gaby found, when she stopped next to the horse and its rider, a woman in a North Face jacket open to reveal a black uniform underneath. There was a patch of Texas on the jacket’s right shoulder and a name tag that read “Morris.” One half of her face was covered in blood, the wetness matting short black hair to her skin, and she was busy trying to push the horse off her. Even if the dead animal were still alive to obey—there was a hole from a large caliber round in the belly of Morris’s mount—Gaby doubted the woman would have found freedom to her liking: There was a large pool of blood under her, which she might not even have noticed yet.

The soldier finally gave up and instead locked eyes with Gaby. Then she sighed and lay back, letting both hands drop to her sides. She hadn’t tried reaching for her holstered weapon, which was the only reason Gaby hadn’t shot her yet. Pieces of an M4 rifle were sprinkled liberally among what looked like the remains of a wooden toy train set.

The air around them was thick with a red, black, and white cloud coming from a nearby apartment building. Gaby was glad for the handkerchief over her mouth, something the soldier didn’t have. Then again, choking on pulverized concrete and brick was the least of the injured woman’s concerns at the moment.

“Gaby?” Nate said as he jogged over to her.

“She’s injured,” Gaby said.

Nate peered down at Morris, holding his own piece of cloth to his mouth.

“What are you looking at?” the woman said.

Nate pulled back. “She’s not going to make it.”

“Says you,” Morris said.

“I got her,” Gaby said. “Keep looking for other survivors.”

Nate nodded and walked off.

“Mohawk boy’s not wrong; I can’t move,” Morris said, turning dull brown eyes back to Gaby. She sounded surprisingly nonchalant, as if they were old friends wasting away a lazy Sunday. “I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel anything down there.”

“What happened?” Gaby asked.

Morris blinked up at her, trying to see through blood that had covered up a part of her right eye. “You don’t know?”

Gaby shook her head. “Why did it attack you?”

“I would tell you if I knew, but I don’t. Did I mention my legs are probably broken?”

Gaby nodded. She waited for the woman to continue, but Morris looked like she had lost interest in the conversation. She let her head loll to one side and stared down the street at nothing in particular. The only sound, other than Gaby’s still quickening heartbeat, was Nate’s boots moving among the ruins on the other side of the street.

“Four hundred people,” Morris said quietly.

“Four hundred?” Gaby repeated.

Morris nodded. Or tilted her head slightly up, then down, in something that resembled a nodding motion.

“Here?” Gaby said. “In this place?”

“Four hundred people,” Morris said again. Her lips quivered, as if she was going to say something else, but instead she just closed her eyes…and stopped breathing.

Gaby stared at the woman in silence for a moment. A part of her thought Morris might be playacting, but that wasn’t true because ten, then fifteen seconds later, and Morris’s chest still hadn’t moved again.

“What did she say?” Nate asked, coming back over.

“Four hundred,” Gaby said.

“Four hundred?”

Gaby slung her rifle and looked around them at the toppled buildings, at the visible body parts. “They were inside when the plane hit.”

“Someone probably ordered them into the buildings,” Nate said. “They would have been able to hear it coming for miles.” He shook his head. “They would have been better off making a run for it; they were sitting ducks inside those buildings.” He wiped at some soot underneath his chin. “She said 400?”

Gaby nodded.

“Christ,” Nate said. “This isn’t right. Whoever did this—whoever ordered this…” He shook his head again. “This isn’t right.”

She didn’t know how to reply, didn’t know if anything she said would be even remotely enough, so she turned around and maneuvered past Morris and her mount instead.

“Come on,” she said, “there might be more survivors up the street.”

Nate followed, their boots crunching broken glass and concrete chunks as they stepped through puddles of blood.

And they hadn’t even hit the halfway mark through town yet…

* * *

“When it finished with the town, it did an extra gun run along a country road that runs parallel to a creek,” Danny said. “There are more bodies out there.”

“Survivors?” Nate asked.

“Maybe a half dozen vehicles made it through.”

“Thank God.”

Danny glanced down at his watch. “We should avoid the state highway from now on. Skip around using the smaller roads until we hit US59, then pick our way north to Starch. It’ll take longer, but better late than dead.”

“How many?” Gaby asked.

“How many what?”

“How many got caught out there? That didn’t get away?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

Danny didn’t answer her.

“How many, Danny?” she pressed.

“It doesn’t matter, Gaby,” he said again. For a brief moment, he reminded her so much of Will, who could end a conversation with just a few words and the right inflection in his voice. “Let’s get going,” Danny continued. “I want to be in Starch by noon. Nate, it’s your turn at the reins.”

Nate nodded and slipped into the truck behind the steering wheel while she took a moment to look back one last time at the town. The clouds of black and gray smoke still loitered above it, as if they would never leave. From a distance, the carnage looked almost poetic, but she knew better; there was nothing artful about the bloodbath below those dull colors.

“Gaby,” Danny said behind her. “We gotta go.”

She turned around and climbed into the backseat as Nate fired up the engine, then maneuvered across the empty lanes toward the feeder road exit to get them off the highway. Danny was right: What had earlier been clear sailing to Starch—there was no such thing as traffic out here, far from the nearest big city—was now a wide-open potential kill zone.

Gaby leaned back against her seat, feeling impossibly drained by the long walk from one end of the destroyed town to the other. She closed her eyes and placed her cheek against the door, the interior of the truck swamped by the cold weather. In front of her, Nate’s Mohawk battled against the breeze, a sight that made her smile despite everything she had seen the last few hours.

“They don’t miss,” Danny had said as they approached the town, all the while listening to the series of chaotic explosions that were so loud even the road had trembled under their truck. “The Avengers are straight-on Gatling guns; they’re right in front of the cockpit so the pilots have to see exactly what they’re shooting at. And they hardly ever miss.”

“Four hundred…”

Gaby replayed Morris’s words in her head, heard again the anger and something that sounded almost like disbelief in the woman’s voice. She saw again the sadness and regret in Morris’s eyes as she stared off, as if she could see something down the street that wasn’t just ruins and body parts and blood. Four hundred people, except for however many had been in those “half dozen” vehicles that had managed to escape along the creek.

She opened her eyes when Nate said from the front seat, “What are we dealing with here?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Danny said.

“That Warthog. Where would something like that come from?”

“There are three Air Force bases in Texas that I know of for certain, probably more I haven’t heard of or been to. That A-10 could have come from any number of places. It’s not like Uncle Sam’s still around to keep them under lock and key. Frankly, I’m surprised this is the first time we’ve seen one of those things since Happy Times went bye-bye.”

“So why didn’t you and Will ever go looking for one? Or hell, maybe something more up-to-date, like an Apache?”

“Can you fly an Apache, kid?”

“Well, no…”

“Yeah, neither could we. There could be a fleet of AC-130s sitting around just waiting for us, and we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with them ’cause we don’t know our cockpits from our cockheads. Why do you think a commercial pilot makes more money than the guy who digs ditches?”

“Sorry, stupid question.”

“There are no stupid questions, just stupid people that ask them.”

Nate grunted before slowing down the F-150 and turning, taking them even further away from the highway. They were headed north now and soon would have to turn back west so they wouldn’t pass Starch by completely. The longer route, but the safer one, especially with that Warthog still up there, somewhere…

“Those people back there,” Nate was saying. “They didn’t deserve that. Even if they were collaborating with the ghouls.”

“No one deserves that,” Danny said.

“What are you going to tell Lara?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

Danny didn’t answer right away. Gaby found herself waiting anxiously for the answer, too.

“I don’t know,” Danny finally said. “I’ll decide when we contact them again, hopefully from the warmth and comfort of Harold Campbell’s facility this time.”

Gaby didn’t have the strength to join their conversation, and instead closed her eyes again and leaned tighter against the door. Winter was already here, but in Texas it was sometimes difficult to tell. Christmas was somewhere over the horizon, and with it another New Year’s Eve where no one would be celebrating, or singing Auld Lang Syne. Maybe the cold would help wash away the smell of smoke and blood that still clung to her hair and skin and every inch of her clothing. God, she needed a bath in the worst—

“Fuck, shit!” Danny shouted from the front seat.

Her eyes flew open and she sat up straight, was about to say something when she saw it—sunlight reflecting off the gray of its wings as it streaked toward them from the other side of the small feeder road.

“Out!” Danny shouted. “Get the fuck out and find cover now!”

She wasn’t even certain if the truck was still moving or if it had stopped when Danny threw open his passenger side door and leaped out. She reached for her own door handle with one hand, the other grabbing her rifle leaning against the seat. The door was opening and she was almost out when she remembered her pack and all the equipment—

“Gaby!” Danny’s voice, from the other side of the vehicle, booming in her ears. “Move your ass!”

She moved her ass, flinging the door wide open and throwing the rest of her out, one hand clutching her rifle.

Never lose your rifle. Never lose your rifle!

She stumbled and fell, saw the highway floor rushing up at a million miles an hour, and had to stick out both hands to stop her fall. She lost her grip on the M4 in the process and cursed herself (What would Will say?) when the road began trembling as if it was getting ready to split open.

She couldn’t help herself and turned her head and looked up, wondering idly if the Warthog streaking toward them right now was the same one that had laid waste to Morris’s town—

“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, piercing through her idiotic thoughts, as he snatched her up from the road with one strong hand.

Gaby fumbled with her footing, groping the air for her carbine lying just out of her reach on the road.

No, no, no! Never lose your rifle! Never lose your rifle!

Before she could break free from Nate’s grip to retrieve her weapon—he was much stronger than she remembered, his arms clutching to her in a viselike grip—they were both falling backward off the road and into a ditch.

She was flailing through empty air, trying to get her bearings, when she heard the terrible brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt of the A-10 as its primary weapon, the 30mm cannon, started spinning—

She landed in the bottom of the ditch, eating a mouthful of grass and dirt as she did so. Before she could spit out the earthly contents, the road behind her came apart and her bones shook violently. The Warthog swooped over them and she looked up, somehow seeing past the blades of grass covering her face.

The sight was almost magnificent—a gray metal eagle, its fixed wings spread wide and proud, flying much lower than any plane should. She expected to see bombs or missiles, but there weren’t any. Then she remembered: Of course it wasn’t carrying any spare armaments, because it had spent everything on the town. On those poor people.

“Four hundred…”

“Gaby, move it!” Nate shouted, pulling her up from the ditch floor.

She struggled to do just that, hating herself for reverting back to the eighteen-year-old girl she thought she had buried a year ago under Will and Danny’s tutelage. The refined Gaby, who had survived Dunbar and the farmhouse and the assault on Song Island, was nowhere to be found as she stumbled into the cold side of the ditch to keep herself upright.

Standing now, she could see the remains of the F-150 in front of her. It was a flaming wreck in the middle of the cratered road, its twisted metal frame little more than a barely recognizable shell of its former self.

No, no, she thought, because everything was in there. The gas cans, the supplies, the boxes of silver ammo…

Crack! as a piece of dirt and grass spit into the air less than a foot in front of her face as a bullet chopped into the ground.

Gaby looked up the road as sunlight gleamed off the hood of a black truck racing toward them. Erratic figures clung to the back, one of them aiming at her behind a rifle resting on the roof of the cab.

No, not one truck. Two.

Then the ground began shaking again as the Warthog swooped over them one more time, the wake of its passing nearly throwing her off her already wobbly feet. Nate, next to her, had to grab onto the ditch wall to keep upright. Her first instincts were to duck, as if that would save her from the plane’s weapons.

The A-10 hadn’t gone very far before it started turning. The sight of it, getting ready to come back for yet another pass, did something unexplainable to her. Gaby felt rising anger at the plane’s presence, the arrogance of the man—and she thought it had to be a man—inside the cockpit at this very moment.

She reached down and drew her Glock.

“Don’t!” Nate said, grabbing her wrist.

“What?” It was the only thing she could think of to say, just before he snatched the gun out of her hand and threw it up to the burning road.

Nate did the same thing to his sidearm before throwing both arms into the air, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” He looked over at her, saw the flash of anger on her face, and said, “Trust me, you gotta trust me.”

She did trust him, but she was also angry. Not just with him, but with everything that had happened. The town, the bodies, Morris, and that goddamn plane as it swooped by over them one more time.

But he was right. Nate was right. The Warthog. The two trucks. The men with assault rifles in the back of them.

Slowly, very slowly, the anger fizzled, and she turned around and mimicked Nate, raising both arms into the air just as the first truck—a dirt-caked GMC—stopped above them. The second vehicle—a slightly more beat-up white Silverado—squealed to a stop next to it. Men in tan military-style uniforms leaped out and swarmed them, rifles bouncing dangerously in their hands.

“Get up here!” one of the men shouted.

“Keep your hands up!” another one said, spittle flying out of his lips. “Keep them fucking up!”

Gaby and Nate climbed up, keeping their hands raised as high as they could make them. It was difficult to navigate the sloping side of the ditch without the use of their hands, but they both managed it anyway, though she had to use her elbows for leverage.

When she and Nate were back on the road, the men circled them, weapons pointed at their faces. They looked wild, almost out of control, and she realized at that moment just how close she had come to being killed if Nate hadn’t wrestled the gun from her.

She looked back at the men, searching for all the things she was used to seeing on collaborators, like Morris back in town. Instead, she saw bright red collars with a white circle in the middle, surrounded by sharp lines that were clearly supposed to represent sun rays. The emblem stood out against the pale drab of their fatigues, as did the all-white patch of the state of Texas over their right breasts with their names stenciled in the center.

Gaby’s eyes were pulled back to an AK-47 pointed in her face. The man behind it was in his late twenties, tall, and he stared back at her even as his forefinger moved dangerously (nervously?) back and forth against the trigger.

I don’t want to die. God, I don’t want to die.

She heard voices and looked across the road, past the flaming ball that used to be their F-150, and saw Danny, hands raised, being patted down by another soldier while the man’s comrades kept the ex-Ranger under their guns.

Danny must have sensed her, because he looked over and nodded, as if to say, “We’ll be okay.”

She wanted to believe him, even as one of the men grabbed and twisted her arms painfully behind her back. She let out a small grunt as someone else ran his hands over her ribcage, then turned her pockets inside out. Two others were doing the same to Nate next to her. Their captors couldn’t have been rougher if they tried.

Above them, the Warthog swooped low as it passed them by, the rush of icy cold air against her face a stark reminder of what had happened to the town behind them and the hell they had involuntarily walked right into.

We should have stayed out of Texas. God, why did we ever come back?

Will would never have let us come back here…

6

Lara

“This is bullshit,” Gage said. “I did everything you asked. I even taught the Mexican how to drive the damn boat. I answered every question he and that midget had. I did everything you asked.”

The ‘midget’? Oh, he means Maddie.

She fully expected this reaction from Gage but wasn’t quite prepared for the emotion behind it. If she closed her eyes and didn’t know who he was, or what he had done, she could almost believe he was being unjustly treated. Almost.

But of course she knew exactly who the man was; more importantly, what he had been prepared to do at Song Island if Keo hadn’t boarded the Trident and taken it over. She knew all of that, and yet she couldn’t help but ask herself for the twentieth time since she stepped inside the room:

What would Will do?

The problem with that was she knew exactly what Will would have done, and none of it included locking Gage inside a cabin on the lower decks of the yacht away from the rest of the population. Will also wouldn’t have fed Gage twice a day and let him out to see the sun every other day. Will wouldn’t have done any of those things, because once Gage’s usefulness came to an end, so did the man’s reason for being.

But she wasn’t Will, and she would never be. One of these days she’d know once and for all if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

For now, it was just her inside a slightly too-dark room, trying not to gag on the musky stench that lingered over everything despite the open portside window. The cabin was big enough for two people, with a single cot in a corner and its own small toilet and sink. It probably had better amenities than Gage had given his past victims.

“You know that, right?” Gage was saying. “I did everything you asked of me. You wouldn’t have gotten off Song Island if it wasn’t for me. Who kept this boat running after that? Me, Lara. I did. Me.”

What exactly did he expect her to say? She knew what he had done, which was precisely the problem. She knew what he had done after Song Island, but she also knew, if not all the gory details, of what he had done before they ever met him.

Gage was not a good man. He was a killer, a thief, a liar, and an opportunist. Which was why she couldn’t allow him to mingle with the rest of the crew and wouldn’t let him go near the kids. That was also why he spent his days down here eating alone, watching the ocean from his window, and counting down the hours until either Bonnie or Benny came down to take him up for his hour-long alone time in the sunlight above deck.

“Where’s my reward?” Gage asked. “Where’s the gratitude? I deserve something, don’t I?”

“There is no reward,” she said.

“You promised me.”

“I didn’t promise you anything, except that you’d keep living. And you have.”

She wasn’t sure if that deflated him or if it just made him angrier. Gage stood across the room from her, watching her back with an intensity that probably should have intimidated her. He shouldn’t have wasted his time; she’d faced worse things in her life since The Purge, and she’d survived them all. Gage was, after all, only human.

His eyes eventually fell to her right hand, hanging loosely at her side, next to the holstered Glock. She didn’t have her rifle because she rarely carried it around these days. She should have been hesitant to stand this close to him, with only eight (nine?) feet of space separating them. They were near enough that she could smell the odor emanating from his skin. Bonnie had told her that Gage rarely bathed in the ocean when he was above deck, and they theorized that he was afraid they’d drive off and leave him floating in the ocean. She had to admit, she’d thought about doing just that—or something like it—on more than one occasion.

Bonnie’s heavy, booted footsteps echoed from the open door behind her. The ex-model was somewhere further up the corridor, close enough that Lara knew she could hear everything being said. They always had at least one person outside Gage’s door, just in case.

You taught me that, Will. ‘Just in case…’

“So, what now?” Gage asked. “You’re just going to throw me away? Like trash? I did everything you asked.”

The answer should have come easily. She had spent more than one sleepless night thinking about it, and each time the outcome was the same: She couldn’t trust Gage. The man standing in front of her might be wearing shabby and stained clothes, and smelling slightly of urine and a lot of sweat, but she could see it in his eyes. Gage had been thinking about this moment, too, imagining what he would do when it finally came. She wondered if he ever managed to convince himself things might work out in his favor, or if he always knew this was the inevitable conclusion.

He had to know, didn’t he? Maybe…

“Well?” he said, sounding annoyed by her silence. “What happens to me now, Lara?”

“Now you leave,” she said.

“Leave? Just like that?”

“I’m going to give you one of the inflatable boats and enough fuel to reach land, if you drive straight toward it. What you do when you get there is up to you.”

“A boat and some fuel?” He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he could divine her true intentions if he found the right angle. “That’s it?”

“And some food and water to last a few days. After that, you’re on your own.”

“What about weapons?”

“No weapons.”

“You can’t do that to me.”

“This isn’t a negotiation. I’m telling you what’s going to happen, and you’re going to accept it because there is no Door B or Door C. There is just this door.” She glanced at her watch. “Your boat will be ready in one hour. Make the most of the time you have left and pack up.”

“I need guns!”

She shook her head, amazed at how calm she was. Her voice hadn’t risen noticeably and her body, along with the hand hovering beside the Glock, remained perfectly steady. She wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible as she walked the length of the boat and climbed down to the lower deck, then moved through the engine room and toward his cabin. She remembered the look on Bonnie’s face as she walked past the other woman, who could barely look her in the eyes. Like everyone, Bonnie had been dreading this moment, too.

But for whatever reason, Lara didn’t feel the sudden surge of adrenaline or pangs of guilt. There was just…calmness, because she knew exactly why she was doing this and why there were no other options. It just had to be done.

“No guns,” she said. “At least not from us. What you find out there is up to you. All I’m giving you is a boat, fuel, and some food and water.”

“You can’t do this…”

“It’s happening.”

“No…”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Don’t I?” he said, peering at her, his head still cocked at an odd angle.

“No,” she said. “You can take what I give you and make the best of it, or you can take your chances.” She finally moved her hand, placing her palm over the butt of her sidearm. “It’s up to you.”

He didn’t say anything and simply glared at her for a few seconds. He didn’t move, though she thought he wanted to. Desperately wanted to.

But he didn’t move.

“I’ll send Bonnie back down here to get you in one hour,” she said. “Be ready.”

She turned to leave.

“Lara,” he said.

She ignored him and continued walking to the door. “One hour.”

“Lara!” he shouted, the sound of her name like a knife.

That time she stopped and turned back around just in time to see him lunging at her.

Oh, goddammit, she thought, realizing just how badly she had read the situation. She wasn’t prepared for this. Not when she thought it was all over.

Gage had lost a lot of weight since she first met him, and although he still limped noticeably on one leg despite the brace, it didn’t seem to slow him down one bit at the moment. She wasn’t ready for his speed or the bloodshot eyes coming right at her. He didn’t so much as cross the small space between them as he launched himself, his body like a living spring that had been coiled, waiting to explode in this one single moment.

And there was something else—a streak of sunlight shining through the open window, reflecting across the flat surface of an object, long and sharp, in his right hand, his fingers gripped tightly around its cloth-covered base. Some kind of knife, maybe a piece of metal he had pried loose somewhere. Whatever it was, he had been hiding it on him when she entered, but he was showing it to her now as he streaked across the room right at her.

Lara lifted her left arm instinctively, not even realizing what she was doing until the shiv sliced into her flesh. There should have been pain—a lot of it, given how forceful Gage had struck, the blow’s impact magnified by his forward momentum—except there was just a stinging sensation, as if her body didn’t truly grasp what was happening and her mind couldn’t interpret the true meaning behind the stream of blood arcing through the air.

She lost her balance even as she was backpedaling and stumbled out the open door and into the hallway beyond. He was still coming, face contorted into an expression that was part anger and part triumph. He didn’t so much as follow her out as he stalked after her, (her) blood flitting off the object in his right hand with his every step.

She was still off balance and stumbling blindly backward, trying desperately to exert some control over her legs, when her back slammed into the smooth metal wall of the hallway outside the room. There was pain that time, but also surprise at how much distance she had covered in such a short time between when Gage struck and now. The breath rushed out of her as she stabbed her right hand down to her hip, found the familiar grip of the Glock, and jerked the weapon up just as Gage raised his right hand and brought it back down a heartbeat later, aiming from right to left—

Bang!

The gunshot was like an explosion inside the close confines of steel and concrete that made up the lower deck. The Trident’s engine was still shut off, so there was nothing to dampen the noise; it was still echoing in her head like a jackhammer seconds later.

Gage seemed to take one, then two, hesitant steps backward, his slashing right hand frozen in the air as if he had simply forgotten how or why it was up there in the first place. His fingers were so tightly clenched around the knife’s handle that they were almost as white as his paling face. Blood gushed from his stomach as he attempted to stanch it with his left hand, sticky wetness slipping through his fingers.

“You—” he said, looking back at her.

She shot him again, this time in the chest, before he could finish what he was about to say. The second gunshot sounded curiously softer than the first, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but then maybe her racing heartbeat, so loud that both her ears seemed to be thrumming, had something to do with that.

Gage fell back through the open cabin door and slammed into the floor with a heavy thump!, followed a split second later by the clattering of the knife at his booted feet.

The heavy pounding of footsteps came from another part of the boat, then someone was shouting her name.

She was still trying to figure out what was happening, or how she had ended up sitting in a pool of blood, when a voice gasped, “Jesus, Lara, Jesus,” followed by a sharp squawking noise and someone shouting Zoe’s name.

* * *

“So that was your brilliant plan?” Carly asked. “You were going to West him? Girl, you should have talked to me about it first. I would have advised you to just shoot the fucker and throw him overboard. No muss, no fuss.”

Lara looked up quizzically at her friend. She found it hard to focus on her face for some reason, so had to settle for Carly’s bright red hair as a marker.

“What?” Carly said.

“‘West him’?” Lara said, her voice hoarse. “What does that even mean?”

“You remember West, don’t you? Yee-haw? You smashed his head in with a radio when he snuck into your room with a gun back at the hotel?”

“Oh.”

West. Jesus, she had forgotten all about West. He had come to Song Island with Bonnie and the others. There had been another man with him, but for the life of her, Lara couldn’t recall his name at the moment.

“You really did forget,” Carly was saying. “Is this one of Danny and Will’s famous compartmentalization thingies?”

“No, I just forgot about him.”

“Really.”

She nodded.

“I wonder what happened to him,” Carly said. “You think he ever made it after you and Danny sent him out into the world with just his boxers and a pair of socks?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.”

“Fair enough. He and his buddy did try to gut Blaine.”

She glanced around the room. She was glad to see harsh sunlight coming in through a window to one side (Still daylight). Considering the unspectacular decorations along the walls and the slightly hard bed she was lying on at the moment, they had taken her back to her cabin.

“He used a piece of his cot, in case you were wondering,” Carly said. “One of the frames, according to Maddie. He must have spent days sharpening that thing. I guess when you’re down there with just that hole to look out of, you need to find ways to fill your time. Like making shanks. What an asshole.”

Lara looked down at her left hand, then lifted it as much as she could. It was covered in gauze, and the complete absence of pain was a surprise. In fact, she didn’t feel much of anything at all. A combination of painkillers and…something.

“What did Zoe give me?” she asked.

Carly shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. You’re the third-year medical student; you tell me.”

“That was a long time ago. Feels like another lifetime…”

“Anyway, you bled all over the place. Freaked all of us out. Imagine what we’d do without you to boss us around.”

Lara managed a weak smile. “You would have gotten by.”

“I don’t know about that.”

There was something on Carly’s face, a seriousness that Lara rarely saw, and it made her wonder just how close to death’s door she had been outside of Gage’s cabin. She remembered pain, a lot of screaming, and wetness…

“I’m okay,” Lara said.

“No, you’re not,” Carly said, “but you will be. We’ll see to that. So you need to get some rest and we’ll do our best to keep this floating barge running in the meantime. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not all dopes. Well, not completely.”

“Danny?”

“Still nothing from that idiot. But he’s got four more hours until nightfall, so I’m delaying panic time until then.”

“What about Keo?”

“Also nada.” She frowned. “That’s worrying, right? It’s noon, Lara. He should have radioed in by now. We did come all the way down here just to pick his sorry ass up.”

She nodded. Or thought she did. Maybe a slight up and down motion.

“Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly continued. “Or at least go closer to the coast, in case he lost his radio but is waiting for us on the beach or something.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“If we’re close enough to the beach to see him, then someone can see us, too.”

“Oh. Good point. I guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

“Something like that. Besides, Keo can take care of himself.” She forced herself to focus on Carly’s face. “Tell Blaine not to expose us unnecessarily, understand?”

Carly nodded. “You’re the boss, boss.”

Lara saw something else on her friend’s face. It was something that had been there for a long time now, and that she had seen on the others’ faces as well. She knew this moment would come—had, in fact, expected it much earlier.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.

Carly looked hesitant, like someone preparing to pick her way through a minefield. “Maybe it’s time we finally talk about why we’re still hanging around the Gulf of Mexico, why you keep delaying going to the Bengal Islands.”

Will…

“We need to talk about it sooner or later,” Carly continued.

Will... I waited for you. I waited days and weeks for you.

Goddamn you. You promised me. You promised me.

“But it can wait until you’re better,” Carly said. “Zoe and I will look in on you through the day, make sure you don’t try to sneak off on us. I don’t think we can afford to lose you, too.”

The way we lost Will…

Carly turned to go.

“Carly…” she said when Carly was at the door. “When Danny and the others come back, we’ll go.”

“Are you sure?” Carly asked.

She nodded. Or tried to.

Carly pursed her lips into a sympathetic smile. “I’ll let the others know.”

“What about Gage?” she asked.

“We tossed him overboard. Gage being a piece of shit human being and all, we thought it was about time he contributed to the world by feeding the fishes.”

“Good,” she said, closing her eyes.

Will’s voice echoing inside her head, the way it had ever since that last night on Song Island:

“Whatever happens, keep moving forward. Don’t stop to look back. Keep moving forward, because that’s how we survive.”

* * *

It was dark outside her window when she opened her eyes a second time. Alarm bells immediately went off and didn’t stop until she could hear the low howl of the wind outside, the gentle slapping of water against the Trident’s hull.

Safe. Still safe.

There was a wall clock, but she didn’t bother looking for it in the semidarkness. There was enough moonlight that she could make out the foot of her bed and a small figure huddled in the corner under a blanket.

It took her a moment to piece together Elise’s round face, the girl’s head resting against the armchair, long hair draped across her oval-shaped face. She thought about calling to Elise, telling the girl to go back to the room she shared with Vera, where she wouldn’t have to twist herself into a pretzel to fit into a chair. But she saw the way Elise was sleeping, as peaceful as she had ever seen the girl, and decided against it.

Lara was already on her back, so she didn’t have to do very much to look up at the shadows dancing across the ceiling. Instead of making her nervous, they soothed her nerves, and she didn’t move for the longest time. The drugs Zoe had given her prevented her from fully concentrating on any one thing, including all the rambling thoughts inside her head, for which she was grateful.

A soft thoom from somewhere in the distance made her glance toward the door. She only heard it because everything else was so quiet. If she thought the nights on Song Island could be deathly still, out here among the waves it was even more pronounced.

There it was again: thoom.

A low rumbling, almost like thunder, coming from a distance. Except there were no hints of raindrops pelting the roof above her. The Trident had had to move through two rainstorms in the last month, and she knew what rain sounded and felt like; this wasn’t it.

She climbed out of bed, relieved Zoe hadn’t connected her to any of the field equipment she had set up to take care of their walking wounded. Danny had been Zoe’s first and (Thank God) only customer so far. Someone had put her into one of her cotton jogging pants and sweatshirts, which explained why her body was so warm despite the open window.

Lara padded across the room, thankful her injury was confined to her left arm. How long had she been asleep? It was hard to gauge time by the darkness, especially with her head still swimming around in a medication-infused fog.

She passed Elise’s sleeping form, the girl completely oblivious—

Thoom.

Definitely not thunder. Or rain. It wasn’t loud or ferocious enough to be gunshots on the boat. Or nearby, which would have meant a second boat. And they were still out in the ocean. Or were they? Had Blaine moved them closer to shore?

“Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly had said, referring to Keo.

The door opened before she even reached for it, and Bonnie’s tall frame blocked her path into the hallway. The other woman looked shocked to see Lara standing there, her left arm bent at the elbow, held tight against her chest.

“You heard it, too?” Bonnie asked.

Lara nodded. “What was it?”

“Explosions.”

“Explosions?”

“From the beach. From Sunport.”

Keo.

“Where’s everyone?” she asked.

Bonnie held up her radio. “On the bridge.”

They turned right and went up the darkened hallway. Why was it so dark? Usually there were one or two LED lights set on dim along the corridors.

Next to her, Bonnie looked like she wanted to wrap an arm around Lara’s waist to keep her upright, but Lara was moving just fine. That was the good news. The bad news was that she was starting to feel a slight tingle coming from her left arm, a clear indication the pain meds were losing their effectiveness.

“Can you walk okay?” Bonnie asked.

“I’m fine. What happened to the lights?”

“Blaine switched them off.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

Lara could hear voices—Blaine’s and someone else’s—from the other side of the open bridge door in front of them.

“Did Keo radio in yet?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bonnie said. “But you’ll have to ask Blaine. That’s his and Carly’s department.”

The other voice belonged to Carly, and she was standing with Blaine in front of the console, looking out the wraparound windshield. They stood in complete darkness, with only streams of moonlight and the occasional blinking dashboard buttons to see with. Blaine was peering behind a pair of binoculars, and though she couldn’t actually make out the Texas coastline outside, she couldn’t shake the feeling they were much closer than they had been earlier today.

Carly glanced over her shoulder. “Hey, what are you doing up?”

“We’ve moved,” Lara said.

“I moved us closer to shore,” Blaine said. “Don’t worry; I switched off the lights before I got close enough to be spotted.”

She nodded, relieved. “What’s going on?”

“I’m betting my nonexistent week’s salary on World War III,” Carly said.

There was another thoom! in the distance, and like the previous ones, this came from the Texas shoreline, exactly where Sunport would be. As she peered out the windshield at the darkened world, a stream of red and orange flames appeared as if from a dragon’s mouth and slashed from left to right, before seeming to diffuse and disappear, leaving behind small pockets of fire that seemed to be…moving around?

There was another thoom! This one was so loud, she swore she could feel the impact causing the boat to shake slightly under her bare feet, but that couldn’t have been possible given their distance…could it?

“You need to see this,” Blaine said, and handed her his binoculars.

She stepped closer toward the windshield and looked through the lens.

The binocular had night vision, which allowed her to see further than she could have with the naked eye. They were still too far away for her to make out every single detail, but she had no problems picking up the objects moving around in the fields beyond the beach. They looked to be on fire.

There was another thoom! and for just a split second, the explosion lit up what looked like a vehicle surrounded by hordes of ghouls.

“Is that…?” she said.

“It’s a tank,” Blaine said, barely able to contain his excitement. “It’s a fucking U.S. Army tank.”

7

Gaby

It seemed to take forever to get to wherever they were going, with Gaby blindfolded and lying in the back of a moving truck the entire time. Her legs were bound at the ankles, her arms twisted painfully behind her back. Nate and Danny were somewhere to her right, their familiar scents a welcome distraction from the constant bumps in the road. At least they hadn’t gagged her, thank God.

She could also sniff the other two in the back of the truck with them.

Soldiers. More soldiers.

But not the same ones from Louisiana or the ones in black uniforms they had encountered in Hellion when they first made their way inland a few days ago. No, these were different men. Different loyalties. And different agendas.

“What happened?” she had asked Morris.

“You don’t know?” Morris had replied, blinking up at her through a layer of blood.

No, she didn’t know, and neither had Morris. Because these men weren’t collaborators, and neither was the pilot that had laid waste to Morris’s town. These men were something else completely. Something more…dangerous.

Her captors hadn’t said a word since she, Danny, and Nate were unceremoniously tossed into the back of the truck, and every now and then she could hear the Warthog in the background. Or, at least, she thought it was the same warplane that had destroyed their vehicle. The possibility that there could be more than one of them out there made her shiver involuntarily.

Every now and then, voices managed to rise over the clatter of the moving truck. Muffled sounds, men talking through radios.

One of the soldiers said into the wind, “Three, all still kicking.”

“Collaborators?” a male voice asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” the man said. He was somewhere to her right, probably sitting on the wheel housing.

“What do they look like?” the voice asked.

“I dunno. Civilians. No uniforms, but they were packing serious heat. Probably had more in the truck before Cole wasted it. We haven’t asked them any questions yet.”

“Okay, make sure they’re still breathing when you get back.”

“Roger that,” the man said.

Gaby waited to hear more, but there was just the continuous thump-thump of the truck’s tires going up and down the unpaved road under them. Each time they hit a hole or had to go over a bump, Gaby’s head lifted slightly, only to slam back down against the cold (and dirty) truck bed. She tried to time the rise and falls but could never get it right and gave up after half a dozen failed attempts.

They must have been moving through a wooded area, because the temperature dropped noticeably despite the combined sweating of her, Nate, Danny, and their two guards. High tree canopies, enough to block out the sun in this part of the countryside, embraced her in cool shadows.

She did her best to keep track of time, but it was difficult without her eyes. Besides, her ears were filled with nothing but the thump-thump of the tires. It could have been a few hours or less than that since they were captured. The warmth of the sun against one side of her face kept her calm, the usual dread of incoming nightfall staved off momentarily. She hadn’t realized how much living on the Trident this last month had dulled her survival instincts until she set foot back on land earlier this week. That mess in Hellion was proof of that.

We got soft…and this is what happens when you get soft.

She was angry at herself, at how she had handled the ambush on the road, and how close to dying she had been in that ditch if it hadn’t been for Nate’s fast thinking. She despised the feeling of helplessness, something she had tried to beat out of her ever since losing Josh to the collaborators and realized the only person she could afford to depend on was herself.

You would have been so disappointed in me, Will. At least you weren’t here to see me screw up so badly.

She was still trying to come to terms with her failures when the vehicle began to noticeably slow down. A little later, the sharp squeal and slightly burning aroma of well-worn tires braking wafted into her realm of smell.

Footsteps as the two men in the back maneuvered around her, Danny, and Nate on their way to the back. The loud clank! of the tailgate being unlatched, followed by the bang! as it slammed down. A stream of voices, vehicles in motion, the extra body odor of a lot of people perspiring in the sun despite the cool air, and the clicks and clacks of…what was that? Metal? Trinkets?

Bullets. She was listening to the sound of bullets being moved around in crates. Not just that, but they were making them, too. The evidence was in the thick taste of smelting metal in the air. The question was: Were they making silver bullets?

Rough hands grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around before they began dragging her backward like a slab of meat. Then there was just empty air and for a moment she thought she was going to fall, but the same pair of hands maintained their grip and turned her around again.

“Feet down,” a gruff voice said. Not the same man she had heard earlier on the radio.

Gaby lowered her feet, touching nothing for the longest time until—there, solid ground. Dirt, not concrete.

The same pair of hands pulled her slightly forward, off the open tailgate, and stood her up. “Don’t move and you won’t fall,” the man said.

She stood still and listened to more clinking and clacking going on all around her. There were a lot of people squeezed into a small area, and every single one of them seemed to be in constant motion.

A man next to her grunted, then a familiar voice said, “Are we there yet?”

Danny.

She almost smiled, but didn’t. There was no telling who was watching and how they would react.

“Where are we?” someone else said. Nate.

“Shut up,” the voice from the radio said. “You’ll speak when spoken to. Got it?”

“Can you run that by me again?” Danny said.

The whump! of something hitting flesh.

Danny’s voice again, but this time sounding like he had his teeth clenched in pain, “So that’s a no?”

“Smartass,” the gruff voice said. Then, “Where does he want them?”

“He’s in the hangar,” another voice said. “Take them over.”

“On foot?”

“We need the truck for transportation. Besides, you need to lose some weight anyway. The walk’ll do you good.”

“Fuck you.”

The other voice laughed.

A hand grabbed Gaby’s right arm and held her steady as someone else cut the zip tie around her ankles. The same hand then pushed her forward. She took that as a sign they wanted her to walk, so she did. Hopefully she didn’t run into something, like one of the many vehicles moving around her.

Her escort walked slightly behind her. A woman. Gaby could tell even with blindfolds on, because there was no mistaking the sudden difference in bodily smell between the guys who had brought her here and the one who had taken over.

“This would be easier if I could see,” Gaby said, picking her way over uneven dirt floor, the rising heat of the sun beating down on her.

“No talking,” her escort said. Gaby was right; it was a woman.

“You have a name?” she asked anyway.

There was no response.

“Are we at an airport?” Gaby asked.

Still no response.

“Not the most talkative bunch,” Danny said somewhere to her right.

“You okay?” Nate said from her left.

“I’m fine, dear; don’t worry about me,” Danny said.

“Gaby,” Nate said.

She smiled before realizing he couldn’t see through his own blindfold. “I’m okay. You?”

“Trying not to trip. And a little sore all over.”

“That’s what she said,” Danny said.

“Shut up and keep walking straight,” Gaby’s female escort snapped. She was sure the woman wasn’t alone, though her companions were keeping their distance.

After about thirty seconds of walking silently across what felt like an open field, the woman finally said, “How did you know?” just as Gaby felt the ground under her switch from soft dirt to hard concrete.

“Know what?” Gaby said.

“That we’re at an airfield.”

“Someone said to take us to the hangar.”

“Ah.”

“What’s going on? Are you guys making bullets?”

The woman didn’t answer.

“I thought we were talking,” Gaby said.

“You thought wrong,” the woman said.

“That’s what they used to call me in college,” Danny chimed in. “Thought Wrong Danny. Wanna know why?”

“No,” the woman said.

“Sure you do.”

“I have a gun that says I don’t.”

“Well, since it’s my personal motto that the gun is always right, I’ll save the explanation for later.”

“You do that,” their guard said.

They walked on for another five minutes, until the loud chatter of people, machines, and vehicles began to fade behind them. She wasn’t sure how far the paved ground went, but it seemed to stretch on endlessly. She was trying to remember how far they had walked when the ground began to vibrate and a loud rush of air hit her with such surprising force she started to fall over, and would have, if a pair of hands didn’t grab her from behind first.

“Easy there,” the woman said.

Gaby found her footing again and turned her head in a vain attempt to follow the object’s trajectory. “What was that?”

“One of the Warthogs coming in for a landing. It’s on the other side of the runway, but they pack quite a punch.”

Jesus, did she just say ‘one of the Warthogs’? Gaby thought, before saying out loud, trying to keep her voice as steady as possible, “How many of them do you have?”

“Need to know, Erin,” a familiar male gruff voice said from behind them.

“I’m not an idiot, Louis,” the woman, Erin, said. Then, with a push against Gaby’s back that seemed to indicate the friendly chatter was over, “We’re almost there. Keep straight.”

* * *

Bright sunlight flooded the wide hangar through a series of high windows along all four sides. The arched roof looked overly tall, though the fact she’d just had her blindfold removed for the first time in a long time might have had a little something to do with her inability to properly judge dimensions at the moment.

Catwalks extended from the bottom of the structure all the way to the windows, ending in platforms that looked big enough for a dozen or so men to keep an eye out on the surrounding area. There were metal bars over the windows, which, like the walkways, appeared to have been tacked on very recently. They definitely didn’t look as if they were part of the building’s original blueprints.

The floor was coated in some kind of shiny material that reflected her face, along with everyone else standing around her, including Danny to her right and Nate to her left. She didn’t know if they were flanking her on purpose, or if that was just how they had been escorted inside. Not that she minded. She liked having them there at her sides, though she would never say it out loud.

They had been led across an airfield and into a hangar, but there were no planes inside. Instead, the cavernous space had been converted into some kind of storage warehouse, with a small army of people in tan uniforms loading a pair of green Army trucks with plastic moving boxes, wooden crates, and metal containers. A woman with a long ponytail (That’s definitely not Army regulation) handed luggage over to a man crouched at the back of one of the trucks, and Gaby heard more of the clicks and clacks of loose items moving around inside.

There were just as many sneakers as there were combat boots squeaking against the glossy floor as the flurry of people went about their business. More boxes, along with garbage bags and just about anything that could have been used as containers, lined the far wall of the building, waiting to be loaded. Duct tape, ropes, and strips of cloth hid the contents, though one of the boxes was slightly see-through, and Gaby was trying to peek at the objects on the other side—

A loud crash! made her look away.

One of the soldiers in the trucks had missed a handoff, and a gray plastic box had broken against the floor. Candleholders, pens, and silverware were rolling around. They were all silver. Every single one of them.

They’re making silver bullets, which means they know about the silver.

There was no panic—no angry voices or barking orders—and people got to work gathering up the spilled items and putting them back into other containers. More than a few of them, she noticed, looked too young to be wearing military uniforms of any sort.

A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his tan pants hanging loosely off a slim waist, picked up a crate from the far wall and grunted his way over to a truck. The teenager’s shirt collar was green and featured the same white sun emblem that was on the collars of the men who had captured her on the road. Those men, she remembered, had red collars. Like the other workers inside the warehouse at the moment, the boy wasn’t armed.

When one of the trucks had filled up, someone slammed the tailgate closed. The truck roared to life, then drove out of the hangar. As soon as it was out, another Army truck began backing into position.

Gaby took the opportunity to look behind her at a steady stream of vehicles moving like busy bees around the airfield. She couldn’t see the entirety of the place from her angle, but what she could see told her she was dealing with a very organized group of people who clearly knew what they were doing.

The presence of the sun eased her mind a bit, but she badly wished she knew the exact time. Besides taking their weapons, radios, and gun belts, their captors had also taken their watches. She hated not knowing how many hours she had before nightfall, especially out here. Things were so much simpler back on the Trident, where nightfall didn’t arrive with the same kind of crawling dread.

She turned back around when a voice said, “Did you find any uniforms on them?”

A lone figure broke off from the group of people in front of her. He had been there this entire time, she realized, with his back to them as he shuffled items between the back of the building and the trucks. The man pulled off work gloves and wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand as he walked over. He wore the same tan uniform as the others, along with the Texas patch over his right breast, and the only thing that stood out about him was the black collar with the white sun emblem in the center.

Red, green, and now black.

The man was in his late fifties and stood eye-to-eye with Danny, but there was something imposing about him that had nothing to do with his height or size. It was in the way he carried himself, the stern, almost paternal look in his eyes. His name tag read: “Mercer.”

“No, sir,” the gruff voice answered from somewhere behind her. “We searched the truck. Or what was left of it. Cole got a little trigger-happy and blasted the thing before we could take them into custody.”

Mercer nodded, then looked at all three of them one at a time. He casually put his gloves into his back pocket before finally asking, “Who’s in charge?”

“I guess that would be me,” Danny said.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Danny, but my mother calls me Daniel. You can call me that, too, but I’ll have to insist on at least fifteen years of child-rearing first.”

The older man trained soft brown eyes on Danny. Anyone else might have turned weak in the knees under that gaze, but most people weren’t Danny, who had survived too many things the last few months—and the years before the world ended—to be affected. Even so, Gaby thought Danny might have actually just…stood a bit straighter?

Mercer finally turned those same calm eyes on her before moving on to Nate a few seconds later. He must not have found anything interesting about them, because he ended up back on Danny. “What unit were you in, son?”

“Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning,” Danny said.

“Fort Benning is an excellent producer of Rangers.”

“They did the best they could with what they had.”

“And your friends?”

“She’s Gaby, and he’s Nathaniel.”

“Just Nate,” Nate said.

Mercer didn’t acknowledge either her or Nate. He saw them, but he didn’t see them. She didn’t know whether she should feel a little annoyed, or glad. Did she really want Mercer to “see” her? Maybe not…

Around them, the activity continued, even as another truck backed inside, the beep-beep-beep of its warning signal loud in the confines of the hangar. The piles of items at the back wall were already much smaller than the last time she looked.

“You were at T29,” Mercer was saying.

“T29?” Danny said.

“The town we attacked earlier today. What were you doing there?”

“Four hundred…” Morris had said. Gaby thought she could still taste the smoke and blood on the tip of her tongue.

“Saw your hog swooping in for the kill and decided to go see what all the fuss was about,” Danny said. “That’s the full extent of us being there.”

“You killed them,” Gaby said. She didn’t realize she had spoken until the words blurted out, drawing Mercer’s eyes to her. There was something about those eyes that made her want to take a step back, and it took all of her willpower to remain perfectly still. Maybe the rising anger and the still-fresh memories of Morris’s town helped. “There were 400 people in that town. Men, women, and children.”

“And pregnant women,” Nate said. “You murdered pregnant women, for God’s sake.”

“It’s war,” Mercer said. “People die in wars.”

“There were pregnant women in that town!” Nate shouted, his words booming in the hangar, so loud that they even managed to pierce through the beep-beep-beep of another Army truck backing inside.

The soldiers working behind Mercer stopped and looked over. A few of them even glanced at Mercer for some kind of response.

Mercer didn’t respond right away, and instead stared back at Nate as if waiting for his fury to burn out. Gaby thought he was going to have a long wait, because she had never seen Nate so angry before—his face was almost red and his nostrils flared, and suddenly that Mohawk looked threatening instead of funny.

“Collateral damage,” Mercer said finally.

“That’s it?” Nate said. “That’s all you have to say?”

“That’s all that needs to be said.” And just like that, he dismissed Nate and focused on Danny. “Let’s talk, soldier.”

“Why not? Not like I have a hot date or anything,” Danny said.

The older man walked off and Danny turned and followed, but not before giving her a slight nod that she would have missed entirely if she hadn’t been looking for it.

“Be cool,” that nod said.

Mercer had climbed into the front passenger seat of a Jeep waiting outside the hangar. Danny took a seat in the back as the vehicle drove off through some kind of private airfield with a small cluster of administrative buildings all the way on the other side. That was also where most of the vehicles and people not in the hangar were congregated, and where, she guessed, they had been dropped off earlier.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said next to her, gritting his teeth.

Gaby took his hand and squeezed. He looked over and pursed his lips, but she could still see the anger on his face. It was the very first time she had ever seen him so angry and though it probably shouldn’t have, it made her like him even more.

“Come on,” Erin said, turning and leading them through the hangar.

While blindfolded, Gaby had thought Erin was in her thirties based entirely on her voice, but she was actually younger—late twenties, and tall. Gaby was used to being one of the taller girls in most rooms, but Erin towered over her at about five-ten, with long dark hair in a ponytail and light hazel eyes. She had a slightly Eurasian look about her, but her accent was all Texan.

The soldier with the gruff voice, Louis, followed behind them. He was in his thirties, balding, and squat. He had a rifle slung over his back and always kept a good distance, as if afraid she or Nate would try something. Maybe she might have done exactly that before she saw all the manpower Mercer had assembled around them.

They were led to an office in the back right corner. It was the only room in the entire structure and two more soldiers stood guard with M4 rifles. Like Erin and Louis, they had red collars on top of their uniforms. That, she realized, was what distinguished them from the worker bees in the place.

Red collars for the warriors and green for support? Was that how it worked? Then what were the ones with black collars, like Mercer? Maybe those were the commanders, the ones who called the shots. That would also make them the ones who were, ultimately, the most responsible for butchering the 400 people in Morris’s town.

Erin walked on ahead of them to one of the two open windows, looked in, and said, “All the way to the back.” She waited for whoever was inside to obey, then walked to the door and opened it. There was no lock, but Gaby guessed they didn’t really need it with the two guards outside.

“What happens now?” Gaby asked.

“Once he decides what to do with you, you’ll be the first to know,” Erin said. “Until then, you’re to sit tight.”

“Once who decides?” Nate asked.

“Mercer,” Erin said.

“Is he your commanding officer?”

“Something like that.”

“Need to know, Erin, shit,” Louis said.

Erin took out a box cutter from her pocket and sliced the zip ties from around Gaby’s and Nate’s wrists.

“Thanks,” Gaby said.

Erin ignored her, said, “Inside.”

Nate locked eyes with Gaby, and though most of his anger had diffused during the walk over here, she could still see the spark of fury in his eyes. For a moment she thought he was going to do something stupid, just like she had almost done back on the road. She wanted to tell him not to, because even if they could get by Erin and Louis and the two guards, there was still Danny somewhere out there with Mercer, not to mention the literal army of soldiers between them.

But Nate didn’t try anything, and Gaby gratefully gave him a pursed smile as they entered the office together, side by side. Erin closed the door behind them, and one of the soldiers standing guard appeared on the other side of the closest window and glanced in. He didn’t look especially threatening, but the M4 in his hands was another matter.

It took a few seconds to notice the stink of too many people jammed into one room, though the smell would have probably been ten times worse if the windows weren’t open. There were five of them and they were huddled against the back wall a second ago, but were now spreading out again in order to give themselves—and each other—some leg room. There used to be furniture inside the office, including a large desk in the center, but they had all been removed, leaving behind just dust outlines.

“Fresh meat,” a voice chuckled from across the room.

Gaby tracked the source to a short man sitting in a corner, legs splayed in front of him as if he owned the space. He had black hair and dark eyes, and there was absolutely nothing trustworthy about him that she could find in the second or two their eyes locked. The man, like his companions, wore identical black uniforms with a patch of the state of Texas on their shoulders.

Collaborators.

The short man eyeballed Gaby up and down before breaking out into a grin. “And here I thought I’d seen the last of you. Small world.”

He looked familiar, even underneath the grime and speckles of dry blood that clung to his face, but she couldn’t quite place him.

She focused on his name tag instead.

It said: “Mason.”

8

Keo

After two hours of sitting and lying on the sand, drinking warm water, and looking out at the endless expanse of ocean while waiting for something to show up, Jordan finally said, “I don’t think they’re out there.”

“The problem is, they could be here already,” Keo said, “and we wouldn’t know it. They won’t risk coming this close to shore in the daytime. Lara’s too smart for that.”

“We should have gone up for the radio.”

“We should have done a lot of things. Story of my life.”

“Sounds like a fun life.”

“It has its moments.” He blinked up at the sun. “I’m hungry.”

“Ditto.”

They got up, brushed the sand off their clothes, and headed up the beach in the direction of the row of houses they’d seen from a distance. Closer, they found a half dozen homes clustered around the same general area, partitioned off from the beach by rickety four-foot fences that wouldn’t have kept out the family of crabs Keo’d had to walk around while licking his lips at the prospect of crab meat later that night.

Finally, something good to look forward to.

He expected to find luxury beachfront properties, but the houses were old and covered in peeling paint, and he had a difficult time imagining them looking any better just a year ago when there were still owners around to maintain them. The buildings had no uniform designs but did share tall foundation stilts and wooden stairs that snaked up to second floors. In case the beach flooded, he guessed, though the idea of being trapped in one of these when the Gulf of Mexico decided to come ashore left him a little nervous.

Sun-bleached grass covered a wide field on the other side of the fence, the weeds going all the way up to their knees as they moved through them. A mangy dog that had been sleeping in the shade heard them coming and jogged off, looking annoyed by the human presence.

“Must be your smell,” Jordan said.

“Must be,” he said, “because we both know you smell like lilacs and roses.”

“You sweet talker, you.”

“Either that, or my nose is all stuffy.”

“Then you had to go and ruin it.”

“It’s what I do.”

“Try to do a little less of it.”

“And suppress my natural charms? Perish the thought.”

She smirked. “Try anyway.”

They checked out a wide squat house with a gray roof, accessing the second floor by creaking wooden stairs along its side. Keo was afraid the staircase might break under him as they ascended, but it remained improbably in one piece all the way to the unlocked front door.

He peeked inside at the empty living room. The windows were sans curtains, leaving a healthy amount of sunlight to splash across the dust-covered furniture. Everything was bright and gray and brown, and he didn’t have to sniff the air to know there wasn’t anything worth finding inside, including anything of the undead variety.

“Maybe check the kitchen just in case?” Jordan said.

“Sure, why not. Maybe we’ll find a carton of ice cream inside the fridge, too.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

They went inside and checked the kitchen and found it just as empty as he had expected. He opened the fridge only after pinching his nose and sucking in a large breath, and closed the door exactly three seconds later after giving it a cursory look.

“Anything?” Jordan asked, coming out of a back hallway.

He shook his head and sucked in a fresh breath of air. “You?”

“I don’t think they were home when it happened. I didn’t see any traces of blood or signs of a struggle.”

“Told you. Waste of time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and headed back to the door.

They walked a short distance from the house with the gray roof to one next door with orange paint. This one looked more promising, with newer construction, and the steps up to the second floor didn’t creak nearly as much. The door, when he tried it, was locked, which was a good sign. A quick glance at the closed windows to his right got him an eyeful of cotton curtains.

“Looks good,” he said.

“Remember, I get first stab at the carton of ice cream,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He slung his M4 and drew his Glock, then looked over at Jordan. She had kept her M4 in front of her and was already in position to assault the door before he had ever said anything.

He must have smiled to himself, because Jordan said, “What are you looking all goofy for?”

“Goofy?”

“It must be those ugly scars on your face. Reminds me of this guy I used to know in middle school. Goofy Larry.”

“Sounds like a great guy.”

“He was, if it wasn’t for the smell.

Keo sniffed himself. “I’ll take a bath in the ocean later.”

“Promises, promises,” she said. Then, “Open the door, Romeo, and let’s get this show on the road before I die of old age.”

He took a step back and gave the doorknob a hard look. It wasn’t anything elaborate, just a round metallic silver (But not real silver, natch) knob with a keyhole in the center.

“Maybe we should try knocking first?” Jordan said. “You know, in case there’s someone already inside.”

“You think?”

“It’d be the right thing to—”

Crash! as Keo kicked the door at the spot just underneath the doorknob before she could finish.

The door swung open, the doorknob and lock hanging off the doorframe.

Jordan sighed. “Dick.”

He grinned, then took a step forward and inside, raising the Glock to chest level. He swept left, then right, before forward again. Jordan followed, leaving just enough room for him to turn, if necessary. The house had been sealed off for so long that the lack of ventilation hit Keo first. It would have been stuffy and hot if the outside weather weren’t so chilly, especially this close to the ocean.

He moved through the living room, passing leather brown furniture, and maneuvered around a glass coffee table with old copies of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan in two separate stacks. His and hers, he presumed. The interior looked more inviting than its exterior, a chandelier dangling from the ceiling and framed photos all around of a couple, but no kids. Fishing poles lined one wall, and an array of sports caps took up space on another. A generous layer of dust covered everything, and Keo fought back a sneeze as he made a beeline for the kitchen in the back.

Jordan had positioned herself in front of the back hallway to his right and was aiming her M4 into the darkness. He was thankful their weapons were loaded with silver ammo, even more grateful he had convinced Jordan to waste a couple of days to raid homes and hammer out some silver bullets along the way. Too bad everything, including all that hard-to-find bullet-making material, was lost somewhere in downtown Sunport at the moment.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

“Let’s clear the hallway first,” he said.

He moved in front of her, and Jordan slung her rifle and drew her Glock. Keo took out a small Maglite from his pocket and flicked it on, then proceeded into the darkened hallway, the bright LED beam moving from wall to floor to ceiling and back again.

“I don’t smell anything,” Jordan said from behind him.

He nodded. She didn’t mean she couldn’t smell “anything,” because they could smell plenty. What she meant was she couldn’t smell them, because the creatures always gave off an identifiable stench when they were inside a place, especially one that was this lacking in proper ventilation.

There were three doors in the back of the hallway, leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom at the end, but none of them had anything worth finding. Like the first house, there were no obvious signs of a struggle or old, browning blood. Which begged the question: Where the hell were Sunport’s beachside residents when The Purge hit?

When they finished clearing the closets and anything else with a door, Keo left Jordan in the house to look for something useful while he went back outside and made his way down to the first floor. The building rested on stilts like all the other homes, but unlike the gray house next door or the white one on the other side, this one had something that looked like a storage shack underneath it. There was a door in front with a large padlock, but it was wood, and Keo easily got around it by prying the hasp free with his Ka-Bar.

Inside, he found an old couch underneath a heavy blue tarp and camping equipment scattered along a shelf in the back. More promising were three five-gallon water bottles and unmarked brown boxes on the higher shelves, probably in case the room flooded. A dirt-covered bag contained a pile of old, size-small T-shirts. Keo took down and opened one of the boxes and smiled at the unmarked silver cans inside. He held one can up and shook it, heard water sloshing around inside. Canned goods. His luck was finally looking up.

He grabbed one of the boxes and turned to leave when he heard a creak underneath him. It was very slight, and he might have not even triggered it if he hadn’t been holding the extra weight.

He stepped back and looked down at an old rug with fraying edges. At one point it had been covered in green, red, and brown patterns, but it was mostly just brown now. Keo put the box down and pulled back the fabric, then peered through the flurry of erupted dust at a wooden door. There was no lock, but he did spot a small rectangular hole near one end, just big enough for a couple of fingers to slip through.

Keo took out the Maglite and shined it through the hole, spying dirt sprinkled across a floor on the other end, but no signs of obsidian eyes or black flesh. Even so, he leaned forward and sniffed the air around the rectangular opening just to be sure.

Nothing. Well, just dirt, but nothing undead.

He drew his Glock anyway (Just in case, as the folks on the Trident would say), then put the flashlight between his teeth and bit down to keep it in place. He slipped the fingers of his left hand into the opening and yanked as hard as he could.

The door swung open, revealing a rectangular shaped gray underground space; the parts of the four walls that weren’t covered in clumps of damp earth looked like cinderblocks. Some kind of extra underground (hidden?) storage area, though it resembled more of a coffin when viewed from above. At the moment it was empty, and he wondered how tight a fit it would be for, say, two people.

Keo holstered the Glock, kicked the trapdoor closed, and picked up the box and left.

* * *

“If the Trident doesn’t show up, I know where we’re staying tonight,” Keo said, dumping the box of canned goods on the kitchen counter.

Jordan was standing next to the sink, pouring warm water over her head to wash off the dirt and sand she’d accumulated. Her short hair had grown out noticeably since T18, but it would still be a while before she had the long ponytail he remembered from their time at Earl’s cabin. She had made a pretty big mess, but then it wasn’t like the owners would be complaining anytime soon.

“Downstairs?” Jordan said, running a towel she’d found in the bathroom through her wet hair.

“Uh huh. Looks pretty comfortable.”

She flashed him a disbelieving look while water poured down her face and onto the sink.

“Mostly,” he added.

“How big is it?”

“Big enough for two people to be cozy.”

“Cozy, huh?”

“You don’t like cozy?”

“I didn’t know we were at the cozy stage.”

“No?”

She gave him a long look, as if she was seriously considering his question. Finally, she shrugged. “What’s in the box?”

“Food.”

“Sweet.”

He took out one of the cans and tossed it to her. “Enjoy.”

“You shouldn’t have,” she said, and tied the towel around her head like a bun, then opened one of the drawers and rummaged around before producing a spoon. “Can’t find a can opener. You still have your Swiss spork, or did you lose everything with your pack, too?”

“That’s why you should always keep the essentials on your person at all times, Jordan.”

“Thanks, Dad. Do you still have it or not?”

He fished out his combo spork/can opener. The utensil was just over six inches long, made of strong titanium, with a spork at the front and can opener teeth at the end. A scork, officially, but the name bothered him for some reason he couldn’t explain, so he stuck with ‘spork.’

He took out another can and opened it, then showed the contents to her.

Jordan wrinkled her nose at the smell. “Disgusting.”

“Really? How long were you running around out there in the woods with Tobias?”

“Not long enough to think kidney beans are even remotely good eatin’.”

Keo finished prying off the lid, then tossed the utensil to her. Jordan had a little more trouble opening hers, but when she finally managed to cut open half the lid, she peered in at the contents and beamed across the kitchen at him.

“Good?” he asked.

“SpaghettiOs. Beats kidney beans.”

“You do know kidney beans aren’t actually beans made of kidneys, right?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

He laughed. “Just wanted to make sure.” He pulled out another can. “Let’s see what else is in here.”

“I call dibs on the first fruit.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works.”

“I got the spork,” she smiled, holding it up.

* * *

Keo was hoping for some variety, but they had to settle for two more cans of kidney beans and SpaghettiOs. They left the rest unopened so they wouldn’t waste them, even though there were still a dozen more inside, and those extra boxes downstairs. As much as she had favored the SpaghettiOs at first, Jordan asked him to switch cans halfway through their second helping.

They sat on the floor next to the couch in the living room as they ate. The position allowed them to see the front door and the windows to their left but not be seen in return by anyone peering in. Keo had closed the door, and though he couldn’t use the lock anymore, an armchair pushed against it solved that problem.

He was looking at a framed photo of the home’s owners, a man in his forties with a bushy beard and a woman the same age, though about fifty pounds lighter. They appeared happy, but then he had seen a lot of photos since the end of the world, and without fail they all seemed happy. Smiling at the camera was a façade from back when things still made sense; there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about these days.

After a while, he glanced down at his watch: 3:19 p.m. Less than two hours before sundown, because it got dark early in Texas in the winter.

“You think they’re really out there?” Jordan asked between spoonfuls of beans. Unlike earlier, when her stomach was growling as she ate, she was mostly just going through the motions now, filling up her belly because her body demanded the nutrients, and because the open cans would just be wasted if they didn’t eat them now.

“Who?” he said.

“Your friends on the yacht.”

“I hope so.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Nope.”

“That’s not very encouraging.”

“Nope.”

“Have you tried calling them on your cell?”

“I did, but their line’s always busy, keeps going to voice mail. Plus, I think I’m out of my roaming zone.”

“That’s how they getcha. Roaming charges.”

“Tell me about it.”

She forced down another spoonful of beans. “You guys slept together?”

The question caught him by surprise, and it took Keo a few seconds to process it. Jordan, meanwhile, looked amused by his reaction.

“Who? Me and Lara?” he finally said.

“No, you and the Queen of England.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“What is she, ugly or something?”

He chuckled. “No.”

“Fat?”

“No, nothing like that. She’s actually very attractive. And, um, thin, I guess.”

“You’re not sure.”

“I mean, she’s reasonably attractive physically.”

“Well, reasonably attractive is good.” He sighed and she chuckled. “I’m just busting your balls, Keo.”

“The reason it never happened was…it just never happened, that’s all.”

“You guys were on that boat together for more than a month, and nothing ever happened?”

“We weren’t the only ones onboard.”

“Still…”

“It never occurred to me to sleep with her. Besides, she was vulnerable back then, after Song Island.”

“Waiting for her boyfriend...”

“Yeah.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I can’t decide if you think so highly of me that you think everyone I’m around will immediately want to jump my bones, or if you think so little of me that I’d go after a woman who just lost her boyfriend.”

Jordan grinned to herself, clearly still amused. “Can’t it be both?”

“I don’t see how.”

“Okay, it’s probably a little more of the former.”

“Ah.”

“Or is it a little more of the latter?” She shrugged. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

“Very kind of you.”

She went back to forcing herself to scoop up another spoonful of beans and swallow them down. After a while, she said, “Have I told you how much I enjoy these heart-to-heart moments of ours?”

“Is that right?”

“Not really, no.”

“Ah,” he said.

* * *

The plan was to stay on the second floor and then move to the storage building downstairs when it got dark, but they didn’t get that far, because around 4:30 p.m., Keo felt the floor under him trembling. It was very slight, and he might not have even noticed it if both he and Jordan hadn’t stopped eating and talking and were just sitting quietly and listening to the soft buzz of insects outside the house.

“What the hell was that?” Jordan said, springing to her feet and snatching up her rifle.

Keo did the same thing, looking toward the window. “Stay here.”

“The hell I am.”

“Jordan—”

“What do I look like, a damsel in distress?”

He didn’t bother arguing with her (after a week on the road with Jordan, he knew better), and hurried across the room to the window and peeked out from behind the curtains. The front of the house faced the beach, which of course was the point of owning real estate out here. Right now the beach was just as empty as when he had checked it thirty minutes ago, with the only sound coming from the waves crashing against the sand. The Gulf of Mexico was serene, with a warm orange glow creeping across the horizon.

Jordan looked out the other window next to his for a moment, then said, “Anything?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“Bupkis.”

Keo put his hand against the wall and held his breath.

There, the same vibration he had felt earlier, as if a large machine was slowly cranking up but still far from reaching its full potential. It was a familiar sensation, but he couldn’t quite place it at the moment.

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

He shook his head, then went to the door and pushed the armchair out of the way. He opened it a crack and looked out. He took a second to eyeball the house with the gray roof next door, then the one with the white paint. No movements came from either building, but now instead of just feeling the vibrations, he thought he could hear it, too.

Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

He slipped outside and crouched his way to the banister that overlooked the vast field of grass behind the house. More homes on stilts, each one as old and weathered as the one he was hiding behind at the moment. Beyond that, in the industrial area of Sunport, were large domed structures blinking in the distance like marbles.

Keo hugged the exterior wall, using it as a shield, and leaned out and looked to his left, back toward the road he and Jordan had taken earlier to reach the beach. Rays of sunlight glinted off the top of a vehicle as it rumbled up the highway in their direction, and Keo only had to see it for a second to know what it was.

Fuck me.

It was tan colored and moving on fourteen wheels (seven on each side) housed inside caterpillar tracks and was still about 200 meters up the road. He would have felt that sixty-ton monster moving from miles away. It helped, of course, that there wasn’t anything except the waves of the ocean behind him to steal its thunder.

Keo recognized the vehicle even without the benefit of binoculars. The turret on top was turning slowly, and there was something odd about the machine gun mounts, but he was too far away to know for sure.

Footsteps behind him, just before Jordan whispered, breathless, “Jesus, is that a tank?”

He nodded. “It’s an M1 Abrams.”

“Fuck me.”

“What I said.”

There was writing along the armor tiles above the wheels of the tank as well as across the long cannon jutting out of the front like a baseball bat. He had absolutely no chance of reading what those letters spelled out from his position. That, and the angle was all wrong, which he guessed was a good thing. That meant the tank’s occupants probably couldn’t see him, either.

“Where is it going?” Jordan asked.

“Looks like the beach.”

“What’s at the beach?”

“Sun and sand.”

“Wiseass.”

He smiled to himself.

“You don’t think…?” she started to say.

“What?”

“That the U.S. Army is up and running again?”

She sounded almost hopeful, and he felt bad when he said, “Soldiers aren’t really soldiers anymore, remember? There’s nothing to stop another Steve or Jack from adding a tank to their arsenal. God knows they don’t seem to have any problems finding gasoline.”

“But where would you find something like that?”

“There must be hundreds of war machines sitting unattended on all the Army bases around the country. Texas alone probably has two or three of them. Guns, ammo…and tanks.”

She nodded reluctantly, and he felt oddly guilty about being the one to dash her hopes, especially since there was so little of it around these days to begin with.

“Doesn’t mean I’m right,” he added. “Who knows what’s been going on out there? Even a lumbering, inefficient dinosaur like the U.S. government could have finally gotten its shit together after a year, right?”

“What are you, North Korea’s spokesman?”

“There’s no leader quite like the Dear Leader.”

The growing rumble of the tank’s tracks and the increased vibrations along the house drew their attention back to the road.

The Abrams was deceptively swift for a vehicle of its size and was capable of forty-five miles per hour on smooth pavement, and wherever it had come from, it was pretty clear the crew had fuel to burn…just like every other collaborator he had ever run across.

“Come on,” Keo said, and turned around.

Jordan followed him down the stairs and they moved around the first floor, sticking to the walls of the storage shack. Down here, with the shade of the second floor above them and the overgrown grass all around, they were less exposed.

“This changes everything, doesn’t it?” Jordan said.

“Maybe.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It depends on who they are.”

“Any ideas?”

“A few.”

“Any of them good for us?”

“Nope.”

She sighed. “Figures.”

They leaned around a corner to watch the tank as it halted about twenty meters from where the road and beach met. The turret moved again, this time in a full 360-degrees—slowly, taking in the entire area around it as if it had all the time in the world. And maybe it did, especially inside its armored shell.

Apparently satisfied there was no ambush waiting for them, there was a loud clang! as a hatch opened, and a head wearing a sports cap poked outside just before a man in a sweat-drenched wife beater and cargo pants climbed out.

“How many people does something like that hold?” Jordan asked.

“You just really need a driver, but Abrams are designed for a four-man crew. Theoretically, you could put in a few more, but it’d be a tight squeeze.”

“You know a lot about tanks.”

“Just enough to know not to be standing on the wrong side of one.”

“Sounds like a good policy for any vehicle,” she said.

The man jumped off the vehicle and landed on the road, then began stretching while a second figure appeared out of the same hatch behind him. The second man hopped down, too. He was wearing some kind of tan-colored military uniform with the shirt buttons undone. Keo glimpsed red collars around his neck and some kind of round white emblem on them. The man poured water over his head and whipped it back and forth, spraying the guy in the wife beater, who shouted out a curse and jumped away.

A third figure appeared above the first two, but he remained on top of the turret, scanning the surrounding area with binoculars.

Keo dropped to the ground and was about to tell Jordan to do the same, but she was already flat on her stomach next to him. Her chin was pressed against the dirt, head slightly tilted, and both palms in the dirt. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Can he see us?” she whispered.

“I think the high grass will cover us.”

“What if they decide to search the houses?”

“Then I guess we’ll have to kill them.”

“They have a tank.”

“They can’t search a house while inside the tank.”

Keo turned over onto his back and laid the M4 next to him, then put his hands on his chest and stared up at the sky.

Sunlight was fading. The orange glow he had seen in the horizon earlier had reached them and was now spreading across Sunport. It was so quiet, with only the nearby waves and Jordan’s soft breathing next to him, that he thought about closing his eyes and catching a nap.

He wouldn’t have minded staying here forever, if he could. If he conserved his supplies, the canned goods and bottled waters could be stretched out, and who knows what were in the other houses? Even if Lara never showed up, and if Frank’s mortality proved to be more human than blue-eyed ghoul, he could see himself wasting the next few months of his life out here, on this long stretch of beach. And there were those fishing poles in the house above him. Fish for lunch, crab for dinner. Why not?

No, it wouldn’t be such a bad life at all. Why keep fighting if he didn’t have to? Maybe all those people in T18 and the other towns had the right idea. Gillian understood. She had chosen predictability over running around out here, constantly afraid for her life.

Gillian.

Dammit. He still remembered the feel of her belly, the shock of discovering she was pregnant, that he had been too late. Then there was Jay. The asshole had to be a good guy, too. Not an asshole, as it turned out.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

“Again?” Jordan whispered next to him.

“Hmm?”

“You’re thinking about her again.”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re like a book, Keo. Don’t ever play poker with me.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

She looked back in the direction of the tank. “Any more thoughts on what they’re doing down here?”

“Lots,” he lied. “But most of them are probably wrong.”

“So what do you suggest we do in the meantime?”

“Lie back and see what happens.”

“Really. That’s your big plan?”

“For now.” He glanced down at his watch. “It’ll be night soon.”

“It’s always night soon,” Jordan said. “Remember when you were afraid of the dark, but then you grew up and realized there was nothing to be afraid of? The good ol’ days.”

“Yeah,” he said.

The good ol’ days. Oh, he remembered them, all right. Back when his biggest goal in life was to see the world and make a few bucks, even if he had to kill a few people along the way for the privilege.

The good ol’ days. Like when he thought Gillian was still waiting for him.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

9

Gaby

“Small world,” Mason said.

Gaby didn’t have to go very far in her memory banks to remember the last time she had seen the man. L15. The collaborator town in Louisiana where Josh had taken her after the pawnshop. Mason had been there, in charge while Josh was away.

“You know this guy?” Nate asked.

They sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, with the door to their right and the windows to their left. She had no desire to mix with the collaborators in the room; as a result, they sat staring across at each other.

“L15,” Gaby said. “He was there at the same time as me.”

She stared forward, holding Mason’s brooding dark beady eyes, and at the same time ignoring the other four men in the room with them. It might have been two against five, but she was going to let them know—all of them, but especially Mason—that there were no cowering damsels in distress among them at the moment.

“The one with Josh?” Nate said.

She nodded.

“Sorry about your boyfriend,” Mason said. “Never made it off the island, from what I heard. Kid had a lot of potential, but he bit off more than he could chew. I tried to warn him, but he got it into his head he was something special. That’s when you know a fall’s coming—when they think they’re too big. You can never be too big, especially these days.”

She didn’t reply. If Mason thought talking about Josh was going to elicit some kind of emotion from her, he was mistaken. She hadn’t erased Josh from her memory—she couldn’t, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t because he was a part of her and would always be—but she had learned to push him into the background and focus on what was still important, like Lara, the girls on the Trident, her job, and Nate.

“Do yourself a favor and shut the hell up,” Nate said to Mason.

“Just trying to be friendly,” Mason said.

“You can stop now.”

“You the new guy, huh?” He looked back at Gaby. “Tsk tsk. The kid isn’t even cold yet, and you’ve already moved on? Where’s the loyalty?”

“Hey, asshole,” Nate said. When Mason glanced back at him, “Keep talking, and we’re going to find out if my fist can fit down your throat.”

Mason chuckled. “I’m shaking.”

“You should be.”

“What’s with the Mohawk?”

“What’s with the blood on your face? You make a habit of getting your ass kicked? Keep it up, and it’s going to happen again.”

Mason smirked, then exchanged a brief look with the other collaborators in the room, as if to say, “Listen to this guy.” But he didn’t say anything again, which told her he wasn’t taking Nate’s threats nearly as lightly as he had made it seem.

With seven people stuffed inside what was essentially an enclosed space of about fifteen-by-fifteen feet, it should have been uncomfortable, except it wasn’t, thanks to the two open windows. There was enough light inside the hangar to see with, and the sounds of Mercer’s people working and engines coming and going made for a constant soundtrack behind them.

Now that Mason wasn’t running his mouth, she spent the next few seconds observing the collaborators in front of her. Mason’s hair was damp with sweat and his clothes were dirty, with spots of dried blood stretching all the way down to one side of his neck. There might have been blood on his clothes, too, but the fabric was too dark for her to be sure. The others looked as disheveled and beaten as Mason, and apparently even more tired, because none of them had said a word.

Then, just when she thought she was going to be able to enjoy the peace and quiet, Mason said, “Like what you see?”

“Keep it up,” Nate said. “You just keep it up, shorty.”

Mason ignored him and focused on her. “We’ve been looking for you, you know. After Song Island. They had us searching every building along the coast. What do you think I’m doing back in Texas? It ain’t because I miss it.”

Gaby didn’t answer him, but she stared back, almost daring him to keep talking. Will had drilled it into her during all those months of training: the importance of intel. Here was Mason, volunteering information she didn’t have but that might come in handy one day—or maybe sooner. She remained silent and let him keep talking.

“I liked him, the kid,” Mason was saying. “He could be a little annoying at times, but smart as a whip. Hated to hear what happened to him. Were you there? Did the kid go down like a champ?”

Josh died to save me, and I’ll always love him for it, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud, because this man didn’t deserve to know about Josh’s fate.

“I bet he did,” Mason said anyway. “He talked about you all the time. Gaby this, Gaby that. Hell, after the first month, I think I could have written a book about the life and times of Gaby. Little Miss Perfect. Personally, I don’t see what the big fuss is about. Mind you, not that I’d kick you out of bed.”

“Mister,” Nate said, his voice rising noticeably, “I’m going to tell you one more time—”

“Or you’ll do what?” Mason said.

Nate started to get up, but Gaby grabbed his arm. “He’s not worth it.”

“That’s right; listen to blondie,” Mason snorted before miming a whip snapping in the air.

A couple of the men sitting around him chuckled, but the rest remained quiet. Mason might have been “whipping” for Nate’s benefit, but it was his men that looked as if they’d had all the fight whipped out of them. The blood on Mason was old, and they were clearly still wearing the same (smelly) uniforms since their capture. How long had they been here? A day? A week? Longer? If Mercer’s red-collared soldiers had treated her, Nate, and Danny like pieces of meat when they were captured, she couldn’t imagine what they had done to these collaborators, who as far as she knew, were the real targets.

Like Morris. Like the people back in T29.

Gaby fixed Mason with a hard stare. “Did you ever think this was how it would all end?”

“How’s that?” Mason said.

“Here, in this small room, wearing that uniform you thought would be your salvation.”

The man seemed to actually put some thought into her question. She had no doubts that Mason was every bit the opportunist she’d always seen him as: a conniving asshole who did whatever was necessary to get by, even if it meant selling out the human race. And for a while, it had worked out very well for him. Mercer’s people had changed that. They had changed everything, for everyone.

Finally, Mason shrugged. “It could have been worse. I could have spent the last year running for my life like the two of you. If this is it, you won’t get any complaints from me.”

“I don’t believe that,” Gaby said.

“No?”

“I think you’ll complain to the very end. Guys like you always do.”

“‘Guys like me’? Sweetheart, you don’t know anything about guys like me.”

“I know everything there is to know. You think you’re complicated?” She gave him a pitying smile. “You’re so simple, it’s embarrassing.”

“Is that right? Why don’t you share this great insight with the rest of the class.”

“I would, but I’d just be wasting my breath. Maybe one day, if you’re really nice, I might tell you.”

“Hope springs eternal, they say.”

“Not for you.”

Mason might have had a clever comeback, but before he could offer it, a voice from one of the open windows said, “Move to the back, now.”

She glanced up at Erin’s familiar face looking in at them.

Gaby and Nate stood up. Mason, across from her, stretched up next to a collaborator who towered over him like a giant. The sight was absurd, but Gaby didn’t have time to enjoy it before she had to move to the back of the room with everyone else.

The door opened behind them and Danny stepped inside. “Miss me?”

“You okay?” she asked.

“Hey, that’s my line.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll let it go just this time, but only because of the clearly shitty company you’ve been keeping while I was away.”

Erin closed the door behind him, and Gaby and Nate walked back over to the other side and they sat down together.

Three against five now. I like those odds.

“Is it just me, or is Erin kind of hot?” Danny said.

“She’s okay,” Nate said, then sneaked a look in Gaby’s direction for some reason.

Men, she thought.

“You kids been getting into trouble while I was away?” Danny asked.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Nate said.

“Glad to hear it.” He held up one of his wrists. “Got my watch back.”

“Aren’t you special,” Gaby said.

“I know, right?”

“Why’d they give it back to you?” Nate asked.

“I told you, I’m special. Pay attention.”

“Did you find out where we are exactly?” Gaby asked.

“Some podunk town called Larkin.”

“We’re way off course.”

“Would appear so.”

“What did he want to talk to you about?” Nate asked. “Mercer?”

“Mostly, our differing approaches to fighting the ghouls,” Danny said. “His is to strike, while I lean more toward hiding. Like every other officer I’ve ever met, Mercer doesn’t seem to have any problems sending other people’s boys and girls to go die for him.”

“How do you know he’s an officer?”

“I can smell them from a mile away.”

“But did he actually say he was an officer?” Gaby said. “You know as well as I do that anyone can call themselves anything these days,” she added, looking across the room at Mason.

The short man didn’t respond and pretended to look at one of the open windows to her left instead.

“Oh, he’s a fancy pants, all right,” Danny said. “Or was, anyway. These days, he’s the Everyman leading the charge. We both know it’s bullshit, but as you saw out there, it seems to be working gangbusters with the masses.”

“So what else did he say?”

“The takeaway is that he thinks the only way to beat the ghouls is by destroying their food supply. One way or another.”

Food supply? she thought, but it didn’t take very long for her to understand. Oh.

“The towns,” Nate said.

“Specifically, the people in them, yeah,” Danny nodded.

“You said ‘one way or another.’ What does that mean?”

“He’s keeping that one to himself.”

“There were 400 people in T29, Danny,” Gaby said.

“I mentioned that. He may or may not have gotten a boner when he found out how many people his Warthog killed this morning.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nate said.

“What I said. Minus the whole using the Lord’s name in vain part.”

Gaby didn’t know how to respond to any of this. Nate didn’t, either, and the three of them sat very quietly against the wall and listened to a truck beep-beep-beeping its way into the hangar outside the room. One of the guards standing outside coughed just before a loud clang! as a tailgate slammed open.

“What did he want with you?” Nate asked. “He knew you were a Ranger. I got the feeling my ROTC credentials didn’t measure up, or Gaby’s.”

“He wanted me to enlist,” Danny said. “Told me I had two choices: either get with the program or get out of the way. Or, and I quote, ‘You’re either with us, or you’re against us.’”

“And what did you say?” Gaby asked.

“That I’d think about it. He wants an answer in two hours.”

“That’s why he gave you back your watch,” Nate said.

“You’re sharp, kid. I should call you Sharp Nate from now on.”

“No thanks.”

“Your loss.”

“What happens in two hours?” Gaby asked.

“They’re getting the hell out of Dodge,” Danny said. “I can be on one of those trucks with them when they do, or left behind with the dead weight. That’s what he calls everyone inside this room, by the by.”

“I’ve been called worse,” Nate said.

“I bet you have.”

“So they’re just going to leave us behind when they go?”

Danny glanced over at her and hiked a thumb in Nate’s direction. “Captain Optimism, this guy. Thinks they’re just going to let us walk out of here.”

* * *

They stood in front of the windows, watching a small handful of people still loading up the only truck inside the hangar. Mercer’s people had done such a good job clearing out the place that she didn’t realize how large the building was until now. With the drastic drawback of people and vehicles, she could now hear every squeaking footstep and clang from the back of the transport.

“Being the thinker that I am, I’ve pieced together this plan of theirs,” Danny was saying, standing between her and Nate. “Mercer didn’t confirm or deny, on account of him not fully trusting me yet. Or at all.”

“Shocker,” Nate said.

“I know, right? I have a very trustworthy face. Anyway, they’ve been bombing towns around this part of the state all morning and all day. We had the misfortune of running across one of their strafing runs. Before that, they were gathering intelligence. Probably months of preparation, all for the big payoff—which was today. The patience and planning is actually pretty damn impressive, the whole indiscriminately killing civilians part notwithstanding.”

“Earlier, Erin let slip that they had more than one plane,” Gaby said. “Did Mercer say how many?”

“Numbers have nothing to do with it. There are more planes out there than there are guys that can fly them. Mercer only has a few pilots in his stable, which really puts a damper on how far he can extend his areas of operation. That’s why the one we saw take out T29 didn’t buzz very far afterward. Mercer’s using it as his eye in the sky, watching out for a counterattack.”

“The collaborators,” Gaby said.

Danny nodded. “They have no choice. Can’t just sit there taking hit after hit, not when your bloodsucking masters’ food supply is being bled out.” He peeked back at Mason and the others on the other side of the room. “It’s inevitable, and Mercer knows it.”

“He’s drawing them in, isn’t he?” Nate asked.

“Uh huh. I got the impression today’s running just as smoothly as he’d planned,” Danny said, returning his gaze back out the window. “They’ve been here for a while now, quietly setting all this up. Until today, they’ve been raiding the surrounding towns for silver and weapons. That’s what’s in all those boxes they’re transporting. Aunt Sally’s expensive cutlery and Uncle Bailey’s all-silver retirement pen. Mercer’s taking them somewhere else, because this place isn’t going to be very useful after tonight.”

“What’s going to happen tonight?” she asked, almost afraid to know the answer.

“This airfield isn’t designed to keep people out. To keep any thing out.”

She didn’t have to ask him what any “thing” was. She knew, and so did Nate.

They were silent again, watching as a couple of teenagers in tan uniforms dragged a heavy cedar trunk across the hangar floor, then lifted it with a lot of effort into the Army truck. The two leaned against the vehicle for a moment, passing around a single canteen that they both drank from. Neither one of them looked older than sixteen.

“I don’t see where we have any choice,” Nate finally said. “We play along for now, leave this place with them, then figure a way out of it later.”

He looked over at Gaby, as if for confirmation. She nodded, because he was right. There was no other choice. It was either go along with Mercer now or stay here, and she had a feeling their captors weren’t going to give them back their weapons when they said good-bye.

“He’s right, Danny,” she said.

“That’s not going to work, either,” Danny said.

She stared at him. “What aren’t you telling us?”

“Remember Indecent Proposal with Demi Moore?”

Gaby and Nate exchanged a look.

“No?” Danny said.

“I don’t think Nate and I even know who Demi Moore is,” Gaby said.

“Damn, I’m old,” Danny said. Then, “Long story short: He asked me to the prom, but he didn’t say anything about you two tagging along.”

“He just wanted you.”

“I told you. Special.”

“Well, crap,” Nate said.

“Uh huh,” Danny nodded somberly.

Gaby exchanged another look with Nate. This time it was he who nodded back at her, and she couldn’t help but smile. It was amazing how they could know what each other was thinking with just a look. Did she ever use to have this kind of connection with Josh? Or Lara, or any of the others? Maybe this was what it was like to be Danny and Will. One look, and they knew exactly what the other was thinking.

“You should go, Danny,” Gaby said. “There’s no reason for you to stay behind, too. Once you’re able, find a way back home. Nate and I will be right behind you as soon as we can.”

“I figured we might be a day or two late,” Nate nodded, playing along. “But we’ll all be back eating fish together by the end of the week.”

Danny glanced at Nate, then at her.

She nodded and pursed her lips into a smile, hoping it was at least a little bit convincing. “We’ll be fine. Look at this place; nothing’s getting through these walls. We’ll ride out the night, then follow you home.”

“Absolutely,” Nate said. “Who knows? We might even beat you back to Port Arthur. You never know.”

Danny rolled his eyes at them. “Give me a break. I was born at night, but not last night. I’m not going anywhere without you two dummies.”

“Danny, don’t be stupid,” she said.

“Have you been talking to Carly again?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Danny, you have to go. We’ll be on your heels by morning.”

“Not gonna happen, so save your breath. Both Lara and Carly would kick my ass, and that’s not the kind of threesome I had in mind.” He glanced down at his watch. “Besides, if they were going to kill us, they would have done it already. They want to keep us alive.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Danny said. He glanced back at Mason and the collaborators again. “You’ve been awfully quiet. Got something to say?”

“You should have taken the deal,” Mason said. “I would have.”

“See, that’s the difference between you and me. I’m not an asshole.”

“I’m a survivor.”

“No, you’re an asshole. If I have to say it a third time, you’re going to find out what a Danny Knuckle Sandwich tastes like. Hint: It’s knuckle-licious.”

Mason snorted but looked away.

“Good boy,” Danny said, and turned back to the window. “Speaking of knuckle sandwiches…”

A Jeep had parked outside the hangar and Erin, in the front passenger seat, climbed out. She walked through the building, past the half dozen people still loading up the final truck, and stopped on the other side of the window to look in at them.

“He wants your answer,” she said to Danny.

“The conditions still stand?” Danny asked.

“I’m afraid so.” Her eyes met Gaby’s gaze for just a moment before returning to Danny. “What should I tell him?”

“We’re like the Three Musketeers,” Danny said. “One cake for all, cake for everyone. Or something. I’m not very good with sayings.”

Erin gave him a confused look.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Danny said.

The woman nodded. “Good luck,” she said, and turned to leave.

“Erin,” Gaby said.

The older woman stopped and looked back at her.

“Do you know what’s happening out there?” Gaby asked. “What your planes are doing? They’re slaughtering civilians. Men, women, and children. There were pregnant women in those towns. There were over 400 people in T29 alone.”

Gaby was hoping for some kind of sign, an indication that all of this was new to Erin, but it wasn’t there.

She knows. Jesus, she knows.

Erin looked at Danny again. “If you change your mind in the next hour, tell the guards.”

“Not gonna happen,” Danny said.

“How do you live with yourself?” Nate asked her.

Erin ignored him and turned around and walked back to the waiting Jeep. Gaby wasn’t sure, but she thought Erin was walking faster than she really had to.

“She knows,” Nate said quietly.

“They all know,” Danny said. “But they’re committed. Heart, soul, and ammo.”

“What’s going to happen tonight?” Gaby asked.

Danny glanced down at his watch. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“I was hoping for a better answer.”

“And I was hoping for a cheeseburger and some French fries the size of my wrists,” Danny said, “but we can’t always get what we want, kid.”

10

Frank

“Why do you fight?”

It was followed by a laugh, or something that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell nuance when his mind was filled with so many voices, so many thoughts, like trying to listen to a city of people talking all at once.

“There is no victory waiting for you at the end of this.”

A sigh of frustration, like a father growing impatient with a child. Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth. He was like a child, at least according to Mabry. They all were; he and the millions and billions out there that flowed from Mabry’s blood.

“They’ll never accept you. She will never accept you. Can you blame her? You’re not the man you once were. You’re not even a man anymore.”

He didn’t answer, because it was a trick. Like all the other times, the voice just wanted him to respond so he would reveal himself. Mabry knew he was connected, listening in, because there was no detaching himself from them. Oh, he could erect walls and build other mental defenses, but he could never, ever become separated. That was the strength of the brood, after all—the oneness.

“You’re just making this difficult on yourself. Why can’t you see that?”

Push it away, into the back of his mind, where the voice became smaller. He couldn’t shut it out, but he could ignore it to some degree, send it to the outer edges of his consciousness where it was still audible but less demanding. Instead, he focused on the here and now, on remaining perfectly still and quiet, and allowing his body to heal.

He slept just beyond the reach of sunlight, though he could feel the heat even down here. Rays like knives, stabbing down at him, poking and prodding, always looking to connect, to slash and rend until he was just bones. Useless bleach-white bones.

There had been too many hands, too many feet, and too many teeth. They had hurt him, pushed him to the brink, but he had survived their onslaught the only way he knew how—by fighting, by clawing, by willing himself through the drowning sea. He didn’t know any other way but to fight.

It didn’t used to take this long to heal, but then he had never been hurt like this before. These days, the wounds closed a little slower, the breaks mended more deliberately, and the blood took longer to replenish. One of these days, he wouldn’t be able to heal at all, to regenerate all his losses, but that day was still far off.

His eyes snapped open, the dirt like sandpaper against his eyeballs. Something was happening. Something was…approaching.

A foot of earth separated him from sunlight. The heat called to him, even stronger than Mabry’s voice inside his head. As he lay there, resting in a tomb of his own making, the damp soil around him trembled as if coming alive. The walls shook, as did the patch of ground under and over him.

Had they found him? Had one of his defenses failed without him knowing it? Did Mabry know where he was and had sent his forces?

No, that was impossible. It was still daylight. He could feel it, like a lover calling to him. And he wanted to give in, wanted to embrace it like he once had, but knowing he couldn’t because doing so—

No, not ghouls.

Something else. Something…bigger.

It emerged from the city on wheels, close enough to his resting place that he could smell its leaked fluids as it lumbered. But it wasn’t flesh and bone. No. This was an animal made of metal. Hard, grinding metal.

He knew instantly what it was. Sometimes it was difficult to remember details from his past life, but this wasn’t one of those moments. He easily dug out the information from when he still wore a uniform, carried guns, climbed mountains, and took lives.

A tank. It was a tank.

* * *

The ground shook, passing from the many particles of dirt that sheathed him. It came from a distance—from where the waves crashed against sand, beyond the city, and where the tank had gone.

Nightfall. He knew without having to see the darkness. The shift in temperature against his skin, the cold that seeped through the earth and folded over him on all sides like a blanket, were evidence enough.

Earlier, he had felt the multiple tremors as they emerged from their nests, growing in intensity as they neared his position. There were hundreds. Thousands. They passed overhead, oblivious to his presence. It wasn’t him they were after. No. It was the machine. The thing that had appeared earlier. The tank.

They were summoned, called forth by the blue eyes. “Take it,” the blue eyes said. “Peel them from their metal skin.”

Another crack of thunder.

No, not thunder. A gun firing.

A cannon.

The tank.

The squeal of black-eyed creatures erupted inside his mind, surging across the connection that bonded him to the brood, to Mabry and the others. Their deaths were like sledgehammers, pounding against the sides of his skull. What he felt, Mabry could surely feel, too. Even more so.

He almost smiled against the dirt at the thought of Mabry hurting, feeling every death, every shriek of pain. If he concentrated enough, he could almost smell the sting of burning flesh as the black eyes vanished against the blast.

And yet they continued climbing out of the darkness and flowed like an unstoppable tide toward the beach. They were wary of the water, but the enemy had stopped just beyond the tides. Even so, the taste of ocean water lingered against their senses, terrorizing them with their possibilities.

“Take it,” the voices said. “They’ve already done too much damage. Stop them now. Here. Show them this world is ours.”

The voices belonged to the blue eyes. The ones leading the charge—directing the attack. They stood back, willing the black eyes forward like every officer he had ever known. Safe from the grinder and brave in their safety. He despised them, but was also cautious around them. They could sense him, just as he could them. He had to walk lightly, skirt around the edge, and never reveal himself.

It had begun while he was asleep, healing the cuts and gashes along his arms and legs and face. His concentration, his mental wall, always slipped when he was at his weakest, like he was at the moment. But Mabry hadn’t found him yet. No, this wasn’t about him. The creatures had not come here for him. They had come for the men inside the tank.

“They did it,” the voices said. “They’re trying to take our food from us. We’ll show them they should have stayed hidden.”

Another boom, followed by more screams of pain inside his head. The tank fired again and again, and each time the ground shook as if threatening to come apart. The continuous howls of black eyes accompanied the smell of singed flesh, and clouds of pulverized bone turned the darkness gray. He saw and sniffed the carnage through the senses of the creatures that were converging on the beach, driven forward by the relentless voices in their heads.

“Forward,” the voices commanded. “Take the machine! Take it now!”

Amid the chaos, he became aware of a new sound. No, not new, but old. A strange noise he hadn’t heard in some time. Music. It was music coming from the tank. From…speakers?

A house came apart, its foundations splintering against a stray cannon round, the smell of burning wood and disintegrating concrete, along with brick and mortar pluming in the air. Black eyes raced through them, unhindered by the wanton destruction.

Then something else. A new smell filling his senses. Not just wood burning, but searing flesh accompanying the cries of pain.

Fire. There was sustained fire among the explosions.

And yet they persisted, assaulting the armored shell of the machine from all sides and flailing against its unyielding skin. They clung onto the moving cannon, hoping to slow it down, their skeletal forms trembling as it let loose and split open another house. The ground shattered as the walls tumbled down and the ceiling collapsed inward, swallowing up a pair of black eyes that had been perched on the roof.

Now was the time, while the black eyes were obsessed with the tank. They were relentless, pouring unlimited numbers against it. He couldn’t see the ground anymore, just a mass of squirming black flesh oozing toward the tan vehicle as it swiveled and fired, swiveled and fired. And all the while, the loud music blared from its speakers, like some unholy noise from the pits of hell designed to drive men mad.

He detached his mind from his body and drifted freely through the layers of soft earth and grabbed the first consciousness that appeared. The creature was weak like all the rest, and he took control of its mind without any effort. They were just husks, vessels for Mabry and the blue eyes to command at will. It had taken him a lot of trial and error, but he was always good at adapting, finding an opening, and exploiting it.

He pushed the creature aside, into the back of its own mind where it could still see and hear and smell but was little more than a voyeur now. Then he moved its legs, from walking to running, then full-on sprinting toward the beach.

Faster. Faster!

There, the war machine. It was still moving, its gun firing, walls of flame stabbing from its armored shell. Black eyes roared as fire engulfed them, eating flesh from bones and vaporizing the precious blood. Mabry’s blood. They fell, disappearing among the fields of scorched grass. Smoke rose from buildings, walls of loose ground filling the air with every thunderous explosion.

He stood under darkness, a lone figure at the edge of the battlefield, and watched the horde of black eyes throwing themselves forward, drawn irresistibly to the squatting thing that refused to fall, or stop, or go silent. All this, while music blared from speakers attached to it, jumbled words filling the night sky, only occasionally broken by the bone-rattling boom of cannon fire.

He remained in the background so the blue eyes wouldn’t sense him. They were preoccupied trying to find some way, some hidden angle or slit, to pry open the mechanical beast. They commanded the swarm to crawl over the spinning turret, howling with frustration and pain as blankets of fire enveloped their soldiers one by one by one…

“Take it!” the voices shouted.

But the machine would not be taken, and it continued to turn even as a few hundred living things clung to it. Its gears grinded on even as the sprockets and crevices became clogged with burnt flesh and bone and spraying blood. They pounded against the metal with balled fists, fingers attempting in vain to pull open heavy doors that wouldn’t budge. The ground groaned under the combined weight, threatening to sink them all.

And the voices screamed: “Tear it apart! Inch by inch! Tear it apart!”

A stream of flames licked across the blackness, torching swaying grass and thickets of flesh in its path. Then the boom of the main cannon, shattering eardrums and destroying everything in its path.

The pointlessness of the scene, the pure carnage and death and destruction, depressed him, but he knew it wasn’t really him, because he didn’t care for these things. The pangs of sadness came from the creature he had shoved aside; its fear and fury were seeping into him. Husk though it may be, the creature still felt, at least inside its own mind.

He backed away from the field as more endless numbers of black eyes streamed past him, charging into the breach, obeying the command of the blue eyes.

“More!” they shouted. “More!” even as another two dozen disappeared in a hail of fire and earth.

He retreated, leaving the battlefield behind, when a brightly lit building flashed across his mind’s eye. It was there and gone before he could fully grasp what he had seen.

A building? Where? Lights? And why were the ghouls moving toward it?

There was something else happening at another place, at the exact same time. The ghouls were busy fighting on two fronts tonight, and the blue eyes were at both places to direct the attacks, their voices slight echoes in the back of his mind because of distance.

He abandoned the vessel he was occupying and let himself float along the stream that joined the brood, finding himself moving further and further away from the beach. Houses, basements, empty cities and rooftops flashed by eyes that didn’t belong to him. Tens of thousands of disjointed voices scrambled through his mind, but he pushed through them and searched for—

There, the same building he had seen earlier.

He focused on it, using the lights emanating from the structure as a beacon. Closer now, he began hiding within the consciousness of random black eyes, jumping between skins, hearing and seeing and feeling what they did, before moving on to the next one, and still the next one. Gathering intelligence, processing what he could, and never staying still for too long.

It had been difficult in the beginning, spying on the brood while remaining unseen. So many trials and errors and near misses. Mabry had almost caught him a half dozen times, but it was the blue eyes that were the most dangerous. There were too many of them, and they knew what he was doing. The black eyes were easier; they were just empty bodies to be taken, the way Mabry had done over the years, the centuries…

But he had learned and adapted, because that was what he did. He adapted and didn’t perish. Was that one of his sayings? Or someone else’s? It didn’t matter. It would come to him eventually. It always did.

He detached himself from another one of the creatures and weaved through the endless pair of eyes and ears, seeing and hearing glimpses of what he needed, but always moving forward, getting closer toward the building with the lights, because it was important. The blue eyes were there for a reason.

“The building,” the voices said inside his mind. “Take the building.”

There, at last.

It was just as brightly lit as when he had glimpsed it the first time. No longer just a flash of light in the distance, but clear as day. He understood now why the blue eyes were so unsure of themselves.

It shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have been this bright. Not here, not now, surrounded by black eyes watching from within the darkened woods that surrounded the place. Someone had made a mistake. Or had they?

The confusion seeped through every one of the creatures, including the one he was hiding within at the moment.

“Something’s wrong,” the voices said. “Something’s not right…”

He jumped bodies until he finally found a black eye moving across an airfield toward the well-lit building. Men in uniforms with masked faces—collaborators—watched him pass. He could smell fear clinging to their pores.

He wasn’t alone. Far from it. Black eyes streamed out of the trees around him and stampeded through overgrown fields of grass, then across smooth, paved roads. The stinging scent of jet fuel filled his nostrils, along with the lingering sweat of human bodies that had slaved in the area not long ago.

“The building,” the voices said in unison inside his head. “They’re in the building.”

He bounded across open space with his brethren, the hesitation giving way to confidence, their strength swelling with their numbers. It was why Mabry had waited so long, why they took the cities first.

“They’ve miscalculated,” the voices said, the confusion from earlier replaced by resounding confidence. “We’ll take them alive. Learn their locations. Then we’ll show them why they should have stayed hidden.”

Closer now, he spied normal eyes flitting across high windows along the walls of the building. The bright lights continued to pave his way, multiple sirens calling to him and the thousands of others to the left and right and behind him.

He ran faster, willing the skinny legs under him to move faster.

Faster and faster and faster!

“Take it,” the voices shouted. “Take it!”

Then something strange happened. The ground under him quaked, and the trees burst into flames. The screams of black eyes filled his mind, the smell of scorched flesh blanketing the air, and he stumbled and fell and was swallowed by the earth as it was torn asunder—

He retreated through the legion of ghouls, jumping from one to another, seeking safety as the crack of thunder—no, explosions—screamed across the night sky, wild wind threatening to engulf him in their wake. The taste of metal crackled inside the creature’s mouth, what jagged teeth it had left chattering in the aftermath.

There, a lone black-eyed ghoul had somehow managed to reach the outskirts of the blasts. It was almost at the building and was leaping when he forced himself into its mind. The creature struggled for an instant—just an instant—and he peered out through its eyes even as—

He was falling!

He reached out and snatched onto one of the metal bars fastened over a window and hung on. Figures were moving on the other side, scrambling around a metal catwalk.

One of them stopped and turned.

They locked eyes for an instant before the man raised two curious eyebrows, light blue eyes looking back out at him, short and damp sandy blond hair matted to his forehead.

Danny.

Book Two

Easy Peasy Company

11

Gaby

After watching Mercer’s people working like assembly line robots for the better part of the day, the sudden absence of all activity inside the hangar was unnatural, like the prelude to something bad. Really, really bad.

“How screwed are we?” Nate asked. “From one to ten?”

“Around fifteen,” Danny said.

“I said one to ten.”

“Ten. And five more.”

Nate sighed and looked to Gaby for help. She managed a smile, if just barely.

The mood had gotten noticeably gloomier since Erin came back to the office, opened the door, then said to them, “The first one who steps outside before we close the hangar doors gets shot. Don’t test me.”

No one tested her, but they did stand at the open windows—her, Nate, and Danny, with Mason and the other four crowding behind them—and watched Erin and the two that had been guarding the office climb into the back of the Ford truck waiting outside. The soldiers then crouched and took aim at them while two others swung the heavy doors closed with a loud bang! The sound of locks snapping into place, followed by heavy chains sliding into position, left no doubt what was happening and that any semblance of optimism she might have had was all for naught because they were being locked inside the hangar.

They scrambled out of the office like escaped prisoners when they heard the vehicle fading into the background, Mason and his men making the door before she, Nate, or Danny could.

“Get it open!” Mason shouted.

Gaby could have told them it wasn’t going to work. That was the point of holding them back, after all. But she didn’t bother and instead watched the uniformed men sweating against the large twin doors, grunting like wild animals. They seemed to get louder with every passing second that the doors didn’t budge.

“Spread out,” Mason said when they finally gave up on the front doors. “Look for another way out of here. Cover every inch. We don’t wanna still be here when night falls, boys! Not in this condition!”

One of the men found a back door, but it also wouldn’t open for him. He started kicking it, then threw his shoulder into the steel frame, and when that didn’t work, he began pacing in front of it like a cornered animal. Two others, including the biggest among them (“Lucas” was written on his name tag) joined the first and tried their luck. Lucas had to be over six-eight, with a massive frame and a neck that was probably bigger than one of her thighs, and while his hands made the door lever look like a toy, he only ended up breaking the latch loose. There was clearly something even stronger than Lucas on the other side.

Mason had been watching them straining and cursing, and when Lucas tossed the broken off lever away with disgust, he said, “Look for something we can use to pry the doors open. Find anything.”

“Never say die,” Danny said, watching Mason’s people racing around the hangar. “You almost gotta respect them.”

She, Danny, and Nate didn’t bother joining in the collaborators’ search because they knew better. They had watched Mercer’s people clean out everything in the place before leaving. They had left absolutely nothing behind. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. They had left them behind. The question was: Why?

“Come on; let’s see what we can see,” Danny said, and began jogging up one of the catwalks that led to the windows over the front doors. He reached the top and looked out, then rasped his knuckles on the glass.

“No go?” she asked.

“Thicker than Nate’s head and twice as bright.”

“Hey, I kick ass on standardized tests,” Nate said.

“But it’s the burglar bars on the other side that’s the problem,” Danny continued.

“What’s out there?” Mason called from below.

“I’m not your fucking secretary,” Danny said back down.

Mason smirked before hurrying over, then climbed up the other catwalk across from them. A couple of his men followed. They left the other two below, including Lucas, still trying in vain to open the single back door, though that had become more difficult now without the lever.

The platform she was moving on wasn’t nearly as long or wide as it had looked from below; the whole thing was about four feet wide and just long enough to cover both high windows. There were eight windows in all inside the hangar—four up front, two in the back, and finally one more on each side.

“They planned this out,” Nate was saying.

“What?” she said.

“This,” he said, gesturing at the catwalks. “There’s no telling how long they’ve been using this place, collecting the silver from the surrounding towns, getting it ready for today.”

“I got the feeling Mercer had FOBs all across the state,” Danny said.

“FOB?” she asked.

“Forward operating bases,” Nate said. “It would explain going through the effort to put the bars outside and the catwalks. Just in case they were discovered.” He shook his head. “A lot of planning went into today. A lot…”

“If you want, I’ll let Mercer know you want to be best buds with him,” Danny said. “Share dips and chips over Sunday football and all that good All-American whoopee do.”

“I’m just saying, the level of planning…” Nate said, but let the rest trail off.

Four hundred dead men, women, and children, she thought, the smell of smoke and blood still fresh in her mind and, she swore, on her clothes. Where there was numbness when she walked across T29, there was now anger. At Mercer, at Erin, at all the people following him.

She turned back to the window and looked past the burglar bars. Mercer’s people had abandoned the airfield, leaving behind a few vehicles parked outside the cluster of administrative buildings across the field from them. The shift from activity to stillness was startling, and she kept waiting for someone to come outside, but no one did.

Gaby refocused on the empty landing strip that stretched beyond her peripheral vision, on the buildings at the end, and then beyond them at the insurmountable walls of trees that surrounded the place. It reminded her of the airport outside her own small town, one of those places you wouldn’t even know existed unless you were from the area. Most of the planes that landed here were probably small private aircraft. She thought she could see still-wet fuel stains along the pavement, but that could just be the dwindling sunlight playing tricks with her eyes.

“Gaby, look,” Nate said.

She followed his gaze upward. The sky. It was darkening.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“An hour, give or take,” Danny said.

“How long is give or take?”

“Thirty minutes-ish.”

“You said this was part of the plan, that Mercer always intended to leave someone behind in here.”

Danny nodded. “He didn’t spill all the details, but that’s what I gathered, yeah.”

“Christ,” Nate said next to her. His voice had dropped noticeably, though it wouldn’t have taken much for Mason and the others to hear, given the echoey nature of the hangar. “They used the airfield as an FOB, but they always intended to abandon it after today. It wouldn’t have taken much to track the hog and whatever else he’s got running or flying around out there back to this place.”

“We’re bait,” Gaby said.

“Well, they were,” Danny said, nodding across at Mason and his two comrades. “We just got unlucky.”

“What are the chances this entire airfield is booby-trapped?” Nate asked.

“Lots and lots.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Shouldn’t have asked, then.”

“I can’t seem to learn that lesson,” Nate sighed.

She looked across at Mason as he peered out the windows. If he’d heard them talking, he was doing a good job not reacting to it. One of the collaborators on the platform with him had punched the windowpane so hard that it cracked (but didn’t break) and left his hand a bloody mess.

Idiot, she thought, watching the man struggle to stanch the bleeding with his shirt.

The collaborator was doing a piss-poor job of it, and she wondered how long it would take him to bleed to death when she heard a noise that hadn’t been there before. With everyone moving around, talking, and Mason’s people raising hell against unyielding metal, she had missed the low rumbling until now. It vibrated along the length of the hangar and traveled across her hand that was pressed against the windowsill.

“Guys, listen,” she said.

Nate and Danny went very still and listened.

“What is that, some kind of generator?” Nate asked.

“I think so,” she nodded. “It’s coming from outside.”

They looked through the windows again, this time searching closer to the building instead of scanning the fields surrounding it. Whatever it was, it had to be close enough that the tremors could be felt. And Nate was right; it did sound like a generator. But why would Mercer’s people leave something like that behind? A generator, and especially the gas running it, was worth its weight in gold these days.

“It has to be nearby,” she said.

“Can’t see it,” Nate said, standing up on tiptoe and trying to look down directly below them. “You?”

“No.”

“Why would they leave a generator behind?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced at Danny. “What’s going to happen when night falls?”

“Bad things, would be my guess,” Danny said.

“You should have left with them.”

He sighed. “Don’t rub it in.”

“Carly’s going to be so pissed when she finds out what you did.”

“Don’t worry; whenever she gets mad at me, I just double down on the oral sex.”

“I shouldn’t be hearing this.”

“TMI?”

“Just a little bit,” Gaby said, managing to smile back at him.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said.

She looked over. “What?”

“Lights,” he said, pointing up. “They’ve been above us this entire time.”

Gaby leaned against the window and looked up. She hadn’t seen them before because there was still too much light outside, but now that it had gotten darker, they were harder to miss.

There were LED floodlights positioned above their windows. Not just theirs, but Mason’s and the ones behind them as well, though those were harder to spot from their platform.

“The generator,” she said. “That must be what it’s for.”

“They’re going to use us as bait, all right,” Nate said. “We’re going to be the only building lit up like a Christmas tree for miles out here. If Mason’s pals didn’t already know we’re here, they’re not going to be able to miss us come nightfall.”

“Like moths to the flame,” Danny said quietly. “I hate it when I’m right.”

* * *

Gaby didn’t know what the hangar’s twin doors were made of, but it was apparently strong enough material that kicking them only produced dull thudding sounds, though that didn’t stop the collaborators from raining blow after blow against them anyway. When all that effort left two of them limping, they turned their attention to the rest of the building. Lucas, meanwhile, hadn’t given up trying to break his way through the back door. He had made some impressive dents, but for the most part, the door remained unimpressed.

She stayed on the platform next to the front windows with Nate and Danny and watched Mason directing his soldiers below them. In between the constant banging, the wails of frustration, the slight hum of the generator outside, and Mason urging the others to attack harder and faster, was the distinctive tick-tick-tick of Danny’s watch. Like a time bomb, letting her know that the end was coming.

“Like moths to the flame,” Danny had said, because in less than an hour the entire airfield would be submerged in darkness…except for their building. If the collaborators and their ghoul allies had an ounce of brain, they would have traced the attacks back here. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were already out there, biding their time. Surely they could already see the lights. And they could afford to wait for nightfall, too. Unlike her, Danny, and Nate.

Mason, hands on his hips, glanced up at them. “You wanna come down here and do your part?”

“And what part would that be?” Danny asked. “The kicking or the crying? I’m not very good at either.”

“Whatever strikes your fancy, smartass.”

“I’m familiar with the ass part, but not so much the first. Just ask my girlfriend. But you boys go right ahead and keep at it.” Then he pointed and said, “I can see a little crack over there. Try ramming that thick skull of yours, maybe that’ll do the trick.”

Mason grunted, while around him the others had stopped to rest. Even Lucas seemed to have given up on the back door. He was bent slightly over, sweat dripping from his face.

“Shut it down, boys,” Mason said. “It’s going to be dark soon; might as well save your strength for tomorrow.”

The others gave him a confused look.

“If we can’t get out, nothing can get in, either,” Mason continued. Then he glanced up at her and Danny. “Of course, if people in the right uniforms show up tonight, that’s another story.”

“You willing to bet your life on your friends not shooting on sight?” Danny asked. “After the day they’ve had out there?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess so.”

One of the collaborators had walked over to stand next to Mason. The man was wiping at sweat along his forehead with the back of his hand, and she recognized him as the idiot who had gashed his fist on the window earlier. His right hand was swaddled in a piece of his shirt and she noticed he had a bit of a paunch, because apparently they ate pretty well in the towns.

The man had dark eyes, and they zeroed in on her. “Why don’t you come on down here, little girl,” he said. “When our friends show up, I’ll put in a good word for you. Of course, you’ll have to be nice to me first.”

“Patterson, shut up,” Mason said.

“Fuck off,” Patterson snapped back.

Apparently someone’s not as in charge as he thinks, Gaby thought, staring back at Patterson. If the man expected her to be flustered by his comments, he was mistaken. She’d faced worse, and she would survive him, too.

Nate, leaning against the railing next to her, tensed at Patterson’s comments, but before she could calm him, Mason spoke first.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mason was saying, smiling at her with something that she could almost believe was actual sympathy. “He hasn’t gotten laid in a while, that’s all.”

“Man, I’m getting really sick of your mouth,” Patterson said, whirling on Mason. The fingers of his left hand clenched into a balled fist. She wondered if he was left-handed or if that was because he had ruined his right on the window earlier. “You’re not in charge anymore. You stopped calling the shots when you got us caught.”

“Is that right?” Mason said, turning to face Patterson.

Patterson wasn’t exactly a tall man. She guessed he was five-ten, though face-to-face (chin to forehead?) with the five-three Mason, he might as well be a giant. She felt almost sorry for Mason. Almost.

“You fucking little midget,” Patterson said, spittle flying out of his mouth. Gaby wondered how long he had been keeping that in. “I’m sick of listening to you telling us what to do. In fact, I’m sick of your face.”

“Hey, you know how difficult it is to find moisturizer out here?”

Patterson wasn’t deterred. “I don’t even know who put you in charge. As far as I can tell, you’re just a little runt from Louisiana.”

“I’m from Texas, chum. I just happened to be in Louisiana until a few weeks ago.”

“Who gives a shit. I didn’t ask for your résumé.”

Mason chuckled. “What exactly are you trying to say, Patterson?”

The other three hadn’t butted in. They stood back and watched, maybe just a little bit curious to see what would happen next. She got the impression that, like Patterson, they didn’t particularly care very much for Mason’s leadership abilities, either.

Patterson leaned in until his face was a mere half a foot from Mason’s, lording his height over the smaller man. “What I’m trying to say is, you need to shut the fuck up and let us do what we have to do.”

“Which would be?”

Patterson’s eyes shot back up to her. “I’ve been watching that piece of ass all day. You can have her friends. You like guys, right, Mason?” He didn’t wait for Mason to answer and glanced over at Lucas and the other two. “What about you guys? You with me? Lucas?”

The other two turned to Lucas, as if seeking permission. Maybe because Lucas could break all of them against his knees like twigs, if he wanted to. But the big man didn’t say anything, and Gaby couldn’t have begun to guess what was going through his head at this very moment.

Patterson apparently had just as much trouble, because he said, “Lucas, come on. You with me? We can do this. You and me. You can have the girl first. I’m not against sloppy seconds.”

Next to her, Nate tensed even further, and she heard Danny whisper softly, “Don’t. It’ll be over soon.”

She looked over at Danny, but he was staring at Mason. She didn’t know why she was so calm despite what they were saying about doing to her, as if she wasn’t there listening to all of it. Maybe it was because in order to get to her, they had to come up the catwalk. She had higher ground and Nate at her side. Even better, she had Danny. The Gaby from a year ago would have been terrified, but she hadn’t been that Gaby in a long time now.

Three against five. I still like those odds.

“Come on, Lucas,” Patterson was saying, sounding dangerously close to pleading. “You and me, man. You with me, or what?”

“Son,” Mason said, directing everything—his eyes, his words, his full attention—at Patterson as if no one else existed inside the hangar, “you need to shut it down now, before it’s too late.”

“Son?” Patterson looked back at Mason. “I’m not your son, ass—” Patterson said, but he never got to finish.

Mason moved so fast Gaby had trouble following him. One moment he was standing face-to-face with Patterson, then a second later the taller man was on the slick hangar floor as a thick arc of blood sprayed through the air. Mason had what looked like a small knife clenched in his right fist, and it took her a few seconds to realize it was a small, rusted over piece of metal barely longer than her forefinger. Blood dripped from the object in Mason’s hand as he stood over Patterson’s twitching form.

Patterson wasn’t dead, though he might have wished he were. His legs moved in jerky motions as he clutched his neck, bright red squirts of blood forcing their way between his fingers. Mason must have struck an artery, which would explain the large amount of blood pumping out of Patterson at the moment.

Mason seemed to sigh—or, at least, he made a loud show of it—before looking back at the remaining three collaborators. “Anyone else want to undermine my authority?”

“Nah,” Lucas said.

The other two didn’t say anything, and their eyes remained fixed on Patterson’s thrashing form.

“Now then,” Mason said, slipping the makeshift knife into one of his pockets, then settling his dark beady eyes on Nate, Gaby, and Danny on the platform above him. “I suggest we all calm the fuck down and enjoy the show. What do you think, soldier boy?”

“I think your leadership style leaves a lot to be desired,” Danny said.

Mason grinned. “It gets the job done.”

“Patterson would disagree.”

“Yeah, well…” Mason looked down at Patterson, whose wide-open eyes stared back up accusingly at him. “I think he was originally from Oklahoma, and I never really had much use for Sooners.”

* * *

It should have been dark inside the hangar, but the combination of very bright (too bright) LED floodlights outside the windows and moonlight were enough for them to see each other with. She had no trouble seeing Patterson resting where he had fallen, almost directly below them. His eyes were still wide open, but there were no signs of life behind them.

She sneaked a glance at Mason and one of the collaborators leaning against their windows. Despite everything Mason had said about “people in the right uniforms” showing up, she could see the doubt on his face and in the anxious way he peered outside.

If Mason was concerned, Danny was the exact opposite. He was leaning against the window on the other side of Nate with something that almost looked like a ghost of a smile on his lips. The sight of it confused and annoyed her.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked over. “Hmm?”

“You’re smiling like an idiot.”

“Was I?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “I was just trying to remember how many times Willie boy and me have been in situations just like this one.”

“How many times?”

“Too many to count. In the Stan, during Harris County SWAT, then later, when things really got weird…” That smile again. “We always got through it, though. He’d come up with a plan and I’d carry it out to perfection, if I do say so myself. That’s what they used to call me in college, you know. Perfection Danny.”

“The two of you ever been in a situation this bad?” Nate asked.

“Worse,” Danny said.

“Worse?” Nate said doubtfully.

“We had a bad habit of getting up creeks without paddles. The shit we got into, and got out of…” He shook his head, smiling at the darkness outside.

It was the first time she could recall Danny talking about Will like he would never come back. In the weeks after Song Island, after Danny had recovered from his wound, she had kept a close watch on him. They all did—her, Carly, Lara, even Maddie and Blaine. In so many ways, the fact that Lara had the rest of them to worry about allowed her to better deal with Will’s absence. Danny, on the other hand, had to wake up to hear the bad news.

Now, as she watched Danny staring out the window, as quiet and thoughtful as she had ever seen him, she couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind at the moment. They had never really talked about the loss of Will, but she knew it weighed heavily on him. Not just the huge empty space Will had left behind, but all the responsibilities Danny had had to take up as a result of it.

She didn’t expect Danny to start spilling his guts now, and he didn’t disappoint her. Instead of pushing him to do something he would never do, she looked out the window at the encroaching darkness, at the undecipherable walls of trees that surrounded the entire airfield.

Christ, it was dark out there, and getting darker with every passing minute.

Clanging metal as Mason rushed down the catwalk, leaving the other collaborator behind on the platform. Mason disappeared into the office with Lucas and the fourth man. She could hear them talking quietly inside, making plans.

“What are they talking about in there?” Nate asked, looking back at the office on the other side of the building.

“Nothing good,” she said.

“We better keep an eye on them. Him, too,” Nate said, nodding at the lone collaborator on the platform across from them.

If the man heard them, he didn’t react to it.

She nodded, when something suddenly moved in the corner of her right eye, and she turned back to the window and peered past the bars toward the small group of darkened buildings across the airfield.

“Danny,” she hissed.

Danny glanced over. “What?”

“Movement,” she said, taking a step to her left until she was no longer exposed in front of the window.

Danny did the same on his side. “Where?”

“The buildings.”

“Ghouls?” Nate asked, hugging the wall behind her.

“I don’t think so. They didn’t move like ghouls.”

“Mason’s BFFs,” Danny said, narrowing his eyes. “They’re in the fields. Stealthy bastards must have been picking their way toward us for the last few minutes under the cover of darkness.”

“How many?” Nate asked.

Danny looked over at her. “A dozen?”

“Sounds right,” she nodded.

Nate looked back down at the office, where Mason and the others were still inside. He turned back to her and was about to say something when the collaborator Mason had left behind on the platform across from them bellowed out, “Mason! We got company!”

Mason, Lucas, and the fourth man rushed outside, but only Mason ran up the catwalk stairs, his boots clanging loudly.

She turned back around to her window and focused on the grassy fields that flanked the long landing strip. There were a dozen figures that she could see, some crouching, others lying on their stomachs, their black uniforms making them nearly invisible.

“You see that?” Danny said.

“What?” Nate said.

“They’re wearing gas masks.”

She saw it: moonlight glinting off the lens of a gas mask covering one of the men’s faces. She could only see the one man because he had raised himself up to his knees and was aiming a rifle at the hangar.

It had been a while since she had run across collaborators in gas masks, and the sight of the kneeling man outside made her shiver slightly. She would never forget Mercy Hospital in Louisiana as long as she lived, because it was where she had killed her first man. She didn’t remember what the man looked like, only the shape of the breathing apparatus covering his face and the dark shape of his eyes behind the clear lens. In some ways, the fact that she couldn’t see all of his face when she killed him made it easier to deal with. The lack of detail meant the nightmares were less vivid.

“Looks like your time’s about up,” Mason said from across the hangar. He was grinning stupidly at them. “Those are our boys out there. Better hope—”

Crack! as a bullet drilled through the windowpane half an inch above Mason’s head and pinged! off the back wall before ricocheting and embedding into the smooth floor a mere two feet from Patterson’s dead body.

“Fuck me!” Mason shouted as he ducked on the platform.

The other collaborator mirrored Mason’s action, throwing his arms over his head as if that would protect him from a bullet. Luckily they were both under the windowsill, so the shooter couldn’t see them.

Gaby and Nate remained where they were, hidden from view next to their window.

Danny, similarly unexposed, was chuckling. “Looks like they didn’t get your memo, Mason. You didn’t send it by carrier pigeon, did you? Birds are so unreliable these days.”

“Shit!” Mason said to no one in particular. He scooted along the platform before sliding up against the wall, where he could stay out of view.

“The fuck they shot at us for?” the other man asked as he did the same thing, sliding up along the side of the other window.

“Why don’t you go out there and ask them, Hendricks,” Mason said.

The man named Hendricks seemed to think about it before leaning slightly toward the window and shouting out, “Hey, don’t shoot—”

Crack! as a second bullet drilled through the windowpane a foot from Hendricks’s face and pinged! off the back of the hangar before burying itself into the floor like the first shot.

Hendricks jerked his head away from the window and shouted, “Fuck!”

Lucas and the fourth man were hugging the wall below them, apparently unsure whether to stay where they were or to make a run for the back office. She would have stayed in the safety of the room because ricocheting bullets didn’t care what uniforms you were wearing, or if you wore one at all.

“I don’t think they know their friends are in here,” Nate said, grinning at her.

“Either that, or they don’t care,” she said.

“My guess is they’re not taking any chances,” Danny said. Then, louder so Mason and the others could hear, “In fact, if I were them, I’d take this hangar out from a distance. Safer that way. Hey, Mason, you boys carrying RPGs these days?”

Mason glared over at him but didn’t answer.

Gaby peered out the window again, keeping as far back as possible while still seeing out—somewhat, anyway. Her angle was limited and she was very aware of how brightly lit her window was at this very moment, giving the shooters clear-as-day targets to aim at.

“See anything?” Nate asked behind her.

She shook her head. “Not a whole lot.”

“Can’t see shit on this side, either,” Danny said.

She couldn’t see forward, where she had spotted the collaborator in the gas mask, but she could see off to the side just fine. The problem was the endless wall of trees that stared back at her. There was nothing out there—

Oh God, she thought, and said breathlessly, “Danny, the trees. The trees.”

She didn’t need lights or night vision to see them as they poured out of the woods surrounding the airfield; there were so many that she swore the building around her was trembling against the stampede of bare feet.

“How many?” Nate whispered behind her.

“Too many,” she whispered back.

“What’s out there?” Mason shouted over to them. “What are you seeing?”

She didn’t answer him. Neither did Danny.

Their lack of response only made Mason angrier, and he shouted again, “Hey, fucktards, what’s out there?”

Gaby was braced against the wall when it started to shudder, the vibrations causing her body to move with it. It wasn’t like when she felt the creatures coming out of the trees. No, this was stronger, more intense. Before she could properly register it, the entire hangar was rumbling as if it was going to come apart at the seams—

Danny whirled away from the window and screamed at them, “Down! Get the fuck down!”

She dropped to the platform on instinct, just as pieces of the windows began to spiderweb, and she heard the sound that she knew would haunt her nightmares for as long as she lived, however long that might be.

It came from above, like a great beast unleashing its rage upon the world.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

12

Keo

Well, I’ve had better nights.

And that was before the tankers fired up the music. They were blaring heavy metal, and the drums and guitars were just loud enough to drown out the soothing waves of the ocean just beyond the beach.

I’ve had a lot better nights.

After the speakers came to life, the cannon fire began. Again and again and again. Each time it let loose, the ground shook. He waited for them to run out of shells. Surely they didn’t have a full load, did they?

But that wasn’t all they had on them. He remembered glimpsing the gun turrets from a distance and knowing they had been modified, but not how or why. In his wildest dreams, he wouldn’t have guessed someone would come up with the bright idea to rig a flamethrower to a sixty-ton war machine. It was a tad overkill, if someone were to ask him.

The unmistakable whiff of burning flesh made its way through the trapdoor above him soon after the cannon fire began. At first, he thought it might have been barbecue cooking. Well, he wasn’t too far off the mark; it just wasn’t the kind of searing meat he usually preferred. It simultaneously sounded, felt, and smelled like the world was having one big party and coming to a glorious, bloody end.

Keo had been to a lot of bad places, seen a lot of bad things, and had even done some of them (okay, maybe most of them), but he had to admit, what was happening above him now was entirely new. Then again, it could just be his present circumstance making things look much worse than they really were.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

“Jesus, how many times have they fired that thing?” Jordan said next to him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Guess.”

“Do I have to?”

“It’ll help pass the time.”

“How so?”

“Just guess.”

On cue, another thoom! rang out, and the enclosed space trembled. Keo imagined a slew of ghouls disintegrating against the explosion somewhere out there. Closer to home, a piece of dirt that had been clinging to a section of the wall for God knew how long fell loose and landed on his hand. He flicked it away.

“What was that?” Jordan asked, alarmed.

“Nothing; just a piece of dirt.”

“Stop that. I have enough dirt on this side and under my ass, I don’t need some of yours, too.”

“Sorry.”

They were in the (coffin) rectangular space under the storage building that he had discovered earlier. It wasn’t nearly as roomy as he had promised Jordan, though there was enough space for both of them to lie down, even if they couldn’t twitch their arms or legs, or blow at a piece of dirt without it landing on one other.

Not that Keo minded too much. If he had to be sealed off from the world in a literal hole in the ground with anyone, at least Jordan smelled better than most. Not that she had done anything special, but women, even ones covered in dirt and grime as she was at the moment, with a week’s worth of sweat to boot, was still preferable to the best-smelling guy he’d ever had the misfortune to lie down next to. Besides, it felt good to give his legs a long rest.

As far as he could tell, the house above them was still standing, though he couldn’t say the same for the others around it. The possibility of losing the building wasn’t the problem; it was being trapped under its pile of rubble that made him nervous. Keo had come to accept the possibility of death in a variety of ways, and buried alive was far, far down the list.

Shoulda made a run for it. Hell, shoulda done a lot of things, pal.

“Well?” Jordan said.

“Well what?”

“I asked you a question. How many times have they fired that thing? About twenty?”

“Ten?”

“Can’t be…”

“Around ten.”

“It has to be more.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you even trying?”

“Of course.”

She sighed, her breath warm against his left ear. He could feel her body heat, hear the soft rustling of clothes as she moved her legs and arms from time to time. She got more restless each time the tank fired and a cloud of dust shook loose from the oak door a foot from their faces. The floor under them was cold and wet and hard, like sleeping on the world’s worst, most painful mattress.

“What the hell is that, anyway?” she asked.

“What?”

“That music…”

“‘War Pigs.’”

“What did you call me?”

He grinned. “It’s a song called ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath.”

“Oh.” Then, “I didn’t know you were into heavy metal.”

“I’m not, but I knew this guy who was. Got himself killed in Mogadishu a few years back. RPG pierced the car we were riding in and gutted him.”

“Gutted him? I thought rockets were supposed to explode.”

“This one didn’t. It sliced through the door and got him in the stomach. Missed the client by a foot. The poor bastard was muttering ‘God’ for three straight days after that. After a while, I wanted to kill him.”

“That must have been awful.”

“Why? He lived.”

“No, I meant your friend.”

“Oh. Yeah. It was pretty ugly.”

“Were you good friends?”

“Nah. Truth is, I didn’t really like him that much.”

“Why not?”

“His taste in music sucked.”

“Oh sure, why not hate a guy because you disagree with his taste in music.”

“Glad you approve.”

She made a sound that might have been a snort. “So these people you used to work for…”

“What about them?”

“They have a name?”

“Yes.”

When he didn’t elaborate, she said, “What was it?”

“You wouldn’t know them. They don’t show up in the Yellow Pages.”

She chuckled.

“What?” he said.

“Phone books. I remember when everyone had one. Then the Internet happened. I guess we’re going to have to go back to phone books now, huh?”

“We’re going to need working phones first.”

“Yeah, there’s that. Well, one problem at a time.”

Another thoom!, and the ground around them shook again, the shockwave lingering a bit longer this time. He listened to another house toppling somewhere in the background.

Shit, they’re landing closer and closer.

“What exactly are they doing out there?” Jordan asked, sounding simultaneously angry and scared.

“Making a hell of a mess, would be my guess.”

“What if it really is the U.S. Army? What if they’re finally fighting back?”

“What they’re doing up there isn’t fighting back.”

“I don’t understand…”

“There’s no point in blowing up a beach full of ghouls,” he said. “If you wanted to kill the bastards, you could go around firebombing buildings and taking out all the places they use as nests during the day. Break a lot of windows, bust down all the doors you can find—all that fun vandalism stuff we used to do back when we were kids.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay, that I used to do when I was a kid. Eventually, you’d have to accept that there’s no point in killing them.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that. The more we kill, the less of them there are.”

“You really think so?”

“The question is, why don’t you?”

“Because there are millions of them out there, Jordan. Maybe billions. You can kill a hundred of them, even thousands a day, and you wouldn’t make a dent. It also won’t get you any closer to winning this war. You’d just get every blue eyes in the area sicced on you. Ones like Frank, except less friendly. Anyone running around out there shelling beaches doesn’t understand what they’re facing.”

“Which is?”

“That we’re living behind enemy lines. The entire planet’s occupied territory. The last thing you want to be doing out there is drawing attention to yourself if you don’t have to.”

He expected an argument, but she was very quiet for a long time.

“I forget that you’ve been out there longer and seen more than I have,” she said finally. “Even when I was at T18, then running around in the woods with Tobias, I was never really out there. What else do you know?”

“Just that the ones behind all this had it planned out from the very beginning. Frank said as much. He said he could hear them talking, hear voices of the ones in charge. They knew what they were doing from day one. The blood farms, the hospitals, the military response…”

“Did he say what happened to the Army? What about the Navy?”

“He said they weren’t around anymore.”

“That’s it?”

“We didn’t really get into details. He’s mostly a man of few words. Anyway, if they were still out there, don’t you think they would have shown themselves by now?”

“Yeah, there’s that…”

“Besides, I learned long ago not to put your faith in Uncle Sam’s boys. They’re overrated and will only disappoint you in the end.”

“Sounds personal. Daddy issues?”

“Maybe a tad.”

“Anyway, when did you guys have these conversations? And where was I during them?”

“Usually asleep.”

“You could have woken me. Maybe I had some questions for him, too.”

He chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“The thought of you and Frank, talking. You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Maybe you don’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How you are around him. You’re…stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“Tense.”

“I didn’t…” She stopped short, then said, “Do you think he noticed?”

Oh, he noticed all right, Keo thought, but said, “Probably not.”

Jordan went silent after that. He couldn’t see her face, so he didn’t know if she was replaying all those nights when they were with Frank and how she had acted (unknowingly, as it turned out) around him. Or maybe she was doing what he was doing and trying to time the aftershocks after each cannon impact and grimacing when they sounded just a little bit closer than the last time.

“Are you missing T18 yet?” he asked.

She sighed. “Maybe a little bit. Why?”

“Sometimes I think the people in the towns are the smart ones. At least they get to sleep in their own beds, with a stomach full of food, and not just kidney beans.”

“I thought you like kidney beans.”

“I don’t like them that much.”

Another bout of silence, with just Ozzy Osbourne somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor. The speakers must have taken a hit, because Ozzy’s voice had become strained and at times incomprehensible.

“So, Black Sabbath, huh?” Jordan said after a while.

“Yup. Black Sabbath.”

“They must have that damn song on an endless loop.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Speakers.”

“Uh huh.”

“These tanks come with speakers?”

“Probably custom add-ons.”

“It’s not bad. The song. Not sure I’d like to listen to it 500 times in a row, but hey, whatever floats their boat.” She paused for a moment, then, “What happens if they hit the house above us?”

“Probably nothing good.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“It’ll fall down and bury us. We’d survive for a few days while trying to open the door, but eventually we’d give up when it won’t budge because of all the rubble on top of it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Then we’d both die of thirst in a few days. Unless you start eating me, or I start eating you. We could probably live off each other’s meat and blood for a few extra days or weeks, if you can keep it all down.”

“Very vivid; thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another thoom!

Keo squeezed his eyes shut against a particularly thick cloud of dust floating down over his face from the door above them. He coughed, and so did Jordan next to him.

“That one was pretty close,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“The closest one yet.”

“Yup.”

“Not good.”

“Nope.”

“What are the chances we can make the beach if we climb out right now?”

“Depends…”

“On?”

“How many of the bloodsuckers are around the house right now that will notice us when we poke our heads out.”

“How many, you think?”

“A few hundred?”

“Sounds manageable.”

“Or maybe a few thousand.”

“That, not so much.” She sighed. “You wanna risk it?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

The cannon fire, the smell of burning flesh, and Ozzy’s waning voice filled the temporary silence inside the room. He tried to pick out the crashing ocean waves in the background, but it was a lost cause through the thick walls. At least they had their thermal clothing, which kept the cool temperature at bay. The only real issue at the moment was the chances of being buried alive down here.

Don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.

Yeah, that’s it. Let’s go with that.

“Keo,” Jordan whispered.

“What?”

“Is that smell what I think it is?”

“Yeah.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah.”

“If you say ‘yeah’ one more time, I’m going to punch you in the balls.”

“Sounds painful,” he said.

“I don’t know what Gillian sees in you.”

“Must be my charming personality.”

“What personality?”

“Man, you’re really going for the low blows tonight, aren’t you?”

She chuckled, just as the tank loosed another round, the resulting thoom! causing his teeth to chatter for a few seconds afterward.

“That was a close one,” Jordan said.

“The one before that was closer.”

“Was it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Not good.”

“Nope.”

“I’m going to die down here, aren’t I?”

“Think positive.”

“The power of positive thinking?”

“Something like that.”

“Hey, Keo,” she said.

“What?”

“Did you ever think you were going to die under someone’s storage shed?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Definitely not under someone’s storage shed.”

“You must have lived one hell of a life before all of this.”

“It was a wild ride, yeah.”

“Can I confess something?”

“Go for it.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing we never met until now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I would have totally fallen for you. I mean, head over heels. Sex on floors, and all that good stuff.”

“Nice.”

She laughed. “But then you’d break my heart, and I’d spend the next few years screwing every guy I meet in an attempt to forget you.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“Yeah. It’s a good thing we didn’t meet before all of this.”

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “It’s a good thing…”

13

Gaby

The earth exploded, splitting open up and down the airfield, and then it started spitting dirt and concrete and flesh and bone against the hangar. The windows shattered against the concussive force, a few thousand pieces spraying inward in the hundredths of seconds afterward, the continuous pek-pek-pek of glass falling like machine-gun fire.

Gaby looked up in time to see Hendricks, the collaborator on the platform across the front doors from her, making the mistake of staying upright as the chaos began. He was still staring, slack-jawed, when a massive chunk of the landing strip smashed through the window, snapping the iron bars as if they were candy. Hendricks realized his mistake too late, and the piece of concrete pummeled him as he attempted to turn and flee. He sailed across the room and fell, landing in a grotesque pile not far from Patterson’s body.

Mason, on the same platform as Hendricks, proved to be smarter. He was already pressed into the metal grates when Hendricks was struck. The collaborator glanced up and they locked eyes for a moment, and he might have actually even grinned at her.

She mouthed back a curse when another series of explosions tore through the world and the entire building thrummed in the aftermath of what sounded like a dozen bombs going off at once. The glass on the other side of the hangar shattered, pelting Lucas and the other collaborator as they made a run for the office in the back. Lucas caught a flying shard the size of Gaby’s arm in the thigh, the sharp, bloody point jutting out the front. The big man roared, so loud that she could actually hear him over the end of the world.

Gaby watched Lucas grab the chunk of glass sticking out behind him, and she wanted to shout at him to Stop, you idiot, you’re only going to make it worse, but she didn’t. Not that Lucas would have heard her over the maelstrom of destruction outside the hangar walls anyway. Lucas somehow managed to get a firm grip with both hands despite having to twist around at the waist, and began pulling. Blood gushed and Lucas let out another monstrous roar, but this time it was entirely lost against the nightmarish brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt of an A-10 unleashing death from above.

She stared at Lucas, unable to look away, when hands grabbed her right arm and a familiar voice shouted very close to her ear, “Come on; we gotta get down from here before this whole building collapses!”

It was Danny, dragging her up to her feet, having to do almost all the work because she was still stunned by the sight of Lucas stumbling around below her, obscenely spraying blood onto the floor. She finally came to her senses and struggled to her feet even as Danny began pulling her toward the catwalk.

“Nate!” she shouted.

Nate was picking himself up behind her, grabbing at the railing for support as another massive explosion boomed! through the fields outside. “Go!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

She turned and followed Danny as he hopped down the steps two, then three at a time. She thought she was going to trip at least a dozen times on the way down, but somehow—miraculously—managed to maintain her balance all the way—

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

Her whole body shivered at the sound, as if the devil itself was touching her on the shoulders. It was indescribable, at once terrorizing and innocuous. But she knew it was far from innocent. She had seen what a Thunderbolt’s cannon could do.

T29. Four hundred souls.

“Go go go!” Nate shouted from behind her, the clang-clang-clang of his boots breaking through her useless thoughts.

As the last few catwalk steps rushed up at her, a piece of the room disappeared, and something fast and large hit the floor in front of her and dug a gaping hole as it burrowed deep. A stray round, she realized, from an A-10’s 30mm cannon. Even as she processed that information, a second and third round punched through one of the thick front doors as if it were little more than papier-mâché. Seeing it do that, with so little effort, made her grimace at what it could do to the human body.

She jumped the last few feet and landed in a crouch next to Patterson’s body, her boots splashing in a pool of his drying blood. A few hours ago that might have made her queasy, but at the moment all she could think about was, Run run run!

Danny was already racing across the hangar toward the office at the far end. She wanted to ask him what was the point, because those walls weren’t going to stand up against the Warthog’s main gun if it decided to strafe them again. Certainly it wouldn’t do a hell lot of good if the building itself came tumbling down—

“Help me!” someone shrieked, and Gaby spun around in time to see Lucas leaning against the back wall, one meaty hand clutching his thigh. Small streams of blood poured between his fingers and his face was impossibly pale.

“Gaby!” Nate, coming up fast behind her, grabbed her arm. “Go go go!”

He pulled her toward the office, but she couldn’t stop looking back at Lucas. The other collaborator who had been with him had disappeared, was maybe lost somewhere in the rubble—

A thunderous boom!, just before Lucas disappeared as a piece of the building crashed down from above, burying the big man in a few hundred pieces of what used to be the roof. Cold air swamped inside, but she was too busy being terrified to feel it at the moment.

“Gaby, come on!” Nate shouted, pulling her forward.

It won’t do any good, she thought. The office won’t do any good. Why can’t you guys see that? But she was too busy stumbling, trying to keep up with Nate as he pulled her toward the office by the hand as if she were a lost child.

Danny was already at the door, holding it open with one hand. “Come on, lovebirds! Suck face later!”

She was halfway to Danny when a flurry of movement made her glance to her right just as Mason nearly cannonballed down the catwalk stairs, clinging to the railing as the building trembled with every explosion—

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

The sound caused Gaby’s legs to weaken, and she wobbled as she lunged through the open office door and kept going. Her forward momentum carried her all the way to the far wall, and she had to stick out both hands to keep from smashing into the ugly peeling paint.

Nate crashed against the wallpaper beside her, his blue eyes seeking hers out immediately. “You okay?”

She nodded silently, too afraid of what might come out if she tried opening her mouth to speak. Her legs were still shaking, her arms trembling, and for some reason her teeth were chattering, even though she knew it wasn’t from the cold pouring into the building through the large gaping holes all over the hangar.

“Fuck!” someone shouted at the same time a black form slid along the floor and slammed into the wall next to her in a heap. Mason.

Gaby ignored him and looked back at Danny as he slammed the door shut (Yeah, that’s going to do it, Danny, that’s going to keep the building from falling on top of us), then hurried over to the windows and pushed one, then the other down.

Danny even took the extra few seconds to flick the locks on both windows into place before stepping back. “Just in case,” he said, grinning at her and Nate.

She managed to smile back, even though she didn’t know how or why.

Danny flattened his back against the wall to her right at the same time they heard another plane (Or was it the same one? How many did Mercer have flying around out there tonight?) slashing by above them, even louder now that there was a giant hole (Holes?) in the roof.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Pieces of the office ceiling tore free and fell around her feet just as the hangar let out a groan that seemed to be coming from every inch of its foundation.

She became aware of something moving outside the windows and glanced over in time to see the last of Mason’s collaborators—the same one who had been with Lucas—running toward them, even as different sections of the roof continued to collapse around him. The man reached out a hand toward the windows—toward her—just before he was sucked under a cascade of beams and shiny metal. A cloud of dust flooded against the windows, covering the glass in sheets of metallic gray.

Gaby wished she could have said she felt sorry for him, but that would have been a lie. He was the enemy; had been, for the last year or so of her life after The Purge. After losing so much—Will, Josh—and with so much more at risk, she didn’t have the strength to care what happened to a man whose name she didn’t even know.

She looked up and saw the night sky, visible through the jagged opening where a large part of the roof used to be. It was a clear night with barely any clouds, and there was plenty of moonlight to see with. She marveled at the sight, feeling strangely calm, when the belly of a plane appeared and disappeared half a heartbeat later, and she braced herself for what she knew would come next.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt.

My God, that sound. That sound!

“Well, this isn’t going well,” Danny said, his voice slightly more haggard than she was used to hearing even in all the previous life-and-death situations they had found themselves in.

A hand—Nate’s—wrapped around hers. She was startled by the sudden contact, but the warmth of his fingers, squeezing her numbed (and cold) ones, was a welcoming feeling. His face was covered in sweat and dirt and blood, and she thought about asking where the blood came from, but he looked okay, or at least unharmed, and his smile was convincing enough that she didn’t.

They slid down the wall and sat on the floor, Danny doing the same to her right. Mason had scurried over to his own corner, his eyes darting to the ceiling as it continued to creak and groan against the continued onslaught outside. Maybe like her, he was waiting for it to break apart and come crashing down and put an end to everything. Maybe, she thought, that might be for the best…

“Danny,” Nate said. “I saw parachutes. Outside, when one of the Warthogs made its pass.”

Danny wiped at a small trickle of blood dripping from his hairline before cleaning his palm on his pants. “Cluster bombs. The A-10s are dropping them like leaking piñatas out there.”

“Where the hell would they get something like that?”

“Probably secured them the same time they did the planes. Why not, right? Everything’s just sitting around in hangars like this one. But, you know, still in one piece.”

Gaby listened to them while focusing on the windows across the room. Even with the thick layer of crushed cement caking the glass panes, she could see enough to know the walls were still standing. A large swath of moonlight lit up the beams and bent steel sheets that had come tumbling down. Somewhere underneath all that was Lucas and the other guy. A part of her accepted that they both had it coming; they were sellouts to the human race, after all. And yet, there was the lingering old Gaby who felt sorry for them, who hoped they hadn’t suffered at the very end—

Something fell out of the sky and bounced against a section of the fallen roof, then slipped and slid almost comically, bony arms and legs flailing out of control, before finally landing in a pile on the floor. There was so much moonlight that she had no problem at all seeing its pruned black skin and domed head as it straightened up and turned, sensing their presence. Sensing her presence.

The creature’s twin dark orbs focused in on her, and it had been so long since she had come face to face with one of the creatures that Gaby had forgotten how unnatural they looked, how emaciated and deformed. This one, in particular, gave the impression of a little child standing on rail-thin legs, its flesh like oily film wrapped around protruding bones.

Gaby scrambled to her feet at the same time as Nate and Danny. She didn’t have to say anything—they had seen the thing falling out of the sky like some sick gift from the heavens, too. She didn’t know about Mason, somewhere in his own corner of the office, and she didn’t particularly care.

Danny rushed forward first and had gotten halfway when the creature smashed itself into the other side of the window. It had used its head like a battering ram, and the glass cracked but somehow managed to remain intact. Everything would have been fine if the ghoul had stopped then, but of course it didn’t, and even as Danny hesitated after the initial strike, the creature struck again and again and again.

“Danny!” she shouted, just before one of the windows shattered and glass sprayed inside the room.

Danny was almost at the window when he stopped and darted left to avoid the flying shards. The creature shoved itself through the opening and landed in a pile of limbs, pieces of glass jutting from its domed head like spikes.

Closer and without the window to limit her vision of it, the creature looked smaller, even unthreatening. That was, until it opened its mouth, showing off caverns of crooked sharp brown-and-yellow teeth. Thick clumps of saliva dripped from the corners of its mouth as it moved—straight toward her.

“Hey, ugly!” Danny shouted.

The thing froze in place, appearing more confused than afraid (Was it still even capable of fear?), and turned in Danny’s direction. It hadn’t gotten its head completely around when Danny struck it in its hollowed chest with a piece of the window frame that had come loose during the creature’s entry. The wood was weak and it cracked into kindling on impact, but it did manage to send the bloodsucker sprawling to the floor. The blow and fall dislodged one of the pieces of glass jutting from its head, though that still left plenty more fragments in place.

Gaby had no illusions the ghoul would stay down for longer than a few seconds, and she was proven right. It quickly untangled its limbs like a snake and was already rising when she saw more black shapes falling out of the sky behind it. They dropped seemingly from nowhere, crashing into the piles of rubble before finally flopping to the floor on the other side of the office windows.

“Well, this ain’t good,” Danny said.

“What now?” Nate shouted from behind them.

“Get back.”

“And then?” she asked.

“I dunno. Make it up as we go, I guess.”

“Good plan,” Nate said.

“You got a better idea? I’m all ears,” Danny said.

“Not right now.”

“All right, then.”

Somewhere behind her, Mason had stood up in his own private little corner, his makeshift knife clenched tightly in one hand and his eyes glued on the broken windows even as the ghouls stood up and moved toward the office. She wondered if Mason knew for certain that his uniform wouldn’t save him, or if he was erring on the side of caution by hanging back to see what would happen next.

Two of the creatures were attempting to squirm through the broken window, slicing themselves on the jagged glass, but of course that didn’t slow them down for even a second. Thick black blood sprayed the walls and floor, but they didn’t stop until they had flopped inside, leaving space for the other two to follow them in. They hadn’t bothered with the door or with the other unbroken window.

Path of least resistance, she thought, before saying, “Danny?”

He glanced back at her and grinned again. He was still clutching the window frame, though it was mostly a handful of skinny twigs now. Gaby didn’t know why, but she grinned back at him. Was this what it was like for him and Will in all those times they found themselves fighting for their lives? An exchange of stupid jokes and cocky grins? Because they expected to survive, even if they didn’t know how exactly?

Except she didn’t really feel as if everything was going to be okay this time, because something very important was missing: Will.

“Think of something,” Nate said.

“Thinking!” Danny shouted back.

“Think faster!”

“That doesn’t help!”

She heard a gasp (Oh God, was that me?) when one of the creatures lunged at them. Its bones clacked as it moved, clearly with some difficulty. She didn’t have to look far to see why: one of its legs was damaged, maybe from the fall into the hangar.

Before she could react, Danny had moved in front of her and was choking up on the remains of his weapon when something she had never seen before or thought would ever happen in her lifetime, did.

Something blindsided the attacking creature and sent it sprawling to the floor. It slid across the room before finally crashing into the side wall. It was locked with something, before she realized that that “something” was another ghoul. They were fighting.

She couldn’t tell the ghouls apart—they all looked the same, little more than thin layers of black skin and dangerously sharp bones—and there was a moment when the world seemed to stop except for the two creatures struggling on the floor. Gaby stared because she didn’t know what else to do. Nate and Danny looked just as perplexed next to her, as were the other three ghouls already inside the office with them.

Jesus, what’s happening?

One of the creatures had managed to get the upper hand and was straddling the other one. It wrapped bony fingers around the other’s throat, pinning it to the floor. Then, with its other hand, it jerked the ghoul’s arm from its socket with a sickening crunch.

“Oh, Christ,” Nate said, sounding as if he might vomit.

But Nate didn’t, though his voice did have an unforeseen effect: it snapped the other three ghouls out of their stupor, and their eyes abandoned the two struggling on the floor to refocus on her, Nate, and Danny. One of them opened its mouth, and bloody saliva dripped to the floor.

“Eyes forward, kids!” Danny said.

“Mason, the knife!” Nate shouted.

She looked back at Mason, standing in the corner with his “knife” held in front of him like a sword and not the finger-sized weapon that it really was. If he understood what Nate wanted, he didn’t respond.

“Mason, give me your fucking knife if you’re not going to use it!” Nate shouted.

“Forget him!” Danny said. “Stick together!”

The ghouls moved almost as one toward them, but they hadn’t taken more than a few steps when something hit a creature in the head. It took Gaby half a second to realize it was an arm. Someone—no, some thing—was using a ghoul arm like a baseball bat—

The same creature that had broadsided the first one and knocked it to the floor. It was up and swinging the arm, striking down the first ghoul before turning its attention on the other two. Bones broke and flesh twumped!, and another one of the ghouls fell to the floor. The third one spun and lunged at its attacker and the two of them spilled into a corner next to the window, vanishing into a part of the office where moonlight couldn’t reach, though she could just barely make out limbs flailing in the darkness.

She was still trying to come to grips with what had happened when one of the fallen ghouls started to get back up.

No, no, no!

She ran right at it—heard Nate shout her name—and kicked out and caught the creature in the head as it was picking itself from the floor. Despite wearing heavy combat boots, her leg shook with the impact as the monster lifted up into the air as if levitating—and for a moment she thought its head might pop loose like in the cartoons—before it fell back down to earth a few feet away.

Instead of giving it time to pick itself up again, Gaby lunged forward and stomped down on its head with her boot, hearing rather than feeling the skull underneath crunching. Thick gobs of black coagulated blood splashed the floor and parts of her pant legs. The stench of tainted blood filled her nostrils as she took a step back, but she pushed it away and kicked the creature in the chest, sending it skidding across the office, where it crumpled against the wall under the windows.

She turned, her chest heaving, looking for Nate and Danny in the semidarkness of the office. For some reason, it seemed to have gotten harder to see in the last few seconds despite the plentiful moonlight coming freely through the now mostly-roofless hangar, bright streams of light reflecting off metal beams and steel sheets strewn around them.

She finally located Nate in the back. He hadn’t moved and was staring at her with his mouth slightly agape.

A flash of movement, and she whirled around, ready to fight, only to see Danny shoving the remains of his window frame into another one of the creature’s eyes before grabbing it by one leg and swinging it into the wall, again and again and again, leaving bloody patches against the wallpaper each time. Finally, when there didn’t seem to be any blood left in the skinny thing, he flung it across the room with a loud, tired grunt.

Danny stumbled back, out of breath, and watched as the remains of the ghoul tried to get back up. “Oh, fuck me. That didn’t really work, did it?”

Because they don’t die, remember? It doesn’t matter if you cut off their limbs or their heads. They don’t die. As long as there’s blood flowing through them, they don’t die.

“Any suggestions?” Danny asked.

She was too busy watching the creature she had fought pick itself up from the floor, even though it didn’t have a head anymore, to answer him. There was just a big lump hanging off long, stringy neck muscles like an unused hoodie, clumps of blood slurping free with every movement.

Danny’s ghoul had given up trying to stand, and despite a crushed skull, it began crawling toward him, spindly arms dragging its remains forward one pull at a time. Two broken legs, twisted into impossible angles, twitched behind it.

“Jesus, I think I’m going to throw up,” Nate said behind them. But like the last time, he didn’t.

“Back, back,” Danny said.

She backpedaled, the ghoul blood sticking to one of her boots making a clumping sound with every step. She winced each time, but managed to keep moving, when—

There was a ringing crack! from the darkened corner next to the window where the two ghouls had disappeared earlier.

She turned, as did Nate and Danny, and even Mason still hiding in his corner somewhere to her right. The collaborator stuck the knife out in front of him, as if that would be enough to ward off any ghoul that decided to zero in on him.

The creature stepped out of the shadows, blood dripping from gashes along its cheeks and body. There was a hole the size of her fist in its chest, where a steady flow of black liquid trickled out. She couldn’t tell if it was the same one that had, for whatever reason, attacked the others. One emaciated thing was the same as another. Right?

The ghoul looked back at her for a moment, as if those obsidian eyes were trying to remember her, to carve her image into its mind. (If it even had a mind anymore.)

“Dead, not stupid,” Will always said.

She looked down and saw that the creature was holding the other ghoul’s head in its hand, its fingers digging into the empty eye sockets.

She didn’t know how long she and the creature stared at one another. A second might have passed, or maybe a minute, before Nate’s voice pulled her back from the other side of the planet.

“Gaby, be careful,” Nate said, stepping between her and the ghoul.

“What the hell’s it doing now?” Danny said, but he hadn’t gotten “now” out when the ghoul looked away from her and threw the head it had been holding out the window.

Then it disappeared back into the corner before returning a few seconds later, dragging the headless ghoul it had been struggling with out with it. They watched it toss the twitching body out the window, knocking loose blood-smeared glass shards that had managed to cling to the frames.

The other two ghouls that were slowly, pitifully making their way across the office had stopped for a brief moment and turned to look at the creature that had attacked them. Or maybe “look” wasn’t the right word, because you needed eyes to look, and heads that were still in one piece, didn’t you?

The third ghoul ignored the other two, finding nothing that resembled a threat from them apparently, and walked to the window and climbed out, then began crawling up the side of the rubble.

“What the fuck,” a voice said behind them.

She looked back at Mason, staring after the creature.

“It’s got the right idea,” Danny said, looking back at the other two ghouls that had begun, once again, to gradually slink their way toward them one painfully slow inch at a time. Whatever dangers they might have presented a few minutes ago had evaporated into something pathetic and sad.

“Yeah,” she said, the single word coming out of her as almost a breathless whisper.

Danny moved first, and Gaby followed.

“Guys?” Nate said behind them.

They went after the ghoul that had managed to rise back up on its mangled legs first. The creature reached for her, but she ducked its clawing hands and grabbed it around the top half of its arms while Danny took the other side. They carried it toward the window and threw it out before they even reached their destination. Their aim was off by a few inches, and the ghoul crashed into one side of the window but managed to collapse outside in a hail of bones and bleeding flesh anyway.

“One down,” Danny said.

When she glanced back, Nate was moving around a crawling ghoul. It was trying to grope at his legs, but he kept sidestepping it. He could have moved in slow motion and the creature wouldn’t have been able to get him, it was that slow.

“Legs,” Danny said.

They grabbed the thing by its legs, keeping away from its impossibly sharp-looking fingers, and dragged it to the window. The creature reeked from every pore, and she had to breathe through her mouth. From the look on his face, Nate was again on the verge of vomiting. The thing weighed almost nothing, like a mannequin. This time, they threw it through the window without hitting the frames.

“Last one,” Danny said.

It was trying to crawl out of the corner. It had no choice, because it was missing one of its arms and its legs were both broken. But there was nothing wrong with its eyes, and they shifted from Nate to Gaby and back again. Nate was closer so it zeroed in on him, not that it was going to reach him anytime soon.

She walked calmly over and grabbed it by a leg, Nate taking the other one, and they dragged the creature toward the window. It flailed with its remaining arm and somehow managed to turn over onto its back. If she looked hard enough, she could almost see something that might have been anger behind its hollowed eyes.

“I got it,” Nate said, and Gaby let go when they reached the window.

Nate lifted it off the floor by one leg, as if it were a bag of flour, and flung it through the window. It landed with a crunch outside among the other three. They were all still “alive” out there, trying to crawl back to the windows, inch by inch, irresistibly drawn to her, Nate, and Danny.

No, not them, but to the blood in their veins.

“Should we…?” Nate said.

“What?” Danny said.

“Go out there and stop them?”

“There’s no point,” Danny said. “The sun will be out long before they reach us.”

Gaby suddenly remembered they weren’t alone in the office and glanced over at Mason. He had sat back down in the corner, blood-smeared arms hanging off his bent knees. She couldn’t see the knife anywhere, but she didn’t believe for a second that he didn’t have it hidden somewhere on him, within easy reach. He looked shell-shocked, and she wondered if she had the same expression on her face.

“What?” he said, his eyes meeting hers.

“You saw it,” she said. “What the other one did.”

He didn’t say anything and seemed to be waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said, “And?”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated.

“Yeah, why?” Danny said.

“How the fuck should I know,” Mason said.

“Because you’re one of them, asshole,” Nate said.

“Fuck you, kid. I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

“Never?” Danny said doubtfully.

“I’ve seen a lot of things, but…” He shook his head. “What I just saw... What that thing just did… I’ve never seen that before. You can believe it or not, I don’t really give a shit.”

Gaby stared at him. Mason was an opportunist, a liar, and a killer, but she believed every word he had just said.

“Where’d you get the shank?” Danny asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Mason said.

“Better keep an eye on it, short stack; someone might take it from you before the night’s out.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

Danny smirked and turned back to the windows. She did, too, and watched the creatures as they continued their interminably slow crawl toward the office. They were bleeding from multiple wounds and stumps as they moved, but that was difficult to see against their black skin. It was easier to make out the gray dust clinging to their gaping wounds and fresh, thick pools of blood that dotted the remains of the hangar floor.

“Hear that?” Danny asked.

“What?” Nate said. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

She hadn’t noticed it until now, but it was deathly silent outside the building and in the airfield around them. She couldn’t remember when it had happened. She kept waiting to hear the sound of warplanes coming back, followed by the sight of gray metal flashing above them, but there was just the clear moonlit night sky visible through the large hole in the roof.

“It’s stopped,” she said. “Outside. It’s stopped.”

Danny nodded. “Hard to believe, but as bad as it was in here, someone just got royally fucked out there.”

“You’re right, that is hard to believe,” Nate said.

Gaby looked over at Mason again and caught him staring back at her.

“Truce,” he said.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said.

Mason laughed. It was a loud roaring laugh, as if he had been keeping it in forever and only now got the chance to finally unleash it. Either that, or the man had lost his marbles. After the events of the night, she wouldn’t have blamed him for going off the deep end. She still wasn’t entirely sure she had seen what she had seen, either—except Danny and Nate had witnessed it, too, so it had to have been real.

Didn’t it?

14

Frank

He was between vessels when Mabry discovered his presence among the hordes fleeing the airfield. He knew it was only a matter of time; he couldn’t hope to hide forever among the throng, especially after exposing himself inside the hangar.

“She always did say you were a fast learner.”

There was something that sounded dangerously like pride in the voice, but it might have just been another trick. He pushed it aside and continued on when hands suddenly seized his arms and wrestled him to the ground. Fingers tightened around his ankles and wrists, and a pair of black eyes glared down at him.

“There you are,” the creature said inside his head.

It didn’t come from the ghoul—this frail thing straddling his waist as the others held him down. No, it came from somewhere else. Mabry. He was inside the creature’s body, using it as a ventriloquist would his puppet, like he had done back in the hangar when he saved Danny and Gaby.

“I told you, you couldn’t hide forever.”

He let go of the physical body and slid back into the river of fractured thoughts and chaotic memories. He had learned to project his mind long ago, but it was easy to lose his way if he wasn’t careful. Distance still eluded him, and the farther he traveled, the harder it was to maintain control.

He leapfrogged from one consciousness to another, letting himself be carried with the flow instead of fighting it. So many images, so many sounds, so many jumbled thoughts that, once upon a time, were capable of so much more. Those days were long gone, usurped by this new existence. They were just shells of what they used to be, suits to be worn and discarded. He didn’t feel pity for them because they were beyond caring.

“Where are you going?”

The voice pecked away at the edges of his mind, prodding and always trying to lure him back into the open. He didn’t bite and concentrated on the mission at hand.

They were out there somewhere—the men who had dropped the bombs and left behind the explosions. Men with warplanes. A new player. Maybe a new ally…

“You’re grasping at straws.”

He could feel them getting closer. The blue eyes. It forced him to keep moving, grabbing and abandoning bodies at will now, trying to stay one step ahead of them. The first time had been difficult, but everything became easier with practice—

Flames licked at his face and charred bodies blocked his path. His vision was flooded with severed limbs and decapitated heads and sheets of flesh stripped from bones.

Death from above, as a gray metal beast split the air above him, leaving behind fire and splatters of thick black clumps of blood that covered the trees and ground, making for treacherous footing. The creature he was wearing was missing an arm, but there was nothing wrong with its legs.

He pursued the warplane along with the rest of the brood. It would have to come down sooner or later, and when it did, he would find out who was behind this. He couldn’t let go now, or he might never be able to find his way back here. He pushed on through the sea of destruction, determined to reach the other side.

“Where is he?” the voices asked. “He’s close by. Find him—There!”

They were converging, skating burning brushes, when he released the ghoul and surfed the currents and found another one—

Where? How far had he gone this time? He’d discovered the limitations of what he could do during his many trial runs. The farther he projected himself, the more control he surrendered. Mabry didn’t have this problem, which was how he could be everywhere and nowhere at once.

He was still somewhere in the woods, the feel of heat licking at his skin, causing an involuntary whimper to escape his scarred lips. The creature put up a futile attempt at resistance, but he pushed it down and turned around and darted even further into the woods, hoping to skirt around the blue eyes. They were out there, searching, trying to locate him again.

The crackling of burning trees filled his nostrils, and flames stabbed at him from the sides. Every one of the creature’s senses was overwhelmed by the thick, putrid aroma of searing flesh, including its own. He skipped over warm patches of blood and crunched bones as all around him, ghouls fled the fire. The scream of the machines shredding the night sky, raining down death and destruction at will.

A tree tumbled, crushing two flailing forms underneath its gnarled trunk. He jumped and followed the others through the scorching fire, the familiar sensation of pain reminding him of what he used to be, even as heat enclosed around his feet, ripping at skin, and traveled up his legs.

He released, returning into the ocean of voices and jumbled thoughts. What once was, what little remained. A surprising burst of sadness for all that they’d lost, all they could never get back. All he could never retrieve.

And Mabry’s voice, calling to him, always.

“It’s time to give up this rebellion. It’s time to embrace who you are. All you have to do is stop running. Stop fighting. You can’t win. You never could.”

There, a ghoul perched on a tree, watching as two of its brethren were engulfed in fire, their screams flooding its mind. He seized it, then made the creature stand up and jump down, then turn, directing it toward the edge of the burning woods. Figures fled to the left and right of him, others already moving much, much farther up ahead. And still so many more behind him.

A heavy thrumming in the air and the ground shook, and he glanced up while in mid-jump as the shimmering gray metal object, made almost shiny by the fire below it, sliced through the air high above the tree canopies. The warplane had a name, but it escaped him at the moment. An animal of some sort.

The plane loosed its cargo and the earth cracked open, the trees collapsing in waves. The sound of hundreds of ghouls screaming in pain all at the same time overwhelmed his mind, and he lost his footing. He went headfirst into some brush and came out the other side, his joints clacking as he struggled to rise.

Too much. It was too much. He couldn’t fight it, couldn’t push it aside—

A wall of flames embraced him, the pain almost instantly unbearable, and he had no choice but to—

* * *

It was gone. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pick his way through the voices a second time and find the ones pursuing the plane. The problem was distance and control. The farther he projected, the less he had. It was a problem Mabry didn’t have. But then, he wasn’t Mabry. None of them were. There was only one, and there would only always be the one.

He opened his eyes to earth and darkness. Home. At least for tonight.

The silence beyond his makeshift tomb was broken only occasionally by the surf meeting the beach in the distance, bringing with it the smell of ocean water, at once reassuring and terrifying. The madness in the fields behind him was over; the blue eyes had sounded the retreat. The war machine had ceased its cannon fire, and there was just the blessed serenity of undisturbed night again.

How long before sunrise? He wasn’t sure, but there was enough time to do what he needed to do, even if his body was still weak. He shouldn’t have been tired, but he was. It wasn’t a physical pain—not the kind that left his muscles sore and tendons tight and flesh beat up. It was a mental fatigue, a strain that was hard to account for but was there, present in the throbbing against his skull and the blurring in his vision. Jumping between bodies was always draining, and this time he had stayed longer than he usually did, or wanted.

It was a risk, but it couldn’t be helped. Danny and Gaby needed him. There had been two others in the hangar with them. Men whose faces were familiar, but their names eluded him at the moment. They were back there, in the part of his memory where he kept the things that didn’t matter, that he could afford to forget.

Danny and Gaby mattered, though. What were they doing out there? They had almost died. Would have, if he hadn’t intervened.

What were they doing out there?

But there were no answers to be found down here in the darkness, so he dug and crawled, and pulled and pushed, until he was free. He straightened and gratefully let the darkness embrace him. He was somewhere between the buildings and the water, in a patch of unspectacular ground with nothing to mark his current presence or eventual leave.

He slid through the wind, the torn fabric of the trench coat the only sound as he raced across the outskirts of the city, leaving the taunting scent of the ocean far behind. Topography was difficult to gauge when he was wearing bodies, but he had glimpsed enough of the burning woods to get a general direction. Somewhere out there, the plane would have to eventually come back down.

* * *

They were out at night, like they always were, and he avoided them by using the shadows. There were shadows within shadows, if you knew where to look. With patience and experience, he had learned to anticipate the shifting of the darkness, always managing to stay one step ahead of the black eyes.

He moved further inland, always aware of the gradual rise in temperature against his skin, the promise of sunrise like a hand from the past reaching out to take hold of him. So he ran faster, aware that he was abandoning Keo and the woman, and leaving behind his need to see her again.

But he had to, because out there, somewhere, was an army. And if he could find it, take control of it, wield it against Mabry…

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said.

Maybe, maybe…

He didn’t get tired easily these days, so he was able to slip and dodge and dart through buildings, alleyways, and wide-open fields. He bided his time when he needed to and called forth speed when it served him. He lost count of how many empty houses he had passed, the endless empty stretches of roads covered by never-ending clusters of vehicles. He would have avoided the cities entirely if he could, but that required too much time, and he had little to waste.

The sounds of the warplanes from the past echoed inside his head as he ran. Another time, another place. A lot of sand and blood and fire…

He pulled himself back to the present as a horde of black eyes stampeded across a flat and empty field. There, the red walls and angled roofs of a barn. The front alley doors were sealed tight, so he ignored them and jumped instead, grabbing the awning and swinging himself up and over and through an open loft door.

He landed in old bales of hay and watched the creatures racing by under the moonlight. A few hundred, which could only mean a search party. How many more were out there right now, scouring the land for him? Did Mabry know he was nearby? Had he allowed the walls in his mind to slip—

Click!

A small figure, partially shrouded in shadows, stood between two molding bales of hay. Fragile hands trembled as they held onto a silver-chromed revolver that was pointed at him, pale lips parting and closing involuntarily, a small heartbeat rapidly increasing every half second as she exposed herself.

He looked past the dirty pants and sweater and recognized a stick-thin form underneath. Malnourished, the stink of urine and fecal matter oozing from every inch of her, making her nearly impossible to distinguish from the natural decay of the barn.

A second figure, smaller than the first, peeked out from the back. A boy, shaggy hair covered in dirt and straws; like the older one, he had the stink of the building all over him. The two of them were a sorry sight, and he felt something that might have been pity even as the silver that made up the weapon tickled the back of his brain.

“Shoot it!” the boy whispered.

“Shhh!” the girl said. “Stay back like I told you!”

But the boy didn’t go back. Instead, he clutched a rusted steak knife almost as big as his entire arm in both hands. The sharp edge was dull but the metal gleamed in the darkness anyway, dangerous enough for a normal human being, but not to him at the moment. Not at this distance, anyway.

The girl cocked her head, staring at him from across the loft, trying to get a good look at him through the remains of the hoodie over his head. She had dark brown eyes, and they were drawn irresistibly to the pulsating blue of his own. He looked away, back out the doors as the last of the ghouls disappeared into the moonlight.

Crunch-crunch as the girl took a step, then another one, toward him. Perhaps to get a better look at his face, or to make an easier shot. Sweat trailed down her temple despite the cold night air. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and he smelled fresh packed dirt around her toes. The small, barely noticeable squeeze as her finger tightened, tightened against the trigger.

Could she make the shot? Unlikely, given how badly she was shaking, but all it would take was one lucky round. Of course, he could avoid it easily. All he had to do was snap her neck—

No. Not that way.

He stared back at the girl. “Don’t,” he hissed.

Confusion swept across her dirty face. Long, stringy brown hair drooped over her eyes, and the gun continued to tremble slightly in her hands.

In the back, the boy leaned out of the shadows, dull knife ready.

“They’ll hear you,” he said to the girl, “and come back. Do you understand?”

Her eyes darted to the loft opening, then back to him. Did she believe him? Maybe. Was that why she and the boy were hiding? Had they seen the ghouls streaming across the fields earlier, even before he did? Or was this their home? Did they live here in the barn?

“Understand?” he asked.

Finally, she nodded, and he sensed hesitation as the gun lowered. Not much, just half an inch, but it was enough. Even better, her finger eased back on the trigger.

“Good,” he said.

“What are you, mister?” the girl asked, cocking her head, still trying to get a better look at him under the hoodie.

When he didn’t respond, the girl said, “Mister? Are you…?”

“Hide,” he said.

“Emmy?” the little boy whispered from the back of the loft. “What’s happening?”

“Shhh!” Emmy snapped back at him.

She was turned around facing the boy when he leaped outside, landed on the ground, and ran off. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop the girl’s voice from echoing over and over inside his head.

“What are you, mister?” she had asked.

He slipped into a patch of woods and skirted around a pair of dead cities, racing against the night, trying to outdistance the coming morning. Never tiring, never sweating, never slowing down.

Out there, somewhere, someone was bringing the war to Mabry’s doorsteps. Someone who wasn’t afraid, who had a plan. Someone with planes and bombs, and maybe even an army at his disposal.

He pushed through the brush and emerged out onto the side of a highway next to a town still filled with the smell of death and destruction, of gunpowder and explosive residue. The streets were once filled with bodies, but they had been taken away; the ones buried under rubble had also been dug up.

He ran across the remains of homes and buildings, and all the while, the girl’s voice echoed in his head:

“What are you, mister?”

* * *

He smelled the sweat under their clothes before he even heard or saw them: two soldiers perched in a pair of trees wearing black clothing and black paint over their faces. Almost invisible against the night. Almost. They cradled weapons attached with long suppressors in case they needed to fire them.

And something else. He had detected a trace of it earlier, but wasn’t sure. Now, closer, he was certain.

Silver bullets.

Their weapons’ magazines were loaded with silver bullets. He tasted the bitter metal against the tip of his tongue and swallowed it down, then made no sounds as he moved under them. They never saw him—never heard or smelled or felt him. The woods hid his presence, the heat and cold emanating from his pores indistinguishable against the chilly air.

He picked up the familiar scent of fresh gasoline that he had been tracking for the last hour. They had abandoned the roads and picked their way here, where he found the barely day-old tire tracks in the ground. The vehicles were hidden now, their engines cold and undetectable against the pulse of the night. They had picked wisely, hiding in a part of the world that humans had abandoned years ago and the black eyes had stopped searching months earlier.

Except it was nearly impossible for his heightened senses to ignore the combined heat radiating from their bodies. They were pressed against each other, finding strength and comfort in accidental contacts, the quickening heartbeats of so many people crammed into a couple of old abandoned buildings like jackhammers.

He sniffed the men on the rooftops. Multiple snipers, gripping recently oiled machine guns. A couple were dozing off, but more than enough were still awake, jacked up with the help of chemicals.

Again, the metallic taste of silver bullets bit against his tongue.

They had so much silver. Not just on them, but also inside the buildings, in the crates piled in the backs of their vehicles. They were well-organized, well-prepared. Was he really looking at an army?

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said.

Maybe, maybe…

He looked back into the woods. He could still smell them, the two brave souls watching the perimeter behind him.

Maybe they would have some answers.

* * *

The older of the two men almost managed to pull the trigger in time. Almost. There was a second of hesitation—which was all he needed to grab the younger man’s weapon—and he pulled, sending the soldier flailing to the ground below.

Before the older man could lift his rifle to fire, he leaped across the open space and smashed the man’s head into the tree trunk. The resulting crunch! caused him a second of remorse, but he pushed it aside as the body disappeared into a bush below.

He leaped down soundlessly and stalked toward the first man, who was scrambling for his holstered sidearm but finding it slippery. There was no suppressor on the gun, but the man either didn’t notice or was too frightened to think of the consequences.

He batted the gun away just as the man managed to lift it, and the weapon disappeared into the grass. He’d heard the crack as the soldier’s wrist broke, and before the man could open his mouth to scream, he placed a hand over it. Pale gray eyes flew wide, but pain or not, the man had enough remaining sense of self-preservation to reach down with his other hand for the handle of his sheathed knife.

The silver coating on the blade made his skin crawl, but he ignored it and grabbed the soldier’s hand as he lifted the knife and twisted—not too hard this time, just enough to force the man to let go of the weapon. The figure underneath him thrashed, terror washing over his painted face. Unlike the girl at the loft, the soldier could see him clearly for what he was—the icy blue of his eyes under the hoodie, the impossible cold and heat that oozed from every pore of his flesh.

“Shhh,” he hissed, putting one finger to his lips.

The soldier went still, the horror in his eyes giving way to confusion.

“Don’t scream,” he hissed.

The smell of urine leaked through the man’s thermal clothing, but the soldier might not even realized what he had done.

“Scream, and you’ll die,” he hissed. “Scream, and the others will die. You’ll bring death on them. The others, like me, in the woods around you. Do you understand?”

The soldier was no fool and he understood, going perfectly still as a result. But the gray eyes continued to stare, unable to pull away from the dark face hiding underneath the frayed fabric of the hoodie.

He removed his hand.

“What are you?” the soldier said, the three words coming out in a breathless whisper that formed clouds of mist between them.

“Shhh,” he said, staring back at the man under him. “This might hurt a little, but I have to know.”

“Know what?” the soldier said, fear flickering back across his face.

“Everything,” he said, placing one hand on the soldier’s forehead and leaning in closer.

* * *

Mercer.

The man’s name was Mercer. He was responsible for the ambush at the airfield, a single day that was months in the planning.

Images of warplanes streaking across the sky and over clear blue waters. An endless expanse of ocean that made his skin quiver at the sight. People cheering. Children in overalls…fishing?

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Men in uniforms training for hours, days, weeks, and months. Firing hundreds—thousands?—of bullets. That’s okay, because bullets are plentiful. You can always make more—or pick them up.

A voice on the radio resulting in a new kind of bullet. Silver bullets.

Where did they get all the silver?

Everywhere. From homes. Buildings. Piles of silver being smelted down.

Someone spray painting a white sun emblem onto the side of a vehicle. A tan-colored tank.

No. Tanks.

Another place, another time. A new mission. Watching bombs being attached to fixed wings. Then those same bombs dropping in the distance. The ground rumbling. Burning trees. Excited reports of hundreds dead over the radio. Thousands?

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

A city on the ocean. Another one underground. Gray walls and mazes of metal pipes, yellow tubing, and machinery.

Civilians. Soldiers. Uniforms. Guns. Ammo.

Flocks of birds? Bird soup…

Pull back, pull back…

Mercer. Concentrate on Mercer.

There. Fifties. Imposing, but just a man. A very dangerous man in control of an army.

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

More images of people, places, and things, but none of them involving Mercer. He had to know more about Mercer. Can he be trusted? Does he pose any danger to her?

No, no. He’d lost his way.

Find it. Have to find it again.

There...

A boy on his tenth birthday blowing out a candle in a backyard as people cheered. (No.) A brand new bike falling, a boy crying. (No!) A nervous first kiss in the back of a car. (Pull back! Pull back!)

No, too far back. He’d lost his way.

No, no, no…

* * *

Blood trickled out of the soldier’s nose, somehow finding its way to the corners of his mouth. Gray eyes stared accusingly up at him, the blackened face frozen in a mask of shock, confusion, and pain.

He stood up from the lifeless body and stared for a moment. A flash of guilt, and then it was gone. He wasn’t sure if that should have disturbed him. He had felt the same way—and passed it over just as quickly—with the older man in the tree. He couldn’t help but think he should have been more disturbed by how easily he killed them.

Shouldn’t he?

He might have lingered on the conflicting emotions if not for the encroaching sunrise against his back. It wouldn’t be long now. Maybe an hour. Maybe less. He could already feel the heat pressing against his skin, urging him to move on, to forget about the dead.

He fled through the woods, replaying the soldier’s memories in his head. The man hadn’t been privy to much, but he had known enough. Snippets of important things, events, and speeches that he had been around to see and hear.

“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Mercer’s words, a clear signal that today was just the beginning, that the worst was yet to come.

He had sought out an army, hoping to find allies to use against Mabry. But all he had found instead was…what, exactly? Another enemy? Or something worse? Was there something worse than Mabry?

Maybe. One way or another, the answer would come.

It always did, eventually.

15

Keo

Bleached white bones crunched under his boots, and the acidic smell of burnt flesh lingered in the early morning sun, threatening to suffocate him if he so much as let down his guard. It was only bearable because of the size small T-shirt he had found in the storage shed covering the lower half of his face, and though that made breathing difficult, it was preferable to the alternative.

He was making steady progress toward the M1 Abrams tank that had, sometime during the chaos, ended up in the fields about 200 meters from where it had started on the road. He wouldn’t be surprised if the thing had simply run out of fuel, given how active it had been last night.

It sat unmoving under the bright sun now, jagged pieces of white bones wedged between its tracked wheels, bony fingers clutched around sections of the 120mm cannon and limbs jutting out along the crevices of the turret. A couple of ghouls had managed to wedge themselves into the loader’s armored gun shield, for all the good that had done.

Further visual evidence of last night’s carnage could be found all across the fields around him. The craters of 120mm impacts dotted the landscape, and the crumpled heaps of destroyed homes made him question if he had emerged out of the storage box into a landfill instead of a beachside neighborhood. Miraculously, the house with the red roof that he and Jordan had hidden underneath had been spared. Maybe his luck was looking up after all.

Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, pal.

He stepped through the carcass of a white house with Trex decking, then wound his way through the remains of the living room and out the back, into a crater about a meter deep, before climbing back up among blackened grass. The tank was frozen about fifty meters in front of him, sunlight glinting off its desert tan hide and the shattered remains of bones draped over it.

He slipped out from behind the leftovers of another house and jogged across charred grass, doing his best to skip around as many skeletal remains as possible, though he might as well be trying to avoid the ground for all the good that did. It was impossible not to crunch or snap an arm or a limb or a deformed skull as he made his way toward his objective. After a while, he just gave up trying. If the tankers heard him coming through all that armor, then so be it.

Forty meters to the Abrams, and Keo was finally able to make out the words “Eat Me” along the length of the 120mm cannon, while “Get Off Me Bro” was spray painted across the armor tiles that covered the track wheels. A white circle with triangle-shaped objects coming out of it was prominently displayed at the front of the tank. After a second glance, he concluded the emblem was supposed to be a sun, and the “triangles” its rays. He had seen a lot of U.S. Army insignias, and that was definitely not one of them.

Thirty meters later, Keo was able to identify some kind of modified flamethrower welded in place of a machine gun inside the loader’s gun shield on top of the turret. An M240 was mounted on the second station, but he didn’t remember machine gun fire from last night. He could, though, recall in great detail the thick smell of barbecuing meat.

Keo changed up his approach and began moving sideways so he could take the remaining distance from the rear. He felt a flood of relief not having that smoothbore cannon pointing right at him—or anywhere close to him, for that matter. He knew it was stupid; chances were, they had blown all their load last night. Still, the sight of that thing staring right at him…

With just five meters left to go, Keo was feeling good about making it to the tank undiscovered. That was, until the loud grinding of metal filled the air. He dived to the ground and rolled to his right until he was covered in the shadow of the M1’s turret. Keo pulled down the shirt and took in a deep breath, his first unhindered one since he had stepped out of the storage shack. Thank God for the constant waves of fresh air coming from the ocean nearby, otherwise he might have choked on the stench.

There were impossibly white skeletal remains all around him, a shattered skull directly two inches from his head, and his rifle was resting on a pile of white and gray ash. He did his very best to ignore something pricking at his legs through the fabric of his pants. Probably a broken hand, or fingers…

A loud clang!, followed by a figure with a shaved head raising himself out of the commander’s hatch of the tank. The man was wearing a tan shirt and pants, and the same sun emblem was embroidered across a red collar, but nothing to indicate rank. The shirt had a white patch of the Lone Star State in the front, with scribbling inside it, but Keo was at the wrong angle to read the letters. It was a military uniform of some sort, but not one he was familiar with. But then, BDUs came in all shapes and sizes, and maybe this was a new variation for a new world?

The possibility that Jordan might have been right, that maybe he was looking at remnants of the U.S. Army, made him question what he was doing out in the fields hiding from them. The last thing he wanted was to start popping U.S. soldiers.

Keo took his hand off the M4, then reached down and drew the Glock. His fingers brushed against something sharp hidden among the grass, and something else was poking at his stomach and had been for the last few seconds, but he managed to ignore it, too, even though he had a pretty good idea what it was.

The soldier (?) had climbed out of the tank and was stretching. When he was done, he opened a canteen and took a long drink from it while glancing around at the fields. “Jesus Christ,” the man said. He tossed the canteen back into the open hatch, then dug out a white silk handkerchief and pressed it against his mouth.

Keo heard a second voice, this one coming from inside the tank, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“We made a hell of a mess,” the man standing on top of the Abrams said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Got a whole fuck lot of them, boys.” He lowered the handkerchief and let out a satisfied sigh. “Who’s got mop-up duty—” the man continued, but he stopped in mid-sentence because he had been turning when he said it, and—

Keo pushed himself up from the ground at the same time the man’s eyes locked onto him. He got his knees under him, then held out his left hand, the palm outward, while his right kept the Glock pointed down at the ground.

“Wait,” Keo said.

The man stared at him, mouth partially agape. His right hand was holding the cloth, and while he wore a gun belt, the sidearm was on his right side, which meant he was right-handed.

“Don’t—” Keo said, when the man dropped the handkerchief and reached for his holstered weapon.

Keo shot the man in the chest.

The soldier fell, slamming into the turret before sliding off it, the white silk cloth fluttering in the air after him.

Keo jumped up to his feet and ran toward the Abrams, thinking, Fuck, fuck, fuck with every step.

“What if it really is the U.S. Army? What if they’re finally fighting back?” Jordan had said last night.

Then I’m screwed, Jordan, Keo thought as he grabbed the closest handhold on the vehicle, his feet searching for anything to use as a stepping stone, finding them, then flinging himself up and over the turret.

He made the top of the tank just as a head poked out of the same commander’s hatch. The man had short spiky hair and was whirling around, the back of his head initially facing Keo. When the soldier finally completed his turn, the man’s eyes widened at the sight of Keo perched behind him. Keo might have held his fire, except the soldier had a gun in his hand and was swinging it around.

Sonofabitch, Keo thought, and shot the tanker between the eyes. The man’s head snapped back before it dropped and slid through the hatch.

Keo scrambled over the turret and reached the opening and looked through it, seeing a third figure below. The man had one hand cradling his dead comrade and the other stretching up with a Sig Sauer. Keo jerked his head back as the man fired—a thunderous boom! as the gunshot exploded in the confines of the tank—and the round zipped past his head, so close he swore he could feel the trail blazed by the bullet.

Instead of leaning back toward the hatch, Keo held out his hand, gun pointed down, and fired two times into the Abrams. Before he even knew if he had hit his target or not, Keo lunged forward and jumped through the round door feetfirst and—

—landed with a wet thud against the stomach of the man with the spiky hair, his momentum sending both him and the tanker with the Sig Sauer sprawling across the metal floor. Keo didn’t have to shoot the third man again because he was already dead—there was a single hole in his chest.

Keo lost his balance as soon as he touched down somewhere in the turret basket and hit his ass on cold, hard metal. Thankfully he was facing the right direction and immediately saw the fourth soldier up front, reclining back in the driver seat underneath the main gun. The man was turning his head and reaching for his sidearm, still in its holster draped over his seat, at the same time.

“Think about it!” Keo shouted, his voice thundering inside the vehicle.

The man did and stopped moving altogether. While his body was frozen in mid-turn, his eyes were free to dart to his two dead comrades before returning to Keo. He was covered in sweat despite wearing only a white undershirt and khaki shorts, similar dress to the third man Keo had shot. A pile of tan-colored uniforms hung from handholds around them.

“Shit,” the guy said.

“Yeah,” Keo said.

* * *

“U.S. Army?” Keo asked.

The soldier, who said his name was Gregson, shook his head.

“Collaborator?”

“Hell no,” Gregson said, looking almost insulted.

“Guess not,” Jordan said.

She stood next to Keo, holding another T-shirt from the storage shed over her mouth. Keo hadn’t needed his since hauling Gregson out of the tank. He wasn’t entirely sure what that said about his sense of smell that he could “get used” to his current environment.

Gregson sat on the ground with his back against the wheels of the Abrams. He had looked older when Keo first saw him inside the cramped space of the tank, but under the morning sun he was a man in his mid-twenties, with light blue eyes and dirty brown hair. His arms, covered in sleeves of tattoos, were draped over his knees. If he ever had any thoughts about escaping, he let it go when he saw the uniformed body on the ground with the hole in its chest.

“So if you’re not U.S. Army and you’re not collaborators, who are you?” Keo asked.

Gregson didn’t answer right away, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he should say anything to them. Keo could have told him that only delusional idiots tried to withstand interrogation. Sooner or later, you broke. Everyone did. Which was precisely why his old organization never bothered to rescue captured operatives.

“The way I see it, we’re on the same side,” Keo continued.

That elicited a snort from Gregson. “Was that before or after you killed my friends?”

“I had no choice. You should thank me for having the self-control not to shoot you back there.”

Gregson seemed to think about that before finally saying, “I guess.”

“So, let’s start at the beginning. Who are you, and what were you doing running around out here last night, shooting up the beach?”

“I was following orders.”

“Whose?”

“Mercer’s.”

“Never heard of him.” He turned to Jordan: “You?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“So, who’s Mercer?” Keo asked Gregson.

“He’s a great man,” Gregson said. “That’s all you need to know.”

“And this great man told you to come down here and empty 120mm shells on an innocent beach?”

“Not exactly.”

“So what, exactly?”

Gregson hesitated.

Keo sighed and drew his sidearm. “I’ve tried to do this the easy way, but you’re just wasting my time now.”

“I thought you said we were on the same side,” Gregson said quickly.

“Not if you keep making me ask twice. I hate having to ask twice.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

“Yeah, all right.” Then, after Keo had holstered his sidearm: “We overshot our mark yesterday, ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes. Then we saw the beach and thought, what the hell. We couldn’t link back up with our forces anyway, so we figured we’d go out with a bang. Worst-case scenario, we were prepared to drive right into the ocean a la Thelma and Louise.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Keo said.

“The movie?”

Keo shook his head.

“I’ve heard of it,” Jordan said.

“Good?” Keo asked.

She shrugged. “It was an oldie. I liked the car, though.”

“I guess that’s all that counts,” he chuckled before turning back to Gregson. “Where are the rest of your forces?”

“Sorry, can’t do,” Gregson smiled back. “Need-to-know, and you don’t need to know. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not telling you shit about that.”

“Tough guy.”

“When it comes to that? Fuck yeah, tough enough.”

Keo nodded. He believed the man. “So what were you doing out here yesterday? Can’t hurt to tell us that, right?”

Gregson thought about that for a moment too, before nodding. “We were doing our part.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“Take out one of the towns.”

“The collaborator towns?”

“What other kinds are there?”

Keo exchanged a glance with Jordan, and he could tell she was thinking the exact same thing: Gillian. T18.

He turned back to Gregson. “What do you mean, ‘take out’ one of the towns?”

“What do you think I meant?” Gregson said. He reached back and banged on the tank. “This thing’s designed to do one thing, and it ain’t making pies.”

“You shelled it? The town?”

“We flattened the fuck out of it, yeah.”

“And the people in it?” Jordan asked.

Gregson shrugged.

“What the hell does that mean?” she said, a noticeable warning edge creeping into her voice.

“We destroyed it,” Gregson said. “Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”

“What were you running from?” Keo asked.

“Technicals and rocket launchers. I mean, our armor could have survived a lot, but there were a lot of them, and who knows what else they had. Besides, our orders were to hit and run, then link back up with the rest of our forces. Failing that…well, it’s been a while since we saw the beach. We knew they’d follow us here. Didn’t think they’d send the skin meats, though.”

“Skin meats?”

“Those ghouls. That’s what some of us call them.”

Keo raised an eyebrow. “You also call them ghouls?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Where’d you get the name from?”

Gregson looked confused; either that, or he had another piece of information he thought was need-to-know. “It’s just a name. Who cares?”

“Just curious,” Keo said.

“How many people did you kill in the town?” Jordan asked.

Gregson didn’t answer her.

“How many?” she asked again.

“I don’t know; we didn’t exactly get close enough to count,” Gregson said. “A lot, I guess. I just drove. The others did the shooting. The mission was to leave just enough behind.”

“‘Just enough’ for what?” Keo asked.

“So they can tell the others what happened.”

“You want them to know. The other collaborators, in the other towns.”

“Yeah,” Gregson nodded. “To let everyone know there’s something worse than the ghouls out here. Us. We killed just enough to make our point.”

“Hundreds?” Jordan said. “Did you kill hundreds?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Because they’re the enemy,” Gregson said. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us. If you’re against us, then you’re the enemy, and the enemy doesn’t deserve mercy. This is war, lady. We’re trying to take back the planet.” He looked to Keo. “You should understand that. How long have you been fighting these assholes out here?”

“You sonofabitch,” Jordan said. “There are women and children in those towns!”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” Jordan was almost screaming at him now. “What the hell does that mean?”

Gregson craned his head toward her, shouting back, “Bullshit, that’s what that means! They stopped being women and children the moment they agreed to become food for the skin meats! They’re just targets now!”

“You bastard…”

“Fuck off!”

Jordan reached for her gun as Gregson scrambled up from the ground, the two of them moving almost simultaneously. Keo beat them both to the punch by hitting Gregson in the side of the face with the stock of his M4, sending the tank driver collapsing back to the ground.

“Don’t,” Keo said, putting one hand over Jordan’s arm as she aimed her Glock at Gregson.

“Why the hell not?” Jordan asked, almost spitting the words out.

Why the hell not? Keo thought, realizing he didn’t really have a good answer for her. He had been worried he had just killed three U.S. Army soldiers earlier, but that turned out not to be the case. Gregson and his friends were something else entirely. Something that was either bad news or very bad news. He still hadn’t decided yet.

He pushed Jordan’s gun hand down. She resisted at first—he could see the defiance in her eyes, how badly she wanted to pull the trigger—but eventually relented.

“Why not?” she asked again, staring back at him. “You heard what he did. He killed God knows how many people back there. There are pregnant women and children in all those towns, Keo. He slaughtered pregnant women.”

“They were the enemy,” Gregson said softly. He had pushed himself back up to a sitting position against the tank and was wiping his bloody mouth with his shirt. “They made their choice, now they have to pay for it. This is just the beginning. If you thought yesterday was bloody, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He grinned at them; it was a grotesque sight with his teeth covered in blood. “Mercer’s got plans. Big plans.”

“What was it called?” Keo asked him.

“What?” Gregson said.

“The town you were assigned to attack.”

“T-something. Benoit knew the exact name, but one town sounds the same as all the others to me. T-this, T-that.”

“Was it T18?”

Gregson shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Benoit.” He glanced over at the first uniformed body Keo had shot. The man lay on his stomach among the blackened grass a few meters away, the back of his bald head reflecting the bright sun. “Oh, I guess you can’t.”

“I guess not,” Keo said.

He drew his Glock a second time and shot Gregson in the right thigh.

“Shit!” Gregson shouted, falling sideways to the ground while clutching his leg. “What’d you do that for?”

Keo ignored him and looked at Jordan. She was staring at Gregson, the hate from a few seconds ago mostly gone from her face, replaced by something that looked almost like sympathy.

“Why didn’t you let me shoot him?” she asked quietly.

“You’re a good person, Jordan,” Keo said. “I’m not.”

* * *

Gregson wasn’t lying about the tank being out of fuel. It was bone dry. They had also burned through their entire armory yesterday, including the flamethrower, and were just left with small arms. Keo salvaged four AR-15 rifles and a can of ammo with 5.56 rounds, which would go a long way in backing up his M4’s dwindling magazine, though he was more grateful to find MREs and water bottles tucked inside two storage compartments. There was a pile of civilian clothes in the back, but they were splattered with blood from the two tankers Keo had shot through the hatch.

He collected the rifles and stuffed the water and food into a couple of tactical backpacks when he saw the edge of a brown paper sticking out of a pants pocket on one of the dead man. Keo tugged it out, then unfolded it.

It was a map of Texas, with black markers circling towns around the southeast part of the state. Not the big cities like Sunport or Galveston, or even Houston, but the smaller, surrounding ones. There were red X’s over some of them—about a dozen in all—but the rest were just circled.

“Shit,” he said under his breath when he recognized one of the towns that had been circled.

Wilmont. Or, as he had come to know it the last few weeks, T18.

Gillian. Pregnant Gillian.

He had left her behind with Jay because there was no other choice, and after the week he’d been through, he was convinced it was the right decision. But now…

Keo put everything down and concentrated on the map. One of the places with an X over it was marked as T22, and it was somewhere on the other side of Sunport.

What was that Gregson had said?

“We destroyed it. Most of it, anyway. That was the mission. Only spent half of our ammo too, tore the place down like a bulldozer, and wasted everything we had for the M240. But we got unlucky; they had reinforcements nearby, and we had to make a run for it.”

So what did that mean for T18, which was missing an X? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Or maybe as far as Gregson’s crew knew, T18 wasn’t their concern because it was someone else’s job.

A lot of maybes, and most of them bad.

So what else is new?

Footsteps, just before Jordan’s head appeared in the opening above him. “Find anything useful?”

“Just one,” he said, and handed the map up to her.

Jordan sat on the turret, put the map in her lap, and looked at it for a moment. “What am I looking at? What do the X’s stand for?”

“Targets.”

“Oh.” She paused for a moment, then, “They have T18 circled, but not X’ed out.” She looked down through the opening at him. “Gillian.”

“Yeah,” he said, and climbed up with the rifles and backpacks.

He settled on the turret and glanced around him. The difference between the charred fields and the white sand of the beach on the other side was startling. Keo collected his thoughts and considered his options.

He had guns, ammo, and now, extra food and water. He could see himself spending a few more months down here in peace. Even if Lara never showed up with the Trident—and there was no reason for them to, without further contact from him—he could be satisfied. Even more so, if Jordan decided to stay behind, too.

It wouldn’t be such a bad life—or however long he had left. Not bad at all.

“What about Gillian?” Jordan asked, bringing him back. “What if T18 is next on the list?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Keo, we have to go back for her. She’s our friend.”

“I tried that, Jordan. We both tried that. Remember?”

“Things are different now. There are tanks rampaging through towns. Gillian doesn’t know that. She stayed because she thought her baby would be safer in T18. Well, it’s not. Not anymore.”

It’s not my problem, he thought, but didn’t say it.

“Keo,” Jordan said.

“She’s still safer with Jay,” he said. “Especially now that the towns know they’re being hit. They’ll take more precautions, put up proper defenses. Protecting their doctors will be top priority.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“It’s what I would do, and I’m just a shooter. The guys running these places are smarter than me. You saw the setup they had back there. It’s like that everywhere.”

Jordan didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if she had given up trying to convince him. She looked past him instead, at the ocean on the other side of the burnt field. Wind blew her short blonde hair into her eyes, and she had to brush it aside.

They sat in silence for the longest time, but of course, it didn’t last.

“So when are you going back for her?” Jordan finally asked.

He sighed, staring out at the impossibly blue Gulf of Mexico. “As soon as I find a working vehicle.”

He didn’t see it, but he thought he could feel her smiling triumphantly behind him.

“Shut up,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t the world’s biggest idiot (maybe just Texas’s), when a small black dot appeared against the water’s surface in the distance. He stared at it for a moment, wondering if he was seeing things, but that couldn’t have been it, because the object was definitely getting bigger…as it got closer.

“Is that…?” Jordan said.

“Yeah,” he nodded, reaching for a rifle. “That’s a boat heading this way.”

16

Lara

“You look like shit, Keo,” Maddie said. “I mean, no offense, but compared to when we last saw you, it looked like you got caught in a combine.”

“He was definitely handsomer the last time we saw him,” Bonnie chimed in.

“I don’t know, scars give a man character.”

“Yeah? Then Keo went and got himself a big ass load of character.”

Keo smirked at the two women. “Nice to see you guys, too. Especially you, Bonnie.”

Bonnie rolled her eyes at him. “Give it a rest. I gave you plenty of chances when you were on the Trident.”

“What can I say. I’m an idiot.”

“Won’t get any arguments from me.”

Bonnie glanced past Keo to the woman standing on the road behind him. She was holding a rifle, with another one slung over her back, and looked as if she was waiting for some kind of signal that everything was okay. Keo did that now, turning and waving, then slung his own weapon. The woman nodded back but didn’t come over.

“Is that her?” Bonnie asked. “The one you kept turning me down for?”

“That’s Jordan,” Keo said. “Things didn’t work out with Gillian. Long story.”

“Must be.”

“What did happen to your face?” Lara asked.

“That’s part of the long story.”

“I guess we’re going to be here awhile,” Maddie said. She looked over at Lara. “Where do you want us, boss?”

“Stay close,” Lara said. When Maddie had started back toward the boat they had arrived ashore in, she said to Bonnie, “Keo’s friend has the right idea. We don’t want anyone sneaking up on us. Coming here was risky enough; let’s not push our luck.”

Bonnie nodded, then said to Keo, “Don’t be a stranger,” before heading up the beach with her M4.

Lara noticed that the ex-model walked a bit wobbly at first and was slowly adjusting with every step. The result of living on the Trident for so long, she thought; they had all become used to the boat’s movements. She wondered if she looked that odd. Maddie, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems re-familiarizing herself with walking on land.

She glanced around them again, unable to fully shake the paranoia. The place had looked deserted when they were on approach, but after last night, she wasn’t willing to just accept anything at face value. These days, ambushes were easy to come by and harder to spot from a distance, and God knew you could hear a motor coming for miles if you had ears.

“Yachting accident?” Keo asked, looking at her bandaged arm.

“Something like that.”

With Bonnie now watching the road, Keo’s friend walked down the beach toward them. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, and younger than Lara by at least a few years.

The woman stuck out her hand. “You must be Lara. Keo has told me a lot about you.”

Lara shook her hand. “All good, I hope.”

“Eh.”

They exchanged a brief, easy smile.

“We were afraid you might have left when I didn’t radio in yesterday,” Keo said.

“I should have, especially after the fireworks show last night. You wanna fill me in on what happened? I guess I should have known you would be right in the middle of it.”

“Long story.”

“Of course it is.”

“Where’s the tugboat?”

“It’s out there somewhere.”

“Who’s captaining it?”

“Blaine.”

“What happened to el capitan?”

“He’s been dealt with.”

“Hunh.”

“Yeah.”

He fixed her with a long look. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed or disturbed. Keo had never been particularly easy to read, and the weeks they’d spent on the Trident together hadn’t helped her understand him any better. Then again, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a lot on her mind at the time. Or still did.

“Didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.

“He didn’t give me much of a choice.” Then, because she didn’t want him to ask any more questions about Gage, “So, where is it? The last time I saw one in person, it was in a museum and I was ten.”

“You know about that?”

“Impossible not to. Woke me up from this,” she said, holding up her left arm.

“This way.” Keo turned around, and with Jordan, led her up the beach.

“Was it them?” Lara asked.

“Depends on who you mean by ‘them,’” Keo said.

“The U.S. Army.”

“Then no.”

“Dammit.”

“You were hoping, too?” Jordan asked, looking back at her.

Lara nodded and told her about Beecher, a colonel who was in charge of a few thousand soldiers and civilians somewhere in Colorado. “That’s the only remnants of the U.S. Army I know of, and I got the sense they were barely surviving up there.”

“What about the Navy?”

“We haven’t run across them the entire time we’ve been in the Gulf.”

She saw the disappointment on Jordan’s face before the other woman turned back around as they stepped onto the road. Bonnie had moved further inland, her M4 cradled alertly in front of her, watching the other direction. Lara thought she could see some kind of domed buildings blinking in the distance.

She looked back at Keo. “You wanna tell me what was so important I had to drop everything and meet you down here?”

“I wanted you to meet someone,” Keo said. “But he’s not here right now. We got separated two nights ago.”

“Who was it?”

“Let’s call him Frank.”

Lara caught Jordan sneaking a look at Keo and saw him shaking his head back in reply. Both movements had been very slight and were hardly noticeable—except they were walking right in front of her, and she was staring at them.

Now what was that about?

“Why did you want me to meet him?” she asked instead.

“He had information about the ghouls,” Keo said.

“Like what?”

“How they operate, their chain of command, all the nitty-gritty stuff.” Then, he added, almost as an afterthought, “He also said he knew how to beat them.”

She perked up. “How?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t say? How does he not say, and how do you not force him to tell you something like that, Keo?”

Keo hesitated, and she thought he was picking his words very carefully when he said, “It’s complicated, but he would only talk to you.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keo…”

“I don’t know, Lara. Frank’s not the most talkative type. You can ask him all the questions you want when you meet him.”

They were moving through the field beyond the beach now, tall brown grass slapping at her legs. She thought she could smell something burning, like someone had left a stove on, but it was mostly obfuscated by the breeze coming from the nearby ocean.

“Tell me something,” Lara said.

“If I can…” Keo said.

“Do you trust this guy?”

“I do,” he said without hesitation.

“Why?”

“He saved my life. Three times now.”

“Mine, too,” Jordan said.

“What is he, some kind of collaborator?” Lara asked.

“Sort of,” Keo said.

“Sort of?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“That seems to be a common theme with you today.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “Trust me when I say this wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. Things…got complicated.”

She had more questions—so many more questions—but the sight of the grass around them turning from brown and green to almost entirely charred black, with large swaths that had been burned completely away leaving behind only blackened dirt, caught her by surprise. The air had also begun to shift noticeably from bearable to almost suffocating.

“Here,” Keo said, holding out a small T-shirt to her.

She took it gratefully and pushed it against her mouth and nose. In front of her, Jordan did the same thing with another shirt, but Keo seemed to be fine with the air. Maybe he had just gotten used to it, though she couldn’t understand how.

She forgot about everything else when she saw the tank sitting in the fields in front of them. It was so out of place and impossible to miss, especially the cannon jutting out from it. The tan-colored vehicle was surrounded by large swaths of charred earth and what looked like the carcasses of two-story houses that had been toppled like dominoes, except for a few that still, somehow, remained standing. She almost lost her balance when a crater that shouldn’t be there popped up in front of her.

“Watch your step,” Keo said.

She thought he was talking about the craters until she heard the crunch. Lara looked down at the remains of an arm—the radius was missing, but half of the ulna was still intact—as it crumbled under her boot. The fingers were all there, but the thumb had been blown off. She stepped over it, then around a small pile of bones—then another. They were scattered everywhere amongst the scorched ground, their numbers increasing exponentially the closer she got to the tank. Every step she took produced a loud crunch that made her wince.

The carnage was spread out, as if the battle had dragged from one side of the field to the other, leaving death everywhere. There was no blood, but she didn’t expect to find any because the ghouls bled a different kind of blood that evaporated against sunlight. Even though she couldn’t smell most of the acidic stench that still lingered in the air thanks to Keo’s T-shirt, she could smell enough that she wished she were already on the Trident again, or at least back on the beach.

She focused on the tank instead, hoping that would take her mind off everything else. “How many tanks?”

“Just the one,” Keo said.

“And you’re sure it’s not U.S. Army?”

“It may have belonged to Uncle Sam once upon a time, but not anymore.”

The crack of a bone snapping under her boots made her flinch, but she willed herself not to look down.

“Did you find out who they were?” she asked.

Keo pointed at a twenty-something man sitting against the tank’s wheels. He was only wearing an undershirt and khaki shorts, and one of his thighs was bandaged. His face was pale under the bright sun, and he didn’t look like he could keep his eyes open as he watched them approach.

“His name’s Gregson,” Keo said. “Had to kill the rest of his crew.”

“‘Had to?’” she said.

“One of them went for their gun and, well, shit went downhill from there.”

“Doesn’t it always with you?”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

Gregson blinked up at her as they stopped in front of him. He looked paler and much weaker up close, and there was a thick clump of blood underneath him. Lara had seen enough people bleeding to last a lifetime and knew without a doubt this man wasn’t going to survive the day unless someone treated his wound.

“What’s with you and shooting people in the leg?” she asked Keo.

“I’m developing bad habits,” he said. “Used to be I’d just shoot them in the head.” He said to Gregson, “Tell her what you told us. Everything, including what you were using this bad boy for.” He banged on the tank, producing dull thuds. “Don’t leave out any details.”

“I need medical attention,” Gregson said. His voice was weak and his lips were cracked.

“You’ll get it after we go over it again,” Keo said.

Gregson squinted at Keo, as if trying to gauge his trustworthiness.

Good luck with that, she wanted to tell him. She had known Keo longer, and even she couldn’t tell if he had meant what he just promised.

“We had a mission…” Gregson began.

* * *

She listened to Gregson talking in a slow, almost uninterested drawl. He spoke in such a matter-of-fact monotone that she had to remind herself she was standing in the middle of a warzone surrounded by the bones of ghouls and not in a park somewhere discussing the weather.

Jesus Christ. What’s going on out here?

When he was done, Gregson lowered his head and stared down at the ground. That was, if his eyes were even still open, which she couldn’t tell for sure. He seemed to have so little energy left after talking that he might have even forgotten to demand that medical attention Keo had promised.

She looked over at Keo, standing on top of the tank behind Gregson, looking back in the direction of the domed buildings she had glimpsed earlier. Jordan was turned the other way, back toward the beach with the shirt pressed against half of her face. They had heard Gregson’s story already and might not even have noticed he had stopped talking.

“How many towns have they attacked so far?” she asked Keo.

He shrugged. “Apparently they were at it all day yesterday. That was the plan. Shock and awe. Hit hard and hit fast, before the collaborators could mount a proper defense. Sounds like they’ve been planning it for months.”

He took a folded map out of his pocket and tossed it down to her. She opened it and stared at the circled locations. There were dozens of them.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“The circles are collaborator towns in Texas.”

“I didn’t know there were so many…”

“I don’t think that’s all of them, just the ones Mercer’s people know about. Scouted in advance of yesterday.”

There had to be at least two, possibly closer to three, dozen circles in all, and all of them concentrated in the southeast. Did that mean there weren’t more in other parts of the state, or were these the only ones Mercer’s people had “scouted”? Each one was marked with a T, followed by a number. About a dozen of the towns had large red X’s scratched across them. One in particular was somewhere between the towns of Hellion and Starch.

Oh, dammit.

“I was at T18 last week,” Jordan said, walking over. She pulled the shirt down just long enough to talk. “Gillian’s there.”

“Your Gillian?” Lara asked Keo.

He nodded. “Long story.”

“Of course it is,” she said. Then, “I’ve never been to any of these places, but from what I hear, there are supposed to be a lot of people in these towns.”

“Hundreds, sometimes thousands,” Keo said.

“T18 had around 4,000 the last time I was there,” Jordan said. “A lot of the women are pregnant.”

“Enemies of the state,” Gregson said. His voice came out of nowhere and he still looked (and sounded) sapped of energy. “Take them out, and you starve the enemy.”

“‘Starve the enemy’?” Lara repeated.

“He means killing the collaborators,” Keo said. “They’re trying to take away what the ghouls prize most—the people in those towns.”

“It’s barbaric,” Jordan said. She stared daggers at Gregson, daring him to challenge her, but he’d already looked back down at the ground. “I would rather die than give blood to those things, but slaughtering them …” She shook her head. “The man who came up with that plan should be hung for war crimes.”

“They’re the enemy,” Gregson muttered to himself. “You’re with us, or you’re against us…”

“Apparently that’s the slogan,” Keo said. There wasn’t any trace of humor in his voice, and he was looking out at the ocean across the charred field. “By the way, where’s the Ranger? I expected to see him make the trip, not you.”

“I sent him, Gaby, and Nate to Starch,” she said. “That was a few days ago, before you got in touch. We’re supposed to be in Port Arthur now, waiting to pick them back up.”

“What’s in Starch?” Jordan asked.

“An underground facility built by a man named Harold Campbell. We sealed it months ago before we left for Louisiana. It has supplies, ammo, guns, and something else Will and I have always talked about retrieving, just in case.”

“Must be important for you to send them back out here,” Keo said.

I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure, she thought, but nodded and said, “Lights.”

“Lights?”

“UV lights.”

Keo looked confused, maybe even doubtful. “Lara, you can go into any store and trip over all the UV lights you can carry. You didn’t have to send the ex-Ranger and the girl to Starch for that.”

“Those lights aren’t like the ones in Starch,” she said.

* * *

“They work,” Lara said. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Ghouls turn to ash against them, the way they do against sunlight.”

“That’s a hell of a weapon,” Keo said.

“It is,” she nodded.

“And you’re only trying to retrieve these lights now?”

“We didn’t need them before. We had the island.”

“And now?”

“After you left, we talked about needing an extra layer of security, just in case. I don’t know what Harold Campbell’s people did to those lights—or what they’re actually made of—but we haven’t been able to replicate them. Danny, Gaby, and I had a long talk, and we decided sending an expedition to Starch was worth the risk. If I knew there was even a remote possibility they would be walking into the middle of a warzone...” She shook her head. “Shit, Keo, if anything happens to them…”

“You didn’t know,” Keo said. “Neither did we, until last night. It’s a big state, Lara.”

“I know,” she said, and looked past him at Bonnie, standing guard on the road with Jordan. The two women looked like they were in the middle of a conversation. She was grateful for the cool wind whipping in from the Gulf of Mexico, because they kept her from smelling the lingering fumes from the fields.

“What now?” Keo asked.

“My primary concern is keeping the Trident and everyone on it safe. And that’s what I’m going to do while we head back to Port Arthur to wait for Danny to make contact.”

“How long has it been?”

“Yesterday morning. His last position was outside a town called Hellion. Close enough to Starch that the next time he radioed in, I expected him to be doing it from inside Harold Campbell’s facility.”

“Did you say Hellion and Starch?”

She nodded somberly. “I saw them on the map.”

“He could have gone around it. The Ranger’s resourceful, bad jokes notwithstanding. And the girl’s good.”

“Gaby.”

“Yeah, her. I’m not sure about the kid with the Mohawk, though.”

She managed a smile. “He’s a good kid.”

“Yeah, but that haircut…”

“I know.”

She looked off into the ocean, in the direction where she knew Blaine and the Trident were waiting for them right now. She couldn’t see the yacht from here, which made her feel relieved. The last thing she needed was to have to fight off collaborators on the ocean, too.

“We’re dealing with a Ranger here,” Keo was saying. “I’ve crossed a few of them in my time, so don’t press the panic button just yet. At least not for another day, and maybe not even then.”

She wanted badly to agree with him, but the doubts made that impossible.

Would you have done it, Will? Or would you have been satisfied with staying on the Trident?

God, where are you when I need you most?

“What about Gillian and T18?” she asked. “How are you going to handle that one?”

“It’s tricky.”

“When is it not tricky with you?”

He grunted before glancing back at Jordan, on the road behind them with Bonnie. The two women still looked like they were in the middle of conversation.

“You got extra room for her?” he asked.

“If you’re not coming, I have a feeling she won’t, either.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

Lara gave him an almost pitying look. “For a smart guy, you can be amazingly dense at times, Keo.”

“When are people going to stop overestimating me? I keep telling everyone I’m just a guy with a gun.”

“Right,” she smiled. “You’re just a guy with a gun.”

17

Gaby

“How many, you think?” Nate asked.

She shook her head. “It’s hard to tell. God knows how many more are buried underneath all that.”

“It looks worse than I thought it would be.”

“It’s kind of what I expected.”

“Really?”

“Mostly.”

“I guess you have a better imagination than me.”

“Well, this looks familiar,” Danny said, climbing up the rubble behind them. He walked the short distance over and crouched next to her and looked out at the airfield. “Plan Z,” he said quietly.

“What?” she said.

“Just thinking out loud. Don’t mind me.”

She followed his gaze back out to the world beyond the hangar. Or what was left of it. If she didn’t already know she was looking at an airfield, she wouldn’t have been able to guess from the remains. The ground had taken a lot of punishment, the slabs of asphalt and concrete that made up the runway scattered across the surrounding area. The group of administrative buildings on the other side was practically invisible against the widespread destruction.

Bleached white bones poked out of the discombobulated green, brown, and gray of the obliterated field like furless prairie dogs playing hide and seek with the sun. Dead (again?) ghouls. So many that she could have started counting and never finished before nightfall, and those were just the ones she could see from her perch. How many more were hidden underneath all that loosened earth and man-made material? What about behind them right now? Or among the scorched trees that flanked the airfield?

“Cluster bombs,” Danny had said when Nate told him about the small parachutes he’d seen falling from the sky last night.

There was just enough wind to disperse most of the lingering stench of vaporized ghoul flesh, otherwise it would have been unbearable against so much unnatural death. Even so, she pulled her shirt up over half of her face, Danny and Nate doing the same next to her. Her eyes stung, a combination of the acrid smell of the dead and the scorched foliage from the woods around them.

They were crouched on a section of the hangar’s front wall that was still standing, the top half blown off by one of the blasts from last night. Pieces of the caved-in roof provided a ladder of sorts, with just enough hand and footholds to crawl up its length. The only thing left now was to hop the ten feet down to the sturdy ground below, where most of the bombs had fallen short. Or maybe the pilots had hit exactly what they were supposed to and the hangar wasn’t one of them.

Pilots. Because there was more than one plane last night. How many? Maybe it didn’t matter. One or two, or ten of those Warthogs would still have changed everything. The bloody mess at T29 was proof of that.

“Well?” a voice said from behind them, from inside the hangar. “What’s the verdict?”

Gaby looked back and down at Mason, standing at the bottom of the incline they had climbed up earlier, shielding his eyes in their direction. The sun glinted off the bloodied weapon in his right hand; his way of warning them that he was ready should they try anything.

“Climb up and find out for yourself,” Danny said.

“No thanks,” Mason said. “I’m going to let you go out there first, then I’ll follow later. Go our separate ways after that. No muss, no fuss.”

“What about your friends?”

“What about them? After last night, they can go fuck themselves. And as far as I’m concerned, the three of you never existed.” His eyes fell on her when he added, “Especially you. No offense, but you’re some bad luck, kid. Josh figured that out too late, unfortunately for him.”

She gritted her teeth at the comment but managed to stop herself from responding. There was no point. Mason wasn’t worth wasting her breath on.

Danny, next to her, snorted. “And they say friendship among thieves gets a bad rap.” He nodded to her and Nate. “Let’s find out if anything survived last night’s jamboree. Also, I don’t wanna be walking around with just our sticks and berries to throw if his friends come back looking for him.”

“We’ll be lucky if we can find a bullet in all that,” Nate said.

“How are we getting down?” Gaby asked.

“Jump,” Danny said.

“Jump?”

“Just pretend you’re a really big bunny,” Danny said, before taking a step toward the edge and, saluting them, jumped down.

* * *

“Anything?” Gaby asked as she rolled a two-by-two chunk of concrete off a rifle stock, only to find the pulverized rest on the other side.

Twisted metal rebar stuck out of the blocks, sharp edges scraping against her palms. She let go and moved on. The last thing she needed right now was to get gashed in the arms or legs because she wasn’t paying attention.

“Dick Butkus,” Danny said from a few yards away. He turned over a piece of landing strip and finding nothing useful, straightened up with a heavy grunt. “Less than dick. Right now, I’d settle for a tiny bit of dick.” Then, he added quickly, “Don’t tell Carly I said that.”

Despite everything, she managed a small smile anyway.

They had been moving steadily up the airfield, hoping to find something they could use as a weapon, always wary of the remains of the buildings up ahead. An hour and a lot of physical labor later, they still had nothing to show for it, and hour two was creeping up on them fast. Nate, having spread out to their right side, had come up just as empty-handed.

Gaby spent almost as much time not falling into holes that hadn’t been there yesterday as she did trying not to roll rubble onto her feet or leg. Thank God she was still wearing boots, pants, and a long-sleeve shirt, or all the gathered dust from last night’s explosive booby traps and concentrated bombing would have covered her from head to toe. Even so, she still had to keep her shirt over most of her face to spare her senses from not just the stench of evaporated ghoul flesh, but other harmful elements still clinging to the air.

A saying of her father’s came to mind—as much as he hated his office job, at least he wasn’t “digging ditches.” She felt like she was digging ditches right now…with her bare hands.

There, something on the ground.

She crouched next to a gun barrel jutting out between a skeletal chest and a block of half-buried concrete. It wasn’t much, but it was about a foot long and heavy enough to make a decent blunting weapon. She pulled it out and put it into her back pocket and continued on.

The closer they got to the buildings, the more pieces of guns and shredded black uniforms they stumbled across. Most of the collaborators from last night had stayed behind at the structures, but not all of them. Not that it mattered. Out here or over there, they were still sitting ducks when the Warthogs swooped in. She tried to imagine the terror of hearing that awful bellowing noise. Did they even know what it was? It was strange to say, but she would have preferred not to know.

“Are we going to talk about it?” she said after a while.

“Talk about what?” Danny said.

“You know what. Last night. That creature… It protected us, Danny.”

“Was that what it was doing?”

“Wasn’t it?”

He shrugged and tossed away the broken remains of a rifle’s magazine he had picked up. “Maybe it was greedy, wanted us all for itself.”

“You know that’s bullshit,” she said, stepping over a terribly deformed head buried in the rubble, wide-open blue eyes staring up at her. She didn’t know where the rest of the man’s body was, or if it was even still attached to him underneath his asphalt tomb.

“Do I?” Danny said.

“It saved us, Danny.”

“I have no idea what happened last night. Willie boy was always the brains of the operation. If he was here, he’d probably have come up with a dozen theories for you by now. Unfortunately for us, I’m less theory-inclined. Or capable.”

“So you didn’t spend all of last night and most of this morning replaying what happened in your mind?”

“I didn’t say that. But I am telling you I didn’t come up with anything that even remotely makes any lick of sense.” He glanced over. “You?”

“Same.”

“So there you go. What’s that old saying about keeping your trap shut if you don’t know anything?”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“Touché,” Danny said. He glanced over at Nate, who had expanded his area further to their right. “Found any gold in them thar hills, Nate-o-rama?”

Nate looked over and shook his head.

“Guess the grass ain’t any greener on the other side,” Danny said. Then, a few seconds later, “Hey-yo.” He bent down and picked something up from the ground. “Eureka.”

He turned a knife over in his hand. It was a Ka-Bar and it looked mostly intact, though the grip and a part of the serrated section was blackened by fire.

“Lucky you,” Gaby said.

“Mommy did always say I had the bestest luck. You know what they used to call me in college?”

“Lucky Danny?”

“Best Luck Danny. Now that I think about it, Lucky Danny would have been preferable.” He grinned and slipped the knife into his back pocket, then rubbed his hands together. “Now, let’s see what we can do about getting Lucky Danny an M4. Big money, big money…”

* * *

“What time is it?” Nate asked.

“Time for you to get your own damn watch,” Danny said.

“I had one, but some assholes took it.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Danny glanced down at his watch. “Two hours till noon. That hot date’s going to have to wait.”

“Shhh, Gaby’s here.”

Gaby ignored them and said, “I didn’t know we’ve been searching for that long.”

“Long enough for Mason to finally poke his head out of the ground and see what all the fuss is about,” Danny said, looking back across the airfield at the hangar on the other side.

It was the only structure still standing (if barely) and was hard to miss. Mason was crouched on the same spot she and the others had been earlier this morning. She waited for him to move, but he didn’t; he seemed content to sit up there like some gargoyle, biding his time.

“Are we really just going to let him go?” Nate asked. He shielded his eyes as he looked back at Mason.

“You want to take him out?” Danny asked.

“We could take him. Shank or not.”

She glanced over at Nate, surprised to hear him making the suggestion and not Danny. Nate was always the idealist, the easygoing guy who turned the other cheek when he could. It was one of the reasons why she liked him, because a part of her was afraid she had gone too far over the edge. Nate, in so many ways, balanced her out.

It was T29, she thought. It had affected her, but it had altered Nate even more.

“Fuck him, he’s not worth the trouble,” Danny said. “One or a dozen more collaborators running around out here won’t make any difference, but we do need to get the hell gone before more show up with something other than a knife the size of their dicks in their hands.”

Gaby stood up from the remaining half of a large oak desk she had been resting on. It stuck out of the ground from what she assumed was the main administrative building, surrounded by charred furniture and toppled walls, some with holes larger than her fists in them. Her boots had been resting on a deflated tire, the rest of the vehicle hidden somewhere in the rubble.

“Where do we go from here?” Nate asked.

“Starch,” Danny said. “We still have a mission to accomplish.”

“How far off course are we?” she asked.

“Sixty miles. More or less.”

She sighed. “Sixty miles, more or less, is a lot of walking, Danny.”

“It’ll be good exercise,” he said before pulling his shirt back up over his mouth and nose. “Come on; let’s split this joint. All this death and destruction is really bringing me down.”

She followed him and Nate, stepping over a small section of still-standing wall and around a half-burned American flag jutting out from a pile of bricks. A blood-smeared arm, its owner invisible somewhere underneath the stack, waved to her as she passed.

Gaby shot another glance across the field and at the hangar. Mason, still on the wall, little more than a stick figure in the distance. She wondered if he was watching them back, waiting for them to disappear before making his move.

“Hey,” Nate said from in front of her.

She looked over as he took a charred but still-in-one-piece bottle of water out of a pants pocket and held it out to her. There was some water sloshing around inside, just enough to make her lips suddenly wet.

Gaby took it gratefully. “Nice find.”

“Don’t tell Danny,” he smiled.

“Don’t tell Danny what?” Danny said from further in front of them.

“That your jokes suck,” Nate said.

“Hey, I don’t take critique from people with monkey haircuts.”

They followed Danny out of the ruins and toward a winding road. The trees flanking it were scorched and blackened, their leaves stripped bare from last night’s fire blast. The entrance looked almost foreboding, like a mouth with teeth waiting to swallow her up.

Gaby took out the gun barrel from her back pocket and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

* * *

She should have been afraid of the dark parts of the woods, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t explain why, exactly, but maybe it had a little something to do with how Mercer’s people had so thoroughly devastated the area that there was still gray ash lingering over the two-lane road as they walked over it.

She stopped fearing the woods and concentrated on other potential dangers instead. They were flanked by guardrails, and a sign they had passed a few minutes back confirmed they had been in Larkin Airport. There was no housing in the area, just miles of woods as far as she could tell. She hadn’t seen anything that indicated the presence of the town of Larkin itself, but if the airport was here, it stood to reason the town couldn’t be much further down the road.

There was a lot of shade, which made the December weather even chillier than it had been in the airfield, where they were standing directly under the sun without protection. She hadn’t realized how many extra layers the assault vest had given her until she didn’t have it anymore. Minus her equipment and weapons, she felt naked and exposed, though the sounds of birds chirping among the trees helped to alleviate some of her wariness.

“You know where we’re going, right?” Nate asked after a while.

Danny, walking about ten yards in front of them, nodded. “Mercer showed me his map. Starch is west.”

“But we’re going east.”

“I noticed that. We’ll look for a vehicle inside Larkin, re-gear as best we can, and then start west.”

“Ah.”

“Is that approval I hear?”

“Eh,” Nate shrugged.

“Tough road,” Danny said.

Gaby smiled. Danny and Nate bickering like an old married couple helped convince her they weren’t screwed, that they could still make it out of Texas alive. She hadn’t realized how much she missed having the constant moving waves of the Gulf of Mexico under her until they were gone. Of course, there was also the food, the company, and the safety of the Trident. She missed all those things even more—

“Car!” Danny hissed in front of them, just before he darted right.

Gaby didn’t know why, but she went left. She hopped the guardrail and slipped behind the trunk of a large tree, Nate doing the same with another tree two feet over. She had been afraid he had gone right with Danny and was glad to see him hugging the trunk next to her.

She looked across the road at Danny, nearly invisible behind another gnarled tree on the other side.

“Someone asked for a ride?” Nate whispered.

It was a beat-up red pickup truck. A Chevy, by the emblem on the front grill. Like the vehicle itself, the engine had seen a lot of wear and tear, and Gaby got the impression getting it started was half the battle, and keeping it running was the other. She spotted a figure behind the wheel, wearing a cap, but the man was still too far up the road for her to make out any details.

The truck was slow, moving at barely twenty miles per hour. She couldn’t tell if that was because the Chevy couldn’t go any faster or if the driver wasn’t certain his vehicle could handle any more speed. Either way, it seemed to take the truck forever to rumble up the road toward them. She realized now that they could have taken their time hiding and would still not have been spotted.

“Damn, that thing’s slow,” Nate whispered. “I think I can get out and push it down here faster.”

“Give it a try,” she smiled back.

“Nah, I don’t feel like getting run over.”

“It’s moving way too slow to run anyone over.”

“Yeah, but why take the chance? This tree is so nice and comfy…”

Eventually the pickup finally reached them, and as it was passing them by, she looked into the front passenger door at the side profile of the driver. He was leaning into the steering wheel, concentrating on the road ahead. She knew now why Danny had gone right—so he would be closer to the driver side.

Ping! as something struck the other side of the truck.

The driver instinctively jammed on the brake, and even as the tires squealed against the road, Gaby caught a flash of movement as Danny bounded over the guardrail behind the vehicle and leaped into the truck bed. Gaby didn’t even know Danny had the ability to move that fast. Where the hell had he been hiding that kind of speed all this time?

Before she knew what she was doing, Gaby had slipped out from behind the tree and was running back to the road.

“Gaby!” Nate hissed behind her, somehow managing to shout and whisper at the same time.

She didn’t stop, because she couldn’t. Danny was out there, exposed.

She leaped over the guardrail, and, ducking to lower her profile, ran toward the passenger-side door just as the driver climbed out on the other side, his door creaking loudly as he pried it open. Gaby caught a glimpse of a rifle over the top of the cab, and the driver, visible from the neck down through the windows, was already turning toward the back where Danny was.

“Hey!” she shouted.

The driver seemed to freeze momentarily, as if unsure of where to point his weapon. It was just enough of a distraction for Danny to jump out of the truck bed, the vehicle dipping and rising slightly as he did so.

A loud bang! as the driver fired, and Gaby thought, Oh no, oh no, and raced around the front hood and to the other side—

The driver was on the road, the rifle still clutched in his right hand but pointed away from Danny, who was straddling the man’s chest. Danny had the sharp edge of his fire-kissed Ka-Bar pressed up against the truck driver’s exposed skin. The man was gasping, the round eyes underneath the cap’s brim impossibly wide.

It was a girl.

She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with long auburn hair spilling out from under the weathered cap. She was grimacing up at Danny, simultaneously trying not to swallow for fear of the knife pressed against her throat and wanting desperately to swing the rifle up and shoot him.

“Gaby,” Danny said.

She hurried over and reached for the rifle, making the girl’s eyes flicker over to her in alarm while her fingers tightened on the weapon.

“Oh, come on,” Danny said, almost exasperated. “I hate to be chauvinistic about this, but I’m clearly on top here.”

The driver sighed, and Gaby wrestled the weapon from her. She stepped back and glanced up and down the road, listening for signs of another vehicle. There had been hundreds of collaborators at the airfield last night, all of them buried under the rubble this morning. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more still in the area that could have heard the girl’s gunshot.

“Oh shit, you’re bleeding,” Nate said as he rounded the back of the truck.

Gaby thought he was talking to her, but no, it was Danny. Blood dripped from the bottom of his right ear, where the bullet had creased him.

Danny wiped at the scratch. “You shot me.”

“You threw something at my car!” the girl shouted back.

“It was just a rock. Relax.”

Gaby noticed a large dent in the driver-side door.

“A couple swings with a hammer, and it’s good as new,” Danny said. “You got insurance, right?”

“You can’t take my truck!” the girl shouted (too loudly).

“Afraid I can, and I must.”

“You can’t!”

“Yes, I can.” Danny stood up, taking the knife away with him. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

The girl didn’t answer him. She stood up, stumbling a bit and cradling her left arm. Her elbow was scraped and bloodied, and she kept looking back at the vehicle.

“What’s inside?” Gaby asked.

The girl gave her a quick, scared glance. Gaby wondered if she ever looked that young, even before the world ended.

“We’re going to take the truck,” Gaby said. “If you have something in there that you want to keep, speak up now.”

“Aren’t you generous,” Danny said.

“We’re already taking her truck; might as well let her keep whatever we don’t need.”

“We should hurry up and go, guys,” Nate said, walking over to them. “No telling who might have heard that gunshot.”

“Alice,” the girl said.

“Alice?” Danny repeated.

“Alice, come out,” the girl said. She wasn’t talking to them.

Danny backed up as the driver-side passenger door opened and a small figure scrambled out in jeans and boots. Both articles of clothing looked about a couple of sizes too large for her, but they were cinched in place by a belt. She had big brown eyes and looked nervously from Danny to Gaby before running over and grabbing the bigger girl around the waist.

“Well, damn,” Danny sighed.

18

Keo

“You think she bought it?” Jordan asked, watching the boat as it faded into the distance. In a few seconds, they wouldn’t be able to tell there were three heavily-armed women in a tender out there in the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.

You should be on that boat too, pal. So why aren’t you?

“Bought what?” he said.

“About Frank.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But not the whole truth.”

He shrugged. “Close enough.”

“I thought she’d, I don’t know, press you more on him.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind, and when you’ve been through as much as she has, you learn to prioritize. The better question is, why aren’t you on that boat with Lara heading back to the Trident?”

“Are we going through this again?”

She sounded exasperated, though he couldn’t understand why. He had offered her a chance at probably the best thing that was going to come around in a long time—space on the Trident, out there somewhere, safe from all this madness—and she’d turned it down.

Just like you did. So who’s the bigger idiot?

Probably a tie…

“Gillian’s my friend,” Jordan said. “I have a lot of friends back in T18. I’m not going to stand by and watch them get massacred by Mercer. Not if I can do something about it.”

“I’m just going back for Gillian and no one else, Jordan.”

“There’s nothing that says we have to stay tied at the hips when we get there. You go do your thing, and I’ll do mine.” She turned around and began walking up the beach, back to the road. “You coming?”

He sighed, then turned to follow her. “What about Tobias?”

“What about him?”

“You know where he is right now?”

“The backup location. He should still be there, unless something’s happened.” She glanced back at him. “You want to ask him for help,” she added. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “Unless he’s still licking his wounds, then we could use a few more guns. Or a dozen.”

“So it’s ‘we’ now?”

“If you insist on sticking around, we should at least do this together. Strength in numbers, and all that. Will he help?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will. I can’t see him sitting by and letting Mercer’s people run a tank through T18. Not after everything he—we—went through to save them.”

“We’ll need a vehicle. Can’t walk all the way back to League City. Well, we can, but I’d prefer not to.”

“Too bad the tank’s out of fuel. Maybe you can push it and I’ll steer.”

“What am I, the Hulk?”

“I thought you didn’t read comic books.”

“I don’t, but everyone knows the Hulk. Big green guy with ripped short-shorts.”

“Close,” she chuckled. “Anyway, if you don’t wanna push me, maybe you can carry me. Let me ride piggyback.”

“Only if we take turns.”

She gave him a brief smile, and he returned it.

“I like this better,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“When you’re not being an asshole.”

“When was I ever an asshole?”

“About half the time you open your mouth.”

He snorted and got another grin from her.

“You really think he’s still out there?” Jordan asked as they stepped up onto the road. She didn’t have to say who “he” was. “Tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know.”

“You sounded pretty confident with Lara. I almost believed you.”

“I guess I’m getting better at lying.”

“How was it supposed to work, anyway? You were just going to introduce Frank to her? ‘Hey, Lara, this is Frank. Frank, this is Lara. You kids chat.’ And what, she wouldn’t ask any of the obvious questions, like why she’s talking to a ghoul?”

“Funny, that’s what I asked him the last time we were together in Sunport.”

“What did he say?”

Keo shrugged. “I got the sense he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or if he had, he didn’t feel like telling me.”

* * *

There were two trucks, both Ford F-150s, which at this point Keo was sure was as ubiquitous to Texas as dickheads with guns trying to kill him. The vehicles were white and tan, both covered in dirt and mud, looking well-used. They were moving on large tires that chewed up the highway at a steady pace toward the beach.

He was expecting some kind of military hardware on display, but no, there were just two guys in the back of each truck, with two more inside. He couldn’t make out faces at this distance, even looking through a pair of binoculars he’d gotten from Gregson’s tank, but he could see just enough to know they were wearing black long-sleeve uniforms.

Collaborators.

He lay flat on his stomach in the fields, ten meters from the road. This part of the beach still had tall, swaying grass that was untouched by the tank’s flamethrower. Somewhere on the other side of the two-lane road was Jordan, waiting for his signal.

“Full-auto,” he said into the radio now, not bothering to whisper because the trucks were still too far away to overhear. The radios, like the binoculars and the spare ammo he had on him, were salvaged from the tank.

“Spray and pray?” Jordan said through the radio. He thought he detected a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Hopefully throw a little aiming in there, too. I’ll take the first truck, and you concentrate on the second one. Shoot anything that moves.”

She didn’t answer that time.

“Jordan,” he said. “Shoot anything that moves. We only need one working vehicle. Take out the two in the back first. Don’t stop shooting until they both go down. Then focus on the ones inside. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

“Jordan…”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Keo,” she said, sounding slightly annoyed. “I was outside T18, running around with Tobias for months before you showed up. I can handle this.”

“I know you can,” he said, hoping it was at least convincing.

The collaborators charging toward him now had already seen the Abrams parked out there under the sun behind him. It was hard to miss, surrounded by barren earth charred black by fire. The trucks hadn’t left the road yet, so he guessed they were approaching the situation with caution, maybe a little bit afraid that cannon was still operational. Playing back what Gregson had said in his mind, Keo wondered if these incoming threats were part of the group that had fought with the tank yesterday and were just now showing up to finish what their ghoul allies had failed to do last night.

“We overshot our mark yesterday,” Gregson had said, “ended up having to fight it out with those collaborator assholes.”

He lowered the binoculars and laid it next to his pack, which had begun to tremble slightly as the vehicles neared. The four in the truck beds were peeking over the cabs, but they clearly only had eyes for the tank parked out there in the field, which was exactly what he was hoping for.

He picked up the M4 and focused on the first truck—the white one—as it sped toward him.

Fifty meters…

Forty…

He could make out the two figures inside the cab now. Both men—one had a bright red beard and the other looked bald.

Thirty meters…

The two in the back looked nervous. Both men. Twenties. The lack of a machine gun mounted in front of them did wonders for Keo’s confidence. The last thing he wanted was to go head-to-head with a technical.

Twenty meters…

He smelled overworked tires and leaking fluid, both indications the vehicles had been on the road for some time now. He wondered how many other collaborators were running around out there, trying to deal with Mercer’s encroachment.

Ten meters!

Keo shoved every other thought away, popped up onto one knee, and looked through the red dot sight at the front windshield of the white truck. He pulled the trigger and stitched the glass from right to left, starting with the driver before picking up the front passenger, and didn’t stop shooting until the truck swerved as the man behind the steering wheel did exactly what Keo expected—he slammed on the brake instead of trying to drive through the gunfire.

The first F-150 was already skidding when Keo heard the pop-pop-pop of Jordan’s rifle from the other side of the road. Keo concentrated on his target as it came to a stop, presenting its backside to him—along with the two uniformed men scrambling around in the truck bed. They were picking themselves up, having tumbled off their feet sometime during the chaos.

Keo flicked his fire selector to semi-auto and shot the first soldier in the chest as he was rising, an AK-47 clutched clumsily in one hand. The man disappeared behind the closed tailgate, while the second one—younger than Keo had first thought; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen—was spinning around, face frozen in shock, just before Keo put two rounds into the largest part of him.

Meanwhile, the tan truck had done the exact same thing as the white one—its driver had hit the brakes when he saw the lead vehicle skidding in front of him. It always amazed Keo how poorly civilians reacted to being shot at.

He was already on his feet and racing through the grass, while at the same time angling his way back toward the highway. Jordan had continued firing, her rifle slamming round after round toward the second truck. Keo had a fresh magazine in his M4 before he was within sight of the driver, who was still alive and had spotted Keo as he stepped onto the road.

Keo put two fresh bullets into the windshield, directly over the spot where the driver was. The man twitched and must have stepped on the gas, because the truck lurched forward and barreled through the fields and kept going for a good thirty meters before finally slowing down on the other side.

He ignored the runaway truck and focused on the tan one still parked on the road in front of him. Fresh blood was splashed across the windshield, blocking his view of the passenger, but he could see the other driver just fine. The man had already opened his car door and was standing outside with his rifle, shooting over the truck bed at Jordan’s position.

Keo jogged up the road, and he was within thirty meters before the man finally heard his approach and turned around. Keo shot him through the open driver-side door window and watched the man drop to the pavement.

The man was still alive when Keo reached him, though he had dropped his rifle and was in the process of reaching for his sidearm. Keo shot him in the chest, and the man stopped moving.

“Jordan!” he shouted.

“I’m good!” she shouted back.

He hurried to the back and looked into the truck bed. There was just one body—a young woman with a blonde ponytail—lying on her back in a pool of blood, staring up at him. She was clutching her stomach with both hands, blood pumping through dirt-covered fingers as she struggled to keep breathing. For a moment he thought it was Gaby, but the cheekbones were too sharp and the nose a little too flat.

Another body lay on the highway behind the vehicle where it had fallen. A man in his thirties, his face pressed into the hot pavement.

“Clear!” Keo shouted.

Jordan picked herself up and jogged over. “You okay?” she asked.

“I’m good,” he said. “You?”

“I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Noted.”

When she reached the truck, Jordan looked into the back and saw the girl, and her face paled. Maybe this wasn’t her first rodeo, but seeing your victim up close was a different animal than shooting them from a distance while looking from behind a rifle.

“Check the other truck, just in case,” Keo said.

She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Instead, she gave the girl another look, then turned and hurried over to the white Ford parked in the grass halfway to the beach.

Keo turned back to the woman. She was still alive, if just barely. The bullet had hit her in the stomach and it didn’t matter how hard she held on; the blood wasn’t going to stop pouring out of her.

“Sorry,” Keo said, and slung his rifle and reached for his sidearm, but by the time he looked back up, the girl had stopped moving completely. She continued staring, wide-eyed, at the bright morning sun above her.

Keo put the handgun away and checked his watch: 10:16 a.m.

He glanced up the road, back at Sunport’s industrial buildings in the distance.

On the other side was T18…and Gillian.

* * *

“What about Gregson?” Jordan asked when they were back on the road in the tan Ford F-150, with the beach fading in the rearview mirror.

There was blood in the front passenger seat where Jordan had shot out the window the same time she killed the man next to it. To avoid sitting in the mess she had made, Jordan was in the backseat with the rest of their supplies, including the AR-15s he’d taken from the tank and everything they had managed to salvage from the other truck.

The driver of the vehicle had somehow managed to escape Jordan’s initial volley unscathed, until Keo killed him outside on the road, so Keo had the luxury of not sitting in someone’s blood as he drove. Not that he hadn’t done something like it before and had a feeling he’d have to do it again in the future.

“What about him?” Keo said.

“Even after everything he’s done, I don’t like the idea of leaving him out there.”

“You wanna go back and put him out of his misery?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“I don’t like leaving him out there, hurt.”

“He’s getting what he’s got coming.”

“A lot of people can say the same about you.”

“And they’d be right.”

She was watching him curiously in the rearview mirror. “You really believe that?”

“Yeah,” he said without hesitation.

“I don’t.”

“That’s because you’re a good and decent human being, Jordan.”

“When did that become a bad thing?”

“About the same time the world ended.”

She didn’t answer, and instead looked out her window at the outskirts of Sunport rolling by. He couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through her mind at the moment. Maybe it was still Gregson, or the girl she had shot. Maybe both. Or she could be wishing she had left with Lara, like he had told her to.

“Any idea who’s taken over T18 after Steve didn’t come back from Santa Marie Island?” he asked.

Jordan thought about it for a moment. Then, “A few people come to mind, but no one stands out. Steve had that place on a pretty tight leash. I would have said Jack, but he’s dead, too.”

“What’s the protocol when one of the leaders get taken out?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know how Steve got chosen in the first place.”

“Tobias never talked about it? Steve told me they used to be co-leaders.”

She shook her head. “He never did.”

“What about Gillian?”

“What about her?”

He grinned. “How do you think she’s going to react when I show back up there again?”

Jordan smiled back at him. “Gillian loves you, Keo.”

“She has a strange way of showing it.”

“Don’t blame her for what happened with Jay. We thought you were dead. It was worse for her. There were times when I didn’t think she’d make it. Not because she couldn’t physically, but because she didn’t want to.”

Keo didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet.

“In a lot of ways, that baby saved her life,” Jordan continued. “Don’t hate me, but she made the right decision. I don’t mean sleeping with Jay; I don’t know why she did that. I mean deciding to stay behind, even after you finally showed up.”

“I know,” he said.

And he did, which was why he was fully prepared to move on. The truth hurt, but it was undeniable. Gillian, in her current state, would have struggled to survive out here. Maybe if he had gotten her to the Trident, where Zoe could have helped with the pregnancy, but there was a lot of space between T18 and the Gulf of Mexico.

Besides, who was he kidding? Happy endings were for other people, not someone like him. He had come to accept that long ago, even though, for a short time there, he had almost managed to convince himself that he deserved one, too.

What an idiot. I guess we know better now, don’t we?

19

Lara

“I can’t believe he didn’t come back with you,” Carly said, even before Lara had completely stepped inside the bridge of the Trident. “And after dragging our asses down here, too. You should have given him a swift kick in the balls for wasting our time.”

“He has his reasons,” Lara said.

“He always has his reasons. What were they this time?”

“He had someone with him named Frank that he wanted me to meet. Or this Frank wanted to meet me. I’m not sure which.”

“Frank?” Carly said. “What a stupid name. Sounds like an out of work porno actor.”

“You know a lot about that?” Blaine asked from his usual position behind the yacht’s controls.

“Hey, I had cable TV, just like everyone else. Scrambled, sure, but you can still see stuff if you look at it at just the right angles.”

“Makes sense to me,” Blaine said. He glanced back at Lara: “Maybe this Frank heard one of your radio messages and wanted to meet the woman behind it. Like it or not, you’re pretty popular these days.”

“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe that could even be remotely true. Nothing Keo had told her about this Frank made him sound like a “fan.” Besides, just the thought of someone out there going through all this trouble just to “meet” her was…unsettling.

What was that Keo had said about Frank?

“He had information about the ghouls. How they operate, their chain of command, all the nitty-gritty stuff. He also said he knew how to beat them.”

She looked at Carly and Blaine, then at the wide-open and calm ocean outside the windshield behind them. What good was Frank’s information to her, even if it was true? Or to Vera and Elise, and all the others onboard the Trident at the moment? She couldn’t think of a single thing.

We should have gone straight to the Bengal Islands, Will. You would have taken us there, wouldn’t you? You would have done the right thing. The smart thing. You always did.

“It’s a moot point anyway, because he wasn’t there,” Lara said. “They got separated two nights ago. Keo says he’s still alive, but I’m not sure he actually believes it.”

“So that’s why he didn’t radio in,” Carly said. “A lot of people are losing their radios these days…”

Lara put a hand on Carly’s arm and they exchanged a brief, private smile. It was a rare occasion to see Carly so somber, and Lara thought she needed the support, even if it was just a simple touch. God knew Carly had done so much more for her over the last few weeks.

“So what did happen over there last night?” Blaine asked. He was, thankfully, oblivious to the private moment taking place behind him. “If Keo was on that beach, that means he was either involved or he saw what went down.”

“A little of both,” Lara said.

“Why am I not surprised?” Carly said.

Lara told them about Gregson and Mercer, about the tank, the destruction it had caused including the scorched fields and the cemetery of bones, and what Gregson and Keo had told her was happening out there in the rest of Texas.

“Damn,” Carly said when Lara was done. “Sounds like a party I’m glad no one invited me to.” She might have even shivered a bit. “They have that kind of firepower?”

“I saw the tank with my own eyes,” Lara said. “I don’t have any reason to disbelieve this Gregson.”

“People lie, Lara.”

“I don’t think Gregson was lying. He didn’t have any reasons to at the time.”

“But they’re definitely not the U.S. Army?” Blaine asked.

“No,” Lara said. “Far from it. They’re dangerous. That’s why we should steer as far away from them as we can. And that means staying the hell away from the coast unless we absolutely have to.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“So what about Keo?” Carly asked. “He’s gone for good this time?”

“I think so, yeah,” Lara nodded.

“Too bad. Carrie was really looking forward to having him back onboard. You told her yet?”

“I didn’t see her on my way here, but Bonnie said she’d talk to her. Were they ever involved? Keo and Carrie?”

“I don’t think so. From what she’s told me, he was stuck on this Gillian chick twenty-four seven. But not anymore, I take it.”

“I guess it’s complicated.”

“It’s Keo, so why wouldn’t it be?”

“There was another woman on the beach with him. Her name was Jordan.”

“That guy works fast,” Blaine chuckled.

“Let the man have his distractions,” Carly said. “I’m a little—okay, a lot—annoyed with him for bringing us down here, but the guy’s done a lot for us. He deserves a little tail.”

Lara smiled, remembering how clueless Keo had been when she mentioned that Jordan probably wouldn’t be leaving with her. Then, later, when Jordan confirmed it, the numbers still didn’t seemed to have computed for Keo.

I guess he really is still stuck on Gillian, she remembered thinking.

“So what’s the order, boss?” Blaine asked.

“How are we for fuel?” Lara asked.

Blaine glanced down at the monitor in front of him. “I’m not gonna lie; we’re running low. We’ll be running on reserves soon, but it’s enough to get us back to Port Arthur and hit another one of the refueling depots on Gage’s list.”

Carly looked at Lara, and she was almost pleading. “Tell me we’re going back.”

“We are,” Lara said. To Blaine: “Pull up anchor and take us back.”

“Thank Jesus Lord,” Carly said, not even trying to hide the relief on her face.

“What about the fuel situation?” Blaine asked.

“One problem at a time,” Lara said.

Carly walked over and casually draped one arm over Blaine’s shoulder. “Boss lady’s spoken. Port Arthur or bust, el chauffeuro. Is that how you say chauffeur in Spanish?”

Blaine grunted. “Close enough.”

* * *

“Too bad about Keo,” Carly said as she walked Lara back to her cabin. “We could have really used him, especially now with stupid Danny still running around out there, refusing to pick up my phone calls.”

“He’ll be fine,” Lara said. “He’s got Gaby and Nate to watch his back.”

“Gaby, yes. Nate? I’m not so sure.”

“Is it the haircut?”

“What else? I gotta get Gaby to convince him to cut it. She could tell that boy to jump into the ocean and wrestle a shark, and he’d do it.”

“Guys will do anything for a pretty girl, I guess.”

“How do you think I’d been paying the bills before the world went kaput?”

“No details, please.”

“Your loss.”

They entered her cabin and Lara unclasped her gun belt and tossed it on the small bed, then went to a small fridge in the corner and took out a bottle of water. She walked over to her bed and sat down, opened the nightstand, and took out one of Zoe’s bottles. She shook out two of the painkillers and downed them with the water.

“Arm giving you trouble?” Carly asked.

“It’s manageable.”

“You sure?”

“It itches more than it hurts.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“The pills help.”

Carly caressed one side of her neck. “At least some dumb bitch didn’t shoot you in the neck.”

Lara smiled. “I was lucky. Gage could have done a lot more damage.”

“It’s funny,” Carly said.

“What’s that?”

“I think he actually thought we’d forget about all the shit he’d done, or was planning to do to the island.” Carly looked thoughtful while staring across the room at the window. “Funny the things people manage to convince themselves.”

“Danny will come back, Carly,” Lara said. “He’ll contact us when he gets the chance.”

“But…”

“But nothing.”

Carly narrowed her eyes at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“I told you everything.”

“No, you haven’t.” She didn’t take her eyes away. “Tell me, Lara. What did you learn out there that you’re not telling me now?”

Lara sighed. “Mercer.”

“What about him?”

“I told you his people are attacking the towns.”

Carly nodded.

“One of them was a place called T29,” Lara continued. “It’s between Hellion and Starch.”

“Hellion,” Carly said. “That’s where Danny and Gaby were the day before their last call-in. The place where they ran into some trouble.”

“Yeah.”

Carly paused, maybe processing the information, or maybe she already knew and was too afraid to know more.

“Tell me the rest,” her friend said anyway.

“There’s a chance the expedition might have run across T29 on their way to Starch. I don’t know. But it’s Danny…”

“Yeah, it’s Danny,” Carly said quietly.

“He’ll be fine, Carly.”

“I know,” the redhead said, smiling back at her. “Besides, he promised me he’d come back and he knows I’d kick his ass if he didn’t keep it.”

Lara gave her friend a pursed smile, wondering to herself how many times she had told herself that exact same thing about Will…

* * *

Her radio on the nightstand squawked sometime later. When she opened her eyes, it was still daylight and there were no signs of Carly, who had stayed behind for another hour to talk and who was still talking when the pills kicked in and Lara drifted off to sleep.

“Lara, you awake?” Blaine said through the radio.

She rolled over and snatched the radio, then pressed the transmit lever.

Is it Will? she wanted to say, but instead, the words that came out were, “Is it Danny?”

“No, sorry,” Blaine said.

Goddammit, Danny. First Will, now you. You goddamn Rangers.

“What’s going on?” she asked, sitting up on the bed. Her head was pounding and she made a mental note to talk to Zoe about switching meds to something less…torturous.

“We need you on the bridge.”

“Are we there already?”

“We’re not even close. There’s something else.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, and climbed out of bed, grimacing when she accidentally reached down to push up with her left arm without thinking.

She grabbed her gun belt and clasped it into place. With the radio in hand, she headed out into the hallway. Turned right and walked the short distance to the bridge on the other end.

The door was open and Carly and Blaine were already inside, surrounded by sunlight. She was surprised to see that it was still afternoon, which meant she hadn’t slept more than a few hours at the most.

Carly looked over. “Hey, sleepyhead.”

“Sorry about dozing off on you.”

“Eh, I liked talking to myself better anyway.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“Four hours, give or take.”

“You should have woken me sooner.”

“No point, until now.”

She looked out the front windshield, expecting to see something that didn’t belong, but there was just the familiar blue waters staring back at her. “What am I looking at?”

“Someone wants you,” Carly said, and pressed one of the many buttons along the curved boat console.

Lara didn’t know what the button did until she heard a young woman’s voice slowly rising through the bridge’s speakers. It was slightly distorted—until Carly pressed something else and the voice cleared up.

“The scanner picked it up about thirty minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Normally I wouldn’t bother with the radio, but it can get pretty lonely up here by myself.”

Lara focused on the voice. “Is she live?”

“Oh yeah,” Carly said. “Poor girl’s been saying the same thing over and over since I showed up.”

Carly pressed the same button a few more times and the volume increased, the voice becoming clearer:

“…goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”

There was a brief pause, then the woman (girl) continued, this time from the beginning:

“This message goes out to Lara. If you’re hearing this, it’s urgent you make contact. We desperately need your help.”

Carly turned down the volume until Lara could barely hear the voice. Not that she really needed to. The girl was simply reading the same three sentences over and over.

“How do you know I’m the ‘Lara’ she’s looking for?” Lara asked.

Carly rolled her eyes. “Is there more than one Lara spreading the news on the radio that no one told me about? It’s you, girl.”

“She’s been repeating the same message for thirty minutes?”

“She took a break about ten minutes ago,” Blaine said. “Then she changed channel and repeated it. I wonder where she got that idea.”

“Yeah, we’re trailblazers, all right,” Carly said. “All the young’uns are following in our footsteps.” Carly smiled at her. “You’re mucho popular these days, kiddo. The first celebrity in the apocalypse, if you will. First, some guy gets Keo to call us down here just for a meet and greet, now there are people actually calling you on the radio. I’m kinda jealous.”

“They’re pretty smart,” Blaine said. “Whoever the ‘we’ is with her. They know we’re still broadcasting, so we’re likely to also be monitoring the frequencies.”

“Good for her,” Carly said, “but we’re not going to answer, are we?”

“She says they need our help. Your help, Lara. Desperately, apparently. Do we just ignore that?”

“Yes,” Carly said. She looked at Blaine, then at Lara. “Guys, come on. Did we forget what happened with Song Island? What that Karen bitch almost did to us? We don’t answer strange calls over the radio.”

“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t know about Beecher,” Blaine said. “Or that kid in Japan. Those guys in New York, Alaska…on and on.”

“But none of those people wanted something from us.” She focused on Lara. “This is a very bad idea. You have to see that.”

“She’s got a point,” Lara said.

Blaine nodded. “I guess.”

“Don’t guess, know,” Carly said. “We need to go back to Port Arthur. We should never have left in the first place, but I’ll accept it, because it’s Keo and God knows we owe K-pop like crazy. But we have to go back now. Tell me we’re going to ignore this and go back for Danny and Gaby. That’s what Will would do. You know that, Lara. He’d take care of his own first.”

Lara pursed her lips into a half-smile. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who was asking herself What would Will do? a lot these days.

“Lara?” Carly said.

“We keep going to Port Arthur, as planned,” Lara said. “We’ll pick up Danny and Gaby, refuel and resupply, and then we head south to the Bengal Islands.”

“Thank you,” Carly said.

“I should have done it a month ago. I’m sorry I waited so long.”

“Hey, better late than never.” Carly sighed with relief and hugged her (maybe a bit too tightly, and Lara winced a bit from a jolt of pain along her left arm), and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she whispered back.

Despite the radio’s lowered volume, Lara could still hear the girl’s voice coming through the bridge’s speakers, talking to her, asking her to make contact, desperately seeking her help. She did her best to shut it out and concentrated on the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico outside the window instead.

Somewhere out there was Danny, Gaby, and Nate, waiting for her to come pick them up, hoping they hadn’t been abandoned. She was the one who had sent them out there, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave them behind.

Not again. Not again…

20

Gaby

The girl’s name was Taylor, and she was fifteen. Her sister, Alice, was eleven and reminded Gaby of Elise and Vera, but unlike those two, Alice was malnourished and her clothes hung off her body. Her big sister didn’t look any more well-fed, but that could have just been the large man’s overalls and bad haircut. Which was to say, she probably cut her own hair and Alice’s in the year since the end of the world.

If Alice hadn’t come out of the truck, Gaby was pretty sure she, Danny, and Nate would have been on the road to Starch by now. Or maybe they would have even reached the town already. It was only sixty miles to the west of them, after all. Though with the collaborators likely on high alert after yesterday, maybe she was being too generous.

Instead, they were somewhere in the woods surrounding Larkin, waiting in the living room of a small cottage as Taylor carried a pile of rifles out from a back room while Alice dragged a raggedy backpack along the wooden floor after her.

“Someone must have been real nice, because I think Christmas just came early,” Danny said.

“You’d be surprised what you can find out there, just sitting around,” Taylor said. “You can take whatever you want. I don’t even know how to use most of them, and I’m a little scared to even try.”

She laid the weapons down on the heavily chipped wooden kitchen counter, and Gaby, Nate, and Danny walked over and formed a semicircle around it.

“That thing’s bigger than you,” Danny said to Alice.

The girl grunted back at him. Danny grinned and took the backpack from her and opened it, then pulled out unopened boxes of bullets and three handguns—two automatics, including a Glock, and a six-shot revolver.

“God bless Texas,” Danny said, and laid the handguns down next to the pile. “Dig in, kids.”

“You don’t want to keep any of these?” Nate asked Taylor.

The teenager shook her head. “I already have the hunting rifle.”

“She won’t let me have one,” Alice frowned.

“You’re too young.”

“Not anymore.”

Taylor rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about this again.”

The younger sibling had a point, Gaby thought. They had all grown up fast these days. You had to, or you didn’t at all.

“Where’d you find them?” Nate asked.

“Mostly around town,” Taylor said. “We haven’t really strayed too far from Larkin. There are fish in the pond out back, so we’ve been able to keep going with the supplies we took from homes and stores nearby. There’s just the two of us, and we don’t really need a lot.”

“Last night must have been scary,” Gaby said.

Taylor nodded. “It was like listening to World War III out there. Every time those planes went by, it sounded like they were right on top of us.”

“They were flying low,” Danny said. “Warthogs do their best work at close range.”

“It helped that the collaborators didn’t show up with anti-aircraft guns,” Nate added. “I guess they didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“They do now. Which means we have to be more careful on the roads. They’re going to be shooting first and fuck the questions.” He glanced quickly at Alice. “I mean, forget the questions.”

Alice smiled back. “I’ve heard worse.”

“I bet you have.”

“Come on,” Taylor said, and the girls drifted over to the other side of the kitchen, where Taylor opened a can of pineapple for the younger girl using a manual can opener. Alice’s mouth was already watering before Taylor even got the lid all the way off.

In the year since The Purge, Gaby could see that the two sisters had made a decent life for themselves out here. The cottage itself was located in a wooded area with a small pond behind them. The girls had no idea how to fish twelve months ago, but Taylor had learned pretty fast.

“There’s no refrigeration, so we pretty much cook and eat them the same day after I catch them,” Taylor had explained.

Adapt or perish, right, Lara?

The cottage had faded yellow walls and dirt-covered floors, with two bedrooms in the back and a shack for supplies outside. It was out of the way, with no actual roads leading to its front doors, which was how the sisters had managed to avoid detection from both humans and ghouls. She hadn’t asked if this was their place or if they had just stumbled across it; the fact was, those things just didn’t matter anymore.

Gaby looked back at the weapons on the counter between her, Danny, and Nate. There were three hunting rifles, a pump-action shotgun, and two AR-15s in the pile. Danny snatched up one of the rifles—it was tanned and looked well-worn, with chips along the sides and stock. He pulled out the magazine, found it empty, and began reloading it with rounds from one of the ammo boxes.

Nate picked up the other rifle and offered it to her across the counter.

“And it’s not even my birthday,” she smiled at him.

“Just remember that when I actually forget your birthday,” Nate said.

“Charming.”

“Just trying to score bonus points for future screwups.”

“Oh, you said screwups,” Danny said. “I thought you said something else.”

“Not in front of the kids,” Gaby smirked.

The rifle was matte black, and unlike the one Danny was turning over in his hands, hers looked almost new. It had a collapsible stock, which she thought was a nice touch. Both had simple red dot sights unlike the hunting rifles, which were equipped with very long scopes. They were good for long-distance shooting, but she’d learned to appreciate the semi-automatic capabilities of an AR. The ability to send a lot of rounds downrange in a short amount of time, she’d found, couldn’t be beat in a gunfight.

Gaby looked over at Taylor. “You’ve never used any of these?”

The girl shook her head. “Those things are too complicated. The one I have is easier. Just pull that thingie back and shoot.”

Gaby smiled. Was she ever that innocent when it came to weapons?

“So there wasn’t anything there?” Taylor asked. “Back at the airfield?”

“Just a lot of rubble,” Gaby said. “What were you hoping to find?”

“Anything useful. I thought about waiting a couple of days, but I guess I was too curious about last night.”

“You know what they say,” Danny said, “curiosity killed the kid in the cottage.”

“Now you tell me,” Taylor said.

Gaby liked the girl. She would have been pretty if she let her hair grow out; or, at least, stopped cutting it herself. The fact that Taylor had managed to keep her little sister alive out here all by herself made her even more impressive.

“We’ll be heading back this way when we’re done with our thing,” Gaby said. “If you want, we can pick you two up, take you back to the Trident with us.”

“You mean, and live on a boat?” Taylor said doubtfully.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact, it’s pretty great.”

“It’d be cool to live on the ocean,” Alice said wistfully between mouthfuls of pineapple.

Gaby’s mouth watered just looking at the syrup dripping down the girl’s chin. When was the last time she had some of that? It was probably before that mess at Mercy Hospital, back in Louisiana. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

“I’m just giving you the option,” she said to Taylor. “It’s up to you, but you don’t have to decide now.”

Taylor nodded. “We’ll think about it. When will you guys be back?”

Gaby glanced at Danny.

He shrugged. “As early as a day, as late as a week.”

“Basically, whenever,” Nate said.

“What I said.”

“Not really.”

“Close enough.”

“We don’t know for sure,” Gaby said, seeing the confusion on Taylor’s face. “But it shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“Is it safer out there?” Taylor asked.

“On the Trident? Yes. Out there, on the ocean, you don’t have worry about people—or other things—showing up at your front door.”

“Or bad men on the road trying to steal your ride,” Danny added.

“And that, too.”

Taylor didn’t say anything. Gaby could see the indecision on her face, that struggle between burgeoning hope and trying to stamp it down because hope was a hard thing to embrace these days. She’d learned that the hard way, too. There was a time when she hoped Will would finally contact them, to tell Lara that he was okay, and come back.

I should have known better. Even Will can’t survive out here by himself.

“When you come back, we’ll know for sure,” Taylor said. She sounded certain; either that, or she was putting on a very good front.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a ham radio, would you, kid?” Danny asked her.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s definitely not a radio made out of ham.”

“Is there a Radio Shack or electronic store in town?” Nate asked. “They might carry one.”

“I don’t really remember,” Taylor said. “There’s a couple of strip malls, but I don’t remember a place that sells just radios.”

“Should we look anyway?” Gaby asked Danny. “We need to let the Trident know we’re still alive. They must be crazy with worry right now.”

Danny shook his head. “Starch is sixty miles from here. We can get there in a few hours even using just the smaller roads. All we have to do is stay out of trouble until then.”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Nate said.

“Indeed it is, Nate-ometer. The facility will have everything we need. Best part: no poking around Hicksville, USA, for them.” He slung the AR-15 and looked back at Taylor. “This everything, kid?”

“That’s all I found,” Taylor said. “What, you want more?”

“Normally this would be enough, but after what we’ve seen? Hells yeah. I’ll take whatever else you got.”

“That’s it, sorry.”

“No grenades?”

“Grenades? Um, no.”

“Hey, couldn’t hurt to ask.” Danny started to go, but stopped and turned back to the counter and picked up the pump-action shotgun. “Just in case…”

* * *

With only sixty miles between them and Starch, a mostly serviceable ride, and now armed, they felt good enough about their situation that they decided to eat first before taking off. They didn’t want to dig further into the sisters’ stash, so Danny and Nate spent a few minutes outside at the pond with a pair of fishing poles, catching a dozen fish in less than ten minutes. A year’s worth of spawning, with only the two girls to cut into the inventory, meant fish were attacking the plastic lures as soon as they hit the water.

Like shooting fish in a barrel, she thought.

They were in the beat-up truck and back on the road by midday, with more than five hours left to reach Harold Campbell’s facility. More than enough time, unless they encountered obstacles along the road, which after yesterday was a very real possibility. It wasn’t just collaborators they had to worry about, though; it was Mercer’s men, too. Texas had become impossibly deadlier since the last time they set foot on it, something she didn’t think she would ever say a year ago.

We should have stayed on the Trident. I wonder if Lara is saying the same thing to herself right now?

“Tough kids,” Nate was saying from the backseat. “Did we ever ask them if that was their place?”

“No,” Gaby said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Nate was looking out the rear window, even though the cottage had long disappeared behind a wall of trees. Danny picked their way through the unpaved dirt trails, eventually locating a stretch of empty country road that, according to a sign, would take them away from Larkin and westward. The idea was to avoid the main highways completely.

As they headed back toward civilization, Gaby found herself listening for the telltale signs of approaching warplanes from above.

“Warthogs do their best work at close range,” Danny had said.

She had seen that for herself yesterday, and just the memory of it made her shiver unwittingly. She hoped the men in the truck with her hadn’t noticed, and when neither one of them said anything—especially Nate behind her—she guessed she was safe.

Nate had one of the bolt-action hunting rifles in his lap, the backpack with the extra ammo next to him, and they each had one of the handguns. She had the Glock in her front waistband (what she wouldn’t have given for a tactical gun belt at the moment), Nate liked the Smith & Wesson revolver, while Danny had chosen the Sig Sauer. She wasn’t going to complain about the extra weapon or the spare magazines, but the fact was, if they had to rely on them today, it meant her hope of a smooth sailing to Starch had been dashed

If the truck was visually unimpressive on the outside, it sounded worse inside. No wonder they had heard the vehicle coming back at the airport. The pickup made too much noise, and she swore the tires squeaked every time they found a pothole or went over something as minor as a hill of dirt, which given the countrified nature of the road, was often.

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, and neither did Nate or Danny. She didn’t know what was going through their minds at the moment, but she kept expecting uniformed men to come out of hiding in front of them, springing an ambush the way they had done to poor Taylor this morning. The only question was whether those men would be wearing tan or black uniforms. Either way, the thought made her grip the AR-15 just a little bit tighter, her right forefinger rubbing against the trigger.

After about half an hour of driving in silence, with nothing but the trees and woods for company and the wind whistling in their ears, Gaby finally said, “Are we going to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Danny said.

“Mercer.”

“What about him?”

“This war of his.”

“What about it?”

“They’re killing people, Danny. Civilians. If it was just the soldiers, I wouldn’t care. But they’re being indiscriminate.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Danny said.

“Do we just look the other way?” she asked.

“You’re assuming we can do something about it.”

“Can’t we?”

“The three of us? Not a chance in hell. Mercer’s got an army. We just saw a small part of it back there at the airfield. He’s got moving pieces all across the state. The man has been planning this for months now. Hell, he might have been cooking it up since the night everything went to shit, for all I know. A guy like that…” Danny shook his head. “It’s going to take more than just the three of us to stop him.”

He was right, and the worst part was, she’d known for a while now, but knowing and accepting weren’t the same thing. The idea of not doing anything at all made her shift in her seat.

“We have to worry about the Trident right now,” Danny continued. “And the people on it. Carly, Vera and Elise, the others. What happens in Texas isn’t our problem. Mercer’s right about one thing: The people in those towns made their choice.”

“They didn’t ask to be bombed from the air,” she said.

“No, they didn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that. We’re outgunned six ways to Sunday.” He sighed, his voice growing more somber, and for a moment she could almost imagine Will talking, and not Danny. “We’ll get what we came for, and then we’ll go home. We’ll swing by on our way and get the sisters, and we’ll call that a victory. As for everything else, let God sort them out. It’s time he earned his pay, anyway.”

* * *

Starch, Texas, was exactly how she had pictured it: a small town of a few thousand people (or it used to be, anyway) along a main highway, and no one would have realized it even existed if not for Lake Livingston somewhere behind it. That lake was why an eccentric millionaire had built an underground facility designed to withstand just about any calamity. To hear Lara tell it, the place had done exactly that, until one night when everything came undone.

After an hour of driving through barren streets, over railroad tracks, and down spur roads that never seemed to end, they finally hit the road to hell that would take them to the end of their journey—the reason they had come back to Texas in the first place.

She didn’t need to ask Danny what time it was; she could keep track of the sun by looking out her window. By her count, it was around 3:00. Soon, very soon, it would be dark again, but they had made good time and she was feeling buoyed by their progress.

Too bad the road to Harold Campbell’s facility was doing its damnedest to ruin her good mood. The massive walls of trees to the left and right of them didn’t help, either. They were so thick that Gaby couldn’t see past them, and they cast such an imposing shadow over everything she could almost believe they were driving through a tunnel instead of a country road.

The craters under them weren’t accidents of nature, but put there by Campbell to deter people from doing exactly what they were doing at the moment. After about ten minutes of struggling to hold onto her seat and not throwing up, she had to grudgingly admit that Campbell might have known what he was doing. After all, he had access to a helicopter and would never have had to use the road himself. She wasn’t so lucky.

If she thought there was a possibility Taylor’s truck might not survive the sixty-mile trip from Larkin to Starch, she was now almost certain it wouldn’t survive the three kilometer-long hike up this pothole-infested hell. Gaby swore she could hear pieces of the vehicle crunching and clanging off the undercarriage with every bump they hit.

“This is nuts!” she shouted.

“Which part of eccentric millionaire didn’t you understand?” Danny shouted back.

“Crazy assholes with money!” Nate shouted behind them.

“How much further”—she started to ask, when the road suddenly smoothed out and she could hear herself just fine again—“to go?”

“There. We’ve survived the Trip of Doom,” Danny said. “Which means the facility should be up ahead.”

“‘Should be’?”

“It’s definitely up ahead.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Nate said quietly from the backseat.

“Out the window, so you don’t get it on the upholstery,” Danny said. “This thing’s a classic, after all.”

“This thing’s a piece of junk,” Nate said.

“Same difference.”

She turned around in her seat and smiled at Nate. He returned it, looking boyish and handsome back there by himself, one hand holding his stomach and his Mohawk flopping too much to one side.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Good,” he said. “You?”

“Hanging in there.”

“I’m fine too, thanks for asking,” Danny said.

“You okay, Danny?” she asked.

“Great, thanks for asking,” he said.

She turned back around and picked her rifle up from the floor, then focused on the road ahead. “Almost there?”

“Almost there,” Danny said.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Almost almost there.”

Now that the road was even again and she wasn’t bouncing in her seat, it was easier to pay attention to the dancing shadows and overly chilly air around them. She wished she could see what was hiding in the woods to the left and right of the road, but it was just one continuous black wall. She thought she might have seen something moving inside—something fast—but Danny had picked up speed and they were past it before she could be sure.

“What’s wrong?” Nate said, leaning forward between the two front seats.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“I thought I saw something…”

“Where?”

“In the woods.”

He looked out his side window.

“Back down the road,” she said. Then, hoping it was at least convincing, “It was probably nothing.”

“Eyes forward, kids,” Danny said.

She looked out the front windshield as they came up to an opening—a wide field carved out of the woods. They passed what look like the remains of a front gate, with an old guard shack on Danny’s side. A wild jungle had grown since the last time anyone was here, and they had to stop the truck about twenty yards past the nonexistent gate.

Danny put the vehicle in park and leaned forward against the steering wheel. He had clearly seen something that disturbed him when he said, “Hunh.”

“What?” she said.

“Those weren’t here last time.”

She followed his gaze out the windshield and across the field.

They were impossible to miss: a small cluster of vehicles, all yellow, sitting in the open. One had a scooper-type arm, and she was pretty sure another one was some kind of bulldozer. Grass had grown around their heavy tires, a clear indication they had been brought here and abandoned a while ago.

“Construction equipment,” Nate said, leaning between the two front seats again. “Looks like diggers.”

“Diggers?” she said.

“For digging.”

“Of course,” she said, feeling stupid.

“Which begs the question: What were they digging out here?”

Danny reached for his rifle, said, “Eyes wide, ears open, and weapons hot at all times, got it?” and climbed out.

She and Nate followed his example on the other side of the truck, their rifles gripped tightly in front of them. The grass was taller than it had looked from inside their vehicle, and if they had kept going, they might have become stuck in another twenty to thirty yards.

“Danny?” she said across the warm hood at him.

He was peering at the construction equipment, as if he could see something she and Nate couldn’t. “Stay frosty,” he said, before starting forward. “Shoot anything that moves that isn’t us.”

Gaby exchanged a quick look with Nate, who shrugged.

She flicked the safety off her AR-15 and followed Danny into the weeds. Grass slapped at her legs, prompting her to think about what things might be lurking inside all the unseen parts of the field at the moment. Not ghouls, of course; it was still daylight—

She glanced up instinctively at the still-high sun. Still time.

But not a lot.

Danny had stopped in front of them and was looking down at something.

“Danny,” she said. “What is it?”

He shook his head but didn’t say anything. She walked over and looked down at what he had been staring at.

It was a big, gaping rectangular hole in the ground, surrounded by obliterated gray and black chunks of something that, once upon a time, had been big enough to cover the opening. Now, there were only piles of the object scattered about the grass, some as small as her fist and others as big (if not bigger) than a desk.

She had noticed the difference under her boots a few yards back, where the soft dirt ended and the hard, even concrete floor began. The construction around the “door” was still intact, but everything else—anything standing more than a few feet above the ground—had been demolished months ago, leaving behind divots and giant clawlike markings that could only have been put there by one of the construction vehicles.

“Oh man, this isn’t good, is it?” Nate said, as he stopped next to her and looked down.

Like the two of them, she was transfixed by the hole in the ground. It was massive and framed by gray concrete walls. Sunlight illuminated some of the stairs leading down, but not enough, and most of what was on the bottom was lost in a thick pool of darkness. She could see the shape of some kind of lightbulb just beyond the light, but there was no telling how long it had been out.

Then the darkness shifted and moved, and all three of them took a quick step back and lifted their weapons instinctively.

“Whoa,” Nate breathed next to her.

“Don’t sweat it; they’re more scared of you than you are of them,” Danny said.

“You think?”

“Absolutely not.”

Danny lowered his rifle and wrinkled his nose, as if he had an itch he couldn’t get to. Then he turned and walked away, stopping about ten yards later. He stomped down on something buried in the ground, producing a loud metallic clang!

“What is it?” Gaby asked.

“The titanium door that was supposed to be over that opening,” Danny said. “We were pretty sure it could withstand a nuke.” He looked in the direction of the construction equipment. “But why use a nuke when you could just pry it open with the right can openers.”

“Collaborators,” Nate said.

“Unless the ghouls have mastered driving a stick, then probably, yeah.”

“So we came all the way out here for nothing?” Nate asked, unable to hide his disappointment.

“It would appear so.” Danny sighed and let his rifle hang at his side. “I guess it was too much to hope the little bastards would leave the facility alone after we left. This’ll teach me to be optimistic.”

Gaby wasn’t entirely sure why she wasn’t more angry, or at least as visibly disappointed as Nate and Danny were. But she wasn’t. Maybe it was everything they had seen and been through since arriving back in Texas. The events of Hellion, T29, even Larkin. After all those things, coming here and finding Starch empty was…anti-climactic.

At least no one died here, unlike the 400 people in T29. Or the poor bastards in Hellion.

She walked over to Danny. “We should go. It’ll be dark soon.”

Danny nodded, then took a moment to look around at the clearing. “We cleaned out Starch pretty good when we were here. Spent a lot of time searching for silver in every nook and cranny.”

“Did you guys happen to stash some silver bullets in town?”

“Afraid not.”

“What about the facility?” Nate asked.

They looked back at him.

“What about it?” Danny said.

“Maybe if we can lure them out…”

Danny gave him an almost pitying look before grinning at Gaby, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it this time. “Captain Optimism, this guy,” Danny said. “Thinks we can lure them out into the open when there are probably a few thousand of them squeezed in there. This, with two hours until nightfall, and no way to close the door.”

“Guess not,” Nate said.

“Facility’s gone, along with everything inside it. We officially came all the way here for nothing. I’m sorry, kids. Maybe next time.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Gaby said. “We knew the risks when we volunteered.” She glanced at Nate, and he nodded and smiled back at her. “So the question is, what’s our next move?”

“It’s too late to go back to Larkin, so we’ll hole up in Starch,” Danny said. “I know Lara and Carly. Even without contact from us, they’ll wait at Port Arthur for as long as possible. They’re not going anywhere until someone shows them our dead bodies.”

“Ugh, not the best choice of words there,” Nate grunted.

“Sorry about that.”

“You’re certain of that?” she asked. “That they’ll wait for us?”

“Sure as Pauly Shore.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Damn kids,” Danny said, and started walking back to the truck. Under his breath, she heard him muttering, “Texas is really starting to piss me off.”

Gaby and Nate turned and followed him in silence. She took a moment to glance up at the sun just to assure herself it was still up there. Was it her imagination, or did the sky look darker since the last time she—

Something flickered in the corner of her eye, some kind of figure, and she stopped and looked toward the woods across the clearing.

She saw trees—a lot of trees.

“What is it?” Nate asked. He had kept walking a few steps before realizing she had stopped and turned back around.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said quietly, as if afraid someone might overhear her.

“You saw something?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Like back at the road?”

Yes, she thought, but said instead, “It’s this place. It’s spooky.”

Nate gave her a reassuring smile. “Trident or bust, right?”

She smiled back. Or tried to, anyway. “Trident or bust.”

They walked the rest of the way to the truck, where Danny was already waiting for them.

Something moved in the corner of her left eye, but Gaby ignored it.

There’s nothing out there, she told herself. It’s just your imagination.

Book Three

Of Monsters and Men

21

Keo

“Get the girl. Lose her. Go back for the girl.”

It wasn’t exactly the best plan in the world, but then things had a bad habit of going sideways these days. Surviving The Purge had been a crapshoot, but the year afterward had become one big blur of gunfights and near misses. He supposed when he really thought about it, riding back to Gillian, a woman who had already spurned him once (or was that twice now?), was about par for the course.

It wasn’t like anything else had worked out these last few months. He would have been perfectly happy to hop back onto the Trident and ride the waves to the Bengal Islands with Lara and the others. Carrie would be there, and of all the women on the yacht, she was always the best reason not to go look for Gillian. And there was also Bonnie…

He must have sighed out loud, because Jordan said, “That’s a pretty big sigh right there, mister.”

“Just thinking,” he said.

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah.”

Jordan was watching him while leaning against the front passenger door of the truck. After about ten minutes with a T-shirt between her and the bloody stains on the seat, she had gotten over being squeamish. At the moment, there was nothing but undeveloped land rushing by outside the open window behind her.

“What?” he said.

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” she said.

“You’re trying too hard.”

“You’re more than you let on.”

“Like I told Lara, I’m just a guy with a gun. It’s not that complicated.”

“I don’t believe that. Bonnie doesn’t believe it, either. We had a little talk back at the beach. Are you curious what she said?”

“No.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that.”

He sighed. “What did she say?”

“Sorry, private conversation.”

He flashed her an annoyed glance, but she just smiled back at him.

They drove on for a few more minutes in silence, the cool wind blasting against his face through the windowless driver-side door. December in Texas was so unlike anything he had experienced in other parts of the world, and he still hadn’t decided if he liked it or was disturbed by it. Maybe a little of both.

They had left Sunport behind a while ago, and there was just empty farmland around them now. A red barn popped up every now and then, along with fenced off property devoid of cows or other livestock. Texas State Highway 288 was a low-to-the-ground two-lane road that connected Sunport and Angleton, and they were on the northwest-bound lane with the southeast-bound thirty meters over to the left. Both long, gray stretches of pavement were barren, with no other vehicle within sight.

“How close are we to the turn-off?” he finally asked.

Jordan took out the same map he had liberated from Gregson’s tank and unfolded it in her lap, then traced the route with her forefinger. “We’re closing in on Angleton. About five more miles. From there, take State Highway 35. That should take us to Alvin, then I-45 after that.”

“You sure he’s going to be there?”

“I’m sure. The question is, will he welcome you back?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I think I made a pretty good first impression.”

She might have rolled her eyes when she said, “You tried to kill him.”

“I was sent to kill him, but I didn’t. Big difference.”

“Let’s hope he makes that distinction.”

“I’m sure he will. Question is, do you think Captain America will help us?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I think he will once I explain what’s happening out here. The Tobias I know wouldn’t be able to sit by while Mercer’s people are butchering civilians. It’s not how he’s wired.”

“What about the others? Would they come along, too?”

“I don’t know about the rest, but Reese will. He looks up to Tobias. There’s a good chance the rest will follow, too. The ones that can still fight, anyway. They were pretty banged up the last time we saw them.”

“So, at least two more guns,” Keo nodded. “Four against an army. A mobilized army on high alert, waiting for an impending attack.”

“Doesn’t sound quite as good when you say it out loud.”

“Are you kidding me? Those are the best odds I’ve had in months.”

She gave him an unconvinced glance.

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” he grinned back at her.

“I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

“Like a stroke,” he said, when he saw it a second later and thought, Oh, fuck me.

He didn’t hear it, but he imagined it was there somewhere outside the vehicle—the telltale swoosh!—as the sun glinted off the dull olive green of the rocket-propelled grenade as it flashed across the windshield, entering the periphery of his vision from the right and disappearing out of the left.

Keo didn’t have time—didn’t waste time—tracking the rocket’s trajectory as it missed the truck by a few feet and kept going. A civilian might have slammed on the brake in shock, but Keo wasn’t a civilian. He floored the gas pedal and the Ford F-150 lurched forward, gaining even more speed as it went.

“Keo!” Jordan shouted as her body was thrown back against her seat by the sudden acceleration.

“Hold on!” he shouted back.

He had both hands on the steering wheel to make sure the truck didn’t do anything he didn’t want it to. His eyes shot left then right, to the rearview mirror and forward, always moving, even as he willed the truck to go faster, faster, faster.

They had been moving at forty miles an hour before, but he was already up to sixty—

—seventy—

—ninety—

“Keo!” Jordan shouted again, clutching to the handhold over her door with one hand, the other gripping her M4 by the barrel.

“Ambush!” he shouted back. “Hold on!”

He zeroed in on the rearview mirror as a man-sized lump—no, two—stood up to the right of the highway, where they had been hiding among the sunburnt fields. They were wearing dark-colored uniforms.

Collaborators?

He expected pursuit at any moment—vehicles to burst out of the grass like some wild animal—but each time he stole a quick glance at the rearview mirror the road behind him remained empty, and even the two that had stood up were just looking after them—

A loud boom! shattered his eardrums, and a second later the steering wheel was fighting his control and the truck was, impossibly, starting to turn sideways. Then he went from looking at the gray stretch of pavement out the windshield to staring at the cloudless sky to seeing the sun-bleached grass twirling in front of his eyes.

They were flying. The Ford was flying through the air.

But not for long. They came back down to earth, and there was an earsplitting blast as the glass around him shattered, drowning out Jordan’s screams. The cacophony of natural and unnatural sounds was followed by the loud crunch! of metal as the car smashed, rolled, and smashed again into the abandoned farmland.

The engine was still turning when he opened his eyes, very aware of the seatbelt strap pinning him to his seat. He pushed past the thrum of pain and concentrated instead on the heavy tap-tap of footsteps in the background. Something wet streaked across his forehead and into his hair and drip-drip-dripped down to…the ceiling?

Combat boots appeared outside the shattered front windshield before he could unlatch himself from the seat belt and reach for his weapon. The legs were upside down for a reason. Oh, right, because he and the truck were overturned.

“Holy shit, they’re still alive,” someone said.

“Not for long,” a second voice said.

The familiar sting of cold metal pressing into the side of his temple was enough to make Keo forget about the pain. He couldn’t quite turn his head all the way around, so he couldn’t see who was crouching just outside the driver-side door.

“Close enough for ya, Tanner?” the first voice asked with a laugh.

“Just about,” the second man, Tanner, said, followed by the very clear click of a gun hammer being pulled back.

“Well, do it already, before she—”

A loud squawking noise cut him off, followed by a muffled female voice. “What’s the body count?”

“—too late,” the first voice finished.

“Sonofabitch,” Tanner said, and Keo felt the barrel depress slightly against his temple.

“Give me a sitrep,” the female voice said.

He heard another click as someone keyed a radio’s transmit lever. “They’re still alive,” the first man said.

“I’m on my way. Don’t do anything until then.”

“Tanner wants to—”

“I said, don’t do anything until I get there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said, though Keo detected obvious derision and wondered if he had transmitted that last part or said it to empty air. “You heard her; don’t pop them yet.”

“Fuck,” Tanner said.

Rough hands grabbed and pulled him out of the overturned Ford and deposited him on the ground on his back, allowing him a great view of the wide-open skies above. It was a very bright afternoon, the kind that would have looked perfect from the aft of the Trident.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.

“Look at that face,” the man named Tanner said. “Shit, man, looks like you’ve been through the wringer. Made you real pretty.”

“Girl looks pretty good, though,” the other one said.

“She still alive?”

“I think so. She’s moving. I’ll go check…”

Footsteps, fading.

Then Tanner’s voice again, somewhere in the background. “How’d you dodge that first rocket?”

Rocket? What— Oh. That rocket.

“You must be the luckiest sonofabitch I know,” Tanner said when Keo didn’t answer. “Harry never misses. That guy’s like a savant with an M72. Good thing Doug was a better shot, or you’d still be hauling ass down the road. Too bad for you, chum.”

An M72 LAW rocket launcher. Uncle Sam’s version of an anti-tank weapon that apparently was just as good against a moving truck going, what, ninety miles an hour? He tried to imagine what the F-150 must have looked like when it was hit. The round probably struck the back first, which accounted for the booming sound, before sending the Ford shooting forward and upward like a launching missile. He would have approved of the sight if he wasn’t the one inside the target at the time.

A new pair of footsteps approached before a familiar female voice (this time unmuffled) said, “He’s not wearing a uniform.”

The same woman who had ordered Tanner not to kill him through the radio. His savior. In the flesh, she had a just barely-there Hispanic accent.

“No, but that’s definitely one of our trucks,” Tanner said. “Goran and Paul took two of them out to track down that tank from yesterday.”

“Sunport?”

“Yeah.”

A brief moment of silence.

“We should finish them off,” Tanner said, slightly agitated. “Look at the blood inside. That’s not new. They killed Goran and Paul, and who knows how many, for their vehicle.”

The woman still didn’t say anything.

“We should—” Tanner pressed.

“No,” she cut him off.

“Why the fuck not?”

“If they came from Sunport, then they might know something about who’s launching these attacks,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were in the tank. My guess is it’s run out of fuel and they had to commandeer Goran and Paul’s truck. Right now, we need intel more than we need two more dead bodies. Go and bring the truck over.”

“I’m telling you, Marcy, this is the wrong move—”

“And I said, go and bring the goddamn truck over,” Marcy snapped.

I guess we know who wears the pants in this family, Keo thought, wishing he could see the woman’s face.

Footsteps leaving. Tanner, huffing and puffing as he went, probably.

Dumb bastard. Pushed around by a girl.

“You got a name?” the woman asked.

Was she talking to him?

The crimp in his neck had lessened, the throbbing pain starting to numb, and he was finally able to turn his head slightly to the left, just enough to see a woman with curly black hair staring down at him. She was in her thirties, wearing a black uniform with a patch of Texas over one shoulder. The name “Marcy” was stenciled across a name tag, and a pair of binoculars hung loosely off a long neck.

Collaborators. Just my luck.

Brown eyes peered back at him. “Name. You got one?”

“Keo,” he said.

“Keo,” she repeated. “What kind of name is that?”

“José was taken.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Funny, you don’t look Hispanic.”

“It’s my disguise.”

Pale lips curved into a smile, but there was no genuine trace of humor. “All right, funny guy. Let’s find out what you know. Then I’ll decide if I’ll do you a favor and kill you and your friend fast, or take my time.”

* * *

They didn’t have to carry him very far because the truck was parked nearby. He was put into the back, his ankles and arms zip tied, but at least they didn’t blindfold him, which allowed him to keep an eye on the amazingly bright sky. Of course, some of that great view was marred by a man in a black uniform manning a machine gun standing above him. The welding that connected the MG’s tripod to the cab looked rushed, which made him wonder if they had put the technical together only recently, possibly in response to Mercer’s attacks yesterday.

He turned his head until he could see Jordan’s unconscious body next to him. She was also bound, strays of short blonde hair matted to her forehead by small clumps of blood. She looked okay—or as okay as you could look after getting tossed off the road by a rocket strike, anyway.

The back of the truck closed with a bang!, and then they were back on the road.

The soldier manning the machine gun was alert, swiveling the weapon around as they moved. It looked like an older model squad automatic weapon, but even an aging piece was still dangerous when you could throw a few hundred rounds a minute downrange without having to reload.

Why was he so surprised the collaborators were all over the highway? Maybe he had expected them to remain around the towns to protect the inhabitants instead of spreading out into the countryside. How many other groups were out there between him and Gillian, waiting to ambush whoever was stupid enough (like us) to be driving out in the open?

Of course, he wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for Mercer. Hell, he’d probably be on the Trident right now, maybe even watching Bonnie and Carrie swimming in bikinis at the back of the anchored boat. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Coulda, woulda, but didn’ta, pal.

The soldier standing near his head shuffled his feet, the dried dirt caking his boots flaking off with every movement.

“Hey,” Keo said.

The man ignored him.

“Hey,” Keo said again.

The man looked down. He was wearing dark shades and Keo got a quick glimpse of himself in the reflective lens, lying on the truck bed. There was blood along the side of his face and in his hair, but he concluded that they looked worse than they actually were, since it certainly didn’t feel as if he was bleeding to death at the moment. Probably.

“What?” the man said.

“Where we going?”

“Base,” the man said, and returned his attention to the road.

“Angleton?”

“Angleton’s dead,” the man said. “Been dead for a year now.”

“So where’s base?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

Keo hadn’t been able to glimpse the man’s name tag, with the soldier’s back to him most of the entire time. “You got a name?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the man said.

Keo smiled. A man after his own heart. “I’m Keo.”

“Good for you. Now shut up.”

“Just trying to pass the time. Seen any tanks lately?”

That got the reaction Keo was looking for, and the soldier stared down at him for three very long seconds. “Keep it up. I got a shit-stained rag in my back pocket that’s looking for a mouth to call home.”

“Fair enough.” Keo glanced at Jordan instead. “Jordan.”

She didn’t move.

“Jordan,” he said again, louder this time.

She finally opened her eyes and grimaced up at the sun for a moment.

“Over here,” he said.

She turned her head slowly and blinked at him. There was a cut along her right temple, but it looked minor next to the contusion in the middle of her forehead. “This is not good,” she said, her words slightly slurred.

“Hey, we’ve been in worse situations. Remember Santa Marie Island? Or yesterday? Or all of this week?’

“I’m trying not to,” she frowned.

“How’s your head?”

“Like someone’s hitting me with a sledgehammer. Repeatedly.” Her eyes darted upward, toward the collaborator hovering over them. Then, after a moment, “Is there something sitting on my forehead?”

“Looks like you hit it on something during the crash.”

“I don’t know how that’s possible. That seat belt almost cut me in half.”

“We flipped.”

“We flipped?”

“The truck. It flipped.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

“They hit us with a LAW,” he said.

“Law?”

“Light Anti-Tank Weapon. I guess they came fully prepared to take out a tank. Can’t say I blame them.”

“Oh.”

“We’re lucky,” he said.

She frowned again. “One of these days we need to sit down and have a really long talk about your definition of lucky, Keo.”

* * *

They drove for another ten minutes or so before the vehicle abandoned the smooth, paved highway and turned right onto a dirt road. Dust enveloped the truck, making him cough. The machine gunner, well-prepared for this part of the trip, pulled a handkerchief that was wrapped around his neck over the lower half of his face. Keo could only close his mouth and try not to breathe in the swirling dust. Jordan did the same next to him, squinting her eyes like she was gagging.

The loud squeal of brakes as the truck, and the ones behind and in front of it, stopped. Doors squeaked open and heavy boots pounded the ground.

The soldier behind the machine gun pulled off his handkerchief and looked down at Keo. “Welcome to base.”

“I call first dibs on the Jacuzzi,” Keo said.

The man grinned, but said nothing. He stepped over Keo, and the truck dipped slightly before rising again as he leaped down the back without bothering with the tailgate.

Keo turned his head and found Jordan looking back at him.

“Another opportunity for that golden tongue of yours to get us out of trouble,” she said. “Start wagging.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t let me down.”

“When have I ever?”

She sighed. “God, you’re going to get us both killed.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

* * *

But they didn’t give him a chance to talk his way out of it. Instead, a pair of armed men led Jordan and Keo from the truck and across the large front yard of a farmhouse. They were surrounded by technicals, and armed men stood guard on the rooftops of a two-story white house on one side and the bright red barn in front of them. The highway was somewhere to his right, but Keo couldn’t spy even a tiny glimpse of it at the moment.

The farm was surrounded by vast fields of sun-bleached land, and if something had been growing out there once upon a time, they were long dead, replaced by empty stretches of brown earth. He could probably scream all day and no one would hear, or care, if they heard.

The zip ties around their legs had been removed so they could walk, but the ones around their wrists remained in place. Not that Keo had any intentions of making a run for it. There were too many men in black uniforms with guns, and the ones on top of the barn were watching them like hawks. There were no signs of Marcy, the obvious leader of the pack, and the men walking them didn’t seem interested in conversation.

Keo spotted a dozen vehicles, including the three that had returned from the ambush, before they were escorted through the barn’s open doors and his entire universe suddenly boiled down to rotting wood and the aroma of stale feed and hay, overlapped with old urine and manure stains.

Jordan made a face. “Jesus…”

“Never been inside a barn before?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“Once or twice.”

“Do they all smell like this?”

“This one’s special. A year’s worth of abandonment.”

“I feel so privileged.”

There was no one inside the barn but them, which he guessed made sense; who wanted to spend all their time in here, with the smells? Their escorts led them to their destination: a metal cage at the back. It looked like some kind of kennel, about ten feet high and just as wide.

One of the men used a key on the cage’s padlock, then pulled the door open. “Inside.”

Keo and Jordan stepped through, crunching year-old hay (and other things he’d rather not think too much about) as they did so. The door clanged shut and the collaborator slipped the lock back through the latch, snapped it closed, then pocketed the key.

“Hands,” the man said.

Keo squeezed his bound hands through the bars, and the man took out a pair of pliers and snipped the restraints. He did the same to Jordan’s zip ties.

“We could use some medical attention too,” Keo said, rubbing at his wrists.

“Tough nuts,” the man said.

“Maybe later, but just the medical attention for now.”

The man grunted. “If it was up to me, I’d keep the both of you hog-tied and rolling around in there.” Then he turned and walked off.

Keo leaned against the cage, feeling like a prisoner in a bad movie, and watched his guards leave. They didn’t go far, though, and stood guard in front of the open barn doors underneath the bright sun. Well, it was bright for now, but it wasn’t going to last forever, which was the problem.

“I thought you were going to talk us out of this?” Jordan said.

“I didn’t exactly get an opportunity.”

“Excuses.”

“Maybe when Marcy shows up…”

“Who’s Marcy?”

“The one running the show.”

“When did you two become buddies?”

“While you were unconscious.”

“Figures,” Jordan said. “I close my eyes for one moment, and you’re already chatting up a new girl.”

Sunlight streamed in around them, through the holes and boards that made up the barn’s walls, and Keo’s eyes were drawn to the ceiling, where he could hear the slight creak each time one of the two collaborators up there moved around, which was about once every thirty seconds or so.

Nervous in the service, boys?

He focused on the bars, then gripped them and tried pulling. They didn’t budge, of course, especially with one end buried in concrete. The individual metal rods themselves were too close together to slide through and he could just barely get his entire arm out, never mind the rest of him.

“What is this thing?” Jordan asked, pulling on the bars on another side of the cage.

“Probably a kennel for wild animals,” Keo said. “Or two innocent travelers, in this case.”

“Innocent, huh?”

“Innocent-ish.” He glanced at the sentries above them again. “Looks like they’re on high alert.”

“Mercer.”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen nine technicals in the same place before. Combine that with the LAWs, and it looks like we just stumbled into the middle of a full-fledged war. What they have going on out here with Mercer’s people is going to make what you and Tobias had to deal with back at T18 look like child’s play.”

“Wow, why is it every time you open your mouth, I feel less and less like we’re going to survive this?”

“Sorry.”

Jordan leaned against the bars next to him and tried to get a better look at the open doors to their left. “How’s your leg?”

“Still attached.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s fine.”

“Is that you being a tough guy?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, tough guy, so what do we do now?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“They kept us alive to find out what we know. Marcy’s deduced that we’re a part of Gregson’s tank crew, trying to go incognito.”

“‘Deduced’?” Jordan said with a wry smile.

“She figured,” he shrugged.

“So, what do we know?”

“Hopefully enough to convince them to keep us alive, at least long enough to make our play.”

“Which would be?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That doesn’t sound very reassuring.” She walked to the back of the cage and sat down on a pile of old hay. “I should have taken Lara’s offer. The Trident’s looking pretty good right about now.”

He smiled to himself. How many times had he said that in the last few weeks?

“I don’t want to say I told you so,” he said, “but I told you so.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She was suddenly very quiet, and Keo looked back at her. “Jordan…”

“What?” she said.

“Jordan,” he said again.

She looked up and stared back at him. “What, Keo?”

“We’ll be okay.”

“Bullshit.”

“I promise.”

She didn’t say anything, and he wasn’t sure if she believed him. Hell, he wasn’t certain if he believed him.

“Okay,” she finally said, and leaned back against the bars and closed her eyes.

He turned back around and glanced toward the open barn doors, wondering how exactly he was going to make good on that promise.

22

Gaby

Didn’t we just do this?

Nate sat across from her in the pitch darkness, Danny’s still form to her right. The ex-Army Ranger was asleep and snoring lightly, his head tilted to one side, the carbine he had gotten from Taylor’s stash lying across his lap. Nate was wide awake and looking back at her. Or she thought he was, anyway. It was hard to tell, because she couldn’t quite make out the blue of his eyes despite there only being five feet or so of open space between them.

It wasn’t fear that moved through her at the moment. Or, at least, not the familiar paralyzing effects that usually accompanied the onset of terror. She could breathe just fine, clench and unclench her fingers against her rifle without difficulty, and she had no problems feeling the slight vibrations that ran through the rotting wooden floor underneath the stained carpet as they moved around below her.

Tap-tap-tap.

Nate had heard it too, because his outline went suddenly rigid.

Tap-tap-tap.

They were traveling across the same places she, Nate, and Danny had less than an hour ago. There was no mistaking the patter of their bare feet moving over dirt-stained slate tiles, the clicks and clacks as they randomly bumped into items hanging off shelves or that had toppled in the year since customers stopped coming.

She slid one hand along the length of her AR-15 and slipped her forefinger into the trigger guard. The weapon felt overly bulky, but she knew that was only because she wasn’t used to it yet.

There wasn’t a lot of space in the attic, and most of it was already taken up with crates of plumbing fixtures, empty water cooler bottles, and unopened boxes of cheap plastic Christmas trees. The only thing they had found to be any use when they had searched it earlier, back when there was still enough light to see with, were two stacks of duct tape. And you could never have too much duct tape—

Concentrate!

The creatures were smart, but they could be fooled. Which was why they had parked Taylor’s truck six buildings down the street, then walked to the hardware store and climbed up to its attic. She would never have known the room existed if Danny hadn’t remembered it from all those months ago when he had raided the place for supplies with Will.

The bang! of the store’s front glass door slamming, followed by silence.

Five seconds became ten…then twenty…but she didn’t let herself relax until a full minute had gone by without the familiar tap-tap-tap coming from directly below her.

Close one. Real close one.

The sound of rustling clothes as Nate got up and slipped from one side of the attic to the other before sitting down next to her on her left.

“Sounds like we’re in the clear,” he whispered.

“Sounds like it,” she nodded back.

“Tired?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Just a little bit.” He leaned around her to look at Danny. “Is he really asleep?”

She nodded. “Like a rock.”

“A snoring rock.”

She managed a smile.

“You should go to sleep, too,” he said. “I’ll stay up, and you can relieve me around midnight.”

She glanced over at Danny, still snoring lightly to her right. He looked amazingly at peace, as if he were back on the Trident and not trapped in Starch waiting for sunlight as ghouls flooded the streets and buildings around them.

“Wake me up at midnight,” she said.

He nodded.

“I mean it,” she said. “Don’t pull any of that chivalrous crap on me.”

“Midnight. Got it.”

“Nate…”

“Hey, I want to get some sleep, too, okay?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted of sweat and dirt, but somehow, still sweet at the same time.

When she pulled back, he was smiling at her.

“What?” she said.

“I wish we were back on the Trident...”

She rolled her eyes. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later, lover boy.”

“Have you talked to Lara? About getting us our own cabin?”

“We’re not the only two people on the yacht, Nate. Everyone has to share.”

“There’s that room behind the engine…”

“The one we’re holding Gage in?”

“It’s about time we throw that guy into the ocean anyway.” She must have been unable to hide her surprise, because he added, “Being out here, with all that’s going on, it’s given me a new perspective.”

“I’ll talk to Lara.”

“Good. Now, go to sleep. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to think about all those other sexy times while you’re doing that.”

“You have my permission,” she smiled, and laid her rifle across her lap, before leaning against Nate’s shoulder.

For whatever reason, the steady rise and fall of his heartbeat to her left and Danny’s impossibly calm breathing to her right lulled her into a strange sense of serenity. Her bones ached and her muscles were sore, and she didn’t realize just how emotionally and physically draining the last few days had been until she closed her eyes and didn’t want to open them again.

* * *

“Gaby.”

She was asleep, but also awake at the same time. Like floating in a bathtub filled with warm milk, bubbles caressing the bottom of her chin. Soothing and calming, but at the same time dangerous, with the threat of drowning hovering over her head.

“Wake up.”

There was something familiar about the voice, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Like a faded echo, tempting her closer to the surface.

“Gaby.”

She opened her eyes to darkness and Nate’s outline in front of her. He was crouched on one knee, his arm extended forward and shaking her awake.

“What—” she started to say (Too loud!), when Nate’s hand clasped over her mouth.

His other hand was already gripping his rifle and he lifted it now, pointing it across his body at the attic door. She had to look past Danny, still snoring quietly next to her, his head lolled to one side. He looked as if he might fall down at any second, but somehow remained upright despite the odds.

She didn’t dare move a single muscle as she listened while staring at the long rectangular-shaped trapdoor. Maybe she was still groggy and her senses weren’t up to full speed yet, but she couldn’t hear anything.

She glanced back at Nate for confirmation. He must have read the doubt on her face, because he gave her a slight nod.

“Are you sure?” she mouthed.

“Yes,” he mouthed back. “Downstairs.”

She reached down and picked up her AR-15 with one hand and pushed Danny with the other. His eyes snapped open almost as soon as she touched him, and they darted in the direction of the attic door before swiveling over to her.

“They found us,” she mouthed.

His lips moved as he began to mouth something back, but he hadn’t managed to form a single soundless word yet when there was a crash! from below, like a gunshot against the deathly silent night, but not quite as thunderous.

Danny snatched up his carbine and turned toward the door while Nate took up position in front of it with his bolt-action rifle. Gaby crab-walked backward, keeping as quiet as possible even though every step sounded like mini-explosions to her ears. She had always been thin, but the end of the world had excised any fat she might have held onto from high school. Despite that, she was convinced she was moving with all the grace of a bloated whale as the three of them spread out to give each other as much room as possible in the already cramped attic space.

She didn’t stop backing up until she bumped into the boxes of Christmas trees, thankful there were no decorations inside to jingle or clink on contact. She positioned the rifle in front of her, and out of pure habit reached down with a finger to make sure the fire selector wasn’t stuck on safe.

Danny glanced over his shoulder and flashed her a wry smile. She saw it easily in the semidarkness, so maybe her eyes had finally adjusted to the conditions after all.

She nodded back at him, as if to say, “I’m fine,” but of course he knew better.

Danny returned her nod anyway before turning back to the door. “Hey, Nate Archibald,” he whispered.

Nate looked over, and matching his pitch, “What?”

“Switch places.”

“Why?”

Danny held up his rifle. “I got more firepower.”

“Oh.”

Nate scooted back while Danny went forward to take his place. They were incredibly quiet for two people moving around in heavy combat boots while slightly hunched over. Danny was settling in front of the door when he froze in place.

Shit, she thought, when the very loud clump-clump of heavy boots moving around in the store below reached them clear as day. If the creatures hadn’t been able to conceal their presence while moving on bare feet, there was no chance at all whoever was down there could while stomping around in boots.

Voices drifted through the floorboards, but they were muffled for some reason, and she could barely make out the words. She did know with absolute certainty there was more than one person moving around (very loudly) below them. It could have been collaborators or some of Mercer’s people, though she guessed it was more likely the former. Only collaborators would so nonchalantly walk around at night these days.

Danny had moved again while she wasn’t paying attention and was now crouched on the far side of the attic door. He laid his rifle down and slowly, very slowly, flattened himself against the floor, pressing his ear against the dirty carpeting.

The voices from below were getting louder—but not necessarily clearer—as they drew closer. She wondered what Danny was hearing at the moment. Maybe he could actually discern what the men down there were saying.

Cla-ching!

She recognized the sound without having to think about it, because she had spent an entire summer behind one of them. That was a cash register opening.

“Dude, really?” someone said below them. It was a man’s slightly high-pitched voice and it was very clear that time. “What exactly is your dumb ass gonna do with all that cash?”

“I always wanted a new car,” someone else said, chuckling. “I should have enough to buy the whole thing cash on the barrelhead by the end of the night.”

“Leave that shit alone,” a third voice snapped. Another male voice, this one filled with authority. For a moment she thought it might have been Mason (Nate’s right; we should have dealt with that prick when we had the chance), but no, this voice was much deeper.

“I’m just fucking around,” the second voice said.

“Do it on your own time,” the leader said. “Clear the store. We’re running out of night.”

“We’re never going to run out of night, man,” the first man said. “Always gonna be another one tomorrow, and the day after that, and day after that…”

“No, but I’m running out of patience, so get the fuck back on the clock. This ain’t no fucking vacation. You forgot about what happened yesterday?”

Gaby recalled the layout of the store when they were moving through it earlier, doing their very best not to touch anything. They’d even left the door unlocked and the windows uncovered, because the creatures knew if you moved something. She didn’t know how, but somehow they just knew.

Dead, not stupid, right, Will?

The store had a simple floor plan, with the front door opening onto four aisles of products. The cash register was at the very end, behind a counter, and the attic entrance, also behind the counter, was five feet from the register. She guessed that was so only employees could access it. The upstairs room was as long as the employee area below, and they were safe up here as long as no one spotted the outline of the door against the ceiling, even though Danny had made sure to bring up the pull rope.

She listened to the clump-clump of boots moving around below them, then the loud crash of a door being kicked in. That would be the bathroom door in a hallway to their left. More voices, once again garbled by distance and…something else.

Nate, in front of her, hadn’t moved, and neither had Danny across the room. The ex-Ranger still had his ear pressed into the carpeting, doing a very good job of ignoring the smell and filth that clung to every fiber of the rug. She hadn’t noticed it before, but it was cold enough inside the attic that she could see mists forming in front of her lips as she breathed in and out, in and out.

More garbled voices, mingling with the clump-clump of footsteps as the men below them started to drift into the background. Moving away, possibly toward the front door, but definitely away from them.

That’s right, go. There’s nothing here. Just keep going. Search the next building.

Keep going…

As if reading her mind, Nate glanced over his shoulder and smiled. The blue of his eyes was like a beacon drawing her in and calming her nerves. She guessed that he knew it, too, and was doing this for her benefit.

She returned his smile and thought about his request to get them their own cabin on the Trident. It was something she’d been thinking about too, especially since spending time with him meant sneaking around when everyone else was occupied elsewhere. But if Lara finally dealt with Gage, then that would open up an extra room below deck. She could even learn to live with all the engine noise.

“Almost home free,” Nate mouthed to her now, except he was only halfway through “free” when there was a bang!, and the floorboard an inch from his body splintered and a bullet zipped through and punched a hole into the ceiling above him.

A small sliver of moonlight spilled through the hole instantaneously, highlighting a part of Nate’s suddenly pale face as he scrambled away from the spot even as the pop-pop-pop! of someone letting loose with a three-round burst from below shattered the silence.

“Fuck!” Nate shouted, launching himself away from the exploding floor with wild abandon. Splintered wood flooded the attic as he hugged the wall, pieces of shredded carpeting billowing around him like insects.

The first shooter hadn’t even stopped firing when someone else joined in. The second shooter strafed the ceiling, clearly trying to cover as much ground as possible, maybe somehow even tracking Nate’s footsteps. God knew Nate wasn’t exactly being quiet about his movements as he dodged the chasing bullets.

“Shit!” Nate shouted again.

Gaby scooted slightly forward, took aim with her rifle, and fired into the floor. She grouped her shots around the visible bullet holes in the carpeting, hoping to hit whoever was down there even as they continued firing up at them. She pulled the trigger again and again, the hammering of her gunshots like thunderbolts in the closed confines, each empty brass casing flickering and disappearing into the jungle of carpet strands. The crush of each discharge boomed inside her ears, but after a while they became little more than a buzzing noise in the background.

She was still shooting, spacing her shots across the floorboards, when there was a sudden flood of cold air. She looked up just in time to see the attic door swinging up, then a figure lunging toward the opening.

Danny!

He was there one second and gone the next, disappearing through the rectangular slot before she could even form his name in her head, never mind actually calling it out loud.

Danny’s disappearance was followed by a single pop! from below, then two more shots—pop! pop!—coming in such quick succession that all three rounds had to have been fired in the space of less than two seconds.

Then…nothing, except for her own ragged breathing to fill the silence. She kept waiting for more shooting, noises—anything.

Nate had pushed off the wall and was trying to peer through the dozen or so holes that the shooters below had created and she had added to. She couldn’t tell if he could make out anything despite the streams of moonlight pouring through from the bullet holes below and above them.

“Anything?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “Can’t see shit.”

“Danny’s down there.”

“I know.”

Two more quick shots, followed by the very obvious clatter of a rifle skidding against the tiled floor below.

Danny!

Gaby scooted forward and spent a second trying to look through the bullet holes in the floor the same way Nate had done earlier, but the carpeting was too thick and they still covered up too much for her to spy anything on the other side.

When she looked up, Nate was already at the door looking down. He glanced over, saw the question on her face, and shook his head. “It’s too dark,” he whispered.

She hurried over to him, no longer caring about making too much noise. At this point, everyone (everything) who was in the area already knew where they were. She looked down the opening, realizing that Danny had never unfurled the ladder before he took the plunge. He had simply jumped down like an idiot, not knowing what was waiting for him down there.

Carly’s going to kick your ass if you die, Danny.

The silence inside the store below her had lengthened to thirty seconds…

…forty…

“Danny,” she whispered.

There was no reply.

She exchanged a look with Nate.

He didn’t say anything, but nodded back as if reading her thoughts and saying, without actually saying the words, “Go for it.”

She smiled back at him, reveling in the fact that they could have a conversation without having to say a word. The last few weeks on the Trident had been some of the best nights of her life, even if they did have to sneak around most of the time. Not because the adults didn’t already know, but because there were also a lot of kids on the boat.

Looking at him now, his blue eyes calm and understanding despite the harrowing last few minutes when it probably felt like every bullet in the world was trying to kill him, gave her a flush of pride.

She returned her focus to the opening, to the sea of black on the other side.

Nate put a hand on her shoulder. The feel of his skin against hers, even through the thermal clothing, was warm and soothing, and a silent promise that he would be there, no matter what awaited them on the other side.

She took a deep breath and jumped down.

23

Keo

“How’s the face?” Keo asked.

“I don’t know,” Jordan said. “Is there still an 800-pound gorilla sitting on my forehead?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Then I guess it’s better than the last time you asked. Which reminds me: stop asking.”

“I’m just worried about you.”

“Hey, it’s nice that you care, but once every hour is enough, don’t you think? Especially since we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. If we ever get out of here at all, which in this case is looking unlikely.”

“There you go, being all positive again.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I try.”

“Try harder.”

“Whatever.”

Keo pressed against the cold metal bars and glanced toward the closed front doors, their rectangular frames illuminated by the dipping sun on the other side. They had sealed off the barn an hour ago, followed by a flurry of activity outside. He had heard more than a few of the vehicles roaring to life before taking off.

“It’ll be dark soon,” he said, glancing down at his watch: 4:24 p.m.

“How long have we been in here?” Jordan asked from the other side of the small cage.

“Three hours and change.”

“It feels longer.” She paused for a moment, then added, “What do you think they’re doing out there? Why hasn’t anyone come in to talk to us yet? I thought they were going to interrogate us for information.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and looked up at the ceiling. He could just barely make out the lone, silhouetted form through the wooden slabs. He wasn’t sure where the other one had gone, or when.

“I wish they’d get it over with,” Jordan said. “The wait’s killing me.” Then, “Sorry, wrong choice of words.”

“You’re right; they should have started in with the cattle prods by now. The fact that they’re leaving…” Is worrying, he thought, but said instead, “…doesn’t make any sense.”

“Cattle prods? They use that for interrogation?”

“Among other things.”

“Have you?”

“Among other things.”

“Jesus, Keo.”

“Yeah.”

“Remember how I was curious about what you used to do before all of this?”

“Uh huh.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Smart.”

She went quiet for a moment. Then, “Maybe they know we’re not who they thought we were. Maybe they found out about what you did at T18.”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. Communication isn’t what it used to be. Nothing’s instantaneous anymore. You don’t realize how futuristic we had things back in the good ol’ days, until it’s gone. Remember when they switched out textbooks for tablets in schools?”

“You kidding? I was ecstatic. No more lugging around five textbooks that weighed more than me combined across campus.”

He glanced back at her, leaning against the bars with her eyes slightly closed. She looked almost content—that is, if he didn’t know any better. Sometimes he forgot how young Jordan was. Like everyone he’d met on the road, she’d had to grow up too fast.

He turned away just as she opened her eyes.

“You think he’s still alive?” she asked. “Gregson?”

“I stopped giving a shit about his well-being the second he closed his mouth.”

“You’re all heart, Keo.”

“It’s my weakness.”

“Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

“That’s easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Just don’t try to shoot me.”

“That’s all it takes, huh?”

“Yup.”

“Good to…” she said, but didn’t finish.

He glanced back and saw her leaning a little bit too much to the right, as if she might have fallen asleep in the middle of her sentence. He hurried across the cage and crouched in front of her, then held her chin with one hand and righted her head.

“The hell?” she said as her eyes flew open. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you might have lost consciousness,” he said, letting go of her chin. “You okay?”

“Didn’t we already talk about that?”

“Are you?” he pressed.

“I’m fine. The head’s pounding just a little bit. Okay, a lot.” She kneaded her forehead with both hands. “You said the truck flew after it got hit?”

“It flew, rolled, and crashed.”

“Yeah, I remember the crashing part. Well, not really remember it, but I can definitely still feel it…”

He put his hand on her forehead and felt the bump. It was more pronounced than last time, which meant there was a very good chance of a concussion. He pulled the strip of cloth he still had inside his back pocket, spat on it, and scraped at some dried blood clinging to the side of her temple.

“Ugh,” she said.

“Sit still.”

“It stinks.”

“It’s just spit.”

“I know, and it stinks. Did you brush your teeth this morning?”

“No, but I used mouthwash.”

“Really.”

“No.”

“Right.”

She stopped talking and stared back at him as he cleaned her. Maybe it was the lack of light inside the barn, but the brown of her eyes was surprisingly lively.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You about done?”

“Close.”

“Hurry up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled.

“What?” he said again.

“Nothing,” she said, but he noticed she hadn’t stopped smiling.

* * *

Night came early in winter, and by 5:30 p.m. there was just the moonlight sneaking through the cracks along the wall and roof to keep Keo and Jordan from completely sitting in darkness. It took a few minutes before his eyes assimilated to the new environment and he was able to make out Jordan next to him, their backs pressed against the cage with the barn wall on the other side. Cold wind seeped through the rotting wood, and though he listened for it, Keo couldn’t (yet) hear the sound of bare feet against the empty earth outside.

He found himself eyeballing the distance separating the bars of their cage again. Five inches, give or take. Five whole inches. Was that enough for a creature of skin and bones to squeeze its way through? Maybe. Of course, he and Jordan wouldn’t exactly be standing by, mouth agape like slack-jawed morons, as the creatures assaulted the cage.

How much force would it take to cave in a deformed skull? He had a feeling he was going to find out sooner rather than—

Creaaaak! as the barn doors were pushed open.

Keo shot up to his feet and moved to the front of the cage, Jordan keeping pace beside him. The large twin doors had swung open, and a lone silhouetted figure walked purposefully, as if it had all the time in the world, toward them.

He recognized wide hips and the gait of a woman, and he guessed Marcy (And so it begins) before she actually revealed herself in a pool of moonlight about ten steps later. She stopped on the other side of the cage, bundled up inside a black leather jacket that had a patch of Texas on the shoulder. She was holding a dirty white plastic bag in one hand.

“Hungry?” Marcy asked.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Keo said. “I don’t wanna be one of those guys, but service in this place is lacking.”

Marcy smirked and pulled something out from her back pocket. His titanium spork. She tossed it into the cage, and the heavy utensil clattered loudly across the concrete floor to the other side.

“Thought you might want this back,” Marcy said.

“Couldn’t you have just handed it to me?” Keo asked.

“No,” Marcy said, and reached into the bag and pulled out an unlabeled metal can.

This time, she did aim it at him, and Keo caught it. Behind him, Jordan had picked up the spork and was cleaning it off using her shirt.

“You know there are two of us, right?” Keo asked, holding the lone can up.

“I’m being generous giving you the spork back,” Marcy said.

“Scork, actually.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah, I’m not a fan of the word, either.”

The can had a pull tab, so he didn’t need the spork to open it. Jordan was practically drooling by the time he tossed the lid away, revealing mushy tuna inside. The smell was indescribable, and Keo couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. It did overwhelm most of the aroma in the place, so that was a plus.

He handed it to Jordan. “Split it with you?”

She grinned, then took the can and dug in with the spork.

Keo looked back at Marcy, watching them from the other side of the cage. “Thanks,” he said. “For the utensil, too.”

“It’s your last meal,” Marcy said. “Thought you deserved to eat it with some dignity, even after what you did to our guys at the beach.”

Shit, Keo thought, but he said, “What is it that you think we did?”

“I know what you did. We found the other guy, too. The one next to the tank.”

Gregson.

Marcy’s face was stoic, lacking anything that he could have interpreted as either happiness or sadness. “He’s been dealt with, in case you’re wondering. And you will be, too, tonight.”

“I thought you wanted to ask us questions,” Jordan said between mouthfuls of tuna.

“Change of plans.” Marcy’s eyes focused on Keo. “Want some advice?”

“Does it involve us getting out of here?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Gee, how about some advice, Marcy?” Keo said in the flattest voice he could manage.

“Don’t resist,” the collaborator said. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.” She pressed her forefinger against her own temple. “They can get inside. You don’t want them rummaging around in there, because once you open the door and let them in, there’s no way to close it. They’re inside for good and it can get a little…maddening at times. I’ve seen…” She stopped.

“What?” Keo said.

“You don’t want them in there for too long, that’s all,” Marcy said. “So don’t fight it. Just don’t fight it.”

They watched Marcy turn around and walk back to the doors.

“Marcy,” Keo said after her. When she didn’t respond or stop, “Marcy, where are you going? Where’s everyone going?”

The woman kept walking before stepping outside through the doors. Two men in jackets pushed the doors closed with a solid thunk.

“What was she talking about?” Jordan asked.

“Hell if I know,” he said.

“Here,” Jordan said, and scooped some tuna and held it out to him.

It was too salty and covered in a thick film of something that he preferred not to think too much about, but most of it was lost in the metallic taste of the spork anyway. But like Jordan, he was hungry and swallowed it down despite the rank smell.

“Not bad,” he said.

She gave him a wry smile. “It tastes like donkey shit, but at least it’s food.”

“Yeah, that too.”

They spent the next few minutes eating in silence. He held the can while Jordan sporked the food between them. Despite the strange liquid that covered the tuna, he was dying for something to drink when they were done. They kept their eyes on the barn doors the entire time, expecting them to open at any moment.

“Don’t resist,” Marcy had said. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.”

“They”? Who was “they”?

Jordan scooped the last piece of tuna and held it out to him.

“Finish it,” he said.

“I’ve eaten more of it than you have.”

“Jordan…”

“Shut up and open your mouth.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he grinned.

“Just do it,” she snapped.

He opened his mouth and had to force himself to swallow down the last piece of tuna. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

He flicked the empty can through the bars and watched it vanish into the shadows along the far wall.

“Your spork,” Jordan said, holding up the utensil. “You think she forgot it on purpose?”

“Doubt it. It’s a little ol’ spork, and they have guns. They’re probably not too worried about us feeding them tuna to death, though given how bad it tastes, that might actually be worse than getting shot.”

He took the titanium spork from her and cleaned it against his pant legs, then put it back into one of his pockets.

“How’s your head?” he asked.

“Like someone’s piping Für Elise directly into my brain, and it’s not nearly as soothing as it used to be when I was younger.”

He put his hand on her forehead again. The good news was, the bump seemed to have lessened in the last few hours, but there was a definite hard-to-miss bruise in its place.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“What?”

“I like it when you touch me.”

He raised both eyebrows. “It’s official; you’re delirious.”

“I’m really not.”

“No?”

“No,” she said, and leaned forward and wrapped both arms around his neck and kissed him.

It caught him by surprise—he saw her coming, the purposeful look in her eyes, but didn’t process what was about to happen until he tasted her lips against his. He kissed her back because he didn’t know what else to do, and because he was a man.

But then she pulled away, her breath slightly ragged. “Jesus.”

“No, just Keo,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “I meant the tuna.”

“Tuna?”

“I can still taste tuna on you, and it reeks.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sit down.”

“What?”

“Sit down.”

“Why—”

“Just do it,” she snapped.

He slid along the bars until he was sitting down on the hard concrete floor. “Jordan,” he got out in the half-second before her mouth covered his again, and he forgot what he was going to say next.

She sat down in his lap, legs wrapping around his waist, and her kiss grew in intensity, her mouth so warm and her lips so soft and welcoming that he couldn’t have resisted even if he wanted to.

And he certainly didn’t want to. Christ, he didn’t want to.

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her body tighter against his. She groaned against his mouth and he inhaled her scent, which made it easier to ignore the strong odor of old hay and spoiled feed and mold, not to mention the stink of the bad tuna both of them had just eaten.

For some reason, she pulled back a second time—causing him to groan in annoyance—but like last time, she was still so close he could have kissed her again without barely moving. She looked strangely sad, but her brown eyes were bright in the semidarkness and he couldn’t turn away.

“Keo,” she whispered.

“What?” he said, suddenly aware of his own slightly labored breathing, mirroring hers.

“What are we doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Gillian?”

“What about her?”

“Do you still love her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should stop until you do know.”

“Maybe.”

She sighed. “But we’re probably going to die in here.”

“Probably,” he nodded.

“Soon.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to regret not doing this. Even here, in this stinking barn. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now, but with everything that’s happened…”

“Gillian.”

“Yeah. Gillian.”

She started to get up, but he tightened his grip around her waist and didn’t let her.

“Keo,” she said softly.

“No.”

“We should wait.”

“Why?”

“For some place better. Less…disgusting.” She glanced toward the other side of the cage. “There are people outside the building.”

“Screw them.”

“Pun intended?”

He grinned. “You’re right; we’re probably going to die soon.”

“Probably.”

“So…”

“So…” she whispered.

She leaned forward and kissed him again.

He didn’t bother with her shirt and reached for her belt.

“Keo,” she whispered against his mouth. “Keo, Keo, Keo…”

* * *

There was something different about the barn, something not quite right in the way the air smelled or even flowed. The change wasn’t just inside the cage, either. He became aware of the strange shift even as he sat against the bars, Jordan’s body curled up in his lap, his jacket and hers covering her in a makeshift blanket.

He opened his eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t need to know my name, meat,” it said from the darkness. No, it didn’t say—it hissed. “You don’t deserve to know.”

It looked like Frank, but it wasn’t. He knew that from the sound of its voice—similar to Frank’s, but there was a noticeable difference. This was what Frank looked like underneath that trench coat and that hoodie he always kept on, as if afraid someone might notice he was no longer human.

Keo should have been afraid—even terrified—but for some reason he wasn’t. He felt a strange calmness that he couldn’t explain.

What the hell is wrong with me?

It was nude, pruned black flesh gleaming against a spill of moonlight. Its legs carried it out of the shadows with that same preternatural gait that always made him stare for just a half-second too long every single time, trying to decide if it was real or a figment of his imagination. It moved with its back slightly arched, its blue eyes (like Frank’s) throbbing against the blackness that seemed to shift around its form as if seeking to avoid it.

He thought about waking Jordan up, but she was snoring lightly in his lap with just that ghost of a smile on her lips. He decided to let her sleep through this. It wasn’t as if the both of them being awake was going to make a damn bit of difference. He’d seen Frank tear apart a marina full of soldiers, seen him hold back an ocean of black-eyed ghouls. If this blue-eyed monster was anything like Frank, then there was absolutely nothing Keo could do at the moment, with just his hands and feet, and year-old hay scattered around him, to keep them alive.

It stopped at the bars, long arms (much too long) hanging at its sides. He expected to see the ebony eyes emerge out of the blackness in the background, revealing themselves after having somehow sneaked into the barn while he wasn’t looking, while he was asleep. How the hell had this thing managed to slip inside without him noticing, anyway?

“I can smell him on you,” the creature hissed. “Is he there right now? Looking through your eyes?”

‘He’?

“Call him,” the creature said.

“Who?” Keo said.

It smiled. Or tried to. Thin lips, like purple drawn-in lines, creased into something that resembled almost a smile. Almost.

“Call him,” it hissed, louder this time.

Jordan stirred and shivered in his lap. Something about its voice must have dug all the way into her subconscious. Keo stroked her hair to calm her. If they were going to die tonight, he’d rather she didn’t see it coming. He wished he could have taken that option himself.

Hell, he was wishing for a lot of things at the moment. Though, for some reason he still couldn’t explain, he wasn’t afraid.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said to the creature.

The blue-eyed ghoul cocked its head to one side. Reading him? Maybe trying to gauge if he was lying. The “smile” had vanished in the meantime.

“No,” it said. “You don’t know, do you? Because he’s spared you.” It might have laughed; it was an unnatural and choked sound that could, in the right circumstances, be mistaken for laughter. “He’s still trying to hold onto his humanity, trying to deny his real nature. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still use you to bring him to us, meat.”

Frank. It’s talking about Frank.

Maybe he was still alive out there after all. Why was he so surprised? He had seen Frank survive a lot of things. What was one more impossible situation?

Frank. You out there, pal? I could really use your help right now.

But it wasn’t Frank who was gripping one of the cage bars in front of him. Keo could actually hear its bony fingers tightening against the metal—just before it gave a swift pull and the padlock broke off, and the door swung open.

“I won’t be nearly as gentle,” it hissed as it stepped inside the cage.

24

Frank

He’d tracked them from the hangar and into the woods, then to a cottage with two girls sleeping inside, and finally back here, where, in so many ways, his old life found its real purpose. The trees were just as thick as he remembered; the ground as unruly; and there, on the other side of the woods, the bitter wetness of lake water against his tongue. They were using an old truck, and it had been leaking motor oil and a variety of other fluids all the way from Larkin.

As he sat perched on a tree, hidden in a fold of darkness, he could smell them all around him. The woods were teeming with them. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The canopies so thick and high they sheltered them from the sunlight even in the daytime.

He jumped down now and picked his way through the shadows, slipping and hiding when necessary. He knew where it was. The town. He’d been through it so many times with Danny in the past. It was just as deserted now as when they’d first found it almost a year ago. Even the surrounding areas had been raided, the few survivors plucked from their holes and basements and fed to Mabry’s machinations.

He moved cautiously through the heart of Starch, darting between homes and buildings and apartments, picking his way around the shadows and alleyways and always staying one step ahead—or behind—the black eyes. They were out there, searching among the town, beyond it; all across the state. He could sense the anxiousness in them, in the voices that echoed inside his head.

“Find them, kill them,” the voices said. “These humans have to be taught a lesson. This is our world now.”

The man named Mercer had done that. He and his army of silver-armed killers. His attacks yesterday had been unexpected, the first time Mabry was ever caught off guard. It was less the destruction, the deaths, and the waste of resources that had bothered Mabry; it was that he hadn’t seen it coming. They’d had it so easy this last year. The humans were cooperating, the towns were thriving, and the blood was flowing freely.

And then, and then, a wrench in the cog named Mercer.

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mabry had said to him.

Perhaps not. Perhaps not, after all…

He had to be very careful because there were blue eyes in the area. Not in Starch, but close enough. He could feel their close proximity in the way the air shifted. They could easily converge if he was exposed, so he couldn’t be seen.

Then something else—a new smell. Sweat against dirty skin. Humans.

He paused to listen in the shadows. They couldn’t see him, because human senses were limited. They were bundles of nervous energy tonight, their hands slicked with perspiration even in the cold weather. The months had been too good to them, and they had reverted to their old selves—fat, lazy, and privileged—and they were no longer used to being in the darkness at the same time as the black eyes.

They turned their heads too fast and kept their voices low as they talked amongst each other, as if afraid of being overheard. Their words were muffled by the various-shaped gas masks snapped too tightly over their faces. Why the masks? Because they were told to, in order to make it easier on the black eyes to tell the difference between the uniforms, because Mercer’s people wore uniforms too, and the black eyes were easily fooled.

“Stay away,” the voices had said. “Stay away from the soldiers with masks.”

They were searching the buildings along Main Street, yet another part of the town he was familiar with. He had gone into every building and checked every room with Danny and the others. A long time ago now. Was this where Danny had gone? He had lost their track somewhere in a parking lot a few streets back, where they had abandoned the leaking vehicle.

Beams from flashlights sliced across the endless waves of darkness. The crackle of radios back and forth, the loud crunch of heavy boots. And every now and then, nervous conversation between the small group. He was so close to them he could have reached out and snapped their necks. It was tempting. So, so tempting.

“The airfield,” one of them was saying. “Shit, it was a fucking massacre. Everyone’s fucking dead.”

“How many?” someone asked.

“Hundreds. I lost count. We didn’t even bother to pull out the bodies.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No, man, I’m telling you, the whole airfield was just gone. Bodies everywhere under all that mess. I think they rigged the ground with bombs or something.”

“Jesus,” someone else said.

“Maybe we’re on the wrong side,” the second one said, dropping his voice to barely a hushed whisper.

The first one laughed softly. Or tried to. It came out choked and desperate to be convincing. “Look around you. It doesn’t matter how many tanks or planes they have, or how many bombs they drop. They’re never going to beat this. Trust me: we chose the right side.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” the second one said. He had a bit of confidence that time. “The planet’s theirs. Nothing we can do about it now.”

“How’s Rachel coming along?”

“Good, good. Two more months and she’s gonna pop that kid right out.”

A brief exchange of nervous laughter before they moved on, entering a new building as a group. Quick and efficient movements, clear signs they had practiced this. He was almost impressed.

A bang! tore through the street, so loud he would have heard it from across the city.

The soldiers that had gone into the building rushed out, their heavy boots pounding against the pavement like explosions.

“What was that? Who fired?” someone shouted. “Where’d that shot come from?”

The squawk of a radio, but by then he was already pushing up the side of a brick apartment and blocking out the voices. He reached the edge, pulled himself up, then raced across the rooftop.

The air around him shifted as the black eyes, somewhere in the outskirts of the city, reacted to the sound.

More gunshots, like rolling thunder, poured up the street one after another. Automatic rifles.

There, a hardware store in a strip mall. It looked familiar…

The gunshots got louder as he neared. One after another, after another. Like a ringing dinner bell to every set of black eyes in the area. The blue eyes had noticed too, but they hadn’t converged. Why not? Because random gunfire wasn’t something they concerned themselves with. Besides, the humans were here. They’d take care of it. And if they couldn’t, the black eyes would.

Good. That would give him some time.

He flung himself off the roof and landed in the parking lot, then raced toward the store. Silhouetted figures moved on the other side of the windows, the staccato flashes of discharging weapons blinking on and off inside the darkened building.

A blast of warm air as he entered the store and skipped over a rotating rack that had fallen, spilling cheap trinkets across the floor. One of the three figures turned around, sensing him. Wide eyes attempted to focus on his moving form as he slipped between two aisles. The man was confused by his presence—or maybe the trench coat that fluttered around him, or possibly the sight of the hoodie draped over his head—and didn’t know whether to shoot or welcome him.

Before the collaborator could decide, three shots exploded behind him. One after another. Evenly spaced, clearly from the hands of an expert.

The sounds of crumpling bodies followed by…silence.

“Fuck me on a stick,” a voice whispered.

Danny.

Boots squeaked as Danny turned, trying to track him with a rifle. All it would take was a single headshot. Danny was good, and fully capable.

He swerved around the racks, but Danny didn’t shoot. Not yet. He wouldn’t commit until he had a target—

Bang!

His left ear disappeared against the bullet, but he kept moving.

A second shot. This one sailed harmlessly past him while he was in midair.

Faster!

He landed on top of Danny, grabbed the rifle by the barrel, and threw it away. Danny let out a startled gasp, but that didn’t last, and his right hand reached down for the handgun stuffed into his front waistband.

He grabbed Danny’s wrist and pinned it to the floor. An unceremonious grunt, but no screaming. Not from Danny, whose own blue eyes glared up at him, daring him. But these blue eyes were filled with life and humanity, unlike his own.

Danny swung, hitting him in the side of the face with a balled fist. He barely felt it the first time, the second time, or the third time.

“Stop it,” he hissed.

Danny stopped punching him. He stopped moving completely.

He could see it in those very human blue eyes—the confusion, the realization that once again everything he thought he knew about the universe had changed.

“They’re coming,” he hissed. “The uniforms and gas masks. Put them on. Let them see you. It’s the only way.”

More confusion swept across Danny’s face.

“It’ll work,” he hissed, hating the sound that came out of his mouth, the unnaturalness of every word.

He wrestled the gun out of Danny’s hand and climbed off, bounding over the counter. He dropped the gun on the floor as he went and pushed through the door.

Cold air attacked him at the same time as the jungle of arms and legs and teeth. He’d misjudged their distance. The black eyes had been much closer and converged much, much faster than he had anticipated.

“There you are.” Mabry’s voice, echoing triumphantly inside his head. “I told you, sooner or later I’d find you.”

He fought through the limbs collapsing all around him, but there were too many. They climbed over him and dragged him down to the street, pummeling him to the pavement with their sheer numbers.

“I always do.”

He grabbed the closest creature and snapped its neck, then detached the head from the spinal cord with a soft pop! He dug two fingers into its eye sockets and swung it like a bowling ball. A head cratered, another jerked out of his path, but still they scrambled over him, biting and clawing and holding on.

“Haven’t you tired of running yet?”

He swung and punched and kicked. Clumps of black blood erupted and savaged the air, covering him. He drove his fist through a sunken chest, the resistance like flimsy plastic wrap, and speared flesh and bone with his sharp elbows.

“You can’t save them. You can’t even save yourself.”

The skull in his hand turned brittle and fell apart. He let it go and grabbed two of the black eyes and whipped them right and left, then forward, before pushing, pushing with both feet and for all he was worth.

“All your plans. Your Plan Z’s. What good are they now?”

Push. Don’t stop. Push. Push! Push!

“Look at you. You’re pathetic.”

Finally! He was out of the pile and racing up the street. Except they were everywhere, reaching for his arms and legs and head. They were doing whatever they could to stall him until the blue eyes could arrive. And they were coming. He could feel their drawing presence in the air.

“Why do you keep fighting me?”

Fingers cut into his flesh, and bone cracked against him as he leapt onto a vehicle, the roof caving under him as he landed. He didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, and immediately jumped again and grappled onto the streetlight above. He had momentum on his side and flung himself up toward the edge of a nearby rooftop. Reached out—and almost missed the edge!

“Why won’t you admit the truth?”

He pulled himself up, the loud patter of footsteps around him like thunderbolts. They were already inside the building and racing up the stairs. There were even more climbing up the wall below him.

“You can’t win. You could never win.”

He didn’t look down the side of the building to see how many of them were coming up. The answer would be too many. There were always too many. So he ran instead.

“There are no second chances. No happy endings.”

He ran faster. Faster. Faster!

“Not for you.”

Another leap of faith, the wind brushing against his face, the flaps of the trench coat fluttering behind him as he cut through the night air like a spear, unencumbered by all the things that used to make him human, that once limited what he could do.

“Wherever you go, however far, I will always be there. Always…”

He closed his eyes and plummeted headfirst into the dark woods. He could already sense them below—an ocean of black eyes—waiting for him with open arms.

25

Keo

“Shibal,” Keo muttered under his breath.

It stopped for a moment—a brief half-a-heartbeat, anyway—to let what he had said sink in, but apparently deciding it wasn’t important enough to dwell on, the creature resumed stepping inside the cage.

Keo scrambled back, managing a single step (Too slow, pal!) before it was standing directly in front of him. The speed with which it had moved left him breathless, and Keo was still trying to grapple with the physics of it when cold, bony fingers slithered around his neck and, perhaps just as a demonstration that it was in full control, pulled him slightly forward only to shove him back against the bars. The metal rods had been cold all day and were even colder now that night had fallen, but it was nothing against the wicked surge of temperatures flooding Keo’s senses like wildfire.

Frank hadn’t been this cold. Then again, Frank had worn that ugly trench coat and kept that hoodie over his head almost the entire time they were traveling together. Maybe that wool fabric did more to absorb his natural (Ha! “Natural.”) body temperature than Keo had realized. He wondered if Ol’ Blue Eyes had done that for his benefit or its own. He guessed he would never find out the answer to that one, among other things he’d never get to do again.

The one bright spot he could see—while the blue-eyed ghoul tightened its grip around his throat, threatening to crush his windpipe with a simple flick of its wrist—was that Jordan was still asleep. She lay on the floor where he had left her, warm underneath a pile of their jackets. She was curled up into a ball, just the top half of her face visible under his coat. She looked peaceful and beautiful, and he regretted all those nights when he never realized it.

“I can smell his scent on you,” it hissed, razorblade lips forming a sneer as it sniffed the air between them. “It lingers like a disease. Is he nearby? Tell me, meat, is he coming to rescue you right now?”

It was referring to Frank again. The other blue-eyed ghoul in Keo’s life. The thought made him want to laugh—if only he could at the moment.

I went looking for a girl, and all I got were blue-eyed monsters. Daebak.

Of course there was nothing awesome about this, with the metal bars against his back. He had to exert every ounce of strength just to suck in enough air to keep breathing, and that was probably because the creature still wanted to keep him alive…for now.

It cocked its head to one side, long neck flexing with a grace that shouldn’t have been possible for something so unnatural. It looked him up and down, as if trying to figure out what made him tick, or special. Keo could have told it there was absolutely nothing unique about him, though he got the impression the monster wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

“Call him for me,” it said, caressing Keo’s face in a plume of hot and cold breath, “so I can take him home, where he belongs.”

‘Call him’? I would if I could, pal. I’d call him to come here and kick your ass. Or at least tear your head off. I’ve seen him do it…

“You’re running out of time,” the creature said. It turned its head to look at Jordan’s sleeping form. “Both of you.”

Leave her alone, you fuck.

“I can smell her all over you, too,” it hissed, that bad attempt at a smile again. “Lovers rutting in a barn. How animal of you.”

Better than dead, assfuck.

“I wonder if she’ll scream for me, too,” it asked.

He clenched his teeth and managed to wheeze out a sound. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as he had planned it in his head. But then, it was taking everything he had just to keep breathing, to suck air into his lungs.

The creature turned its gaze back to him, eyes like a siren’s call drawing him in. Goose bumps raced up and down Keo’s flesh.

“We’ll keep her alive for a while,” it hissed. “We’ll have fun with her. Play our little games. And when we’re bored, we’ll put her out of her misery. But until then, she’ll wish she was dead. Now call him.”

Keo shook his head. Or tried to. He mostly just wiggled it left, then right, then left again. He wanted to shout, “I have no fucking idea how, you piece of shit!” but he couldn’t.

God, why was it so hard to just breathe?

Then, unexpectedly, the creature’s fingers (he swore he could feel every single joint in the thing’s hand) unfurled slightly. Not enough for Keo to convince himself that he might survive tonight, but just enough that he could suck in a lungful of precious air.

“I…don’t…know…how,” he managed to gasp out.

The creature cocked its head to the other side, pulsating blue eyes watching him closely. It was reading him, trying to gauge his truthfulness.

“It’s…truth…” he croaked out.

The taut flesh over its improbably smooth domed head seemed to wrinkle in response. “No, you can’t, can you?”

Did it just sound…disappointed?

Tough nuts, pal.

“But he’s left his imprint on you,” the creature said. “He’ll be able to find you…eventually. And when he does, we’ll be there waiting. You’ll still prove useful after all, meat.”

Hey, use away, as long as you keep me alive, Keo thought, but could only get out, “Ack.”

“What was that?” it said, lips forming something that could almost be mistaken for a smile if viewed at just the right angles. “I can’t hear you. Speak louder.”

“Ack,” Keo said again.

“What was that?” It leaned forward, then turned its head, presenting a useless stump that used to be an ear to him. “Louder, meat. Convince me I should let you keep all your limbs. After all, I don’t need all of you, do I?”

Closer.

Its eyes bored into him like twin moons. “Did you say something?”

I said closer…

“I can’t hear you,” it hissed. “Speak up.”

There. That’s close enough.

He tightened his grip around the metal handle of the spork, the same one that Marcy had given back to him to eat the tuna with. The thing that was technically a scork, but he hated that name. He had palmed the utensil as the creature entered the cage, wasting a precious second when it couldn’t see where his hands were, hidden under the jacket covering Jordan’s body. He hadn’t used it yet because it was too far, and because it would have taken him at least a second to swing his arm up, then left toward his target: the creature’s head.

“They’re smarter than the rest,” Danny had said. “If you see them, run the other way, Obi-Wan Keobi. Or shoot them in the head. That seems to work pretty well.”

Shoot them in the head. Right. If only I had a gun, and it was standing perfectly still.

But at least I have a scork. Ugh, I hate that word.

He almost laughed, because it was that absurd. He was going to die trying to stab this blue-eyed freak in the head with an eating utensil. The combination fork/spoon/can opener was titanium and strong as hell, so at least there was that. All he’d have to do was punch hard enough to break skin and get it through the bone. Of course, before he could do that, he had to make sure it didn’t see him striking.

Yeah, no sweat—

“Oh, shit,” a breathless voice said, before he could finish his thought.

The creature, just as surprised by the voice as Keo, twisted its head to find Jordan scrambling up from the dirty barn floor, the coats falling off her. She stumbled backward until she bumped against the bars on the other side of the cage. She had gone the wrong direction, Keo saw; if she had gone right instead of back, she could have easily escaped through the open door.

If she was still groggy from sleep, she was wide awake now, and her eyes snapped from the ghoul to him, where they remained.

“Go!” he croaked. “The door!”

Her eyes flashed from him to the creature, then to the open door. There was nothing to stand in her way. It couldn’t grab her and keep its hold on him at the same time. The question was: Which one of them did it want to keep inside the cage more? Of course, he already knew the answer to that one.

“But he’s left his imprint on you,” it had said. “He’ll be able to find you…eventually. And when he does, we’ll be there waiting.”

It didn’t need her, except as leverage against him. And right now—

“Go, goddammit!” he managed to get out. It wasn’t nearly as forceful as he had intended, but it was all he could muster with the creature’s fingers still wrapped around his throat like a metal glove.

But for whatever reason, Jordan didn’t move toward the door. She had seen it, and she was smart enough to know there was no way the creature could stop her. So why hadn’t she moved, for God’s sake?

“Jordan!” he said again, the effort of shouting (or trying to) making every inch of him tremble with pain. “Get out of here!”

Instead of running for the door, Jordan stood where she was, as if her feet were planted to the concrete floor. Then she did something he hadn’t expected—or wanted, for that matter. She ran right at them.

No, not at them, but at the creature.

Oh hell, Jordan, he thought as the ghoul’s ghost-thin lips slithered into a mock smile. It held him steady against the bars with one hand and began lifting the other one—

Keo pulled out his right hand, the one with the spork, out from behind his back.

Go for the head! Go for the head!

But even as he told himself what he had to do, his mind judged the speed and distance and what it would take—a wide, exaggerated arc from bottom to top, right to left, because there wasn’t any other way to get it from behind his back and to the creature’s temple where it had to go, because anywhere else was pointless.

Not enough time. Not nearly enough time.

What was the lesson he’d been taught in school? Oh, right. The fastest path to a target was a straight line. Like a bullet. Or, in this case, a goddamn spork.

So Keo jerked the titanium utensil upward and toward the ghoul’s exposed chin instead.

He felt a flush of triumph at the sight of the spork’s teeth breaking flesh, could feel the resistance from its jawbone on the other end, but he kept pushing and pushing, putting everything he had into it, until finally (Eureka!) the tines broke through bone.

It let him go then, and even as it did so, Keo pulled the spork back out, the slurp as thick black blood splashed on the ground, leaving a trail as the creature stumbled backward. Keo couldn’t tell if he had hurt it or if it was just shocked. Either way, he was free and he could breathe again, and Keo took the next few seconds to gasp for breath like a drowning man.

“Oh, Jesus!” Jordan shouted. She had frozen halfway to them.

The blue-eyed ghoul was touching its chin, thin trickles of blood oozing through its fingers. Keo couldn’t figure out if that flicker of something on its face was hurt or anger (or curiosity?), and he didn’t waste another breath thinking about it.

Air filled his lungs, and he felt renewed strength as he launched himself forward and smashed into the creature, catching it full in the chest. It was like hitting a sack of flour, and Keo couldn’t reconcile its unnatural strength with how weak its body was pushing back against him. He drove it back, back, until there was a satisfying clang! as the monster’s rail-thin form collided with the metal bars.

Keo pulled back slightly and shoved his forearm against its throat. Its neck was slick because it was covered in its own blood, but he ignored the nausea-inducing sensation and pressed harder. He pinned it to the cage with his left hand while cocking back his right, tightening his grip on the handle of the spork, just before sending it flying forward for the killing blow—

No!, his mind screamed as the creature snatched his right hand by the forearm and grabbed him by the shirt collar with its other hand and, as if it were dealing with a petulant child, threw him back. He crashed into the metal bars, felt rather than heard the entire cage rattling on impact, just like what every bone in his body was doing.

He stumbled forward, but his legs were wobbly and he couldn’t focus. He did manage to see the floor rushing toward him just in time to somehow stick his hands out before he hit the hard pavement, saving his face from a painful collision.

Get up! The voice inside his head screamed. Get up, get up, get up.

He pushed himself up from the floor, every inch of his body screaming with pain, begging him for rest. His arms had doubled in weight for some reason. Keo managed to turn his head, looking up as the creature hovered over him.

“Human,” it hissed, the act of talking (hissing), of moving its jaw up and down, sending black blood dripping to the floor a few feet from Keo’s head. “You’re only human.”

So close. So goddamn close.

It ran its ice-cold fingers through his hair, got a firm grip, then dragged him up. Keo let out an excruciating howl as his scalp burned and threatened to tear from his head, and it was all he could do to scramble to get his feet under him and stand up so he wouldn’t be completely at the creature’s mercy.

“I’ve decided,” the creature hissed, “that you don’t need your arms.”

It pushed him back into the bars, and Keo only managed to get out a grunt even as the ghoul let go of his hair and grabbed both of his arms and grinned at him.

God, that grin. For as long as he lived—however short—he would never forget—

The spork.

Shit, he’d lost the spork. It wasn’t in his hand anymore, and Keo didn’t remember when he had dropped it. Probably somewhere between being thrown around the cage like a monkey and having his hair yanked like he was someone’s bitch. Not that it would have mattered anyway, because the ghoul was tightening its fingers around both his forearms, and there was no way in hell it was going to let go this time.

It leaned forward until it was so close it could have stuck out its tongue and slipped it into his mouth. Keo almost retched at the imagery.

“This is going to hurt,” it hissed. “But don’t worry. You won’t die. We have ways to stave off death. You’ll thank me.”

It cocked its head, and again, that goddamn grin. He hated the fuck out of that goddamn grin.

“Or not,” it hissed.

Then the blue-eyed ghoul did an odd thing. It was pulling back—to get into a better position to render his arms from their sockets, he assumed—when its eyes suddenly abandoned Keo’s face and snapped left—

And Keo thought, Wait, where’s Jordan?

There was a dull thunk! from somewhere in the cage, and the ghoul released both his arms. The sudden absence of its impossibly strong grip was so swift that Keo was sinking to the floor (Again? Jesus, I can’t stay off this floor.) before he could wrap his mind around what had happened, what was happening, and why both his arms were flopping uselessly to his sides instead of lying on the cage floor in a pool of blood.

Fortunately, he was staring forward the entire time, even as he was dropping to his knees. Keo saw the ghoul let out something that sounded almost like a guttural squeal before it vanished out of his peripheral vision. There was another loud clanging! as something bounced against the cage bars yet again. Except this time, thankfully, it wasn’t him.

Keo found the strength to turn his head until it settled on the ghoul, which was sitting on the floor with its back against the rods. Its eyes were wide open and staring forward, as if it was still trying to focus on something and having a difficult time. But of course it wasn’t, because there was a metal object sticking out of the center of its forehead between its eyes.

So that’s where the spork went.

The shiny metal had gone in deep, its handle buried halfway in the creature’s skull after having penetrated not just bone, but whatever was still back there. Small rivulets of blood poked through the point of impact and dripped along the titanium eating utensil.

A figure was crouching on the other side of him—Jordan, her face flushed with worry, brown eyes focused entirely on him. “Keo…”

“Shit, Jordan,” he said. Or croaked. Or coughed the words. One of those.

“You dropped the spork,” she said, barely managing a smile, even though he could see her lips quivering and her hands were shaking uncontrollably as she stroked his cheeks.

He smiled back at her before he saw it. The cage door. It was wide open, and the padlock was lost somewhere in the darkness of the barn.

Darkness. The barn. Night.

“Jordan,” he said.

“Shhh,” she said, peering at him. “I can’t even tell what color your neck is at the moment. Did it—”

He shook his head. “Outside. The barn. Night. Remember?”

It took a second—just a second—before she understood. Her eyes flew open, and she glanced back at the open cage door. “Oh, God. What do we do?”

“Danny told me a story,” he said, looking at the dead ghoul. “It’s about a farmhouse in Louisiana…”

* * *

They didn’t have ropes or duct tape to tie the creature up, but its bony arms and legs were pliable enough for them to shove the limbs through the bars and pull and prod them into position, at least enough to keep it in place. For something that had been unfathomably strong, its body was light enough that Jordan did most of the carrying, while he helped out the best he could with arms that had all the strength of spaghetti strings.

If it were only his arms or aching body, he would have been happy. His throat throbbed too, the windpipe bruised, and God knew what other damage he had suffered. He took some comfort in the fact he could still breathe, so at least he wasn’t wheezing anymore.

“You think they’re out there?” Jordan asked.

She sat next to him at the back of the cage, both of them wearing their jackets. She had helped him put his on, Keo flinching with pain the entire time. The spot gave them a perfect view of the dead (again?) blue-eyed ghoul’s malformed ass and back. Its head was tilted to one side, the way it had done more than once during its interrogation of him. It almost looked as if it were embracing the cage, arms and legs wrapped around the bars, refusing to let go.

“Willie boy cut off their heads and stuck them on pikes,” Danny had told him. “I don’t know why, but they responded to it. The black eyes. They stayed away from the farmhouse all night.”

Gaby had confirmed Danny’s story. Not that Keo ever doubted it, though he had to admit that sometimes the ex-Ranger had a tendency to exaggerate. He hadn’t, that time.

“This is crazy,” Jordan said. “Why would they stay away just because we killed him? It. Whatever.”

He glanced down at his watch. 10:11 p.m. It wasn’t even midnight yet. There were still nine hours before sunrise.

Goddamn Texas winters.

Jordan moved closer so they could share their body heat. “It wanted him, didn’t it? Frank.”

He nodded.

“Does that mean he’s still alive?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said softly.

“Hopefully?”

“Maybe that, too.”

You out there, Frank? You still alive, buddy?

Can you hear me now?

He smiled.

“What?” Jordan said. When he gave her a questioning look: “You had a stupid grin on your face.”

He shook his head. “Just thinking of a joke—”

Tap-tap-tap.

He stopped in mid-sentence.

The sounds had come from above them. From the roof.

They both looked up in time to see a pair of figures flitting across the cracks, temporarily blocking the streams of moonlight. Next to him, Jordan’s body went rigid before she reached down and picked up the spork from the floor. Blood, like mud, caked the stumpy tines.

Tap-tap-tap.

That came from outside the barn.

Tap-tap-tap.

From all around them.

Tap-tap-tap...

He and Jordan sat in silence and waited. He could hear her accelerated heartbeat, the sound of her fingers tightening around the spork’s handle.

Saved by a spork, he thought. Never in a million years did he ever think he’d have to rely on an eating utensil to survive the end of the world.

They waited and waited, but the creatures never made any attempts to enter the barn, though he could hear them easily enough through the rotting barn walls. They sounded agitated and restless, and yet they never tried to come inside. Maybe they could see through the cracks and saw the dead blue-eyed ghoul hanging off the cage door. Or maybe they just, somehow, knew.

After a while, he noticed the ones on the roof above them had simply…left.

“This is freaky,” Jordan whispered.

Better than dead.

“I don’t think they’re coming in,” she added, just a trace of barely restrained hope in her voice. “God, I can’t believe we’re going to survive this. Jesus, Keo, Jesus…”

He looked over and was surprised to see her crying silently next to him. He reached over and brushed the wet drops off her cheeks, even though doing so made his entire arm feel like it was going to fall off at the socket.

She gave him a pursed smile and shook her head. “I’m ten years old again,” she said, alternating between choking back tears and laughing.

He smiled and put his arm around her, grimacing with pain, and pulled her to him. She came willingly, leaning her head against his shoulder. It hurt like a sonofabitch, but he didn’t let her know that.

In the semidarkness, with little to do and even less to hear, he found himself thinking about the last few weeks. It was funny how things had worked out. He had come to Texas to find Gillian, but had found Jordan instead.

He had to admit, it wasn’t an entirely bad trade. Not bad at all.

26

Gaby

She landed on the tiled floor with a loud thump! and, in a crouch, immediately sprang up. The suffocating blackness was the first thing she noticed, followed by the two figures lying on the floor in front of her, their outlines visible in what little moonlight had managed to punch through the front windows of the hardware store. Her forefinger tightened against the trigger and she almost pulled it but stopped herself just in time because neither body was moving.

She hadn’t stood up for more than a second before there was another thump! behind her. Nate, falling through the attic door after her. He was so close as he landed that he probably had to do some fancy maneuvering at the last second to avoid crashing into her. It was her fault; she had forgotten to move out of his way.

She did that now, taking a step forward, the rifle in front of her. She swung it left, then right, scanning the darkness.

Christ, it was dark.

“Danny!” she hissed.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” a voice said, just before a lone shadow appeared from around one of the many shelves that separated the back of the store from the front. If she hadn’t heard his voice first, Gaby might have fired because she could only see a dark specter blanketed in shadows, moving toward her.

“Jesus, Danny,” she said.

“No, just Danny.” He stopped and crouched before reaching her.

“What are you doing?”

“Those other two—start stripping them.”

“What?”

“Their clothes. Grab them quick, before they come back.”

“Before who comes back?” Nate said behind her.

“Spider-Man and his amazing friends, who else?”

She glanced back at Nate, who was slowly lowering his rifle. She could just barely make out his soft blue eyes in the darkened store.

He met her gaze and shrugged. “I should have known he was too stupid to die.”

“I heard that,” Danny said.

“You were supposed to.”

The dead man closest to her was lying on his stomach, his head turned to one side so that the protruding breathing apparatus of a gas mask over his face was easy to make out. He had on a brown jacket, and a rifle lay next to him, within reach of his extended fingers. Gleaming brass casings surrounded him like a police chalk outline.

When she turned the dead man over onto his back, he had on a black uniform underneath. There was a name tag, but she didn’t waste the second it would have taken trying to squint out the letters. He was a collaborator—a dead one—and that was all she needed to know.

Nate moved past her and toward the second body. He crouched and pulled off the man’s jacket to get at the uniform underneath. He glanced back at her before the two of them looked over the counter at Danny on the other side. He was already unbuckling the third dead man’s gun belt while keeping one eye on the front door.

She followed his gaze, but couldn’t see anything out there.

“Danny,” she said.

“Less talk, more stripping,” he said.

“Is this going to work? The uniforms?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Danny…”

“Sure,” he said, his grin just barely visible in the semidarkness. “Put everything on. Uniform, gun belt, and gas mask—the works.”

She wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if he even believed it himself, but she turned back to her man anyway. Her fingers were trembling slightly as she pulled down the jacket’s zipper.

The collaborator was younger up close, probably in his mid-twenties, with short black hair and hazel eyes. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead, where blood pooled. His face looked frozen in a state of shock.

Better you than me, she thought, and pulled off his jacket.

* * *

The pants and shirt were a size too big for her, but she fixed both at the same time by tucking the hem of the shirt into her waistband and tightening the gun belt another notch. There was surprisingly little blood on the clothes. At least, in the darkness of the hardware store. It would probably look different in the morning.

If she was still alive to see morning.

Nate hadn’t been quite as lucky. His man had bled out so much he made a face the whole time he was pulling the shirt on, then zipped up a jacket over it. He picked up a gas mask from the floor next. “Is this really going to work?”

“I don’t—” she started to say.

Danny interrupted her, snapping, “Put them on now,” from the other side of the counter.

She glanced over, surprised by the edge in his voice, but something else drew her eyes past him, and she saw the silhouetted figures moving outside the store on the sidewalk, their emaciated forms like dancing shadows against the moonlight.

Ghouls.

She sucked in a large breath and pulled her gas mask on, then grabbed the dead soldier’s M4 she had laid on the counter. The ammo pouches around her waist were full again after combining the leftover magazines with the ones she had been carrying since this morning. She touched the butt of her Glock, just to make sure it was still in the holster along her hip.

Nate had wandered over to stand next to her, clutching his own stolen M4. His appearance, with his lengthening Mohawk sticking out above his gas-masked face, made for a menacing sight, like something out of a bad post-apocalyptic movie.

“Stay here,” Danny said, taking a step forward.

“Where are you going?” she asked, wondering if her voice sounded as odd as his did through the gas mask.

“Gotta let them know we’re in here, so they don’t come in for a closer look.”

“Danny…”

“Trust me.”

She sighed and clutched the rifle tighter, watching Danny walk toward the front of the store to stand about five feet from the windows. He had stopped in a pool of moonlight, as if presenting himself to the swarm of undead things outside.

God, Danny, I hope you know what you’re doing.

His presence didn’t go unnoticed, and the creatures surged toward the store seconds later. The sight of them rushing forward made her catch her breath, and it took everything Gaby had to fight the instinct to retreat. She didn’t, because there was nowhere to go. The only escape was up, back into the attic—and then what? Could they really survive up there all night?

“I think it’s working,” Nate whispered next to her.

The ghouls were pressing themselves against the glass panes, some sliding their bodies back and forth, leaving thick clumps of liquid in their wake. A bony elbow tap-tapped against another section of window, though she wasn’t sure if the creature was doing that on purpose or if it just couldn’t help itself because of its mangled arm. They hadn’t made any attempts to enter the store through the lone door yet, which was the best indication Nate could be right, that this might actually be working—

One of the creatures glared past Danny and straight at her.

Her legs might have wobbled slightly, and when her hands showed signs it might follow suit, she tightened her grip around the rifle to keep them busy. The sight of them rubbing themselves against the glass and peering in at Danny (and her) made her skin crawl. She willed the rest of her body to remain still, and slowly, very slowly, they obeyed.

Then, one by one, the creatures pried themselves from the windows and raced off up the street. The sight of them, simply pulling back and disappearing one by one by one, leaving thick films of brown and white (and yellow?) liquids behind to mark their presence, made her breath quicken even more so than when they were staring in at her.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said breathlessly next to her.

Danny turned around and began walking back to them. He looked calm, as if he hadn’t just been playing who-will-blink-first with a swarm of ghouls, with just a thin wall of glass between them a few seconds ago.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Nate said.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Danny said.

“It must be the uniforms and gas masks. They’re using them as some kind of identifying markers. Like dogs.”

“Like dogs?” she said.

“That’s what they are, when you get down to it. Just animals. Not any smarter or dumber. And it’s pretty easy to trick an animal, even one that runs on two feet.”

Danny finally reached them and pulled off his gas mask.

“I never doubted you for a second,” she smiled at him.

“Not even a second?” he smiled back.

“Okay, maybe just a pinch,” she said, pinching her fingers in front of her.

Danny grinned, and from the look on his face, he probably had a clever comeback ready, but he was interrupted by a loud squawk that blared across the store, followed by a muffled voice from somewhere in the darkness.

“Come in, Perkins,” the muffled voice said. “You still there?”

“That’s a radio!” Nate said, dropping his voice to almost a whisper for some reason.

“Find it!” Danny said.

Nate searched behind the counter while she looked on the other side, and Danny went through the aisles, scanning the floor.

“Anything?” Danny called.

“Nothing,” she called back.

“It’s not back here,” Nate said.

“Keep looking!” Danny said.

Another squawk from somewhere in the darkened store, followed by, “Perkins, come in.”

The voice sounded clearer (and closer!) this time, and she hurried toward a corner, feeling like a blind man groping for a clue.

There!

She snatched it up from the floor, said, “Got it!”

Nate and Danny hurried over as the radio squawked again, and this time a new voice said, “If they’re not answering, it means they’re dead.”

“All of them?” the first voice asked.

“What do you think, genius? If the others are still around, they’d answer, wouldn’t they?”

“What now?” a third voice asked. “Do we go in after them?”

“We don’t even know where they were when the shooting started,” the second man answered.

“Somewhere in the middle of town,” the first said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

She knew leaders when she heard it, and there wasn’t one among the three they were listening to now. There was too much doubt in their voices and too little certainty. You couldn’t hope to lead men with that kind of wavering. She had learned that much just watching Will at work.

“Can’t go in there now, not with all that activity,” the second voice said. “Nightcrawlers are all over the place like fucking cockroaches in heat. They must be chasing something big. I don’t wanna get in the middle of that.”

“So what, just leave them in there?” the first one asked.

“It’s risky, that’s all I’m saying.”

“We should wait till morning,” the third man said. He was trying to sound confident, and failing. “We’ll get reinforcements then. That’s assuming whoever’s in there is still alive after tonight. That’s a big if.”

“Yeah, I like that idea even better,” one of the other two said. She was losing track of who was who; there was a mechanical distortion through the handheld radio that made the voices start to blur together.

“Tomorrow,” someone else said, clearly relieved.

They waited to hear more conversation, but the radio remained quiet.

After a while, Danny grinned at her and Nate and said, “See? Told you. Easy peasy.”

Then he let out a big sigh.

* * *

Just in case the dead soldiers’ friends decided to risk entering the town anyway, they dragged the third body behind the counter and deposited it in a pile with the other two. They left the attic door open with the rope connected to the ladder dangling down, in case they needed it in a hurry. She didn’t like the idea of being cornered up there again—the brief but hellacious gun battle from earlier still fresh in her mind—but it was preferable to facing the snake pit of ghouls gathered outside the store at the moment. She could still see them occasionally moving back and forth across the store’s glass walls.

Danny had locked the front door just to be safe, not that any of them thought it was going to do a hell of a lot of good if the creatures decided to assault the building anyway. The glass windows weren’t going to hold for very long, at least not between now and morning. The lock was more for the benefit of any humans that might be poking around. If nothing else, it would provide them with an early warning.

They crouched behind the counter with the bodies a few feet behind Gaby. She did her best to ignore their presence, which was difficult because it seemed like her boots squeaked on their blood or she kicked a stray brass casing whenever she moved. Nate was on the other side of the back counter, and Danny had taken up position in the middle. Danny sat against the back wall now, another one of the dead soldiers’ M4s in his lap. His recently acquired jacket was zipped up all the way to his neck, and he looked like a turtle with its head stuck out of the opening.

They had all removed their gas masks for the sake of comfort, though at the moment, with the stink of the bodies nearby, she was having second thoughts.

“What happened?” she asked Danny. She wasn’t quite whispering, but she kept her voice low enough that she could be heard and still hear anything approaching the store.

Danny looked over. “When?”

“After you jumped down.”

“I shot them.”

“All three?”

“I got lucky. It was dark and they were preoccupied with trying to pinpoint where you and Nate Dogg were up in the attic. That, and they probably didn’t expect me to jump down the way I did. You know, all idiot-like.”

“You fired two more times after that. What were those for?”

Danny’s face changed slightly, from relaxed to something she hadn’t seen in a while, not even when they had discovered that their expedition to Harold Campbell’s facility was for nothing.

It looked like…uncertainty.

“Danny…”

He shook his head. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you, kid.”

“After all we’ve been through? After last night in the hangar?”

He grinned, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it.

“What was it, Danny?” she pressed.

“Remember back at the farmhouse?”

“What about it?”

“The blue-eyed ghouls?”

“Wanna play?” the creature had asked her, the sound of its voice burying itself so deep into her soul that she would never be able to forget it for as long as she lived.

“What about them?” she asked.

“One of them was here tonight. Earlier.”

Nate’s shadowed outline stiffened at the other end of the counter. She should have reacted the same way, but she was surprisingly…calm. Maybe it was the last few days, or last night back in the hangar at the Larkin airfield, but for some reason she couldn’t quite summon the fear that should have been natural when told there had been a blue-eyed ghoul inside the store with them earlier tonight.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I can’t explain it,” Danny said.

“Try.”

“It told me to put on the uniform and gas mask. Told me they would work to keep the ghouls out.”

She didn’t reply. Neither did Nate. How do you respond to something like that?

“Jesus, Danny,” was all she could manage.

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” Danny chuckled. “Hell, I still don’t believe it, and I actually lived through it. Unless, of course, this is all one big dream, in which case where are the bikini-clad girls? In my dreams only, you understand, so don’t be running off half-cocked and blabbing that last part to Carly without proper context.”

“You said it told you the uniforms would work?” Nate asked.

“Uh huh.”

“Why would it do that?”

“I haven’t a clue, kid. Not a clue.” He paused, then added, “There was something weird about it…”

“You mean besides the fact that it was a blue-eyed ghoul and it was talking to you, while simultaneously not trying to kill you?”

He grinned. “Yeah, that too.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Something…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know how to explain it. Hell, I might have just imagined the whole thing. It was pretty danky up there in the attic with you two. Lots of bad BO going around.”

Despite the jokes, she could see it on his face: Danny was at a loss for words, something she couldn’t say with any regularity. But whatever had happened before she and Nate came down the attic, it had struck him speechless. More than that, it had left him confused and unsure of himself.

“I’m still not convinced this isn’t a dream,” Danny said.

“It’s not,” Gaby said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Ditto,” Nate said.

“Well, shit,” Danny said, “if I can’t trust you, who can I trust, Nathaniel Ramsey? You are, after all, a war hero.”

“I still don’t know who that is,” Nate said.

“You should pick up a book sometime. Books, in case you crazy kids and your wacky Internets don’t know, are these heavy things made of paper and bound into a big boxlike object that you can also employ as a rat beater. Very useful.”

“Did it, uh, say anything else?” Nate asked. “This…thing?”

“Nope. It said to put on the uniforms and gas masks, then to show myself to the looky-loos outside.” He shrugged, and Gaby thought he might have reached down instinctively to clutch the M4 in his lap just to be sure it was still there. “Figured, what the hell. The damn thing had me by the balls and it tells me how to save myself, then just runs off? Didn’t think I had much to lose after that.”

“Jesus Christ, Danny,” she said again, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Yeah,” he said, and stared into the darkness again.

She wondered if he was replaying the moment with the blue-eyed ghoul over and over in his head, still unsure of everything he had seen or heard even now, long after the creature had gone. God knew her own encounter with one of those things had been traumatic enough, and hers only wanted to kill her. This one wanted to…save them?

And here she thought things were finally starting to make some sense. Returning to Texas had completely undermined that belief. First, there was the insanity at the airport hangar, and now this. Whatever “this” was. She still wasn’t entirely sure, and judging by the continued confused expression on Danny’s face, neither did the ex-Ranger.

We should have stayed away. We should have stayed out of Texas. God, why did we ever come back? For lights?

They didn’t say anything after that for the entire night. No one knew what to say. Not Danny, not her, and not Nate. Instead, they sat in silence and watched the shadows with suspicion, and waited for an attack that never came.

In the morning, it was a different story.

27

Keo

Hey, Frank, you out there? Someone was looking for you last night. Give me a call back when you get this, pal. We gotta have a nice, long talk.

“You’re looking thoughtful,” Jordan said.

“Do I?” he said.

“I’m guessing you’re either thinking about Gillian or Frank.”

“It’s not Gillian.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t thought about Gillian all night.”

“Was it something I said?”

“Something you did.”

“Ah,” she said, and he thought she looked pleased with his answer.

“You did it very well,” he said.

“I’ve had practice. Though probably not nearly as much as you.”

“Are you calling me a whore?”

“Adventurous,” she smiled.

“Sounds better,” he smiled back.

“The arms?”

“Like a fat man’s sitting on them.”

“Try not to move them.”

“Sound advice,” he said, peering through the half-an-inch of viewing space between the door and the side of the barn.

He could see just enough of the farmhouse’s front yard to know that all the vehicles that were still capable of moving had done just that last night, taking along with them any visible signs of soldiers on the premises. There also wasn’t any of the familiar aroma of vaporized flesh outside, unlike behind him and Jordan at the moment.

They had opened their eyes to the sight of the blue-eyed ghoul, still fastened over the cage door, slowly turning to ash as morning sunlight claimed it. The creature had simply wasted away, leaving just bleached white limbs to continue clinging to the bars.

A few minutes after that and they were running through the barn, trying to figure out how they were going to fight their way through men with guns who already thought they were a part of Mercer’s murderous brigade. Except they didn’t have to, because the collaborators really had abandoned the place last night, which was probably also why Marcy had never come back for the spork.

“Don’t resist,” she had said last night. “Answer every question you’re asked, and don’t lie. Because they’ll know.”

Keo got the feeling Marcy didn’t expect to ever see him again after last night. He didn’t blame her; he wasn’t even sure how he had survived himself. But all he had to do was look across the barn doors at Jordan, leaning across from him and peering out at the empty front yard, for his answer.

“What?” Jordan said.

“Just thinking—”

“Uh oh.”

“—how you saved my life last night.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, “What did you come up with?”

“I’m glad you were here.”

She chuckled. “Because I saved your life?”

“Yeah, that too.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are we talking about the sex again?”

“It was very good sex.”

“Save it for later, Romeo.”

“The sex, or talking about it?”

“Both. For now, what are our options?”

“What options? I just see one. They’re not out there right now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come back.”

“You think they’re coming back?”

“I don’t see why they’d just abandon this place.”

“I don’t, either.” She paused for a moment, then, “Are you sure you can do this in your condition?”

“I’m fine,” he lied. He reached into his back pocket and produced the spork. “Besides, I’m in possession of a very lethal weapon.”

“Watch where you’re pointing that thing.”

“Are you talking about the spork?”

“Cute.” She looked back at the door. “Ready?”

“On five?”

“On five,” she said.

He faced the door and began silently counting down from five. On one he pushed his door open, Jordan doing the same to hers.

He had put on a game face when Jordan asked if he was all right, but pressing his shoulder into the door made him wonder if the blue-eyed bastard hadn’t actually broken every single bone in his body last night, given the relentless throbbing and wobbly knees that suddenly made their presence known. He grunted through the pulsing pain and kept pushing, until the warmth of the sun surrounded him and he blinked up at the wide-open skies.

He had the spork gripped tightly in one hand and ready to fight, as if it was going to do a damn bit of good if someone with a gun was standing outside waiting for them. Then again, he bet the dead blue-eyed ghoul probably hadn’t thought the eating utensil was much of a weapon, either, but it had since learned otherwise.

Fortunately for both of them, the farmhouse was just as deserted as it had appeared from inside the barn. The only reminder that there had been men and women here yesterday was a white pickup truck parked at the edge of the wide clearing. Keo hurried over to it, but he already knew what he’d find—or not—before he even reached it.

There was no convenient car key dangling from the steering wheel, and when he opened the hood, there was no battery. He lowered the hood back down, careful not to let it slam, just in case there were people in the area. Sound traveled these days.

“Can we use it?” Jordan called from the front porch of the main house. She had been peering through the windows but hadn’t tried to go in yet.

“They abandoned it for a reason. Anything over there?”

“It’s too dark inside, but I’m pretty sure I saw something moving in the back hallway. Maybe we should risk it. There might be weapons, food…”

“Move on. It’s too risky.”

She gave one of the windows another quick glance before hopping off the porch and walking back to him.

Keo had climbed into the pickup, in search of something, anything, he could use. He found a rusty tire iron on the floor and pulled it outside with him. It wasn’t a gun or a knife, but he wasn’t going to complain about a melee weapon. If nothing else, it had better reach than the spork.

“Whatcha got there?” Jordan asked.

He tossed the tire iron over to her.

“Ah, you shouldn’t have,” she said, catching and turning the rusted object over in her hands, before wiping some (though not all, by any means) of the rust off on her pants. “Could be a little cleaner.”

“Could be a gun, too, but we can’t always get what we want.”

“No kidding. I was hoping to wake up on a nice comfy bed this morning.”

“Such an optimist.”

“And someone with less scars on his face.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Eh, I’ll live.” She smiled at him, before her eyes dropped to his feet. “What’s that?”

“What?”

She pointed and Keo looked down at a white piece of paper, about half the size of normal writing paper, trapped under one of his boots. He took a step back and picked it up. It would have been pristine if not for his boot print, and there was lettering on it in big, blocky capital letters, as if it had been cranked out by a printer.

Jordan leaned in to get a better look. “What’s it say?”

It read, in three separate rows:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

Keo read it out loud, then handed her the paper. Jordan peered at it, as if she could see more than what was printed on the page. He walked over and glanced into the back of the pickup and saw two more identical pieces of paper inside.

He scooped them up and walked back to her. “Saw them back there earlier, but I thought they were just litter.”

“Mercer?” Jordan said.

“I’d bet my spork on it.”

“So, what, they’re driving around throwing these things out of their car windows? I hope they’re getting good gas mileage, because it’s a big state.”

“They wouldn’t need to hit the entire state; just the areas where they’ve struck. Remember the map from Gregson’s tank? The towns they were attacking were almost entirely clustered around the southeast.” He glanced up at the clear skies. “Besides, maybe they have a better delivery system.”

“Planes?”

“It would take a lot to hide planes from the collaborators for all this time, but they managed exactly that with the tanks and themselves, so maybe…”

Jordan turned the paper over, but it was blank on the other side. “So this is some kind of propaganda?”

“Gregson did say Mercer has a plan. I guess this is part of it.”

“What’s that? Bomb the shit out of people, then ask them to join you?” She stared at the paper. “It says to ‘pick a side,’ but doesn’t say how, or where to go.”

“Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll run into more of Mercer’s people between here and T18, and you can ask them for all the details.”

“Again with the warped definition of luck.” She crumpled the flyer and flung it across the yard with everything she could muster. “So what do you think?”

“About?”

“‘Pick a side.’ What happens if we don’t?”

He didn’t answer right away. Keo had never had any problems choosing sides—it was usually the people who paid him the most. But that kind of no-brainer decision wasn’t going to work anymore. Which was too bad; he liked it better when things were simpler.

“We might not have a choice,” he said. “The people who get hurt the most in a war are usually the ones caught in the middle.”

“Like the civilians in the towns. Like Gillian.”

He nodded.

“There’s some sense to it, I guess,” Jordan said. “What Mercer’s doing. The townspeople would have heard about what had happened to the other places by now. Even if the ones in charge of the towns managed to stick all the survivors from the attacks into a dark room somewhere, there’s still the soldiers. They wouldn’t be able to stop blabbing about it. That’s how it is in T18, and I’m guessing in the other settlements, too: the soldiers are just civilians with uniforms. Most of them are married or living with someone. You’re encouraged to, because being a couple means getting out of the dorms and into your own house.”

“Coupling plus sex equals babies?”

“Pretty much. Anyway, you can’t hide something like this. This kind of news will spread like wildfire.” She paused, then, “What was that Gregson said? Something about letting everyone know there were other things out there scarier than the ghouls? He was talking about them. Mercer’s troops.”

“Sounds like it.”

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About everything. Mercer. This plan of his. The war with the collaborators. All of it.”

Keo shook his head. “I think this Mercer guy knows exactly what he’s doing. Either that, or he’s fucking insane.”

“Can’t it be both?” Jordan asked.

He chuckled. “Definitely.”

* * *

His instincts were to leave as quickly as possible, just in case Marcy and the others did return, but there was still too much of the place left to explore for potential weapons. The optimist in him was hoping to find something useful the collaborators might have forgotten or left behind, maybe either because they were in a hurry or were just clueless. He was, after all, just dealing with, when you got right down to it, conscripted soldiers.

They spent half an hour searching the parts of the farmhouse that they could be sure didn’t have any ghouls hiding inside, including a storage shack in one corner of the property. Inside, Keo found a lot of tools, an old tractor that might have still worked if there were gas, and enough parts to probably make two more of the machine. He also discovered an old, rusted over machete on a shelf near some piles of lug nuts and spare tires.

“Got a knife,” he said when he came back out of the shack.

“Looks more like a sword,” Jordan said.

“Technically a machete.”

“Can you even cut anything with that?”

“Sure, if you hit them hard and often enough,” he said, and switched the machete for her tire iron.

“Aw, you get me all the bestest gifts, Keo.”

“I like to show my appreciation when a woman does me the honor of boinking me in a barn.”

“If I knew boinking guys in barns would get me this much gratitude, I’d have done it throughout college.”

“I have a feeling you didn’t have a lot of problems getting guys to do what you wanted in college, Jordan.”

She smiled at him. “You don’t have to kiss my ass anymore. You already got in my pants, remember?”

“It never hurts to lube up.”

“Sounds like the prelude to something painful.”

He chuckled. “We’ll see.”

“Promises, promises.”

She gave the machete the once-over, then put it through a few practice swings. In the sunlight, the blade was more rusted over than it had looked inside the building, but it was still a decent weapon. Even if that edge couldn’t cut as well as it used to, it was nevertheless going to hurt coming down on an arm or a leg.

“Not bad,” she said when she was done. “If I can’t kill someone with this thing, I can at least give them tetanus.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“So,” she said, fixing him with a serious look. He could tell she had been thinking about it ever since they woke up this morning, and even more since. “After everything we’ve seen—Gregson, those collaborators yesterday, that blue-eyed thing last night—what are the chances we’re going to even make it to Gillian alive, much less actually be in a position to save her when we get there?”

Good question, he thought, and looked around at their surroundings.

It was the same now as the last time he had checked: A flat and open land, and somewhere out there was the highway. The problem wasn’t finding it—just follow the dirt road connected to the house. It was the very long road (and when you were moving on foot, everything took too long) between here and T18 that was going to be a problem.

Marcy and her collaborators were on high alert, if all the firepower he had seen yesterday was any indication. Besides the technicals, they were carrying around LAWs, no doubt as a response to Mercer’s tanks. What were the chances he and Jordan could make it to Tobias, and then Gillian, without ever running across another group of well-armed men with itchy trigger fingers?

You just walked right back into a warzone, pal. Congratulations.

He sighed out loud.

“I take it the chances are pretty piss poor,” Jordan said.

“I’ve been in worse situations,” he said. “Come on; let’s find the highway.”

“There are people with guns and rocket launchers on the highway, remember? Maybe we should stay out of the open as much as possible.”

“Look at you, being all tactical.”

She smirked. “I just don’t wanna get blown up again.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t very fun, was it?” He glanced in the direction of the highway. “I guess we start walking.”

“That’s your big plan?”

“We’ll figure it out between here and there, wherever ‘there’ ends up being for now.”

“I could have come up with that plan,” Jordan said.

“Yup,” he said, and started off.

Jordan followed behind him, and they didn’t say anything for a while. He was hoping it would stay that way, but of course he should have known better.

Less than thirty seconds later, Jordan said, “What are you going to tell Gillian?”

“About what?”

“You and me. Is there a you and me?”

“After last night, you still have to ask?”

“Yes.”

He stopped and looked back at her. “I gave up on Gillian a week ago.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes,” he lied.

He wasn’t entirely sure if she believed him, but she gave him a pursed smile anyway. “I should tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“I expect a promise ring.”

He chuckled. “Will you settle for my letterman jacket?”

“Depends. What did you letter in?”

“Pure badassness.”

“Impressive.”

He smiled and turned around and continued walking. She followed, picking up her pace until she was walking beside him stride for stride.

“It’s going to be a long walk,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working car on the road.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Of course. How do you think I finally landed you?” she said, and smiled at nothing in particular.

28

Gaby

“I see two vehicles,” Nate said. “How many do you see?”

“Two, too,” she said.

He chuckled.

“This isn’t funny, Nate. We’re probably going to die in the next few minutes.”

“Sorry.”

She was crouched beside one of the windows at the front of the hardware store watching the vehicles coming up the street. Nate mirrored her pose on the other side of the building, his breath fogging up the glass surface in front of him. She flexed her fingers around the pistol grip under the barrel of the M4 to keep it from going numb. The weapon had a red dot sight, which was more than good enough for daylight fighting. The dead collaborator she had taken it off had been carrying two extra magazines, and counting the two she already had for the AR-15, gave her a total of five. She’d had to make do with much less.

“Maybe they’ll pass us by,” Nate said.

“Maybe,” she said, though she didn’t believe it for one second.

They were close enough that she could have heard him (and vice versa) even if he were whispering, which he wasn’t because he didn’t have to. The soldiers were still a good hundred yards down the street, and they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

She paid very close attention to the four figures moving on foot as they peeked into windows and kicked in doors on both sides of the street. The vehicles stopped each time they made entry, then resumed when they re-emerged. At this rate, she didn’t think they would reach her and Nate for another half an hour.

They don’t have to rush, because the night belongs to them. They can take all day if they want to.

There was a lone woman among the soldiers, and Gaby watched her breaking a window with the stock of her rifle before peeking inside. It wasn’t much of a search on her part, but she seemed satisfied with it and jogged over to rejoin the others. Gaby didn’t blame her for wanting to stick as close to the weaponized trucks as possible.

“Technicals,” Danny and Will called them. The ones she was looking at were blue and red, and both had machine guns mounted in the back, each one manned by a soldier. They weren’t wearing gas masks, but she could see the breathing apparatuses hanging from their belts as they moved about. She guessed they didn’t need them in daylight, without the ghouls around to mistake them for the enemy.

She was glad to be rid of the mask herself. It sat somewhere on the counter behind her now, along with the uniform of the dead man she had put on last night. All three of them had swapped back into their old clothes, though they had kept everything else, including the rifles, gun belts, and supply pouches. It was more than they’d had even after the trip to Taylor’s cottage outside of Larkin.

“We should have brought lunch,” Nate said.

“I never asked, but can you cook?”

“Hell no. What about you?”

“Why? Because I’m a woman I should know how to cook?”

“Well, yeah.”

She smirked, and he chuckled.

“They sure are taking their sweet time, though,” Nate said, focusing back on the street.

She wasn’t at all concerned with the deliberate speed of the soldiers. It was those machine guns that made her wary. She had seen what kind of damage those things could do up close. Bonnie had become very good with the M240 they had onboard the Trident, and she’d seen the ex-model obliterating targets in the water with one pull of the trigger.

The soldiers were less than fifty yards when she said, “Get ready.”

“Danny?” Nate said.

“Soon.”

“When?”

“He didn’t say. But soon. Just be ready.”

Nate stood up, his body sliding against the wall next to the glass window, and stretched his legs. She did the same thing on her side, extending first her right leg, then her left. Her hands had numbed a bit while waiting, and she forced blood to circulate along the rest of her limbs now.

She zeroed in on the men inside the two vehicles. Only the blue one had another soldier in the front passenger seat besides the driver, and that man was talking into a radio. When he was done, he put it on the dashboard and said something to the man behind the steering wheel. The fact that she hadn’t heard the radio clipped to her hip squawk when the man was using his told her they had, smartly, switched channels after last night.

There were nine of them that she could see—“could see” being the operative phrase. Who knew how many more were further up the street or in other parts of Starch? How many were waiting on the outskirts of town right now, ready to swarm once these nine located their targets? How many were the collaborators committing to flushing them out? Or maybe the better question was, how many could they afford to commit, with Mercer’s people still running around out there?

Even if this was it, nine was still a lot for them to kill. For her to kill. And they’d have to do exactly that to get out of Starch alive. The Trident was waiting for them somewhere out there. They’d never leave until they had exhausted every effort to find them. Danny was right about that. She had seen how long Lara was willing to wait for Will; her friend would never just abandon them after a few days. A few weeks from now might be another story, though.

“Holy shit, is that…” Nate said from across the store.

She turned to him and was about to ask what “that” was when she heard it, too.

It was a slight buzzing sound that came out of nowhere and gradually increased, until she knew exactly where it was coming from: Outside, but more importantly, from above.

Gaby glanced out at the street and saw the soldiers jumping up the sidewalks and seeking shelter against building storefronts. Their heads were upturned and following the object as it glided across the open skies. It was hard to miss, because it was the only unnatural thing up there.

It was a plane.

Round and fat and gray as it moved high above them.

Gaby’s first instincts were similar to the collaborators: Run and hide. She was already hiding, but how much cover would the hardware store provide when that plane started dropping bombs? Or, if it was anything like the Thunderbolts that had laid waste to T29 and the Larkin airfield, started its strafing runs? Anyone outside would be most vulnerable—

Danny.

He was out there, in the open, and was a sitting duck to any type of aerial bombardment. She looked anxiously up at the ceiling, wondering if he had come to the same conclusion as she had, and waited to hear him scrambling around up there, where he had taken up position ever since sunrise filled out Starch.

Except the plane didn’t shoot, even if it did seem to be dropping something out of its belly. White…something was falling in long, jagged lines down to earth from the craft. More than a few of them landed on the rooftops in front of her, some on the streets. One fluttered almost majestically to the sidewalk—

Crack!

The shot had come from above her, from the hardware store’s rooftop.

Danny!

She almost smiled. Of course the ex-Ranger would be the only one to realize the perfect opportunity to strike, while everyone (including her and Nate) were distracted by the appearance of the plane.

She focused back on the street just in time to see the soldier standing behind the machine gun on the blue technical collapse into the truck bed. The weapon he had been manning swiveled as he released it, the muzzle aiming harmlessly up at the cloudless sky.

“Now, Nate, now!” she shouted.

She stepped away from the wall and lifted the M4, lining up the red dot with the soldier standing in the back of the red truck. He was in the process of taking aim at the rooftop of the hardware store with his weapon and was crouching slightly to get a better angle.

Forty yards. Easy shot with a carbine.

She fired, the bullet smashing the window in front of her, and a split-second later the machine gunner disappeared out of her scope.

Then Nate was firing to her left, unloading downrange with three-round bursts. Gaby blocked out his shots and zeroed in on the driver of the red truck. The man had slammed on the gas because the vehicle started lurching forward, picking up speed as it went. Her second bullet drilled through the windshield, spiderwebbing it, and—missed!

Shit!

She scrambled to line up the sight, but before she could squeeze off a frantic make-up shot, the truck’s windshield spiderwebbed again, but this time directly in front of the driver. The man slumped forward into the steering wheel and a loud blaring sound—the horn—filled the air. She waited for the vehicle to stop, but instead it kept coming—straight at her.

“Nate!” she shouted, trying to be heard over his three-round bursts. “Incoming!”

He pulled his eye away from his scope just in time to see the truck. She was already moving even before he did and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that Nate was too smart to stand there and gawk at the technical as it barreled its way up the street at them. She hoped, anyway.

She gripped her rifle with both hands as she swerved around the aisles until, finally, saw the counter at the back. She thought about grabbing the attic door and going up, but there wasn’t going to be enough time. She could already hear the loud roar of the truck’s engine (was it revving?) as it approached the front windows—

The massive crash! she had been waiting for, as the vehicle’s front fender took out the remainder of the glass curtain wall that she and Nate hadn’t already obliterated, along with the door. Her ears rang, even as she heard the continued pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from above her, from Danny as he continued raining fire on the soldiers in the street.

Now, now, now!

She dropped and slid the last few feet along the dirty floor, flinching at the gross image of leftover blood from last night that she was soaking up with her clothes like a sponge. Her slide was true, and she disappeared through the entrance of the back counter at the same time all hell broke loose behind her. Her forward momentum carried her past the counter and she tucked her body into a ball, the rifle clutched against her stomach, and careened into the wall with the back of her neck.

As she unfurled, she found herself with a perfect vantage point to see Nate as he was hopping over another part of the counter in some kind of parkour move she had only seen in the movies. She wasn’t prepared for that. She always knew Nate was athletic and in excellent shape, but she didn’t know he could do that.

Nate landed facefirst, somehow managing to stick out his hands in time before impact, but his rifle wasn’t so lucky, and it clattered loudly as it struck the floor and skidded away. He scrambled to get as far under the countertop as he could manage as glass shards and nails slammed into the wall and fell around them. She thought he had the right idea and scooted forward to be next to him.

He glanced over as the last few items inside the hardware store settled around them, and grinned. She returned it, but their moment was short-lived because gunshots were still ringing out from the street as well as above them, where Danny was still perched—which meant the truck crashing into the building hadn’t brought down the roof.

Thank you, Jesus.

She scrambled up to her knees and looked over the debris-strewn counter. The red technical was buried halfway into the building, tossing shelves and all the abandoned tools on them everywhere. The driver had finally taken his foot off the gas and was nowhere to be found.

“Danny?” Nate said.

She craned her neck as two shots boomed above them, as if on cue.

“Still kicking,” she said, and got up and ran back through the store, skirting around the vehicle that had claimed a large piece of the interior. The crunch-crunch of objects under her boots and from behind her sounded as Nate followed on her heels.

There wasn’t anything left of the storefront, a fact that occurred to her just as she slid to a stop, about the same time a bullet buzzed! past her head and pinged! off the tailgate of the truck behind her. She was standing out in the open with absolutely nothing to hide behind, like an idiot, and Gaby would have dived to the floor for cover if it weren’t covered with sharp chunks of brick and mortar and an ungodly amount of broken glass.

Instead, she turned around as—ping!—another bullet nearly took her head off, but hit and ricocheted off the truck a second time instead.

Pop-pop! from the other side of the truck as Nate opened fire into the street.

She smiled to herself (He’s covering my retreat. God, I think I love this man.) as she ran back to the driver-side door and opened it. A body fell through and slumped on the floor at her feet, but she ignored it and moved behind the broken window. On the other side, Nate had slowed his shots now that she was safe.

She spied a figure moving behind the blue technical still parked in the middle of the street. There were bullet holes in the front windshield, either Danny’s or Nate’s doing, but no signs of the driver. The figure stuck its head out from the back bumper. It was the woman Gaby had seen earlier, and she was lining up a shot at Nate.

Gaby fired twice in the woman’s direction, both rounds hitting the side of the truck, one smashing the back lights. It was enough to drive the woman behind cover before she could pull her own trigger.

The crunk! of a car door opening as Nate followed her example on the other side of the useless vehicle. She looked across the bloody front seats as he slapped a fresh magazine into his M4.

“You okay?” she asked.

He glanced over. “Yeah. You?”

“One piece, thanks to you.”

“Just don’t let it happen again.”

She smiled. “I’ll do what I can.”

When she looked back, the street outside had grown eerily quiet, though she might have heard faded scratching from above her. Danny, maybe moving around for a better shot. He had the high ground because Danny was smart and this was what he did. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have to face him and Will at the same time.

She focused out the smashed front wall of the hardware store and concentrated on the two bodies next to the blue truck—one was on the sidewalk; the other lay almost perfectly in the middle of the two-lane road. Two bodies that she could see, but more that she couldn’t. She knew for a fact there was one body in the back of the red truck she was hiding behind at the moment, and another one at her feet.

Two plus two made four collaborators accounted for.

Then there was the blue truck’s driver and the dead machine gunner in the back.

Two plus four made six.

“Take out the machine gunners first,” Danny had said this morning. “Those bad boys are going to chew us up and spit us out in little vomit chunks if we let them get going.”

So she had waited for Danny to take out his man before she targeted hers while Nate sprayed the street to sow confusion. One of those bodies on the streets might have been his—not that any of them were going to be taking a tally after this.

That left them with three live bodies to account for, including the woman. Unless the passenger of the blue technical was already dead and somewhere on the floor of the vehicle. Then that would leave two. Two or three.

She had to admit, she liked those odds.

Gaby watched and waited. What were the remaining two (or three) going to do now? If they were smart, they’d stay right where they were and radio for backup. Which meant…

She looked into the truck and saw the two-way, covered in blood, on the front passenger seat. She waited for it to squawk, for the soldiers outside to radio for help, because there had to be other collaborators outside Starch at this moment, right? These nine couldn’t possibly be all there were. Maybe—

A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned around in time to see a figure—a man—leaping up the back of the blue truck. He was going for the machine gun. That was the plan, anyway, but the man hadn’t finished throwing his other leg over the tailgate before a shot rang out and he stopped his forward momentum. A second later, he collapsed and disappeared over the back.

“So much for that idea,” Nate said. “One left?”

“Maybe two.”

“You saw two?”

“No, there might be two, but definitely one more. The woman.”

“What’s she going to do now?”

“The smart thing would be to call for help.” Gaby glanced back at the silent radio again.

“You’re assuming they’re sm—” Nate started to say, but he ended up shouting “Shit!” instead as two figures made a run for it on the street.

She stepped sideways, away from the door, and tracked them. She ended up filling her optic with the back of the woman, and fired—and missed again! Her bullet went high, and the woman ducked and turned left—toward the mouth of an alley.

Gaby took her time and fired a second bullet and saw the woman spin in mid-stride.

Gotcha!

Next to her, Nate was shooting, his bullets raking the wall behind the woman, who was still moving despite her wound. A second later the figure disappeared from the sidewalk.

Or not, she thought when there was a single crack! from above them, and the man who had taken off at the same time as the woman stumbled and dropped to the opposite sidewalk, about eighty yards up the street.

“Gaby!” Danny shouted from above them. “Secure Speed Racer!”

Gaby raced out of the building. Nate, as always, was right behind her.

She jogged up the street, waiting for the man to make a move, but he never did. He must have known he wouldn’t have gotten far even if he managed to pick himself up. Gaby peeked at the alleyway where the woman had disappeared just as she ran past it. Splashes of blood on the sidewalk, but no signs of the collaborator.

Pieces of paper, the objects she had seen falling out of the plane earlier, reflected back the sunlight around her, littering the streets, but she didn’t have time to stop and pick one up.

“I got the alley!” Nate shouted behind her.

She continued on toward the wounded soldier alone.

He was lying on the pavement on his back, clutching his right leg. Danny’s shot had gone through his thigh and the collaborator was grimacing in pain. His teeth were clenched, and Gaby wasn’t sure if he was going to curse her or scream for help when she finally reached him. A pool of blood gleamed under him.

“Fancy meeting you here, beautiful,” the man said. “I should have known it’d be you and your little friends running around out here causing trouble again.”

Mason.

Of course he was still alive. The man really was like a cockroach, showing up whenever they least expected him.

“You’re looking well,” he said as she picked up his rifle lying a few feet away. He held his hands up in surrender as she pulled his handgun out of its holster and stepped back.

“Clear!” she shouted.

She took a moment to scan the streets. There was no way someone within miles of them hadn’t heard those back-and-forth volleys. If there were more collaborators around, they would be here within minutes. The fact that they hadn’t shown up yet put her slightly at ease. Maybe Mercer’s attacks had spread them out thinner than she had imagined.

Footsteps behind her, followed by Nate’s voice. “The woman’s gone. You got her good, though. She bled all the way to the back of the alley where she went over a fence.”

“I guess I should have gone left instead of right, huh?” Mason said.

“Guess so,” Nate said. Then, recognizing the man, “Sonofabitch. You again.”

“I’m like Steven Seagal. Hard to kill, even though I’ve been marked for death, under sieged, and have stood on deadly ground many a times before. Get it?”

“Get what?”

“Never mind,” Mason sighed.

More footsteps behind her, then Danny’s voice: “How was my shot?”

“True,” she said.

“That’s how I likes ’em. The other bird?”

“Flew the coop,” Nate said.

“Well, that’s disappointing. I guess it’s true what they say: You want someone dead, you gotta shoot them yourself.”

“What do we do with him?” Gaby asked.

“Good question,” Mason said.

“Shut up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Blue truck’s still good,” Danny said. “We’ll grab Doogie Howser, M.D. here and boogie before more of his friends show up. Nate, salvage what you can.”

Gaby hadn’t looked away from Mason. A part of her thought he might vanish if she turned away for even a second. He had struggled to sit up and was still clutching his leg.

“Why?” Gaby asked.

“Why what?” Mason said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.” She looked back at Danny. “Why are we wasting our time dragging this piece of trash along with us?”

“Hey, come on now, no need for that kind of language,” Mason said.

“Shut the hell up,” she said, and pointed her rifle at him.

He stared defiantly back at her. She could almost believe he wasn’t frightened, but she knew better. He was putting on a good front, but men like Mason didn’t want to die.

“Because he’s still got friends out there,” Danny said. “What are the chances we’re going to get around all of them? Unlikely, and you know how optimistic I can be. But I bet our new friend here’s willing to point out all the ambush spots so we can go around them.”

“And why would I do that?” Mason asked.

“Because if we get caught, you’re going to be the first to go. And I ain’t talkin’ about the bathroom, short stuff. You comprehende my bad Spanishe?”

Mason grinned widely. “Well, you do make a persuasive argument.”

“See? We’re practically BFFs. That’s how I am. I live and let live. There’s even a word for that.”

“Magnanimous?” Mason said.

“No thanks, I just ate.”

Gaby sighed. She didn’t like it. The thought of having to spend another minute around Mason made her queasy, but Danny was right. They needed to get home, which meant making their way back to Port Arthur. There was a lot of highway between them, and with Mercer out there, more dangerous than when they had first traveled the same miles.

Her eyes drifted to the road around them, at the white pieces of paper strewn about, as if someone had dumped their office trash out of a second-floor window. “Danny. The plane. They were dropping paper.”

Danny snatched one up. “You guys littering now?” he asked Mason.

“Not us,” Mason said.

There were large, blocky capital letters on the paper in Danny’s hand, but she couldn’t make out the words over his shoulder.

“What’s it say?” she asked.

He skimmed it, then handed it to her. It looked like some kind of advertising flyer, about half the size of the paper she was used to back in school. The letters were clearly generated by a printer, and they read:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

She returned her gaze to Mason, still sitting on the pavement, either too hurt to try to get up or too afraid of being shot.

“Mercer,” she said.

“Would be my guess,” the man nodded.

“Looks like we got ourselves a regular Hatfields and McCoys situation,” Danny said. “Hide the relatives and pass the ammo. Me personally, I like to stay out of other people’s civil wars.” He looked back at Mason. “So the question of the moment is, how many more of your pals are out there beyond the town limits?”

“This is it,” Mason said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want.” He nodded at the flyer in Gaby’s hand. “We got bigger problems right now. They sent us back here just to see what happened to their friends.”

“Sent you?” Gaby said. “You used to be in charge of a whole town.”

Mason sighed almost wistfully. “Things change, blondie. We’re not in Louisiana anymore. New job, new position. That whole Song Island fiasco messed up my cred with the bosses. I guess you could say I’m back in the mail room.”

“So we won’t run into more of you out there?” Danny asked.

“I didn’t say that. The towns may be on lockdown, but the guys in charge aren’t just going to sit back and wait. It’s the Wild West out there—multiple kill teams running around shooting each other. Theirs and ours. Lucky for you, I know where our guys will be. I know their movements.”

“And Mercer’s peeps?”

Mason shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Danny,” Gaby said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t trust him.”

“We have to,” Danny said. “He gives us a better chance of getting home.” Danny tapped his Sig Sauer for effect when he added, “Of course, for someone with a ten-year-old girl’s body, he’s got a nice big juicy head. I bet I could plug that thing from fifty yards using this here handgun, easy.”

Mason swallowed, but smartly didn’t say anything.

Danny looked over at her. “Let’s go home, kid.”

“What if he’s lying, and he leads us right into a trap?” she asked.

“Then we’ll kill them, along with anyone else who gets in our way,” Danny said, and turned to go.

29

Keo

They had been walking north for the last hour, keeping parallel to the highway about fifty yards to their right while staying out of the open. Unfortunately, that meant traveling across fields of farmland and grass that at times went all the way up to their knees. Fortunately, the land wasn’t fenced off, which saved them the trouble of having to go around each individual property. The extra precaution didn’t make them completely hidden from the road, but it was better than just walking around out there exposed, the way they had done in the truck yesterday. They’d eaten a rocket for that little bout of stupidity.

“Remember what that guy said about Angleton?” Keo said.

“Something about it being dead,” Jordan said. “For a year now. Why?”

“Might be worth looking for supplies there.”

“You really think there’ll be something useful after all this time?”

“Won’t know until we look.”

“But wouldn’t your friend Marcy and her pals have already raided it by now? I got the sense they were based around here.”

“My ‘friend’ Marcy?”

“She did give you back the spork.”

“She gave us back the spork. And as I recall, she threw it into the cage.”

“Probably her idea of foreplay.”

Keo glanced over, not sure if all of this was her way of teasing him or—

She was grinning.

Right. Teasing. Walked right into that one, didn’tcha?

“I’m just messing with you, Keo,” she said. “Have to keep myself entertained somehow.”

“Good to know.”

She shooed away a bug that had launched from one of the sunburnt blades of grass around them and landed on her forehead. “How long have we been walking, anyway?”

“An hour.”

“You sure? It feels like more. By the way, I’m hungry.”

“Too bad, because there’s nothing to eat.”

“Can’t you go, I don’t know, make a trap out of some twigs and catch us a rabbit or something?”

He wished there were something in the endless acres of untended farmland spread out to the left, right, forward, and back of them. He would have settled for a fruit or two. Jordan wasn’t the only one starving this morning.

“What am I, your servant?” he said instead.

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Well that’s disappointing. What kind of relationship can we possibly have if you won’t even go out there and hunt down food for me?”

He chuckled and whirled the tire iron in the air, listening to the whoosh-whoosh it made, the only sound other than their tired footsteps for miles around. The lack of anything made him wonder who the farmhouse they had escaped from belonged to, and why the people had come all the way out here, so far from another living human being.

“Jesus, where is everyone?” Jordan said after a while.

“We’re in the boondocks.”

“This isn’t the boondocks, Keo. This is Mars. Only drier.”

He looked toward the highway. It was flat and empty and cut across the fields, the only stubborn hint of civilization having even reached this far out into the countryside. Like Jordan, he wondered where Marcy and her collaborators had gone to. Was there a city nearby that he didn’t know about or hadn’t seen on the map when they still had one? It would make sense, assuming the machine gunner wasn’t lying when he told Keo Angleton was “dead.”

“I’m hungry,” Jordan said next to him.

“You already said that.”

“I’m starving.”

“I got the gist when you said you were hungry.”

She sighed. “Do something, Keo. Go find a cow and beat it over the head with that tire iron and cook me something to eat.”

He smiled. He would, if he could, but there was nothing around them but unfettered tall grass swaying in the morning breeze. What were the chances there was an animal or two hiding among them? Towns like T18 had their share, but they were far from T18 at the moment.

“Car!” Jordan half-shouted and half-whispered.

He went into a crouch even before Jordan had finished saying the word. She did the same next to him, clutching the machete, the dull brown-colored blade so rusted over he was afraid it might fall apart if she moved it too fast. He changed up his grip on the tire iron, but like the last hour, still found it incredibly lacking.

What’s that old saying? “Don’t bring a tire iron to a gunfight.”

Or something like that.

It was a white Ford truck, overturned in the ditch on the other side of the road, about forty meters in front of them. Its wheels were sticking out just above the grass line, sunlight glinting off their rims. He scanned the empty acres around them but came up as empty now as the last dozen or so times he’d searched for clues of humanity.

He glanced at Jordan. “I’ll go first. Don’t move until you see me reach the other side.”

He expected an argument, a variation of “If you can do it, I can too” girl power nonsense, but Jordan just nodded back.

He must have looked surprised, because she said, “What?”

“Keep an eye out around us, just in case,” he said, then got up and jogged forward, angling right as he went.

He bent over at the waist to lessen his profile as much as possible, but he knew it wouldn’t be nearly enough if someone was out there watching him. The fact that he was wearing dark clothes and moving through a mostly tan/brown sun-scorched field likely didn’t help. He stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Keo breathed easier (though not by much) when he finally reached the ditch on their side. He snapped a glance up, then down the road, saw pieces of glass, metal, and aluminum spread across the pavement, and burnt tire tracks. Sections of the truck had broken loose as the vehicle skidded off the road before finally landing on its roof on the other side. He sniffed freshly spilled gasoline and leaked motor oil, so whatever had happened hadn’t been all that long ago. Maybe even this morning.

He took a breath, then climbed out of the ditch and darted across the road, still keeping himself as low as possible. He waited for gunshots, but they never came. He finally reached the other side and hopped down, breathing with relief when he flattened his back against the cold dirt wall, because no one had fired a shot yet.

He started up the ditch, crunching glass hidden among the thick weeds. There were still no signs of people or blood in the ditch or on the road to his left, and he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad sign. Cars didn’t drive themselves, and they certainly didn’t lose control and overturn without a reason.

Keo stopped for a moment and peeked over the top of the ditch to see Jordan moving steadily from the fields and toward the other side. She finally got there and hopped into the ditch, then peered up and across at him. They exchanged a brief nod.

He continued toward the truck, trying to see as much of the vehicle as possible, but the angle was all wrong and he ended up staring at the bent back bumper and a Texas license plate hanging on by just one remaining screw. He was fully prepared to break someone’s head open with the tire iron should they lunge out at him from the wreckage, but he didn’t have to, no matter how much noise he was making with all the crunching glass under his boots.

When he finally reached the damaged vehicle, Keo sneaked a quick look into the shattered back passenger window by exposing his head for a brief half second before pulling it back and waited for the gunshots that never came.

Breathing easier now, he crouched and took a longer look this time. There was no one inside the back or the front seats. Shredded upholstery, more broken glass, and splashes of blood covered the driver’s seat and front passenger’s. He figured out where most of that blood came from when he spotted the two spiderwebbed bullet holes in the front windshield. There was plenty of evidence that whoever was in the vehicle when it ran off course hadn’t left unscathed, but there were no signs of the people themselves.

Keo stood up and looked around him again. This was the first time he had gotten a good view at the open land on this side of the highway, not that there was much of a difference; it looked just as brown and sun-bleached on this side as it had on the other.

He swept the immediate area around the truck, trying to find traces of where the driver and passenger had gone. There was a lot of blood in the grass around him, but no clear indications the men (or women) had been pulled out and then dragged away.

So where the hell were the bodies?

He turned back to the highway. “Clear,” he said, just loud enough for Jordan to hear.

She climbed out of the ditch. “Bodies?”

“They must have either been thrown clear or taken.”

“Who would take them?”

“I don’t know. But they bled all over the place.”

“I’ll see if they’re back there,” she said. “They might have things we can use, like real weapons.”

“Good luck.”

Keo watched her walking down the highway for a moment before crouching again and pulling open the back driver-side door and crawling inside. He had to pick his way through two dozen or so stray cartridges scattered along the ceiling just to find a couple of empty MRE bags. He could still smell their contents—lasagna in one, mashed potatoes and turkey in the other. His stomach growled at the aroma. Close, but no cigar.

There wasn’t much in the front except some empty water bottles and candy bar wrappers. He spotted more abandoned 5.56 rounds, but no hints of the weapons they were meant to load. The fact that he couldn’t find a single spent shell casing told him the truck’s owners hadn’t fired back when they were ambushed.

And this was definitely an ambush. The only thing that didn’t make any sense was the bodies. Where the hell were the bodies?

“There’s nothing back there,” Jordan said when he crawled back outside the vehicle. She was perched on the highway behind him. “Anything useful?”

“Not a thing.”

“Food?”

“See first answer.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I didn’t completely come back empty-handed,” she said, holding out a familiar piece of white paper—more of the flyers they had found back at the farmhouse, except this one had fresh tire tracks over it. “They’re going to get such a stern talking to when Texas finds out they’re littering out here.”

The white sheet had the same blocky capital letters as the others, and read:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

Keo climbed up from the ditch and stood on the highway. Jordan stretched next to him, then folded the piece of paper and slipped it into her back pocket.

“Are you collecting them now?” he asked.

“I’m going to take a look at them again later.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “There might be a secret code or something we’re just not seeing.”

“Seriously?”

She smiled. “It’ll give me something to do. Better than staring at your ugly face all the time.”

“Damn,” he said.

“Just kidding. Your face is beautiful. Even with all those unsightly things on it.”

She flicked some dirt off his forehead and leaned in and kissed him. She tasted of sun and day-old tuna, but that didn’t stop him from kissing her back. She rubbed her hands playfully against his butt, and he might have thrown her to the highway and had his way with her right then and there if she didn’t pull away, laughing as she did so.

“Let’s make a promise,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Next time, it has to be on a bed.”

“Not a lot of beds around here, Jordan…”

“So when we finally find one, it’ll be even more spectacular.”

“‘Spectacular’?” he smiled. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I never do,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips before looking back down at the truck in the ditch. “So what happened to it?”

He smiled, amused she could switch topics so easily when they were just making out like teenagers a moment ago.

“Bullet holes in the front windshield took out the driver and his passenger,” he said. “Or maybe just the driver, who lost control of the car and ended up there. Same difference.”

“So where are the bodies?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Maybe the animals took them?”

“That’s assuming there are still wild animals out here.”

“There has to be, right? There was that dog back at the beach outside of Sunport. Anyway, who do you think they were?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” He glanced up at the sun and shielded his eyes. “Angleton’s close by. We should hit it before nightfall, then figure out our next move after that.”

“So you’re saying we should be angling toward Angleton?”

She was smiling triumphantly as she said it, and Keo hated himself for not having noticed much, much earlier what a beautiful woman Jordan was. Or maybe he always knew? He remembered really liking her when they had first met outside of Earl’s cabin many months ago, but Gillian had been there at the time. Gillian was still around now, but it wasn’t the same.

He smiled back at her. “Been saving that one up, huh?”

“Just a wee bit,” she said, pinching her fingers together.

He exaggerated an eye roll. “Let’s get going before I throw you more softballs.”

“I love your softballs, Keo. But then, I’ve always had small hands.”

He groaned. “Seriously?”

She laughed. “Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to amuse herself. It’s really, really boring out here.”

“Can I at least be in on the joke, too?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and turned back up the highway.

She took one step, then two, when there was a loud, ear-shattering crack! and Jordan crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut. The painful thump! as her head hit the pavement at the same time he dropped to one knee and grabbed at, and caught, her limp body, the gunshot still echoing all around him—

A second crack! and a bullet zipped! past his head, so close that he swore his left ear was left flaming hot in the aftermath of the near miss.

He should be running, heading for cover, anything to get out of the open, but instead he dropped the tire iron and frantically slipped both hands under Jordan’s armpits and began dragging her sagging body backward. His body screamed with pain, and both arms threatened to fall off again. It seemed to take forever (Jesus Christ, how long was this goddamn road?) before he finally reached the other side, and he deposited both of them into the ditch, gasping for breath as he landed on the cold soft dirt, Jordan’s body twumping next to his.

He crawled over and grabbed her, suddenly aware that his clothes were clinging to his chest and sticky with blood. Was he bleeding? No. It wasn’t his. It was Jordan’s. It was all Jordan’s. She was struggling to breathe, her eyes blinking uncontrollably, fading brown eyes snapping frantically all around until they finally found his face.

He smiled down at her. Or tried to. “You’ll be all right. Gotta find the wound and patch you up. Give me a second, okay?”

She didn’t answer, even though her lips were quivering, as if constantly on the verge of making a sound but never succeeding. Her face was impossibly pale, every inch of her body trembling in his lap.

He couldn’t find the bullet hole in her jacket through all the blood, so he had to unzip it and pull it off her. There, the source of all the bleeding, just over her left breast. The bullet was still in there somewhere, pumping blood out through the single wound.

There was so much blood. Jesus, why was there so much blood?

Keo picked her jacket back up and pushed it against her chest. She seemed to seize up, maybe from the pressure he was putting on her, but he didn’t ease up because the bleeding needed to be stopped at all costs.

“Shoot for center mass. Then take out the brain to make sure.”

Everyone knew that, from the cops to the military grunts to guys like him. You always shot for center mass—the chest—to get the target down, then you finished him off with a head shot. It was SOP. Whoever was out there—whoever had taken the shot—had done exactly that.

Jordan continued to blink up at him, and there was a hollowness to her eyes that didn’t belong. The Jordan he knew—who had kept her friends alive after the end of the world, who had saved his miserable life last night—was full of life. But he didn’t see that right now. There was only sadness looking back up at him.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve stopped the bleeding. No one boinks me in a barn and gets to just run away.”

Her eyes widened, that familiar Jordan life coming back, if just for a split second, and her lips somehow managed to form a smile.

He returned it, or thought he did. He focused on her eyes, on her pained face, and forgot (and didn’t care) to react to the pounding footsteps crossing the highway, just a few seconds before a figure leaped into the ditch in front of him.

He heard similar sounds behind him and knew another one was back there.

“Shit, got one,” a voice said. Male. Young. Keo could practically feel the giddiness dripping from his every word.

He tore his eyes away from Jordan’s paling face and looked up as a man (boy) moved cautiously toward him. He had black, brown, and green paint over his face and was wearing some kind of Ghillie suit stuffed with brown straw and grass. He was cradling an AR-15 with a large scope on top, the weapon covered in the same camo pattern as his face. A gun belt, with a holstered sidearm, stuck out of his right hip.

“Don’t fucking move,” the man said. He was trying to sound menacing and doing a poor job of it. Despite the face paint, he couldn’t have been more than twenty.

Behind Keo, the second ambusher shuffled closer, too.

Keo looked back down at Jordan, at the thin smile frozen on her lips. There was a peaceful expression on her face, belying the fact she had just been shot in the chest and had bled enough for both of them.

The man in front of him leaned forward and peeked down at Jordan. “Dead center, Bill. Nice shot.”

Bill, the man behind Keo, said, “Told you. And yours went wide.”

“Not my fault; he dropped on me.”

“What’s that, two for me and one for you?”

“Sounds right.”

“You see a uniform on them?”

“Nope,” the one in front of him said. “Civilian?”

“Don’t take any chances. These collaborators can be sneaky.”

They’re Mercer’s men, Keo thought as he listened to their back and forth.

But even as his mind processed that information, he couldn’t take his eyes off Jordan, lying in his lap. Her body had gone completely still, but her face remained serene as he stroked her cheeks and brushed at strings of tears falling from the corners of her eyes. There was blood on her lips, and he thumbed them away gently.

He sighed and closed his eyes. Just for a brief second.

When he opened them again, he focused on his surroundings. The young one in front of him, the older-sounding one behind him. The soft wind blowing through the fields around all three of them, causing the grass to sway to his left and skirting across the highway to his right, picking up some of the debris from the crash. But most of all, the bright red of Jordan’s blood on his hands, sticking to his fingers.

“The flyer,” Keo said.

“What?” the young one said.

“The flyer,” he said again, pulling the piece of paper out of Jordan’s back pocket and holding it up. It was wet with her blood.

The one in front of him took two steps forward and snatched the paper out of Keo’s hand. He flicked it open, glanced at it once, then looked past Keo at Bill. “It’s one of ours.”

“‘Join the fight to take back Texas,’” Keo said. “‘War is here. Pick a side.’ That’s what we did. We picked a side.”

“The fuck is he saying, Luke?” Bill asked.

“It’s from the flyer,” the man named Luke said, holding the paper, covered in Jordan’s blood and tire tracks, up for the other man to see. “I guess he’s saying he came looking for us, to sign up?”

“Bullshit. It’s a trick.”

Luke had let both arms drop to his sides, including the right hand with the AR-15. “But that’s why we dropped them in the first place, right? To get recruits?”

“They didn’t say anything about bringing in recruits,” Bill said. “That’s not our job.”

Keo wondered how much older Bill was compared to Luke. Maybe he should interject, say something to help push Luke along. He had a feeling whether he lived or died was going to be decided in the next few seconds, and Luke was going to play a very big part of it.

“Yeah, but the flyer,” Luke said, holding it up again.

Bill sighed. “Shit.” Then, clearly annoyed, “You checked him for weapons?”

“He only had that tire iron, and he dropped it back on the road.” He looked down at Keo. “So, you wanna join up, huh?”

Keo ignored his question, and said instead, “I need help with her.”

“What for? She’s dead.”

“She’s still alive.”

“No way.” Luke leaned in to get a better look. He was close enough Keo could smell dirt and sweat on his body underneath the Ghillie suit. “You sure?”

“She’s still alive,” Keo said, looking up at him. “I stopped the bleeding, but I need to dress the wound. The bullet missed vital organs, from what I can tell. You got a first-aid kit?”

“Damn,” Luke said, and slung his rifle.

“What are you doing?” Bill asked, alarmed.

“Relax; I told you, he’s unarmed,” Luke said. “I was watching him the whole time, remember?”

“Be careful.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The young man knelt in front of Keo and reached into one of the pouches along his belt. He leaned in closer to get a better look at Jordan at the same time. “You sure she’s even breathing, man?”

“Dammit, kid, don’t get too close,” Bill said.

Luke might have been on the verge of saying something back, but he never got the chance because Keo brought out his right hand, the one with the spork, and jammed it into the side of Luke’s neck.

“Fuck!” Bill shouted.

Keo lunged forward while simultaneously pulling Luke toward him, using the handle of the lodged spork as leverage. He jerked his legs out from under Jordan’s limp form and slid behind Luke.

“Fuck!” Bill shouted again.

Keo slid one arm around Luke’s neck, clamping his struggling body against his own, while his right hand dropped to Luke’s hip, blood-covered fingers searching out the young man’s holstered gun among the grass and straws.

“Let him go!” Bill shouted.

Bill had lifted his rifle—another AR-15—and was shuffling his feet less than two meters away. Keo hadn’t realized how close the man had been to him. Bill was wearing a Ghillie suit that was almost identical to Luke’s, and his face was covered in the same camo pattern. He clutched and unclutched his rifle even as he swayed left and right, trying to line up a shot on Keo.

But Bill didn’t shoot, because Keo was using Luke as a shield and doing everything possible not to expose his head for a clear shot. Luke’s body spasmed uncontrollably in front of him, the younger man’s hands groping for the spork sticking out of the side of his throat like some cancerous appendage.

By the time Bill realized what Keo was doing, Keo already had Luke’s gun out of its holster. Bill finally fired—and struck Luke in the stomach. Keo didn’t give him the chance to pull the trigger again and shot Bill in the chest with the handgun. He didn’t stop shooting until Bill had collapsed to the ditch floor on his face.

Keo finally allowed himself to breathe again, the gun still pointed, and watched Bill’s body the entire time, in case the guy was wearing some kind of bulletproof vest underneath his suit and tried to get back up.

A second, then two—before Keo shot Bill in the top of his exposed head just to make sure.

Satisfied now that Bill wasn’t getting back up, Keo sat down and pushed Luke off him with one of his boots. The body careened forward and landed on its stomach, mirroring Bill’s posture in front of them. Keo lay down and stared up at the sun, and inhaled in and exhaled out the chilly winter air in silence.

He didn’t know how long he stayed down, blinking up at the clear skies. It could have been a few seconds, or a few minutes, or possibly a few hours.

Finally, he sat back up, then crawled over to Jordan and knelt next to her. She still had that strangely contented look on her face, and if not for all the blood and the balled up jacket crushed against her chest, he might have been able to convince himself she was just asleep.

He stole a quick look up at the sun again. He had plenty of hours left, but it wouldn’t last.

Nothing ever did, these days.

* * *

He left Luke and Bill in the ditch and carried Jordan into the fields about fifty meters from the highway before digging a shallow grave using two Ka-Bar knives he’d salvaged from the dead men. It took longer than expected, and his palms were raw and blistered by the time he was done. He buried Jordan and covered her up to keep any animals that might still be roaming around out there from getting to her, then sat down next to her grave for about half an hour, with just the silence and the wind to keep him company.

Afterward, he walked back to the bodies and went through their pockets. They were carrying identical AR-15s, each one mounted with a large scope for long-distance shooting. He slung Bill’s rifle, then threw Luke’s as far into the grass as he could. He had a feeling he had a long walk ahead of him, and each rifle was already at least seven pounds of extra weight. He slapped on a gun belt, then put the Sig Sauer he had taken from Luke in the holster. Keo pulled the spork out of Luke’s neck and wiped off the blood, then pocketed it. The damn thing had saved his life twice now; the least he could do was keep it around.

He couldn’t find any tactical packs on either men, which meant they had left them behind somewhere. Keo climbed back up to the highway and reoriented himself, remembering where he and Jordan had been standing when the shots came. Then he backtracked the source of the gunshots into the endless fields and kept walking until he found two camouflage packs among the grass about 150 meters away.

He unzipped them one by one, pulling out MREs, canned beans, and extra magazines. They were both too heavy to take, so he tossed most of the canned goods and extra ammo and kept just the MREs and the spare magazines he could carry without overburdening himself. The load was still too heavy, but he figured it’d get lighter as he used up the supplies along the way. If not, he’d just eject what he didn’t need, as needed.

He spent another hour looking for Luke and Bill’s vehicle. He was sure it was out there somewhere, like their packs. They couldn’t have humped all the way out here on foot, could they? It was possible, but where would they have stayed last night? He was obviously dealing with a two-man kill team. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn there were identical squads crawling all over Texas at the moment, making life miserable for the collaborators.

But despite his confidence, he didn’t find a vehicle anywhere in the vicinity. Either the men had hidden it too well, or they really had been dropped off. Both were possible, and neither one did him any good at the moment. He considered expanding his search range, but that would have taken much too long, and time was, as always, not on his side.

Keo walked about a mile up the highway, sticking to the ditch alongside it to stay mostly hidden, before finally stopping when his stomach growled again. He took a break and opened one of the cans, devouring the beans inside using the spork. He noticed there was still blood along one of the tines but ignored it.

He opened one of the pouches around his waist and took out the map he had spotted earlier while removing the belt from Luke. It was heavily marked, with collaborator towns circled in red ink, including T18 just outside of League City. The new map was almost identical to the one he had taken from Gregson, but with a few notable additions. One had a rough drawing of a star within a circle next to a town called Larkin, Texas. A second star-within-a-circle marked Lochlyn, about twenty miles northwest of his current location. As far as he could tell, Lochlyn was a small place in the middle of nowhere. Both new locations had crude drawings of planes next to them.

Airfields. That’s how they’re getting in and out of Texas. Using private, isolated airfields hidden in the countryside.

He glanced up at the sky, then down at his watch. Five hours of sunlight left. If he didn’t stop to rest again, he could easily make Lochlyn before nightfall.

And then what?

He had limited options, but one of them was to continue on to T18 and try to rescue Gillian, which would mean fighting his way back into a town he had already barely survived the first time. But she was in there, and she was in danger, and goddammit, he owed it to her and Jordan to get her out before Mercer’s people attacked again.

What was the alternative?

Go to Lochlyn, find Mercer, and kill him.

If the man was even there, and if putting a bullet between Mercer’s eyes stopped this—whatever “this” was. But then again, what was a snake without its head? If killing Mercer stopped the war, then Gillian would be safe. Her and the baby and (Fuck you) Jay.

Two possibilities. Two directions. They weren’t much, but there it was.

Lochlyn was closer, but what were the odds Mercer was even there? Fifty-fifty? Ten-ninety, against? Maybe he’d get to Lochlyn and there wouldn’t be anyone there at all. Those plane markers, for all he knew, could have just been doodling, Luke’s way of passing the time.

The odds that Mercer was even there, that killing him would change anything, was slim. On the other hand, getting back into T18—even with Tobias’s help—and rescuing Gillian while the town was on lockdown was going to be a hell of a feat.

Shit. It was bad odds either way.

But he’d had worse.

He checked his watch again.

Keo got up, tossed away the empty can of beans, and climbed out of the ditch, jogging across the highway.

Fuck it, he thought as he headed northwest.

Epilogue

“Irony”?

Was that the word? Sometimes he had difficulty grasping the easiest things. He blamed it on having too many voices inhabiting the same space inside his head, an unending tide of chatter, almost like being stuck in a small box with a few million other people, but maybe the answer was simpler. A lack of focus on things that didn’t matter, that was pushed into the background, because everything else in the forefront was crucial to his survival.

Maybe the word he was looking for was “poetic.”

Or “tragic.”

It had to be one of those. Sooner or later, it would come to him. It always did.

Just like how they had led him here. He hadn’t expected it, but here he was. He’d killed the two blue eyes outside of Starch, decapitated them in the woods and left their bodies to be found far, far from this place. It hadn’t been easy, and they had gotten their shots in, but he was always good at surviving.

Adapt or perish, someone once said.

The night had dragged on, and through the seemingly endless throng of black eyes, he had arrived—hurt, bleeding, and badly in need of extra nights of healing. So what else was new? It seemed like that was all he did these days: fight, survive, and rest, in order to do it all over again.

He had abandoned his mission, left Keo and the woman to fend for themselves somewhere out there in the world. There hadn’t been any choice, because Danny was in danger. He and Gaby, and the boy, Nate. But Keo was still alive. He could feel him out there, somewhere. The connection wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but it was good enough.

And there was Mercer. Once a potential ally in possession of an army, with airpower and armor at his disposal. A plan months in the plotting (“You’re with us, or you’re against us.”). Except Mercer wasn’t the answer he had been hoping for. No, Mercer was dangerous. Too dangerous to trust her with.

She was still out there, maybe still waiting for him. He wouldn’t blame her if she had given up. It had been days. Weeks? Months? It might have been months. It was sometimes difficult to keep track of the days and nights, because the days tended to blur by when all he could see whenever he opened his eyes was darkness.

But he had arrived at this place, where all the answers he had been searching for were waiting for him. The blue eyes had given it away. They thought they were hunting him, when in truth it was the other way around. Oh, they hadn’t wanted to, and they fought tooth and nail, but there were ways around that.

This was where it had all started, with that night in the dilapidated apartment building where he found salvation in a pair of silver crosses, just as he needed them the most. A sign from God, or just coincidence? He still didn’t know. Did God even exist? If the devil did, then shouldn’t God, too?

He slid carefully along the rooftop and lowered himself to the edge. The hulking shape of the highway, flat gray in the moonlight, impeded his vision. Metal, plastic, and aluminum carcasses of objects that no longer had any uses covered the mighty structure from end to end. And there, in the background, all the familiar buildings, the skyscrapers, the homes and offices of people who once called this place home.

Ironic.

That was the word he was searching for. It was ironic that he would end up back here, after all the months of running away from it.

Here, back at the heart of the infestation.

Back here, where the longest night of his life occurred, where he and Danny fought for hours to escape the hordes of undead.

Here. In this city. He was in there, somewhere.

Mabry.

The streets and highways and buildings were crammed with them. He was far enough beyond their reach that they couldn’t see or sense or smell him, but he would never be able to get any closer than he was now. They would guard Mabry with their lives, keep him from prying eyes night and day. The blue eyes were in there, too. He couldn’t fight them all, even if he was at full strength.

At least, not alone.

He could already feel Mabry stirring, sensing his nearness. How did he know? Because he was everywhere, and nowhere. Except that wasn’t true anymore. Mabry was somewhere. He was here.

He turned and fled, leaping across rooftops, avoiding the black eyes below. All it would take was for one of them to look up and see him, and they’d swarm. He would never make it out alive.

Two rooftops, three…and the voices remained silent inside his head, a good sign he was still undiscovered. Faster and further. He had to keep going. Keep moving. It wasn’t safe here, not this close to Mabry.

He was bleeding again, the constant motion draining him, slowing him down with every step, every jump, every rooftop. He couldn’t allow that. Weakness lowered his guard, and he needed the mental walls even more now to keep back the voices, to stay beyond Mabry’s reach.

Rest. He needed to rest, and sleep, and heal.

He slowed only after he had left the world of brick and concrete behind and could feel soft earth under his feet. Gray gave way to green as he went deeper, and deeper still, into the woods.

Rest. He needed to rest.

And heal…

* * *

“Why do you fight?”

Mabry. Calling out to him, trying to get him to reveal himself. He maintained the wall, but there was no denying Mabry’s voice. It burrowed deep, despite all his best attempts to drown it in memories of his old life, of her...

“You must know by now. There’s no point.”

He concentrated on the worms crawling over his arms and legs. Slippery things. Wet. Once upon a time, he would have been disgusted. Now, they were his daily companion.

“She’ll never accept you. None of them will.”

His eyes snapped open. Footsteps—a flood of bare feet—directly above him. Mabry’s scouts, spreading out into the darkness of the woods. Had Mabry sensed his closeness after all? Was he exposed? Something that might have been panic (or maybe just memories of what panic was) flooded his senses.

“But Kate was right about you.”

No, it was just a false alarm. The black eyes had continued into the woods, the tremors across the ground signaling their passing. It took a while because there were so many of them, but eventually, eventually they faded, until there was just the peace and quiet again.

“Your knack for survival is uncanny.”

He closed his eyes and raised extra mental defenses. He could feel Mabry groping at the corners of his mind. Close, so close, but still searching blind.

“You won’t give up, will you?”

Sleep. Rest. Heal.

“You’ll never give up.”

Soon, very soon, he would come face-to-face with the monster, and he would either slay him or be slayed by him. Soon, very soon, the end would come, and he would either rise victorious or fall. But he had to try. Because too many lives were at stake, especially hers. He would do anything—everything—to protect her, even if he couldn’t stand side by side with her when it was over.

“You’ll fight as long as there’s a breath in your body.”

Mabry was becoming agitated, scouring the connections between the brood with renewed intensity. Because Mabry was the constant voice, the hand that guided them (me) and soothed their worries. Without him, they (we) would be mindless things. Husks.

“You would have been such a worthy successor.”

Mabry was the beginning, and the end.

“Someone to carry on my legacy.”

The everything, and the nothing.

“Alas, alas…”

He was everywhere, and nowhere.

But that last part wasn’t true anymore, because he knew exactly where Mabry was now. The dying blue eyes had led him right to his doorstep.

Here, back in Houston, where it had begun almost a year ago.

Mabry was in there, somewhere.

Sleeping.

Hiding.

And very, very vulnerable…

About The Horns of Avalon

Copyright (c) 2016 Sam Sisavath

Some battles are still worth fighting.

Killing has never been something Keo shied away from, but the events of the last year have made him rethink his bloody past. Except nothing lasts forever. Now, Keo has embraced his old ways and set his sights on a new target—and there is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.

For Lara and those on the Trident, an encounter with a new group of survivors pulls them even further off course. It doesn’t seem to matter how hard Lara tries to steer clear of Mercer’s war on the ghouls; fate seems intent on drawing her into the conflict.

Meanwhile, the fighting rages in Texas, with Mercer’s kill teams roaming the land and collaborators on war footing. Caught in the middle, Danny, Gaby, and Nate are desperate to reach the coast, but find themselves pawns in a nightmarish game of cat and mouse instead.

In this penultimate volume in The Purge of Babylon series, loyalties will be tested and destinies embraced, and the road to salvation will finally be revealed to those brave enough to answer the call of the Horns…

Prologue

“Facebook.”

“Facebook?”

“Yeah, Facebook. Twitter. Pinterest. Basically, all of social media.”

“I never had much use for social media.”

“That’s because you’re old.”

“I’m not that old.”

“You’re pretty old.”

He grunted. “Get off my lawn.”

She giggled. It was barely audible, and he enjoyed seeing her act like such a kid again, so why did it make him wince just a little bit?

Because there are undead things all around us. Everywhere. They could be hiding under us right this moment.

Great, Riley, freak yourself out some more, why don’t ya.

He was glad for the darkness, because it meant Hannah couldn’t see the hairs along his arms standing up. After all, he was supposed to be the confident one, the adult that got things done. It wouldn’t have benefited either one of them if she saw through that charade over some inane chitchat about what they missed most about the old world.

“What are you going to miss?” she asked.

It was a good question. He hadn’t thought much about it; staying alive in the here and now had always been more important. Hannah waited, arms clenched tightly around knees pulled up to her chest, but he could tell his answers were less important to her than the act of (hushed whispers) speaking, their little rebellion against the cold nights and the things that moved within them.

Out there, somewhere…

Always out there…

He fought back another shiver and finally said, “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought much about it.”

“Taco Bell,” Hannah said.

“Taco Bell?”

“I love Taco Bell. Their breakfast menu is to die for. Let me guess: You’re a McDonald’s guy?”

“Neither.”

“Neither?”

“Neither.”

“That’s a first…”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve never met someone who wasn’t either a Taco Bell or a McDonald’s guy. I did meet this one dude who liked both, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like either.”

“You need to expand your circle of friends.”

“I guess.” Then, “Too late for that now.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

He searched out Hannah’s form in the blackness but could just barely make out her outline. He only knew where to look because she hadn’t moved from the spot she had settled down in, back when there was still light out. This, despite the fact that they were barely five feet apart. There was a time when that distance would be wider, but those nights were long gone. Now, if he didn’t reflexively sit down next to her, she would do it.

Strength in numbers.

And dwindling, fast…

“Are they gone?” she whispered, her voice dropping noticeably.

He didn’t need to think about the question because there was only one they out there, right now…

He nodded before realizing she probably couldn’t see despite their close proximity. There was a lonely sliver of moonlight somewhere in the back of the room, but they had made sure to stay away from it. Sometimes the creatures moved across rooftops, and even a small, barely inch-wide hole was too much to risk. After all they’d gone through to survive when so many hadn’t, he wasn’t going to take any chances now.

Stay alive. Just stay alive…

“I think so,” he whispered, matching her pitch.

As soon as the words left his lips, he clutched the shotgun tighter. Two months ago he’d never fired a gun, much less owned one, but now he had three on him. Hannah, meanwhile, carried a small pistol. He had debated about giving a weapon to the sixteen-year-old but eventually caved. She was still uncomfortable around the handgun and rarely drew it, and he never told her it was the same with him.

“I thought they’d never leave,” Hannah said. “Do you think they know we’re up here? Is that why they were inside the house?”

“I don’t know. We were careful…”

“We were really careful.”

“We were,” he nodded again, hoping that would reassure her. “We’ll be fine. We’ve gotten this far, right?”

“Right,” she said softly.

“We just have to stick together.”

“Stick together…”

“Hannah…”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a McDonald’s breakfast guy. Hotcakes and sausage all the way.”

“I knew it,” she said, and chuckled softly.

He could just make out the outlines of her shoulders as they drooped slightly, a sign she was finally relaxing after being so tense for much of the night. He had to look around the floor before he could make out the trapdoor about six feet in front of him. The attic was poorly insulated and the outside chill seeped through the boards. It was a good thing they had taken precautions and raided an Archers earlier today for new—thicker—winter clothing.

“Shopping rocks,” Hannah had said, and he had beamed because seeing her happy and carefree was such a rare thing these days.

Despite staring at her for the last five minutes, Riley couldn’t be sure if she had gone to sleep or was just leaning against the wall to rest. Hannah could sleep anywhere, so he wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the former, especially in this attic where they had spent the last three nights huddled inside. Sometimes he wondered if that was a mistake, that maybe the smarter thing was to keep moving.

But go where? There was nowhere to go. Absolutely nowhere.

The city was overrun. The state, too. Maybe even the entire country.

The world…

Jesus, cut it out. Stop filling your head with things you can’t change, you idiot.

Concentrate on the now—and right now this little girl is depending on you to keep your head in the present.

His hands had gone numb from gripping the shotgun so tight, and it took some effort for Riley to unclench them. He did it one finger at a time, until he could feel the blood circulating freely through all ten digits again.

Better…

He didn’t even know why he was carrying around so many guns. It wasn’t like shooting them did any good. The damn things didn’t die even after you blew their whole head off. He knew because he had done that, and watched with his jaw on the floor as it kept coming like something out of a nightmare. A blood-soaked goddamn nightmare.

When he could hear the telltale signs of Hannah’s sleep-induced breathing, Riley allowed himself to finally close his eyes and lean back against the wall. In the first few nights of the end of the world he’d heard a lot of gunfire, sounds of survivors like him and Hannah fighting back. But then they’d all faded, until there were only the endless silent nights like the one he was listening to right now.

It was hauntingly serene, even soothing, and at the same time terrifying.

* * *

The welcoming warmth of morning had filled the attic while he had his eyes closed, and his loud yawning woke Hannah, who lay next to him. Her long, dirty hair cascaded over half her face, and she swiped at it before smiling across at him.

“We made it,” she said.

“Of course.” He smiled back. “I never had any doubts.”

“None?”

“Not a one.”

Her face darkened a bit. “Was it just me, or did they sound closer last night?”

They were definitely closer, and they stayed longer than the other times, he thought, but said, “Closer schmoser. It’s morning. Let’s go enjoy the sunlight.”

“My favorite part of every day!” she said, her voice purposefully loud, as if she had been holding the volume back all night—which, he guessed, was true.

He got up and moved around to get the blood flowing to all of his extremities again. The attic was big enough that he could stretch to his full six-one height with plenty of space to spare. Hannah, all five-three of her, never had to worry about cramming into a small corner. He always did his best to find them a hiding place with enough room for both of them to be comfortable, but that wasn’t always possible. This attic had been a godsend—not to mention all the supplies packed into the house’s pantries underneath it. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling it was a mistake to have stayed here for three straight nights. That was usually one night longer than he was comfortable with.

Stop it. You’re alive. Hannah’s alive. That’s all that matters…

Riley slung his shotgun and walked to the trapdoor. He crouched and eased it open before sticking his head forward and breathing in the fresh air.

“Smell good?” Hannah asked behind him.

“Like a nice Big Breakfast platter at Mickey D’s.”

“Taco Bell all the way, baby.”

“Pfft,” he said, exaggerating the smirk before pulling back the collapsible ladder and extending it below. “Ladies first.”

“Since when am I a lady?”

“Close enough. Now come on, down you go.”

She leaned over the opening and took a long look at the second floor hallway below, just the way they had practiced. The room was lit up by a pool of light that reflected off her slightly grimy face, and Riley wondered what he looked like at the moment. He hadn’t showered in…God, he couldn’t remember. It didn’t help that he had been wearing the same clothes for just as long. The only saving grace was that both he and Hannah had gone smell blind a long time ago.

“Clear?” he asked.

“Looks clear,” she said.

“Be certain.”

“I’m certain. Pretty certain.”

“Pretty certain or just certain?”

She snorted. “Pretty certain, certain.”

“Good enough.”

He watched the girl climb down, then heard the thump as she jumped the last few steps to the hallway below.

“Hey,” he called after her.

“What?” she said from below.

“Don’t wander off.”

“I’m just standing here waiting for you, dude. Can you please hurry it up already?”

He smiled. Hannah had called him dude for three weeks after they first met, before one day she started using Riley. Now it was back and forth between the two, depending on how annoyed she was with him, like she was now.

He had turned around to position himself on the stairs to follow her down when he heard footsteps below him. “Hannah,” he said, slightly alarmed.

“What?” she called back from below.

“Strength in numbers, remember?”

“I’m just going to get my stuff in the bedroom.”

“Hannah, wait for me.”

She didn’t answer, which prompted him to hop the last six feet down the ladder and land in a crouch. Riley had never been particularly athletic, but he’d since discovered some modicum of athleticism he didn’t know existed. He wasn’t going to take on Michael Jordan at the Y anytime soon, but he was doing things now he never thought he would—or could—do before the world decided to stop making sense.

He was straightening up, hands groping for the shotgun slung over his back, when he looked up the hallway and saw Hannah with one hand on the doorknob of the master bedroom. She had already pushed it open, and he glimpsed pitch darkness on the other side that immediately set alarms off inside his head because it shouldn’t have been that dark in there.

“Hannah!” he shouted.

She stopped and looked back, and a smile flashed across her face. Even with all that dirt, he thought she looked cherubic—sweet and innocent. Hannah was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, and though Riley never had any siblings—

“Hannah—” he said again when he saw the shadows in the master bedroom, barely visible through the small slit in the ajar door, move.

She must have either heard or smelled them, because she turned around at almost the exact same moment it reached out—a deformed hand, bony fingers uncurling—and grabbed her around the ankle. The acidic stench of searing flesh filled the hallway almost immediately as the exposed part of the creature’s skin turned to white ash against the sunlight, and Riley thought he might have heard something that sounded like a squeal of pain from inside the room, but all of that was lost against Hannah’s screaming. She might have started out trying to yell his name, but it quickly became lost in a long cry that filled the entire house.

Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus blurred across his mind as a second hand reached out and long, bony fingers wrapped around Hannah’s other ankle. The flesh on the second hand burned off as it made contact with the sunlight, but even as clouds of white-gray ash filled the hallway, both hands tightened their grip around Hannah’s legs and the creatures pulled her in—

“Hannah!”

It took him less than a couple of seconds to cross the second floor, but even as he launched himself into a run he knew—deep down, he just knew—that it was too late. She was already down, and they were pulling her along the wooden floor. The last he saw of her was Hannah, on her stomach, staring back at him with impossibly wide eyes as she tried in vain to grab the sides of the bedroom door. There was a look on her face, an expression he had first seen during that night when they found each other for the first time as the world died around them.

It had taken him weeks to figure out the story behind it because he didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to intrude on her innermost thoughts. Finally, one night, he saw it again—just a quick there-and-gone glimpse—but it was long enough for him to understand.

It was sadness.

Hannah was sad. For her loss. For his. For the world’s.

She had that same look on her face now as she lost her hold on the doorframe and—

She was gone.

He slid to a stop in front of the open door, sneakers squeaking loudly, but not enough to drown out the pounding in his chest or the constant refrain of Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus running through his head.

They were inside the master bedroom, so many that he couldn’t tell where they began and the walls and floor ended. They had covered the windows with bedsheets and blankets, and the small horde of creatures were focused in the very middle, far from the small streaks of sunlight that had managed to badger their way into the room anyway. Their backs were exposed to him, deformed spines prickling against films of flesh that barely resembled skin. The overwhelming stench, like vomit left to roast in the sun, made him gag and take a step back.

But he didn’t retreat far enough to avoid seeing one of her legs sticking out of the pile of feeding monsters. She had stopped moving, and the only sound aside from the crash of his runaway heartbeat was the unforgiving slurp-slurp-slurp.

He fired the shotgun, racked it, and fired again.

One of them glanced back at him, its hollowed obsidian eyes surrounded by pruned flesh. It looked almost annoyed, the clump-clump of coagulated blood dripping out of the hole he had made in its right shoulder.

Then it turned back around and bent its head and resumed feeding.

He racked the shotgun and fired again, this time aiming for the head of the closest one. It flopped forward but picked itself up, moving unsteadily with the top of its head mostly gone. Unlike the previous one, this creature didn’t bother to cast him an annoyed glance.

Riley stumbled back, back, every step like pedaling through quicksand, the (Useless. It’s useless!) weapon in his hands impossibly heavy. What good was a gun if it couldn’t kill these things? Why did he carry so many on him? Why did he spend so much time arguing with himself about letting her carry a small pistol—

Hannah.

Jesus, Hannah, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

He turned, groping the walls for support, and staggered his way down the length of the hallway. There was no railing, or he might have keeled over it and plummeted to his death below. Maybe that would have been the humane thing—the right thing—to do. At least it would prevent him from replaying the look on Hannah’s face—that odd expression of sadness—as she realized what was about to happen in the split second before it did.

He fumbled down the stairs, not sure how he was able to keep from falling—clutching to the banister with an iron grip probably helped—while dragging the shotgun behind him, the weapon clacking and thumping against every carpeted step, still connected to him by the long strap.

The first floor was covered in swaths of sunlight, the air so warm that when it hit him it was like moving through an inferno. There were signs everywhere that they had been inside the house while he and Hannah had hidden in the attic. It was in the air (The smell. God, the smell!) and the toppled furniture, the open door, and the broken windows. But they had been here the previous nights, too, and always left. So why didn’t they leave this time?

He was blaming them—the creatures—when he should be blaming himself. Because he should have known better than to spend three nights in a row in the same place. He should have known better.

I’m sorry, Hannah. I’m sorry…

He was irresistibly drawn to the open door, crashing into furniture and knocking down a vase, though he didn’t hear it shatter. His ears rang with the shotgun clattering behind him as the weapon bounced off walls and the legs of a nightstand until it was finally scraping against the concrete driveway outside.

He blinked against the sun, unable to process why it was so bright this morning or why the always-welcoming heat was now trying to suffocate him. Breathing was difficult, and he had the sensation of drowning. He fell to his knees, so numbed that he didn’t even feel the impact. He kept blinking, trying to chase the last image of Hannah’s face out of his (memories) eyes…

“You okay, son?”

He opened his eyes back up. Someone was standing in front of him.

A man. Tall.

Or maybe not so tall, because Riley was on his knees and his perspective was skewed. The sun hung high behind the man, the flow of light bending around his broad shoulders as if it were afraid to touch him. The brown of his eyes as they looked up at the house, then back at him. There was sadness there, understanding. This was a man who knew what Riley had been through, who understood Riley’s pain.

“Your friend didn’t make it,” the man said quietly.

Riley shook his head, but when he tried to open his mouth, he only sucked in much-needed oxygen.

“Was she your wife?” the man asked.

He somehow managed to shake his head again.

“Friend,” the man said.

Riley nodded.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” the man said. “But you’re alive. You need to stay that way.”

He blinked up at the man. “Why?” he said, the single word coming out almost as a croak.

“Because we’re all that’s left,” the man said. “One of these days we’re going to take it all back, but until that day comes, we have to stay alive, whatever it takes.”

The man held out his hand. Riley looked at it, then at the man’s face. Fifties, at least, almost as old as his father had been when he passed.

“Time to get back up, son,” the man said.

Riley reached for the proffered hand and let himself be pulled up. He was very light on his feet for some reason. Either that, or the man was impossibly strong.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Riley…”

“Good to meet you, Riley.”

The man looked behind him at three others standing on the sidewalk beyond the front yard of the house. Two men and one woman. They were cradling the kind of military rifles Riley had seen in some of the pawn shops around town while he and Hannah were scavenging, but that they’d always been too intimidated by to pick up. A beat-up white truck was parked in the road, the engine still churning.

How was it possible he hadn’t seen or heard these people until now? Where had they come from?

“Check the house,” the man said to the others. “Kill everything.”

The three didn’t hesitate. They jogged up the driveway, passing Riley and the man, and vanished into the house one by one. They moved as if they had been training for this one moment all their lives.

“It’s dangerous,” Riley said. He wasn’t sure if the man had heard him, though, because his own voice sounded lifeless to his own ears. “They’re in there. The creatures.”

“We know,” the man said. “We heard you shooting while we were down the street. Sound travels these days.”

“But they don’t die,” Riley said, trying to get the man to understand. “They don’t die.”

Riley looked back and up at the second floor when he heard the gunshots. Rapid-fire, like how machine guns always sounded in the movies. He flinched when a bullet pierced one of the master-bedroom windows and sent glass plummeting to the driveway in front of him. More rounds punched through the walls and vanished across the street.

The man put a reassuring hand on Riley’s arm and led him back to the sidewalk. “Just in case.”

“They don’t die,” he said as he let himself be pulled back.

“There are ways to kill them. I’ll teach you.”

The shooting had stopped. In fact, it had ended a while ago, and he could hear the three coming back down the stairs. He expected to see just one or maybe two if they were lucky, but instead all three returned. Their eyes searched him out, and Riley saw that they were full of sympathy, especially the woman’s.

“Good to go, sir,” one of the men said as they passed.

“Well done,” the older man said. Then, to Riley, “It’s time to go, son.”

“Go where?” he asked quietly, the image of Hannah’s last expression burned into his mind’s eye, replaying over and over and over.

“Away from here,” the older man said. “We need time to grow, to train, to prepare. And when we’re ready—and only then—we’ll finally act.”

“Ready?” He looked back at the man, unable to understand what was happening, what he was trying to say. “Ready for what?”

“All that can wait. For now, you should come home with us. There’s not a lot of us left anymore and we have to stick together.” He pointed at the other three: “That’s Benford, Rhett, and Erin.”

The two men and the woman nodded back at him, and Riley had never felt more welcomed in his life.

“And you can call me Mercer,” the older man said. He squeezed Riley’s shoulder and gave him a comforting smile. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, Riley. Are you in? Will you help me take back what belongs to us, whatever it takes?”

“Yes,” Riley answered breathlessly.

Book One

Port of Call

1

Keo

Find Mercer. Kill Mercer.

It used to be that he could come up with three goals without having to work all that hard, but these days he was happy with two. These days, things had a way of blowing up in his face. Like with Gillian, like with Jordan...

Jordan...

He wished he could say watching someone he cared for bleeding out was a new thing. Over the years, he’d learned to detach himself, to avoid making friends, and to tune out when they started talking about their families “back home” or their dreams. A nod here, a forced smile there was all it took. Most of them just liked to hear themselves talk anyway, never mind if anyone actually heard them.

There wasn’t a whole lot he could do about the last few days of his life. They were done and gone, beyond his reach. All he had left was what was ahead of him: a place in the middle of nowhere called Lochlyn, Texas. Such a minor town that it was barely a blip on the map he carried in one of the pouches around his waist.

What were the chances Mercer was even in Lochlyn? God only knew (not that he believed in God or anything), but it gave him a place to go, a target to focus on. Keo was always at his best when he had someone to go up against. Pollard, Steve, and now Mercer. Men who brought death and misery. It was a good thing he was used to such men. Hell, if you were to ask some of the people he’d known in his life, they would say the same thing about him.

Find Mercer. Kill Mercer.

The former was going to take some doing, but the latter, well, he was an old hand when it came to that. The trick was to find the man first, though. It would have probably helped if he knew what Mercer looked like, but then Keo reasoned a man like that, who controlled an army of fearless killers (and they’d have to be fearless, to bring the battle to the collaborators, to scatter across the Texas countryside in two-men kill teams like they were doing right now) would stand out.

Pollard had. Steve had, too. They all did, if you knew what signs to look for. And Keo did. He had been around enough of them and taken orders from their ilk more times than he could stomach. They were always easy to spot.

The leader. The alpha.

So all he had to do was reach Lochlyn and go from there. No sweat. It was as easy as following the map, using the sun as his compass.

Find Mercer. Kill Mercer.

About four hours before nightfall, there was a noticeable drop in temperature. It had gotten colder these days, but Texas in December was still perversely illogical. Anywhere else and he would be freezing, but here, moving through a field of grass burnt brown by the sun, there was just enough wind against his exposed face to give him a slight chill.

It had taken him too long to get this far. A day now since he had buried Jordan in a nondescript part of the countryside under a grave of rocks to keep the elements (and other dead things) from desecrating her. He wished he could have spent more time, made a better (decent) final tomb, but he’d wanted to flee that place before it was too late.

“Too late” for what, he didn’t know, even now. He just had to go.

There wasn’t a lot around him now except large patches of untilled fields and the occasional house and accompanying red (always red) barn in the distance. He had lost sight of the highway or anything resembling a paved road about five miles back. Lochlyn was somewhere up ahead of him. Unless, of course, he had gotten lost and didn’t know it. That was entirely possible, too. A lot of things were possible these days.

He’d thought about checking the buildings for clues to his exact whereabouts but decided to bypass them. If he was hurting for guns, ammo, or food, he might have taken the time, but he was carrying enough of all three to last for a few weeks if he conserved. So he kept moving. Besides, if he were still running around out here a week from now, that probably meant he hadn’t found Mercer. Worse, he had no clue how to find Mercer. Either way, if he couldn’t locate and kill the man in the next couple of days, then the mission would be a scratch—

A man’s deep voice, arriving with a sudden gust of wind from up ahead: “How many?”

“She said three,” another voice said. Also male, but younger sounding.

“Shit, we lost three so far?” the first one said.

“That we know of.”

“More?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit.” Then, “On the upside, The Ranch’s going to be less crowded when we get back.”

“Dude…”

“What, too soon?”

Chuckling from both men.

Keo was already on one knee, the unslung AR-15 in his hands. He carefully eased off the rifle’s safety while listening to the conversation in front of him. How far? Twenty meters? Thirty?

“You got it?” Deep Voice asked.

“Again?” Younger said.

“I like listening to it.”

“You in love with her or something?”

“Or something.”

“Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?”

“What’s so weird about it?”

“What if she’s fat and ugly?”

“She doesn’t sound fat and ugly.”

“What does fat and ugly sound like?”

“I don’t know, but not like that. Besides, it’s better than talking about our MIAs. That shit’s just depressing.”

A short laugh, followed by a brief moment of silence.

Keo counted one second...five...

…twenty...

What the hell were they doing up there? He hadn’t moved since he heard them, but now he let his breath come out in short spurts, in tune to the sporadic gust of wind blowing through the stalks of dying grass around him. It wasn’t much cover, but the field did go all the way up to his waist, and on one knee he was almost invisible. Not entirely, but good enough that whoever was up there hadn’t spotted him yet. Some of that elusive luck was working in his favor for once, with the men not looking in his direction when he nearly walked right up to them like a blind idiot.

One minute became two, and still nothing.

What the hell are they doing?

He reached down to make sure the handgun was in its holster at his hip before rising back to his feet and, bent forward at almost a seventy-five-degree angle at the waist, took one step and stopped to listen.

Five seconds…ten…

Nothing.

He took a second step, then a third...

There was just the rustling of grass against the wind and the soft crunch-crunch of his boots on the sun-hardened ground. Every step sounded like banging drums, and Keo spent just as much time cringing at the noise he was making as he did trying to reassure himself it was just his mind magnifying them, that it was just his imagination on overdrive…

Shit, you almost convinced yourself that time, pal.

The sun was still high in the sky, the warmth giving him just enough assurance to keep moving steadily forward. Nightfall was coming, but it would be a while. He had plenty of time. Plenty of time…

Five meters...

A soft mechanical click, very clear against the natural countryside around him, froze him in mid-stride, and Keo went down on one knee for the second time.

“Almost out of batteries,” a voice said. Younger. “Did you bring yours?”

“Nah,” Deep Voice said. “You’re out?”

“Yup.”

“Ugh.”

“Sucks for you.”

A grunt. “You won’t believe this, but there was a time when these things could only hold ten songs at a time, and they cost twice as much.”

Younger chuckled. “You’re right; I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true.”

“How long before— What?”

“You smell that?”

“Smell what?”

Keo looked down at his clothes. His dirty clothes.

Sonofabitch.

He launched up from the ground and took the remaining ten meters at a dead run, the crunch-crunch of his boots exploding loudly under him, and this time he didn’t even try to pretend it was just his imagination.

Can you hear me now? he thought, almost laughing out loud.

The first head that popped up in front of him was balding and had what looked like a rash over his right cheek. He was in his forties and wearing nondescript camo clothing, and though Keo couldn’t see the rest of his body, the man looked in reasonably good shape. Fading white wires (earbuds?) dangled from his ears and connected to a small device in his hand. He turned his head, saw Keo, and his eyes went white and round like baseballs.

Keo snapped off a shot at five meters—close enough that he barely had to aim—and blew the man’s brains out.

The gunshot boomed and was just starting its echo across the landscape when the second head popped up.

Younger, with some kind of military buzz cut, was in the process of standing up when the older man collapsed next to him. Instead of reaching for his weapon, the man held up his hands and shouted, “Wait—”

But Keo didn’t wait. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He was moving too fast, the surge of adrenaline driving him forward with a full head of steam. He swung the AR-15 and connected solidly with the stock of his rifle. His victim dropped to the ground back onto the already bent stalks of grass where he and his now-dead friend had been sitting.

Keo sucked in a deep breath and spun around in a complete circle, searching for more targets among the wavy blades of grass and the sporadic lines of trees circling him. The gunshot. Someone would have heard that gunshot. It was simply impossible not to these days with the deadness of the world.

So where were they?

Was it possible there were only two in the entire area? Could he be that lucky?

First time for everything.

Satisfied there was no one else out there—or at least no one dumb enough to show themselves—Keo dropped down behind the makeshift wall of grass.

Mercer’s man—and he had to be one of Mercer’s men, because who else would be out here this close to Lochlyn?—was rolling around on the ground, both hands cupping his shattered nose. Blood oozed through his fingers, and the man’s eyes, soft blue, blinked erratically up at Keo.

“Relax; you’ll make it,” Keo said.

The man’s eyes dropped down to the holstered sidearm at his hip. It looked like a Sig Sauer, similar to the one Keo was carrying.

“Sure, why not?” Keo said, and grinned at him.

The man stopped rolling and wisely didn’t reach for his weapon.

“Are there more of you around?” Keo asked.

The man didn’t answer right away. Maybe he was trying to decide how much he should tell, if anything.

“Hey, what’s that?” Keo said, and pointed at a random spot on the ground.

The man predictably turned his head to look, and when he did, Keo punched him in the face. Of course, he wasn’t instantly knocked unconscious; he simply groaned against Keo’s fist, but before he could hold out his hands to ward off further attacks, Keo punched him again, and again…

* * *

“Who are you? What do you want?” the man asked, though it came out more like “Whaphuduuwhump?” because of the broken nose and busted lip. His face was an odd shade of purple and brown, which was a little hard to see in the darkened second floor of the barn where Keo had brought the man, about a hundred meters (give or take) from the field where they had clashed.

Keo could see the exact spot from one of the open doors; he had been staring at it for the last forty minutes, convinced more of Mercer’s men would be responding to the sound of his gunshot. That had been stupid. He’d fired without thinking of the consequences. He couldn’t even blame it on the dead man for popping up right in front of him like something out of a bad horror flick. He didn’t bother with the lie. He’d shot Deep Voice because he wanted to. After the week he’d had, he just wanted to kill someone.

“You got a name?” Keo asked.

“Davis,” the man said.

“What about your friend?”

“Butch.”

Keo chuckled. Davis and Butch. It sounded like a bad Hollywood Western.

“Where’s Mercer, Davis?” Keo asked, looking back at Davis, who was sitting behind him on an old block of hay.

The building around them smelled of year-old animal feces and mold. It was at least ten, maybe twenty times worse than the last barn he had been in (with Jordan) in terms of smell, but was still in relatively good shape. This building, along with the farmhouse next door, was going to outlive him; not that that was saying very much.

If it’s still here after this week, it might outlast me…

“Mercer?” Davis said.

“Your fearless leader.”

“What do you want with him?” Davis was still having difficulty speaking, especially when he had to string more than a few words together. It took Keo a few seconds to understand everything he said.

“Is he in Lochlyn?” Keo asked.

Davis didn’t answer. His hands and ankles were presently bound with duct tape, and Keo hadn’t been too worried about the man fleeing as they made their way here, then up to the second floor. Davis was in no shape to run, and certainly not while Keo had the AR. Out there, with wide-open spaces for hundreds of meters at a time, there weren’t a whole lot of places to hide. That was the only reason Keo felt comfortable enough to stop and wait for Mercer’s men.

Or, at least, that’s what he told himself.

Give me a break. You’re still here because you want them to show up. You can taste it, can’t you? You want this. Admit it.

Yes, he thought. I want this. It’s what I’m good at…

When Davis still hadn’t answered, Keo said, “Lochlyn. Mercer. Is he there?”

Davis finally shook his head.

“Where is he?” Keo asked.

“I don’t know.”

Keo casually took his hand off the barrel of the slung rifle and rested it on the butt of the Sig Sauer he’d taken from Davis earlier and had stuffed into his front waistband. Davis’s eyes—or his left, anyway, because the right was black and blue and puffy like a blowfish—were drawn to the not-so-subtle movement before snapping back up to Keo’s face.

“I don’t know where he is,” Davis said.

Keo didn’t take his hand off the gun. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Back at The Ranch.”

“‘The ranch?’” Keo repeated, just in case he hadn’t made the words out correctly given Davis’s situation. Hadn’t the dead Butch said something about a “ranch” too, before Keo shot him?

“Home base,” Davis said. “That’s what we call it.”

“Where is home base?”

Davis shook his head.

“You don’t know?” Keo asked.

“I know. I’m just not telling you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Davis nodded with something that could almost be mistaken for conviction, which if true was impressive given his current state. Even though both of them were mostly hidden in the darker corners of the barn, Keo could easily make out Davis’s injuries.

“What do you want with him?” Davis asked.

“I want to put a bullet between his eyes.”

Keo was watching Davis closely for a reaction, but he had to admit he wasn’t quite ready for the grin that broke out across Davis’s face.

“That’s an interesting response,” Keo said.

“You’re one of them. Collaborators.”

Keo shook his head. “No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you how little that means to me.”

Davis snorted. “Then why do you want to kill Mercer?”

“Personal reasons.”

The man leaned slightly forward, as if to get a better angle on Keo’s face. After the almost hour they had spent together, Keo thought that was another very interesting move from his hostage. At the moment, Davis looked more curious than he was afraid, which wasn’t quite what Keo was going for.

“What?” Keo said.

“I’m just trying to see if you look familiar.” Davis finally shook his head and sat back. “No. I don’t know you. I’d remember that face.”

“Scars give a man character.”

“So I hear.” He paused, then, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my leg.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that. You’re clearly favoring one side. Old wound?”

Not old enough, Keo thought, but said, “Where’s Mercer?”

“I told you, I don’t know where he is. The last time I saw him was back at The Ranch.”

“And you’re not going to tell me where this ranch is?”

“Nope,” Davis said, and grinned back at him.

Keo sighed and took his hand away from the gun. He snapped open one of the pockets along his pant leg and pulled something out.

“What the hell is that?” Davis asked, narrowing his eyes at the titanium eating utensil in Keo’s hand.

“Spork,” Keo said. “Though technically, it’s a scork.”

“Scork?”

“Spoon, fork, and cork. Get it?”

“Ah,” Davis said, though his eyes (or, at least, the good one) never left the object in Keo’s hand.

“But the word ‘scork’ makes me queasy,” Keo said. “So I prefer to call it a spork anyway and ignore the whole ‘cork’ part. Even though, obviously, it’s incorrect.”

“You’re a man of eccentricities.”

“No one’s ever called me that before.”

“So, what are you going to do with that...spork?”

“I’m going to see how much pain you can take.” Keo twirled the utensil between his fingers. “I would have used the Ka-Bar, but it wouldn’t hurt nearly as much and you might bleed out too soon. I can’t risk that.”

Davis stared at the spork, as if mesmerized by its movements. “And that’s…not risky?”

“It’s a lot harder to cut an artery with this.”

Davis swallowed. “I won’t tell you where he is.”

“You said you didn’t know where he is.”

“I don’t. Not at this very moment.”

Keo stopped twirling the spork and pressed his forefinger against the metallic tines. “They’re pretty sharp. Not that sharp, but pretty sharp. It’ll puncture skin, and even bone, if you push hard enough. I saw it go through a forehead once…”

Davis didn’t have to say anything, because his tensing body gave it away. The man looked as if he was mentally and physically preparing to spring up to defend himself, but either his bound arms and legs prevented him from taking action at the moment, or he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he remained nervously perched on the bale of hay.

“Tell me where to find Mercer,” Keo said. “Is he in Lochlyn?”

“No,” Davis said. “I told you. The last time I saw him was back at The Ranch, before all of this. I don’t know where he is now.”

“And you won’t tell me where this Ranch is…”

“No.”

Keo sighed and lowered his hand. “All right. This is getting ridiculous. I’m running out of sunlight, and you’re just pissing me off now.”

He began walking toward Davis.

The man pushed himself up from the haystack and attempted to move toward the stairs, but he predictably tripped on his bound legs and fell with a thump! to the debris-strewn floor on his face. He tried to roll over onto his back, but by the time he finally managed it, Keo was already standing over him. Even in this shadowy part of the barn, Keo swore the eating utensil actually gleamed.

“One last chance,” Keo said. “Tell me where to find Mercer.”

“Jesus, please,” Davis said.

Keo grinned. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but I have to admit I’ve never been mistaken for our Lord and Savior before. You a religious man, Davis?”

“Yes...”

“Me, I’ve never had much use for it. More of a hassle in my old line of work. So tell me, Davis. What did you used to do before all of this?”

“I was a teacher...”

“Cool. I killed a teacher once.” Keo sat down on Davis’s chest, put his hand on the man’s forehead, and easily pushed Davis’s head back against the rotten floor despite his attempt at resistance. “He screamed and screamed...”

“Oh, God…”

“It took a while, and it was messy…”

“Lochlyn,” Davis said, almost spitting the word out.

Keo sat back a bit. “Lochlyn?”

“You can find Mercer through Lochlyn.”

“You said he wasn’t there.”

“He’s not, but you can find him through there.”

Keo let go of Davis’s forehead. “Go on...”

“We’re using Lochlyn as an FOB. You know—”

“Yeah, I know what FOBs are. Go on.”

“The last flight out is tomorrow. Everyone involved in this area is supposed to be back by then. Including Butch and me.”

“What were you and the other guy doing out here, anyway?”

“Perimeter security. In case of collaborator counter-attacks.”

“What happens when you don’t come back?”

“I guess they’ll know something happened. They’ll be ready for you,” Davis said, and Keo thought the other man wanted badly to smile but was doing everything possible to swallow the urge.

“Where’s it going?” Keo asked. “The flight?”

“The Ranch. If you want Mercer, he’s probably going to be there.”

“Probably?”

“I’m a small cog in the machine. I’m not privy to all his movements. But it’s your best bet.” Davis let out a heavy sigh and closed his one good eye for a moment before opening it again. “If you’re going to kill me, just make it fast. I’d like to skip the prolonged pain part if at all possible.”

Keo stood up and put the spork away. “See, that wasn’t so hard. I knew you’d come around.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not right now; we both have headaches.”

Davis struggled to sit up, pushing against the floor using his elbows. Somehow, he managed it after a few tries.

“I’m curious,” Keo said. “What makes someone follow a man like Mercer?”

“You want the truth?”

“That would be nice.”

“There are three types of people running around out here. The true believers, the nonbelievers, and everyone else in the middle.”

“Which one are you?”

“Everyone else.”

“So why do the nonbelievers follow Mercer if they don’t buy what he’s selling? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s dangerous out there.”

Davis shrugged and looked toward the barn doors, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear what he was about to say next. “He saved our lives. Most of us wouldn’t be here if not for him. That’s the kind of thing that buys a lot of loyalty.”

“But you don’t believe in his war.”

“What we’re doing out here...” He focused on Keo again. “You know? About the attacks on the towns?”

Keo nodded.

“I’m just a schoolteacher,” Davis continued. “I didn’t even know how to fire a gun until the world ended. Butch believed, though. He was one of the true believers. Me, I’m just trying to get by. Mercer saved my life. He saved all of our lives. I owe him…” He shook his head. “But I don’t owe him to kill old men and pregnant women and children.”

Keo crouched in front of Davis and stared at the man’s heavily bruised face.

Davis looked back at him. “I’m telling the truth. All of it.”

Keo ignored him and asked instead, “How’s the face?”

“It’s numb. Everything’s numb. I know my right eye is the size of my foot at the moment, but I can’t feel it. Or my nose. Or my mouth. I can hear how I sound, but thank God I can’t feel the reasons why.” He reached up with his bound hands and touched his cheek, wincing at the contact. “Were you really going to do it? Use that spork on me?”

Keo nodded. “Yeah, I was.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what now?”

“Tell me about Mercer.”

“And then?”

“Mercer. What does he look like?”

“And then?” Davis pressed.

“Then I move on to Lochlyn, and if Mercer’s not there, I go on to this ranch of yours.”

“What about me?”

“I don’t need you anymore, so you stay here.”

“I need a gun. If you’re going to leave me behind, I need a gun.” He held up his bound hands. “And you have to release me.”

“All right.”

“You swear.”

“Only on Fridays, but never on Sundays.”

“Fuck you,” Davis said. “I mean it. You swear you’re telling the truth.”

Keo raised his right hand and smiled at Davis. “Scout’s honor.”

2

Lara

“Port Arthur’s a no-go,” Danny said through the radio. “It’s locked tighter than a virgin’s sphincter.”

“You know a lot about virgin sphincters, babe?” Carly asked.

“Hey, I hear things.”

“I bet you have.”

“Any trouble getting from Starch to Port Arthur?” Lara asked, and Carly repeated the question into the microphone.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Danny said, but didn’t expand on his answer.

He was somewhere outside the Texas port city with Gaby and Nate, though he hadn’t given any specifics just in case someone was listening in on their frequency. It was a small chance, but these days even the smallest something had the potential to blow up in your face.

Just in case, right, Will?

“What does he think the collaborators are doing in Port Arthur?” Lara asked, directing her question at Carly.

“What am I, your personal parrot?” Carly said, and handed the microphone over to her. “I already spent ten minutes talking to him before you showed up. That’s about nine minutes too much with Danny, in case you were wondering.”

Lara smiled. That wasn’t even close to being true, because she knew for a fact her friend had spent every day Danny was out there worrying about him. That was something they all did a lot of these days. Before Danny, it was her and Will.

Damn you, Will, you promised me…

She said into the radio, “Danny, what are they doing in Port Arthur?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Danny said. “The kid thinks they might be trying to block our path to open waters.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t see the point. We’re special, yeah—the special-est in my very humble opinion—but we’re not worth committing this much manpower to capturing, especially with all the fun and games going on out here right now.”

“Mercer…”

“Well, I didn’t want to say his name, in case he’s like the Candyman or something.”

“The what?”

“The Candyman. Clive Barker? Tony Todd? One of the best slasher flicks of the 1990s?”

“Is that like the bogeyman or something?”

Danny sighed loudly through the radio. “You kids and your lack of respect for the classics of cinema...”

She grinned. It wasn’t that she was that much younger than Danny, but every now and then it was fun to needle him. She remembered when she used to get the same kind of joy out of doing it to Will.

“Anyway, back to our marvelous road trip,” Danny continued. “I figured we’ll chug on along south-like, find another part of the coastline to link up with you guys. It’s a big state, should be lots of empty beaches for the linking. I’ll radio back as soon as we locate one of them, and you can come over and pick us up. Easy as Mother and apple pie.”

“Easy, huh?”

“Hey, good things happen to those who think positively, or so I’ve been told.”

“I’ll have to give that a try.”

“Give it a swing,” Danny said. Then, “Carly tells me you guys are doing just fine without us.”

“We’re getting by. Spend more time worrying about yourself.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”

“That’s my man,” Carly said.

“Speaking of worrying about oneself, where’s Keo now?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know, out there somewhere,” Lara said. “He and Jordan were headed back to one of the towns when I last saw them. T-something.”

“They’re all T-somethings. Well, if I run across him out here, I’ll let you know.”

“What about Mercer’s people? Any problems with them since Starch?”

“Luckily we’ve been able to avoid them, too. They seem to be confining their operations further inland. Probably have more FOBs out there all set up and ready even before they launched this little adventure of theirs.”

“FOBs?”

“Forward Operating Bases. Places they’re using to launch their attacks.”

“Like that airport outside of Larkin.”

“Exactamundo.”

“How many of those do you think they have?”

“As few as one more, as many as a hundred.”

“That’s…a big number, Danny.”

“Mercer’s had a year to think this up. The guy’s… Well, momma always says not to say anything if you don’t have something nice to say.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“I’m learning, Lara, I’m learning…”

She smiled. “Good to know. What about this Mason guy?”

“What about him?”

“How useful has he been?”

“Got us around a couple of ambushes, so he’s not been a terrible investment in time and duct tape. But I’m thinking I might have to cut him loose real soon the closer we get to a new and less soldier-infested exfil point.”

Lara didn’t press for details; she didn’t want to know. Images of Gage being tossed into the ocean while she slept flashed briefly across her mind. She only needed to know that Danny would do what he had to in order to come back just as she had on the Trident. Just as Will had before them…

“How’re you guys for fuel?” Danny asked. “You’ve been doing a lot of running around out there. Did the tank finally get topped off?”

She exchanged a brief look with Blaine standing behind the helm to her left. The fuel. How many times had they discussed the topic? How many times had she stood right here on the bridge and gone through all the scenarios with Carly and Maddie and Bonnie? Too often, and every single time the results were the same.

But Danny didn’t need to hear that right now, so she said into the radio, “We’re fine, Danny. Concentrate on finding your exit point, and we’ll be ready to pick you up.”

“Was it my imagination, or did it take you a while to answer that one?” Danny asked.

“It’s your imagination,” she said, hoping it was at least semi-convincing.

* * *

She watched the kids cannonballing off the swimming platform at the back of the Trident and into the crystal blue water of the Gulf of Mexico. Most of them were out there—Dwayne, Elise and Vera, and the other kids she had never really made time to get to know. Their energy was boundless, and the cold water didn’t seem to have much of an effect on them.

Lara found herself envying their carefree spirit and at the same time was glad they didn’t know what was happening in Texas at the moment—with Danny and Gaby, or what Mercer’s men were doing to the collaborator towns.

“To let everyone know there’s something worse than the ghouls out here,” a man named Gregson, one of Mercer’s men, had once said to her.

They know now, don’t they? They know now…

“Ah, to be young and clueless,” a voice said behind her.

Lara looked over as Zoe pushed against the railing next to her. They were on the uppermost deck of the yacht, which gave Lara a great view of her surroundings, including that of the kids jumping into the water in front of her.

“There’s definitely something to be said about not knowing too much,” Lara said. “Besides, they’ve seen enough horrors to last a few lifetimes.” She paused for a moment. “They deserve this. We all do.”

“You partaking?”

“Not in this weather.”

“I can’t believe they’re not freezing to death by now.” The doctor tightened her jacket’s collar around her neck. “I have a feeling I’m going to get some new patients very soon.”

“Do we have flu shots?”

“Fully stocked.”

“Good.”

“Don’t worry, boss, I got the sickbay handled. You just take care of…every single other thing that matters.”

Lara smiled and sneaked a look at Zoe. They hadn’t known each other all that long, but Zoe had come to her with the best reference—Will’s. Over the months she had proven invaluable, and Lara wasn’t sure if she’d even have Danny now if it wasn’t for Zoe.

We’re all doing our part, Will. You’d be proud of us.

“Danny?” Zoe asked.

“Still out there with Gaby and Nate.”

“But okay?”

“In one piece,” she nodded, and thought, Thank God, because I’m the one who sent them out there. If anything happens to them, it would be my fault.

“So are we,” Zoe said.

Lara gave her a curious look.

Zoe smiled sheepishly. “We were just talking…”

“Again?”

“We’re always talking behind your back, Lara. You should know that by now.”

“So what was on the agenda this time?”

“We decided to make it clear to you that we believe in and trust you. That whatever you decide, we’re behind you. We know you’re going to get us to the Bengal Islands one way or another. We have faith.”

“Jesus, how long was this meeting?”

Zoe laughed softly. “And we mean every word of it. We know you’ve been second-guessing yourself. About Keo, Danny, about everything. And I’m telling you—we’re telling you—that you don’t have to.”

“Don’t I?”

“No, because none of us could have done a better job. And most importantly, we know it.”

“I shouldn’t have sent Danny and Gaby out there.”

“You made a calculated decision, and Danny agreed.”

“If they don’t come back, it’ll be my fault.”

“They’ll come back. Danny’s an ex-Ranger. He’ll make it back.”

“I wasted a lot of fuel getting to Sunport…”

“Because Keo called. And Keo is… Keo.”

Lara pursed her lips and couldn’t help but smile appreciatively back at the other woman. “Question.”

“Shoot.”

“When do you guys have these chats, and why am I never invited?”

“Because besides talking about you, we do a lot of talking about you.”

“Makes sense.”

Zoe looked back across the Trident, past the kids and at the open waters beyond. “And, oh, we also talked about this Mercer guy. He sounds like real bad news.”

“From everything I’ve heard, he is.”

“What do you think’s going on out there right now?”

“I try not to think about it too much. Whatever’s happening, it’s out of our hands. Mercer, the collaborators…” She focused on Elise and Vera, the two girls holding hands as they cannonballed into the water side by side. “This is all that matters. The lives on this boat.”

Zoe nodded, and the two of them watched Dwayne landing hard enough into the water that it splashed not just everyone in the area, but also his mother Kendra and Carrie standing on the platform watching them.

“Thanks,” Lara said after a while. “For the pep talk.”

“Normally we’d let Carly do it, but we thought you might need to hear it from someone else from time to time.”

“Who’s up next?”

“Bonnie. Then Blaine. And I think Carrie called dibs after him.”

“I hope you guys at least wrote down the order.”

“Oh, we did. Sarah’s in charge of all the paperwork.” Zoe turned around. “If you want to talk, about anything, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks,” Lara nodded and realized she meant it.

“Sure,” Zoe said before pushing off the railing. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell Bonnie she’s up next.”

Lara glanced after the doctor before turning back around to look out at the clear blue horizon. The Trident was anchored far enough from land that she couldn’t make out Texas in the distance, which meant no one along the coastline could see them, either. At least not without high-powered binoculars, and what were the chances someone was scanning the ocean this moment?

Below her, Carrie let out a scream as Kendra grabbed her from behind and pushed her into the water. Carrie went under for a moment before resurfacing, wet clothes and rifle clinging to her.

Lara smiled to herself and thought, I’ll get them to the Bengal Islands, Will. I’ll keep them safe. I promise…

* * *

“You’re going to catch a cold. Again.”

Elise pouted but didn’t stop turning around in a circle so Lara could wipe her dry from head to toe. The girl didn’t completely stop shivering until she was wrapped in a big, fluffy cotton bath towel that Lara had laid out. She should have been annoyed at the puddles of water the girl had tracked into her cabin, but she was strangely okay with it. Maybe it was because it was Elise, and Lara had forgotten how much she enjoyed these moments.

She sat down on the end of her bed and watched Elise slip out of her bathing suit and into a pair of long pants and a sweater. She was growing up and filling out, and Lara barely recognized the skinny kid she had rescued from Dansby, Texas, nearly a year ago. Elise hadn’t gotten any taller—not yet, anyway—but she wasn’t as rail thin as before thanks to the plentiful food in the ocean that regularly graced their lunches and dinners.

“You’re getting better at swimming,” Lara said.

“Practice makes perfect,” Elise smiled back.

“You’re not there yet.”

“Maybe one day.”

“Maybe one day,” Lara nodded. “Until then, it’s going to get colder, so this might be the last time for a while.”

“It’s not that cold.”

“Cold enough. Doctor’s orders.”

“Zoe said so?”

Lara made a face. “Clever.”

Elise grinned. “When are Danny and Gaby coming back?”

“Soon.”

“I miss them.”

“Me too.”

“Hey,” Elise said suddenly, as if something had just occurred to her.

Lara smiled. The way the girl’s thoughts shifted from topic to topic was something to behold. “What?”

“We were outside one night, and we thought we saw something.”

“Who is ‘we’ and when was ‘one night?’”

“Me, Vera, and Jenny, and it was last night.” Elise’s head tilted slightly to one side, a clear indication she was lost in thought.

“What were you guys doing out at night?” Lara asked.

“Jenny said it was a boat,” Elise said, ignoring her question.

“Was it a boat?”

“I don’t know; it was kind of small.”

“What color was it?”

“Black, I think?”

“You’re not sure?”

Elise shook her head.

“Did you see it again today?” Lara asked.

“Nope.”

“And you’re sure it was a boat?”

“Maybe…”

“If you see it again—or something like it—you need to come and tell me or one of the adults right away, understand?”

Elise nodded. “Will do, boss.”

Lara rolled her eyes. “Not you, too.”

* * *

“A boat?” Blaine said.

Lara nodded. “She said Jenny thought she saw a boat.”

“But she’s not sure.”

“That’s the problem. It could have been a boat. Or it could have been anything. Or nothing.”

“Maybe it was Blaine,” Carly said. “He’s pretty dark.”

Blaine smirked. “What does Danny see in you?”

“Must be my winning personality.”

“It’s not that winning.”

“Personality is what I call my vagina.”

Blaine groaned. “I hate talking to you.”

“I love you, too,” Carly said, and blew him a kiss.

Lara ignored them, said, “If it was something, it was too far for either girls to make out. Who was on watch last night?”

“Carrie,” Blaine said. “But she would have said something if she saw a boat out there. The same for Maddie; she relieved me at midnight as usual and was up here until morning.”

“Vera didn’t mention seeing anything, either,” Carly said.

“Elise didn’t even want to mention it,” Lara said. “I think she just did because it came to her at the moment.” She shook her head. “We need to do a better job letting them know to report what they see.”

“Could be another body,” Blaine said.

He was looking through his binoculars at the surrounding ocean. From up here, on the upper deck of the Trident, they had the next best view of the Gulf of Mexico. The only better vantage point was on the roof above them. Lara didn’t need binoculars to know there was nothing out there right now. At least, nothing she could see with the naked eye.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be trouble if it didn’t sneak up on us.

“We still don’t know where that body came from,” Carly was saying. “Or what or who put it in the water in the first place.”

“There are a lot of things going on out there that we don’t know about,” Lara said. “For all we know, there’s more than one body floating around. It’s a big ocean. It was a one in a million chance that one would come close enough for us to see it.”

“Like winning the lotto,” Carly said, and wrinkled her nose. “A really smelly, bloated lotto.”

Blaine let his binoculars hang around his neck and glanced over at her.

“What’s wrong?” Lara asked.

“I don’t like the idea of another boat out there watching us.”

“I don’t like the idea of anything out there watching us,” Carly said, shivering slightly. “Maybe it was a perverted whale.”

“And Elise said it was black?” Blaine asked.

“She thinks it was black,” Lara nodded.

“That’s a good way to blend into the night if you were on a scouting mission. You don’t usually find a lot of black-painted boats precisely because you don’t want to get run through at night by another vessel.”

“You think someone painted their boat black as camouflage?” Carly asked.

Blaine shrugged. “That’s what I would do. Not exactly a lot of chances you’d run across another boat all the way out here. So what other reason would there be to paint a boat black?”

No one said anything for a while. Carly looked back out the bridge and Lara joined her.

After a while, Lara said, “Exactly how far are we from land, Blaine?”

“I’ve kept us steady at twenty miles out,” Blaine said. “No one should be able to spot us from the coastline. Especially at night with our lights manually shut off.”

“Damn, I wish Danny were here already,” Carly said, reflexively crossing her chest with her arms and rubbing her shoulders.

“Who’s got guard duty tonight?” Lara asked.

“Gwen,” Blaine said.

“Ask for volunteers to join her. I want to double all the sentries until otherwise noted. We’ll also need to post someone permanently at the back, too.”

“I’ll draw straws with whoever doesn’t volunteer to back up Gwen tonight,” Carly said.

“One last thing,” Lara said. “I want all the adults armed again, including Dwayne, even if they’re not on guard duty.”

“Dwayne too?” Blaine asked.

“He’s really good with that bolt-action rifle of his,” Carly said. “Scary good, for a thirteen-year-old.”

“I thought he was twelve,” Lara said.

“He turned thirteen three weeks ago, remember?”

No, she thought, but said, “I guess I forgot.”

“Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

Lara nodded and gave her friend an appreciative nod.

“What about Claire?” Blaine asked. “Gaby’s been training her…”

Lara shook her head. “She’s not ready yet.”

“So it’s settled,” Carly said.

“I’ll bring my cot back up here and tighten the shift between me and Maddie,” Blaine said. “I’ll make sure someone’s always up here every hour of the day from now on.”

“Maybe bring two cots, one for Sarah,” Carly said. “You know, in case you guys want a little late-night boom-boom action.”

Blaine groaned. “Please don’t ever say ‘boom-boom action’ ever again.”

“Trouble in paradise?”

“Something like that.”

“You guys should do what I do. Send one of you out there. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or some crap like that.”

“You get that out of a Hallmark card?” Blaine asked.

Lara stepped closer to the windshield and could barely hear them going back and forth behind her as she looked out at the never-ending expanse of blue ocean outside. Her mind swam with all the potential hidden dangers she hadn’t seen—or even tried to look for—before. She had almost convinced herself there was no one out here but them, even though she knew better. There had been the dead body they had fished out of the water off Sunport, and later, that voice on the radio asking her to make contact.

They had been floating around the Gulf of Mexico for so long, safe and sound onboard the Trident that she had almost made herself believe they could be safe so long as they stayed far away from Texas. She should have known it wouldn’t last forever, and maybe she always did but had just done a very good job of deceiving herself.

The girls could be wrong. There might not have been another boat out there last night watching us.

Yeah, right…

3

Gaby

This must be what God feels like.

The man’s head drifted slightly left, then right in her rifle’s ACOG scope. It had been a while since she found herself in possession of an optic that could shoot long distance, and this one had come courtesy of a dead man.

I can kill him right now. It would be so easy. Just squeeze the trigger…

She did it even as she thought it—tightened her forefinger around the cold steel. All it would take was a little more pressure. Just a little bit more. That was how easy it was to end a life. The Purge might have devastated the planet, but it hadn’t changed the way a gun could kill.

“How many?” Nate asked, his voice bringing her out of her own world.

She depressed the trigger and pulled slightly back from the eyepiece, if just to chase away the temptation. “Too many.”

“Again.”

“Uh huh.”

“When has it ever not been too many?” he said.

It was a common refrain these days. There were always too many. In the daytime, in the nighttime, there were always too many. Too many dangerous men in the day and too many undead things at night.

Too many. Always too many.

“Are they tracking us?” Nate asked. He sounded run down from the last few days, even a little annoyed, but not scared. Or, at least, she couldn’t detect any fear in his voice. “They must be tracking us…”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“First Port Arthur, and now here…” He shook his head. “Gotta be, right?”

“I don’t know, Nate.”

“Gotta be,” he repeated, mostly to himself that time.

She looked over at him lying against the edge of the rooftop next to her. The Mohawk was mostly gone, his hair grown in (out?) around the ridiculous stump in the middle. He had dirt on his cheeks and forehead but didn’t seem to notice it. The girl in her spent a moment being self-conscious about her own appearance, but the woman that had emerged easily dismissed the thought without much resistance.

Nate lowered his binoculars and met her gaze. “But why would they be tracking us? For Mason? I thought he was just another grunt these days.”

“I don’t think he was lying about that part. After Louisiana”—And Josh and that terrible night on Song Island—“he’s not what he used to be, and I know for a fact he wasn’t just another grunt back then.”

“Makes no sense,” Nate said. “We’re not that important, especially with Mercer’s people running around blowing up people. The three of us should be at the very bottom of their to-do list.”

She nodded because he was right. They weren’t important at all. What were three more people when the entire state was on high alert? The collaborators they’d (managed to avoid so far) run across in the last few days were on a war footing; they had their hands full with small teams of hit-and-run…what the hell were they? Rebels? Insurgents? Or maybe she should just think of them as Mercer’s killers, because that was exactly what they were.

Even now, she hadn’t dismissed the possibility that either Mercer’s men or the collaborators had found Taylor and Alice at their cabin in the woods outside of Larkin. The place had been empty when they showed up to collect the sisters for the trip home like they had promised. The door was open and there were no signs of the girls. More baffling, there was no evidence of a struggle. The sisters had simply…vanished. Nate thought it had to be ghouls, that the girls’ luck had finally run out, but she wasn’t so sure. Mason, of course, said he didn’t know anything about it, but the man was a liar and it was hard to believe anything that came out of his mouth.

In the end, they’d had to move on, with the sisters added to a long list of failures since returning to Texas.

We should have stayed on the Trident. We should never have come back.

We should never have come back…

She focused on the present, on the here and now, and looked through her M4’s optic again, picking up the same man she’d had in her crosshairs before. He was still leaning against the metal guardrail with his back to her. He had brown hair and spent most of his time working on a thick piece of beef jerky he’d fished out of a see-through bag earlier. He hadn’t come alone; his friend had climbed up onto the hood of the Jeep parked between the two highway lanes and was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. They were both wearing black uniforms, and if she squinted, she could almost make out the Texas patch on their shoulders.

What the hell are you guys doing here?

Gallant, Texas, was a small town of about 3,200, surrounded by flat country land almost exactly halfway between Port Arthur and Galveston. The tiny city’s one major (only?) contribution was the slightly raised I-10 interstate road that joined it with Beaumont and Port Arthur to the east, Baytown to the west, and Galveston somewhere in the southwest.

The soldiers were loitering on that highway right now, looking for…something. They hadn’t found this place by accident. She was almost certain of that. So what were they doing here? Could Nate be right? Could these men have been tracking them?

What the hell are the two of you doing here?

She laid the rifle on the rooftop and rolled over onto her back, blinking up at the sun. She didn’t have to look at her watch to know they still had hours to go before nightfall. Her body was in tune to her environment and had been since they began picking their way south from Starch, skirting potential ambushes along the way, only to find Port Arthur crawling with collaborators.

“Hey,” Nate said.

She glanced over. He was holding a small piece of white paper and handed it to her. It was half the size of a regular writing sheet and was blank on one side. She had to turn it over to see the familiar writing:

JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS

WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

The words were clearly typed on the sheet using a machine, maybe even a computer printer. The idea that someone out there was printing out a bunch of propaganda flyers had been an interesting topic of discussion for a while, but after encountering more of them as they made their way southeast, it had become less interesting.

“First and only one I’ve seen in Gallant so far,” Nate said. “Wondered where it came from.”

“Probably from the same batch they dumped over Port Arthur,” she said. “It’d make sense for them to bypass the small cities for the bigger ones. Less wasteful that way.”

“How many you think have picked a side? Or, I guess, a new side?”

She shook her head. “Who knows? Maybe a lot, maybe very few, or maybe none.”

“After all that bombing? I don’t know, Gaby. If I were in those towns and I saw what happened to the next town over…”

The memories of what had happened to T29 were burned into her soul. She couldn’t forget what she had seen, and God did she want to so badly.

The town, the sisters, all the failures of the last few days…

She closed her eyes. “Can we not talk about this?”

“You okay?”

“Just a headache.”

“You should take some of the meds we have in the first-aid kits.”

“No.”

“That’s what they’re there for, Gaby.”

“They’re for emergencies. Besides, it always goes away.”

“You sure?” he asked, and she could hear the concern in his voice.

“I’ll be fine.” She opened her eyes and said, before he could argue the point, “We should head back.”

She crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it, then turned around until she was lying on her stomach again. She picked up the rifle and began crawling backward away from the ledge. The distance between them and the highway was close enough (Shooting distance, at least with the ACOG) that she took every precaution. It only added a minute or so to their retreat anyway, and they had minutes to spare at the moment. Nate mirrored her crawl until they were almost on the other side, and only then did they stand up and take the ladder in the back down to the street below.

They had walked over to their position on top of the Waffle House, so that meant walking back to where Danny and Mason were. The area they were in was oddly divided with the stores and restaurants to one side and almost exclusively traveling hotels and inns on the other. The tallest building in the entire place was a Comfort Inn and Suites. The rooftop above the hotel’s three stories would have given them a much better spying perch, but the idea of going through those floors just to get to that perfect spot spiked the hairs on the back of her neck even now.

They wound their way through the streets and buildings using the businesses as cover whenever they could. Not that she expected to be spotted from the highway, but again, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks just to shave off a few seconds or minutes. So they took their time and moved along, through, and behind a fast food joint, then a gas station, and a dozen other buildings.

“Wanna get wasted?” Nate asked as they walked past one of the many brick and mortar stores. The sign outside was in gaudy neon, reading “Gallant Liquor Store.”

Not very creative, she thought, looking in at the hundreds of bottles still sitting on display shelves. The store was remarkably undisturbed and she couldn’t find any signs of ghoul occupation—there were no blankets on the windows or blood smears. Unlike most places they had traveled through, it was rare to find evidence of a ghoul nest in Gallant. It was another reason they had decided to make camp here. That same disregard for the town by the monsters was also why it didn’t make any sense for the two collaborators to be lingering around it.

What are you two doing here?

“Let’s relive our college years,” Nate was saying.

“I never went to college.”

“Oh, right. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”

“Are you saying I look old?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re lucky I already like you, or else…” She playfully put a hand on the butt of her sidearm.

He raised both hands in surrender and began walking backward, grinning at her. “If you want, we can pretend we’re in school. I’ll be the big man on campus, and you’ll be my cheerleader girlfriend. I bet if we look hard enough we might even be able to find a cheerleader uniform somewhere in this place, maybe at the high school we passed earlier…”

She shook her head but couldn’t help herself and smiled anyway. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you be my cheerleader boyfriend…”

* * *

They made their temporary base about a mile from the Waffle House inside the Gallant First Bank, one of the few buildings that had everything they needed in case they were forced to stay the night in town. Large white GFB letters were easily visible on the rooftop, welded to some kind of scaffolding. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but then it fit in with its surroundings, mostly department stores, restaurants, and she guessed the cream of the commercialism crop in Gallant. The bank had security bars over the windows and doors, and when they peeked inside, found it as pristine now as it had been a year ago.

She saw Danny peeking out at them from behind blinders on one of the front windows as they approached, then a few seconds later one of the doors clicked opened before they even reached it.

They slipped inside and Danny locked it back up. “What’s the word, birdies? Tell me you haven’t been giving each other disgusting hickeys out there while I was babysitting in here?”

“A Jeep with two soldiers,” Nate said. “They showed up and parked on the I-10 around ten in the morning and haven’t moved since. We think they’re looking for something.”

“Maybe us,” Gaby said.

“Has to be, right?”

“Did you go and ask them?” Danny asked.

“Uh, no,” Nate said.

“Maybe they’re just searching for property to rent or buy. Land’s pretty cheap these days, and property’s always a good investment. Always has been, always will be.”

“We thought they might have been the same two we saw outside of Port Arthur yesterday,” Gaby said.

“Were they?”

She shook her head. “Same uniforms but different vehicle, and one of the two from yesterday was blond. These two both had dark hair.”

“Dark-haired muchachos are seriously the worst.”

“Self-loathing?” Nate asked.

“Maybe a tad,” Danny said. Then, looking at her, “Why didn’t you just shoot them? I gave you that ACOG for a reason, you know.”

“It was tempting…” Gaby said.

“Next time when in doubt, shoot.”

I almost did, she thought, and tossed her pack on the island counter in the lobby, knocking down a few deposit slips that had been left behind. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a bottle of water and took a drink.

The place was remarkably clean when they had found it, with no evidence of a fight or blood anywhere, and Nate theorized it was closed when the town succumbed to The Purge. Like most small cities around the state, the citizens probably knew something had happened when the big metropolitans like Houston and Dallas went dark. It would have been terrifying as they waited for the second night. She knew the feeling, having lived through it herself a year ago.

There were still piles of money in the registers and safes when they looked around this morning, and the two offices in the back were in immaculate condition. She kept expecting someone to clock in for work whenever she glanced at the counters. There were plenty of lights coming through the closed blinds behind her to see with, but not enough to give their position away to someone passing by, like those two guys…

Maybe Nate’s right. Maybe they are following us.

But why?

When she finished drinking and put the bottle away, she looked back at Danny. “Nate is convinced they’re tracking us.”

“What do you think?” Danny asked her.

“I don’t know, maybe. It’s just too much coincidence that they—or one of their friends—keep showing up wherever we go.”

Danny nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked lost in thought, and whenever that happened, he always reminded her so much of Will. They looked nothing alike, of course, but when the usually jovial Danny went still, it was hard to shake the resemblance.

“Where’s Mason?” Nate asked.

“Dozing, the last time I saw him,” Danny said. “Being a hostage is hard work.”

“I should go check on him.”

“You think he’s going to try something?” she asked.

Nate shrugged as he walked past her. “I just don’t like the idea of that guy being somewhere where at least one of us can’t see him at all times.”

She watched him go into the back hallway, then open the door into one of the two offices and disappear inside. Gaby turned back to Danny, who had returned to looking out the blinders at the street outside.

“Did you talk to the Trident yet?” she asked.

“Still waiting to pick us up,” Danny said. “All we have to do is get to someplace where they can do exactly that, and then we’ll all be on the sundeck drinking piña coladas. Easy breezy.”

“Easy breezy, huh?” she said doubtfully.

“Have faith, Gabster. We’ll get there. Eventually.”

She didn’t doubt they would get home—she just hoped they all made it, and in one piece.

“I believe you,” she said.

“You should. I’m never wrong.”

“Never?”

“Well, mostly never.” He glanced up the street in the direction she and Nate had come. “You said two?”

“Two, yeah.”

“But one vehicle?”

“That I could see or hear.” When he didn’t ask or say anything, she continued: “What are you thinking?”

“That if we want to get out of here before nightfall and those two hombres are still hanging around on the highway, then we might have a problem.”

“Just one?”

“Okay, one of many. The biggest one is the noise factor. As soon as we fire up our ride, they’ll know we’re here. Then they’ll radio their friends, and who knows how many of them are between us and the coastline. We might have to wait them out.”

“How long?”

“Hopefully they won’t make us wait too long. I’m not a very patient guy when piña coladas are at stake.”

“How far is it between Gallant and the coast?”

“Twenty-five miles, give or take. The problem isn’t the distance—it’s the not knowing how many guys with guns and bad intentions are waiting for us between here and there.”

“Captain Optimism,” Gaby said.

“That’s what Carly said when I told her about our present dilemma.”

“They’ve been out there for a while. What’s their fuel situation?”

“I’ve been told that they’re dealing with it.”

“Is that good or bad?”

He shrugged. “That’s what I said.”

She heard voices from the back of the bank and glanced over. Nate had left the office door open, and she could hear him talking with Mason but couldn’t quite make out the conversation.

“What about Mason?” she asked.

“What about him?” Danny said.

“Does he know what’s waiting for us out there?”

“His knowledge is getting more limited the farther south we get. He only knows what he knew before Starch. Everything after that is all Greek to him.”

“Then why are we keeping him around?”

Danny gave her an amused look. “You sick of him already?”

“I’ve been sick of him since Starch, and I still don’t believe he doesn’t know anything about what happened to Alice and Taylor. I just don’t see any reason to keep dragging him along if he’s outlived his usefulness, Danny. ”

“Wow, talk about breaking my heart,” a voice said behind her.

She looked over at Mason coming out of the back hallway with Nate. The collaborator was still wearing the same black uniform they had captured him in back at Starch. His face was grimy with dirt and sweat—which ironically made him perfectly at home among them—and the only thing clean on him was the bandage around his right leg. He walked with a noticeable limp and a grimace, his reward for trying to kill them a few days ago.

“After all we’ve been through, too,” Mason added.

“Give me one reason why we should keep you around,” she said.

“Because I’m still more valuable to you alive than dead. You can use me—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what the hell—as a hostage, if it becomes necessary. And yes, I do think it’s going to be necessary.”

“Bullshit. You’re just trying to talk your way into staying alive. You’re not important to them. You never were.”

“Then why have they been tracking you all the way from Starch?”

There was just a ghost of a smile on his pale and cracked lips, probably because he knew a full-blown smile would have just pissed her off, and Mason, for all his faults—and the man had many of them—wasn’t stupid.

“Good question,” Danny said. “So, tell us, ol’ popular one, what makes you the bee’s knees? And don’t say it’s because of your stinky armpits, ’cause I’m sure I got you beat on that one.”

“It’s a secret,” Mason said.

“Is that right?”

“You can try to beat it out of me, but I’m still not going to tell you.”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty good at beating things out of people. Just ask Johnny Paulson back in middle school.”

“The difference between me and Johnny Paulson? I know keeping quiet is the only way to stay alive. The second I tell you, I’m a dead man. And I really, really like staying alive.”

Danny exchanged a look with her, then she did the same with Nate. She wasn’t sure if either one of the men believed Mason, but she got the feeling they were like her: They didn’t believe a thing that came out of his mouth, but they couldn’t disregard it out of hand, either. And that, ultimately, was what Mason was going for.

“You’re a tricky little bugger,” Danny said, pointing a finger at Mason. “You know what happens to tricky little buggers? They eventually overstay their welcome and end up being stuffed into ventilation shafts. And trust me, buddy, I know my ventilation shafts.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Mason said.

“Think about it.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I don’t believe you,” Gaby said.

The collaborator grinned at her. “Just ask yourself one question, sweetheart: How do you think I’ve stayed alive this long? It wasn’t because of my good looks.”

She bristled at the word sweetheart but pushed through it. The last thing she wanted was for Mason to see that he had an effect—any kind of an effect—on her with his words. It was a weak man’s weapon because right now, that was all he had.

Gaby stared at him. “The second you prove you’re no longer valuable, I’m going to end you.”

“I believe you,” Mason said.

“Good. Because when the time comes, you won’t be able to say I wasn’t honest with you.”

He smiled defiantly back at her, but she couldn’t help but notice that this time it wasn’t nearly as convincing.

* * *

Crack!

Danny, looking down at the well-worn map of Texas spread out on the bank’s island counter, snapped a quick glance at the windows that faced the street. He hadn’t said anything when two more shots, about three seconds apart, crackled across the city even before the first one had fully faded.

“Same rifle?” Gaby asked.

Danny nodded. “Bolt-action. Heavy caliber.”

“What are they shooting at—” Nate said, when the pop-pop-pop of an automatic rifle cut him off.

“Someone’s shooting back,” Gaby said.

“Is that good?” Nate asked.

“Good, bad, as long as they’re not shooting at us, that’s all that matters,” Danny said. He pushed off the counter and moved across the bank lobby to the front windows.

More gunfire washed up and down the street outside. It took her a moment, but there was enough of a sustained volley that Gaby managed to trace its origin back to the highway. Had the two collaborators in the Jeep found someone to shoot at, or had someone found them?

“Pack up,” Danny said.

Gaby folded up the map and pocketed it. “Are we leaving?”

“I don’t think we have a choice, kids. All that racket’s doing is drawing a whole lotta attention our way. Pretty soon we’ll be up our butts in bad boys in black uniforms, and I don’t know about you two, but I’d rather avoid that uncomfortableness.”

Gaby exchanged a nod with Nate, and he hurried into the back where they were keeping Mason. She snatched up her rifle leaning against the counter and grabbed her tactical pack from the floor. The weight of the ammo in the bag instantly reassured her.

A soldier who complains about too much ammo is a dead one, right, Will?

Danny was still peeking out the blinds, looking in the direction of the gunfire. The familiar crack of the high-powered rifle, followed by the torrent of pop-pop-pop of automatic return fire. Someone, somewhere, was wasting a lot of ammo. Will, she thought, would never approve.

“Danny, anything?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Can’t see shit, but they’re not outside, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t see shit from in here. Did I mention that?”

“It sounds like it’s coming from the highway. You think it might be Mercer’s people?”

“That would be my guess.” Danny glanced over as Nate brought Mason out from the back, keeping the shorter man in front of him. “Looks like we might be putting your supposed importance to test sooner than you think, Mason ol’ chum.”

“Looking forward to it,” Mason said.

She looked past the collaborator and at Nate behind him. “Ready?”

“Good to go,” Nate nodded.

Nate’s pack jutted out from behind his back, making him look like a hunchback. Unlike hers, his was bulkier, because aside from his own ammo, he was also carrying most of their emergency rations. They had more supplies in the truck outside, but they had learned the hard way it was a good idea to carry whatever you could on top of that because you never knew when you might lose your vehicle to an A-10 Warthog on a strafing run.

“Okay,” Danny said, “let’s blow this three-horse town.”

He rushed into the back hallway, Nate and Mason turning and following close behind, while Gaby brought up the rear. She glanced behind her at the closed blinders one last time before crossing the lobby after the others.

Outside the bank the firefight continued, the booming crack! of a bolt-action rifle now overlapping with the pop-pop-pop of return fire. Whoever was out there, they sounded determined to end one another.

Better them than us.

* * *

It was an older model red Toyota pickup, one that Danny had found in someone’s garage after the vehicle they had been using since Starch died on them. The Toyota looked nearly as beat up as the building it was hidden in, but its owner had kept it in good condition and it worked without any trouble once they replaced the battery and fed siphoned fuel into its tank.

It was still parked behind the Gallant First Bank where they had left it, dented cab hood reflecting back the sun. It wasn’t exactly the prettiest thing in town, and even before The Purge most thieves wouldn’t have looked twice at it.

Nate opened the back door and shoved Mason inside, then slid in beside him. Mason’s legs were free, but his wrists were bound with duct tape to keep him from getting any ideas. She kept expecting the man to make a run for it a dozen times since they began their trek, but he seemed oddly content to be their hostage, though she didn’t for one second believe that.

Don’t trust him. Whatever you do, don’t trust him.

Gaby tossed her pack on the floor before climbing into the front passenger seat while Danny settled in behind the wheel. He put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it right away. Instead, he rolled down the window and listened, except there wasn’t anything to hear.

It was suddenly very quiet again.

“Sounds like someone finally won the brouhaha,” Danny said.

“I don’t hear any running vehicles,” Gaby said.

“If they called for reinforcements, it would take a while for them to get here,” Nate said. “Port Arthur’s a long way off.”

“Unless they have people closer...”

“There’s always that.”

She looked over at Danny. “Maybe we should be gone before they show up.”

“Works for me,” Mason chimed in from the backseat.

“Shut up,” Nate said and slapped Mason in the back of the head. “When we wanna hear a peep out of you, we’ll ask.”

Mason grunted and looked as if he wanted to say something back, but clenched his teeth in silence instead. Gaby smiled. It was a rare thing to see Nate so aggressive, but she couldn’t help herself; she liked it when he was.

Danny still hadn’t turned the key in the ignition. He continued leaning against the steering wheel and staring out at the empty street in front of them. Until the gunfight a few minutes ago, Gallant was the definition of a dead town. They hadn’t found a single soul living here when they arrived, not even an animal or two.

“What are you thinking?” Gaby asked.

“Cheeseburgers,” Danny said.

“Cheeseburgers?”

“With chives. And bacon.”

“And how does that help us?”

“It doesn’t, but you asked what I was thinking, and I was thinking about a nice big juicy cheeseburger.”

“With chives and bacon.”

“Yup.” He sat back, the car’s torn upholstery squishing under him. “When this is over, I think I’m going to open a cheeseburger joint. Call it Danny’s Cheeseburgers.”

“A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

“What can I say, I like to make a splash,” Danny said just before he turned the key in the ignition.

The truck didn’t roar; it meowed to life, but with the absence of any other sounds at the moment, the churning engine might as well be a loud monstrous bellow alerting anyone with ears to not just their existence but their location as well.

“Eyes wide, ears open, and guns hot,” Danny said as he put the truck in gear and slowly eased it out from behind the bank, peeking left then right at the empty streets, before turning right and pointing them south.

They hadn’t gone more than a mile down the road, passing a series of empty buildings and storefronts to both sides of them, when she heard a new noise and looked at her side mirror and sighed.

“Danny,” she said.

“I see them,” he said.

“Ah, man,” Nate said as he twisted around in his seat and glanced out the rear windshield.

“Better step on it, sport,” Mason said, though Gaby didn’t hear anything that even resembled triumph in his voice. If anything, he might have sounded a little…anxious?

The pickup gained speed while Gaby put her M4 in her lap and flicked the safety off, then stuck her head out the open window and looked back down the street.

It was the same Jeep from the interstate, she was sure of it, and it was far enough behind them that she couldn’t see the driver’s face, though she could make out a second figure in the front passenger seat. A part of her knew it was too much to expect they could just exit Gallant the way they had entered it—unnoticed—but she’d clung to the hope anyway.

“Company!” she shouted.

“Tell me something I don’t know!” Danny shouted back.

He hadn’t even gotten the word know out when a second car turned into the street behind the Jeep, and for just a brief second she entertained the possibility that it was going to ram the smaller vehicle in front of it, knock it into one of the buildings, and allow them to escape. Instead the Jeep’s passenger waved at the truck, which picked up speed and pulled up alongside it.

“Danny! More company!” she shouted.

“Yee haw! Now it’s a party!” he shouted back.

Sunlight bounced off the truck’s gleaming dark skin, and it was impossible to miss the machine gun mounted on top of its cab. A man stood behind the weapon, literally clinging to it to prevent the speeding vehicle from shedding him like some unwelcomed pest. He looked like a rag doll back there, and no amount of wishful thinking on her part ended with him flying through the air.

“It’s a technical, Danny!” she shouted.

“When it rains, it pours!” Danny said, and she thought he might have been laughing at the same time.

She pulled her head back into the pickup and looked at him. “Can we outrun them?”

“Not in this jalopy,” Danny said.

“What, then?”

He glanced over and grinned. “I got a plan.”

“A good plan?”

“Call it Plan Z.”

She groaned. “We’re going to die…”

4

Keo

He spent the night in an outside cellar at a farmhouse about half a mile from Lochlyn. You wouldn’t know the town even existed if you didn’t have a map and someone to point the way. Fortunately, he had the benefit of both. Even so, he ended up stumbling into the south end of the city limits and had to quickly retreat before he was spotted out in the open. If there had been a sniper on duty, he would have been dead. The enemy would be on high alert after Davis and Butch failed to check in, and that made him overly cautious.

Nightfall came quickly, giving him less than an hour to squirrel himself inside the cellar. The door was made of a simple wooden construction, nothing that would stand against a prolonged assault. The room itself was small and damp, and judging by the indentations, once held glass bottles, maybe even spirits. Or moonshine, perhaps. He was in the boondocks of southeast Texas, after all. Who the hell knew what people did down here to pass the time?

There were slits in the door that anyone with eyes (black, blue, or whatever color) could use to look into the cellar, so he grabbed clumps of dirt and plastered them over the vulnerable spots. Fortunately, the earth was wet enough to cling to the wooden slabs. He reinforced the latch on the door with Butch’s rifle that he had brought along just in case. It wasn’t like the man was going to need it or any of his supplies anytime soon.

The work done, he settled down on the soft ground and rested his back against the sticky wall and took a drink from a canteen. There was something else he had brought along—a small pink iPod barely the size of his thumb that Butch had been listening to when Keo shot him in the fields. The green light flickered when he pushed the on switch, and a voice drifted out of the white earbuds dangling from the device.

Keo placed his AR-15 on the ground and trained his eyes on the cellar door barely ten feet across from him. He had done a pretty good job sealing up the cracks, and the room was almost pitch dark except for a few random strands of inconsequential (fading) sunlight. He had positioned himself in the right spot, which in this case meant staying as far away from the stray slivers as possible.

He was surprised when he slipped one of the buds into his ear—left the other one dangling—and heard her voice. That surprise turned into a grin, because for some reason a part of him expected to see—well, hear, anyway—her again even all the way out here.

“…the traitors in uniforms that scour the countryside in the daylight for survivors, any bullet will do…”

Lara’s voice, clear as day. He had been on the bridge of the Trident when she recorded the message, and he still remembered the lines.

“…get to a place that is surrounded by bodies of water. Stock up on silver; if you know how, make silver bullets, or any silver-bladed weapons. The daylight is no longer your friend, but don’t be discouraged. As long as you’re breathing, as long as you are free, there is hope. We will adapt and keep going, because that’s what we do. This is Lara, and I’m still fighting alongside you.”

There was a brief pause before the message repeated itself.

Keo popped the bud out of his ear. Why had Butch and Davis gone through the trouble of recording the message, looping it, then uploading it to an iPod? He would have liked to ask Butch, but that wasn’t going to happen. Davis would have had the answer, in all likelihood, but that ship had sailed, too.

He made a mental note to tell Lara when he saw her again. He wasn’t sure if she was going to get a kick out of it or find it creepy. How many of Mercer’s men were carrying around her message on iPods out there?

Definitely creepy.

He flicked off the on switch and the little green light faded into nothingness, leaving him sitting in the dark all by himself again.

* * *

He didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, not helped by the fact he kept waking up every other hour to throbbing in his legs. Both of them. He didn’t know how that was possible and gave up trying to dismiss it as being just figments of imagination after the third time.

He got a total of two hours of shut-eye, spending the rest of the night listening to them moving on the other side of the door. They were going through the farmhouse behind him, racing up and down both stories. There was a barn on the other side of the property, and he heard them raiding it, too.

Did they know he was around? Smell him? Sense him somehow? Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe they were tracking Mercer’s men. That was more likely. Mercer’s goons might have managed to stay under the radar all this time, setting up their little FOBs around the state before they finally struck, but once the genie was out of the bag…

What were the chances the ghouls were going to get to whoever—and however many—were hiding just outside of Lochlyn at the moment?

He drifted in and out of sleep while waiting for the night to give way to morning, most of it spent staring at the door and listening for the first signs that he had been discovered. He was so used to hearing them out there, skittering across the open, that he found the sound of their movements almost…comforting?

It’s official: I’ve lost my fucking mind.

Around three in the morning, their numbers started to thin out and it became more difficult to pick them up. By four, they were almost completely gone except for the occasional strays that walked or ran or stopped just a little too close to the cellar entrance. He could see their shadowy figures flitting across the small openings, and a few of them paused just a bit too long for his liking.

He kept waiting to hear gunshots, which would be a sign that the creatures had found Mercer’s men. But there weren’t any. Not at midnight, or at three, or four, or when the first signs of morning finally began filtering through the cellar and the ground under him started warming up. Not a lot, just enough to be noticeable after sitting on the cold, damp earth all night.

The lack of shooting or hints of confrontation between Mercer’s men and the ghouls last night was a good sign, because it just meant more men for him to kill.

Yeah, we’re officially a little bloodthirsty now, aren’t we?

* * *

Mercer’s people weren’t inside Lochlyn itself, of course. They were hunkered down outside the city limits on the north end, hiding (almost) in plain sight, which was ballsy of them, but then again, what wasn’t about these people?

Instead of anything that remotely looked like an airfield, there was a two-story house with peeling white paint surrounded by woods. The only thing that made the homestead stand out from the one he had just spent the night in and the dozen others he’d passed while skirting the town proper was the large barn next door and a wide-open clearing.

Keo crouched near the tree line and watched the property for a good ten minutes. Ten became twenty, then a full half hour, and there were still no signs of people anywhere in the open or inside the house or the barn next door. No people, and no movement.

Could Davis have lied to him? Could Mercer’s men have left yesterday?

Shit. What if he had come all this way for nothing—

Two figures emerged out of the trees almost half a football field to his left, their movements flickering at the corner of his eye.

Now where had they come from?

Keo pressed against a tree trunk and watched the two men, both wearing black and green camo clothing, stride through the overgrown grass toward the main house. Sunlight glinted off the barrel of their rifles, and one of them had a second weapon, some kind of shotgun, slung over his back.

A bit overkill, Keo thought before remembering that he was carrying not just the AR-15 he had taken from Luke, but also Butch’s.

What the hell. A little overkill never hurts these days.

He watched the two men—Scouts? Perimeter guards?—bypass the house and continue on to the barn. There was an echoing click before a third figure stepped out of the red building, pushing at one of the twin doors. A fourth man soon appeared and helped with the other door. They wore identical black and green clothing, but nothing that looked like an actual uniform or red collar emblazoned with the familiar sun emblems. That didn’t really mean anything though; Luke and Bill hadn’t been wearing the uniform either, and he was 100% sure they were Mercer’s men. The same for Davis and Butch.

The four men exchanged words, but Keo was too far away to hear the conversation. Instead, he sat back and watched the two new arrivals disappear into the barn with the other two before all four returned outside about five minutes later, this time pushing a large, heavy, tarp-covered object out into the morning sunlight with them.

At first Keo thought it was an old tractor, or some kind of farming equipment, given its size. That is, until he stared at it through his binoculars.

It was a helicopter with some kind of heavy netting draped over it. He could make out green metal glinting through the holes in the camouflage, and it was pretty clear the machine had wheels that made it easier to move despite its bulk.

“The last flight out is tomorrow. Everyone involved in this area is supposed to be back by then,” Davis had said.

The last flight back to The Ranch…

Four men became six when two more came out of the barn, but none of them were Mercer. Besides the fact everyone was too young to be Mercer, there was no reason for Davis to lie about the man not being here. But while Mercer might not be here right now, these men knew where he was and how to get there, and right now that was good enough for Keo.

Not all six were armed, but at least two of them were. Even if he could take out both of them from this distance, that still left four to make a run for the barn. Once inside, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be unarmed for very long. And how many were inside right now that he couldn’t see?

So what, then? Wait for them to climb onboard that helicopter and leave?

No, that wasn’t going to work. Not one bit.

Find Mercer. Kill Mercer.

It was a pretty straightforward job. Not a breeze by any means, but he’d had tougher gigs, even if he couldn’t think of them right now.

He got up and backtracked into the woods until he couldn’t see the helicopter and the men pushing it, then turned and began moving right. He circled the clearing, sticking to the natural camo provided by the thick trees and foliage around him. Keo didn’t stop until he was looking out at the rear of the red barn.

He moved back toward the tree line, and crouching, looked out.

The barn was about thirty-five meters in front of him, and from his current angle he couldn’t see the front doors or the two-story house on the other side, but he could make out the nose of the helicopter as it was pushed into the wide-open space where it could power up and take off. He hadn’t spotted anything that looked like an LZ out there—makeshift or otherwise—but a good pilot probably didn’t need one.

He got up and slipped out of the trees and made a straight line for the red building. Closer now, he could hear grunts and voices coming from the other side as the six men put everything they had into pushing the aircraft. Equipped with wheels or not, that thing probably weighed close to 6,000 kilograms or more, not counting however much fuel it still had in the tank. That, he guessed, would depend on how far these men expected it to ferry them.

Keo made the back of the barn without incident but didn’t press up against the peeling red paint. Instead, he stopped just short of it and found a small sliver between two boards and looked in, glimpsing a pair of figures moving around on the other side.

So at least two more bodies. Swell. That made a total of eight, which was still less than he had been expecting, unless there were more hiding in the barn or somewhere out there in the woods.

The barn was big enough to have two stories and Keo tried to look up, but there wasn’t enough of a crack to see anything past the first floor. He moved along the back, searching for another peephole, but didn’t find anything good enough to see through by the time he reached the building’s right edge. The good news was, as soon as he rounded the corner, he spotted a side door.

What were the chances it was unlocked?

He put his hand on the rusted-over lever and tested it by pressing cautiously down with his thumb. The latch moved on the other side (unlocked!) without any noise, not even a telltale clack. He pulled his hand away and craned his head to eavesdrop on the voices coming from the other side of the building, somewhere between the barn and the main house. They weren’t really chatting up a storm, but there were a couple of ongoing conversations, though the topics eluded him.

Keo faced the side door again and took a breath.

Eight men that he knew of for sure, maybe (probably) more he couldn’t see. It wasn’t exactly the ideal situation, and God knew the prospect of shooting it out with eight men was intimidating enough that it made all of this seem like one big suicide run. Only an idiot would barge in there in hopes of getting to someone who wasn’t even present. Only a damn fool would do exactly what he was about to do against such overwhelming odds.

He almost laughed out loud trying to recall the last time someone had mistaken him for anything other than a damn fool.

Suck it up, pal, and get it done. Mercer’s not going to end himself, you know.

He reached for the rusted-over lever a second time, steeling himself for the charge. He’d have to take out the two inside first, then move toward the open front doors and waste the ones pushing the helicopter. Most of them, anyway. He’d need to keep at least one of them alive for interrogation, preferably the pilot. But he wouldn’t necessarily know who the pilot was unless the guy was wearing some kind of flight suit, which would be a dead giveaway, but unlikely.

Oh, fuck it. Now you’re just stalling.

He sighed, thought, This one’s for you, Jordan, and pushed his thumb down on the lever a split second before a big chunk of the already rotted wooden door in front of him cratered. Splinters exploded and filled the air (Gunshot!), every single piece seemingly gunning for his face.

Keo’s mind screamed, Gunshot! Where the hell did that gunshot come from? even as he spun and started dropping to the ground

It was a man, and he was wearing some kind of ghillie suit that would have made him blend effortlessly into his surroundings just beyond the tree line if not for the rifle in his hands. The muzzle was pointed in Keo’s direction, and the reason Keo hadn’t heard anything resembling a gunshot meant the weapon had a suppressor—

Keo dived left at the last second even as the man fired again, the second round smashing into the wall an inch from his head, so close that the sound of the weapon drilling through the vulnerable wood (Thwack!) and disappearing into the barn was the only noise the shot made. He had thrown himself down to avoid the bullet without thinking and had to stick out his hands—with the AR-15 clutched in them—or else he would have smashed face first into the ground.

There was a loud boom! from behind him, and Keo didn’t have to look back to know someone had just kicked the barn’s side door open. Not that he could have looked to be sure, because he was still falling—

He hit the ground, spun onto his back, and grimaced as the second rifle slung over his back dug into his flesh (Should have left it behind, dammit!), but the pain vanished quickly and was replaced by blinding fury when a steel-toed boot slammed into his side. He was pretty sure one of his ribs cracked. If he was really lucky, it would just be one.

He glimpsed figures flashing across his line of vision, blotting out the sun above him, just before the stock of a rifle cracked over his face.

There goes the nose again.

He tasted blood in his mouth and felt his rifle being yanked out of his hands as if he were some old man incapable of holding onto anything, then another boot (or was it the same one?) landing a second kick, but thankfully this time it only glanced off his thigh. It still hurt like a sonofabitch, and it was all he could do to grit his teeth to keep from crying out.

He waited for more, but his punisher had apparently decided that two (Or was that three? Four?) was enough and backed away, leaving Keo to lie on his back staring up at a glowing orange ball. At least it was warm and sunny this morning. He could think of worse ways to go—somewhere cold, for instance.

God bless freaky ass Texas weather, he thought with a wry grin.

“What are you smiling at?” a voice said. Female. Partially amused, but mostly confused. “I don’t think you should be smiling right now.”

“You sure that’s a smile?” a second voice asked. This one was a man and wasn’t nearly as pleasant-sounding.

“Looks like a smile.”

“Hard to tell with all the blood…”

Keo shifted his sight from the sun to the first silhouetted figure looming over him. For a moment he thought it might have been Marcy again, but it couldn’t have been because she was a collaborator and these were Mercer’s men. Or had he stumbled across the wrong group of people? Had Davis lied to him after all and sent him to his death?

Clever, Davis. Real clever, you jackass.

“You missed,” the man said. It didn’t sound as if he was directing the accusation at Keo. “Twice.”

“It’s the suppressor,” a second male voice said. “Threw off my aim.”

“Riiiight.”

“I’m serious, man.”

A third silhouette flanked the first two, except this one seemed to have the outline of a…bush? No, not a bush. He was looking at a ghillie suit…the guy with the rifle who had taken the shots at him.

“He’s seen better days, that’s for sure,” Ghillie Suit said. “Damn, look at that face.”

“That’s my bad,” the other man said.

“You did that?”

“Had to make sure he stayed down.”

“I think you made sure.”

“Damn straight.” Then, “Is that what I think it is?” The man crouched briefly before straightening back up, this time with a familiar white wire dangling from between his fingers. “Aw, shit, it’s Davis’s iPod, isn’t it? What the fuck’s he doing with Davis’s iPod?”

“I guess now we know what happened to him and Butch,” Ghillie Suit said.

“You think they’re dead?”

“I don’t think they gave it to him out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“Is he alone?” the woman asked.

“As far as I know,” Ghillie Suit said. “Could be more hiding in the woods.”

“I swore the nightcrawlers found us last night,” the other man said. “They might have sent their human lackeys to check. You think he’s a collaborator scumbag?”

“Maybe,” woman said. “Spread out; make sure he doesn’t have any friends hiding out there.”

The man who wasn’t Ghillie Suit left and Keo heard a radio squawking, but that was quickly drowned out by the sound of a machine roaring to life. First slowly, then gradually gaining speed and power until it was all he could hear and the ground under him began trembling, pebbles dancing near his right eye.

The helicopter. Wait for me, boys!

He must have grinned a second time, because the woman said, “There it is again. What’s so funny?”

He thought of a joke Danny had once told him about a priest, a rabbit, and a horse walking into a bar, but when he opened his mouth to tell it, the only sound that came out was a slightly labored wheeze.

“I guess not!” Ghillie Suit said. With the noise continuing to grow in the background, the man had to shout to be heard. “What’re we gonna do with him?”

“I don’t know yet!” the woman shouted back. She crouched next to Keo and her face slowly came into focus.

Not completely, but enough for him to know she wasn’t entirely bad looking.

“What’s he doing sneaking around out here by himself?” the woman asked, though Keo wasn’t sure if she was asking him or Ghillie Suit, or just talking mostly to herself.

Maybe I should ask her out for drinks. Get to know one another…

“He looks like he’s going to be way more trouble than he’s worth,” Ghillie Suit said.

“Maybe,” the woman said, standing back up. “We can always just throw him out of the hatch later if he becomes a pain in the ass.”

Or not.

5

Gaby

“Ready, kid?”

“No.”

“On the count of five…”

“Danny, I’m not ready!”

“One…”

“Not yet!”

“Two…”

“Danny!”

“…four…”

“What happened to three?”

“Go!”

She would have cursed him if she had the chance, but by the time his Go! echoed in her ears, the pickup’s tires were screaming and the smell of burning rubber filled her nostrils as the vehicle slammed to a stop in the middle of the road. She threw her body into the door, one hand jerking at the lever, praying she had timed it just right, because otherwise she was going to go splat on the pavement—

The door snapped open, rusted hinges working overtime, but was soon lost against the overwhelming squeal of tires under her and the quickly approaching engines of the two vehicles behind them. Her feet didn’t so much as touch the road as they grazed it, and she was racing forward. A sheet of abandoned newspaper crumpled under her boots, the sound like gunshots despite all the other noises swirling around her at the moment.

The road out of Gallant, Texas, was a two-lane street separated by fading yellow lines, and their vehicle had turned slightly left as it skidded to a stop and she lunged out. That pointed her right toward the shoulder and the row of cars on the other side. They hadn’t made it very far out of town before Danny came up with his (not so) brilliant plan. She would have argued to keep going and hopefully lose their pursuers among the side streets, but Danny hadn’t given her any choice.

Her heartbeat thundered against her chest as she ran for all she was worth, the M4 clutched in her right hand, her left swinging back and forth as if that would somehow make her go faster. She couldn’t help herself and tossed a quick look to her right and down the street just as she crossed the shoulder.

They were still coming—both of them. The Jeep that she had seen on the I-10, which may or may not have been tracking them since Port Arthur, and the big black truck with the dark uniformed man perched behind the towering cab. It wasn’t the size of the second vehicle that made the pit of her stomach drop. No, it was the mounted machine gun. Gaby had seen what one of those things could do, and the thought of being on the wrong side of it made her run faster and faster.

She forced herself to turn forward and focus on the long white metal pole separating the car lot from the street. She reached out with her left hand and leapt over it, her momentum almost sending her right into the grill of a used Ford truck.

She stuck out both hands to protect herself, rifle clanging against the parked vehicle, and twisted her body until she slid against the dirt-caked side. She didn’t waste any time and leaned against it—ignoring the surprisingly cold contact! She raised the M4 and laid it across the hood and took just a second—maybe even a half-second, just long enough to see the Jeep filling up her ACOG—to aim before she pulled the trigger.

The rifle bucked and empty shell casings clink-clink-clinked against the truck and slid down like raindrops to scatter at her feet, but she never released the trigger. Gaby oscillated her fire left and right, sweeping the street as the Jeep swerved about fifty meters away (Jesus, how did they get so close so fast?) until it somehow ended up on the northbound lane. That left the southbound wide open and the big truck—a GMC, from the logo up front—taking up the entire lane as it continued barreling in her direction.

She was sending everything she had downrange because it was her job to slow them down (or stop them, but she didn’t think that was possible) in order to give Danny and Nate just enough time to—

The pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons coming from her right told her she had done her job and given her friends the time they needed. Danny and Nate were pouring it on, and the ping-ping-ping! of bullets punching through the truck’s body were some of the best sounds she’d ever heard in her life.

She kept shooting, waiting for the GMC to stop under the prolonged assault, but the damn thing kept coming. It wouldn’t stop or slow down even as bullets raked its front windshield and grill and hood. The pavement around it exploded, chunks of asphalt flickering into the air like missiles.

And then the thing she had been dreading: The ferocious roar of the machine gun finally coming alive, the brap-brap-brap of the MG drowning out her shots and Danny’s and Nate’s—

She ducked as bullets smashed into the other side of the Ford, the ping! ping! ping! like bombs going off next to her. It was all she could do to reload the M4, concentrating on getting a solid grip on a fresh magazine from one of her pouches even though her hands were covered in sweat. Every inch of her trembled every time a round slammed into the vehicles and road around her. The damn machine gun never seemed to run out of bullets and continued to rain long after she had finished loading her rifle and pulled back the charging handle.

And then, just like that, nothing.

The suddenness of it froze her in place, still crouched behind the bullet-riddled truck, her breath hammering out of her. It took her three full seconds before she allowed herself to finally believe what her ears were telling her.

It was quiet. Unbelievably quiet.

It took her another five full seconds to will herself to stand up—her legs were wobbly for some reason, and her hands trembling slightly—and look over the hood of the vehicle up the street.

The GMC had come to a stop (Thank God) at an odd angle in the middle of the road about twenty meters from the red pickup, its hood facing her end of the street, which allowed her to see the (at least) two dozen or so holes spread out from one side of the windshield to the other. Spilled gasoline tickled at her nostrils, and the painfully gradual drip-drip-drip sound of leaking fuel from somewhere at the back of the vehicle was the only thing she could hear other than her own labored breathing.

The enemy truck was so close that she didn’t have to look through her weapon’s optic to see the smoke coming out of holes along the grill and hood or the driver slouched over the steering wheel, unmoving. The machine gun on the cab was resting on its stock, the muzzle pointed up at the cloudless sky. Sunlight beat down on the shiny black coat of paint as if it had just come off the lot.

She was so focused on the dead-in-the-street truck that it took her a while to recognize the sound of an engine roaring to life. She scanned past the GMC and spotted the Jeep still fifty meters up the road. It was attempting to make a wide U-turn and almost crashed into a stop sign in the process. The driving was erratic, to put it mildly, which made her wonder if the driver was hurt.

Pop! as someone fired at it, the round hitting the back of the Jeep as it completed its desperate U-turn before speeding away. She thought about shooting after it, but it was already too far away and hitting a moving target—even one as big as a car—was never an easy shot, even if her hands weren’t shaking.

“Gaby!” a voice shouted. Danny.

“Yeah!” she shouted back. She didn’t take her eyes off the unmoving technical; a part of her expected it to come back to life as soon as she relaxed, the man in the back rising behind the machine gun like some unkillable monster.

“You good?” Danny asked.

“Yeah! You?”

“Right as rain.”

“Now what?”

“Clear the technical!”

She stepped away from the Ford and climbed over the metal pole barrier—keeping her eyes on the target the entire time—before finally moving up the street. The smell of spilled gasoline became more evident as she drew closer, and broken glass crunched under her shoes. Her heartbeat had slowed down, her breathing returning to (mostly) normal, and she picked up her pace to cover the remaining distance.

Gaby glimpsed the fading Jeep in the distance just before it vanished completely, taking the sound of its engines with it. With that threat gone, she turned her attention to the technical, her finger testing the M4’s trigger, ready to shoot anything that moved. Any goddamn thing at all.

But nothing moved in or around the truck. At least, nothing living.

She kicked empty brass casings around the vehicle before finding the soldier in the truck bed. His hands were clutched around his throat where he’d been shot. By the amount of blood pooled under him, she guessed he had bled out soon after he fell.

There were two more bodies in the truck—the driver and his passenger. They were both wearing black uniforms, and the passenger was crumpled on the floor in an impossible ball shape. For a moment Gaby thought the man was hiding, but no; he was just dead. She made sure by opening the door and nudging him in the shoulder with her rifle’s barrel until he toppled sideways in the other direction and didn’t move.

“Clear!” she shouted.

She gave the street one last look, listening for the Jeep’s engines, and when she didn’t see or hear any signs of it, she turned and jogged back to Danny and Nate.

She hadn’t seen the pickup earlier because she was so focused on the enemy, but if Danny thought it was a jalopy before, she wondered what he was going to call it now. The side facing her was covered in holes, and like the GMC’s, its tank was leaking gasoline. Sheets of glass covered the road and one of the back tires had been shot out, though she didn’t remember hearing anything that sounded like a tire blowing. Then again, given how fast she was emptying her rifle, she probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb going off next to her at the time.

The truck was there (mostly, anyway), but there were no signs of Danny or Nate. Or Mason, for that matter.

“Danny!” she called.

“Here,” Danny said, his voice coming from the other side of the truck.

She jogged the rest of the way and went around the pickup. Danny had his back to her, but she could see that he was crouched next to Nate, who sat with his back against the driver-side door. Their weapons were on the pavement.

“Nate,” she said.

He looked past Danny and smiled at her, but it was overly forced and that realization only made her run faster to him. She went around Danny and kneeled on the other side of Nate, her stomach dropping at the sight of blood gathered around his waist.

“How bad?” she asked.

“I’ll be okay,” Nate said.

She ignored him and fixed on Danny. “How bad?”

“Could have been worse,” Danny said. When she gave him a disbelieving look, he added, “He could be dead.” Then, “Press here,” and pulled his hands from a T-shirt he was holding against Nate’s left side.

She replaced his hand with her own, her fingers turning red as soon as she touched the fabric. She looked down at Nate.

He was smiling at her. Or trying to. “I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.”

“Right. Just a scratch,” she said quietly.

Danny had stood up and was looking around them, his rifle back in his blood-covered hands. “He’s gone.”

“Who?” she said, glancing over.

“Mason.”

She looked around them—at the car lots to both sides of the street, then the empty road out of town behind them. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”

Danny was too busy squinting at the cars in the dealerships to answer, as if he could magically pick up Mason’s scent if he made his eyes small enough. Gaby looked back at Nate, keeping her hands on the bloody bundle of clothing pressed against his wound. As much as the idea of Mason escaping made her furious, she found it easy to push it aside to concentrate on keeping Nate from bleeding to death.

“My fault,” Nate was saying, his voice so soft she barely heard him. “He was my responsibility. I wasn’t paying attention…”

“Shut up, it doesn’t matter.” She was trying to find the balance between pressing too hard and not hard enough against Nate’s side. She couldn’t even tell what color the T-shirt used to be anymore. “What about Nate, Danny?”

Danny slung his rifle. “We’re going to have to look for the bullet and take it out. Can’t leave it in there.”

“You’ve done this before?”

He shrugged.

“Danny,” she pressed. “You’ve done this before?”

“Well, there was that time in a diner, though Willie boy did most of the work. But I think I got the gist of it.”

Nate groaned.

Danny grinned at him. “Relax, Nathaniel-san. Back in college they used to call me Danny the Surgeon, and it wasn’t because I always wore white surgical gloves around campus, though yes, I could see the confusion. Those things are super soft, you know.”

* * *

The pickup may have been beaten up before it was shot up, but it was a tough old thing. Despite leaking fuel and brandishing new bullet holes along most of one side, once they replaced the blown tire, the truck was still serviceable, and the engine came alive when Danny turned the key.

“I told you I picked a winner,” Danny said before he righted the vehicle and pushed them down the street.

She sat in the back with Nate, keeping an eye on his paling face and the bandages around his waist. Like the shirt earlier, the white fabric was already soaked with blood and growing a darker shade of red every second.

She must have grimaced at the sight because Nate made an effort to smile up at her. “It looks worse than it really is.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“No, really.”

“Stop lying.”

“What makes you think I’m lying?”

“Because I know you.”

He smiled again. Or tried to again. He was doing a very poor job of it, and she wished he would stop. The effort alone was probably causing him more harm than good.

“You know me too well,” he said.

“Not well enough,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.

She kept her arms around his body to keep him from moving around too much. Danny was driving just fast enough to get them as quickly down the street as possible while glancing at the map of Gallant spread out on the front passenger seat next to him. He only swerved once or twice, which was amazing given everything he was multitasking. He was also amazingly calm, but she wondered how much of that was a façade, or maybe she was just projecting her own fears and emotions onto him. Danny was an ex-Ranger, after all. It wasn’t as if blood was anything new to him.

“How much farther, Danny?” she asked.

“A mile or two,” Danny said. “Can’t go too far in this thing, with your boyfriend back there bleeding all over the upholstery.”

“Sorry about that,” Nate said quietly.

“You’ll clean it up later.”

“Gotcha.”

She put a hand over Nate’s mouth to shush him, then said, “How much gas do we have left?”

“Not enough,” Danny said.

“Maybe we should have siphoned some from the GMC…”

“Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe it’s Maybelline. We’ll be fine.”

“Will we?”

“You betcha.”

He sounded confident, and that more than anything did a lot to ease her mind. This was the new Danny. The leader. Other than Lara, there was no one else Gaby would trust with her life. Except maybe Nate…

“See, we’re almost there,” Danny said as he slowed down and made a right turn.

The road under them went from smooth asphalt to uneven dirt road. Nate groaned in response.

“Danny,” she said.

“I know,” Danny said. “We’ll be there soon. Better he suffers a little now than die a lot later.”

A sheen of sweat had covered Nate’s face as he looked back up at her. She smiled at him, then bent down and kissed him softly on the lips. When she pulled back, he was smiling again, and this time it actually looked acceptably convincing.

“Gotta get us our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “Definitely.”

“It’ll be nice. Our own room. We can sleep in whenever we want. Finally.”

“You always want to sleep in.”

“Or maybe we won’t sleep at all.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.”

“It’ll be nice,” he said again, and closed his eyes.

She fought the urge to tighten her arms around him to keep his body steady against hers as the truck continued to rumble down the patch of dirt road, afraid too much additional pressure would hurt him.

She kissed his unresponsive lips instead.

Stay alive, Nate. Please, stay alive.

I can’t bear to lose you too…

* * *

Gallant had more land than it did people, so the houses on the outskirts of the main commercial area were spread out. The dirt road Danny had turned into eventually became smooth asphalt again, and they passed a series of residential homes with large front and backyards.

Danny finally settled on a house with a dirt driveway and nothing but empty fields behind it. If not for the map, they would have driven right past this part of town and never known people lived here. The house had a white truck parked in the front yard and an unattached garage big enough for two cars, which was good because she didn’t think the jalopy was going anywhere after this. If they could even start it again with the drain on its already leaking fuel tank.

She stayed inside the truck with Nate while Danny cleared the house by himself, then did the same to the garage next door. When he came back, they hid the pickup in the garage, then carried Nate inside the house and put him down in the living room. The residence was a single-floor building with burglar bars outside the windows and over the front door. Those security measures were the main reason Danny had chosen it out of all the other houses in the area.

“I’m going to need your help,” Danny said as he shrugged off his pack, took out a bottle of water, and poured it over his hands.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Nate lay on the couch with his eyes closed. His hair was soaked in sweat and his entire midsection was covered in blood, as were his pants and what was left of the shirt Danny hadn’t already cut away to put on the bandages earlier.

“Tell me you can do this,” she said to Danny.

“The first-aid kit has everything we need.”

“Danny, tell me you can do this.”

He nodded. “I can do this.”

She stared at him for a few long seconds before finally nodding. “Okay.”

“Let’s get to work,” Danny said, then handed her another bottle of water to clean her bloody hands with.

* * *

“Want a souvenir?” Danny asked.

She shook her head. “Be my guest.”

“Eh, souvenirs are for old people anyway.”

Danny flicked the bullet he had dug out of Nate into the bathroom sink. There was just enough light coming from the small rectangular opening behind her to see the 5.56 bullet as it clinked around the porcelain bowl before vanishing down the drain.

All that damage, from such a small thing…

Gaby concentrated on rubbing Nate’s dried blood off her fingers, but it didn’t seem like she was making any real progress. After a while, she gave up and grabbed a blue cotton towel hanging off a rack and forced herself to be satisfied with wiping the sweat off her face.

“He’s gonna be out the entire night from the morphine,” Danny said, “which means you and I get the privilege of guard duty.”

“Yay us.”

“What I said. Anyway, we have everything we need to survive the night. Burglar bars over the windows, extra food, and water. All we have to do is stay as quiet as mice and they won’t ever know we were here.”

“Who are we talking about? Ghouls or humans?”

“Both.”

“You think there’s more of them out there? Besides the guy in the Jeep?”

“I think that technical was already on its way here before the fun started. Maybe because of whoever they were exchanging fire with earlier.”

“It had to be Mercer’s people. They’re everywhere.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. Mercer’s fun boys are becoming a real pain in my ass. Right now, though, I’m more concerned with why those boys in black were here in the first place. That technical came later.”

“The Jeep.”

“Uh huh.”

“What if Nate was right? What if they were tracking us?”

“The question is why.”

“Mason?”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No. Something else is going on.” He shook his head. “I’d give my left pinky finger to find out what.”

Danny seemed to drift off, lost in thought, and Gaby did the same, staring at herself in the mirror above the sink. She was already covered in dirt and sweat, but now she’d added streaks of blood by touching her face with her bloodied hands. A year ago the sight of the girl looking back at her would have horrified her, but these days it barely registered. She wetted the towel with a dab of water from what was left in her bottle and went to work.

“He’s still out there,” she said after awhile. “Mason.”

“Yup,” Danny nodded.

“We should have killed him.”

“Probably.” Then, “Get some rest, kid. It’s been a long morning, and it’s going to be a long night. We can’t travel with Nate in his condition, at least not if you want to keep him alive for cuddling later.”

“I’d really like that.”

“A little cuddling, a little premarital sex…” Danny said before turning and leaving the bathroom.

She smiled wryly after him before returning to cleaning Nate’s blood off her cheeks and forehead. When she was (mostly) done, she tossed the towel into the overflowing trash bin, snatched up her rifle, and went outside to join Danny. She could already feel the temperature starting to drop around her.

It would be dark soon. Very soon…

6

Keo

Well, this didn’t quite go as planned.

Or maybe that wasn’t entirely true. The fact of the matter was, he was (somehow, some way) still alive, and more importantly, there was a good chance he was being taken to Mercer. Of course, that was the best-case scenario, and he had a feeling he knew what Danny would say if he ever caught wind of Keo’s presently overflowing optimism.

Not that he had much of a choice. It was either focus on the positive or wallow in the pain. Because there was a lot of pain.

His face was on fire, and moving even just a little bit sent jolts of electricity coursing through his body. But it wasn’t the type of pain that signaled a broken rib (or two), so that was the good news. The bad was that his captors hadn’t bothered to clean up his face, which explained the feeling of sandpaper scraping at his eyeballs. He still had a mouthful of blood, most of it coming from his broken nose. His forehead might have been slightly cut, though that was currently taking a backseat to the pounding originating from between his eyes.

The pain should have been worse with the helicopter pulsing continuously through him as it traveled over the state of Texas, the whup-whup-whup of its rotors like sledgehammers pounding nails into his skull. He had no idea where they were or where they were going, only that they were already in the air and moving when he opened his eyes and (discreetly) took stock of his situation.

He was surrounded by the same people he had seen back at the barn—three of them sat across from him while two more flanked him. A sixth, sporting aviator shades, was perched behind a machine gun mounted along the open starboard-side hatch. The weapon looked like an older model M240 with a box magazine; the man behind it pointed the weapon playfully at a flock of birds outside and mimed shooting them. The port-side door was closed and the only thing Keo could see out the windows were empty skies.

Six men and one woman, and two in the cockpit. It wasn’t even close to being manageable numbers; not that he had any ideas about escaping anyway, especially with his wrists and ankles duct taped together. Never mind the fact that he had never learned to fly, because going out one of the open doors was probably his only real option at the moment. They had removed everything he had on him, leaving just his clothes and the blood on his face.

He wasn’t sure how long the woman had known he was awake; she was watching him with a curious expression on her face. She looked tall even sitting down—maybe just a shade under five-ten, and like most women he had encountered since The Purge, carried very few if any excess pounds on her. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and that made the bags under her eyes more apparent.

Someone hasn’t been getting their beauty sleep lately.

She looked tired but was trying to power through the fatigue. He’d seen plenty of guys do that on jobs either with caffeine or pill-sized stimulants. She had short black hair, but he could imagine her with a long, flowing mane just a year ago. The obvious Parisian genes were easy to spot and she reminded him a little of Bonnie, the ex-model with whom he had spent a lot of time with back on the Trident. Like the men around her, the woman wasn’t wearing anything that looked like a uniform or a name tag, which made perfect sense if they were indeed Mercer’s men and were out here launching guerilla-style hit-and-run attacks on collaborator positions.

His ruse exposed, Keo gave up pretending to still be asleep and straightened up, or as much as he could manage while restrained. His nose felt as if there were cotton balls jammed into both nostrils, and the hard floor was sticky with fresh mud and dirt and (no doubt his contribution to the mess) blood.

“Where we going?” Keo asked, directing his question at the woman. He had to shout to be heard over the turbine engine that made every inch of the helicopter thrum as if it were going to come unglued at any second.

She didn’t answer him, but she didn’t take her eyes off him, either. The guy behind the machine gun glanced over at the sound of Keo’s voice before returning his gaze out the hatch as the helicopter caught up to another flock of birds.

“Can I get some water?” he asked the woman.

She stared but still didn’t say anything.

“Towel?”

Nothing.

“I smell jerky in the air. I wouldn’t mind some of that. I’m famished. Haven’t eaten all day and most of yesterday.”

“Shut up,” the man sitting to his left said.

Keo ignored him and said to the woman, “Ever heard the idiom ‘You catch more flies with honey?’”

“If I give you some jerky, will you shut up?” the man sitting to the woman’s left said.

“Absolutely,” Keo said.

“Too bad. I finished it off this morning. Chased it down with some coffee and an oatmeal cookie.”

“Sounds like fine dining.”

“It ain’t the Hilton, but it’ll do.”

He turned back to the woman. “Maybe you can tell one of these gentlemen to give me some water.”

“What makes you think she’s in charge?” Beef Jerky Guy asked.

“Oh, come on. It’s obvious she wears the pants around here.”

Something that looked almost like a smile flickered across the woman’s face, but it only lasted for a blink of an eye before vanishing.

“Right?” he said to her.

She ignored him, said instead, “What happened here?” and traced one side of her face with her forefinger. “Looks like it must have hurt.”

“It did,” Keo said, remembering the cold steel of Pollard’s knife as it sliced its way into his flesh. “You should see the other guy.”

“Prettier than you?” Beef Jerky Guy said.

“Not even a contest.”

“Considering how you look, that’s saying something.”

“I still have nightmares about it.”

“I bet.”

“Where we going?” he asked the woman again.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“Give a guy a hint.”

She didn’t answer.

“Then can I at least get some water?” Keo asked.

“You already asked that,” she said.

“Figured I didn’t have anything to lose by asking a second time.”

She nodded at the man sitting next to Keo. The guy produced a canteen and leaned over. Keo opened his mouth gratefully and took as much water as he could, then swished it around to wash away the blood clinging to the walls of his mouth before swallowing the whole thing down.

“Thanks,” he said to the woman.

“Next thing you know Slaphappy Jerry here’ll want a change of clothes,” Beef Jerky Guy said.

“I’m Keo,” he said to the woman.

“Good for you,” she said.

He couldn’t help but smile back at her even though doing so made the entire lower half of his face hurt, as if someone were punching it repeatedly.

“Where we going?” he asked for the third time.

“Ask that again and I’m going to throw you out the hatch,” the woman said.

“I’d like to see that,” Beef Jerky Guy grinned.

“Only if you buy me dinner first,” Keo said.

“Smart guy, huh?”

“It’s my disguise. I’m actually very dumb. Hence my current situation.”

“Yeah, you really bungled that one, didn’t you?” He chortled. “Man, what were you doing showing up by yourself like that?”

Being the world’s biggest idiot, or something pretty goddamn close, Keo thought, but said, “You sure you’re out of those jerky?”

“Pretty sure,” the man said, and smacked his gums for effect.

“Too bad. There’s nothing better than two guys bonding over some meat.”

Beef Jerky Guy stared at him like he didn’t know how to respond to that. The woman next to him, Keo noticed, barely managed to suppress a snort.

* * *

A combination of pain and lack of sleep took its toll and he dozed off soon after, and didn’t wake up a second time until someone was nudging him on the shoulder. A gruff male voice half-shouted, “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!”

Once the haze cleared, Keo opened his eyes to empty seats in front of him, just before Beef Jerky Guy and a second man yanked him out of his own seat and pushed him toward the open door. He stumbled, expecting to fall on his bound legs, until he noticed he was moving freely again, though he couldn’t say the same about his still-bound wrists.

One out of two ain’t bad.

“Don’t fall, princess,” Beef Jerky Guy said. “No one’s picking you up. We’ll make you crawl the rest of the way.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Keo said.

“Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.”

“You’re too kind. I would have settled for the jerky breath.”

“Heh. Funny guy. You a professional comedian or something?”

“No, but I’ve been told I can be a pretty stand-up guy.”

“Oh, funny,” Beef Jerky Guy said. “Now move.”

A third man was waiting for him outside the open hatch as Keo hopped out of the helicopter. It was a mistake, and he grunted against a sudden surge of pain as he landed in a slight crouch. The still-spinning rotors swarmed the area with cold winds that made every inch of his exposed face sting.

They were in a field surrounded by grass that went up to his knees, but all he had to do was sniff the air to know they were next to the ocean. Keo breathed in the fresh breeze and tried not to think about the last time he was this close to the sea and who he had been with at the time.

One of his captors, maybe Beef Jerky Guy, pushed him in the back, and Keo stumbled forward. He ducked his head reflexively, the way people do without thinking when they exit a helicopter. Of course the rotors didn’t come close to slicing off his head, but it made him feel better anyway as he struggled across the hard ground, grass slapping at his legs.

He didn’t have to look far to see where the woman and the rest of his traveling companions had gone. They were up ahead, beyond the field and on a long stretch of beach. The men had spread out to stand guard while the woman had a radio to her lips, one hand shielding her eyes as she looked out into the ocean. He wasn’t sure what she was looking at because he couldn’t see anything out there except blue waters. Given that it was still midday, it didn’t take a genius to know he was staring at the Gulf of Mexico.

“Wanna go for a swim?” Beef Jerky Guy asked from behind him. “Wash all that crap off your face?”

“Sure. Maybe you can help me clean it off,” Keo said.

“Maybe if you had a pair of tits I might think about it.”

“You’re all heart, pal.”

“I’m not your pal, dude.”

“And I was saving up for that friendship bracelet, too.”

They were in a very isolated part of the coastline without anything that looked like civilization, much less houses, within sight on either sides of the beach. There were no hints of industry further inland and the beach was littered with seaweed and trash, along with fish carcasses. They were probably the only souls around for miles, which made it a pretty good spot for an extraction point.

The woman glanced over as Keo and his guards reached her. “Keep an eye on him. If he makes one wrong move, shoot him.”

Keo stopped next to her, the sunbaked sand sinking under his boots. “Now why would I do a stupid thing like that?”

“We should shoot him now, Erin,” Beef Jerky Guy said.

“Don’t say that,” Keo said. “What about that friendship bracelet we were going to get?”

“Shut up.”

“Is that a no?”

“Erin,” Beef Jerky Guy said, ignoring Keo. “This guy doesn’t know anything. Whoever he is, he probably killed Davis and Butch.”

“Not yet,” Erin said.

“Give me one reason.”

“I don’t have to give you a damn thing, Troy,” Erin said, and it was hard to miss the finality in her voice.

Troy grunted but didn’t press the issue.

Keo suppressed a smile, when the roar of a turbine engine revving up made him look back, just in time to see the helicopter rising slowly into the air. The man with the aviator shades sitting behind the machine gun waved at them, and Erin returned it.

“See you when we see you,” Erin said into her radio.

“Have a safe trip,” a male voice answered.

It didn’t take the helicopter long to turn into a small dot in the sky, and soon Keo could barely hear its whup-whup-whup.

“Where’s it going?” Keo asked.

Erin ignored him and said, “Looks like we’re early.”

“That’s a first,” the man standing next to Troy, whose name Keo had never caught, said.

“ETA twenty minutes. Until then, I want the area secured. The last thing we need is someone sneaking up on us again.”

“Definitely wouldn’t want that,” Troy said. “What about him?”

“He’s not going anywhere.”

Footsteps faded behind Keo, along with Troy and the second man’s presence.

In the next few seconds, Keo ran through all the possible escape scenarios, but each time he always came to the same conclusion: Mercer. Find Mercer. And the only way to do that was to let these people take him to the man.

Should be easy enough…as long as I don’t get killed on the way over.

“So who’s picking us up?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” Erin said.

“A boat?”

“Unless you can swim very, very far.”

“I happen to be a very good swimmer.”

She ignored him, said instead, “What were you doing back at the barn?”

“Hunting game.”

“With two semi-automatic rifles,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I was hunting big game.”

“There is no big game. Not anymore.”

“I’m an eternal optimist.”

She smirked, though he couldn’t tell if that was amusement or annoyance. Maybe a little of both. “You had Davis’s iPod on you.”

“There’s a lot of iPods just sitting around out there. What makes you think the one I had belonged to this Davis guy?”

She fixed him with a long look, and he was mostly convinced she didn’t believe a single thing he was saying. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to tell me now. We have people who are very good at extracting information. You’ll be telling me everything anyway, including what you were doing back there.”

“I told you—”

“I know, hunting game.”

“I get the feeling you don’t believe me.”

“You know what I think?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I think you killed Davis and Butch, just like Troy said. Maybe Luke and Bill, too, but that’s a bit of a stretch. What I can’t figure out is what you were doing out there at the barn. Alone. You had to have seen the others pushing the helicopter. That’s six people. And you still moved on us anyway.” She squinted her eyes at him. “You’re either the dumbest man alive, or you’re looking to get yourself killed. So which one is it?”

Can’t it be both? he thought, but said with as much conviction as he could muster, “Neither. I was just curious what you guys were doing out there. If I had known people were going to start shooting at me, I would have kept going.”

“You’re going to stick to that?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Uh huh,” she said before turning back to the endless blue waters in front of them. “Of course, I’m not discounting the possibility you’re one of those guys with more balls than brain cells.”

“Have you been talking to my old girlfriends?”

She ignored him again, said, “You know how I know you were looking for us?”

“Even though I wasn’t?”

“You never asked who we were. That tells me you already knew.”

Well, shit, Keo thought, and wondered how long he was going to be able to keep this up before Erin finally agreed with Troy that it wasn’t worth taking him with them.

* * *

Erin had said the ETA was twenty minutes, but it was more like seventeen before the gray dot appeared in the horizon, followed by the slowly growing whine of twin outboard motors. Keo knew it was some kind of offshore fishing boat before it got big enough for him to make out its V-shaped hull. As soon as the boat appeared, the others began converging back on his and Erin’s location.

“Are we all going to fit in there?” Keo asked.

“We’ll make do,” Erin said. “And if not…”

“I know, I go over the side, right?”

She smiled but didn’t confirm or deny.

As the boat neared, Keo counted two guys onboard—one behind the helm and the other squatting at the bow with a rifle. On cue, the radio in Erin’s hand squawked and a male voice, almost entirely drowned out by the motors on the other end, shouted, “Any trouble?”

“You’re clear,” Erin said into the radio.

“Roger that,” the man answered.

Erin clipped the radio back to her hip. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried anything yet.”

Keo held up his bound hands. “Hard to try anything like this.”

“Still, knowing what you did, where you’re going, and what’s going to happen when you get there…”

“Maybe you’re assuming too much. Maybe I didn’t do the things you think I did, and as a result I have nothing to fear.”

“Sure, whatever you say, Keo.”

A hand clamped down on Keo’s shoulder, and he smelled the familiar odor of beef jerky in the air as Troy said, “Cheer up, buddy. It’s a nice, long trip back to The Ranch. Plenty to see and do on the way.”

“Hey, as long as you’re around I’m sure it’ll be a great time, Troy,” Keo said.

“That’s the spirit.”

Keo looked over at Erin, but she was busy watching a couple of the men slinging their weapons and stepping into the lapping waters of the Gulf of Mexico to wait for the boat. Keo focused on the moment—the here and now.

And right now, he was alive.

Hurt, sore, and bleeding, but alive. And as long as he stayed that way, he could still finish the mission: Find Mercer, then kill him.

Who’s Captain Optimism now?

This guy…

7

Lara

There were two of them, and they were olive drab, not black; though in the darkness of the night, they might as well be black.

“Jon boats,” Maddie whispered next to her.

“Jon boats?” Lara repeated.

“That’s what those are called. Looks like they have trolling motors in the back, but they’re keeping them quiet and rowing the old-fashioned way so they won’t make any noise.”

The better to sneak up on us, she thought, watching the two crafts as they glided smoothly across the water. If not for the half-moon, she wouldn’t have been able to see them at all. It was pretty clear where they were headed—right toward them.

The Trident was anchored like it had been the last few days with its lights shut off, which was standard operating procedure, because despite their distance from shore, it wasn’t a good idea to be the only lights blinking out here. But SOP or not, they had been spotted and had been since last night, maybe even longer. These men approaching them now knew exactly where they were and how to reach them without being seen or heard.

Or they thought they did, anyway. They were about to get a very rude awakening.

“What are those things made of?” Lara asked.

“Usually aluminum,” Maddie said. “Sometimes fiberglass or wood.”

“Wood?”

“But usually aluminum.”

There were three figures in each boat, with one sitting forward at the bow while the two behind him slowly rowed them forward with paddles. They were likely armed, since you didn’t try to sneak up on an anchored yacht in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night without bad intentions.

The radio resting between her and Maddie squawked—it was just a small sound with the volume turned almost all the way down, but it still made enough of an impression that she flinched a little bit.

“Wonder what they’re doing all the way out here at this time of the night,” Blaine said through the radio. He was somewhere above and to the left of them, hidden by the darkness of the bridge. In case they needed to abandon the charade, she wanted him up there and ready. She wanted everyone ready.

Just in case, right, Will?

“Maybe they just want to borrow some sugar,” Bonnie said. She was positioned on the upper deck and tasked with watching the other side of the boat in case there were more surprises coming their way.

“I guess we should greet them all friendly like,” Carly said. She was on the main deck behind them, keeping an eye on everyone else. “That would be the Christian thing to do.”

“Fuck that,” Blaine said.

“Hey, there are children present.”

“Oops.”

“Sucker,” Carly said. “Everyone’s locked inside their cabins, snug as bugs.” Lara could hear a slight echo from Carly’s radio, which meant she was in the hallway outside the rooms, probably pacing nervously back and forth and doing her very best not to let it show in her voice. “Just make sure to keep the collateral damage limited to outside, okay guys?”

“That’s going to depend on them,” Bonnie said.

“Shoot first and never mind the questions; isn’t that the Ranger way?” Blaine asked.

“Sounds familiar,” Carly said.

Lara picked up the radio and keyed it. “That’s enough chitchat. We’re going radio silent from now on. Everyone, wait for my signal.”

She had let them go back and forth because they needed it; there was something unnerving about sitting (or standing) around in the dark waiting for men with guns to slowly, oh so slowly, reach you. All that anxiety needed a release, and talking or joking always seemed to do the trick. She’d seen it work for Danny and Will plenty of times.

Next to her, Maddie was peering over the railing. “I still just count six. All armed, probably. I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe they’re coming here to borrow some sugar.”

Lara gave her a wry smile, then picked up her M4 and checked that the safety was off for the third time since she arrived at the spot next to Maddie on the boat’s port side. They were almost exactly in the middle of the main deck, hidden behind a wall section of the railing that provided plenty of cover in case of a firefight. The better shooting position was on the upper deck, and she already had Bonnie and Benny up there right now.

Maddie fidgeted and switched up her grip on her own carbine. “It’s times like these I miss having the Ranger around.”

“He’ll be back soon enough. Then you’ll be complaining about his bad jokes.”

“Yeah, probably.” She paused for a moment, then, “Too bad Keo didn’t come back with you. We could sure use him, too.”

She shared Maddie’s regret and wondered what Keo was doing right now. The last time she saw him, he and Jordan were on their way back to T18 to get the oft-talked about but never-seen Gillian out of Mercer’s destructive path. Had they made it? Where were they now? He knew exactly how to contact her, so why hadn’t he?

You still alive out there, Keo?

She pushed the question away and peeked over the railing. Without binoculars, the boats looked more like two long, black shapes bobbing slightly up and down against the ocean currents. They were still far enough away that she couldn’t hear the slosh-slosh of their paddles moving against the water, but close enough that she noticed a slight pang of anticipation and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of fear, which was something she hadn’t felt in a long time since coming out here.

“Who do you think they are?” Maddie whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t be collaborators…”

“Why not?”

“I’ve never known those guys to be this subtle. Remember the last time they assaulted Song Island?”

She nodded. How could she forget? That night still haunted her dreams. The blood, the deaths, the piles of bodies, then later the tide of ghouls…

“Maybe they’re pirates,” Maddie was saying.

“Pirates?”

“Not the Johnny Depp metrosexual type of pirates, but more like those Somali pirates you hear about on the news. They take over boats and hold the crew for ransom.” The smaller Texan shrugged. “But that was back when money was still, well, money.”

“Pirates,” Lara repeated. For some reason, just saying the word made her smile.

“Hey, stranger things have been happening these days. Ghouls, end of the world, blood towns… Why not a little pirate action?”

She looked over the railing at the jon boats again. The six figures inside them still lacked details even though they were closer than before, which probably meant they were all wisely wearing black clothes that helped them blend into their environment.

They had definitely come prepared. The question was: For what?

* * *

“Blaine,” she said into the radio. She wasn’t whispering, but it was close. “Call it.”

“Forty yards,” Blaine said. She couldn’t tell if he had changed his voice to match hers or if it was the result of the lowered volume on the two-way. Whatever the reason, she had to strain more than usual to hear him.

Next to her, Maddie shuffled her feet and there was a sharp click! as she thumbed her rifle’s fire selector off the safety position.

“Thirty-five,” Blaine said.

“They’re taking their sweet time,” Maddie whispered. She couldn’t—and maybe wasn’t even trying—to hide the anxiety in her voice.

“Thirty,” Blaine said. “They’re still on course to make contact almost directly below you, Lara.”

“Roger that,” she said into the radio. “Bonnie, anything on the other side?”

“Still nothing,” Bonnie said. She sounded anxious. “Should I go over to Benny’s and back him up?”

“Yes.”

“Moving!”

Thank God for Blaine, hidden on the bridge, observing as the two jon boats slowly crept toward them; she couldn’t see anything now that she was completely hidden behind the thick wall. It went up to three feet along the side of the yacht, and the only way to see over it would be to raise herself and peek. With the men so close, the chances of being spotted were just too good.

Even though she couldn’t see them, she could hear the quiet but persistent slosh-slosh of their plastic paddles moving against the water as they neared.

“Bonnie, where are you now?” she said into the radio.

“In position!” Bonnie said, her breathing coming through the radio in labored gasps.

“Twenty-five yards,” Blaine said.

Lara poised her thumb over the radio’s transmit lever and glanced briefly at Maddie. The other woman was watching her back, the M4 rifle gripped tightly in her hands.

“Twenty,” Blaine said.

“Cutting it a little close, aren’t we,” Maddie said. It may or may not have been a question.

“Fifteen,” Blaine said.

She keyed the radio and hissed into it, “Now!” and stood up.

The lights snapped on around her, the sudden switch from darkness to blinding brightness like sharp knives pricking at the corners of her eyes. This despite the fact she was prepared for it, so the effect on the men in the jon boats would have been even more dramatic.

And it was, she saw as she peered through the iron sights of her carbine at the smaller boats in front, and, as Blaine predicted, right below her. They were caught in the water about ten yards off the side of the yacht, both vessels moving side-by-side and close enough that the two men at the bows could have swapped places by jumping over. The four in the back still had their paddles in their hands and were leaning over their respective sides when the lights hit them in mid-row. They were all wearing black clothes like she had guessed, though she didn’t expect their faces to be painted black and green.

The two up front were the real problems, because there was a reason they weren’t rowing. It was why she focused on them first and instantly spotted the rifles in their hands, the weapons dangling off their shoulders by straps. Half of the men had one hand shielding their eyes from the bright lights blasting in their faces, but she knew that sudden disorientation wasn’t going to last forever.

And it didn’t. It took three eternally long seconds for the men to understand what had happened—that they had been caught in an ambush—and for the ones in the back to drop their paddles and reach for their rifles on the floors of the boats. Two of them actually let go of their paddles in mid-row and the plastic devices sank into the water. The two up front were already taking aim, swinging their weapons from side to side and up and down as Lara and Maddie, and Bonnie and Benny above them, then Carrie, Gwen, and Lorelei popped up along the sides of the Trident. Lara wondered what they must look like to the men, with the bright spotlights doing a number on their field of vision.

But they had to know, didn’t they? It may have just been six against seven, but it was more than that: They were at a great disadvantage on their small boats adrift in the ocean. They had no cover, no room to maneuver, and they were, for all intents and purposes, sitting ducks.

Sitting ducks with rifles.

“Hold your fire!” Lara shouted. “If you open fire, we will kill you!”

They didn’t react right away, but they also didn’t start shooting, either. Instead, they kept looking left and right, and up and down, maybe counting how many guns were pointed at them, maybe trying to decide if they could make it through this encounter alive. All the lights on the Trident weren’t turned on the boats, but there were enough to be hazards, and she could see the way the men below her were blinking, trying to focus on what they were facing.

They had to know they didn’t have any chance, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

“Put down your weapons!” Lara shouted. “You have ten seconds to comply before we open fire and kill every single one of you!”

Most of the six men began honing in on her voice.

“You now have five seconds!”

They didn’t move. A couple of them exchanged looks, the whites of their eyes visible thanks to the black paint covering their faces.

“Four!”

Before she could get to three, one of the men lowered his rifle and said something to the others. The other five didn’t seem to react until the man tossed his weapon off the side of the jon boat. It plopped into the Gulf of Mexico and sank. Maybe it was the noise, but the men suddenly realized what he had done and began looking at one another. If they were talking, she couldn’t hear it over her own racing heartbeat.

“Oh Jesus, come on, guys, come on,” Maddie whispered next to her.

Lara didn’t take her eyes or her weapon off the small open crafts below her or the men standing unsteadily on them. Maddie, despite her quiet pleading, also didn’t relax, and Lara hoped the rest of her people were equally stout right now. One man throwing his gun away didn’t mean anything when the other five hadn’t followed suit, and so many things could still go so, so wrong in the next few seconds.

“The rest of you!” Lara shouted. “Do it!”

Slowly, one by one, they grudgingly lowered their weapons.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Maddie whispered when the men began tossing their rifles into the ocean and raised their hands into the air.

“Your belts, too!” Lara shouted.

They obeyed, even though she kept waiting for at least one of them to rebel, to take his chances rather than be captured. But none of them did, and slowly as the gun belts slipped into the water, she blinked out the sweat in her eyes despite the cold night air. Her shirt under the assault vest was already drenched, though she hadn’t noticed it until now.

The man who had surrendered his weapon first had moved to the bow of his boat while the others remained in the back with their hands raised. “What now?” he shouted up at them—at her.

“Pick up your paddles and start rowing toward the back!” she shouted down. “Attempt to go in any other direction, and we will open fire! Do you understand?”

The man turned around and nodded at the others, and they sat back down and picked up their paddles. Or the ones that hadn’t dropped theirs into the ocean, anyway.

“Wow,” Maddie said breathlessly next to her. “That was too intense.”

Lara glanced over at Maddie, who was wiping sweat off her forehead with her shirt’s long sleeve. “Head to the back and get them onboard, Maddie.”

Maddie nodded and jogged off.

Alone, Lara lowered her rifle and leaned against the railing and wiped at her own dripping sweat. She sighed and willed her heartbeat to slow down, slow down…

Jesus, Will, how did you do this day in and day out?

Jesus, Jesus…

* * *

They pulled both small boats out of the water and left them in the back, and even as the six men were led through the lower deck (she wanted to keep them as far away from the upper decks and the kids as possible), Blaine powered up the Trident and got them moving again, just in case the men had friends who might come looking for them. Lara posted additional sentries on both sides of the yacht and equipped everyone with night-vision binoculars.

With their hands bound with duct tape, the captives were led through the lower deck and placed inside a small room where the boat’s crew usually ate their meals. Their ankles were bound, and five of the men sat down while Benny and Maddie stood guard outside the door. The sixth man, the one who had been first to surrender, left with Lara.

She led him, his hands still bound, to one of the crew cabins they had been using as an extra storage room, and closed the door after them. The man sat down on a box of military MREs and looked around him. He was older than the rest—late forties, with gray liberally sprinkled along a military-style haircut. He could have passed for her father, except he was lean and muscular and almost six feet.

It should have been imposing for her to be in a room alone with him, but she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she wasn’t the least bit intimidated. Maybe it was the Glock in her hip holster; or maybe she was just tired of being afraid of people when there were so many other things out there to be scared of.

“You have a name?” she asked.

“Hart,” the man said.

“I’m Lara.”

“Nice to meet you, Lara.”

“Likewise, Hart. How old are you?”

“That’s my line,” he smiled. “What are you, twenty?”

She smiled back but didn’t answer him.

“Twenty-five?” he said.

“You’re getting warmer.”

“Gotta admit, you’re the last person I expected to find in charge of this boat.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Older. More male.”

“Happy to disappoint you.”

He sighed. “I guess we should get on with it, huh? It’s late, and I’m sure we’re both tired. Especially me. These bones aren’t made for sitting on those tiny boats for hours.”

“How long were you guys out there?”

“Long enough.”

“Where did you come from?”

“I can’t tell you that. At least, not yet.”

“‘Not yet?’”

He gave her a noncommittal shrug.

“You wanted the boat,” she said.

He nodded. “We wanted the boat.”

“You’re not even going to try to lie?”

“No point. You got us by the balls. I figure whether we live or die now depends on what I say next.”

“That’s a very astute observation.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“What?”

“Astute.”

“It means you’re right. Whether you live or die depends entirely on what you say now, in here.”

“Ah,” Hart said.

“Were you going to kill us?”

“No.”

“Then how were you going to take the boat from us?”

“Hopefully without bloodshed.”

“You were pretty heavily armed, if that was your hope.”

“The plan was to sneak onboard and take it over with minimal collateral damage. We needed the boat. The weapons were insurance.”

“I could have killed you and your men out there.”

“I know…”

“If one of your guys had opened fire…”

“I know,” Hart said again. “Trust me, I know.”

They let a few seconds of silence fall between them.

Five seconds became ten, then fifteen…

He wasn’t afraid of her, she could tell that much. Mostly he seemed completely resigned to his fate. She told herself not to believe him, that he wasn’t telling her the complete truth, but for whatever reason, she chose to ignore it.

“Where’s your base of operations?” she asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way from shore. We’re too far for that.”

“We didn’t.”

“So where did you come from?”

“I can’t tell you. At least, not yet.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“What would I need a pen for?”

“I’m going to give you a radio frequency,” Hart said. “The guy you’ll want to talk to will be on the other end.”

“Is he in charge?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I want to talk to him?”

“How long have you been on this boat?”

“That’s none of your business.”

He shrugged slowly, as if just doing that simple move was tiring. “What I’m trying to get at is you’re probably running low on fuel and supplies. Am I right?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Of course I am,” he said. “The collaborators have all the marinas and fueling stations along the coastline on lockdown. The ones they haven’t already destroyed, anyway.”

“You’re not a collaborator…”

“And neither are you, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. I’d be fish food at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Which is why I think we can make a deal.”

She stared at him but remained silent.

“Call my CO,” Hart said. When she still didn’t say anything, he leaned slightly forward, his eyes almost pleading with her now. “Please. I promise you, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

8

Gaby

She hated the sinking feeling that always came with waiting for night. There was a thickness in the air, as if the molecules that made up the world suddenly doubled in density. Even breathing seemed to get a little harder, and it didn’t help that the weather got immeasurably chillier as the sun disappeared. Darkness, unencumbered by artificial lights that once dotted the landscape, fell over everything.

They left the living room windows the way they had found them—dirty linen curtains over the glass panes on the inside, without any extra barriers that hadn’t been there when they found the house. Danny had locked the doors because a locked door wasn’t obvious like windows that were barricaded with furniture. The ghouls were dead, not stupid, as Will always used to say, and they knew when an environment had been altered. It was instinctive, a level of base intelligence that remained long after their humanity had been stripped away.

Eventually they retreated into the main bedroom in the back. There was a single window in the room, and thankfully it had blinders that were already closed earlier today. That made perfect sense. The previous owners wouldn’t have wanted their neighbors looking in at their bedroom. She and Danny upended the king-size bed and leaned the box spring and mattress against the window, then wedged them into place with a heavy wood armoire.

“Should hold,” Danny said.

“You think?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“That’s not very reassuring, Danny.”

“Oh well.”

They moved Nate into the master bedroom and placed a mattress from a smaller room on the floor for him to lie on. He hadn’t woken up from the morphine, and a part of her was glad he wasn’t going to be awake for this. Not just because of the pain, but in case things went from bad to worse. She hated the thought but the possibility was there, especially if the collaborators really had been tracking them since Starch.

What makes us so special? Hopefully we won’t have to find out.

They had brought all their supplies and weapons into the house, and while Danny called the Trident on the ham radio in the living room, she sat with Nate in the bedroom and watched him sleep. He was covered up with a throw blanket, but every now and then he would still shiver. She knew it wasn’t from the slowly building cold outside the house’s flimsy walls or from his wounds.

Nate suffered from nightmares where he would relive that night at the pawnshop in Louisiana and the days and nights afterward when she thought he was dead. It had taken a long time before he would confess it to her. She would have held him now, the way she did all those other nights, if not for his wound. She had to be satisfied with stroking his hair, and when that didn’t seem to help, leaned close to him and whispered, “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re with me now. You’re safe, Nate. You’re safe. I’ll watch over you. I always will…”

His trembling subsided, whether because of her whispers or because the nightmares had run their course she didn’t know, and he slowly settled into a peaceful slumber. She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers along the sides of his neck, feeling the very distinct indentations that covered most of his body underneath his clothes. They were teeth marks, a daily reminder of what he had been through and why he was never going to outrun his nightmares.

It was dark enough inside the room that her wristwatch’s hands were glowing when Danny came back inside. He walked to the corner and put the radio away.

“How’s everyone?” she asked.

“Still waiting to pick us up,” Danny said. “Other than that, nothing they couldn’t handle.”

“Problems?”

“Maybe, maybe not. They’ll know for sure tonight.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Eh, they’ll deal with it like they always do.” He sat down and rummaged through his pack. “They’re in good hands. I’m more worried about us tonight.”

“Did you tell them about Nate? Or why we’re not already waiting on a beach for them?”

He shook his head. “I just told them we got delayed. Accident on the road, and everyone’s slowing down to take a look. You know, the usual Texas traffic. Besides, nothing good’s going to come from them knowing what kind of creek we’re up without a paddle.”

“That good, huh?”

“Hey, we’ve been in worse situations. Compared to that whole Larkin snafu, this one’s a peach. At least no one’s trying to strafe us from above.”

“Good point.”

“That’s why they call me Good Point Danny.” He took a drink from a bottle before continuing. “The smart move would have been to adios outta here before dark. Take our chances on the road.”

“You know we couldn’t do that. Not with Nate’s situation.”

“Nate schmate.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He shrugged. “You might be overestimating my fondness for him.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. Danny would never leave her or Nate, just as she would never leave the two of them. And Nate…well, she knew Nate would never leave her. He had proven that twice now.

“Maybe it’s not too late to find a better hiding spot,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure this is as good as it’s gonna get. At least, in the time we have left.”

“That’s disheartening.”

“Just have to get through the night; then we’re home free.” He stood up and walked back over to the door. “If you hear something that sounds like bad news, you know what to do.”

“Take Nate into the bathroom.”

“I was gonna say run outside and see if I might need some assistance, but sure, do the other thing, too.”

Danny stepped outside and closed the door after him.

She looked down at Nate again and brushed specks of dirt out of his hair. Maybe it was the chaos of the day combined with the stress of almost losing him (again), but somewhere between six and seven o’clock she closed her eyes and went to sleep without realizing it.

* * *

Tap-tap.

Her hand was reaching for the M4 leaning against the wall next to her before she had fully opened both eyes. Nate was snoring lightly, the rise and fall of his chest underneath the flimsy throw blanket drawing her attention temporarily.

Tap-tap.

It came from above and slightly in front of her, which made sense because there was nothing behind her except the back of the house. She pulled her eyes away from Nate and turned them upward, trying to pinpoint the exact location—

Tap-tap.

More than one. Two at least, but likely more because where there were two there was usually a horde right behind them. They were moving back and forth on the roof of the residence directly above her. There was no pattern to their movements that she could detect, almost as if they were testing their footing, which didn’t make any sense. The creatures were almost reckless when it came to their lives.

She sat perfectly still on the mattress next to Nate, acutely aware of everything about her surroundings, including her own slightly labored breathing, which provided a stark contrast against Nate’s slow and steady heartbeat. She located the second rifle—Nate’s—nearby and reached for it, then laid it on the floor next to her. The fact that both weapons were loaded with regular bullets made her question why she was even arming herself.

Danny. Where was Danny?

The bedroom door was still closed and she craned her head slightly forward, hoping to hear something from the hallway on the other side, but there was nothing.

Did Danny know they were out (up) there? If she could hear it—if they had been loud enough to wake her up—it would have been impossible for Danny to miss them. Unless he had gone to sleep, too. Was that possible? Could Danny be asleep right this minute, oblivious to what was happening above them?

She started to get up when the door clicked open. She lifted the rifle as a silhouetted figure slipped inside and slid the door closed before leaning against it.

Danny.

The whites of his eyes searched her out in the darkness, but if he said anything, she didn’t hear it. Gaby finished getting up and tiptoed across the room toward him. Halfway to Danny, she glanced back at the window on the other side of the room. The armoire remained pressed against the bed, which was long enough that it covered up the entire window frame and didn’t allow any moonlight to penetrate inside.

She pushed up against the wall next to Danny, whose head was slightly tilted as he listened to the persistent tap-tap above them.

“Are they inside?” she whispered.

He shook his head and whispered back, “Not yet.”

“How many?”

“Don’t know. Dollars to donuts it’s a buttload.”

She looked back across the room again and could just make out Nate in the pitch darkness. With just his head sticking out from underneath the blanket, he looked like a bodiless head floating in the shadows. They had purposefully put the mattress with him in the corner closer to the bathroom to make moving him in there easier if they had to.

Tap-tap-tap.

She glanced up, drawn irresistibly by the noise. If there had only been a few before, they had just gotten some company. Five? Ten? Not that it mattered—

Tap-tap-tap!

“Danny,” she whispered.

“The bathroom,” he whispered back.

“And then?”

“We’ll cross that bathtub when we get to it.”

They hurried across the room to Nate. Gaby slung her rifle, then picked up the spare M4 and added it to her own. She grabbed their backpacks as Danny bent at the knees before standing back up with Nate cradled in his arms. She half-expected Nate to wake up as soon as Danny lifted him, but he remained limp as the ex-Ranger turned and, with some effort, carried him into the bathroom. Gaby hurried over to open the door for him.

“Much appreciated,” Danny said, grunting with the strain of Nate’s weight.

Danny went into the bathroom first, then gingerly laid Nate down on the small single-size mattress they had inserted into the bathtub earlier. She thought Nate might have groaned as Danny lowered him, or it might have actually been Danny sighing with relief.

“Guy weighs a ton,” Danny said. “Time to put him on a diet.”

“I’ll get on it as soon as we get back to the Trident.” She looked back at the bedroom. “What—”

A loud crash! tore through the house before she could finish. It came from their left and was soon followed by the unmistakable sound of glass breaking. On cue, the tap-tap noises above them ceased entirely.

“Danny,” she said breathlessly.

“I know, I know,” Danny said. “Maybe we should have barricaded those windows after all, huh?”

“Gee, ya think?”

He grinned back at her then nodded at Nate. “Keep an eye on him.”

“Where are you going?”

“Be right back.”

“Danny,” she said, but he had already vanished through the door, the darkness on the other side swallowing him up in a matter of seconds.

She unslung the rifles, laying one across the sink, then spent a few seconds pushing their backpacks and supplies into the crevices around the toilet so she didn’t accidentally trip on them if she had to scramble around the tight confines. It was dark enough inside that she couldn’t even see her own reflection in the mirror above the sink. She only knew where to find Nate because the white porcelain tub stood out—

Another loud crash! and Gaby thought, There goes the bedroom door…

She spun toward the open bathroom door at the same time the first gunshot rang out. It was followed by two more shots, both single shots but fired in such quick succession it was easy to mistake them for burst-fire. They seemed to have come from right outside the bathroom, except she didn’t see the telltale staccato flash of gunfire, so it couldn’t have been that—

The single shots became a volley as the shooter switched from semi-auto to full-auto, the pop-pop-pop blowing across the house and she thought, At least Nate won’t be awake to see this.

She ran back into the master bedroom and immediately made out a solitary figure (Danny) crouched in front of her and firing at where the door had once been. Something had shattered the slab of wood into pieces that were now spread across the room—something either very heavy or very, very strong.

Danny snapped a quick look behind him as he stood up, his hands busy with loading a fresh magazine. “Get back inside! We’re fu—”

She was pretty sure she knew what he was going to say but didn’t get the chance to, because one second he was standing up in front of her trying desperately to feed a magazine into his rifle, and the next he was on the floor and there was a ghoul perched on top of him.

Jesus!

The thing had moved so fast she hadn’t even seen it coming through what remained of the door. It was just suddenly there and on top of Danny, pinning him to the floor with one hand while ripping the rifle out of his grip and tossing it across the room as if he were a petulant child in need of discipline.

Then it turned its head, and deep, pulsating blue eyes bored into her soul.

“Run!” Danny shouted despite the creature’s hand wrapped tightly around his throat.

Run? Run where, Danny? Where can I run that it can’t find me?

Of course, she didn’t say any of those things out loud. She was too busy backpedaling, moving as fast as she could (though it didn’t seem to be nearly fast enough) toward the bathroom door behind her. She lifted her M4 (Go for the head! Shoot it in the head!), but before she could pull the trigger, something moved in the corner of her left eye.

She finished the pull anyway, but her aim was off and the round sailed past the creature’s head and disappeared into the shadows. She had missed! How the hell had she missed from such a short distance? Or had the thing simply moved its head to avoid her shot? Could it move that fast?

Yes. Yes, it could. She remembered that time at the farmhouse in Louisiana and how fast that blue-eyed monstrosity had been—

It was just a blur, but even before her eyes could report its presence to her brain, it had already reached her and broadsided her. It couldn’t have been flesh and blood because the blow was too strong, like being hit with a jackhammer, and it sent her flying across the room and into the armoire. She was still trying to comprehend why she was no longer holding her rifle (or standing) as she was falling and finally slammed into the floor.

She couldn’t find the wherewithal to stick her hands out in time to stop her fall, and the face-first blow with the floor sent pain rippling through her entire body. Which was just as well, because most of her bones were still rattling from being slammed into by that semi-trailer (Anyone get the license plate of that thing?), then not even a second later crashing into the armoire.

Which part of her wasn’t screaming at the moment?

She expected to hear gunshots, something to indicate Danny had gotten the upper hand on the monster that had knocked him to the floor, but there wasn’t any. Which were more bad signs. With Danny, silence was never a good thing.

Gaby managed to flatten her palms against the floor and pushed herself up, if just slightly, even as her face throbbed. She turned her head and saw two figures entering the room, stepping over splintered wood sprinkled across the floor. But they moved like men, not ghouls, and were wearing gas masks and carrying rifles.

A pair of bare feet entered her line of vision, blocking her view of the figures in gas masks. The legs in front of her were black but somehow still stood out against the suffocating darkness inside the room. She craned her head, her neck straining with the effort, until she was staring into a pair of blue eyes. They looked like crystal heartbeats hanging in the air, beating slowly. The thing’s skin emitted an unnatural combination of cold and heat that had little difficulty piercing through her thermal clothing, making every inch of her shiver uncontrollably.

“So frail,” the blue-eyed creature (hissed) said. Thin strips of purple lines on the lower part of its face twisted into a grotesque facsimile of what must have been a mocking smile.

She looked past the creature and at Danny, unmoving on the floor behind it. The blue-eyed ghoul that had been perched on top of him was gone—no, not gone; it had simply abandoned him after Danny was no longer a threat and was now standing over him.

“Danny,” she said, his name coming out as barely a whisper.

The creature in front of her bent, grabbed her by the throat, and lifted her up from the floor as if she weighed nothing. It held her effortlessly in the air, and she struggled to breathe even as the toes of her boots scraped the floor, desperately trying to find the solid footing that was no longer possible.

Being in such close proximity to the creature, being touched by it, made her almost gag. If not for the pain, she might have lost the battle. Its fingers were more bone than flesh, and she swore she could feel every single joint that made up all five digits. And as hard as it was to fathom, she didn’t think it was even using most of its strength, because it looked almost amused by her flailing. Its lips (or what passed for lips) again formed that twisted thing that might have been an attempt at a smile.

“How did you ever survive for so long, little thing?” it asked her, its voice a sharp hiss that left no room for doubt it was no longer human.

Did it expect her to answer? And if so, how? She couldn’t reply with its hand around her throat, constricting her ability to do something as simple as breathe, never mind articulating sounds into understandable words.

Behind the creature, the two figures in gas masks had grabbed Danny by the legs and were dragging him out of the room. His body was limp and she couldn’t tell if he was even still alive. Had the monster done something to him? And what about her? What were they going to do to her?

She remembered Nate in the bathroom behind her. She thought about the teeth marks that covered his body that he went to great lengths to hide unless he was with her. Maybe they were going to do just that to Danny, use him the way they had poor Nate after the pawnshop. And once they were done with him, she would be next. And there would be nothing she could do about it. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

No.

Hell no!

Her fingers brushed against the Glock holstered at her hip as she focused everything she had left on the ghoul in front of her. It seemed content to watch her struggling to breathe, finding some sick amusement in her pain, which it could clearly see on her face. It wasn’t as if she were trying to hide it; she couldn’t even if she wanted to.

Fuck you.

Fuck you!

The gun slid out easily—

The head!

—and she raised her arm and fired from almost point-blank range—

Shoot it in the head!

Its head seemed to twitch slightly, and the bullet vanished into the wall behind it.

No!

Before she could squeeze the trigger a second time, it casually grabbed the barrel with its other hand and twisted, and she somehow managed a scream despite its fingers wrapped impossibly tight around her throat, constricting everything from breathing to sounds. Or had she screamed at all? Was it all in her head?

It dropped her to the floor as if she were nothing, and Gaby forgot all about the fire burning in her throat because there was fresh, excruciating pain from her right wrist. She scooted back, away from the creature, cradling her hand in her lap, sure that it was broken, or if it wasn’t, then something was broken somewhere.

The second blue-eyed ghoul appeared behind the first (How the hell had it moved so fast?), and it too looked down at her as if she was barely worth its time. The mere presence of two of them in the same place, standing so close to one another, combined to give off an intense cold and heat pulse that threatened to drown her in some thick invisible ocean.

They looked down at her, blue eyes like living orbs against the darkness, but for some reason she didn’t think they were really seeing her at all. She had stopped mattering to them; they’d had their fun with her and now she had become…insignificant.

“How long until he comes?” the second one hissed.

“Not long,” the first one said. “He spies on us. The clever boy.”

“Not clever enough.”

“He’ll come for them soon.”

“Yes.”

“And when he does…”

“We’ll end him.”

“Finally…” the first one hissed, its thin lips worming their way into something that almost—almost—resembled a smile.

9

Frank

“We have him.”

He didn’t need the voice to tell him that. He had seen the black-eyed ghouls swarming on the small Texas town, waiting as the men in gas masks entered the house. He could taste the acrid smell of gunpowder on the tip of his tongue as the creatures swarmed the building only to hang back as the two blue eyes made their entry.

“But you already know, don’t you?”

He had hoped they would have made it back to the sea by now. Back to the safety of the ocean, where she waited. From Larkin to Starch and back again. It was risky, but if anyone could do it, it would be them. Danny was well trained, and Gaby had been a quick student. But Port Arthur was a nest of ghouls and collaborators, and they’d been forced to reroute.

“You saw us take him.”

The voice wasn’t Mabry’s. No, Mabry had gone silent these last few days. (Why? You know why.) It was someone else drawing him into the river of consciousness that connected the brood, showing him images in the aftermath of the assault on the house. The projection was vivid, which meant they were close, though sometimes distance could be deceptive when he was in the hive mind. They knew he would be listening and watching while hiding along the edges, always beyond their reach.

“And the girl.”

It was his fault. He had exposed them to the enemy because of what he had done outside of Larkin. He had revealed himself, but even worse, he had shown them his weaknesses. (Danny…Gaby…) He couldn’t sever those ties and didn’t want to, not if he had any hope of clinging onto what still made him who he was, and without that he might as well be one of the mindless husks that serviced Mabry’s will.

“She’s a weak one. She won’t last very long.”

They moved and prodded at the corners of his mind, always threatening to break through his defenses. But it was all a trick, a cheap mirage, because he had learned to camouflage himself from them. It had taken days, weeks, and months, with so many trials and errors and near-misses that nearly cost him everything. There were so many times when they almost had him, when one crucial mistake could have ended everything he was working toward.

“They’re both such frail things.”

If they only knew where he was now, what he was doing and had been for the last few nights. Moving in silence, sleeping in the day, drawing closer to the beginning and the end, while staying invisible. Always in the shadows. It hadn’t been easy, because the chances of being discovered increased exponentially the closer he got…

“It doesn’t take much to break them.”

Waiting. For him. A small town with a sign at the city limits reading: Gallant, Texas. They had let him see the markers, showed him the way in.

“Don’t make us wait very long.”

It was a trap. An obvious trap. Even a fool could see it, and he wasn’t a fool. He had never been one, and he wasn’t one now.

“You know how easily bored we can become.”

Danny. Gaby. He should resist and stick to the plan.

Stick to the plan!

But he couldn’t.

“Hurry,” the voice said inside his mind, “before it’s too late. They’re only human, after all.”

Danny. Gaby…

* * *

Smoke and gunpowder lingered in the air between Houston and Gallant. He recognized signs on overpasses and along the roads, and there were enough landmarks to know he was moving in the right direction.

“Mercer.”

The name reverberated inside his head, sometimes screamed out by the many consciousness—both strong and weak—that flowed through it day and night. The creatures knew the name, despised it. He was the cause of their pain, the man who brought fire from the skies and sent the armored machines into their carefully preserved towns. The man who was threatening their food supply, their future.

“Mercer!” they cried. “Mercer!”

He saw the evidence of Mercer’s victories wherever he went. Towns that once brimmed with life—many of them on the verge of bringing in new life—had been wiped out in torrents of violence. Survivors—and there were always survivors—scattered across other locations, always taking their stories of horror and blood with them.

“Mercer! Find him! Kill him!”

And each time the stories grew. Bigger and bloodier, the exaggerations mixed in with the truth. The fear was spreading among the food supply, taking root in the souls of men and women that had surrendered. They were becoming hesitant, doubts sprouting from their once-contented minds.

“Mercer! Stop him at all costs!”

He had to cross another town, and like the last few, he didn’t have to skirt around the edges to keep from being seen, because there was no one left to witness his passing by. It was just debris and the fading stench of smoke and gunpowder now, residues of a bloodbath from two days ago. The bodies were gone, removed to be fed on before the precious liquid in their veins became useless.

“Mercer!”

And as Mercer’s people rampaged, the agitation grew inside the hive. The brood was restless, the blue eyes swearing retribution, and yet their human collaborators seemed incapable of stopping the chaos. How, they wondered, could so few people cause so much destruction?

“Humans,” they said, “this is what they do.”

“This is what they’re capable of,” others agreed.

“Violence,” still others chimed in.

“Destruction.”

“They’ll slaughter even their own.”

“Even the ones bearing children.”

“They’re indiscriminate.”

“Animals.”

“Worse than animals.”

“Yes.”

“This is why we have to show them a better way.”

“Our way.”

“Yes…”

He moved along the piles of rubble, making sure not to touch the bullet casings that littered his path. The black eyes were out there (everywhere), watching and listening and feeling for every slight shift in the wind, every out-of-place item. They weren’t nearly as intuitive, their senses not nearly as heightened as his, but they made up for what they lacked in ability with sheer number. And there were so, so many of them.

The town receded into the distance behind him, and he circled buildings that once thrived with life. A faded yellow M seemed to almost glow in the distance, beckoning him, but he went the other way, avoiding the long, gray concrete highway that connected Houston to the cities along the coastline.

The voices had stopped calling to him hours ago, but even as he neared his destination, a surge rippled across his skin with the first hint of morning. It was coming, rising in the east as it always did night after night after night…

“Don’t make us wait very long,” the blue eyes had said. “You know how easily bored we can become.”

But he didn’t hurry. He knew they would wait for him. That was, after all, the whole point of last night. Capturing his friends. Danny and Gaby. And the boy.

What was his name again?

It would come to him, eventually. It always did.

* * *

He slept, and like all the other nights, he dreamt of her. The crystal blue of her eyes, the golden strands of her hair, the sweet taste of her lips, and most of all, the feel of her skin against his. She would cringe if she could see him now, he was sure of it. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t even a man at all.

Lara.

She was out there somewhere, waiting for Danny and Gaby. Maybe even waiting for him. No, not him. She would have given him up for dead long ago. Days ago. Weeks ago. Months (?) ago.

How long had it been since he died?

He couldn’t remember. The nights were a blur. Not that it mattered, anyway. The past was the past; he had to concentrate on the future. The here and now.

Mabry.

Out there, vulnerable. So, so vulnerable.

He had spent days in the city poking at their defenses, looking for ways in. A small sliver of access, a forgotten point of entry. Anything that would allow him to get close and do what he had to do.

Mabry.

He should have stuck to the plan and not left to come here. But it was Danny. And Gaby. And if he wanted to retain an ounce of his humanity (it was already so difficult; he could feel it slipping every night, every time he had to rest, to heal his wounds), he couldn’t leave them in the blue eyes’ hands.

“Don’t make us wait very long.”

He opened his eyes to gunfire in the distance, followed shortly by the very distinctive taste of blood in the air, carried to his position by the wind. He licked his lips, and every inch of him yearned to taste it. How many days had it been since he satiated himself on the raccoon? Too long ago, and it had been such a small creature; he’d been forced to spend so much of his energy on recovering from his wounds.

The gunfire rolled across the world like thunder. Close, but beyond his reach. He could feel the siren of daylight calling to him. He longed to embrace its warmth. It had been so, so long. It wouldn’t have taken much, and there was nothing to stop him.

Except her. And the future.

Not for him, no. The future was for her. Everything he did now was for her.

Lara.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the blue of her eyes, the yellow of her hair, the sweetness of her lips…even as the pop-pop-pop echoed, then faded, only to start all over again…

* * *

Gallant, Texas.

A nothing city in a nothing part of the state. It was close enough to the ocean that the breeze teased at his skin. He ignored it—easy to do this far from the (killing) water—and pressed on through the darkness, moving toward the center of town.

The business district. Shops and glass storefronts. Car dealerships.

They were here somewhere. Danny and Gaby. Like mice, held against their will to draw him closer.

So he went.

There were nests in the bigger buildings around him. Fresh ones. They had only come here recently and were staying off the streets, though he spied a few of them on the rooftops leaning over the edges, watching and waiting to report in. The black eyes were always smarter when the blue eyes were around to command them.

“He’s here,” a voice said inside his head.

“Close,” another added.

Had they seen him? No. He was too careful, and he wasn’t “him” at the moment. Maybe they had sensed him. It was always a challenge to hide from the blue eyes when he was in close proximity, and “close” was a matter of perception. Distance, when connected to the consciousness the way he was right now, was not always easy to pinpoint.

“He’s wearing one of them.”

“The black eyes.”

“Clever boy.”

“Not clever enough…”

They knew. No.

No, no, no.

Hands reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders, and his arms snapped, the clacking of bones against loose skin as they converged, coming out of the shadows around him. Fingers groped at his face, slipping into his mouth and eyes for a foothold.

He abandoned the black-eyed ghoul he had been wearing, letting go of the creature’s mind and slipping back into the river that all the ghouls were connected to. He floated, spying visions and sounds and smells.

There, another one. It was alone, perched on a rooftop overlooking the center of Gallant. A lookout. He seized its mind, pushing it to the edge of its own existence and assuming command. It resisted, but not for long. Never for long. The black eyes were mere husks, as weak mentally as they were physically.

A horde stormed down the street below him, passing him by. They were searching for him, trying to locate the creature he had jumped into, unaware he was above them, watching—

Hands grabbed both his arms from behind, turned him against his will, and a fist punched through his chest.

Twin blue orbs pulsed in the darkness, surrounded by other blue eyes.

“There you are,” the creature said, its voice dripping with triumphant glee. It leaned forward while others held him in place. “Tell me, where are you hiding?”

Razor thin lips formed snakelike smiles.

“You’re close!”

He pulled back, back…

* * *

He opened his eyes. His real eyes.

“There you are,” the voices said inside his head. More than one, a dozen echoes overlapping, and as loud as if they were standing right next to him. “You didn’t think you could hide forever, did you?”

Footsteps converging on his location. Dozens? Hundreds?

“Take him!” the voices shouted. “Take him now!”

They poured in through the windows and doors, and some battered their way through the thin walls. He abandoned the darkened corner, legs that had been still for hours coming alive and pistoning under him. There was no hiding now. They knew where he was. They all knew where he was.

The black eyes were weak, slow things, and he snatched up a piece of metal from the floor and smashed his way through them, and when the floor turned into a writhing black tide of pruned flesh, he went into the air. Hands groped at him, fingers scraped against his arms and legs and sought out desperate pieces of the trench coat that fluttered behind him.

He crashed through the window and into the street. The gray concrete highway gleamed to his left, the city of Gallant to his right. He was close enough that he could smell the rest of the ghoul population moving toward him as one, coming out of the buildings. All the buildings.

Hundreds. Thousands.

He flung himself onto a car and used it to grab a windowsill and crawled up the side of a bakery. He hadn’t had the chance to swing up onto the ledge before there were three—four—five—throwing themselves at him.

“He’s ours!” the voices echoed inside his head. “There’s no escape for him! Not tonight!”

He shattered a ghoul’s skull with his fist and threw two more off the rooftop. The fourth and fifth attempted to wrestle him to the gravel floor by diving at his legs, but he caved in one’s chest with his foot, then twisted and decapitated the other one with the edge of his hand.

And he was free again, but not for long. The structure trembled as they raced up the stairs below him while more crawled up all four sides of the building, just as many plummeting back down to the street below when they lost their grip.

The wind whipped at his face as he ran, then leaped, across two rooftops. He sprung back up to his feet as they pulled themselves over the ledges around him. He raced past them and sailed into the air again—

Pop-pop-pop.

The sound of gunfire coming from nearby forced him to twist his body in mid jump until he was moving in that direction.

“Something’s wrong,” the blue eyes said inside his head.

Was it a trick? Another trap? No, not this time. There was no need because they had him where they wanted him. Here, now, within their grasp.

Pop-pop-pop.

He tasted blood in the air. Not tainted blood like the kind that flowed through his veins. No, fresh blood. Human blood.

Pop-pop-pop.

He leaped across rooftops and raced toward the source of gunfire even as they surged around him, clamoring against one another to be the first to reach him. But he was faster and he leaped when he had to, dodged when he could, and bashed a path through flesh and bones when it was the only way left to him.

The night was thick with their number. Ghouls. Black eyes. They had secured all the rooftops as far as he could see, and he was forced to go down. He plummeted, grabbed a windowsill, swung left, then right, and finally caved in the roof of a parked vehicle on the sidewalk.

And they were on him almost immediately. A wave of black flesh slamming into his body from all sides, bony fingers grabbing at the fabric of the trench coat while dead black eyes pooled around him. Jagged yellow and white and brown teeth bit into his arms and legs and neck in an attempt to slow him down, but still he fought.

He couldn’t let them stop him. Not here, not now. He fought, for Danny and Gaby. For Lara. For her future.

But there were so many, and they forced him to the cold, hard pavement. Blood gushed from fresh wounds and his legs weakened as they climbed over him, then over each other, their weight doubling, then tripling. And still they grew, until it became impossible to throw them off with mere physical strength.

Then something new and unexpected rippled across the sky, sending a ferocious gust of wind across him and the swarm that blanketed him. It froze them in place for a split second—which turned into a full second, then a full two seconds—as the noise grew and grew until it became unmistakable.

“No!” the voices screamed inside his head.

He managed to look up through a small sliver in the forest of wrinkled flesh just as the belly of the mechanical beast flashed overhead and its roar filled the world, shaking him—and the creatures around him—to the bones.

“No, no, no!”

As he watched it pass overhead, he was reminded that there were still things out there to fear that didn’t sleep in the shadows and hide from the sunlight.

Then the beast bellowed, and he might have smiled.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Book Two

On a Pale Horse

10

Lara

“I don’t want bloodshed,” the man said. Lara detected what might have been a Southern accent, but those things were tricky over the radio, so she couldn’t be absolutely sure. “We can resolve this in a way that avoids that. No one’s been hurt yet, and I’d rather keep it that way. ”

You should have thought of that before you sent them over here, she wanted to say, but resisted.

“Bottom line,” the man continued, “we can still come to an arrangement. Nothing’s happened yet that makes that impossible.”

“What if we had opened fire on your men?” she asked.

“But you didn’t.”

“I could have.”

“But you didn’t,” the man insisted. “That’s all that matters, and all I want to focus on right now.”

She exchanged a look with Carly, who was standing next to her with her hands on her hips, and then with Blaine at his usual spot behind the helm. Morning sunlight slowly filled up the bridge of the Trident, pushing away last night’s chill. Unlike the last time she was in the room, all three of them were armed and rifles leaned against the walls within easy reach.

It had taken her all of last night to decide whether to take Hart up on his offer. She was still too wary of a possible trick in case Hart and his CO had a backup plan if their boarding went awry and had ordered Blaine to keep moving all night, with a full guard rotation inside and outside the yacht.

“Mighty generous of him,” Carly was saying.

“You don’t believe him?” she asked.

“If being with Danny’s taught me anything, it’s that you can’t trust anyone who tries to sneak up on you in the middle of the night. It always ends badly—and painfully.”

Lara looked to Blaine. “What do you think?”

The big man shook his head. “I guess it depends on what he can offer us in return for sending his guys back. What did Hart say they had over there, wherever there is?”

“Supplies and fuel.”

“Like he knew exactly what we needed,” Carly said.

“He knew about the fueling stations and marinas being manned by collaborators,” Lara said. “They’ve been out there. They know what’s happening back on land.”

The bridge’s speakers squawked, and they heard the man’s voice again: “Are you still there?”

Lara held the microphone up to her lips and clicked the transmit button. “I’m still here.”

“You’re thinking about my offer.”

“We’re talking about it.”

“You’re in charge?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Riley, by the way,” the man said.

“Lara.”

“Nice to meet you, Lara. Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“The man’s a master of understatement,” Carly said. “First he spies on us, then tries to board us, and now he’s acting all ‘Golly gee, I just wanna be friends.’” She rolled her eyes. “Goes to show you guys are as trustworthy as a knife in the back.”

“Hey,” Blaine said.

“Present company excluded, of course.”

“Damn straight.”

Riley, of course, hadn’t heard any of the back and forth, and he said now, “I assume my man told you about what we can offer?”

Lara pressed the transmit button on the mic. “He did.”

“Supplies. Fuel. Guns and ammo too, if you need them, though I get the impression you don’t.”

“Where do you get your fuel from?”

“Does it matter? The important takeaway for you is that we have what you need.”

“Maybe he’s living on a big oil tanker,” Carly said.

“Oil tankers carry crude oil,” Blaine said. “They have to be processed into usable fuel.”

“What are you, an expert on oil now?”

“Hey, I get around.”

Lara said into the radio, “I need to know your location.”

“I’ll be happy to give you the coordinates as soon as you tell me we have a deal,” Riley said.

“That’s the problem. We don’t have a deal. Not until you can convince me I can trust you.”

Riley didn’t answer right away. Next to her, Carly began humming the Jeopardy theme song.

“Can he convince us of that?” Blaine asked. “After last night?”

“I don’t know,” Lara said, “but I’d like to see him try. Maybe he’ll end up telling me something he doesn’t want us to know.”

“You sly fox,” Carly said.

The speakers squawked again, and Riley finally said, “I think we need to do this face-to-face, Lara. I don’t see how this could work any other way.”

Carly smirked. “If he thinks we’re going to just show up at his front door after what he tried to pull last night, he’s got another thing coming.”

“You have six of my men,” Riley said, almost as if he had heard Carly, “so I’d say you have a pretty big bargaining chip.”

“He’s got a point,” Blaine said.

“What if he doesn’t give a crap about any of them?” Carly asked.

“We might have to take the risk.”

“No, we don’t.”

Blaine sighed. “Yes, we do, Carly.” He glanced at his dashboard’s readings, then back at them. “We’re running out of options here, guys. We need to refuel soon.”

Carly sighed and turned to Lara. “What about Danny and Gaby?”

“They’re not due to radio in for another two hours,” Lara said.

“You know Danny can barely tell time.”

Lara gave her friend a half-smile. “You think this is a bad idea.”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Is your definition of bad also terrible?”

“We have the upper hand. Once he gives us his location, we’ll know where he is. We can show up from any angle and be ready for anything.”

“Bonnie’s awfully good with that M240,” Blaine said.

Lara nodded. “There’s that, too.”

“I still don’t like it,” Carly said.

“We’ll see what they have to offer. If the terms aren’t to our liking, then we’ll leave.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“What if they try to stop us? Do I have to keep mentioning last night’s shenanigans? We can’t trust these people.”

“They want the Trident,” Lara said. “Hart made that pretty clear last night. They’re not going to risk damaging it now. All we have to do is keep our distance.”

Blaine smiled. “I like it. We hold all the cards.”

“They could always change their minds about wanting the boat intact,” Carly said. “Shoot us with a rocket launcher or something. Plenty of those things just lying around.”

“Maybe,” Lara said, “but then why bring us over? If they don’t need the boat anymore, this seems like a lot of effort to go through. Besides, sinking us means sinking six of their own.”

“Again, boss lady, if he actually cares about his guys,” Carly said.

Lara nodded. “There’s that…”

* * *

Hart looked up when she stepped inside the room where they had been keeping him and the other five men below deck. The room was small enough that all six squeezed into the same narrow space made for an uncomfortable night, especially with their hands still bound.

“We need to talk,” she said to Hart.

“Did you call him?” Hart asked.

She nodded, then turned to Benny, who was standing guard outside the door with Carrie. “Any trouble?”

“Nope,” Benny said.

“They haven’t tried anything,” Carrie added.

Lara turned back to Hart. “Let’s go.”

He struggled up from the floor using the wall for support. The other five remained where they were, Benny eyeing them like a hawk with his M4 held at the ready in front of him. Lara stepped aside as Hart exited the room, and they closed the door and padlocked it from the hallway.

“Where to?” Hart asked.

“Follow me,” she said.

“What did Riley say?”

“He confirmed your story.”

She couldn’t tell if Hart had breathed a sigh of relief, because it was so loud below deck and she couldn’t even hear their footsteps as she led him through the engine room, then out and onto the lower deck of the moving yacht.

Hart blinked up at the clear skies and let out an almost blissful sigh (she heard that, that time), holding his bound hands up to shield his eyes from the sun. Above them, Maddie moved along the railing. Higher up, Bonnie was stationed behind the M240 machine gun that she had spent a lot of hours on, back when Keo and Danny were running all the adults (and Dwayne) through weapons training.

“Keep going,” she told Hart, who walked in front of her. She kept just enough distance between them that he couldn’t do something stupid like twist and try to grab her, or, more likely, the Glock in her hip holster.

“So what else did Riley say?” Hart asked.

“He gave us his location. We’re on our way there now.”

“No wonder we’re moving.” He stopped at the back of the boat when they reached the ladder leading down to the swimming platform below and turned around to face her. “So what are we doing out here, Lara?”

“Tell me about last night.”

He pursed his lips at her, and she thought he looked almost embarrassed. Hart didn’t have the face of a cold-blooded killer, but she couldn’t forget that he was the leader of the group that had tried to sneak up on them last night. That, more than anything, made her extremely cautious of him.

“What about last night?” he finally said.

“Riley sent you to board us.”

He nodded. “We couldn’t risk you saying no if we showed up and asked to borrow the Trident.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated.

“Why do you need the Trident so badly?”

“You’ll have to talk to Riley about that.”

She shook her head and drew her Glock, then held the gun nonchalantly at her side. “I want you to tell me now.”

Hart looked immediately down at the gun, then back up to her face. He swallowed, and she saw the fear in his eyes and knew he wasn’t acting.

But he said anyway, “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t. If Riley hadn’t told you already, then he wouldn’t want me to.”

“I need you to tell me right now, Hart.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You just choose not to.”

“You’re right. I choose not to.”

She clenched and unclenched her grip on the gun. “You see my dilemma, don’t you?”

He nodded. “I do.”

“You came here last night to take our boat, and now your Mister Riley is telling me he’d be willing to trade fuel and supplies for you and your five friends. You’ll forgive me for being cynical, but that doesn’t jive.”

“It’s complicated.”

“What isn’t these days?”

He smiled, though it came out just a bit too forced. “You have to trust someone sometime, Lara.”

“I do. I just don’t trust people who try to board my boat in the dead of night.”

Hart looked down at the gun hanging at her side again. “Are you going to shoot me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. I don’t want to die.”

“That’s the most honest thing you’ve told me yet.”

“Not true. I’ve been honest with you since last night. I just haven’t told you everything you asked, but I haven’t lied once.”

“That’s the problem. I have no idea if you’re lying or not because I don’t really know you.”

“That can change. All you have to do is listen to what Riley has to say.”

“He sounds younger than you.”

“That’s because he is.” He glanced down at the gun again. “Are you going to shoot me, Lara? I’d really prefer it if you didn’t.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

* * *

It jutted out of the ocean like the torso of a mechanical beast, limbs stretching outward in every direction. It was impossible to miss, and she saw it as soon as she stepped back onto the bridge. The Trident had powered down, though the waves were still pushing it forward toward the object.

“Holy shit,” Lara said.

When Riley had given her the coordinates and Blaine punched it into the yacht’s computer, they had theorized what Riley’s location could be—an island, a marina, maybe even a fleet of boats—but she had to admit, this was not one of their guesses.

“That’s exactly what I said,” Carly said. “Blaine was telling me how they got something like that out here in the first place. Educate her, big man.”

“They build it along the coastline, then transport it out here before setting it down,” Blaine said. “They’re essentially self-sustaining cities with a crazy long shelf life. Most of the time they’ll still be sitting out here long after the wells they’re tapping have dried up.”

“Here’s a better look,” Carly said, handing her a pair of binoculars.

“I did a lot of odd jobs back when I was younger,” Blaine said. “One of them was construction; got to work on one of these, though that one was a lot smaller. It takes a huge crew to put them together, but the money was really good. Afterward, I applied to come offshore but didn’t get picked.”

“Did you tell them you were totally legal?” Carly asked.

Blaine grunted. “It’s a tough gig to get, that’s all.”

“Sure, sure…”

Lara stared through the binoculars and scanned it up and down. The thing was yellow and gray and rested on four massive columns that looked like meaty stumps sticking out of the water. A giant crane extended out of its right side, gray metal sticking out against the soft blue of the cloudless sky.

It was an offshore oil rig sitting in the middle of the ocean.

“You ever seen one in person all the way out here?” Carly was asking Blaine.

“Nah, but one of my uncles did time out here,” he said. “He would leave, and I wouldn’t see him for months at a time. Most of his work was overseas, but sometimes he’d be sent out to the Gulf.”

Lara lowered the binoculars. “How close are we, Blaine?”

“At least a mile,” Blaine said. “We’re safe. Current’s pushing us closer, but nothing to be concerned about yet.”

“How far were they from our last position?”

“Fifteen miles, give or take.”

“They rowed those pieces-of-shit boats fifteen miles to get to us?” Carly said.

“They probably used the trolling motor for most of the trip,” Blaine said, “then shut them off when they were close enough and rowed the rest of the way. They could afford to take their time. It wasn’t like we were going anywhere.”

“What’s our situation?” Lara asked.

“Everyone’s in position,” Carly said. “Like you said, boss lady, if this Riley guy thinks he’s going to lure us here and try to board us with our pants down a second time, he has another thing coming. The last time I saw her, Bonnie was literally chomping at the bit to let fly with that M240.”

“Champing,” Lara said.

“What?”

“It’s champing at the bit, not chomping. Common mistake.”

Carly sighed. “Have I told you how much I hate you lately?”

Lara smiled, then peered through the binoculars again. She couldn’t detect any signs of movement on the platform or along the raised crane. There was a tall tower-shaped object that was red and yellow at the very center of the rig. She knew it was large even if it looked practically quaint next to the towering crane.

“What is that thing in the middle?” Lara asked.

“That’s the derrick,” Blaine said. “The drill.”

“Can they see us yet?” Carly asked.

“If we can see them, it’s a good bet they can see us,” Blaine said. “Especially if there’s someone hanging off that crane.”

“I don’t see anyone,” Lara said.

“Sneaky people are good at being sneaky, remember?” Carly said.

Lara lowered the binoculars and looked at Blaine. “What do you think?”

He thought about it before answering. “Well, no one’s shot at us yet.”

“Jinx,” Carly said.

Lara glanced back at the rig. It looked empty. Looked, anyway. But of course she knew better. Riley wouldn’t have given her coordinates to an abandoned platform. There would be no point if the man was hoping to convince her to hand his men back to him.

A light flickered on the dashboard and Blaine said, “It’s him.”

“I guess they can see us after all,” Carly said.

Lara nodded, and Blaine pressed a button. Riley’s voice echoed through the speakers along the walls of the bridge a second later: “Thanks for coming.”

Lara picked up the microphone and pressed the transmit button. “So how is this going to work?”

“I don’t suppose you’d take my word that I mean you no harm and send my men back to me?”

“Captain Optimism, this guy,” Carly snickered.

Lara said into the microphone, “You supposed correctly.”

“Then I guess there’s nothing left but for us to talk face-to-face,” Riley said.

“Just you and me.”

“Yes.”

“And your men?”

“Since you’re not willing to return them to me yet, the only way I can see this working is for you to hold them onboard while you’re over here. Is that acceptable?”

She exchanged a long look with Carly and Blaine.

“I know I haven’t told you this recently,” Carly said, “but you’re worth more than six of them. Let’s turn around and leave. Danny’s going to radio in at any moment, and we need to be there to pick him up when he does.”

“Blaine?” Lara said.

He shook his head. “Carly’s right. You’re worth more to us than six of them.”

She couldn’t help but smile back at the two of them. “Stop it, guys, you’re making me blush.”

“We mean it,” Carly said. She was as serious as Lara had ever seen her. “Blaine, me, everyone on this boat—we don’t know this Riley from Adam. He may or may not give a crap about Hart and the others. I don’t think we should risk it if it means risking you.”

“I can go,” Blaine said.

“Or me,” Carly said. She shrugged, then smiled mischievously. “He doesn’t know what you look like.”

“He knows what I sound like,” Lara said.

“Hey, who sounds like themselves over the radio?”

“She’s got a point,” Blaine said.

“Gee, thanks, Blaine,” Carly said. “I don’t know whether to be happy-happy that you’re backing me up or kind of pissed off you’re willing to risk my life if it means keeping boss lady here.”

“I, uh…” Blaine said, but wisely didn’t finish.

“Anyway,” Carly said, turning back to Lara. “I’ll go. We can’t afford to lose you. Me, on the other hand…” She let it trail off with a shrug.

“Danny would kill me if I did that,” Lara said.

“Yeah, there’s that,” Carly smiled. “But he’ll get over it. I mean, look at all the single and available ladies on this tub. He’d probably forget about me within a week, that asshole.”

“No, he won’t,” Lara said. “Besides, this is why I get paid the big bucks, remember?”

Carly shook her head. “I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I, but I don’t see any other way unless we want to turn around and leave, and our fuel reserves can’t afford that right now.”

She looked over at Blaine, as if to ask him, “Right?”

He nodded back, even though she could see he didn’t want to.

Before Carly could argue, Lara pressed the microphone and said, “Riley.”

“I’m still here,” Riley answered.

“You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“I assumed you and whoever is on the bridge with you needed time to debate the pros and cons of accepting my offer.”

“He can definitely see us,” Carly said, lowering her voice for some reason while turning to look out the windshield at the oil rig.

“He probably has lookouts on that big ass crane out there,” Blaine said. “I would.”

“Did you come to a decision?” Riley asked through the speakers.

“One hour,” Lara said.

“I’ll send a boat to come get you. One man. Unarmed. You’re free to bring your weapons.”

“One boat, with one man on it. If I see more than one at any time between now and when I return to the Trident, the yacht will turn around and leave with or without me onboard. My people will then execute Hart and the others and toss their bodies overboard so you can pick them up. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Riley said. Then, “Expect my man in one hour.”

Lara put the microphone back down on the dashboard. When she looked up, Blaine and Carly were staring at her.

“Tell me you weren’t serious,” Carly said. When Lara didn’t answer right away, she sighed. “God, I don’t know whether to be impressed with the new and way more badass Lara, or hate you so much right now for taking this stupid risk.”

Lara smiled at her friend. “I love you, too.” Then, to both her and Blaine, “Now pay attention; this is how we’re going to do this…”

11

Gaby

She woke up to gunfire—or, at least, she thought it was gunfire. She couldn’t be entirely sure because of the sea of molasses swooshing around inside her head that made every part of her body heavy and at the same time disjointed. How was that even possible? Maybe it had a little something to do with the constant pounding—

“There she is,” a voice said. “Good morning, sunshine.”

It only took half a second for her to recognize the voice : Fucking Mason.

“Back to the land of the living,” Mason said. “Well, mostly anyway.”

“Fuck you,” she said. Or croaked. What mattered was that she got it out.

“Now where’d a pretty little thing like you learn to talk like that?”

She had opened her eyes to Mason’s face (Squirrelly, as Lara would say) hovering in front of her. He was crouched with his hands draped over his knees, but what she really noticed was the fresh black uniform he had on. The only thing missing was his name on the tag over his breast pocket; there was no cursive stenciling, just the word Mason written in what looked like permanent marker.

“Yeah, it’s a rental,” Mason said when he saw where her eyes were lingering. “Unfortunately, proper uniform distribution’s taken a bit of a hit recently. Can’t blame them, what with Mercer’s goons running around out there.”

The crack! of a rifle shot echoed in the background. She tried to figure out where it had come from, but it faded too quickly, replaced by the same pervading silence of a dead world that was all too familiar to her.

“Speaking of the devils,” Mason said, tilting his head a bit. “They’ve been at it all morning. Showed up as soon as the sun poked over the city. I guess all that action from yesterday drew them here. What’s that saying? Like moths to the flame? Making a real mess out there, too.”

They? she thought, but couldn’t push the word out this time.

Why was she so tired? She wasn’t in pain. Not really, even though her throat felt as if she had a rubber band around it, constricting airflow. She reached up and massaged the area where the creature had grabbed her last night, but it didn’t seem to help. She had to use both hands, because her wrists were bound together with plastic zip ties. Her legs were similarly restrained at the ankles. How long had she been like this? Tied up and sitting on the floor against a wall? Probably the entire night.

“I know how you feel,” Mason said. “The first time I met one of those things, I almost shat my pants. They still give me the willies.”

He shivered, but she couldn’t be certain if that was involuntary or for her benefit.

She stared at the man. Mason was short, and while not physically disgusting, he wasn’t exactly attractive, either. He had dark eyes and short dark hair, and although he had cleaned himself up since he was Danny’s and her prisoner, it hadn’t done anything to improve his looks. But why should it? The man was a piece of shit and nothing would change that—

“Oh, come on,” Mason said. He was eyeing her closely. “Cut me some slack. I’m just a guy trying to get by is all.”

“You’re a piece of shit,” she said, forcing the words out with some effort.

“But does that make me a bad guy?”

“Yeah, it does.”

He glanced to his right. She followed his gaze over to a bundle lying on the floor. She sat up straighter at the sight of Nate. He was swaddled in camping gear with only his head sticking out of the thick fabric. He looked sound asleep, and she breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of his chest rising and falling underneath the sleeping bag.

It took her a few seconds to realize they were back at the Gallant First Bank where she, Danny, and Nate had stayed previously. They were in one of the back rooms—the manager’s—with the familiar big oak desk still pushed off to one corner, giving them plenty of space. Except for herself and Nate, only Mason was inside with them. The door to her right was open, which was the only reason there was enough natural light for her to see not just Mason but Nate, since both offices were windowless. She thought she could hear voices drifting from the bank lobby outside, but she didn’t quite have the strength to focus on that part of the world.

“So tell me, sweetheart, would a piece of shit save his life?” Mason asked.

She gave him a disbelieving look. “You?”

“Yes, me. Is that so hard to believe?”

“Yes.”

He grunted. “They wanted to ‘play’”—he did air quotes—“with your boyfriend last night while they were waiting for him to show up. But I convinced them if having two of you as insurance was good, three’s even better. Took some convincing, but they bought it.”

She glared at him, trying to decide if she could believe this traitor to the human race. He looked back at her, a small smile playing across his lips. Mason was scum, and the idea that he would actually go to bat for Nate seemed absurd.

“I liked him,” Mason said, as if he could read the doubt on her face—and maybe he could since she wasn’t doing very much to hide it or her dislike for the man. “Most of the time, anyway. He was nicer to me when you and the Ranger weren’t around. Mostly when you weren’t around. I dunno, but maybe he didn’t want you to think he was weak.” He shrugged. “He was decent enough to me; I never had to ask him for a drink or some food. So when he wakes up, tell him I paid back my debt.”

“You’re lying.”

“Honest to God.”

She stared at him. “I don’t believe you.”

He sighed, as if he were disappointed with her. “Whatever. Just tell him. He knows the truth.”

She looked over at Nate again. If Mason was lying, he was doing a very good job of selling it, because the Nate she knew would absolutely do what Mason was saying, even for someone with Mason’s very questionable history. Nate had hardened noticeably since that first meeting in Louisiana, but maybe that was just an act for her benefit because deep down, even after everything he had been through, Nate was still the most decent man she knew.

She turned back to the collaborator. “Why would they listen to you?”

“You mean because I’m just another sack of meat to them?”

“Not the ‘sack’ I was thinking of.”

He chuckled. “Good one. But to answer your question, it’s because I’m not. Just ‘another sack of meat,’ I mean.”

“I never believed you were anyone important before, and I still don’t now.”

“The other guys in uniform couldn’t care less about what happens to me. But I’m talking about the real bosses here. How did you think they found you in the first place? Because Nate was right. They were tracking you—just not in the way you think.”

“How?”

“I’m connected to them. Well, one of them.”

“‘Them?’”

“Them,” he said, as if she should know—and Gaby guessed that she did. There wasn’t a lot of thems out there right now. There was only one them that mattered.

He’s talking about the ghouls.

The blue eyes…

“They have a way of getting into your head and sticking,” Mason said. “They’ve been in my head since the early days of what you call The Purge. After my demotion post-Louisiana debacle, I thought they had cut me loose. Turns out it really is true what they say: Once you go black you can never, ever go back.”

She watched his face closely, waiting for him to keep going, but he didn’t. Mason seemed to drift off as if all the talk about “them” had gotten him thinking about something else. Something that might not be entirely…pleasant.

When he returned his eyes to her, his mouth turned upward into a forced smile, and he might have been about to say something else—maybe even give her more information on how “they” had used him to track her and Danny all the way from Starch to Gallant—but before he could say a word, the very clear pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire echoed from outside the bank’s walls. There was something that sounded like return volley before silence took over again.

“What’s happening out there?” she asked.

“Told you, Mercer’s men,” Mason said. “Turns out there’s not that many of them. A few hundred, give or take. But man, they’re kicking up one hell of a ruckus.”

“A few hundred?” Gaby asked, remembering all those soldiers outside of Larkin when they were captured. It had seemed like more than just “a few hundred” back then. “How do you know there’s only a few hundred of them?”

“They got ahold of one of his regulators. The blue eyes, I mean.” He tapped his temple. “Got into his head. He didn’t have to tell them anything after that.” He went quiet for a moment and looked almost…what? Thoughtful? Frightened? “They know everything that poor bastard knew, and as it happens, everything he’s ever going to know.”

“He’s dead…”

“Dead, not dead. Either way, death is a release.”

“So why don’t you ‘release’ yourself from them? End it now. That way you won’t have to worry about them”—she tapped her own temple with the back of her knuckles—“back in there anymore.”

He chortled. “I would, but I like this thing called living too much. What, you thought I was a believer or something? I’m just trying to stay alive here, sweetheart.”

She gritted her teeth, wanting badly to tell him to stop calling her sweetheart, but she managed to restrain herself. Showing him an emotional outburst would just give him something else to use against her, and the man already had too much ammunition as it was.

“They’re like cockroaches, showing up wherever you least expect them,” Mason said, taking a moment to listen to the pop-pop-pop from outside the building.

Gaby had to fight back the smile. Cockroaches would be exactly how she would describe Mason and his collaborator friends, and it was ironic to hear him referring to someone else as that.

“They’re not here to rescue you, in case you were wondering,” he said.

“I wasn’t,” she said.

“Maybe you’re smarter than you look, then. Brains and beauty, huh?”

She ignored his comment and said, “Where’s Danny?”

“He’s around.”

“Where is he?”

“Around,” Mason said before standing up.

She watched him and saw him grimacing as he stood up on slightly unsteady legs. Gaby took a lot of satisfaction in knowing that she had done that—gave him a lingering pain he wasn’t going to get rid of anytime soon.

“No one’s going anywhere,” he said. “We’re all going to camp out here until nightfall.”

“Maybe you won’t have a choice.”

“Cute. You think a couple of shooters are going to force us out?” He shook his head. “No can do, sweetheart. The bosses would have our heads if we abandoned this place. No, it’s going to take more than what they got out there right now to send us packing.”

“They don’t need more than a couple of guys to do that. Are you forgetting what they did outside of Larkin?”

“Oh, I remember. But it’s pretty obvious they don’t have a lot of planes. Or if they do have more than what they’ve shown so far, not a lot of pilots. They’re picking their targets, hitting some of the denser towns. It’s a real bloodbath out there, and the bosses are pissed. I didn’t know how much until they brain-jacked into me. They are really pissed.”

“You’re scared of them,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “The ghouls. You’re terrified of them.”

“Of course I am,” Mason said, staring back at her. “I’d be fucking crazy not to. And after last night, I’d think you would be, too.”

* * *

Where are you, Danny?

He had to be either in the lobby or in the room next to them, because there wasn’t anywhere else to be inside the building. Gallant First Bank was designed to serve a limited client pool, and there was no need for a larger space. So where were they keeping Danny? Were they separating them on purpose?

Without Danny to talk to, and with Mason gone, Gaby was left to watch Nate’s sleeping form. He was alive, and that meant everything to her, even if she couldn’t stop thinking about what Mason had said.

“They wanted to ‘play’ with your boyfriend last night while they were waiting for him to show up.”

“Him?” Who was the “him” Mason was referring to? And why were the blue-eyed ghouls waiting for “him?”

Mason had closed the door behind him, but if she pressed her ear against the wall she could just barely make out voices coming from the hallway. She had no trouble hearing the echoes of shooting outside the building, though. They remained sporadic, a series of attacks and returned volleys, followed by long periods of silence. Then they would start all over again, almost as if whoever was exchanging fire out there were constantly on the move. That was the only thing to explain why the shooting seemed to be coming from different directions every time she heard a new exchange.

“They’re like cockroaches, showing up wherever you least expect them,” Mason had said, referring to Mercer’s kill teams that were running around Texas at the moment, making life miserable for the collaborators. She had no doubt whatsoever they weren’t here to rescue her, Nate, or Danny, so why were they attacking a town like Gallant at all? There was nothing here that was of any value. No collaborator civilians to murder or resources to ruin.

Or maybe it was even simpler than that. Maybe she was overthinking it. Maybe it really was as basic as the continued presence of Mason and the others drawing them in like, as Mason had said, moths to the flame. They were, after all, called “kill teams.” And their goal right now was to kill collaborators.

Great. Trapped between two groups of psychos. This road trip just keeps getting better and better.

She sighed and took a moment to gather her thoughts before finally deciding there was nothing she could do about what was happening out there. Instead of wasting more time on a problem that was beyond her control, she gave up and scooted across the room until she was sitting next to Nate. Thankfully the floor was mostly devoid of debris or anything to get in her way as she clumsily moved sideways, doing her best not to trip over her own bound legs and relying on the wall behind her as much as possible.

Nate was unconscious, but he was breathing normally, which was a very good sign. Just to be sure, she unzipped his sleeping bag to check his wound. Whoever had tended to him since last night had done a very good job; the bandages she and Danny had wrapped around Nate had been replaced, and very recently, from the looks of it. He also wasn’t quite as pale as he had been yesterday. If anything, Nate’s physical appearance looked better and color had returned to his cheeks and lips.

The sleeping bag kept Nate (mostly) insulated from the cold that had gathered inside the room. She still had her own thermal clothing on underneath her jacket and boots, which was the only thing keeping her from trembling against the chill at the moment.

With the door closed, it was darker now than it had been when she first woke up. She leaned her head against the wall and listened to a new round of automatic gunfire. It had started up again a few minutes ago and hadn’t quieted like the last few times. She couldn’t quite make out if they were getting closer, though it sounded as if they were.

“They’re not here to rescue you, in case you were wondering,” Mason had said.

She didn’t doubt that whatsoever. Mercer’s men had their own agenda. A bloody one. She had seen that for herself outside of Larkin and had witnessed more of it as they picked their way south from Starch. Even now, as she closed her eyes, she could still smell the blood and smoke from T29. It had been a real town once upon a time, with a real name, but it was just T29 now. Or it had just been T29, because it wasn’t much of anything anymore…

She must have been more sluggish and tired from last night than she realized, because by the time she snapped her eyes open to the sound of approaching footsteps, the door was already opening and—

Danny entered the room with a collaborator in a black uniform walking behind him.

Danny saw her and smiled. “Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Danny,” she said, and gave him a half-smile back. It was all she could muster.

He started to sit down next to her when the soldier said, “Not there.”

“You said I could sit anywhere,” Danny said.

“When did I say that?” the man asked. He was in his thirties, with brown hair. The name stenciled across his name tag read: Lopez.

“On the way over here.”

“Bullshit. Sit across the room away from them.”

Danny got back up, walked across the room, and sat down next to the big desk. “Don’t be like that, Lopez. I thought we were becoming friends.”

“That’s what happens when you assume,” Lopez grinned.

“What?”

“What?” Lopez repeated.

“What happens when you assume?”

“You know.”

“I don’t,” Danny said, looking completely serious.

“Fuck off,” Lopez said, stepping back through the door and closing it behind him.

She waited to hear the collaborator walking away, but he didn’t, which probably meant Lopez had taken up a guard position outside their door. Neither office had locks anymore, but the carbine in Lopez’s hands solved that problem.

“How’s the Natester?” Danny asked.

“He’s better,” she said. “Where were you?”

“In the lobby. They had some questions for me.”

“About what?”

“This, that, everything in between.” He cocked his head when they both heard the sharp crack! of a rifle shot outside the walls. “And some of that, too.”

“Mercer’s men?”

“Yup. They wanted to make sure I didn’t know anything about it. I told them maybe.”

“But you don’t.”

“Yeah, but they don’t have to know that. Also, I wanted to see how far they’d push with the questioning.”

“How far did they push?”

“Not very, as you can see by my still-pretty face.”

“Ah.”

“I got the sense they were afraid to tune me up. At least, ol’ Danzinger was.”

“Danzinger?”

“The guy asking the questions. The leader of the pack, from the looks of it. His name sounds like a ’70s rock band front man, but the guy looks like an accountant.”

“I thought Mason was the leader.”

“He’s more like a floating consultant. Looks like Danzinger’s team just got saddled with him.”

“Mason told me he was connected to them. The blue-eyed ghouls. That that was how they always knew where we were. How they tracked us from Starch. Because he told them.”

“‘Told them?’”

“That’s what he said.”

“Hunh,” Danny said.

“I’m not sure if I believe him. Do you?”

“Will…” Danny started, but didn’t finish.

“What about Will?” she pressed.

“Kate used to visit him all the time. In his dreams. They would talk, hold whole conversations. The way he put it, the whole thing was beyond freaky. I’m glad I never slept with that bitch.”

“Is that how it works? You have to sleep with them to become—I don’t know the word—connected, I guess, to them?”

“Hey, nothing’s more powerful than swapping the ol’ baby-making spit.”

“Gross, Danny.”

“It’s a medical term. I swear.” Then, “Anyway, I hope I never find out. The thought of one of those things crawling around in my head…” He shivered. “Damn. I think I might have wet myself there. Wait, did I just say that out loud?”

“You think she’s still out there? Kate?”

“I hope never to find that out, either.”

“What else did they want to know?”

“Nothing worth repeating. Danzinger seemed more annoyed by the constant hit-and-run attacks than anything.”

A long series of pop-pop-pop crackled, but this time it actually sounded like it was coming from farther away than the last few back-and-forth. It went on for a few seconds, which stretched into a full two minutes before things fell quiet again.

Danny was looking down at his watch. “They’re biding their time. I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon, kid.”

“Mason told me they—the blue eyes—are waiting for someone. They’re using us as bait to get this person here.”

“Our little buddy Mason seems to know more than he’s letting on. That sneaky little pussy…cat.”

“I told you, we should have killed him back at Starch.”

“Yeah, yeah, stop nagging. You’re starting to sound like Carly.”

“That’s a compliment.”

“It should be, she’s a wildcat in bed.” Danny glanced at the door. “Most of them are still in the lobby, including Lopez and Mason. At least eight more running around out there engaging Mercer’s boys.”

“Twelve in all?”

“Uh huh. That includes the driver of the Jeep that was chasing us earlier.”

“Twelve men is a lot of resources, Danny. If Mason’s to be believed—and I’m not one-hundred percent buying it—they’re here because of the blue eyes, and this person they’re trying to lure to Gallant.”

“He’ll come for them soon,” one of the creatures had said last night as it stood over her.

“Yes,” the other one had replied.

“And when he does…”

“We’ll end him.”

“Finally…”

Across from her, Danny was staring at the wall next to the door. She didn’t know how long he had been doing that, but it was obvious to her by the look on his face that it wasn’t the barren white wall that was on his mind. He was somewhere else...

“Danny,” she said.

He shook his head before she could say anything else. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”

“Yes, I do.”

“What was it, then?”

“He,” Danny said. “The person all of this is for. The reason we’re still alive.”

She nodded.

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“Are you sure?”

“Maybe…”

“Danny, what is it? What’s been on your mind since Starch?”

He shook his head, then started to speak, only to stop himself.

“Danny,” she pressed. “What is it?”

“The blue-eyed ghoul back in Starch,” he finally said. “And at the airport outside of Larkin before that.”

“Danny, what are you saying?”

Larkin and Starch were burned into her memory—two nights of confusion that she still struggled to understand even today. She didn’t know how she was going to tell Lara and the others about them if she couldn’t even make up her own mind what had happened. There was a reason Danny hadn’t mentioned all the details to their friends back on the Trident. He hadn’t known how, either.

“Are they related?” she asked. “What happened outside of Larkin, then in Starch?”

“I don’t know,” Danny said.

“Danny…”

He shook his head.

“Danny,” she said again, unsure if she actually wanted to hear the answer.

“Maybe,” he finally said. “Maybe…”

12

Lara

You should be here right now, Will, not me. This was never the plan.

Why did you have to go and ruin the plan?

The “man” Riley sent over was a girl named Faith, who couldn’t have been older than twenty, and arrived alone in a small ten-footer to pick Lara up.

They were halfway to the oil rig when Lara glanced back at the Trident. She couldn’t see Bonnie on the roof, but she’d be there right now watching her back with binoculars while Blaine kept guard on the other side of the wraparound windshield on the bridge. Carly, Benny, Carrie, Maddie, and everyone else would be at their stations and on full alert until she returned.

This is such a bad idea. You know that, right?

Everything about this was risky, but they were running out of choices. They had already exhausted most of the refueling locations on Gage’s list around the area—the ones that hadn’t been razed to the ground or occupied by collaborators, anyway. The only other place left to explore was down south along the Mexican coastline, and what were the chances collaborators hadn’t either destroyed or taken over those places, too?

Mercer. This was all because of him. Before his attacks on the towns, they hadn’t had any difficulty finding abandoned but plentiful fuel.

Mercer…

Even when she did everything possible to steer clear of the man, his war still somehow managed to affect her.

She faced forward and looked past Faith, standing behind the controls in front and slightly to the right of her, and at her destination.

The platform looked bigger and more imposing out here in the open sea. It was at least 500 feet long and probably half as wide, though she couldn’t be sure of the latter since she was looking at it from the front. It stood well over a hundred feet above the water and rested on four massive foundations made of solid concrete, the heavy gray color marred by bright yellow stripes.

“How many people are onboard?” she asked Faith, shouting over the roar of the engine to be heard.

“The Ocean Star,” Faith said.

“What?”

“That’s what it’s called. The Ocean Star.”

“They have names?”

“I don’t know if all of them do, but this one does. It was designed for about 150 crewmen.”

“Are there 150 people onboard?”

“Not exactly,” Faith said.

From what she could see, the rig consisted of four levels, including the top platform. The lower three were a tangled web of beams and tubing, with rows of yellow guardrails and stairs crisscrossing all four sections from end to end and top to bottom. She paid special attention to the massive crane towering over everything like some kind of metal tentacle rising out of the ocean. She expected to see the snipers that she knew were somewhere up there, but even closer now she still couldn’t spot them. Either they were very well hidden, or Riley had taken them down. Maybe that also explained the lack of visible people moving around on the platforms.

“You live here?” Lara asked.

Faith nodded. “We all do.”

“I noticed you’re not wearing a uniform.”

“We’re not soldiers,” Faith said. She had on khaki cargo pants and a long-sleeve plaid shirt underneath a thick winter coat. Long, stringy black hair poked out from under a hoodie and blew against the cold wind. Unlike Hart and the five with him, the young woman looked nothing like a soldier.

Faith was also not armed when she showed up, and Lara’s cursory inspection of the boat—made easier because she was standing at the stern behind Faith—had revealed no weapons, though of course Faith could have hidden something inside the compartment under the vessel’s middle console. Lara wore her gun belt, but she hadn’t bothered bringing a rifle. If Riley was setting her up for an ambush at the oil rig, whether she came with one M4 or ten wasn’t going to make a bit of difference. The logic behind her decision was a no-brainer, but the emotional part was less easy to swallow.

“Don’t go onto the bad man’s oil rig, Lara,” she imagined her mother telling her.

“Listen to your mother,” her dad would say.

She crossed her arms over her chest for warmth. It might have been her imagination, but she swore it had gotten noticeably colder since she climbed onto the small boat and began her trek to the oil platform.

“Why did he send you?” she asked the girl.

“I don’t know; he didn’t tell me why,” Faith said. “He asked if I would come get you, and I agreed.”

“He asked you,” Lara said. It wasn’t a question.

“I told you, we’re not soldiers, Lara.”

Then what are you? she wanted to ask, but didn’t. She said instead, “You’re survivors.”

“Yes.” Then, as if sensing her hesitation, the girl said, “Riley’s not trying to trick you, Lara. He wouldn’t do anything to risk Hart and the others.”

“He took plenty of risks when he sent them to take my boat last night.”

Faith seemed to hesitate, but Lara couldn’t see her face, so she didn’t know what the younger woman was thinking.

Finally, Faith said, “He regrets that. I don’t think he got any sleep at all last night.”

That makes two of us.

The girl slowed down the vessel as the Ocean Star loomed in front of them before finally killing the motor completely. She expertly used the boat’s forward momentum to ease it underneath the structure until they were alongside one of the docks. Riley may not have needed to order Faith to come get her, but it was pretty obvious the young woman knew her way around a boat.

Two men, both unarmed (at least as far as she could see without telling them to strip off their thick coats), were waiting for them underneath the platform.

“Riley’s orders,” Faith said, finally looking back at her for the first time since they started away from the Trident.

“What’s that?” Lara said.

“No one you meet on your way up to see him will be armed, but you’re free to keep your weapons on you at all times.”

“That’s awfully considerate of him.”

“He’s trying to make up for last night. Please let him, Lara.”

The plea caught her by surprise, and Lara didn’t answer right away.

Finally, she nodded. “Lead the way.”

Faith took her up along the winding stairs while the two men worked to secure the boat behind them. There were a dozen vessels of various models already in the water when they arrived, including a couple of fast boats. She didn’t see anything bigger than a fifteen-footer tied to any of the docks and had to wonder if that was the reason they were so desperate to get their hands on the Trident—it was easily many times bigger than all the vehicles they had combined.

“Can I ask?” Faith said hesitantly.

“Depends on what you’re going to ask,” Lara said.

“Our guys. Are they okay?”

“They’re all alive, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I meant…” She paused, then, “I meant, was there any shooting last night? During the siege?”

“There was no siege. We took them prisoner before they even climbed aboard.”

“Oh.”

“What did Riley tell you?”

“Not a lot, but I thought something bad might have happened—” She stopped short and shook her head, then glanced over her shoulder with an almost apologetic look. “So there was no shooting? No violence?”

Depends on what you mean by “violence,” Lara thought, but said, “No. We took them prisoner and put them in a room all night.” She saw the relieved look on the girl’s face and said, “Who are you worried about?”

“What do you mean? I’m worried about all of them.”

“But there’s one in particular, right?”

Faith might have blushed. “My boyfriend. James. Do you know if he’s okay?”

“I don’t remember talking to anyone named James, but if he’s part of the crew, then he’s fine. Like I said, we didn’t hurt anyone. They were smart and surrendered when we caught them trying to sneak onboard.”

“Oh, thank God.”

God had nothing to do with it, Lara thought, remembering how close she had come to giving the order to open fire. If Hart hadn’t seen how badly out-positioned he had been and told his men to stand down, things might have gotten bad. The six-men-dead-in-the-water kind of bad.

“I guess everyone here knows what happened,” Lara said.

Faith nodded. “It’s not a very big place and Riley doesn’t hide many things from us, especially something this big.”

Lara was startled by a flock of birds that appeared out of nowhere and glided in for a landing along the railing next to her. They were small and purple, and she got the feeling she was more wary of them than they were of her. That is, if they noticed her presence at all.

“Oil rigs are magnets for birds,” Faith said, smiling back at her. “We get every kind.”

Faith wasn’t lying. Lara had seen flocks in the air as they were coming in. At first she thought they were going to swerve around the human-made monstrosity squatting in the middle of the ocean, but instead they honed in on it, landing all along the multiple levels.

“Where do they come from?” Lara asked.

“Everywhere,” Faith said. “By the time they reach us out here, they’ve been flying for so long they just crash. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Then, with a look that Lara wasn’t sure was a joke, Faith added, “Bird stew used to be on the menu until we realized how awful it tasted.”

They went up another set of stairs before finally reaching the top platform. As they climbed up, she took the opportunity to sneak a look at the ocean behind her before settling on the familiar white shape of the Trident about a mile away. From out here, the luxury yacht looked absolutely lonely surrounded by vast open ocean, which was exactly what she was hoping to see. It was going to take a lot (a miracle) to sneak up on the yacht’s crew. Anything other than a submarine was going to get shredded by gunfire before they even got close.

Seeing the solitary boat in the distance eased her mind tremendously. Even if everything went bad and Riley turned out to be the snake in the grass that a part of her expected him to be, at least she could say everyone onboard would be safe. Most of all, she could count on Blaine to put the Trident in gear and get out of there at the first sign of trouble. He wouldn’t want to do it and there would be all kinds of internal and external conflict, but Blaine would do the right thing. She had made damn sure of that before she left.

“That clearheaded rush you just got?” Faith said in front of her. “That’s the altitude. It’ll clear up any sinus problems you have. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s friggin’ cold up here, so keep your jacket on at all times or you’ll end up in sickbay.”

When she turned around again, the first thing she saw—because it was simply impossible to miss—was the giant derrick in the center. It was red and white and looked like a shrunken version of the Eiffel Tower. The only thing taller than the drill was the massive crane to her right. She spent a few seconds looking it up and down but like all the other times, she couldn’t make out any figures perched along its many sections. Even so, she didn’t believe it was empty for a second. It was simply too perfect a location to not have someone up there, and if her civilian mind knew that, someone like Hart and Riley would, too.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

“To answer your question, no; we haven’t turned the drill back on,” a voice said.

She looked over as a tall man walked toward her. He was wearing green cargo pants and, like Faith, wasn’t armed in any way that she could see. His jacket’s collar stood up against the sides of his neck to protect him from the cold.

“I’m Riley,” the man said, sticking out his hand.

“Lara.”

“I know,” he smiled.

She didn’t return it. “Nice place you got here.”

“It’s got a great view and the rent’s cheap,” he said before nodding at Faith. “I’ll take her from here, Faith; thanks.”

“I’ll go wait with the boat,” Faith said. To Lara: “Please listen to what he has to say.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Lara said. She couldn’t decide if she was annoyed or genuinely touched by the girl’s earnestness.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“I know,” the younger woman said before heading back down the stairs.

Lara turned back to Riley and caught him looking her over.

He recovered quickly and said, “Come on; let’s go inside. I should have worn my thermal socks.”

“I can’t stay long.”

“One hour?”

She nodded. “One hour.”

“That’s more than enough time.”

He turned around and started off and she followed, leaving just enough space between them that she could still see every inch of him and the spaces around them at the same time. She had done it unconsciously, and recognizing it, thought, Is this what it’s like to be you all the time, Will? Always on 24/7?

“I’ll be perfectly frank with you, Lara. I’m surprised you came,” Riley was saying.

So you agree this is a stupid idea, too?

“But I’m glad you did,” he continued. “I know it took a lot of guts after everything that happened. But I wouldn’t have expected anything else from the Lara.”

He had glanced over his shoulder when he said that last part, and she gave him a wry look back.

“When did you figure it out?” she asked.

“That you’re the same Lara who sent out those messages over the radio? Not right away. I had to listen to our conversation a few times before it clicked.”

“You recorded our conversation?”

“The rig has a pretty impressive comm system. I had our talk recorded just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. A lot’s riding on this—six lives, for one—and I didn’t want to fuck it up the way I did last night.”

She smiled to herself because she knew he couldn’t see. “It takes a big man to admit when he fucks something up.”

“Thank you for not harming Hart and the others.”

“How can you be so sure that I didn’t?”

“You said you hadn’t.”

“I might have been lying.”

“Are you?”

She didn’t answer him.

He looked over his shoulder again. “Are you?”

“No,” she said finally.

“So my thank you stands.”

“People have gotten killed running around out here believing everything a stranger tells them.”

“But you’re not just any stranger, Lara. You’re Lara.”

She wasn’t entirely sure how to take that. The radio messages were therapy as much as they were an attempt to reach out to other survivors. She had only added her name to it with the second broadcast because, deep down, she still expected Will to be listening. It was stupid and desperate, but at the time she didn’t have anything to lose.

Riley led her through the platform and around the large drilling devices that occupied a good portion of the rig. They stepped over pipes of various shapes and sizes, a hard hat that someone had left behind, and passed a bright orange vessel hanging off the side. She guessed it was some kind of emergency raft. They entered a maze of pumps and tanks circling the derrick like army ants, each with their own command unit. She wasn’t paying attention to where she was going and almost stumbled into a group of heavy machinery but managed to swerve around them at the last second.

The remnants of spilled liquids—chemicals, additives, and fuel used to keep this place churning night and day back when it was still in operation—filled her nostrils. She could only imagine how loud it would be up here when everything was up and running. Right now she might as well be zigzagging through a museum, a showcase of how mankind once bled the earth for resources.

Riley didn’t seem to have the same kind of trouble, but then, he had probably gone through this maze so many times he didn’t even have to think about where he was going.

“How do you get around this place?” she asked.

“You get used to it,” he said. “We were running into everything the first few weeks. A lot of accidents, bumps, and bruises. But we’ve cleared up everything that isn’t nailed down and even took apart some of those that were. You should have seen it when we first got here. About fifty percent of all this open space didn’t exist.”

They passed a helicopter landing port to their right resting on its own raised platform. It was empty at the moment, but she could smell recently spilled fuel and was going to ask Riley where the aircraft was when there was a clink. She looked down just in time to catch a shiny lug nut skidding across the floor before disappearing underneath a machine painted blue and about the size of a car.

They had been walking for a while and didn’t look to be any closer to reaching their destination, and she was growing frustrated. That, and her legs were starting to tire, reminding her of just how good she had it back on the Trident

God, how did I get so out of shape?

“You brought me here to talk,” she said. “So let’s talk.”

“We’re almost there…”

“No, Riley.”

She stopped in the middle of two machines with dials and conduits sticking out of them to both sides of her. One was red and the other was white, and she couldn’t even begin to guess what either one did.

Riley stopped five feet in front of her and turned around. “This is the kind of discussion that we should take inside, Lara. Besides, it’s cold out here.”

“I’ve never felt more clearheaded.”

“It’s warmer inside.”

“It’s warm enough out here,” she said, fighting back a grimace as a particularly cold wind whipped through the valley of machinery around them. “Tell me what I’m doing here, Riley. Tell me now.”

Riley nodded, his blue eyes focusing on her as if he was afraid of missing every reaction on her face in the next few minutes. “I need your boat, Lara.”

“I have six of your men on my boat right now that already told me that. So what else do you want from me, Riley?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just the boat.”

“Why?”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

His eyes had left her face and gone to her hip because her right hand had slid closer to her holstered sidearm. A year ago the notion that she would reach first for her gun when threatened—or even when she just felt threatened—would have terrified her. Now, she did it without even thinking.

“Don’t,” Riley said again.

“Don’t what?”

“Please don’t draw your gun.”

She didn’t know why, but Riley asking her not to do it made her want to do it. Again, without her realizing it, her fingers brushed against the grip of her sidearm.

“Lara,” Riley said, his eyes returning to hers, “I have a man on the crane, and he’s watching us right now.”

The crane…

“He can’t hear what we’re saying, but he can see everything,” Riley continued. “If you draw your weapon, he’ll shoot.”

It’s a trick! her mind screamed, but she had to exert every ounce of willpower to keep from turning around and zeroing in on the crane.

“There is no man on the crane,” she said. “I looked.”

“His name is Peters,” Riley said. “Trust me, he’s up there. I had to keep him up there, just in case things went sideways. He’s my insurance. My only insurance. Everyone else is staying out of the way on purpose.” He held his hands steady at his sides, the palms facing her as if he wanted her to see he had nothing in them. “I’m not armed, Lara. I can’t stop you if you decide to shoot me right now. But Peters will respond if you do that, and he never misses. Never.”

He’s lying. There is no man on the crane. You looked, remember?

But how easy would it have been to hide someone up there? Very easily, because there were so many metal parts and angles it would be impossible to see every single section of the crane. All a sniper would need was to find a perfect spot, and depending on how long Riley and his people had been here, they could easily have figured that part out a long time ago.

Then again, even if there were someone up there, the distance was too great and the man would be shooting from a high angle. Not to mention all the machinery around her, including the two flanking her right now. There were a lot of reasons why a shooter wouldn’t be able to make the shot, even if he “never misses.” The odds were all in her favor.

Right?

Maybe…

Lara exhaled a slow breath, but she didn’t take her hand away from her hip, though there was now an extra inch of space between her fingers and the Glock. She sneaked a quick look to her left, then her right in case Riley’s men were trying to outflank her. She tried to pick up sounds of footsteps behind her, but there was just her slightly racing heartbeat pounding in her ear.

“So talk,” she said finally.

“We should do this inside,” Riley said.

“No. Out here. Tell me why you need my boat and why in God’s name you think I’m going to give it to you.”

He nodded reluctantly. “I have people on the Ocean Star. Civilians.”

“Faith told me you were all civilians.”

“Some people are more civilian than others.”

“Is that supposed to make sense to me?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. This place, this platform, it was an FOB until just a few days ago.”

“FO what?”

“FOB. Forward Operating Base. It was used to launch an attack on the mainland very recently. You probably don’t know anything about it since you’ve been out here the entire time.”

Is he talking about…Mercer?

Something must have registered on her face, because Riley tilted his head slightly to one side. “Or do you?”

“No,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t give a damn what you believe.”

“Fair enough.”

“Get to the point.”

“I’m trying to.”

“Try harder.”

He sighed, took a breath, then continued. “I have people I need to transport off the Ocean Star and to safety.” He looked out toward the ocean in the direction where the Trident would have been if not for the wall of metal and tubes in his way. “Your boat showing up out of the blue was a godsend.”

“You have boats here. A lot of them.”

“I don’t have enough, and the ones I do have aren’t nearly big enough. If there were still bigger vessels at the ports, I might have risked launching a raid on them, but they’re gone. The collaborators sank them a long time ago.”

“So you risked boarding the Trident with six armed men.”

“I had no choice. It was the best and fastest option. I need your boat, Lara.”

She shook her head. “You can’t have it.”

“You don’t understand—”

“No, I understand perfectly. You want something I have, and I’m not willing to give it to you. What I do have are six of your men. And they’re the only things you’re going to get out of this.”

“And I want them back,” Riley said. “All six of them. They only did what I asked them to. Hart had doubts, but…” He shook his head.

“You should have listened to him.”

“I had no choice.”

“You already said that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You’re still not getting my boat.”

He sighed. “Can I show you something?”

“What can you show me that will make me change my mind?”

“The Lara from the radio would change her mind.”

Lara walked toward him—saw his eyes go wide with surprise—and stopped only when she was less than a foot from bumping into his chest. Even though he was taller than her and she had to tilt her head to look him in the eyes, she could feel him wanting to take a step back, but somehow managing to hold his ground.

“Lara,” he began, almost stuttering out her name.

She cut him off: “You don’t know me. If you have any doubts that I’ve already given orders to shoot your men and throw them overboard and abandon this place when I don’t return within the hour, you should wipe it out of your mind right now. You may have heard something I broadcasted on the radio, but you don’t know me, or my crew. You don’t know what we’ve been through, or what we’ve done, or what we’ve lost. So when I tell you that you don’t know a damn thing about me, I want you to take it to heart, Riley, because you don’t have a clue what I’m capable of.”

“I believe you,” he said.

“Good,” she said, and glanced down at her watch. “You have thirty minutes left. I suggest you use them wisely.”

13

Gaby

The ongoing gun battle between Mercer’s men and the collaborators took on a strange ebb and flow—a hellacious five or so minutes of back-and-forth followed by an hour (sometimes two) of long silence where nothing happened.

Danny had gone uncharacteristically silent since their conversation following his return to the room, seemingly content to listen in on the barely-audible chatter coming from the lobby—not that they could really hear anything with the closed door and the sudden spurts of violence beyond the walls.

After he left her, Mason had yet to return. She wondered if he was running around out there with the rest of Danzinger’s people, trying to put an end to Mercer’s fighters. It was an odd thing to think about, mostly because she had no idea if she cared who won or lost or if she was hoping they might end up killing each other, which would leave just her, Danny, and Nate.

Best-case scenario. Which probably means it won’t happen in a million years.

Nate had woken up a couple of times, but the longest he had stayed awake was only a few minutes. That was just enough time for him to see her and smile before drifting off again. She checked his bandages every thirty minutes to make sure he wasn’t bleeding again and always had at least one ear open listening for any irregularities in his breathing.

“They gave him sedatives,” Danny told her the first time Nate opened his eyes. “I guess they don’t want him waking up between now and tonight. Keep him out of their hair.”

“Mason said he saved him,” she said.

“Did he?” And when she nodded, “You believe him?”

“I don’t know.” She told him about Mason’s claims. “It sounded like Nate.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“Does this mean you’re going to go easier on him from now on?”

Danny chuckled. “I didn’t say that.”

She smiled, and spent the next hour or so watching Nate sleep. After everything he had been through, he deserved as much rest as he could get. She wanted nothing more than to pack him into a car and drive to the coast where Lara and the Trident would be waiting for them. They could have done that days ago if Mercer’s people hadn’t begun their crusade against the collaborators.

Mercer.

Was it possible he was the “he” that the blue-eyed ghouls were hunting? No, because it didn’t make any sense. She, Nate, and Danny had nothing to do with Mercer, and holding them hostage wasn’t going to lure the man here. He couldn’t care less if they lived or died, and she would be surprised if he even still remembered them after Larkin. For all he knew, they were already dead and buried underneath what was left of the airfield.

“Whatcha thinking there?” Danny said, his voice breaking through her thoughts.

“What?” she said, looking over at him.

“You look like me when I’m being all thoughtful and whatnot. What’s up?”

“You tell me.”

“Come again?”

“You’re not telling me everything.” She let the rest go unsaid but didn’t take her eyes away from him.

Danny shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

“When is it not?”

“Well, this is even more complicated than usual.”

“What is it, Danny? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?”

“That’s the problem, kid; I don’t know anything. Not for sure, anyway. At least, nothing that would hold up in court.”

“We’re not in court. It’s just you and me and Nate in here.”

“To be fair, Nate’s barely here…”

“You know what I mean. So just tell me already.”

“I think…” he started, but didn’t finish.

She could see that he wanted to say it—this thing that had been spinning around inside his head for the last few days—but for whatever reason, he didn’t go through with it. Maybe he couldn’t, or he didn’t want to.

“Danny,” she said.

He shook his head. “It’s too crazy.”

“What’s too crazy?” She could feel her patience with him slipping, even if he didn’t seem to notice it. “Just tell—”

He held his hand up to shush her just before shouting erupted from outside the door. It came first from inside the hallway next to them, then all the way from the lobby. Pounding footsteps immediately followed, then someone screaming in pain. The cracks of gunfire from outside, sounding the closest they had been since the day began.

Gaby stood up and walked to the door, pressing her ear against it. Danny did the same with the wall across from her. She glanced over at him, wondering if he was hearing the same thing, when a loud boom! cut through the noise and the door vibrated, along with the walls and floor and ceiling around them.

She took an involuntary step back, but Danny didn’t move.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Sounded like an explosion,” Danny said.

Gunfire exploded, this time clearly coming from the lobby just beyond the back hallway, the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire drowning out every other sound, including more screams and shouting.

“That’s not good,” Danny said.

“They’re inside,” she said.

“Or coming in…”

Then, just as fast as it had begun, it stopped; there was just the silence again.

Gaby hurried back to the door and pressed against it and listened, but there wasn’t anything loud enough happening out there for her to hear through the slab of wood. She looked down at her bound hands and wondered how far she and Danny could get in their current condition. Of course, it was all a moot point because there was Nate, and he hadn’t even opened his eyes through the explosion and gunfire.

A loud bang! drew her focus back to the door.

It was a gunshot, and it had come from the lobby. A single, purposeful gunshot.

She exchanged another look with Danny when they heard a second bang!

“Shit,” Danny whispered. “Get back.”

He pushed off the wall and retreated across the room. She did the same, returning to her spot next to Nate, but her butt hadn’t touched the floor yet when the door smashed open and a man with an AR-15 stood in the open doorway, pointing the weapon in at them. He saw Danny first, sitting across from him, before swinging his rifle over to her, then back at Danny.

She expected to see Lopez (or someone else who had taken his place at guard duty) lying dead outside the door, but there were no signs of casualties that she could see.

The man was tall and thin, and his face was covered in black and green camo paint. The rest of him matched his face, including thick camo pants and a long-sleeve shirt underneath a tactical vest with slots stuffed with spare magazines. Equally full pouches hung from his narrow hips, including a gun holster.

“Don’t even fucking flinch,” a gruff voice said from behind the painted face.

Gaby sat perfectly still, and so did Danny. She worried that the loud, crashing door might have woken Nate, but one look at him eased her fears, though it made her wonder what kind of meds the collaborators had given him to make him sleep through all of this.

The gunman saw her eyes going to Nate and said, “He dead?”

“No,” she said.

“You sure? He looks dead to me.”

“He’s just sedated.”

“We’re on the same side,” Danny said, and raised his bound hands slightly off his lap to let the guy see the zip ties.

“Oh yeah?” the guy said, though he sounded doubtful. The fact that he hadn’t loosened his grip on his rifle for even a second was proof of that. The weapon was very steady in his hands, which told Gaby all she needed to know about him.

“You’re part of Mercer’s army, right?” Danny asked.

The man cocked his head, a glint of curiosity showing through the paint. “What do you know about it?”

“We found the flyers. Join us or die, right?”

Not quite right, Gaby thought, realizing what Danny was doing. He already knew this man with the rifle was one of Mercer’s killers—everything about him gave that away—and if he was here inside the bank, then that meant the collaborators were dead. (For a very quick moment, the thought of Mason finally getting what he had coming made her heart race with triumph.) Danny was playing on the propaganda flyers they had been finding all over the state, like the one Nate had found earlier yesterday while they were scouting.

But Danny was wrong. It wasn’t “join us or die”; it was more like “join us to take back Texas.” Or something close. Not that it mattered, and she suspected Danny knew it, too. He just needed to get the man’s attention, to sow the seeds of the lie he was already cooking up.

And it seemed to work, because the man relaxed the hand that was clutched tightly around the pistol grip underneath his rifle’s barrel. He didn’t lower the weapon, though, but it was a good start.

“Close enough,” the gunman said, and grinned, showing impossibly white teeth.

Gaby couldn’t help but relax a little, even if a part of her didn’t believe they were any better off than before. What was that old saying?

Out of the frying pan and into the fire…

* * *

But maybe she was worried about nothing because it looked as if Mercer’s men were more concerned with the collaborators than they were with her, Danny, and Nate. The man who had found them in the back room called himself Fritz, and he led them to the front of the bank, leaving Nate where he was, but only after Fritz had checked to make sure Nate wasn’t playacting.

The lobby was in pieces, and she didn’t have to go very far to see the source of the explosion she had heard earlier: Almost one entire side of the bank’s front wall was gone, leaving behind a gaping hole in its wake. Brick and mortar had been blasted across the once-wide lobby space, covering a large chunk of the floor. The island counter that had been used for filling out deposit slips had been chipped by gunfire but was somehow still standing, and the same was true for the teller windows at the end of the lobby.

She counted five bodies, all men in black uniforms—Texas collaborators. One of them had the name Danzinger stenciled across his tag. The rest were either lying on their stomachs or were buried in rubble along with their names. She didn’t see anyone among the dead who was even remotely close to matching Mason’s short stature, which made her just a little bit ticked off.

He really is like a goddamn cockroach.

Besides Fritz, there were two others wearing similar clothing, their faces also covered in camo paint in the lobby. One was standing guard next to the hole while the second one sat in a chair with a bent metal leg spooning chunky food from a bag of MRE. Gaby got a whiff of beef ravioli in the air, but she was more concerned about the M4 rifle with the attached grenade launcher leaning next to the man.

A wall versus a grenade launcher. Easy win.

The third man looked up as Fritz led her and Danny across the lobby. “Prisoners?”

“They were like this when I found them,” Fritz said.

“So, prisoners.”

“They said they’re volunteers.”

“Volunteers?”

“We saw the flyer,” Danny said.

“Flyer?” the man said, confused.

“That shit we’ve been tossing out of planes since after R-Day,” Fritz said.

“Ah, the flyer.” The man took a moment to shake some salt from a packet into his bag before going back to work with a plastic spoon. “Names?”

“I’m Danny, she’s Gaby,” Danny said. “The one sleeping it off inside the back office is Nate.”

“Three?” the man said to Fritz.

“Basically two and a half,” Fritz said. “Second guy’s mostly dead.”

“He’s just been sedated,” Gaby said. “He was shot yesterday.”

“How’d that happen?” the obvious leader asked.

Gaby nodded at one of the collaborators. She had never seen the man before and didn’t know his name, but one was as good as another right now. “They’ve been chasing us for a while; finally caught up to us yesterday. Almost killed Nate in the process.”

“Why?” the man asked.

“Like we told Fritz here,” Danny said, “we left the town we were assigned to so we could sign up. Fight the good fight. Take back Texas. All that good stuff.”

“You went AWOL? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“AWOL, who-gives-a-shit-wol, whatever you wanna call it. We’re not risking our lives for those night-crawling fucks anymore.”

Damn, Danny, you almost convinced me that time.

But Gaby couldn’t decide if the man was convinced or not, and his response was all that mattered. Even with all that gunk over his face, she could tell he was older than Fritz by a few years, and it made sense that in this rankless army of Mercer’s that the oldest man probably ended up leading, if just by default. Of course, she could have been entirely off base and the one standing with his back to them, guarding what was left of the wall, was the real leader, even though he hadn’t said a peep.

She decided to focus on the man sitting in the chair when she said, “Is it true? What the flyers said?”

“What do they say?” the man asked.

“That you’re going to take back Texas. Because that’s why we risked everything to leave the town. Tell me it’s true,” she added, injecting just enough desperation into her voice to be convincing but without overdoing it. Or, at least, she hoped she wasn’t overdoing it.

“If it’s not, tell us now,” Danny said, picking up on where she left off.

“It’s true,” the man nodded.

Gaby watched the leader slowly finish up his meal and toss the bag to the floor. He pulled out another small packet from his pocket and fished out an oatmeal cookie. Gaby had to stop herself from drooling over the smell.

“We’re taking back Texas, and we’re always looking for new recruits,” the man finally finished.

“Thank God,” Gaby said, again putting just enough of the old Gaby—the girly high school Gaby—into her voice to be believable.

Jesus, when did I become such an actress?

“I’m Benford,” the man said. “You already met Fritz.” He hiked a thumb at the third man in the room. “That’s Kip.”

Kip tossed a glance over his shoulder and gave them a “what’s up” nod. He was much younger than both Benford and Fritz, and despite the paint caking his face couldn’t have been older than her. But then, age was hard to tell these days because everyone grew up so fast. You had to, or you didn’t survive.

Benford was smiling at them, white teeth poking through his camo and giving off a slightly sinister vibe. “Unfortunately, we can’t just take your word for it, you understand.”

“But I have such a trustworthy face,” Danny said.

“You won’t get any arguments from me. You get lost in Texas on your way back to California or something?”

“Nah, I’m just naturally sunny.”

“I can see that. But like I said, hard to trust people these days, so everyone has to pass a test first.”

“I suck at tests. Is it at least multiple choice?”

Benford ignored him and said, “Kip, bring him in.”

The kid disappeared through the wall.

“What’s going on?” Gaby asked.

“We need to make sure,” Fritz said.

“Make sure of what?”

“You’ll see,” Benford said.

Kip returned, but he wasn’t alone. A fourth man with camo on his face—another one of Mercer’s—along with Kip was flanking a black-clad figure between them. The man’s head was drooping like he didn’t have the strength to raise it, and his arms were duct taped behind his back. He was struggling with his footing, forcing Mercer’s men to drag and carry him at the same time.

Mason. Please let it be Mason.

The man lifted his head…and it wasn’t Mason.

Dammit.

Like the other dead men in the lobby, she had never seen the collaborator before. The part of his uniform where the name tag was supposed to be was missing, along with most of his right sleeve. Blood trickled down his face and thick, bloody clumps scarred both sides of his temple. He looked as if he were in tremendous pain, and she understood why he had so much difficulty walking: His right leg was broken, and blood dripped from both pant legs. When Benford and the others took out the bank wall, they had apparently claimed their share of collateral damage, and this man was one of them.

Kip and the fourth man dropped the collaborator to the floor in front of Benford. The man collapsed on his knees. Despite his weakened state, he somehow managed to stay upright, if just barely, and glanced first at her, then Danny, then around at the other faces in the room. Beyond the blood and bruises, defeat clouded his eyes, but there was a spark of defiance there, too.

Benford drew his sidearm and took out the magazine. Then he pulled back the slide and slid a bullet into it. “One round. Who’s it gonna be?”

“Me,” Danny said before Gaby could even process what Benford had just asked them.

“What’s wrong with the girl?” Benford asked.

“Not a thing,” Danny said, “but I talked her into this. The other kid, too.”

“Whatever,” Benford said, and tossed the gun to Danny. “Make it co—”

Danny caught the gun and shot the collaborator once in the chest before Benford could even finish.

“Well, shit,” Benford said, watching the man in black slump to the floor.

Gaby stared at the dead man while Fritz chuckled from somewhere behind her.

“Welcome to the Rebellion,” Benford said. “Your first assignment is to drag your old friends into the back office. They’re ruining the décor of the place.”

“We sticking around?” Fritz asked.

Benford glanced at his watch. “Got plenty of time before nightfall. Maybe we’ll get lucky and more of them will show up, give us extra target practice.”

* * *

The Rebellion was really just four people at the moment—Benford, Fritz, Kip, and the fourth man, Justin. To hear Fritz tell it, they never had any intentions of a prolonged engagement with Danzinger’s people, since that went against their mission of hitting and running.

“We kept waiting for them to get reinforcements,” Fritz said. He was perched on the island counter, feet swinging back and forth as if he were at the park. “But no one ever came. We were pretty sure they’d at least get a few extra bodies from that buildup in Port Arthur. We put two guys on the road, just in case, to do a little sniping. But nope. We hit them all day, poking at them from every angle, and no one ever showed up. I guess they’re stretched thin ever since R-Day. Probably keeping most of their forces in the towns.”

“R-Day?” Gaby asked.

“Resistance Day. Our little name for it. Nothing official or anything. He’s not a big fan of titles. Or rank, for that matter.”

“‘He?’” Danny said.

“Mercer,” Fritz said. “The Big Cheese.”

“Where’s he now?”

Fritz shrugged. “He’s around.”

“You don’t know?”

“I know, but you don’t need to know.”

“I thought we were all friends now. You guys even showed me the secret handshake and everything.”

Fritz grinned. “Not yet. But maybe if you keep proving yourself we might show you the secret lair.”

“Awesome. Do we get costumes, too?”

“Hey, what you do with your free time is your business.”

Danny grinned back at him. “Sweet,” he said, and went back to eating from the bag of MRE Mercer’s men had given them.

She concentrated on her own bag of Meal Ready-to-Eat, gobbling up the clumps of chicken pesto pasta with the cheap spoon that came with the food. It probably said a lot about how desensitized she had become to how the new world operated that her appetite only increased after dragging the dead bodies into the back room with Danny. She wished she could say she felt sorry for them, but besides Lopez, she didn’t know a single person or even their names, and she didn’t care enough to read their name tags.

They tried to kill us, and they shot Nate. Screw them.

The MRE tasted a bit bland at first, but a little salt and seasoning from the provided packets lent some life to it. She had pocketed the cookie and beef jerky and saved the coffee grounds for later. The last time she had coffee was on the Trident, where they regularly dipped into the reserves they’d brought from Song Island. She thought about Nate and how much he’d enjoy his own calories-heavy bag, but he was still asleep in the back office.

Despite having been “welcomed” to the Rebellion, Benford hadn’t given them weapons, and she used the opportunity to try to come up with a scenario where Nate wouldn’t be left behind when Benford finally decided it was time to move on, which he would eventually. Right now the only thing keeping them in the bank was Benford wanting to rest his men. They might not have lost anyone in the gunfight, but they had been at it all day and actually looked more tired than her and Danny.

Benford was outside on the sidewalk now with some kind of portable radio set on the hood of a bullet-riddled Jeep. She recognized it as the same one that had chased them yesterday, backed by the technical. The vehicle was damaged, its front windshield smashed and hood badly dented from, she guessed, the same explosion that had taken out the wall. Benford had his M4 with the grenade launcher slung over his back, and he didn’t seem all that concerned about standing out in the open, maybe because Justin and Kip were somewhere out there keeping watch while he and Fritz stayed back.

Benford was talking into the radio’s microphone and occasionally listening, but she couldn’t make out what was being said from inside the building. The radio didn’t look like the kind they had been carrying around with them and using to communicate with the Trident. Benford’s was probably military-issued, while theirs was a civilian model.

“He’s like a dog with a bone,” Fritz was saying while looking out at Benford. “He knows something’s not right about this place. The collaborators have no reason to stake a base all the way out here, and we’ve seen multiple nests in the bigger buildings. Those things don’t normally waste time in a no-nothing place like this, so why are there so many nightcrawlers around?”

“You saw them?” Danny asked.

“Couldn’t miss them. They were crammed into every store and building we passed. Had to be hundreds of them in the place. Maybe more…”

“How many did you guys kill?”

“Six in all, counting the one you popped. Why?”

“There were more than six earlier today,” Gaby said.

“If there were more, then they weren’t here when we hit the bank. And if they’re out there, Kip and Justin would have spotted them already.” He shrugged. “My guess is they knew they were beaten and took off.”

Gaby could picture Mason doing exactly that. The man was an opportunist and a survivor first and foremost. If he thought Danzinger was going to lose, he wouldn’t have any hesitation about abandoning them. The only other reason he wasn’t one of the dead was if he hadn’t been around when the fight got out of hand. She didn’t know which explanation she preferred, not that either one did anything to change the results: Mason was still out there, somewhere.

Like a goddamn cockroach that needs to be stepped on.

“Why’d you do that, by the way?” Danny was asking Fritz.

“You mean the bank?” Fritz said. When Danny nodded, “Benford’s decision. They had one on the roof and one on the sidewalk outside, but other than that it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Benford had us prodding them all day until he was finally convinced they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. It was like they were just satisfied to sit here and wait.” He eyed Benford, who looked like he was in the process of wrapping up his radio call outside. “Like I said, dog with a bone. He wants to know why they were here, why no one came to their rescue, and what the nightcrawlers are doing in a place like this.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Danny said, looking out at Benford.

“Yeah, well, don’t say that to him,” Fritz chuckled.

“Mum’s the word.”

Gaby drank her bottle of water and dabbed some onto her fingers to clean them against her pants. Like Danny, she knew something Fritz and Benford didn’t—the collaborators hadn’t abandoned Gallant despite the constant attacks and lack of reinforcements because they couldn’t. She remembered how Mason had talked about them earlier and how unsettled he had looked. He had tried to hide it, but she could see through his façade.

She looked up when Benford came back inside the bank and put the radio away in his pack.

“What did they say?” Fritz asked.

“They don’t have any intel about this place,” Benford said. He looked and sounded disappointed. “As far as they know, there’s nothing important about Gallant, no reason why the enemy didn’t want to leave or why there are nightcrawlers all over the place.” He looked over at Danny. “What about you? You don’t know what they were doing down here?”

“Not a clue,” Danny said. “The only reason we’re here is because Port Arthur was crawling with soldiers. Your guess is as good as mine why they’re messing around this place.”

Benford seemed to believe him. Maybe it was the way Danny had told the story—while casually eating his prepackaged food without a care in the world—but even Gaby would have bought the lie if she didn’t know better.

“So that’s that, then,” Fritz said. “We bugging out or what?”

“Short of tearing the place apart?” Benford nodded. “We had our fun. Besides, there’s plenty of other targets out there to pick from.”

“I can dig that.”

Just then, the crack! of a gunshot echoed outside, and all four of them dropped to the floor instinctively.

Two more shots followed, then silence.

Gaby glimpsed Danny’s bag of MRE skidding across the tiled floor and looked over in time to see him reaching for his hip for a sidearm that didn’t exist. He looked over at her and mouthed an exaggerated sigh.

Benford had unclipped a two-way radio from behind his back and hurried over to the hole in the wall. “Justin, Kip,” he said into the radio, “give me a sitrep.” When they didn’t answer, “Justin, Kip. Give me a sitrep, goddammit.”

The radio in Benford’s hand and the one clipped to Fritz’s waist squawked in reply, and a male voice said, “You boys should have left town when you had the chance. This is what happens when you lollygag.”

Fuck me, Gaby thought when she recognized the voice.

“Do yourself a favor and let us go in there and collect your guns,” Mason said through the radio. “Trust me when I say it’s your best option, because you’re not going to like what happens when night falls. Nosirree, you are not.”

Then, because it was Mason and he knew exactly how to get on her nerves:

“Oh, and that hot blonde number who is no doubt listening in on this? Hey, sweetheart, you miss me yet?”

14

Lara

“The rig was designed to accommodate about 150 crewmen, but we don’t have nearly that many onboard right now,” Riley said as he led her off the top platform and into a stairwell, their boots clanging off heavy metal stairs as they went down.

She expected to feel claustrophobic as they entered the belly of the structure—like moving around in a submarine—but their path was lit by LED lights, and everything, including the walls, was surprisingly clean. She didn’t know why, but she thought a place that was supposed to house oil workers who slaved on heavy machinery for most of the day would be grimier…and smellier.

“Sounds like it should be pretty comfortable with all the extra space,” Lara said. “So why are you in such a hurry to abandon it?”

“Comfort isn’t the problem.”

“So what is?”

“We’ll get to that later.”

“You keep saying that, but I’m not hearing anything that would make me hand the Trident over to you.”

“I’m not asking you to hand it over to me, Lara. You just need to let me borrow it for a while.”

“I still haven’t heard anything that would make me do that, either.”

“I haven’t gotten to my sales pitch yet,” he said as he pushed through a door and they stepped inside a hallway lit by bright natural sunlight.

“Where are we?”

“The crew area, where the workers stay when they’re not working.”

She found out why the place was so bright when Riley led her past an open door and she looked in at two kids about Vera and Elise’s age, propping their chins and arms against an open window on the other side of the room. One of the children, a girl, glanced over and smiled at her, and Lara reflexively smiled back.

“You said you had civilians onboard, not children,” she said. “How many?”

“About a dozen in all.”

“Why are they here?”

“Because their family is here.”

They walked past a couple of closed doors, and Lara thought she could hear voices coming from the other side of both of them.

“Is this what you wanted to show me?” she asked. “Two kids in a room?”

“It’s a beginning.”

“So there’s more.”

“I wouldn’t be much of a salesman if I didn’t have more under my sleeve.”

He stopped at another open door, then took a couple of steps out of the way to let her look in.

It was some kind of exercise room, except the equipment had been removed and the space taken over by people. Sunlight streamed inside through windows along the far wall, and she counted at least twenty civilians either standing or sitting around. Some were occupied with card games while others were gathered around a TV watching some kind of movie on a Blu-ray player. A few had staked out private spots to read books. There was conversation, but it was of the hushed variety, as if they were all waiting for something—something bad, or big, or maybe both—to happen. A few of them glanced nervously over at her and Riley.

“Who are they?” she asked. “What are they doing here?”

“Everyone has their own rooms, but I guess they find it easier to all be in the same place,” Riley said.

“No. I mean, what are they doing here, on the Ocean Star?”

“They’re part of a support network. Cooks, mechanics—basically the lifeblood of every war effort. They’re here because this is an FOB and our job is to keep the war going.”

“What war are you talking about?”

Riley was looking at her intently. “I think you know.”

He’s talking about Mercer’s crusade in Texas.

She’d known who Riley was as soon as he began talking about what was happening back in Texas. He was a part of Mercer’s army. So were Hart and Faith, and now, the people in this room. She didn’t have any doubts anymore, but she couldn’t let Riley know that. At least, not until she had squeezed him for every piece of information.

“I don’t,” she said.

“Are you sure about that?” he asked, not taking his eyes off her.

“I should know what I know, Riley, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He nodded, but there was a ghost of a smile on his lips, as if he had just gotten what he had been waiting (looking?) for. “All right. Let’s stick to that story for now.” He turned and continued up the hallway. “Come on; I have more to show you.”

She looked into the room one more time before following him. “How many people are on the rig?”

“Thirty-two civilians.”

“I thought you said you were all civilians.”

“Some are more civilian than others.”

They turned a corner and passed another large room, this one equipped with flat screens along the walls, but unlike the previous room, none of the TVs in this one were turned on. There was a stack of red chairs in one corner because the space had been converted into living quarters. Instead of civilians, there were a half dozen men and women in assault vests sitting or lying down on spring cots. Everyone wore gun belts, and rifles leaned against their beds or the walls nearby.

They didn’t stop at the second room.

“So this is where you’re hiding the rest of your Harts,” she said.

“I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“Which would be what?”

“That I was looking to jump you as soon as you were onboard.”

“They’re soldiers.”

“They’re the security force that’s supposed to keep the FOB safe.”

“How many?”

“Fifteen. I’m responsible for forty-seven lives in all, not counting myself.”

“They look a little jumpy.”

“Things are a little tense right now,” Riley said. “Not just here, but back in Texas, too. Which you don’t know anything about.”

She smirked at his back but if he heard or saw it, he didn’t react.

“There are more FOBs like the Ocean Star out there,” Riley continued. “Not quite like this one, and staffed differently, but we all serve the same purpose.”

“Which is?”

“Keep the war effort alive. Keep the fighting on course. Keep the killing going.” He stopped and turned around to look at her. “Mercer.”

“Mercer who?”

“Cut the shit, Lara. You know about Mercer,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

So here it is. The moment of truth.

“No more lies,” she said.

“No more lies,” he nodded.

“I’ve heard stories about Mercer, but I’ve never met him or seen what he’s doing out there in person.”

“Everything you’ve heard is true, and it’s the reason I need to get these people as far away from the Ocean Star as possible.”

“I’m listening…”

“We don’t want anything to do with the bloodbath that’s taking place in Texas right now. That’s why I need the Trident. It’s the only thing big enough to carry everyone here away.”

“So you’re running, is that it?”

“Yes,” Riley said without hesitation. “We’re running, Lara. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s why I volunteered for this job in the first place, why the people in the other rooms are here, too. Will you help us get as far away from Mercer as possible?”

She didn’t answer him, and Riley never took his eyes off her.

“Lara,” he said. “Please. I need your help. I’ll beg if you want.”

“I don’t want you to beg.”

“What do you want?”

“Tell me everything about Mercer. About this war of his. If you want a prayer of me saying yes, I want to know everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” she said. “Start at the beginning…”

* * *

They sat across from one another in the Ocean Star’s galley—the only two people in the entire place—with chunks of SPAM and fried fish on plastic trays between them. Like life on the Trident, Riley’s people had no trouble fishing the Gulf of Mexico for a steady diet of fish every day. She took note that the kitchen in the back still had a working refrigerator, which meant Riley had plenty of diesel fuel to waste.

We could definitely use some of that.

“The people here and the ones out there fighting his war right now wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him,” Riley said. “He saved our lives. Literally and figuratively. The first few weeks were the hardest, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You were out there, too.”

She didn’t say anything. The first few weeks of The Purge were not something she liked to dwell on.

May you burn in hell, John Sunday. You and your brothers.

“He knew about the oil rigs,” Riley was saying. “He knew about a lot of other things that never occurred to me or most people. I don’t know how he knew. It’s one of the many mysteries surrounding Mercer. He doesn’t talk much about his past, and he doesn’t have to. His actions did all the speaking for him.” Riley paused and seemed to take a few seconds to search his thoughts. Then, “What you have to understand is, we followed him because we wanted to, because we believed in him. Nothing he did up until what they call R-Day affected that belief. For most of us, anyway.”

“What finally changed your mind?”

“The realization that it was happening. The war. It was actually happening. Before, it was just theory. And then…it wasn’t.”

“You said there are forty-seven people on the Ocean Star—forty-eight, counting yourself. How many are out there running around Texas?”

“Over 500,” Riley said. “That’s not including the people in the other FOBs.”

“In all?”

“Almost a thousand.”

It sounded like a lot, but even as she turned the number over in her head, she knew it wasn’t really. There was a colonel in Colorado who had over 4,000 civilians and military personnel hiding in a bunker called Bayonet Mountain with him at this very moment. Compared to that, “almost a thousand” people wasn’t nearly as impressive. Then again, it wasn’t as if you needed a lot of warm bodies to drop bombs and shell a helpless town filled with pregnant women and civilians.

“He managed to save that many all by himself?” she asked.

“Not by himself,” Riley said. “He started small, with a handful, but the numbers grew and soon they were able to cover more ground, pull more people out of their hiding places. In the beginning, there were just four of them. Mercer and three others. I made five.”

“You were there at the planning stages of his war.”

Riley shook his head. “It wasn’t a war then. Not really. Yes, he talked about it, but he never gave any specifics, and for the longest time it was just this abstract thing he would bring up every once in a while. Mostly it was just people trying to stay alive and help each other do the same. He found out about the silver a long time before we even heard your radio broadcast. But he didn’t know about water or UV lights, otherwise we would have used places like the Ocean Star a lot earlier.” Riley poked unenthusiastically at his food with a plastic spork before continuing. “Eventually we transitioned from survival mode to planning. We’d always been good at searching and loading up on food, supplies, and fuel, but I didn’t know what they were really for.”

“His war.”

Riley nodded. “He’s had it on his mind from day one; he just never let us in on any of the details. Back then, we were just glad to be alive and searching for other survivors, and we never knew any better. I guess you could say we were blissfully ignorant and loving it.”

“Where did you get the war machines? The planes?”

“The problem isn’t finding them; it’s training people to use them. We only had one pilot, a former Iraq War airman named Cole. He was able to train two others.”

“Why just two?”

“Not everyone can fly a plane, Lara. It’s not as easy as climbing into the cockpit and stepping on the gas pedal.”

“I guess not.”

“We located a unit of Abrams tanks at an Army base. All the ammo we needed was just sitting there for the taking. The tanks are easier to train for—all you really need is a manual and a lot of space—but they have limited range and they’re not exactly subtle. From the reports we’re getting out of Texas, Mercer’s already lost two of his tanks assaulting the towns. The kill squads will eventually do more damage to the collaborators than the war machines as the war goes on.”

“Kill squads?”

“Basically hit-and-run teams. They’re mostly autonomous, and their job—their only job—is to sow confusion among the enemy ranks, make them think there are more of us out there than there actually are. It’s a dangerous job, and the ones running around out there are all volunteers. The hardest of the hardcore Mercer believers.”

“Sounds like a bunch of nice guys.”

“Not really. Anyway, this is just the beginning. His version of shock and awe. Strike first and fast, before the enemy knows what’s happening.”

“By indiscriminately killing a lot of innocent people?”

“That part…” He shook his head. “It caught a lot of us by surprise. It’s why I’m here. Why everyone’s here.”

Lara considered that the look in his eyes might have been all for her benefit, but she didn’t think so. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she was sitting across from him and neither one of them had moved for a long time, she saw the bags under his eyes, proof that rest wasn’t something Riley was familiar with for a while now.

“Phase one was shock and awe,” she said. “What’s phase two?”

“Recruitment,” Riley said. “Mercer knows he can’t keep fighting this with just 500 soldiers, even as well-trained and committed as they are. Guns and ammo aren’t the issue. We cleaned up more than one Army depot before all of this. His plan was always to start with Texas, get the Texans behind him, before expanding to the other states. He thinks if he inflicts enough damage, make them fear him enough, that he can convert the collaborators, including all the townspeople that can pick up a gun and fight with him.”

“Why now? Why didn’t he just wait until he had more men?”

“He said we couldn’t, that the longer we waited the more comfortable the townspeople would become with their new life, and it would be harder to convince them. That, and with every FOB we establish, we increase our risk of being discovered. I don’t know how much of that was bullshit, honestly.”

“What if that doesn’t work?” Lara asked. “What if the collaborators won’t turn? What if they keep resisting him and he has to kill more and more people?”

Riley pursed his lips. “Then a lot of people are going to die for no reason.” He put his spork down and looked intently across the table at her. “Now you know why I have to get my people out of here. I won’t let Mercer throw them into the meat grinder. The only option is to run.”

* * *

“What exactly does he want from us again?” Blaine asked.

“To transport his people away from here,” Lara said.

“Where is this magical place he wants to take them?” Carly asked.

Lara shook her head. “He hasn’t told me yet.”

“In case you say no?” Blaine said.

“That would be my guess. I don’t blame him. I’d do the same.”

The warmth inside the bridge of the Trident was a welcome change from the chill of the oil rig and the stuffy air in its hallways. She stood inside the room with Blaine and Carly, the three of them staring out the windshield at the Ocean Star seemingly fastened permanently to the Gulf of Mexico. To look at it, she wouldn’t have known there were nervous civilians crowding its rooms and hallways or anxious commandos waiting to rebel against the man who saved them.

“I guess he’s not entirely dumb,” Carly said. “Last night notwithstanding.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Lara said. “Or he didn’t think he did, anyway. He’s walking a razor’s wire. Playing the loyal soldier to Mercer while committing what amounts to treason behind his back.”

“Just from what I hear about this Mercer guy,” Blaine said, shaking his head, “I definitely don’t wanna end up on his shit list.”

“Neither does Riley.”

“So what do we get in return for playing chauffeur to his forty-seven people?” Carly asked.

“Forty-eight, including Riley,” Lara said. “The most important thing we’ll get is fuel, since a dead-in-the-water Trident won’t exactly help him execute his plans.”

“Execute,” Carly said. “Nice choice of words, boss lady.”

Lara smiled. “Point is, we can fit forty-eight more people onboard. At least temporarily.”

“You sure about that?”

“Blaine?” Lara said, looking over at the big man for confirmation.

He nodded. “It’ll be a tight squeeze, but it’s not impossible. We’ll fill up the cabins and open areas, and push comes to shove they can spill outside onto the decks. Lots of space on the aft and bow.”

“And hey, a little extra sun never hurt anyone, right?” Carly said.

“They’ll also be loading us with supplies, too,” Lara said.

“What kind of supplies?”

“Food, water, guns, and ammo. He’s agreed to let us have as much food as we can carry in our galley, but I told him he could keep his guns and ammo.”

“You can never have too much ammo,” Blaine said.

Carly chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Blaine said.

“That sounds like something Will or Danny would say.”

Blaine smiled. “Best compliment I’ve gotten all year.”

“Speaking of Danny,” Lara said. “Did he radio in yet?”

Carly’s face sobered up and Lara got her answer. She glanced at the digital clock on the bridge’s dashboard: 9:17 a.m.

“He’s late,” Carly said. “And not the oh-shit-Aunt-Flow’s-late sort of late, either.”

“Did you try making contact with him?”

“He’s not answering, either. No one is.”

“They’re probably busy looking for a way down to the shoreline. You know how unpredictable it is out there. If he ran into trouble, he would have let us know yesterday. Did he say anything?”

“No, but…”

“But?”

“I don’t know,” Carly said. “I got the feeling he wanted to tell me something, but didn’t, for whatever reason.” She shook her head and put on a brave face. “Of course, when it comes to Danny, I’ve learned it’s not always a wise policy to assume he has more going on upstairs than meets the eye.”

Lara reached over and put a hand on Carly’s arm and got a pursed smile in return.

“How does transporting Riley’s people and waiting to pick up Danny work?” Blaine asked. “What if Danny boy calls while we’re en route to wherever Riley wants us to take them?”

“I don’t know,” Lara said. “But we’ll do what we always do—deal with what’s in front of us and pivot if something comes up after that.”

“So we’re definitely doing this?” Carly asked.

“We need their fuel,” Lara said. “It won’t hurt to restock our galley at the same time.”

“I assume this means you think we can trust him,” Blaine asked.

“I think so.”

“You need to be sure, Lara.”

Lara nodded, maybe more to convince herself than Blaine. “Yes, we can trust him.”

And she thought, God, I hope I’m right…

* * *

Faith, the girl who had been driving her back and forth between the Ocean Star and the Trident, was coming back to pick her up. This time Lara wouldn’t be alone, and stood at the swimming platform at the back of the yacht with Hart at her side and the other five men behind them. They were rubbing their wrists and blinking at the sun like prisoners who hadn’t been let out for years instead of less than twenty-four hours.

“You made the right choice,” Hart said. “I know it couldn’t have been an easy one, but then, you are Lara.”

“You figured that out too, huh?” she said.

“After our first talk last night,” he nodded. “You sound different in person, but I’ve heard your voice enough times that it’s stuck in a loop inside my head.”

She gave him a curious look.

“Some of the guys carry around iPods with your broadcasts on them,” Hart said and smiled almost shyly at her. “During a supply run in the early days, one of the groups raided an Apple store. They brought back stacks of those tiny iPods. They’re pretty good for loading with music, or in your case, inspirational messages. Doesn’t take much power to charge, either, and they last a ridiculously long time.”

“Are you telling me there are guys running around out there with iPods loaded with my broadcast?”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s…disturbing.”

“It’s hard to explain, but your messages, especially the first one—this stranger speaking to us through the airwaves one night, telling us how to fight back, that there’s hope as long as we don’t give up…” He shook his head and again looked almost embarrassed. “It had a profound effect on a lot of us, more than you’ll ever know.”

Lara felt a slight shiver run through her at the thought of Mercer’s (killers) men flying around in planes bombing civilians or rolling around in tanks shelling pregnant women while listening to and getting inspiration from her messages. The whole thing made her want to vomit, and it was all she could do to concentrate on the approaching vessel instead. Hart must have seen her discomfort, because he let the topic go.

She couldn’t be sure, but Faith looked like she was smiling widely as she got closer. The young woman had upgraded to a bigger boat now that she would be driving six extra bodies back to the oil rig instead of just Lara.

“What about Mercer?” she asked Hart.

“What about him?” Hart said.

“When did you figure out he wasn’t who he said he was?”

“That’s the thing. I can’t really say if he ever actually lied to us.”

“No?”

Hart scrunched his face in thought, his graying hair rising and falling against the cool wind. “He gave us everything he promised, and in return we gave him our loyalty. It wasn’t like he demanded it. We gave it to him willingly.”

“You still think you had a choice?”

Hart sighed. “Maybe not. Maybe it was one of those unspoken trade-offs. Whatever it was, I don’t think he ever lied to us. He might not have told us everything, but in the early days, as we were preparing for what the younger guys called R-Day, I don’t think most of us—or maybe it was just me—fully understood what he was asking us to do.”

“Slaughter innocents…”

“Yeah,” Hart said quietly, as if that one word drained all of his energy.

One of the five men behind them walked forward and waved at Faith. He was young, with short blond hair, and was beaming as Faith approached them.

James, I presume.

Lara looked past Faith at the Ocean Star waiting for them in the near distance. She ended up staring at the towering crane, which looked like a stray limb poking out of the sea. If she stared hard enough, she thought she might have spotted something moving around up there. But of course it could just be the bright sun playing tricks on her eyes.

“Riley told me there was a guy named Peters up there,” she said, pointing at the crane.

Hart nodded. “Uh huh.”

“He said Peters never misses.”

“He doesn’t.”

“First time for everything.”

Hart smiled. “Not with Peters.”

15

Gaby

Whatever confidence Benford and Fritz had while they assaulted the bank fizzled when their number was halved, with Kip and Justin likely dead somewhere out there. How else would Mason have gotten his hands on their radio?

Gaby couldn’t help but look down at her watch every few minutes. Nightfall came fast in Texas in the winter, and it would be pitch-dark by 5:30 p.m.

And right now…1:46 p.m.

Time flies when you’re outgunned.

She looked across the bank lobby at Fritz and Benford crouched at the front of the building. Fritz was peeking out of the hole in the wall while Benford moved from the still-intact front doors to the remaining windows. At some point during his back and forth, he took out his ham radio and spoke into it. He kept his voice low, as if he knew she was eavesdropping, but because of the short distance, she managed to hear snippets of the conversation anyway. Benford did most of the talking and she caught the words ghouls and torch it before he turned the radio off and slipped it back into his pack.

Gaby exchanged a look with Danny, both their backs against the island counter. They were close enough to see the empty street outside but far enough to stay out of the path of any stray bullets. Hopefully, anyway.

She mouthed at him, “Did he say ‘Torch it?’”

Danny nodded.

“What did he mean?” she mouthed.

Danny shrugged and she swore he mouthed back, “Tacos,” but that couldn’t have been right, because it didn’t make any sense.

She gave him a questioning look and he grinned, and she thought, Dammit, Danny, this is no time for one of your stupid jokes.

She sighed and looked forward at Fritz and Benford. Somewhere beyond the hole between the two men was Mason and who knew how many collaborators. Either he had finally gotten the reinforcements Benford had been waiting for, or Mason had left with enough men to take both Justin and Kip out. Either way, Mason was out there and he had the upper hand, because there was no way for them to leave Gallant First Bank without being shot.

She glanced back at the hallway and at the door on the other side of the dark passageway. What were the chances Mason didn’t already have someone waiting in the back alley just in case? The man was an opportunist scumbag and a dozen other unlikeable things, but the one word she would never use to describe him was stupid. But just in case Mason did decide to come through there, she and Danny had helped Fritz blockade it with a heavy metal filing cabinet from the manager’s office. It had bought them some goodwill, and, hopefully, further convinced Mercer’s men that they were on their side.

The silent lull inside the lobby and outside in the rest of Gallant was unbearable. In the aftermath of Mason’s mocking radio call, he had gone uncharacteristically quiet. When she looked over at Danny, he was staring at the pile of weapons resting in the corner across from them. Fritz, near the left side of the opening, stood in their way, but he was so focused on what was potentially outside that she wasn’t even sure if he remembered they were still in the room with him and Benford.

When Danny looked over at her, she shook her head and mouthed, “Too risky.”

He nodded, agreeing.

“Any other bright ideas?” she mouthed.

He shook his head, then shrugged before turning back to Benford and Fritz, and said out loud, “Um, guys?”

“What?” Benford said without bothering to look back at them.

“Don’t wanna be a downer here, but you are aware that the reason they’re not attacking is because they don’t have to, right?”

Fritz looked over his shoulder at them. “What’s that mean?”

“You know something we don’t?” Benford added, also looking back now.

“All those fresh ghoul nests in town that you saw while you were picking your way here,” Gaby said. “Remember?”

“Aw, fuck,” Fritz said. He shot Benford a quick, worried look. “They’re right. We’re sitting ducks in here. Those fuckers don’t have to come in to get us; if we’re still here when it gets dark, they’ll be the least of our problems.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Benford said.

“The uniforms,” Danny said.

“What uniforms?” Fritz said.

“The ones in the office.”

“The dead guys?”

“That’s them.”

“What about them?” Benford said.

“The first thing you learn in the towns is that the ghouls respect the uniform. Hey, men in uniform, who doesn’t like them, amirite?” When neither Fritz nor Benford said anything, Danny continued: “Point is, they recognize the uniforms and steer clear. I don’t know how or why; they just do.”

“He’s right,” Gaby said, picking up where Danny left off. If they were going to play the collaborator-turned-defectors, she might as well embrace the role, too. “They told us to always keep the uniforms on at night, especially when we’re outside the town limits. It’s always worked.”

“Always?” Fritz said doubtfully.

“Always,” Gaby nodded, and thought, Probably.

Benford and Fritz exchanged a look, but from their mannerisms she could tell that neither men were convinced.

Danny must have seen it too, because he said, “Don’t think of it as wearing a dead man’s clothing. Think of it as putting on a dead man’s stink to keep back the wolves.”

“I got a better idea,” Benford said. “The Jeep.”

“The Jeep?” Fritz said.

“We get in that Jeep, and we take our chances on the road. Blast our way out of here.”

Gaby exchanged her own look with Danny and saw that he was thinking the exact same thing: “Are these guys serious?”

When she glanced back, Mercer’s men were grinning at each other as if they had just won the lottery. She didn’t know why she expected men who were going around Texas killing everything that moved to be open to logic, so it made some kind of warped sense that they would prefer to go out in a blaze of glory.

And our luck just keeps getting better…

“Fuck yeah,” Fritz was saying. “We’ll drive it right down their throats.”

“Can’t be too many of them out there,” Benford said. He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself and Fritz. “Maybe a half dozen, if that.”

“You sure? They did take Kip and Justin…”

“They could have sneaked up on them. We assumed they’d left the city, but what if they didn’t? What if they were just hiding out somewhere else in town when we hit the bank?”

“That’s possible, I guess.”

“We just need to find the key.”

“The key?” Fritz said, as if he didn’t understand the concept.

“For the Jeep,” Benford said, and peeked out at the vehicle in question still parked on the sidewalk outside, so close and yet so, so far away. “It wasn’t in the ignition when I was out there earlier.”

Danny turned to her, and Gaby saw the spark of something in his eyes—not mischievous, exactly, but there was something there.

Before she could ask him, Danny said to Benford and Fritz, “Whoever was driving it probably pocketed the key when he parked.” When the two men looked over, Danny jerked a thumb over his shoulder and at the back hallway. “It might still be there.”

“Worth a shot,” Benford said to Fritz.

Fritz frowned. “You mean, go through the bodies?”

“Don’t be so squeamish. They’re already dead.”

“That’s not helping.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Danny said.

Fritz got up and jogged, slightly hunched, across the bank.

Danny started to get up, but Fritz pointed the muzzle of his AR at him and said, “You stay here.” Then, at her, “You come with me.”

“I thought we were besties now,” Danny said.

“Not quite.” Then, when he saw that Danny hadn’t sat back down, “Sit down.”

Danny did, while Gaby got up and followed Fritz into the back hallway.

As she went, she sneaked a look back and saw Danny watching her. He nodded, as if to say, “You can do it,” and she thought, No I can’t, Danny, no I can’t, but she returned his nod anyway, because there were no other options she could see.

Gaby turned around and glimpsed Fritz just before he disappeared through the first door in the back. She followed him and sucked in a breath and steeled herself for what was waiting for her in there. For some reason, dragging them into the room earlier—she could still see the dry bloody trails they’d left behind, leading all the way from the lobby—hadn’t affected her at all, but the prospect of seeing them again…

Stop it. You have work to do.

Focus!

Like the manager’s office in the back (where Nate was sleeping, blissfully oblivious to everything happening around him), there were no windows in the room, but there was still just enough light to see with once her eyes adjusted to the new environment. Semidarkness or not, there was no way she wouldn’t know about the bodies at the back, because she and Danny had put them there.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Fritz said as he grabbed one of the dead men and pulled him off the pile to rifle through his pockets.

“What ideas?” she said as she got ahold of a heavy man with a mustache. The thud! he made as he landed on the floor made her wince. She’d had a lot of experience with bodies these days, but she still had to fight back against her gag reflex.

“That’s a good girl,” Fritz said.

She didn’t bother responding and instead shoved her hands into the dead man’s pockets and rummaged around them. She found a pack of gum and spare 5.56 shells. The man also had random supplies in the pouches around his waist, but the ones designed to carry ammo were already empty, their contents currently sitting in one of the lobby corners right now along with all the weapons. She tossed the useless items and lifted the man up from the floor just enough to go through his back pockets.

“Gaby,” Fritz said.

“What?”

“That short for something? Gabrielle?”

“Does it matter?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Don’t feel like you have to put yourself out.”

He chuckled. “Come on; we’re on the same side now. Or what, you’re taken or something? You and the California surfer?”

“We’re just friends.”

“Ah,” he said, and she thought, Jesus, is he flirting with me?

The thought further nauseated her, especially given where they were and what they were doing at the moment. She was still trying to decide how to feel about Fritz’s comments when her hand touched cold steel in the dead man’s back pocket. She quickly wrapped her fingers around it and pulled her hand out.

“Nothing,” Fritz said. He was working so close to her that she could smell his sweat as he reached over and pulled another body toward him, handling the dead man as if he were a (heavy) bag of flour. “You get lucky?”

“No key yet,” she said, turning her body slightly so more of her back was to Fritz.

She opened her hand and looked down at the folded pocketknife. The handle was about four inches long, which meant the hidden blade would be around three inches or so.

There is a God.

She had been prepared to do this the hard way, by getting her hands on one of Fritz’s weapons—either his sidearm or the knife in a sheath strapped to his left hip. It wouldn’t have been easy; Fritz was bigger and stronger, and despite the element of surprise, she would have had to get really, really lucky. There would have been a lot of noise, maybe even a gunshot, and Danny would be at risk.

But what else was new? They were all at risk if they did nothing.

“Maybe it’s not here,” Fritz was saying. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the balls? Might have to shoot our way out of here on foot. I guess that’ll be fun, too.”

Fun? That’s one way to put it.

“Other guys got into this because they believed in the cause,” Fritz continued, oblivious to what she was doing next to him, “but me and Benford? We just like the excitement. Be all you can be, right?”

She pocketed the knife and turned around. “Anything?”

“Zilch.” He wrinkled his nose. “And to top it off, they’re starting to reek, too.”

“We all reek.”

He grinned at her. “Some reek less than others.”

Jesus, he really is flirting with me.

She managed to force out a smile back at him before turning to the next body. It was heavy, but not too much that she couldn’t have dragged it closer with a little straining, and it certainly wasn’t heavy enough that she had to make noises as she edged it near her, trying to get it off the two bodies underneath it.

“Jesus, he’s a big one,” she said between grunts.

“Time to hit the gym,” Fritz said.

“Maybe after this.”

“Make an appointment. I’m always available for consultation.”

“Deal,” she said, and grunted again as she pulled at the body.

Fritz got up from the dead man he was searching and moved over and grabbed her man by the arm. Gaby had just enough time to glimpse the collaborator’s face—it was the same one that Danny had shot back in the lobby earlier. It might have been the lack of light, but she swore the man looked completely at peace.

“He’s not that heavy,” Fritz was saying.

“Heavy enough for me,” she said.

“I got it,” Fritz said, and pulled hard enough that he dumped the body on the floor with a loud thud.

While he was pulling, Gaby had taken a step back to give him room to work. At the same time, she slipped her hand into her pocket and took out the folded knife, then thumbed the stud sticking out of the side that allowed users to simply push the knife open with one hand—or more precisely, one thumb.

There was a slight click as the blade came out—about three inches worth, with a serrated section—but if Fritz heard it, he didn’t react. He stood in front and slightly to the left of her, almost exactly opposite the door behind them, which allowed a stream of pale light to splash across his back. She had no trouble whatsoever finding his neck, portions of it still layered with the face paint he hadn’t taken off since she first saw him. Whatever it was he and Benford had covered themselves in, it had stayed in place remarkably well.

Fritz crouched and reached for the dead man’s pockets, saying, “You’re taking the last two. No fair I have to do all of them. Equal opportunity and all that, right?”

He was chuckling, his back to her, when she jammed the knife into the side of his throat, aiming for the middle while at the same time wrapping her left arm around his head and seeking out his mouth with her palm. He let out a startled grunt and jerked back even as she pushed the knife in further, and his body slammed into her chest and knocked her off balance as they spilled to the floor. As she fell back, all Gaby could think about was locating Fritz’s mouth to silence him so he couldn’t let out a scream that would alert Benford outside.

A loud thump! as she slammed into the floor with Fritz’s thrashing body on top of her. There was pain, but she was too busy pulling the knife out of Fritz’s neck to properly feel it. An arc of blood spurted across the room, the fresh wetness mingling with the multiple trails of dry blood that smeared the floor from when they had dragged the bodies inside earlier. Fritz’s body continued to spaz on top of her as she gave up trying to find his mouth (Jesus, where the hell is his mouth?) and instead concentrated on locking her free arm around his throat to keep him from moving around too much as she plunged the knife once, twice, three times into his chest.

He continued flailing against her, his much bigger and heavier body making it hard for her to suck in air, even as she heard him letting out a gurgling sound. Warm blood splashed both of her arms, but mostly her left hand as it tightened around his throat in a vise grip. She held him in place even as he struggled, his legs kicking out between hers. The man seemed to never run out of strength, not even when she embedded the knife a fourth time into his chest.

Then finally, mercifully, his entire body went still.

She gasped for a lungful of much-needed air and pushed his body off her, then rolled over onto her side and stared at the darkening wall for the next two, five—ten seconds. Both of her fists and most of her long sleeves were covered in blood, along with her chest and chin. Her clothing clung, damp with Fritz’s life force, the fresh stink of death threatening to make her vomit back out the MRE she’d eaten earlier.

Get a hold of yourself!

Danny, remember? He’s still in the lobby with Benford!

She pushed up onto her knees and looked back at Fritz just to be sure he was dead. He wasn’t moving at all, though his eyes were wide open and staring up at the ceiling. She remembered how he was flirting with her just before she murdered him and could no longer hold back; she bent over to throw up.

But it was a dry heave, and the chicken pesto pasta didn’t come up. There was spittle, though, and she swiped at it with the back of her blood-covered hand.

Jesus, what part of her wasn’t covered in blood?

The sudden realization of voices, coming from the lobby, made her straighten up. She tightened her grip around the knife instinctively.

It was Danny, saying something about a “horse and a bar,” though she couldn’t make out every word. Maybe it was the ringing in her ears or the sound of her heart hammering against her chest as it tried to catch up to her labored breathing.

Danny was still talking when she shook off the nausea, then tossed the knife and hurried back over to Fritz’s body. She pushed it up, ignoring the warmth of his blood against her skin, and tugged the rifle off him, then did the same to the gun in his holster. A black Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, smaller than she would have expected given a man as big as Fritz.

She bypassed the long knife strapped to his left hip and collected all the spare magazines he had on him, including an extra for the pistol, and staggered back up to her feet, feeling much better with the ammo’s extra weight on her. She made sure the AR-15’s safety was off as she approached the door, listening for clues that Benford might have heard the scuffle with Fritz, but all she could hear was Danny still talking.

Was it just her, or did he seem to be talking louder than usual? It was almost like he was trying to keep Benford’s attention so he wouldn’t hear—

Her. Danny was distracting Benford because if anyone could hear what was happening in here with the open door, it would be Danny, who was much closer than Benford.

She smiled to herself.

I love you, Danny. I really, really do.

She wiped her bloody hands on her pant legs so she would have a better grip on her weapons, then leaned out the door and glanced left toward the lobby.

“Oh, come on, that was funny,” Danny was saying.

Benford might have grunted, but he didn’t take his eyes off the street outside.

“I got another one,” Danny said. “It involves girls in bikinis. You like girls in bikinis, don’t you, Benford?”

“What I would like is for you to sit there and be quiet,” Benford said.

“Oh, you’re no fun,” Danny said, just as he looked back and saw her, and grinned.

She returned it before slipping the Smith & Wesson out of her front waistband. Danny nodded and began to slowly raise himself up from the floor. Gaby went into a slight crouch, took a breath, and then slid the pistol across the lobby to him.

She had put a lot of muster on it, thinking she needed to in order to clear the space between her and Danny, but it was probably too much and the gun made a skeeeeeee noise as it traveled to its destination—

And Benford heard it!

Mercer’s man turned around and started to get up, but by then Danny had already snatched the gun off the floor and, still on one knee, twisted and shot Benford twice in the chest. Benford seemed to stumble, as if he had just lost his balance, before sitting back down on the floor with the M4 landing perfectly in his lap.

Gaby hurried out from the back, focusing on the hole in the wall next to Benford’s awkwardly sitting form. She half expected Mason’s men to use the momentary distraction to attack, but they didn’t, and she made it to the front of the bank without having to dodge bullets. She leaned against the wall and peeked out at the street. When she couldn’t see another living soul outside, she pulled back behind cover.

“Anything?” Danny asked behind her.

“No,” she said.

“Of course not. Why make it easy for me? My luck’s not that good.”

“What now?”

“Gear up,” he said.

Danny slid the Smith & Wesson into his empty holster, then walked over to the pile of weapons in the corner and helped himself to an M4, slung it, and began snatching up magazines from the floor and stuffing them into his barren pouches.

“Grab that 203,” he said. “It might come in handy.”

Gaby crouched next to Benford, ignored his accusing stare, and picked up his rifle. She poked through his pouches but couldn’t find any ammo for the grenade launcher attached to the weapon.

“He must have used up all the grenade rounds,” she said.

Danny grunted. “Figures.”

She didn’t bother taking the spare magazines on Benford. She was already flush with Fritz’s, and they were interchangeable with the M4. She slung the rifle and stood up, then stared at the hole again.

The Jeep was still out there on the sidewalk, so tempting and yet so impossible.

“Did you find the key?” Danny asked.

“No, but we didn’t look through all the bodies yet.”

“Keep an eye out,” Danny said, and jogged through the lobby and disappeared into the back room.

Gaby leaned against the wall and this time took her time looking up and down the empty streets of Gallant, Texas. She let out an involuntary sigh as the reassuring warmth of sunlight brushed against her skin.

Something caught her eye as it traveled up the street, whipping past the parked Jeep. She glimpsed a small strip of paper with black lettering on it…it was another one of Mercer’s propaganda flyers. She followed the white sheet’s progress until it disappeared up the street, then realized she was leaning too far out and pulled herself quickly back inside.

Stupid. If there was a sniper out there, you’d be missing a head right now.

They had to be out there somewhere, close enough to the bank to keep an eye on Mercer’s men. The most obvious choice would be the two-story department store directly across from her. The sign above the front doors read “Gallant’s Best,” and the front exterior was painted red and white with shades of blue. A nod to the American flag, maybe. She squinted but couldn’t tell if there were things other than just curtains covering the building’s windows. But if Mason’s men were in there, the best spots to watch the bank would be either the roof or from behind one of the second-floor windows—

She heard a squawk behind her and glanced back at the two-way radio still clipped to Benford’s hip.

“Talk about a curious development,” a voice said through the radio.

Mason.

“Does this mean you and Danny boy got the upper hand on Mercer’s dickheads?” Mason asked.

She stared at the radio but didn’t reach for it.

“What’s the matter, kitty cat got your tongue, sweetheart? Don’t be shy. If I’d wanted to harm you, I would have done it when you stuck your head out a second ago.”

Goddammit.

“Go on,” Mason said. “I won’t bite. Much.”

She crouched and grabbed Benford’s radio but didn’t use it.

Mason didn’t seem to mind. “I know what you’re wondering: How did that handsome devil escape Mercer’s boys? Admit it. It’s been on your mind ever since you found out I’m still out here kicking and winning it.”

She couldn’t help herself and finally keyed the radio. “You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit.”

“She lives!”

“But I’ll tell you one sure thing, Mason: Your luck’s not going to last forever. One of these days you’re going to find yourself in a noose that you can’t slip out of.”

“Why so serious, sweetheart?”

“I’m not your sweetheart.”

“Sweetie, then?”

She looked up as Danny slid quietly across the lobby and pushed up against the wall on the other side of the hole. He looked over at her and shook his head: No key.

“I see Danny boy made it through okay, too,” Mason said through the radio.

Danny cocked his head questioningly.

“He can see us,” she said. “I don’t know where he is, but he can see us right now.”

“That sneaky little twat,” Danny said. “You’re right; I should have plucked out his lying tongue back in Starch.”

“I told you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Then, “You know, Benford and Fritz weren’t completely wrong. We could make a run for it.”

“What about Nate?”

“Right. Nate…”

“We can’t leave him here, Danny. I won’t do it.”

“There’s always Benny…”

“Danny…”

“Kidding!”

The radio squawked and Mason said, “I know what the two of you are discussing right now. ‘Should we make a run for it? Surely,’ you’re saying, ‘facing anything out there is better than staying put when it gets dark.’”

“Asshole’s kinda psychic, isn’t he?” Danny said.

“I don’t know about the psychic part, but the asshole part’s spot on,” Gaby said.

“Just remember,” Mason was saying, “I just need the two of you alive. They said nothing about keeping you in one piece. Do keep that in mind.”

Gaby looked across at Danny. “Promise me.”

He nodded. “We’re not going anywhere without Mal Reynolds.”

“Who?”

“Firefly?”

She shook her head.

“Never mind,” Danny said. “Point is, we’re not leaving without your boyfriend. And you can take that to the bank. Or, well, since we’re already at the bank…”

“Thank you,” she said, and got up and tossed Danny the two-way radio before dashing into the back of the building.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Danny asked after her.

“Sweet talk him to death.”

“I’ll give it a shot, I guess,” Danny said.

Gaby slipped inside the manager’s office in the back and caught her breath, because where Nate was supposed to be, there was just an empty sleeping bag—

“Gaby,” a voice said.

She spun around and found Nate behind her, leaning against the wall while clutching a large book in front of him. His face was pale and covered in sweat, and he didn’t look like he could stand at all if not for the wall propping him up.

“Jesus, Nate,” she said.

“I heard shooting. What happened? Where are we?” He glanced around the room. “Looks familiar…”

“We’re back at the bank,” she said, and went to him.

She helped him sit down on the floor, positioning his back against the wall to keep him from toppling over. He flinched with every movement, but just the fact that he was finally awake (and alive) made her overjoyed.

“What’s with the book?” she asked.

“My secret weapon,” he grinned.

“Looks dangerous.”

“I swear it weighs like 500 pounds.” He paused for a moment and looked down at his stomach. “By the way, I think I was shot.”

“Danny and I dug the bullet out. You don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember a thing.”

“That’s okay. What matters is that you’re awake and alive.”

She stroked his face and leaned forward and kissed him. Tenderly at first, afraid of breaking him, then just a little harder.

“Gaby,” he whispered.

She pulled back slightly. “Hmm?”

“You have blood all over you, babe.”

“I know.”

“Whose is it? Do I want to know?”

“It’s not mine or Danny’s, and this time it’s not yours, and that’s all that matters,” she said, and kissed him again.

16

Lara

The sign on the wall read “Roustabouts 5:00 A.M. sharp” with the “5:00 A.M.” in large blocky red letters. She had seen similar signs along the rig, but especially around the living quarters where, she assumed, the “roustabouts” congregated.

“Five a.m.?” Bonnie said, almost whispering. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to wake up at five a.m. even when I was flying around the world doing runway work.”

“Must be nice,” Lara said, matching Bonnie’s pitch.

“Being hot has its privileges, what can I say? You could have passed for a model, you know. What are you, five-seven?”

“Five-five.”

“Never mind, then.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Just being honest.”

They stood in the back of the communications room, watching Riley wearing a headset and standing over a console lined with buttons and monitors while a young woman who had introduced herself as Terry manipulated the controls. The woman, who looked to be in her late thirties with naturally curly hair, seemed to know what she was doing, even though Lara could see her fingers tapping nervously on the table. Lara could only hear snippets of the ongoing conversation, and all of it from the room’s side. While Terry was clearly nervous, Riley was calm and his voice remained steady throughout.

“Roger that,” Riley was saying into the mic sticking out of his headset. “We’ll be ready to receive you by then. Ocean Star out.”

Riley took off the headset and handed it back to Terry, whose hands were shaking as she took it. “Jesus Christ, Riley. I never want to do that again. I think I’m going to piss my pants.”

Riley put a comforting hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “You did good, Terry.”

“You think they suspect anything?”

“If they did, then they wouldn’t still be on their way here.”

“Where are they coming from?” Lara asked.

He looked over. “Texas. We’re going to be getting a lot more units coming our way for refueling and resupplying now that the first phase is reaching its end.”

“And then back to the war?”

“Some of them. But most will be heading back to The Ranch.”

“The Ranch?” Bonnie said.

“That’s what the younger guys call it,” Riley said. “It’s our main base of operations. It’s also where Mercer planned all of this and where we built up the forces that’re being used in Texas right now.”

“So what happens when this unit shows up?” Lara asked.

“We’ll pretend like everything’s okay and refuel and resupply them and send them on their way.”

“Just like that?”

“That’s the plan.”

Lara exchanged a look with Bonnie.

“What?” Riley said.

“What happens if they don’t buy it?” Lara asked.

“They will,” Riley said. “We’ve done this before. Besides, I know the unit that’s heading our way right now. One of them is a good friend of mine. I would know if they suspected anything,” he added, looking back at Terry when he said it. “We just carry on like business as usual, and everything will be fine.”

“You sound pretty certain,” Lara said.

“I am.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

He shook his head. “I’m not.”

* * *

“He’s cute,” Bonnie said.

“Who?” Lara asked.

“Riley. Baby blue eyes.”

“Is that what they call them?”

“Tall, broad-shouldered…”

“From what I can tell in the few hours I’ve been here, he’s not taken yet, so feel free to make your move.”

“I was thinking more about you.”

Lara sighed. “Bonnie, I brought you here to help me do inventory and figure out how much space we’ll need to clear on the Trident to accommodate Riley’s people, and because Carly can’t—and won’t—leave the bridge until Danny calls in—so don’t start with me.”

“I’m just saying; you could do worse.”

“I don’t have to do anything. And my love life—or lack thereof—is not up for debate.”

“Sorry,” Bonnie said.

The two of them turned a corner and pushed their way into the stairwell. Every step they took produced a loud clang, something that used to bother her—anything that made a lot of noise, especially when she was the cause of it, bothered her—but she had become used to it after going up and down the Ocean Star all morning.

“Sorry,” Bonnie said again. “You’re right; it’s none of my business. I’m just worried about you, that’s all. We all are.”

Again with the “we.”

“Tell everyone I’m fine,” Lara said.

“I know you are. That’s why we trust you with our lives.”

Maybe you shouldn’t, because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

“We’re behind you,” Bonnie said, apparently taking Lara’s silence as approval to keep going. “We know every decision you make is because you’re looking out for us. Everyone on the boat believes that. We have a lot of faith in you, Lara, and we care about your well-being.”

“Like getting me a boyfriend?” she said, and this time smiled at the ex-model.

“Something like that,” Bonnie smiled back. “Baby blue eyes, Lara. Baby blues.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said as they reached the landing at the top of the stairwell.

The door in front of them was a thick metal airtight structure with a round wheel instead of a traditional lever or knob. Bonnie gripped the wheel and spun it with both hands, then pushed the heavy door open.

They stepped outside and onto a staircase that overlooked the Ocean Star’s top deck. Lara tugged at her jacket’s collar as they made their way down and over to one of the edges overlooking the western part of the platform. They leaned against a chipped yellow railing with the water sloshing below them while signs around them warned of the importance of hard hats and holding onto the railings at all times.

She had no trouble locating the Trident anchored nearby, swaying slightly back and forth against the waves. It was only about a football field’s length from them, and if she stared hard enough she could just make out Blaine’s outline on the bridge and Carly pacing behind him.

“Carly’s going to burn a hole in the bridge’s floor,” Bonnie said.

“She’s worried about Danny,” Lara said.

“Hopefully he radios in soon. I’d hate to lose him, Gaby, and Nate.”

If we did, it’d be my fault for sending them out there in the first place.

“Yeah, me too,” she said instead.

There was a white tube connecting the Trident to an old gray refueling ship that was about a quarter of the yacht’s size. The vessel had been attached to the other side of the Ocean Star when they first approached the rig, so they hadn’t seen it before. For a while she wasn’t sure if Riley could live up to his promise of fuel, but he’d proven her wrong. The more she learned about the rig’s importance to Mercer’s war efforts, the easier it was for her to believe that Riley’s mutiny was not going to be well-received. The fact that Riley planned on taking the refueling boat with them, along with the inventory and armory, would only add to the insult.

He’s risking a lot.

No, that’s not true. He’s risking everything.

Two men wearing black tactical gear and carrying rifles walked past them. They were part of Riley’s security personnel and were back at their stations now that he didn’t need to hide them from her anymore. There was also someone on the crane in the background. Lara had seen the man’s silhouette every now and then, but never for too long. That would be the oft-mentioned, never-seen Peters.

She unclipped her radio and pressed the transmit lever. “Blaine, come in.”

“Blaine here,” the big man answered. “Everything good over there?”

“We’re on schedule. Faith’s taking Bonnie back to you with the first of the supply runs in a few minutes. Depending on how close Mercer’s men are from us, there might be one more, at least for now.”

“What about the refugees?”

Lara and Bonnie exchanged a grin.

“He’s not wrong,” Bonnie said. “They are sorta like refugees.”

Lara said into the radio, “They’ll come over later once Mercer’s people are gone. Missing civilians would be a huge tip-off that something’s not right on the Ocean Star.”

“Good point,” Blaine said.

“How long before the tank’s topped off?”

“Ten more minutes, give or take. Has Riley told you where we’re taking him yet? It’d be nice to know now so I can get started figuring out the best route there. It’d also give me something to do other than watch Carly wear out the carpet back here.”

“I’ll let you know when he tells me. Until then, be on the lookout for Bonnie in a few.”

“Roger that,” Blaine said.

She put the radio away. “You should get going,” she said to Bonnie. “They’re probably finished loading the supplies by now.”

Bonnie took out a notepad from her back pocket and scanned it. “That’ll be the cooking oil. He’s giving us half of his stock. Hot and generous.”

Lara rolled her eyes. “Get going.”

“Yes, sir, ma’am, sir,” Bonnie said.

She gave Lara a mock salute, then pushed off the railing and headed down the nearby stairs, her boots clanging off the steps after her.

“Where did you get that thing, anyway?” a voice asked behind her just before Riley appeared next to her a few seconds later, taking over the spot Bonnie had just vacated.

She knew Riley was only in his early thirties, but he looked so much older than that. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep either; there was a heaviness about everything he did and said. In another place, another time, he would be handsome and she might have gotten weak in the knees if they had met in a bar or at a party, but now, watching him staring at the Trident, she could only think about the burdens of leadership and the choices he’d made. Not just for him, but for forty-seven other souls.

I wonder if I could make that kind of choice in his shoes?

Will could have. But then, Will could do a lot of things…

“I guess you could say it sort of just showed up when we needed it most,” she said.

Riley chuckled.

“Did I say something funny?” she asked.

“The boat showed up when you needed it most, and now it’s here. I needed a way to get my people off the Ocean Star, and you showed up. There must be something special about that boat.”

Its previous owners would beg to disagree, she thought, but said, “I never asked you how you spotted us in the first place.”

“Peters.”

“Peters?” she said, and reflexively turned around and glanced up at the crane, though this time she couldn’t see anything that looked like a man up there.

“He’s got one of those amateur telescopes up there,” Riley said. “It’s supposed to be used for astronomy, but he’s adapted it for terrestrial surveillance. The damn thing weighed close to twenty pounds and it took forever getting it up there in one piece, not to mention welded into place. He spotted the Trident when it was still twenty miles away—even before you guys anchored—otherwise we’d never have met.”

“Lucky you.”

“Lucky us,” Riley said.

“Lucky you I didn’t give the order to shoot last night.”

He smiled. “Definitely lucky me, then.”

Neither one of them said anything for a while, and they were content to lean against the railing and let the cold wind whip around them. A fishing boat had already left the Ocean Star while they were talking and was now maneuvering toward the back of the yacht, where a couple of figures were waiting for it. Faith and Bonnie would be on that boat along with the first stack of supplies from Riley’s inventory.

Finally, she said, “Why an oil rig?”

“Probably the same reason you’ve been living off the yacht,” Riley said. “The Ocean Star has the benefit of being isolated. You would have just cruised right past us if I hadn’t pulled my idiotic stunt last night.”

She smiled and hoped he didn’t see it.

“These things were built to withstand time and anything Mother Nature can throw at it,” Riley continued. “And while it’s not exactly halfway between the Texas shoreline and The Ranch, it’s the next best thing.”

“You mentioned The Ranch before. Where is it, exactly? Or is that something else I don’t need to know yet?”

“Have you ever heard of Black Tide Island?”

“It doesn’t ring any bells.”

“It’s a U.S. government-owned piece of real estate in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. The military uses it for war games, and it’s equipped with a base big enough to have its own accompanying landing strip.”

“That’s where your planes took off from.”

“No. I mean, yes, the planes Mercer’s using during R-Day have the range, but the logistics made it impossible, not to mention all the fuel they would burn just getting from point A to point B. The ones they’re flying out there were already sitting in Texas air bases, gathering dust. We only used Black Tide to train the pilots.”

“You mean people were flying around out here all this time and no one noticed?”

“Like I said, Black Tide is in the middle of nowhere, on purpose. How many other people have you run across before us?”

She thought about the dead body they had fished out of the ocean, then later, the voice on the radio begging her for help but that she had chosen to ignore…

“None,” she said.

“It’s a big ocean,” Riley said. “Anyway, after the pilots were trained, it was just a matter of sneaking them back into Texas with the main force. We already knew where to get everything we needed for the operation. Of course, it took the teams weeks to get the planes working, but Mercer is blessed with men who know their way around machines.”

“Blessed,” she said, unable and unwilling to hide the derision in her voice. “Not quite the word I’d use to describe what’s happening out there right now.”

“They’re only doing what he asked of them.” He leaned closer against the railing, as if he were trying to make himself small. “I’m not proud of any of this, Lara. I wish I could say I was braver, but I wasn’t.” He looked over his shoulder as the same two guards she had seen earlier passed them by again on their rounds. “When all of this is over, I’ll take the blame.”

“The blame for what?”

“For not putting a stop to this nightmare before it ever got started. But I didn’t. None of us did. We could have done so much more—I could have done so much more—but we didn’t, and we’re going to have to live with that.”

She thought about the voice on the radio again, asking for her to make contact, asking for her help…

Lara closed her eyes and counted to five, then opened them again.

“The plan was always to bail once we got out here,” Riley was saying, “but my transportation never arrived.”

“What happened?”

“At the last minute, Mercer decided to reroute it to help with the war effort. I think he’s planning to attack Port Arthur from two sides—land and sea.”

“So you needed a replacement transportation, fast.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“What about that refueling ship?”

“It’s not exactly designed to haul people around, Lara. And definitely not forty-eight people and all of our supplies.”

“How did you convince everyone here to abandon Mercer’s war, anyway? That must have been one hell of a discussion.”

“It didn’t take that much convincing, actually.”

“No?”

“As the CO, I was able to handpick everyone here with us right now. So I only took the ones that I knew could be convinced. Most of them are friends, and some are known acquaintances.”

“So you only selected people who were already pro-mutiny.”

“Exactly.”

“Smart.”

“One of the few smart things I did, I guess you could say. It took a lot of work and vetting, but I had help.”

“Hart.”

He nodded. “Hart, Faith, Terry, and a few others. I never told you this, but the Ocean Star, in terms of staff, is the smallest FOB out here. It’s not because the rig can only accommodate forty-eight people. These were just the ones I could be sure of.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He looked over at her. “What do you mean?”

“You said you handpicked everyone here, but how can you be absolutely sure everyone sees things the way you do?”

“I don’t understand…”

“Fine. You only chose the ones you thought would be the most open to your mutiny. But how can you be absolutely certain every single one of them didn’t just say yes when you revealed your plan, not because they agreed with you, but because they had no choice?”

“No choice? Of course they had a choice.”

“What if some of them are just going along with you because they’re afraid of what will happen if they say no? You said it yourself how difficult it was to do what you’re doing because of everything Mercer’s done for you. He saved your life. He saved all of your lives. What if not everyone is quite as willing as you to cross the line from having doubts to full-on mutiny?”

Riley didn’t say anything for the longest time, and she found it difficult to read his face. Was the notion that he could have miscalculated even registering? Maybe he really didn’t understand the possibility that one of the forty-seven people he had brought onboard so they could all escape Mercer’s insanity together might not actually want to escape after all.

She felt a little sorry for him for introducing all of these doubts, but she pushed through the guilt (You’re getting really good at that…). She was getting involved in something that could cost more than just Riley and his people, but also the lives of everyone on the Trident, and she’d be damned if she didn’t face it head-on.

“I’m assuming you’re 100% sure about Hart and the other soldiers,” she asked.

He nodded. “I am.”

“That leaves the civilians. What are the chances they’re just going along with you because they know you have the full backing of the guys with guns? Don’t you think in that situation it would be a little intimidating for them to say no? After all, they know you’re the one who came up with this idea.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t pick these names out of a hat, Lara. I looked into the eyes of each and every single one of them when I told them what I was planning. The things Mercer is doing out there in the name of saving humanity…” He shook his head and she could see him growing with confidence. “Trust me, I know every single person on the Ocean Star right now, and they all want to wash their hands of this bloodbath.”

Lara didn’t know if she believed him, but Riley seemed to embrace it as the truth, and she didn’t know any of these people—hell, she barely knew Riley—well enough to question his (absolute?) certainty.

“All right,” she nodded. “They’re your people. I accept that you know them better than me, but I just wanted you to consider the possibility you could be wrong. All it would take is one mistake, Riley, and there’s more at stake here than just your people.”

“I didn’t make any mistakes, Lara. They’re all on board. I would stake my life on it. Hell, I am staking my life on it.”

Famous last words, she thought, but didn’t voice her doubt.

Instead, she followed his gaze back out into the ocean, to the Trident and the busy activity at its aft.

“I like Hart; he’s a good second-in-command,” Riley said, “but he doesn’t always challenge my decisions. It’s nice having someone second-guessing me for once.”

“Glad to be of service,” she said, and they exchanged a slightly awkward smile.

“I don’t know if you’ve already guessed, but this whole war and leadership thing is new to me. I’m flying by the seat of my pants most of the time, doing my best not to get everyone who depends on me killed.”

Join the club.

“How long before Mercer’s men arrive?” she asked.

Riley glanced at his watch. “Soon. We’ll need to send the Trident away so it’s not spotted. Five miles in the opposite direction should do it.”

“I’ll let Blaine know once they finish loading the supplies.”

“Hey, Riley,” a voice called behind them. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“You found me,” Riley said, and started to turn. He hadn’t gotten fully around when there was a bang! and a stream of blood spewed out from behind his back at the same time a bullet pinged! off the railing.

Lara spun around as Riley’s body sagged to the floor next to her. The only reason he didn’t slip right into the water below was because he was clutching the railing with both arms. His face was plastered with a sheen of confusion as he stared at his shooter.

Her mind screamed to Go for your gun, go for your gun, you idiot! while the man who had shot Riley took a step toward him and was about to shoot him again. She knew she would never get her pistol out in time to stop him.

So she screamed “Don’t!” instead.

The sound of her voice startled the man and he looked over at her, as if seeing her for the first time. She didn’t know who he was, but there was nothing strange about that. She hadn’t come close to meeting all of Riley’s people and could count on one hand the number of faces she would recognize.

He had dark brown eyes partially hidden underneath a dirty baseball cap, and they were focusing in on her even as he swung the gun gripped tightly in his right fist in her direction—

Bang!

The second shot exploded in the air like a crack of thunder at almost the exact same time the man’s head, along with the cap perched on top of it, seemed to come apart. He collapsed, gun and body clanging against the steel platform floor. The gunshot’s echo was still fading across the endless ocean when Lara looked up at the crane and saw a dark figure silhouetted against the sun, and Riley’s words rushed back to her:

“His name is Peters. I had to keep him up there, just in case things went sideways. He’s my insurance. My only insurance…and he never misses. Never.”

She turned back to Riley and found him on the floor, his back resting against the railing while blood pumped out of his right shoulder and dripped down the edge of the rig and into the ocean below. He was staring forward at the lifeless body, a large puddle of brains and skeletal fingers reaching toward him from his would-be assassin.

Lara crouched next to Riley, pulled off her jacket, and draped it over his shoulder, then pressed down hard from both sides. He grunted from the pain but never took his eyes off the dead man.

“Who is he?” she asked.

He wiped at his forehead with a bloodied hand before answering. “Andy. Jesus.”

“One of your security guys?”

Riley shook his head. “He’s a mechanic. Kept things running. Jesus. I didn’t think…” Riley blinked as if he had trouble believing what his eyes were showing him. “I was sure of him. I was so sure of him….”

I guess you weren’t sure enough, Lara thought, wondering how many other people were running around the Ocean Star right now that weren’t quite as all-in with Riley’s mutiny as he had proclaimed. Maybe the woman who had served them fish and SPAM in the galley, or the parent of the kid who had waved to her as she walked past their room earlier this morning…

Loud, clanging footsteps as people approached them. She looked up as Terry, the woman from the comm room, and two others—including Hart—raced around the maze of machinery and ran to them.

“Oh God, Riley, oh God,” Terry said.

The third person was an older man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and civilian clothes. He crouched next to them and reached for the bloody jacket she had pressed against Riley’s wound. “What happened?”

“He shot him,” she said, nodding at Andy’s mostly headless corpse.

“Andy?” Terry said.

“Fuck,” Hart said, gritting his teeth.

“You can let go now; I got him,” the man with glasses said.

She stood up and backed away as the man and Hart worked to lessen Riley’s bleeding. The older man seemed to know what he was doing, so he was probably a doctor or had experience with gunshots, because he didn’t look fazed by Riley’s injury. Two more men, both in tactical gear, appeared and hovered over them. The horrified look on their faces told her everything she needed to know: They didn’t think this could happen, and the fact that it had left them questioning everything.

After a while, and with so many bodies crowding around Riley, Lara couldn’t see him anymore. She walked over to where Andy was instead and stood over his remains.

It was a nice shot. Hell, it was a perfect shot, especially from so high up and at such a drastic angle. She remembered telling herself that there was no way someone up there could hit her all the way down here, that all the odds were in her favor, even as Riley told her not to reach for her gun.

Jesus, that was close.

The radio on her hip squawked and she heard Blaine’s anxious voice: “Lara. Lara, come in.”

She unclipped the radio and keyed it. “I’m here, Blaine.”

“What was that shooting?”

“Long story; I’ll explain later.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Thank God.” Then, “There’s something else. I was going to call you before I heard the shots.”

She brushed at a bead of sweat with her hand, forgetting that it was still covered in Riley’s blood. “I could really use some good news right about now.”

“Danny finally radioed in,” Blaine said.

Oh, thank God.

“How is he?” she asked.

“I don’t know; Carly’s talking to him now. I’ve never seen her so happy.”

“Fill me in later.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” she said.

But Riley might be dead, and if he dies, where does that leave us?

She looked off at the Trident sitting where she last saw it.

At least I got him to refuel us first…

“Lara,” Terry said as she emerged out of the crowd and walked on wobbly legs over to her.

“Riley?” Lara asked.

They watched as the wall of bodies came apart and the two commandos picked up Riley and, with the man in glasses at their side, carried him off. Hart looked after them, wiping his blood-covered hands on his pant legs.

“Who’s the civilian?” Lara asked.

“George,” Terry said. “He’s our doctor. Or, well, the closest thing we have to one out here. He’s actually a veterinarian.”

Hart walked over to them. He looked in shock, and she swore he had aged five extra years since she last saw him. “You okay?” he asked her.

She nodded. “What about Riley?”

“George will do the best he can.”

“I have a doctor—a real doctor—on the Trident.”

“Can you bring him over?”

“Her. And yes. Until then, what happens now?”

“What do you mean?” Terry asked.

“I mean,” Lara said, “Mercer’s people will be showing up anytime now. Are they going to ask where Riley is if he’s not here to meet them?”

Hart and Terry exchanged a look.

“Well?” Lara said. “Are they?”

“Maybe,” Hart said.

Lara was annoyed by their uncertainty but managed to temper it down—at least, some of it. “Did the others meet with Riley when they came through here?”

“Yes,” Terry said. “I mean, they didn’t ask or demand it or anything, but he was always there when they showed up. You know, as the CO.”

“What about you?” Lara asked Hart. “Can you take his place?”

Hart was still trying to wipe the blood off his hands when he looked up at her. “I guess I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

“You’re going to have to do better than that.”

He didn’t answer her.

“Hart,” she pressed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can do it.”

She wasn’t sure if Hart actually believed his own words, but it wasn’t like she had any other, better choices at the moment. It was either Hart or…who else was there? Terry? The thirty-something woman who was shaking next to her?

“You’re staying, right?” Terry asked her.

The idea that she would leave now—run away, essentially—had never occurred to her until Terry brought it up. She could hear the fear in the older woman’s voice, and it bugged her that people who should be telling her what to do were always deferring to her instead. There was something very wrong with that.

How did you handle it, Will?

God, I never knew how hard you had to work all the time to keep us alive.

“Yes,” Lara said. “We’re not going anywhere. I promised Riley I’d take you and the others away from here, and I’m not going to break my word.”

She saw the instant relief on Terry’s face, and even Hart seemed to stand just a little straighter.

Lara focused on Hart. “What’s your plan?”

He shook his head without even thinking about it. “I don’t have one.”

“None?”

“Riley was the brains of this operation. What about you?”

“Me?”

“I saw you back there on the yacht. Next to Riley, you probably have the most leadership experience. Which, yeah, is sad considering I can probably pass for your dad. But I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m in over my head here, Lara. I could really use your help.”

She took a moment to wipe her hands, still covered in Riley’s blood, on her pant legs.

Then: “We’re going to proceed like everything’s normal. They’re going to show up on schedule and we’re going to resupply them, then watch them leave. If something happens that prevents that, then we’re going to kill them.” She stared at Hart when she added, “You okay with that?”

“Yeah,” Hart said.

“You might know some of them. Riley said he knew the ones that were on the way here now.”

“I do, too, but that won’t keep me from doing what I have to do.”

“Good.”

“What about me?” Terry asked.

“I need you to get people out here and clean up the blood and”—she looked back at Andy’s corpse, left where he had fallen—“the rest of this mess.” She glanced up at the crane and shielded her eyes against the sun. “Is he up there? Peters?”

“Only Peters could have made that shot,” Hart said.

“Tell him to come down,” Lara said. “I want to talk to him before Mercer’s men show up…”

17

Gaby

Despite the sunlight filtering into the lobby through the hole in the wall, she could feel the cold seeping through her jacket and the thermal layers underneath. The weight of the ammo around her waist and Benford’s M4 with the now-useless M203 grenade launcher helped to (mostly) keep her mind off what was coming very, very soon.

Tap-tap.

The sounds came from behind her, but she didn’t react with alarm. There was only one other person moving around in the bank lobby, and that was Danny, who appeared in the corner of her peripheral vision and settled into a crouch on the other side of the hole in the wall.

“How goes it?” he asked.

“Same-o, same-o.”

“That bad, huh?”

She smiled. “How’d it go with you?”

Danny had spent the last ten or so minutes in the back, using Benford’s military ham radio to contact the Trident and letting their friends know that they were still alive but weren’t going to make it for their pickup today. With her attention focused almost entirely on the city outside the bank, she hadn’t been able to hear as much of the conversation as she would have liked.

“As good as can be expected,” Danny said.

“That bad, huh?”

“And a bag of chips.” Danny leaned his carbine on the floor and made sure his jacket’s zipper was all the way up to his neck. “The big news of the day is that they ran across some of Benford’s friends out there in the Gulf and were pulled temporarily off course.”

“Everyone okay?”

“Lara seems to have it all under control. They finally got refueled and could have come and gotten us if we were somewhere gottenable.”

Danny opened a bottle of water that he had scavenged from Benford’s pack while looking for the radio and took a drink. When he was done, he tossed it across the opening to her. She caught it and took a few sips as he talked.

“But none of what’s happening out there’s gonna do us any good in here. Probably a given they have the back alley manned and the whole street locked down. Snipers on the rooftops would also be my guess.” He leaned out slightly and peered up at the rooftop ledge of Gallant’s Best across the street from them. “That’s a pretty big clothing store for such a small town. What do you think they sell in there? Cowboy boots? Belt buckles the size of my head?”

“Why, you looking for a belt buckle the size of your head?”

“Hey, accessories make the man. Besides, it’s not the taste in fashion that matters; it’s how big it is. Or so I’ve been told.”

She finished and tossed the bottle, with still half left, back to him.

“Too bad we couldn’t find the key to that Jeep,” Danny said, eyeing the parked vehicle on the sidewalk outside.

“Maybe it’s in the glove compartment.”

“Don’t you think ol’ Benford would’ve checked?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, finding out for sure would take anywhere from five to ten seconds. Maybe less if I really haul ass and don’t do something stupid like slip when I cross the sidewalk. Alas, that’s more than enough time even for these wannabe soldier boys to take their sweet time shooting me in the ass.”

“They don’t want to kill us, remember?”

“Even if they only tried to wound us, all it’d take is one shitty shot and I’m rolling around on the street, clutching my ass.”

“What’s the preoccupation with getting shot in the ass?”

“It hurts, kid. It really hurts.”

“Are we talking from experience?”

He snorted. “Maybe.” Then, still looking out at the Jeep, “Look at it.”

“What?”

“The Jeep.”

“What about it?”

“It’s just sitting there, mocking me.”

She smiled. “It’s an inanimate object, Danny. It’s not mocking you.”

“It’s definitely mocking me.”

“You’re just imagining things.”

“Hunh.” Then, looking across at her, “We all clear on the backup plan?”

She nodded. “Retreat into the manager’s office with Nate. Seal the door.”

“Nothing quite like a last stand in a podunk town.”

“I could think of better things to do with my time.”

“Well, sure, if you wanna be a Negative Nancy about it.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.”

He went suddenly very quiet, his eyes never leaving the streets outside.

“What is it?” she asked.

“When I was hanging up, I told Carly that I loved her, and she cried.”

“She misses you.”

“I mean, yes, she misses me. Who wouldn’t? What I meant was, I think she knew the truth even though I tried to bullshit my way through it. That redhead knows me too well. When I said ‘I love you,’ she started crying and didn’t stop before I signed off.”

“I’m sorry, Danny.”

“Yeah, me too, kid.” He glanced back at the offices. “I think it’s time to try on some new clothes.”

She nodded, picked up the two collaborator uniforms waiting in a small pile next to her, and jogged across the lobby and into the back hallway. The clothes she was carrying were the least bloody ones she could find among the dead; even so, her stomach churned at the thought of having to wear them. But it had to be done. Even if it didn’t work (It has to work), they had to try, because what the hell else were they going to do? The only other option was to give up, and there wasn’t a single quitter among them.

Nate was sitting at the back of the office when she entered, a large pile of rifle magazines and bullets scattered between his legs. An M4 leaned against the wall next to him and he was wearing one of the collaborator’s gun belts.

He looked up when she stepped inside. “Everything okay?”

She nodded. “Time to get dressed.”

He looked at the bundle in her hands and sighed. “You know, you used to have much better taste in clothes.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do.”

He caught one of the uniforms she tossed over and grimaced at the sudden movement (Shit, I forgot; sorry, Nate), then wrinkled his nose at the stench of blood clinging to the fabric.

“Try not to think too much about it,” she said.

Nate stuck his finger through one of the bullet holes and wiggled it around. “Look at what I can do, Ma.”

She rolled her eyes. “Put it on.” Then, “You need help?”

“Nah, I mastered changing clothes when I was ten.”

“Ten?”

“I was a late bloomer,” Nate said, struggling to stand up.

She wanted desperately to reach over and help him but managed to restrain herself. Nate needed to do it himself; even more importantly, he needed to know that he could. Finally, he was able to stand up on both feet—they were a bit unsteady at first, but that went away after a few seconds—and began undressing.

She gave him as much privacy as possible—which wasn’t much since they were in the same room together—while changing into her own pair of blood-stained shirt and slacks.

When he was done, Nate sat gingerly back down and pinched his nose. “Ugh. I thought it’d be easier the second time, but not so much.”

He was referring to Starch, when they had used a similar tactic to survive the night. The fact that it had worked then was the only thing giving her any hope at the moment.

If it worked once, it should work again, right?

While working on the buttons of her shirt, she sneaked a quick glance across the room at Nate. He looked so much better since a night ago, and all the rest he’d gotten had definitely helped. He was still shaky on his feet and it would take a while before he was even close to being 100% again, but she felt a lot better knowing that he had survived the worst of his wound.

Now all we have to do is survive everything else they’re going to throw at us tonight.

She finished with her shirt by pushing the hem into the waistband. It was a little loose everywhere, but it was the best fit she could find.

“Bandages still okay?” she asked him.

He nodded. “You said Danny stitched me?”

“Uh huh.”

“He did a pretty good job. It totally doesn’t feel like my guts are about to burst out whatsoever.”

“Not funny.”

“Too soon?”

“Way too soon,” she smiled.

“True, though,” he said, picking up a magazine from the floor and thumbing rounds into it.

“How’s the inventory look?”

“We have eleven magazines for the rifles and thirteen for the handguns. I separated them by caliber,” he added, indicating the smaller individualized sections.

“Nicely done.”

“Hey, you give me a job, I’m gonna do it gangbusters or not bother at all.”

“I never had any doubt.”

She walked over and sat down next to him, placing her rifle on the floor within easy reach.

Nate leaned over and sniffed her. “You stink worse than me.”

“I’m pretty sure we stink about the same amount.”

“Definitely not.”

“Whatever.”

He pinched his nose again and said, his voice slightly distorted, “I heard Danny on the radio earlier. How’s the Trident?”

“Better than us right now.” She sensed him watching her intensely and turned to meet his gaze. “What?”

“You’re so beautiful.”

“My nose hasn’t healed right…”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“The scars on my cheeks…”

“I don’t care about scars.”

“I’m wearing a dead man’s clothes…”

“So am I.”

“…and covered in his blood…”

“Ditto.”

“I haven’t showered in days…”

“You smell wonderful.”

She gave him a wry smile. “You’re too easily pleased.”

“Only when it comes to you,” he smiled back.

She leaned over and kissed him. His fingers slipped into her hair, and he tugged her closer. She tried to pull away, not wanting to aggravate his wound, but his mouth was so insistent that she gave up and just enjoyed it because, she told herself, this could very well be the last time they had the chance.

* * *

“Tick tock. Tick tock, goes the clock.”

The sun wasn’t completely gone, but it had dipped below the rooftop of Gallant’s Best, so she couldn’t see it anymore. The street outside the bank had darkened enough that she couldn’t tell if the Jeep was brand new or scarred by the same explosion that had taken out a large chunk of the wall.

Her watch ticked to 5:13 p.m.

“Time to check under the beds and in the closet for monsters.”

She could barely hear Mason’s voice with the two-way handheld radio’s volume set to almost its lowest setting. Turning it off completely to silence the man’s irritating voice was an option, but Mason talking meant Mason potentially giving away something they could use.

“Hear that?” Mason said. “That’s the sound of the real world starting to wake up.”

She thought she saw shadows moving behind one of the drawn curtains that covered a window along the department store across the street. Or was that just her imagination? How big was that building anyway? Big enough for a few hundred ghouls to be hiding inside right this moment? Maybe more if they crammed into both floors. And why wouldn’t they? The creatures couldn’t care less about comfort. That was a human thing, and they were well beyond that now.

“You think he knows?” Gaby asked.

“About the uniforms?” Danny said.

She nodded.

He shrugged. “He hasn’t mentioned it yet if he noticed, and that guy runs his mouth more than a fat guy on a treadmill in January.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t made a run for it yet,” Mason was saying through the radio. “If I were a betting man—and I’ve been known to lay a few shekels here and there on the roulette table—I’d put good money on the Ranger taking his chances before the sun sets. Of course he wouldn’t have made it, but he’d have gotten an A for effort.”

“Oh, for the love of God, shut him up,” Danny said from across the blasted opening in the wall. He was almost completely sitting in shadows, and if not for the white clouds of mist forming as he spoke, she wouldn’t know where he was.

Gaby reached down and switched off the radio, then picked it up and clipped it behind her belt. A radio was too valuable to just throw away these days, even if the only person on the other side was Mason.

She glanced down at her watch again: 5:15 p.m.

Christ, where did the last two minutes go?

She searched out Danny in the darkness. “I don’t think they’re coming.”

“Doesn’t look that way.”

Despite every indication that Mason would stay back until nightfall, they couldn’t risk retreating into the backroom until they were absolutely certain. The man was a liar, after all, and couldn’t be trusted. But now that the sun had all but vanished and she thought she could feel the floor under her vibrating as…things began moving across Gallant…

“Time to boogie,” Danny said. He got up and began moving backward across the lobby.

She did the same, anxious to get the hell as far away from the opening as possible. But they didn’t rush it and backpedaled one step at a time while keeping their eyes on the wall and the doors and windows in front of them. She turned around only when she saw the island counter passing by to her left and rushed after Danny, past the first office (with the bodies, and Fritz), and toward the manager’s room in the back.

“Nate,” she called.

He poked his head out of the office, his M4 clutched in his hands. “Okay?”

She nodded. “You got guard duty.”

“Gotcha.”

Nate stepped out into the hallway and stood guard while she and Danny went all the way to the back and removed the large metal filing cabinet they had helped Fritz put over the alley entrance earlier. They took it into the office, with Nate retreating into the room after them. They closed the door, then leaned the heavy cabinet against it before pinning it in place with the desk.

It was a decent barricade, and if it was just the black eyes trying to get in, she thought their chances were pretty good the door would hold. But that was the problem. She knew very well it wouldn’t just be the black eyes. The blue-eyed ones would also be around tonight, just like they had last night, and that time at the farmhouse in Louisiana…

With the door closed, Gaby could barely make out Danny and Nate standing in the room with her. Danny had unslung Benford’s pack and was rummaging through it. A few seconds later there was a double cracking sound, and two glow sticks gradually filled the room.

Danny’s face, suddenly awash in fluorescent green, grinned at her. “And then God said, ‘Let there be awesome green disco lights, and so there was.’”

“Not quite sure that’s the line,” she smiled back at him.

“Eh, I never was much of a church goin’ boy.”

“Looks good,” Nate said, nodding his approval at their handiwork over the door. “Definitely looks like it could last through the night.”

“Winter springs eternal, kids,” Danny said.

“You don’t think so?”

“If it were just those black-eyed bastards? Yeah. But that’s not the case, is it?”

I guess I’m not the only one who remembers.

She looked at her watch, the white neon hand more green than white: 5:20 p.m.

* * *

If they thought Gallant was quiet before, listening to the excruciating silence from inside a small office in the back of a bank surrounded by four walls and a barricaded door was an entirely new experience.

She sat with Nate at the back, with the door in front and to her right. Danny sat to their left in the corner. No one had said a word since they settled down to wait, and as they listened to what Mason called “the real world” coming awake around them, they continued to maintain the quiet, the anticipation of what all three of them knew was coming (Anytime now, you bastards) almost suffocating.

The ghouls were out there by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, so why hadn’t they begun assaulting the door yet? Despite straining to hear, she couldn’t detect them outside in the hallway or the bank lobby. Which didn’t make any damn sense at all. They had to know the three of them were in here. Even the black-eyed creatures, with their limited intelligence (Dead, not stupid, right, Will?) could trace the new blood from the streets to the gaping hole in the wall and sniff their trail to the back of the building. And if even by some miracle they couldn’t, the presence of the blue eyes would make up for it.

“He’ll come for them soon.”

“Yes.”

“And when he does…”

“We’ll end him.”

“Finally…”

All of this was for one man. Who the hell were they waiting for?

The question turned over and over in her head and had been since last night. Except now it was so much louder and so much more persistent, with nothing for her to do but listen to the silence as she waited and waited for the creatures to show themselves.

What are you waiting for?

She looked over in Danny’s direction, his face covered in the green light from the glow sticks. He had his rifle between his legs, the muzzle pointed up at the roof, and was staring at the door across from him. She couldn’t tell if he was lost in his own thoughts or if he was just as mystified by the lack of an attack as she was.

She felt welcome warmth as Nate reached over and found her hand and squeezed. “Can’t wait to get our own room on the Trident,” he said quietly.

“It’s going to be loud down there with the engine next door,” she said, matching his soft pitch.

“Who cares. That’s what earplugs are for. Plus, no one will know what we’re doing down there. Know what I mean?”

“Not a clue.” She kissed him on the cheek, then pulling back slightly, whispered, “I love you.”

“Finally,” he whispered back. “I didn’t think you would ever say it.”

She smiled and kissed him again, then rested her head against his shoulder.

“Tired?” he asked.

She nodded. “You?”

“Like every part of me is about to go all Scanners.”

“Scanners?”

“You know, that movie where the guy’s head blows up?”

She shook her head.

“We’ll add it to the Netflix queue when we get back to the Trident,” Nate said.

“Deal.”

The office looked different swimming in green, almost surreal somehow. Nate slipped an arm around her, and she wanted to close her eyes and forget about what was going to happen in the next few minutes, or hours. But it was going to happen tonight. The blue eyes hadn’t gone through all this trouble to forget about them now.

“He’ll come for them soon,” one of the creatures had said.

He. Who the hell was he?

She allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment even as her ears kept listening for telltale signs that the creatures had finally arrived outside their door, or beyond the walls of the bank, or maybe even above them on the rooftop. Except they weren’t in any of those places because there was just dead silence all around them.

What in God’s name are they waiting for?

She had her eyes partially closed and was concentrating on the warmth of Nate’s body against hers when there was a massive boom! that tore through the room, so close and immediate that her ears were still ringing even as she struggled to open her eyes and move, move, move, dammit!

By the time she managed to fully open her eyes, green tendrils of smoke were already starting to fill the room at a dizzying speed. Then Danny was shooting, his face lit up by a staccato effect of green and white and orange as flames stabbed from his M4. He had somehow made it onto his feet before either she or Nate could react and was actually pushing his way into the smoke instead of running away from it like a sensible human being.

Since when does Danny qualify as “sensible?” she thought even as she scrambled to get ahold of her rifle, which she had dropped about the same time the explosion knocked Nate’s arm from its place around her body.

She wasn’t sure when she lost sight of Danny, but one second he was in front of her and in the next breath he had vanished into the spreading green smoke, and the only thing she could make out was the pop-pop-pop of his rifle assaulting her ears as the ringing from the explosion subsided. The M4s they were armed with were only capable of three-round bursts, but Danny was squeezing the trigger so fast that they sounded almost like one continuous full-auto blast.

She finally (finally!) got her numbed feet under her and scrambled up, gripping her rifle in one hand and shouting, “Stay here!” back at Nate.

He was coughing and trying not to gag against the smoke, but he somehow still managed to flash her a defiant look as he shook his head. “The hell I am!”

“Nate, please!”

“No!” he shouted back.

Loud crackles of gunfire reached them, coming from the hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before.

They blasted through from the other room. Jesus Christ!

Nate was already on his feet when she began moving forward. She could hear him coughing behind her as he followed, and Gaby lifted her rifle as—

A figure stumbled through the jagged opening in front of her. He was wearing black and she glimpsed the shiny lens of his gas mask—

She fired, and the man, moving between rooms, fell awkwardly, landing in the middle of the hole with one part of his body in their room and his legs in the manager’s office.

How the hell did he get past Danny?

It was impossible not to inhale the smoke—a combination of disintegrated Sheetrock and explosive powder swarming around the opening—and she started to cough along with Nate even as they kept pushing forward.

Questions swirled around in her head as she forced her legs to move:

Why did the collaborators attack? Why risk an explosion when Mason had strict orders to keep them alive? Or had the “him” that the blue-eyed ghouls were waiting for finally arrived, and their usefulness as bait had finally come to an end?

“Danny!” she shouted as she stepped over the dead man and into the connecting room. There had been a lot of smoke in the other office, but there was even more in here, almost as if the collaborators hadn’t properly executed their breach.

The only response to her shouting of Danny’s name was the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from outside the room, through the open door to her right.

“Danny!” she shouted as she stumbled over bodies on the floor.

New bodies, and not the ones they had stacked in the back of the room. These were all black, with gas masks jutting out from their faces like plastic elephant tusks.

“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, shouting from behind her. “Wait!”

But she didn’t wait. She couldn’t. Danny was out there by himself, the continued banging of ferocious back-and-forth automatic rifle fire forcing her to move faster and faster.

“Gaby, wait!”

She ignored Nate’s desperate plea and finally made it out the door and into the hallway, ready to see caverns of yellow and white and brown fangs coming at her. She twisted right toward the alley door, but it was still closed and there was just suffocating darkness back there. She turned left toward the lobby—

Pop-pop-pop!

A figure was shooting in the direction of the street while backing up toward her. She couldn’t tell what kind of clothes he was wearing—it looked dark, either black or blue, so it could have been Danny or a collaborator uniform. After all, weren’t they wearing the same colors right now?

She lifted her rifle and took aim when the man threw a glance over his shoulder. She couldn’t see his shadowed face, but there was nothing that looked like a gas mask, and that was the only reason she didn’t pull the trigger.

“Back, back!” the figure shouted. Danny! “We got incoming, kid! A shit ton of incoming!”

She looked past him and saw that something had swallowed up the hole in the front wall of the bank. No, not something, but some things.

Oh, so there they are.

She never believed they would make it through the night without the ghouls finding them. It was simply beyond the realm of possibility, the kind of optimism that only the old Gaby could have fallen prey to. And yet, and yet, she had wanted to believe. God, she had wanted to believe so badly.

But the truth stared her in the face as she took in the forest of pruned black flesh and heard their bones clacking as they surged through the opening and poured across the lobby floor like an endless ocean wave.

She turned and ran, and heard Danny’s footsteps close on her heels.

“Faster!” he shouted. “Faster!”

Up ahead, Nate had finally found his way out of the door, and his eyes widened at the sight of her and Danny racing back to him.

“Nate, run!” she shouted. “They’re inside! They’re inside the building!”

She saw the whites of Nate’s eyes, and he might have screamed something back at her but she couldn’t hear, because at that very moment the floor and the walls and the ceiling began vibrating uncontrollably. She heard the very distinct clink-clink-clink of empty brass casings (Danny’s, the collaborators, whoever’s) that were littering the floor began jumping around like beans.

At first she thought they were being hit by an earthquake, but then she heard it, and the sound sent a spear into the very center of her soul. The first time she was introduced to it was on the road, then again later, outside of Larkin. It was a sound that she would never forget for as long as she lived, whether that be the next few seconds, or minutes, or years from now.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

18

Frank

He was close. So close. He could almost feel them nearby.

Danny and Gaby.

It was a trap. He knew that without a shred of doubt. Danny, Gaby, and the boy whose name he couldn’t remember were being used to lure him to the town of Gallant. They knew he would come, that he would have no choice because the (small) part of him that was still human demanded he come.

They were waiting for him. The blue eyes. And they wouldn’t be alone.

He knew all these things, and yet he had come because he had no choice. Simply no choice. Because they had Danny and Gaby, and if there was a shred of humanity left in him, he couldn’t ignore it.

They were so close and yet so far away. He wished he could pinpoint their exact location, but there was too much chaos inside his mind as well as outside in the physical world. The universe was breaking apart, death pouring from above, and he caught random flashes of memory from faraway places filled with sand where it was hot and cold and sometimes both at the same time.

Somewhere above him, Mercer’s warplane shook the heavens as it returned for another pass.

He didn’t know how he had gotten here, but he was sure Danny and Gaby were close even as he concentrated on the two black-clad figures, almost indistinguishable in the pitch-darkness of the floor. They were facing the far wall when he crashed through the window and tucked and rolled and snapped back up to his feet. They turned—fast, but not fast enough—and he saw the whites of their eyes shining through the clear glass of their gas masks.

Collaborators. Traitors.

The one on the left was the first to react, and he had almost fully lifted his rifle when his neck snapped. The second one was slower and dropped his weapon and stumbled back in mortal terror. It didn’t save him.

He grabbed the man by the uniform and flung him into the wall with one hand. There was a heavy crack! as bones shattered and the thump! as the limp body slid unconscious to the floor.

He turned his head at the sound of a few hundred stampeding feet surrounding the building outside. They poured themselves into the first floor below him, and more were coming from up and down the streets.

Moonlight glinted off one of the men’s fallen rifles, and he picked it up. It had a name. M-something. And a number. He couldn’t remember either detail at the moment; not that it mattered, because it would come to him.

It always did, eventually.

The air shifted and the familiar gust of wind swamped the walls of the building, signaling the return of another kind of monster—this one made of metal and fire. The wall in front of him exploded, a tsunami of glass and brick and mortar reaching out at him like spidery tentacles. Shards sliced what remained of the trench coat as he lifted his arms to protect himself and spun at the same time, making himself as small as possible.

Then, a second after its armaments had razed the street outside and everything around it, there was the delayed sound of the plane’s roar:

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

He staggered away from the wall—or what was left of it. Blood dripped from his wounds, long pieces of glass jutting out of flesh, an extended gash across his right cheek, and something the size of his fist protruding from his chest. He picked and pulled at shards both big and small, like annoying wood splinters, the slurp of his blood spraying the already-filthy carpet.

Thomp-thomp-thomp!

They had finally made it to the second floor and were now racing through the hallway. In a matter of seconds, they would find the right room and overwhelm him.

“He’s inside!” the voices shouted. “Don’t let him escape!”

He didn’t have to break his way through the windows this time, because there weren’t any left—or even a wall to stand in his way. There was just a jagged hole, and he charged and leapt and shot free like a bullet through it. The cold night air flooded his hyper senses, the shredded remains of his coat snapping angrily like unwanted limbs behind him.

He sailed through the night air, free of the restraints of gravity, even of human logic, the rifle still clutched in his hands. Maybe he had clung to it as a token of his old self, a reminder of what he once was but could never be again.

As he slashed through the night air like a knife, he glimpsed rubble in the streets below. Vehicles had been reduced to junk, the concrete pavement a shell of its former self. The concentrated fire had left behind severed limbs and decapitated forms, still-intact bodies buried under the upended road. A carpet of (re?)death as far as he could see, and yet, miraculously, the buildings around the devastated killing field remained mostly intact. Clearly the sign of a highly skilled pilot at work.

Then he was across and crashing into metal scaffolding that was holding a white sign with letters on it. It buckled and snapped, the grinding of metal like nails on a chalkboard in his ears, so loud that no one could have missed it.

Noises—pop-pop-pop!—coursed through the soles of his feet like electricity. Gunfire, coming from the building below him.

Then a new noise—thump-thump-thump!—racing wildly.

Heartbeats, also from below.

Human heartbeats.

Had he found them after all? Danny and Gaby and the boy whose name he couldn’t remember? Were they below him now, fighting for their lives?

He managed a single step toward the edge when the world quaked as half of Gallant vanished in a ball of fire in the distance. Some kind of bomb. The heat washed across the air, forcing him to turn his shoulders against it. Unnatural warmth made his flesh tingle as the dead and dying filled his head with tortured screams, hundreds of ghouls blinking out of existence as flesh was stripped from bones, which were then pulverized into powder milliseconds later.

He managed to quiet the pained voices in his head, the relentless screams, just as the air above him quivered. He looked up as the creature fell down, smashing him with its fists and driving him to the graveled rooftop floor. Blue eyes glared at him as impossibly long, bony fingers tightened around his throat.

“There you are,” it said, even though its lips, inches from his own, didn’t move. “We’ve been looking for you for so long.”

He smashed the weapon he’d held onto since picking it up from the building across the street into the side of the creature’s head. The rifle disintegrated like brittle twigs, but it stunned the ghoul just enough to knock it off him.

He sprang up, realizing too late that the monster wasn’t alone.

They surrounded him, blocking his paths of escape.

“We knew you’d come,” they said, four voices forming one coherent thought inside his head.

“So predictable.”

“…so human.”

“Look at him…”

“…clinging to the façade.”

“Pathetic.”

“Now you’re going to die.”

“Again.”

“But this time…

“…for good.”

“And he’ll be pleased…”

“…that we finally ended you.”

“…so pleased...”

They attacked as one, and from all four sides simultaneously. They were faster than any of the black eyes could ever hope to be, and stronger. So, so much stronger. He didn’t have the element of surprise on his side, and there was no advantage to be had. None.

They went for his arms and legs. He managed to dislodge one, but his attempt to punch through its chest went wrong and he only landed a glancing blow.

His left arm had been grabbed and bent at an impossible angle, and he heard the crack! of bone breaking but didn’t feel it. Somehow he fell on one knee, then both, and a hand seized his throat before the grip became a forearm pressed against his neck, searching for and finding a hold that refused to yield.

“You shouldn’t have come,” they said inside his head.

“But we knew you would…”

“…knew you would.”

“They’ll be the death of you…”

“…again.”

“They’re only human…”

“They were made for this…”

“…destined…”

“They’re chattel...”

“…meat…”

“…storage…”

“Let it go.”

“Stop fighting.”

“Why are you still fighting?”

“You have no idea how long…”

“…he’s been planning this…”

“It’s all part of the plan.”

“Accept it.”

“Accept it!”

He somehow ended up staring at the sky. It was a strangely bright night, and the wind was cool against his flesh. He closed his mind from the pain as two of them pulled at his arms while a third, behind him, put pressure on his head until his neck was straining and he could feel the muscles stretching beyond their limits, hear the tendons tearing one by one, by one…

“It’s over,” they said.

“This is how it ends.”

“She wasted her life to turn you…”

“…such a mistake…”

“…remedied, now…”

“Thank her when you see her again.”

He refused to think of her. She was gone. Dead (again). Outside a gas station somewhere unimportant. Ironic that his last breaths would also happen on the rooftop of a building somewhere unimportant.

But he didn’t give in. It wasn’t in his nature.

“Still fighting,” they said.

“Give in…”

“…this is the end…”

“…inevitable.”

“It’s all part of the plan…”

“His plan…”

“…give in!”

Lara, he thought, his mind’s eye filling with memories of her. Images and sounds and sensations that he had held onto even though doing so weakened him and kept him unsure and hesitant. But he couldn’t let go because it was her. It was Lara. The natural and crystal blue of her eyes, always so full of life even at her lowest moments. The smooth touch of her skin and the warmth of her breath against his neck as they lay together.

The best nights of his life.

The best days.

Because she was there.

Lara.

Lara…

I’ve failed you.

Again.

Forgive me.

Forgive me…

Then something strange—a sudden uptick in the cold followed by the loud scream of metal piercing air.

Then something heavy falling from the sky.

Plummeting faster, faster, faster.

“No,” they said inside his head. “No!”

Yes, he thought, and closed his eyes as the heat of the expanding blast absorbed the buildings around him and the solid rooftop under him disintegrated and he tumbled, out of control, into a black void as his skin burned and peeled and screams from a hundred—a thousand—creatures filled his mind in a tsunami of pain and horror and, oddly enough, sweet release…

* * *

Blue eyes peered at him, but the shape was all wrong. Everything about it was wrong. It wasn’t thin enough and the smell coming off it was sweaty, dirty, and greasy, but not the chaos of cold and heat coexisting. Warm air flowed forth as it breathed in and out with some difficulty, the weapon clutched in one hand and draped over its knee almost too casually.

“Man, talk about dropping in without calling first,” it said.

No, not an it.

A he.

“Good thing we were in the other room when you showed up. Of course, you guys made a real mess, but I’ll let that one slide since I don’t think it was you that dropped the bomb. Or da bomb, as the kids say. On the plus side, you also buried all the corpses we had piling up in here, so thanks for that. They were becoming a real eyesore.”

It was a man and his voice was…familiar.

“It wasn’t easy, you know. I was this close to putting a bullet in your head and calling it a day,” the man said, pinching his forefinger and thumb together. “That trench coat—or what’s left of it—saved your life. Where do you do your shopping anyway, and do you get a discount if the stuff is only thirty—excuse me, I meant, ten—percent intact?”

The part of him that still recognized pain had shut down. It was an automatic response by his mind to spare the rest of him so he could keep functioning. He couldn’t turn his head, but he could sense the other blue eyes around him. Two of them. Except there was no cold or warmth coming from their skins, and their accusing voices had quieted inside his head.

They were gone. Dead. (Again?)

Thick, coagulated black blood covered the parts of his body that he was still able to retrieve sensations from. He was gashed and bleeding, even in the areas that he couldn’t see, and partially buried in rubble from the stomach down. Only the top half of him had been spared the crushing weight of the building as it came tumbling down after the concussive force of the blast took apart its roof. Massive blocks of concrete made a prisoner out of him, and he was certain his arms were no longer connected to his pulverized shoulder joints. His legs…no, he would have to turn the pain receptors back on to find out what had happened to them.

He couldn’t turn his head because it was twisted to one side, his chin resting against a drooping shoulder. The muscles and tendons along his neck had been severed, pulled until they snapped.

He was hurt. Badly.

The man crouched in front of him was gesturing with the gun. “Bullet to the head. Kind of a gyp, don’t you think? You’re faster, stronger, all kinds of crazy comic book supervillain shit, but all it takes is one little ol’ bullet to the ol’ noggin and you’re kaput. Doesn’t even have to be silver.”

He was alive. Why was he still alive? Because the man had chosen not to end him, even though he could with a simple (so simple) pull of the trigger. A slight pressure and it would be over, along with all the nights of stalking Mabry, finding his weaknesses, looking for the perfect angle to attack.

“In case you were wondering, yes, it looks like you’ve seen better days,” the man said. “I’d say you look like shit, but that would be an insult to poop everywhere.”

The man had mischievous blue eyes, and blond hair matted with dirt and sweat stuck to his forehead. Streaks of dried blood stretched from his right temple to his chin and curved around cracked lips. There was blood in the air. A lot of it. Old and fresh. The man was bleeding from multiple wounds. Painful, but not life-threatening. At least, not anymore. Medical ointment tingled his nostrils.

They were inside a partially darkened room, half of it lit by streams of moonlight invading from the gaping holes above them where the roof used to be. He reached out with his mind, but his range was limited in his current condition. It turned out he didn’t have to go very far after all.

There. They were outside the building. Immediately outside. Hundreds, thousands. They could sense his presence in return. Not just him, but the other blue-eyed ghouls, too. The two lifeless ones buried with him, and somewhere out there, two more. Not dead, but close. Dying.

The black eyes would not come in. They were confused and scared.

The man was still looking at him, the sparks of curiosity evident in his eyes. “You know, don’t you? They were out there beating on the door until you and your pals started dancing around up on the roof. Then they retreated back into the street. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

He didn’t answer. He wanted to, but when he sent the command, his mouth wouldn’t move and no sounds came out, not even the hiss that he despised so much.

“Ah, sorry about that,” the man said. “Forgot to tell you, but you don’t really have lips anymore. Or a mouth, for that matter. I guess you’re going to have to grow them back, huh? Can you grow them back?”

He blinked, and the man actually smiled.

“She wanted me to shoot you in the head,” the man said. “We’ve had a recent history of not shooting people when we should have, so I don’t blame her. But I had to know.” He leaned in closer. “Can you hear me in there? Blink twice for yes and, well, I guess you wouldn’t blink if you can’t understand me, right?”

The man stared at him, and there was a slight uptick in his heartbeat. He was anxious.

So he blinked once, then a second time.

“So you can hear me. Hot damn!” He rocked back on his feet. “What number am I thinking of?” A chuckle. “Just joshin’ ya, buddy. Or am I? You guys are psychic, right?”

He didn’t blink.

“No?”

He remained still, eyes fixed on the man’s beaten and bruised face.

“Just a bit?”

The man sat down on the floor, the gun in his hand still draped nonchalantly over one bent knee. He could smell the fresh gunpowder in the air. All it would take was a shot to the head, just like with the other two dead blue eyes.

“You were there, in Starch,” the man said.

Starch? Yes, he remembered. It was a town not far from here, and of some significance to him. Or was it? His mind was stuck between trying to battle the pain and digging deep for memories that were slippery to the touch.

Starch. Yes.

He blinked twice.

“What about outside of Larkin? In the airfield hangar? Did you have something to do with that, too?”

Airfield? Hangar? He didn’t recall a Larkin. But then his recollection was unreliable at the moment in his fugue state.

“No?”

No? Yes? He wasn’t sure. With parts of his mind shut down to prevent the pain overload, it was hard to concentrate. There was a way to remember, but it would hurt. It would hurt a lot.

“What are you doing?” Was that concern in the man’s voice? “Pain’s finally pulling into the station, huh? And here I thought you guys didn’t feel pain anymore. I guess it’s true what they say—you do learn something new every day.”

Yes. Pain. A lot of it. And there was going to be more as he released the clamps that kept them at bay and his body began to burn. It started as small sensations, like tiny flickers of fire being lit before growing in intensity and beginning to flood the rest of him one brutal inch by brutal inch.

But at the same time the fog began to lift and memories returned, and while he still had great difficulty sifting through them and recognizing what he was looking at, it became easier with every passing second.

“Hey, you going to die on me or what? Um, again?”

The events of tonight returned.

Then last night.

All the way back to a fortnight.

No, too far.

Back, back…

The pain. God, the pain…

Yes, Larkin. The airfield. The hangar. In the room…

The pain!

He blinked twice.

The man raised both eyebrows. “Well, slap me on the ass and call me Sally.” Then, leaning forward again, “Who the fuck are you, buddy? What are you?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He knew who he was, but he had no voice and no ability to respond in any meaningful way. So he remained silent even as flames roared through him like lightning, scorching everything in their path. It was unlike anything he had experienced since the transformation, and he hoped never to face it again.

Slowly, very slowly, he attempted to push them down, shutting off the pain receptors one by one by one…

“I guess that was a stupid question,” the man said. “You not having a mouth to answer with and all.”

No mouth. No lips. Or tongue. Could he regenerate a tongue?

Maybe. He would find out soon enough.

“Do you know me?” the man asked, his blue eyes watching him intently as if they could look into his soul.

Soul? Did he even have a soul anymore—

Wait. What did the man ask?

“Do you know me?”

Yes. He knew him.

Didn’t he?

Yes, it was in there somewhere, hidden in the deeper recesses of his mind. He had refused to let them go in all the weeks and months since she changed him. It was buried deep and stored at the very bottom where everything important resided. He didn’t go to them often because they were dangerous. Remembering the past, remembering her, was dangerous.

But he dug through them now. Searching, searching…

There.

He blinked twice.

“You know my name.”

He remained still.

“You know me, but you don’t remember my name?”

Two blinks.

“I don’t know if I should be insulted by that. I’m guessing I should, just a little.”

Crunching sounds before a second figure appeared behind the first. The newcomer was tall and slim. Despite the blood and sweat and dirt, the natural smell of a woman clung to her skin. Where had she come from?

“Are you done with it?” she asked. There was something in her voice—traces of fear and anger and…disgust? “Just put it out of its misery. Do they even still feel pain?”

“Apparently they do,” the man said.

“Shoot it and get it over with.”

“He knows me.”

“What?”

“He knows me,” the man repeated. “He was at Larkin. And Starch.”

“The one at Larkin looks nothing like this one. It had black eyes, remember?”

“I know, but it says it was there. And I believe it.”

“You believe it? Danny, for God’s sake, look at it.”

Danny.

The name was like precious cargo rising to the top of his mind after being buried in the ocean for a millennia. He grasped desperately for it and held on, afraid it would slip out of his reach. It was important, this name.

Danny.

“Sua Sponte.”

“Rangers lead the way.”

“Not yet,” the human named Danny said. “I don’t know what’ll happen if I shoot it.”

“It’ll die,” the woman said. Her name eluded him, but it was familiar, and down there somewhere, too.

Danny…

“Yes, it will,” Danny said, and turned to look at her, “but I don’t know what that’ll do to all the party people standing outside our walls right now.”

The woman shot a quick, nervous glance across the room. He didn’t know what she was looking at.

“I’m more concerned with our lack of a full roof at the moment,” Danny said, pointing at the open holes in the ceiling above him.

“You think they’ll come in if it dies?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point.”

“So what, then?”

Danny looked back at him and tilted his head slightly to one side, as if trying to mirror his unwitting pose.

“Danny,” the woman (girl?) said. “What are you going to do with it? We can’t just leave it there. What if it digs itself out?”

“I don’t think it can.”

“You sure about that?”

“Mostly sure.”

“Have you been…talking to it?”

“Yes and no. It’s been mostly a one-way conversation with a few blinks thrown in. Might be worth waiting for it to grow its mouth back so we can have a proper tête-à-tête.”

“Can it…do that?”

“I have no idea what it can or can’t do. That’s one reason I haven’t sent him to the big Blue Yonder yet. Maybe we can learn something from him. If that’s even possible; I don’t want to just throw the opportunity out the window.”

“‘Him?’”

“What?”

“You just called it ‘him,’ Danny.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, technically I’m not wrong. It was a him, once upon a time.”

“But not anymore.”

“That boat would seem to have sailed a while ago, yup.”

The girl shivered in the darkness. “Are you just going to sit here all night and talk to it?”

“That’s the general idea. You should go keep Natmillian company. I’ll shout if I need a hand.”

The girl turned to leave, but not before looking back at him one last time. Then she was gone and he heard whispers, followed by the presence of a third heartbeat somewhere outside the room that he hadn’t noticed earlier because of his weakened state.

Danny had moved closer while he wasn’t paying attention and was now peering at him. There was a new intensity in his eyes as he stared, as if he was searching for something important.

What was he looking for? More importantly, what did he expect to find? What was there left to be found? What if all Danny saw was a lifeless corpse that refused to die, with an empty black hole where a soul used to be—

“Jesus Christ,” Danny said, his voice barely rising above a whisper.

Then, as if he was afraid to say the word out loud:

“Will?”

Book Three

Shoot The Messenger

19

Keo

Once in the boat and on their way, Keo paid attention to his surroundings for the first ten or so minutes, but after a while his mind started to wander. After all, there were only so many identical stretches of ocean you could stare at until it got old real fast, which in Keo’s case was around the twenty-or-so-minute mark.

Instead, he spent his time observing Erin, Troy, and the other four in the boat with him. The only time they stopped was to pour gas into the boat’s tank from the generous supply they had brought with them. Keo couldn’t begin to guess where they were headed, though he’d never thought of The Ranch as being out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Just the name alone had him envisioning fields of grass and grazing cattle and possibly a horse or two. But no, they were definitely heading farther and farther out to sea.

Maybe The Ranch was a submarine or a ship. Maybe even one of the many Navy destroyers or aircraft carriers that no one had seen since The Purge. What about an adrift oil tanker being commanded by a one-eyed maniac? The possible identity of The Ranch became more elaborate as the sights (What sights?) around him remained the same and boredom set in again.

Keo sat at the stern of the offshore vessel with his hands and legs duct taped, empty red gasoline cans tapping against his boots as the boat moved against the waves. They had restrained his legs only after he had climbed onboard, as if he could escape with his hands bound. He wasn’t even sure he could swim if he fell overboard. How long could he tread water before he succumbed to fatigue and drowned? He was a good swimmer, but he wasn’t that good.

The good news was that he had stopped bleeding and no longer needed a wad of paper stuffed up his nostrils. His exposed forehead and nose had gone mostly numb from the chill of the winds plastering him nonstop. He would have liked a painkiller or two to dull the remaining pain, but that wasn’t one of the options offered up by his captors. Which was to say, they didn’t offer up any options whatsoever.

Troy and Erin sat on both sides of him on raised chairs, while the unnamed two that had come with him from Texas sat on a bench at the front. No one had said a word since they cast off, and the only noise was the wind roaring in Keo’s face. Although they had been traveling for some time, it didn’t look as if they had made any progress. Of course, that could have just been because the damn scenery never seemed to change.

Eventually the never-ending blur of ocean and nothingness took their toll, and Keo stopped fighting the boredom and closed his eyes, only to wake up with a start when a hand pushed at his shoulder. He opened his eyes to the sight of Erin leaning in front of him with what almost looked like a smile.

“What?” he said, shouting over the wind to be heard.

“First and last warning,” she shouted back. “You nod off and fall overboard, and we’re not stopping to fish you out. Without your arms and legs, I’m guessing you’ll sink right to the bottom.”

“Unless the sharks mistake you for snacks first,” Troy said. “Might be the most merciful thing. I hear drowning sucks.”

“Sharks, huh?” Keo said.

“It’s an ocean, numbnuts. There are sharks and a lot of other things out here you don’t wanna come face-to-face with.”

Keo stared at Troy for a moment, wondering if the man actually believed that or if this was just a bad attempt at intimidation. He decided it might have been a little of the former and a lot of the latter.

Troy grinned, proving him correct. “Just fucking with you, Bruce.”

“Bruce?” Keo said.

“He thinks you’re Chinese,” Erin said. “Bruce Lee?”

“I’ve been mistaken for worse.”

“Like what?” Troy asked.

“A guy named Fred who I used to know back in the day.”

“What’s so bad about Fred?”

“That’s what Fred asked himself every day.”

Troy gave him a puzzled look.

Erin flashed Keo another almost smile. “Give him a minute. Troy can be slow on the uptake sometimes.”

“Fuck off,” Troy said, and turned back into the wind.

Keo took a second to scan his surroundings in case things had changed since he last had his eyes open. He shouldn’t have bothered. There was still just water—lots and lots of water—shimmering underneath the afternoon sun.

“Almost there,” Erin said, as if reading his mind.

“The Ranch?” Keo asked.

“Not yet.”

“So, what’s ‘there?’”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

Keo looked ahead, and he didn’t see anything but an empty horizon and an endless field of blue water. “I don’t see anything…”

“It’s out there.”

“And what’s going to happen when we get there? Are you going to kill me, Erin?”

“That’s not my call.”

“Whose call is it?”

“You’ll find out.”

“When we get there.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

Keo sat back and checked to make sure his jacket’s zipper was done all the way up to his neck. It might have been his imagination, but he swore it had gotten a lot colder since he was last awake.

“I don’t think Troy likes me,” he shouted to Erin.

This time she came so close to a smile that Keo decided to go ahead and call it one anyway, as she said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

* * *

It was an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Keo had to admit, of all the possible locations for The Ranch he had considered, an oil rig had never occurred to him. Though, as he stared at the gray concrete foundations and yellow stripes crisscrossing the platforms, he thought it made perfect sense. It was isolated and surrounded by water, and even if it ever came under attack by collaborators, you wouldn’t need that many people to defend it. In fact, he counted at least a half dozen locations where snipers could hold off an assault force by inflicting enough damage to dissuade them. The crane sticking out of the side of the massive structure was one of those places.

Keo looked over at Erin. “The Ranch?”

“No. Just the ‘there’ before the real ‘there,’” Erin said. “It’s called the Ocean Star, and it’s just a waypoint station.” She kicked at one of the empty cans near his feet. “We need to refuel.”

“So not The Ranch.”

“I guess you’re not as dumb as you look,” Troy said.

“A lot of people would disagree.”

“I bet.”

“Give it a rest,” Erin said. “You two sound like an old married couple.”

“I call groom,” Keo said.

Erin ignored him and climbed off her raised chair and walked the short distance to the center, where the two men who had picked them up stood at the helm. The rushing wind prevented Keo from hearing what they were saying, not that he needed to know to get the gist of it. They were going to dock underneath the oil rig.

“City on the sea,” Erin said as she walked back to him. “That’s what they call these things. They’ll be here long after we’re gone. Of course, by then the birds will have taken over. At least that way they won’t be a total blight on nature.”

Keo glanced up at a flock of birds flashing by overhead, making a straight line for the metal structure in the near distance.

“How many of these do you guys have out here?” he asked Erin.

“Need-to-know,” Erin said.

“That’s why I asked. I need to know.”

She smirked and grabbed her things off the floor and slung her pack while Troy did the same on Keo’s other side. Neither one looked nearly as impressed as he had been with the rig’s continually growing size, which told him they had been here before. Likewise for the four in front of him as they guided the boat under the Ocean Star and prepared to dock.

“Am I going up there, too?” Keo asked.

“Unless you’d rather wait for us down here,” Erin said.

“The weather’s nice, and maybe I can borrow a fishing pole, get us some chow while you guys go do your thing up there.”

“Kind of you, but I’m going to have to insist you come up with us. Don’t worry; they have a brig where we’ll stow you while we go about our business.”

“Okay, but when we run out of food, remember I offered.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Erin said.

* * *

They had to free his legs so he could move on his own power up the stairs, his footsteps, along with Erin in front of him and Troy behind him, clanging with every step. A variety of birds perched along the railings of the structure watched them pass by, seemingly oblivious to human presence. For every one that was awake, he saw two or three that were asleep.

“Who’s up for bird soup tonight?” Keo asked.

“Do you ever shut up?” Erin, walking a few steps in front of him, asked.

“Can’t help it. I tend to talk a lot when I’m being led to an interrogation and possibly death.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“No?”

“You could always join us.”

“I would if you told me who or what you people are.”

“Because you don’t already know,” she said, and though he couldn’t see her face, he imagined her smirking when she said it.

“I get the feeling you don’t believe me, Erin.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Man’s intuition.”

“I’ve never heard of that one before.”

“It’s like woman’s intuition, except manlier.”

“Ah,” she said, and turned a corner and kept ascending.

“What are the chances I’m going to survive The Ranch?” Keo asked, following her around the bend in the stairs.

He was surprised Troy hadn’t intruded on his back-and-forth with Erin yet. As far as he could tell, the man was still back there, close enough that Keo considered spinning around and going for his gun. Worst-case scenario, they’d both go over the railing and into the water, which would undoubtedly spell death for him with his hands still tied. Then again, what did he have to lose?

“That depends on what you say,” Erin was saying in front of him.

“I don’t know anything,” Keo said.

“I didn’t say you did. I said it’s going to depend on what you say when you’re presented with the questions.”

“Well, at least the truth is on my side.”

“Right,” Erin said. “You just keep clinging to that, Keo.”

A man appeared above them—forties, broad-shouldered, with grays in his hair. He wore the same black uniform and tactical vest as the two that had helped them dock below the rig. Keo looked for a name tag but didn’t see one on the newcomer, either.

“Welcome back,” the man said, extending a hand to Erin.

She shook it. “Thanks, Hart. Where’s Riley?”

“He came down with a cold,” the man named Hart said. “Stuck in bed, so I’m running the show until he gets back up on his feet.”

“He okay?”

“It’s a cold. He’ll get over it.”

“You guys have a doctor onboard, right?”

“George. He’s a vet.”

“Same difference,” Troy said, piping up for the first time.

Hart gave a slightly weird smile. “Yeah. George’s come in real handy lately.”

The older man stepped aside to let them up onto the highest deck of the oil rig. The wind picked up noticeably, and the first thing Keo observed as soon as he climbed up was just how bright it was up here, with nothing but open skies above him.

He expected to see people around, but there were only a couple of men with slung rifles standing guard along the edge of the platform to his left. One of them was leaning against a chipped railing and the other one was absently chewing something. They wore the same attire as Hart, which weren’t uniforms exactly, but close enough. Both guards looked oblivious to their arrival.

Machinery outnumbered people on the top deck, with the derrick sticking out from the center in front of them and the even taller crane lording over everything. Keo stared at the towering structure for a moment, trying to spy the lookouts he knew had to be up there. After all, you didn’t take over a place like this and not make use of its best assets.

“You returning to The Ranch?” Hart was asking Erin as he led them across the platform.

“For now,” Erin said. “All the teams will be returning one by one, so you’re going to be pretty busy for a while. Richards and José are downstairs refueling; when they’re done, they’ll be heading back to shore to pick up more people. That means I’m going to need one of your boats to continue on.”

“Sure, no problem. How are you for supplies?”

“We’ll fill up what we need, but it shouldn’t be too much. What about you?”

“The pantry’s fully stocked, so no worries. How’s the war going out there?”

“It’s…going.”

“Is that good or bad?” Hart asked.

“I guess it depends on your perspective,” Erin said.

Hart glanced back at her, apparently not quite sure how to take her response. Keo shared his confusion.

“I guess it depends on your perspective”? Keo thought.

“Casualties?” Hart asked.

“Maybe more than we’d like,” Erin said, and looked over her shoulder at Keo. “You wanna add something?”

“I’m just a tourist,” Keo said. “I don’t know anything.”

“Who is he, anyway?” Hart asked. “Why is he tied up?”

Erin turned back to Hart. “The better question is, where is everyone?”

“Huh?” Hart said.

“The last time I was here, there were kids running around. Where are all the civilian workers, Hart? Don’t tell me they all caught a cold, too.”

She stopped suddenly, and Keo had to do the same or he would have bumped into her. Erin’s right hand drifted uncomfortably close to her holstered sidearm while behind Keo, he heard Troy shuffling his feet and the sound of a safety being clicked off.

Uh oh.

Hart, realizing that the party had stopped, did too, and turned around.

“Well?” Erin said. “Where are all the civilians, Hart?”

The older man looked past Erin and at Keo. No, not at him, but at Troy standing over Keo’s left shoulder. Unlike Erin, whose rifle was slung over her back, Keo knew for a fact that Troy had his cradled in front of him the entire time they’d walked up the stairs.

“They’re inside,” Hart said, shifting his eyes back to Erin. “There’s no work to be done out here right now.”

“You sound a little nervous, Hart,” Erin said. “Why are you so nervous?”

“I’m not.”

“Bullshit,” Troy said behind Keo. “You’re definitely nervous.”

Hart shook his head and attempted a smile, but it came out so badly that Keo thought, And things were going so well, too.

“You’re being paranoid,” Hart said. “Relax. There’s nothing going on. Just calm down.”

Hart was still talking when Keo glimpsed black-clad figures moving in the corner of his left eye. It was the same two guards that had greeted them when they first stepped onto the platform. Keo hadn’t noticed before, but the men had been shadowing them this entire time while keeping their distance. They were now moving toward them, and one of them had begun to unsling his rifle.

Oh man, here we go!

Before Keo could do or say anything, things went from bad to absolutely fucked when two shots exploded behind him (Goddammit, Troy, you fucker) and the guard reaching for his rifle stumbled and fell as his partner scrambled to get his own rifle free. The guy was simultaneously too slow and in too much of a hurry, and it was like watching a bad comedy routine as he fumbled with the deadly weapon.

Keo waited for Troy to finish the poor sap off when something slammed into him from the front and knocked him backward. He grunted when his back crashed into the hard steel floor and pain stabbed through him, but it was nothing compared to the heavy weight of another person landing, then moving frantically on top of him.

Who the hell? he thought when a third shot rang out and a body collapsed in a pile next to him.

It was Troy, his rifle somehow still clutched in his hands. Blood gushed out of a hole in his chest where the bullet had exited after it had punched through the back of his throat. The chances were pretty good poor Troy was dead before he even hit the deck.

Keo didn’t have a lot of time to think about Troy’s last seconds of life because the weight on top of him suddenly lifted and he could breathe (and move) again. It was Erin (?), and she had rolled off him and scrambled to her knees as two more men in tactical vests appeared out from behind the machines and surrounded her, their rifles pointing at her head.

“Don’t shoot!” someone shouted.

It was Hart, who for some reason was on the floor too, and was slowly picking himself up. What was Hart doing off his feet in the first place?

It took about two seconds for Keo to gather the evidence and play the scenario out in his head: The body that had knocked him down was Erin’s, and someone had to have done the same to her. That someone was Hart, who had barreled into Erin and drove her into him.

“Don’t fucking shoot!” Hart shouted. He lifted one open palm toward the sky—no, not the sky, but at the towering crane.

I knew there was a sniper up there.

But sniper or not, it didn’t stop Erin from wrapping her fingers around her holstered sidearm. Keo thought about rolling away and getting out of the line of fire, but that might just end up drawing attention to himself. And right now, he didn’t want to make any sudden moves, especially since the two newcomers and the third remaining guard had their rifles pointed at Erin, and all three looked a little nervous.

Oh, who was he kidding? They looked a lot nervous.

Keo sat very still on one knee and barely breathed. He had never felt so vulnerable in his life—unarmed and with his hands bound in front of him, and Troy’s blood, bright under the sun, oozing along the ridges in the floor around him.

What to do, what to do?

“Erin, don’t,” Hart was saying. He was clearly trying his very best to stay calm but was only partially (if Keo was being generous) successful. “Take your hand away from your gun, Erin. Don’t draw that sidearm!”

It was bad enough Keo was helpless and trapped in the midst of a situation that was borderline FUBAR. He also didn’t have a clue what was happening, and that might have been the more aggravating part.

Wasn’t the Ocean Star a part of Mercer’s group? Didn’t Erin say they were coming here to refuel and resupply before continuing on to The Ranch, wherever the hell that place turned out to be? Both she and Troy hadn’t looked nervous at all as they approached the rig, clear signs that they didn’t see this coming, either.

Man, I’m so confused right now.

“Erin!” Hart said—he was almost shouting now for some reason. “Don’t do it! Riley wouldn’t want you to do this!”

“Riley?” Erin said, and though Keo couldn’t see her face because he was behind her, he could hear the confusion in her voice. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Hart said. “But he’s been shot.”

“Shot? By who?”

“It’s a long story,” Hart began to say, when Keo thought, Fuck me, because he could see Erin’s fingers tightening around the gun and saw the slight hitch in her elbow as she began to draw the weapon.

He slammed into her from behind, catching her almost in the small of her back with his shoulder, and knocked her off her knees and threw her back onto the deck. Her hands had abandoned the gun in order to stop her fall and Keo spilled on top of her, hearing her scream as his weight drove her chest-first into the steel floor.

He felt like laughing—wasn’t this what had just happened to him?

One good turn deserves another, pal!

He rolled off Erin’s back and scrambled to his knees but didn’t get any farther because the muzzle of a rifle was pointing right in his face from just a foot away. Worse than that, the eye looking at him from behind the iron sight of the weapon was blinking so rapidly Keo was afraid it might explode at any second.

Keo stared back at the man and said, stretching the words out as far as they would go, “Don’t…pull…that…trigger.”

The man kept blinking and a bead of sweat dripped down his forehead despite the cold wind. But he didn’t shoot.

“Jesus Christ,” Hart said from behind him. When Keo looked over his shoulder at the older man, he said, “You almost got yourself killed, you dumb bastard.”

“Yeah, well, it was either that or let her draw,” Keo said.

Hart turned to Erin as two of his men pulled her up from the deck. Her face was flushed red and she blew hair out of her face while they twisted her arms behind her back and zip-tied them.

She looked away from Hart and at Keo and actually snarled at him. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“Hey, I saved your life,” Keo said.

“What?”

“I saved your life.”

“You were saving your own hide!”

“You say tomato, I say potato. Same difference.”

“I should have let Troy throw you overboard like he wanted to.”

Keo glanced back at Troy’s lifeless corpse.

Jesus, what a shot.

He turned back to Erin. “Troy and I were best friends; he’d never do that. But let’s not get bogged down with the past, huh? We’re both alive, and that’s all that counts.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Hart said, staring at Keo.

“Keo.”

“Kay?”

“Keo.”

“What, like the car?”

Keo grinned. “I’ve been called worse.”

20

Lara

“Small world,” Keo said when he saw her walking through the door.

“Getting smaller all the time,” she said. “What happened to your face?”

“Ran into a tree.”

“Why didn’t you go around it?”

“It was a very big tree.”

“I’d ask if you’ve ever been in a jail cell before, but I think I already know the answer.”

He grinned at her from the back of the Ocean Star’s brig. Except for the still-fresh bruising around his nose and forehead, he didn’t look any worse than the last time she had seen him on the beach outside of Sunport. She was surprised, though, that the woman sitting on the bench next to him wasn’t Jordan. There were four other men inside the cell with Keo and the woman, but none of them looked familiar, either.

She looked back at Keo. “Wanna tell me what you’re doing here? Besides causing trouble, I mean?”

Keo got up and walked the short distance over, then leaned against the metal bars in front of her. “You know me. Always popping up where you least expect me.”

“Where’s—”

He shook his head before she could say Jordan’s name.

“Bad?” she finished instead.

The grim look on his face was the only answer she needed. Before she could ask any other stupid questions, he said, “I know what I’m doing here—well, sort of—but what are you doing here? I was told this was enemy territory, but here you are, not even in shackles.”

“Long story,” she said.

“Ah, one of those.”

“When is it never one of those?” She glanced back at one of Riley’s men standing guard at the door behind her. “He’s a friend.”

The man took out a key and walked over. “Back,” he said to Mercer’s men. When they had all retreated to the back, the guard opened the cell door with one hand, the other resting on his holstered sidearm.

Keo stepped outside and the man quickly slammed the door shut, locking it again.

“Free at last, free at last,” Keo said. He looked back into the cell at the woman. “Sorry about Troy.”

The woman glared at him but didn’t reply. Not that she had to. Those eyes pretty much said everything she was thinking.

“Her name’s Erin, and she’s one of Mercer’s top guys,” Hart had said while briefing her on what had happened on the platform earlier. “She and Riley were there in the beginning with Mercer. Only Rhett and Benford have been with him longer.”

“Is that why you were trying so hard to keep Peters from shooting her?” Lara had asked.

“Riley and I know her from way back. There was a time when he actually considered bringing her with us, but she’d gone to Texas before he could make the offer.”

Lara looked in at Erin now. Except for the glare she had shot in Keo’s direction, Lara couldn’t really read anything else of note on Erin’s face. She didn’t look angry, exactly, but she wasn’t fine with her current circumstance, either.

“Riley knows her longer than anyone,” Hart had said. “He really thought she might have come with us if he’d gotten the chance to sell her on the idea.”

Riley thought he knew Andy, too, and how did that turn out?

The woman must have sensed her staring, because she looked away from Keo and over at her.

They exchanged a long, silent look before Lara turned back to Keo. “Come on; let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Are you saying I stink?” Keo asked.

“Are you saying you don’t?”

He sniffed himself, then shrugged. “Fair enough.”

She led him to the door, then out into the corridor. Lights perched along the edges of the oil rig had turned on automatically at dusk and were now visible through the small windows along the walls.

“How’s everyone on the tugboat doing?” Keo asked. He was rubbing his wrists as he walked beside her.

“Complicated,” she said. “But we’re dealing with it. Wanna tell me what you were doing with Erin and the others?”

“As soon as you tell me how you got so chummy with these guys. As far as I know, they’re both Mercer’s crew. Only…not, apparently.”

She told him about Riley, about his attempt to hijack the Trident last night, then his plans to detach himself from Mercer’s war and, finally, their agreement.

“He dead?” Keo asked when she was done.

“He’s in sickbay with Zoe now. Hart’s also there. He wants to talk to you.”

“You trust him?”

“He’s in over his head, but he’s willing to listen. What happened earlier with Erin was my idea; he was just going along with it.”

“No. I meant Riley. You trust him?”

“He hasn’t lied to me yet.”

“As far as you know.”

She nodded. “As far as I know. But he hasn’t done anything to make me believe he can’t be trusted. In fact, he’s probably a little too trusting for my liking.”

“The getting shot by his own people thing.”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s gotta sting.” Then, “Where is the Trident, anyway? I didn’t see it when we were pulling in.”

“It’s docked on the other side of the Ocean Star and out of view.”

“Smart.”

“We have our moments.”

They walked in silence for a moment, before Keo said, “Should I even ask if the Ranger made it back yet?”

She shook her head and sighed. “It’s complicated…”

* * *

“You wanna do what?” Hart asked.

“Kill Mercer,” Keo said.

“Why the hell would you want to do that?” Hart said. Lara couldn’t tell if he was against the idea or just confused by it.

“It’s personal,” Keo said.

Lara stood between the two men near the door, listening to them going back and forth inside the oil rig’s sickbay while watching Zoe check on Riley’s vitals across the room. Both Hart and Keo were talking in low voices—or, at least, they had started that way. If Zoe was bothered by the conversation as it grew in volume, she didn’t stop adjusting the IV drip connected to Riley’s arm to let it be known. Riley was heavily sedated and hadn’t woken since they brought him inside the room hours ago.

“Was that what you were doing out there when you got caught?” Hart asked. “Sneaking around, trying to find Mercer?”

“Something like that,” Keo said. “I didn’t know where he was or even what he looked like, so I had to take more chances than I would have liked.”

“How was getting captured going to help you?”

Keo shrugged. “It wasn’t my first choice, but it worked out. Erin was taking me to him for interrogation.”

“Where?”

“The Ranch.”

“You know about that?”

“It’s been a topic of multiple conversations I’ve had with your fellow Mercerians.”

“‘Mercerians,’” Hart grunted. Lara couldn’t tell if he liked the word or found it insulting. Maybe a little of both. “Why didn’t they just shoot you on the spot?”

“Only Erin can answer that,” Keo said. “She’s the only reason I’m still alive now.”

“Hunh,” Hart said.

“That mean something to you?”

Hart glanced over at her, and Lara could tell he was replaying their last conversation about Erin and Riley. “Maybe,” Hart said.

“Tell Keo what you told me,” Lara said.

Hart nodded and repeated what he had told her about Riley and Erin, how Riley had almost recruited her, but she left for Texas first. Keo listened silently, processing the new information without interrupting.

“The Ranch is an island called Black Tide,” Lara said when Hart was finished. “That’s where they were taking you.”

“So that’s where Mercer will be,” Keo said. “Which leaves the obvious question: How do I get there?”

“Reaching Black Tide isn’t the problem,” Hart said. “I can give you the coordinates, and you could get there by boat with enough fuel reserves.”

“What’s the security like?”

“That’s the good news…”

“Good, I like good news.”

“Right now, Black Tide is at its most vulnerable. You won’t find a better time to assault the place. With the war in full swing, there won’t be enough men left to watch every inch of the place, so you could easily sneak onto it at night.”

“So I could just swim ashore with no one the wiser?”

Hart shrugged. “Theoretically.”

“I’m a very good swimmer.”

“It’s true,” Lara said. “Keo is half dolphin.”

“So about that boat and a map…” Keo said.

“You have your pick of boats; we won’t be needing them anyway, thanks to the Trident,” Hart said. “You can fill it with as much gas and reserves as you need to reach the island. Getting back, well, that’s your problem, because we’re not going to be here when you come back. That’s assuming you make it out of there alive.”

“You let me worry about that.”

“Can I ask why?” Hart said, looking curiously at Keo.

“Why what?”

“Mercer. Why, and what do you hope to achieve by killing him?”

“Some assholes just need killing,” Keo said. “Your Mister Mercer is one such asshole.”

* * *

“Jordan,” Lara said.

Keo nodded and leaned against the railing at the top of the stairs, with the submarine door into the oil rig closed behind them.

“He killed her?” Lara asked.

“Not with his own hands, but he may as well have.”

“This war of his…”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, Keo. I know you two were close.” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “I really liked her, even though we only met for a short time.”

“She was easy to like.”

“When did it happen?”

“After Sunport. We were on our way to T18.”

“And Gillian?”

“I don’t know. We—I never made it to her.”

Keo went quiet and they spent the next few minutes staring silently at the sunless horizon, at the black-and-blue of the ocean sloshing under the full moon. Even the wind seemed to have settled down, and she didn’t have to zip her jacket all the way up unlike the last time she was out here. She focused on the Trident, anchored nearby with just enough of its lights turned on to give its position away.

“What are you going to do after you kill Mercer?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

I was afraid of that.

“We could use another able body on the Trident,” she said.

“You got Hart and the other guy.”

“Riley hasn’t told me where I’m supposed to take them. If we don’t like it there, it wouldn’t make sense to stay. This alliance of ours might be very short-lived.”

“Does Hart know the location?”

“I think so, but he won’t tell me without Riley’s permission.”

“Loyal to the end, huh?”

“Loyalty’s a hard thing to find these days.”

“And there’s the kind that convinces you dropping bombs on pregnant women is perfectly A-OK.”

“I didn’t say it was always a good thing.”

She glanced over at him. There was a single light bulb over the door behind her, and it cast a halo around them. She wished she were looking at the face of someone who expected to come back from his “mission” alive, but she knew better.

“I could really use you back on the Trident with me, Keo,” she said.

“My greatness precedes me,” he smiled, though it wasn’t nearly as convincing as his usual smiles.

“It’s well deserved.”

“I knew you secretly liked me.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

He chuckled. “Just sayin’.”

“Come with us.”

“You mean after I finish with Mercer.”

She shook her head and turned around to look at him. “No. I don’t mean that at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget Mercer. Come back to the Trident with me instead.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

“At least tell me you’re hoping to also stop this war by killing him.”

“I could, but it’d be a lie.” He looked off at the darkness around the oil rig and gritted his teeth. “There’s nothing noble about this, Lara. There isn’t a grand plan. There’s just me and him.”

“You just want to kill him, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Jesus, Keo.”

“Yeah…”

She turned away and leaned back against the railing. “Danny’s probably dead,” she said quietly.

“What?” Keo said, looking over at her for the first time since they stepped outside. “I thought you said he was just having a problem getting back. That’s a hell of a long way from ‘probably dead,’ Lara.”

“Carly hasn’t stopped crying since he radioed in hours ago. She doesn’t think he’s going to make it.”

“Jesus. What did he say?”

“It wasn’t what he said; it’s what he didn’t say.”

“What about the girl and her boyfriend?”

“They’re with Danny. If he doesn’t make it, I don’t think they have much of a chance on their own.”

Keo let out a loud, frustrated sigh and laid his forehead against the chipped railing for a moment before lifting it back up, and Lara thought, Goddammit, girl, you are one manipulative bitch, aren’t you?

“You’re putting me in a tough spot,” he said.

“I’m asking you to live.”

“What makes you think I don’t want to live?”

“Cut the crap, Keo. Don’t insult me by lying.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Say yes to coming back with me and forgetting about Mercer.”

“I can’t do that. Jordan’s dead because of him.”

“I’m sorry about Jordan, but there are other people still alive who care for you. Like Carrie. She’s been waiting for you.”

“You told her I was here?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Keep it that way.”

“Why don’t you want her to know?”

“I won’t be staying long anyway. Plus, I’ve never been very good at good-byes.”

“What about Bonnie?”

“What about her?”

“She likes you, too.”

“I don’t blame her. I’m fucking handsome, and there’s not exactly a lot to choose from these days.”

Lara couldn’t help herself and laughed softly.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, feigning hurt.

“Nothing,” she said, and shook her head.

“Besides, you’re a tough kid.”

“I’m twenty-six going on forty-six.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You don’t look a day over thirty-six.”

“I feel it. Every imaginary day of it.”

She sucked in a deep, cool breath and looked over at the Trident nearby. It wasn’t late enough that everyone would be asleep already, so most of the crew were probably gathered in the galley over a late-night dinner and maybe a board game. In her wildest dreams (nightmares?) she would never imagine so many people putting their lives in her hands. And why should they? She was a twenty-something civilian with no military training. What the hell did she know about leading people?

Nothing. Not a damn thing. That was always your job, Will.

“If Danny’s gone, we’re going to need you even more,” she finally said. “I can’t keep doing this by myself. It’s too much.”

“You seemed to be doing all right to me. Look, you’ve even adopted an oil rig.”

“Just the people on it…”

“You stuck your neck out for strangers.”

“They had something I needed…”

“Now who’s bullshitting who?”

The girl’s voice on the radio flashed across her mind again, begging for her help…

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe I’m just trying to make up for some bad decisions. So what’s your excuse?”

“I’m just tired.”

“Tired of what?”

“Tired of fucking everything up that I touch. I’m tired of trying, Lara.”

“We’re all tired,” she said. “I’m tired. Carly’s tired. Danny, Gaby, Riley, Hart… We’re all tired, Keo. But we push on, because we don’t give up. You know who gives up?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Assholes,” she said.

He smiled. “Assholes, huh?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Keo. If you won’t stay with us, if you won’t come back to the Trident with me, at least promise me you’re not going out there just to get yourself killed. Tell me you’ll at least try to make it back, and mean it.”

“What if I can’t?”

“You can. You just have to make the choice.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll do my best. How’s that?”

She nodded. “Good enough.”

“Tough oil rig,” he said.

She reached over and put her hand over his. He pursed his lips and stared off at the darkness and didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry about Jordan,” she said after a while.

“Yeah, me too,” he said softly.

21

Keo

A young blond twenty-something named James led Keo to the Ocean Star’s armory, which took them through the civilian area. Kids peeked out of open doors as they walked through the hallway, and Keo saw people packing up their belongings inside rooms.

“Looks like everyone’s ready to go,” Keo said.

“Never thought it’d happen,” James said. “When Riley asked us to join him, I was pretty sure we’d all end up dying out here.”

“That’s the spirit, kid.”

James grinned nervously at him. “You have no idea how crazy all of this is.”

“Oh, I think I know a little bit.”

“Maybe, but you weren’t there in the early days, back when it was just us and Mercer. He saved our lives. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be here. And now we’re betraying him…” He shook his head. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

I don’t need to understand, kid. I just need a clean shot.

“So make me understand,” Keo said. “Why is everyone leaving if all of you owe Mercer so much?”

“Because of Texas. What’s happening over there.” James actually winced. “I want to have kids one day. Even after everything that’s happened, I want to be a dad and raise a family, and I can’t do that if I’m a part of what’s going on out there.”

Kinda late to be jumping ship, isn’t it, pal? he thought, but of course didn’t say it out loud. Whatever he thought of James or Hart or the rest of Riley’s people, Keo had to admit, it took some guts to go against Mercer.

“Looks like you guys are going to make it out of here just fine,” Keo said.

“I hope so,” James said, “because sooner or later someone’s going to figure out what’s really happening. No one wants what happened this afternoon to happen again.” James gave him a forced grin. “It’s kind of being a chicken shit, I know, just running away…”

“Hey, nothing wrong with running. Done plenty of it myself.”

“The thing is, it’s better than shooting it out with people we’ve been spending the last year of our lives with. A lot of them are still our friends. I get why they’re out there following Mercer. Most of them lost everything, and this is all they have.”

“What about you? What did you lose?” Keo asked as they turned a corner.

Apparently they had also left the civilian population behind, because the hallway was almost empty and the only sounds were their footsteps.

“Friends and family, like everyone else,” James said. “But I was one of the lucky few; I found someone in all this mess. She’s the one who introduced me to Riley, got us here. Faith.”

“Not a lot of that going around these days.”

“No, I mean, her name’s Faith.”

“Ah.” Then, “What changed her mind?”

“I guess it was me. I was one of the people Mercer sent out there to scout the state. That’s how we mapped out the towns for attacks. We knew where they were, got a good idea of their sizes, and even the best attacking options. Me and a lot of other people spent a lot of time out there hiding and reconning.”

“You saw the pregnant women.”

James nodded. “They were one of the first things we noticed. We snapped a lot of pictures, and they were in a lot of them. And that was it.”

“What was it?”

“Faith saw them. The pictures. Everyone did. But it didn’t really register until we got closer to R-Day. When the teams started leaving Black Tide Island one by one, it got real real fast. We couldn’t avoid it anymore.”

“So you joined Riley’s crew.”

“Basically.”

They turned another corner and walked in silence for a while. Keo was thinking the hallway was never going to end until it finally did.

“Here we are,” James said.

“Here?”

“What, you expected Fort Knox?”

“I guess not,” he said.

Keo exchanged a brief nod with the two guys in tactical vests cradling rifles and standing guard in front of a door. There was nothing to indicate there was an armory behind them. The guards stepped aside, and James stuck a key into a padlock and pulled the door open. Keo followed the young man inside.

The armory was a converted storage closet and wasn’t mind-blowingly impressive, but it had a decent selection and there was a lot of everything, more than enough to arm everyone on the rig (including the kids) five to six times over. He wasn’t too surprised by the surplus since guns were easy to find if you knew where to look, and Mercer struck him as the type who would know.

A light bulb flickered on above him while Keo looked over his choices. Racks along the walls held automatic rifles and shotguns and shelves housed handguns and ammo while spare gun belts hung from hooks.

“This everything?” Keo asked.

“What, you want more?” James said.

“I was hoping for a little variety.”

“Like what?”

“You don’t happen to have an MP5SD lying around, would you?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Heckler & Koch submachine gun.”

“Uh, no. What you see is what you get. Sorry.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess,” Keo said, and grabbed a Sig Sauer P250 and an M4 off the rack. “Silver bullets?”

“For what?”

“Ghouls.”

James shook his head. “Not here. Would be nice, though, right?”

“But you know about them?”

“Of course we do. We found out even before Lara sent out her first broadcast. Mercer figured it out.”

“So why don’t you have silver bullets?”

“Dude, we’re in the middle of the ocean. What do we need silver bullets for all the way out here?”

Because you might not always be in the middle of the ocean, Keo thought, but decided arguing with James was pointless and turned his attention back to the rifle instead. “This thing come with any accessories?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Maybe something that goes boom, for instance.”

“Hold that thought.” James crouched next to one of the shelves and rummaged through the ammo cans and boxes before straightening up with something in his hand. “This do?”

Keo took the M203, a grenade launcher that could be attached to the bottom of his carbine. “I need you to do something else for me…”

“You want a bazooka, too?”

“If you got it. If not, just tell Hart I need to speak to him.”

“What about?”

“Erin,” Keo said.

* * *

He showered in one of the unused crew quarters and didn’t bother to look at himself in the fogged-up mirror when he walked past it. The long scar along his cheek tingled after the hot spray, but his nose and most of his face felt better even though he was pretty sure he looked like a big red mess of bruises.

At least you’re still alive, pal. That means you can still pop Mercer. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to do that with the M203 from a distance.

Lucky, he thought, and couldn’t help but smile to himself. After all he had been through, just thinking that he might get lucky was almost worth a long laugh.

He had black clothes laid out on the small bed, with the rifle he’d taken from the armory leaning against the wall nearby. Keo hadn’t loaded up on weapons because more guns and ammo weren’t going to help him get on Black Tide any easier. Once he accessed the island, he could always acquire more firepower if he needed it.

He had put on the black cargo pants and was pulling on a T-shirt when someone knocked on his door.

“Yeah?” he called.

“It’s me,” a voice said.

“Give me a minute.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

Keo grabbed the gun belt and slipped it on, then picked up the Sig Sauer P250 from the chair nearby and holstered it. He shoved his feet into fresh new socks and boots and left the rifle behind.

At the door, he looked out at James, waiting outside. “Hart’s ready for you,” the younger man said.

“What about Erin?”

“She’s waiting, too.”

Keo nodded and closed the door behind him, then followed James for the second time through the oil rig’s long hallways.

“You think she’ll do it?” James asked.

“I won’t know until I ask,” Keo said. “How well do you know her?”

“There were a lot of people on Black Tide, and we never really crossed paths because of our jobs. Also, she’s higher up than me.”

“I thought you guys don’t use ranks.”

“You don’t need ranks to know who’s out of your league. The people Mercer trusts the most he puts in positions of leadership.”

“Like Riley?”

“I guess even Mercer makes mistakes.”

I’m counting on that.

They entered into the stairwell and made their way up, footsteps clanging against the metal steps.

“You’re really going to do it, huh?” James asked. “Kill Mercer.”

“That’s the plan.”

“It won’t be easy.”

“Nothing ever is.”

James pushed through another metal door and led Keo out of the stairwell and into another brightly lit hallway.

“It’s going to be tough,” James said. “Getting on Black Tide is one thing, but getting to Mercer… That’s not going to be easy.”

“That seems to be the going consensus.”

“When I told Faith about what you were planning, she wanted to know if you were crazy.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I wasn’t sure.”

Keo grinned.

As they walked some more, he could sense the kid was holding something back, so he said, “What is it?”

James hesitated, but finally said, “Truth is, I don’t know whether to wish you good luck or not. I mean, what we’re doing here, we’re betraying Mercer’s trust, I know, throwing everything he did for us right back in his face, but still…”

“He saved your life,” Keo said.

“Yeah, he did. Faith’s, too. Everyone’s. If it weren’t for him in the early days, we wouldn’t be here. We owe him everything. In a lot of ways, he’s a good man. Maybe even a great man.”

“Those pregnant civilians he’s murdering out there would disagree with you.”

“I know, I know. Believe me, I know. We all know, that’s why we’re here.” The young man shook his head. “Having said all that, I still don’t know whether to wish you good luck or not. Sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it, kid.”

“I’m twenty-three,” James said.

“Good for you,” Keo said.

* * *

“I should have let Troy kill you,” Erin said.

Keo smiled at her. “You said that already.”

“It bears repeating.”

“Why don’t you say it one more time so we can put it to bed?”

“I should have let Troy kill you.”

“Happy?”

“No.”

“It’ll have to do.” Keo looked over at Hart, standing on the other side of the open door. “Can we have some alone time?”

“You sure?” the older man asked. He looked exhausted, and sweat matted his hair to his forehead.

“I’m sure,” Keo nodded.

Hart glanced at Erin, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. Her hands were zip tied at the wrists, but her legs were free. She ignored Hart and concentrated on Keo, and he saw the curiosity in her eyes. She didn’t know what was happening, but she wasn’t afraid, either.

“James will be outside,” Hart said before closing the door behind Keo.

Keo leaned against the wall next to the door and didn’t say anything. Erin watched him back intently, maybe trying to read his face for clues.

Finally, he said, “They told me you and Riley were part of Mercer’s original Four Horsemen.”

“They said that, huh?”

“You and Riley and some guys named Benford and Rhett. At the beginning, they said, there were just the four of you, and you built this army and helped Mercer collect everything he would need to launch this war of his.”

“People here talk too much.”

“James, the kid standing guard outside, said Mercer’s plans didn’t feel real until the day the teams started leaving the island. Then he couldn’t ignore it anymore. The people in the towns, the pregnant women…”

Erin kept quiet.

“Riley told Hart he considered trying to convince Rhett, but he didn’t because he couldn’t be one-hundred percent sure.”

“Apparently, Riley’s one-hundred percent sure isn’t so sure after all,” Erin said.

“You heard about the shooting, huh?”

“Like I said, the people on this rig talk too much.”

“But Riley was pretty sure he could convince you, but before he got the chance, you had already left for Texas.”

“Is that what he said?”

“That’s what he told Hart. Was he right?”

“Riley hasn’t been right about a lot of things.”

“I don’t think he was entirely wrong.”

“No?”

“You know why I think that?”

“Do share.”

“Because you didn’t let Troy kill me,” Keo said. “I think you’re done with it.”

“With what?”

“Everything happening in Texas right now. You saw what’s happening out there up close, and you’re done with it. Men, women, and children being slaughtered just so Mercer could send a message to the collaborators. Maybe, once upon a time, you thought you could do it, go along with his plan. After all, he saved your life. Saved all of your lives, or so everyone keeps telling me. But when you saw the bodies, smelled the charred flesh… The battlefield is never the same in person. It changes you.”

She didn’t say anything for the longest time, and Keo didn’t push her. He watched her instead, observing the way her shoulders tightened, the way she sat straighter as he talked, and could almost time to the exact second when her eyes drifted; he knew she was reliving what she had seen out there. Keo could always tell when the man next to him had lost his nerve; it usually happened long after the bullets stopped flying and they were beyond the battlefield.

He saw the doubts in Erin’s eyes now. It was clear as day. Maybe it had always been there, but it had never clicked for him because he didn’t know to look for it.

Better late than never.

“It’s done,” she said, meeting his eyes again—except this time the hardness was gone. “I was a part of it. Maybe not the ones dropping the bombs or commanding the tanks, but I did my part. I can’t take any of it back. I can’t make it unhappen.”

“What did you do, exactly?”

“I was in charge of Support in one of the FOBs. After we abandoned it, I moved over to coordinating the kill teams outside of Lochlyn.”

“You were heading back to Black Tide Island even before I showed up.”

“The first phase of the operation is ending. By tomorrow morning there’ll be a lot more people moving through here on their way back to The Ranch.”

“You told Hart this?”

“I don’t have to. He already knows.” Then she narrowed her eyes at him. “So what am I doing here, Keo? What’s your deal?”

“My deal is that I’m going to Black Tide Island to kill Mercer.”

“Oh, is that all?” She half-rolled her eyes at him and sat back in the chair. “Hell, if that’s all you wanted, you should have just let me take you to him.”

“That was the plan. I had nothing to do with what happened on the Ocean Star this afternoon.”

“No? You knew that woman in the brig…”

“That had nothing to do with this afternoon. I didn’t know she was going to be here. I would have been happy with letting you take me to Mercer. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment before nodding. “I believe you.”

“You should. It’s the truth.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t instantly believe everything that comes out of your mouth.”

“That’s understandable. But now that I have the upper hand, we can both agree I don’t have any reasons to lie to you.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want from me? All of this”—she looked around the room—“even Hart’s little interrogation, was clearly designed for you and I to have this conversation. You took me out of the brig on purpose so the others wouldn’t hear. So what do you want from me, Keo? I’m tired, it’s been a long day, so please get to the fucking point already.”

He smiled and nodded. “I want you to finish what you started: Take me to Black Tide Island.”

“You don’t need me for that. Hart could tell you where it is.”

“I’ve been told that getting there is the easy part. I might even be able to land in one piece by myself. But all of this would go so much easier—increase my chances of success—if I had someone to help me with the locals. Basically, a guide that everyone knows and respects. One of Mercer’s trusted lieutenants, say. You know someone like that?”

She smirked. “I guess you’re not as dumb as you look.”

“I keep telling people that.” Then, “Are you in?”

“You want me to help you kill Mercer. Is that the ‘in’ you’re talking about?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“Why?”

“Because he needs killing.”

“No, not that. Why would I help you?”

“Because you want to stop what’s happening out there and what will keep happening if he keeps his war going. More towns filled with more people whose only crime is that they can’t fight like us. And because you know that Mercer’s phase two is going to be much, much worse.” He paused to let his words sink in before continuing. “Tell me, Erin, how much sleep have you gotten since all of this started?”

She didn’t answer him, but she didn’t have to. He’d had no trouble seeing the bags under her eyes when he first met her, and now, with the bright ceiling lights in the room, they were even more noticeable. If she had gotten more than a few hours sleep a day all this week, he would be very surprised.

“Enough to get by,” she said.

“Bullshit.”

“You don’t know anything about me, Keo.”

“I know what people have told me about you, and I know that keeping me alive after Lochlyn was a stupid decision, but you reasoned your way into it because you didn’t want more blood on your hands. I told a shitty lie and you went along with it, not because you believed me, but because you just didn’t want one more death on your ledger.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Maybe later,” Keo said. “Right now, you need to take me to Black Tide and get me on that island in one piece so I can do what you and Riley should have done but were too much of fucking cowards to do.”

She clenched her teeth and stared defiantly back at him. If her hands weren’t bound and she had a gun, he wasn’t sure if he would still be alive right now.

“This is your chance to fix your mistake,” he continued. “You won’t be able to bring back all the lives that’ve already been lost, but you can prevent new ones from being snuffed out. Get me on Black Tide Island, and I’ll do the rest.”

Slowly, very slowly, her jaw relaxed, as did the rest of her body. “Can you do it?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“It won’t be easy.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“And what happens if you succeed? You think it’ll stop all of this?”

“Yes,” he answered, again without hesitation. “From everything I’ve heard about the man, he’s almost single-handedly driving this by the force of his personality. Without him, it would grind to a halt—at least temporarily. But that might be enough time for people like Riley, like James and Hart, to finally feel safe enough to speak up. As long as Mercer’s running the show, they’ll never speak up. It’s too dangerous, and it’s not just their necks on the line. Everyone has friends and loved ones to think about.”

Shit, you almost convinced yourself that time, pal!

Keo didn’t know if he actually believed what he had just told Erin, but he wasn’t going to voice that doubt, and he was hoping it didn’t show on his face.

“He has loyalists,” Erin said. “They’ll keep fighting even after he’s gone.”

“Commanders don’t keep a war going, Erin. Foot soldiers do. Civilians like the ones on the Ocean Star do. Without them, the machine can’t keep going.”

Keo picked up another chair from a corner and walked over, then sat down in front of her. Only a few feet separated them, and he caught her eyes sneaking over to his holstered sidearm as he took out a knife and sliced the zip ties from her hands. When he put the knife away and looked up, her eyes had returned to his face while she rubbed her wrists.

He leaned forward, and if she wanted to, she could have reached over and snatched his pistol out of its holster.

Except she didn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

“I need a guide,” Keo said. “You know the place. I don’t. And I can’t afford to still be running around looking for Mercer when the sun comes up. So I need you, Erin. Are you in or out?”

Her stare never wavered from his face. “You’re either insane or delusional if you think you can pull this off, even with my help.”

“Are those my only two choices?”

“Or suicidal.”

“How about none of the above?”

He smiled at her then leaned in even closer. She would have absolutely no trouble grabbing his gun now.

Except she still didn’t.

“Help me end this madness,” Keo said. “Only one more person needs to die. You know deep down that I’m right, that this is the only course of action left. There’s no other way.”

“On one condition…”

“Name it.”

“Promise me you’ll do everything possible to keep the body count to a minimum.”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

“Promise me.”

“I’ll keep the body count to a minimum,” Keo nodded.

She sat back in her chair and let out a long sigh, as if the weight of the world had just been lifted from her shoulders. “When do we leave?”

He stood up. “Have you eaten yet?”

“Not since this morning.”

He picked the chair back up and returned it to the corner. “We’ll get something to eat first, then shove off at midnight. It’ll be a nice moonlit boat ride in the dark. Might even be romantic, if you play your cards right.”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m single, you’re single…”

“In your dreams.”

“Oh, trust me, we’ve done more than just a moonlit boat ride in my dreams.”

She smirked. Then, as he turned to the door, “Hey.”

Keo stopped and looked back.

“On a scale of one to ten,” she said, “how certain were you I wasn’t going to take your gun and shoot you just now?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he drew the Sig Sauer and tossed it to her.

She caught the gun easily, and by the startled look on her face, he guessed she figured it out pretty fast.

“It’s not loaded,” Erin said, weighing the gun in one hand.

“Not as dumb as I look, remember?”

She sighed and tossed him back the gun. “Dick.”

“Not the worst thing I’ve been called tonight,” Keo said as he holstered the gun.

“You said you needed to get this done before morning.”

He nodded.

“So tell me you have a good plan to make that happen,” Erin said. “Tell me that this isn’t a spray-and-pray suicide run.”

“I have a plan,” Keo said. “Whether it’s a good plan… Well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

22

Gaby

“Back at Starch,” Danny said. “It was the same one. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but I always knew there was something different about that one. It just took me a little time to figure it out.”

“Danny, its eyes look just like all the other blue eyes,” Gaby said. “How can you tell it apart from the ones that attacked us last night?”

“Trust me on this, kid. It’s him.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“But what if?”

Danny shook his head. “I’m not. And I need you to trust that I’m not.”

She didn’t answer him, because she didn’t know how. She was afraid of what would come out if she opened her mouth. Instead, she stared at him across the semidarkness of the hallway and said nothing. Danny was bleeding from a number of cuts along his temple and arms, and despite the stink of smoke, sweat, and blood clinging to every inch of him—and her and Nate, and the entire building, for that matter—he was still in one piece.

Danny was looking at her, but not at her. He was staring at—and through—the closed door behind her. On the other side was the creature that had literally fallen into their laps when the back section of the bank’s roof caved in from the blast. It had been some kind of bomb, and if it had detonated any closer they would all be dead right now instead of just dirty and smelly and bleeding from small cuts.

“Torch it,” Benford had said into the radio. Whoever he had been talking to hadn’t managed to set the town on fire, which she was grateful for, but if the First Gallant Bank was any indication, the lone warplane had left plenty of wreckage behind outside their walls. Thank God there had just been the one plane. If there had been more, with extra munitions available to drop…

She glanced out the hallway at Nate, just to make sure he was still there. He was crouched next to the counter in the lobby and only had eyes for the large pile of rubble that had inadvertently covered up the hole put in the front wall by Benford’s grenade launcher. Slabs of partially intact concrete jutted out of the chaos, the big and small pieces awash in the blue of the moonlight that pooled inside the bank through the large, jagged opening where that section of the roof used to be. Rooftop gravel carpeted almost the entire length of the lobby, with most of it concentrated near the front.

Gaby was just glad she couldn’t see the street outside, because that meant whoever (whatever) was out there couldn’t see in, either. Not that she had any delusions a pile of brick and mortar and concrete was going to keep back the creatures if they wanted to come in. All it would take was a short climb and they would be inside.

Except they didn’t climb over, or do anything to show themselves.

But they were out there. She knew that without having to hear or see them, even if she thought she could smell their stench coming in through the multiple holes that pockmarked the bank’s ceiling. It was also a lot colder now, and she clutched her jacket to her chest while making sure her rifle remained within reach.

She looked back at Danny still staring past her. “What are you going to do with it, Danny?”

He shook his head and didn’t answer right away. She could tell by his expression it was a question he had been asking himself all night.

“If it is Will—” Gaby said, but stopped herself short. Then, “If it was Will, then it would explain a lot.”

“Why it told me to put on the uniform in Starch,” Danny said.

She nodded. “I don’t suppose he told you how he knew that would work?”

“No lips, remember?”

“Right. No lips. You think he can grow them back? The black eyes never could. When they lose something, it seems to be gone for good.”

“He’s not one of them.”

The question is, what is he?

“If that is Will,” she said, “how do you think he did it? How did he save us at the hangar without actually being there?”

“I’ve been thinking about that…”

“And?”

“Willie boy always thought the creatures had a kind of hive-like mind, always connected somehow. He thinks that’s how they know where to swarm when they discover survivors, or how the blue eyes control them.” He tapped his temple. “Think of it like a network of bloodsucking, well, bloodsuckers.”

“Like what, the Internet?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “Some kind of ESPN shit.”

“You mean ESP.”

“Uh huh. The Worldwide Leader in Bloodsucking.”

Gaby managed a smile. There wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t sore and dirty (and smelly, even if that part was harder to confirm), but the upside was that they were all alive. Still wearing bloody dead men’s clothes, yes, but alive nonetheless, and right now that was all that mattered and all she wanted to concentrate on.

After a while, she said, “If it is Will, do you think he was the one the other blue eyes were trying to lure here? Were they using us to get to him?”

Danny, she saw, was grinning stupidly at her.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, annoyed.

“You said he, not it.”

“I did?”

“Uh huh. More than once.”

She sighed. “Give me a break. I’m doing my best to wrap my head around all of this, but it’s not easy. I feel like my head is spinning and I don’t know which direction is up or down.”

Danny chuckled. “Now you know how I’ve been feeling since Starch.”

* * *

“What did Danny say?” Nate asked when she crouched next to him beside the island counter, about five feet from where the pool of moonlight ended in front of them.

“He’s not sure yet,” she said, readying her M4 across her knees even though there was nothing to shoot at (Jinx!).

She looked out at the opening where the wall used to meet the ceiling, but there was now just a gaping hole staring out at the moon above them. With so much bright moonlight, it was easy to make out the footprints plastered across the lobby floor, so many that they overlapped each other many times over. When they were retreating, the creatures had taken the bodies of Benford and the dead collaborators that had been assaulting the bank with them.

Wouldn’t want to waste a single drop of that precious blood, right, boys?

The silence inside and outside the bank hung over them like a physical thing, a blanket that could drop at any second and smother them underneath it. The thought made her nervous and Gaby clutched the rifle tighter, if just to give her hands something to do.

“What about you? You really think it’s him?” Nate asked. He glanced briefly backward at the manager’s office.

“Danny seems to think it is.”

“He would know, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have they known one another? If anyone would recognize Will, even under all that, it would be Danny. Who knows him better?”

She nodded. “Once you’ve been in combat with someone, survived the end of the world side-by-side with them… That kind of connection is hard to come by.”

“Like us?”

“We still have a long way to go.”

“But we’ll get there.”

“Maybe, if we can get out of this town alive first.”

“Eh, I don’t know, it’s not that bad. Bullet holes and destroyed buildings notwithstanding, I think it’d make for a pretty good summer vacation spot.”

She smirked. “You’re doing Danny now, is that it?”

“You know what they say, ‘If you can’t beat ’em…’”

“Become as annoying as them?” she finished for him.

“How’d you know?”

“I’ve been around Danny too long.” Her legs were tiring, and she finally gave in and sat down on the floor, but only after brushing small chunks of rooftop gravel away. “How’s your side?”

“Hurts, just like everything else.”

Pain lets you know you’re still alive. Right, Lara?

“I was expecting fire,” Gaby said.

“From the bombing?”

She nodded.

“I guess there isn’t anything left in Gallant that’s flammable,” Nate said. “Or, at least, not enough to start and maintain a fire. We’re lucky that Warthog only had two bombs to drop.”

“Yeah, lucky,” she said quietly. Then, “We have to get back. The Trident. Whatever it takes, we have to get back.”

“We will. Just a few more hours, and it’ll be sunup. Then we’ll go home.”

He put an arm around her, and Gaby leaned against his shoulder, welcoming the warmth of his body to help fight back the cold that swamped the lobby. She wondered if she would ever be able to enjoy moments like these without guns within reach or undead things moving outside her walls. Were those things even possible anymore?

“I was thinking…” Nate said quietly.

“What?”

“That thing in the office. If it really is Will…”

“It’s a big if...”

“I know, but if it really is Will, then it changes everything, doesn’t it?”

“How?”

“He saved our lives at Larkin, then again in Starch. He did that, Gaby. He didn’t have to, but he did. The question is: Why?”

Why? I’ve been asking that question all night, and I’m no closer to the answer.

“If he’s still Will, what else can he do?” Nate continued, though now Gaby wasn’t sure if he was even talking to her anymore or just speaking his thoughts out loud. “What does he know? How long has he been out here? What has he been doing?”

“We think the blue eyes were trying to lure him here, using us as bait.”

“There,” Nate said.

“What?”

“He knows something, Gaby,” he said, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. “Get it?”

“No…”

“Think about it,” Nate said. “If they’re this desperate to stop him, if they’re going through all this trouble just to bring him here, he must know something they don’t want us to know. The question is: What?”

* * *

She fell asleep with Nate’s voice in her head, asking her “Why?” and “What?” over and over again, and opened her heavy eyelids back up to the sight of Danny hovering over her.

“You catching a little nap there, little girl?” he said, grinning down at her.

“Oh, God,” she said, and hurried up to her feet, the sound of loose gravel crunching under her boots. “Nate…”

She didn’t have to look far to see him leaning against the counter where she last saw him, his head lolled slightly forward. He was snoring softly yet somehow still clutching the rifle resting across his lap.

She shook off as much sleep as she could and picked up her rifle from the floor, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and angry with herself. “I’m sorry, Danny. I must be more tired than I thought.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it, Tex,” Danny said. “No harm, no foul.”

She snapped a quick look at the front wall across the lobby, at the undisturbed barricade and the pools of moonlight coming in from the openings above. Still dark, and nothing had come in while she was asleep.

Stupid. So stupid.

“I’m sorry, Danny,” she said again.

“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s hunky dory.” He took out a bottle of water and handed it to her. “Partially my fault. I was too preoccupied in the office, didn’t think to check up on you lovebirds until now.”

She chased away more of the grogginess with the water before handing the bottle back to him. “Any progress?”

“If you call the fact that we had a nice, long chat progress, then yes.”

“He’s talking now?”

“Lips grew back.”

“So they can regenerate flesh.”

“One second he’s mouthless, the next he’s making sounds. Or hissing, anyway. Musto presto, new lips-for-you-to.”

“What did he—it—whatever—say?”

Danny sat down and she did the same, her eyes wandering back to the front wall again.

“It’s him. One hundred and twenty-two percent,” Danny said. “He knew things I never told anyone. About me, about us.”

“Like what?”

“Afghanistan. SWAT. This really hot blonde who I picked up at a bar and was convinced I was going to marry, only to find out—Well, you don’t need to know all the details. Point is, he knew things that only Willie boy would know.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“But what if.”

“We already went over this, kid. You just have to trust me. I’m not wrong.”

“You’re that sure?”

He nodded. “Sure as sure can be. Surest, if you will.”

“That’s pretty sure.”

“You’re damn straight.”

She managed a half-smile. “What is he doing right now?”

“Recuperating. He took a pretty solid beating before he dropped in on us. It was apparently quite the death match on the rooftop, with attempted quartering and such. Real serious shit.”

“So he’s really hurt.”

“On a scale of Ouch and FUBAR, he’s about plus ten beyond FUBAR.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Nope. That’s why I dug him out of the rubble to help him heal faster.”

She must have gasped out loud, because Danny chortled and looked barely able to contain himself.

“Relax,” he said. “It’s free, and as you can see, I’m still in one piece and adorable.”

“You should have waited for us.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know; watch over you in case it tried something?”

“It didn’t.”

“But it could have.”

“But it didn’t,” Danny said. “It’s Willie boy. He’s skinnier—okay, he’s basically skin and bones—and he’s seen better days hair-wise. But you have to admit, he looks pretty snazzy in that trench coat.”

“That’s a trench coat?”

“Well, it was, about a few million pieces ago.”

“Why was it—he—wearing a trench coat?”

Danny shrugged. “Fashion sense?”

She sighed and shook her head with exasperation, not sure if she was angry with Danny or unable to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a loose blue-eyed ghoul behind her right now, with nothing between her and it (him?) but a single door. She had seen what they could do back at the farmhouse and last night. How fast and strong and so goddamn hard to kill they were unless you got them in the head, and that was so, so much easier said than done.

“Did he tell you how it happened?” she asked.

“He said it was Kate’s doing.”

“His Kate?”

“One and only. That night, after we ran the gauntlet from the farmhouse…”

She nodded. How many times had she relived that day? Too many to count.

“She got to him, then,” Gaby said.

“Yeah,” Danny nodded.

He didn’t add anything else and she had difficulty finding the right words, so the two of them sat in silence and listened to Nate snoring lightly next to them while staring at the barricaded wall. She knew Danny was thinking the exact same thing that she was: That day after the farmhouse, when they lost Will to the roadblock…

After what seemed like hours, though it was probably just a few minutes, she said, “So what now?”

“We wait until sunup, then go home,” Danny said.

“What about him?”

“He had a pretty interesting story to tell me. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger, as the saying goes. New Willie has been reconning the enemy, gathering intelligence. Apparently he’s made himself such a nuisance that the enemy cooked up this little scheme and stalked us all the way from Starch just to use us as bait to lure him here.”

She looked over at Danny. “So does he? Know something they don’t want us to know?”

Danny grinned back at her, his blue eyes glinting with mischief—or maybe that was just the moonlight reflecting off them.

“Well?” she said. “Does it—him—Will know something or not?”

“I guess you could say that,” Danny said. “Does knowing a way to save the human race count?”

23

Keo

“This feels familiar,” Erin shouted about two hours into the trip.

She stood behind the helm of the twenty-footer, the balaclava that covered almost her entire face except for her eyes playing tricks with her voice. If he were sitting anywhere on the fast-moving vessel besides a few feet in front of her on a narrow bench, he might not have heard a single word she said.

He pulled his balaclava down slightly to shout back: “Yeah, but this time I’m not in any danger of getting tossed overboard.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

He grinned and pulled the mask back up, leaving the cold wind to smack against the exposed parts of his face.

The offshore boat they were moving in had a T-top, but the canopy was missing. Even so, it was the best and fastest vessel Hart had to offer. If anyone were around to see them, they would spot a long, white object slicing at fast speeds across the wide-open Gulf of Mexico. There was absolutely nothing else around them, the Ocean Star having faded into the distance (Probably for good) a long time ago.

Keo was looking forward when Erin appeared next to him and said, “Move over.”

“The fuck?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the empty helm.

“Relax; it’s on cruise control,” Erin said, laughing behind her ski mask.

“I didn’t know this thing had cruise control,” he said, scooting over on the bench to give her space.

Erin sat down with a heavy sigh. “The girl told me about it before she gave me the keys.”

The girl was Faith, James’s girlfriend. The two made for a nice-looking couple, and Keo found himself wishing them well as he and Erin set off. He was, though, resigned to the realization that he would never find out how they did, because chances were very good he wasn’t going to ever see them again. Not them or Lara or anyone else on the Trident, for that matter.

There you go again being Captain Optimism, pal.

Next to him, Erin closed her eyes and leaned her head against the fiberglass helm. “You know what’s funny?”

“Johnny Carson?”

She ignored him, said, “Despite everything I know, I would have found a way to justify it—what’s happening out there, what we’re doing. It wouldn’t have been easy, and some days would be harder than others, but I think I would have pushed on anyway, lying to myself. And every day the lies would eat at me more and more. It was already bad even before I met you.”

“What would have happened then? When you couldn’t handle it anymore?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know now, but probably nothing good.”

“So you’re saying I was your savior?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Sounded like it…”

“What I’m saying is, I think I would have kept on going to the bitter end, and I wouldn’t have been the only one. When I see what Riley’s doing back at the Ocean Star, it just reminds me what cowards the rest of us are. At least he’s doing something.”

“From what I hear, his plans wouldn’t have gotten very far if Lara and the Trident hadn’t shown up.”

“Maybe, but he’s at least doing something. Unlike us. We would have kept telling ourselves about all the things Mercer did for us to justify our cowardice.” She paused for a brief moment before continuing. “Even though we saw the collaborators as enemies, we told ourselves we were doing it for their own good, that we were ultimately saving them. We knew all about the pregnancies, the daily bloodletting. We scouted them months in advance of the attacks.”

“James told me.”

“We knew what was going to happen. What the body count was going to look like. You don’t throw planes and tanks into the mix and not know.”

She went silent and stared forward, and Keo couldn’t tell what she was looking at—or maybe what she was looking for. For all he knew, she could have been staring past the open seas and into the past, wondering how things might have changed if she had acted.

So that’s what guilt looks like on someone else.

“I should have stopped him,” Erin said. “God, we had so many chances.”

“We?”

“Those of us who had doubts. When I think back, I know it wasn’t just me.”

“Like Riley.”

She nodded. “I always knew he wasn’t comfortable with the plan. I could see it on his face, in his eyes whenever we met with Mercer to discuss strategy. He was always so quiet, especially compared to the others.”

“Who else was in the inner circle with Mercer?”

“There was me, Riley, Benford, and Rhett. We were the first four. Later, he added others. Bellamy, Jerkins…”

“And you all had doubts?”

“Not all of us. But it wasn’t just Riley and me, I know that. I don’t know, maybe in some naïve way we—I—were hoping Mercer would move past it. He talked about it on and off, but it just never seemed real until a few months before R-Day officially started.” She sat back and sighed. “We’re civilians, Keo. We’re not like you, bred for this sort of thing. We trusted in Mercer. Trusted in him implicitly.”

“That’s what manipulators do,” Keo said. “They prey on your loyalty.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know how hard it was on my own in the early days. When he found me, living became more than just surviving. It became living again.”

“Was that before or after he brought you to Black Tide?”

“Before.”

“How did he know about the island in the first place?”

“He never said, but he’s ex-Army, so that probably has something to do with it. I would never think to look for weapons at an Army base. I wouldn’t even know where to find one off the top of my head. Do you?”

“Ran across some guys who did the same thing in Louisiana.”

“Friend or foe?”

Keo pulled up his balaclava and tapped the scar that ran down the side of his face.

“So that’s what happened there,” Erin said. “What became of them?”

“There was shooting and bad words,” he said. “I don’t play well with ex-Army types. Wannabe joke-spouting ex-Army comedians are the exception.”

“Good to know.”

Keo pulled the mask back down over his face and stared at the nothingness in front of them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sure we’re going in the right direction? Because it’s been a couple of hours, and I still don’t see anything that even looks like an island out there.”

“It’s a secret U.S. military base, Keo. They’re not going to make it easy to find. With an ocean this big, you’d have to be either super lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—to just stumble across Black Tide by accident.”

“So what you’re saying is, yes, we’re going in the right direction.”

“Yes, we’re going in the right direction.”

“Okay. Just wanted to make sure.”

“So I’ve been spilling my guts, and I noticed you haven’t reciprocated.”

“What were you hoping to hear?”

“What happened?”

“What happened what?” he asked, even though he knew damn well what she was referring to.

“You know what,” Erin said. “You’re not going there to stop this war by killing Mercer. It’s personal. I can see it on your face when you talk about him. So what happened? What did Mercer do to you?”

“One of your teams killed a friend of mine. I tracked them back to Lochlyn.”

“You thought he would be there?”

“I was hoping he’d be there.”

“What about Davis and Butch? The iPod?”

“I shot Butch and took Davis for questioning.”

“Is he dead? Davis?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked over at him. “Don’t lie to me, Keo.”

“I’m not lying to you. He was still alive when we parted company. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I had other things to worry about.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes.”

She turned away.

“You knew them?” Keo asked.

“Of course I knew them. They were part of my unit.”

“Davis?”

“He was a good friend,” she said, and didn’t say anything else.

* * *

“How does an island that small make it through all the tropical storms and hurricanes that whip across the Gulf of Mexico every year?” Keo asked.

“Simple but tough Army engineering would be my guess,” Erin said. “In all the time we’ve been here, we’ve survived over a dozen storms the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. It was terrifying the first few times, but after a while you get used to it, and now you just hunker down until it passes. The place is incredibly sound, and it’s been designed to be used and reused. That includes the airfield, the surrounding woods, and the beaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if braving storms was part of the curriculum.”

They sat on the same bench at the front of the twenty-footer, staring at the first light he had seen since they left the Ocean Star. It wasn’t even that bright, but against the vast emptiness of the sea and the night, it might as well be a lighthouse beacon. With the single engine that had been propelling them for the last few hours turned off, the world was once again dead silent, with just the sloshing of the currents under and around them.

Keo scanned the island from side to side, noting where it began and ended now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It was about two kilometers long, but he couldn’t tell from his current distance how much of it was covered in vegetation, though there didn’t seem to be a lot of trees. Or, at least, nothing tall enough to stand out against the dark canvas that surrounded the place like a black glove.

“Two kilometers?” he asked.

“Just a bit longer than a mile,” Erin said.

“How wide?”

“Maybe a quarter mile. There’s a landing strip that runs through the middle. The main facilities are joined into one contiguous structure, and it’s ringed by woods and beaches. The first few weeks after we arrived, we were always stepping on empty shell casings that had been left behind. We’re looking at the back of the island now. Boats usually dock on the other side where there are piers and slips. This side is pretty much used for beaching exercises. But since we’re coming from the Ocean Star, it makes sense for us to land here.”

“Where there’s less security.”

“Exactly.”

“Hart said the place was primarily used for war games.”

She nodded. “There were stacks of files and old maps detailing various scenarios they had run through this place in the past. I don’t think they spent a lot of time here though, probably as long as it took them to complete whatever games they had in mind. It’s a durable place, but it’s not exactly cozy.”

“So, shitty accommodations?”

“I guess soldiers don’t need more than a cot and a pillow.”

“You guys didn’t find any of them when you showed up?”

“Soldiers? No. It was empty. No ghouls, either.”

“Lucky you.”

“Not luck. Mercer knew it would be empty. That’s why he brought us here.”

Keo sneaked a look at her, sitting next to him. There was something about the way she had said Mercer’s name. He had noticed it twice now: there was a reverence to it, the kind of respect that made him question if she could be trusted when the chips were down and his hide was on the line. Maybe he had made a mistake deciding to trust someone who, less than a day ago, had threatened to kill him more times than he could count.

“You good with this?” he asked.

She looked back at him and saw the way he was eyeing her. She pursed her lips into a forced smile. “No. Not at all.”

“What does that—”

“I mean, I’m not good with what we’re about to do,” she interrupted, “but yeah, I’m good with this this.” She faced forward again. “It has to be done. If he’s gone, there’s a chance we can pull the others back and stop this war and save lives.”

“Whose lives?”

“Theirs, ours, all of us.”

Keo nodded. He didn’t want to tell her that the chances of that actually happening were low, that even with Mercer gone there were probably going to be true believers determined to carry on the fight in their dead commander’s memory, or something equally ill-conceived.

But right now Erin didn’t need to know about his doubts. He couldn’t afford for her to start having second (third?) thoughts. God knew this was going to be tough enough without having to worry about her, too.

“How are we going to do this?” he asked.

“There’s nothing special about it. I already radioed ahead when we were on the Ocean Star and told them we were coming. They’re expecting us”—she glanced at her watch—“about now.”

“That’s the whole procedure? Call ahead and then show up?”

“It’s not Get Smart, Keo. There are no hidden doors or passwords to go through. If you found the island, then you were meant to be here.”

“What about defenses?”

“There are guards along the beaches and around the main facility, but that’s about it in terms of potential trouble spots. Everyone who can fight is either in Texas or on their way back.”

“Will they care it’s only the two of us showing up?”

“The guys I made contact with on the radio will, but they won’t be on the beach waiting for us. The guards who will be won’t know any different.”

He nodded and looked up at the sky. Pitch dark, but it wouldn’t stay that way for very long. Not that he needed a lot of time, but darkness was always better for wet work. There wouldn’t be nearly as many people standing guard, and those who were would be staving off fatigue and sleep. In his experience, even the most capable soldier wasn’t at his full alertness in the early morning hours. Best-case? The people here would be used to long, peaceful night sleeps, which would give him even more room to work.

Worst case? Everything blows up in his face, and he was dead before morning.

Either/or.

“All right,” he said, slipping the balaclava back down over his face. “Let’s get you home.”

* * *

There were two of them—men, from the way they stood and the shape of their outlines—and they were waiting on the beach as Erin cut the engine a second time and let the currents push them forward. Keo could make out night-vision goggles over the guards’ faces, which meant they had seen him crouched at the bow of the offshore vessel even better than he could see them.

He glanced back at Erin. “Is this going to work?”

She didn’t answer right away, but the obvious concern on her face, lit by the dashboard lights, didn’t exactly give him confidence.

“Yeah, sure,” she said finally.

“You don’t sound very convincing, Erin,” he said, just barely suppressing a laugh. Because what else could he do in this situation but laugh?

“It’ll work,” she said. She followed that up with a nod, though he wasn’t sure if that was for his benefit or hers. Then again, given the way she was staring at the two guards waiting for them (likely armed to the teeth), he could probably figure out the answer.

Keo turned back around to face the beach. He had his rifle slung behind him and still wore his gun belt because it wouldn’t make sense for a Mercer man to return “home” unarmed. Judging by the relaxed posture of the two, it was the right move. The guards stood watching, but he didn’t see anything about their forms to indicate they were anxious or alert, and they certainly weren’t holding the rifles dangling in front of them with anything even close to resembling menace.

So far, so good.

“We won’t be the first one to come back,” Erin said behind him. “They’ll be used to this by now. The fact that there are just two of us may raise some questions later, but not from these two. If your plan works, this will be all over by the time enough people have woken up to start asking those questions.”

They were less than twenty meters from the sand when one of the guards waved, while the second one turned his head to look up the beach as if he found something more interesting up there. That was exactly the reaction Keo was hoping for, and seeing it did more to convince him than Erin’s assurance had a few moments ago.

Keo returned the wave and stood up as the surf carried them closer. He jumped off the boat as soon as he felt the fiberglass hull sliding against soft sand and landed knee-high in freezing cold water.

The guard laughed, night-vision goggle perched on top of his forehead. “Nice jump, Geronimo.”

There wasn’t a lot of light on the beach, at least nothing like he was used to back on Song Island in the old days. The guards were clearly relying mostly on moonlight and their gear to see with, and the closest light emanated from an LED lantern hanging off a tree about thirty meters behind them. It wasn’t nearly enough to reveal the entire stretch of beach, which made Keo think he could have swam to shore just fine under the cover of darkness.

Keo grinned back at the soldier. “Hey, I almost had it.”

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades, dude,” the man said.

“Tell me about it,” Keo said, and turned around and grabbed the boat’s V-shaped bow and pulled it in.

The guard helped with the other side, but the second one was more concerned about not getting caught in the waves that were washing ashore than lending a hand. As Keo and the Good Samaritan pulled the boat up, Erin walked to the front and picked up the line from the floor.

Keo backpedaled up the beach, his soaked boots squishing under him. Erin tossed him the line, and Keo pulled the boat further in. The guard was too busy talking to Erin and the other guy had wandered off.

Definitely so far, so good.

There was a metal spike to which Keo tied the boat’s line. It wasn’t exactly a sophisticated docking system, but then they were landing on the backside of the island.

“Just you two?” the guard was asking Erin behind him.

“Just us,” Erin said.

“How’s the war going? We don’t get a lot of information. Heard it was going well, though.”

“Yeah, we’re bulldozing through the collaborators,” Erin said. “Pretty soon there’ll just be the monsters to deal with.”

“That’s when all the silver bullets come in, right?”

Erin nodded. “That’s right.”

“Can’t wait for that. I’m tired of playing security guard over here.”

“Don’t worry; you’ll get your chance soon enough.”

“Looking forward to it,” the man said.

As he was tightening the rope around the spike, Keo took a moment to scan the rest of the island. There wasn’t much in the way of defenses that he could see except for the two guards he had already met, though Keo did glimpse two more figures farther up the beach to his right. Still, four people weren’t nearly enough to cover the entire two-kilometer span of the island on this side, but maybe there were more people than he could see with the naked eye. Either that, or Mercer really was stretched thin. Which, if true, meant the man was definitely putting all his eggs on the collaborators turning on their ghoul masters and bulking up his ranks.

Good luck with that, pal.

Erin had walked over to join him, and she handed him his pack and asked, “You ready?”

He nodded and said in a low voice so the closest guard didn’t hear, “You good?”

“Yes,” she said, louder than he would have liked. “Let’s go; I wanna grab some shut-eye before sunup.”

That last part, he guessed, was for the guard’s benefit.

Keo followed her up the beach, sliding the pack’s strap over his left shoulder only in order to keep his right arm free. The M4 with the grenade launcher thumped reassuringly against his back, within easy reach. When he looked back at the water, the guy who had helped him pull the boat up had already returned his NVD over his eyes and was walking off to join his buddy.

“What about the boat?” Keo asked.

“Someone will take care of it later,” Erin said.

They waded through knee-high grass in a field on the other side of the beach. It was easy to pick up the signs that Uncle Sam had been here and had chopped down a lot of the scenery, leaving a mostly unobstructed view of the place. Keo spied the roofs of buildings jutting out of the ground in the distance, and though he expected to see planes taking off and landing, the only sounds came from the crickets in the woods and birds in the trees around him.

“What that guy said about silver bullets,” Keo said.

“What about it?” Erin asked.

“I can understand why people on the Ocean Star weren’t equipped with them, but what about the teams in the fields? The ones in Texas right now?”

“Mercer’s orders.”

“Why?”

“Their job is to strike at the collaborators, not fight ghouls. If they had silver ammo, they’d be tempted to do the very thing he told them not to do. This way, they’re forced to stay on course. Hide at night, fight in the day. And you don’t need silver bullets to do that.”

Four guys in a tank apparently didn’t get that message.

“That’s a pretty hardcore way to ensure your soldiers do exactly what you tell them,” Keo said. “And all the kill teams went along with it?”

“A lot of them protested—I was one of them. But he stuck to his guns and we found ways to be okay with it, like we always do. I heard rumors that some of the teams stole silver bullets from the armory and took them with them. But I never actually met any that did.”

“The funny thing is, I agree with him.”

Erin looked over, surprised. “You do?”

“Not his no-silver policy even if you die because of it part. That’s just stupid. But on the not engaging the ghouls part, yeah, I get that. It’s pointless.”

She nodded. “He said it was a losing battle. There are so many of them, killing a hundred here, a thousand there wouldn’t even make a dent in their number. He said we’d just use up all the silver ammo we spent so much time and sweat making. He wanted to save it for emergencies, but mostly for when we finally took the fight directly to the monsters. That’s why we still have people out there whose only job is to collect silver.”

“He’s playing the long game.”

“Always. From day one, his goal was to first take away the ghoul’s greatest resource—cut their supply line, as he put it.”

“Humans.”

“He’ll kill as many as he needs to get them to turn on their masters.”

“What if he ends up killing everyone instead?”

“That’s why I’m here on Black Tide with you, Keo. To make sure that doesn’t happen.” She ground her teeth together, and he heard the conviction in her voice for the very first time when she added, “There has to be a better way to take the planet back. There has to be.”

Maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t, but Keo wasn’t too concerned with the answer at the moment. Right here and now, he could only concentrate on one thing:

Find Mercer. Kill Mercer.

He replayed the look on Jordan’s face as she bled out in his arms next to the highway; the oddly contented smile she gave him as he held her, forever frozen in his mind’s eye. Days later, and he still didn’t know how he felt about her, but he knew that he liked her and knew exactly how he felt about watching her die.

Somewhere on the other side of the field they were moving through, lights shone from a series of blocky gray buildings. Mercer would be in one of those right now, oblivious to what was coming for him.

Keo glanced down at his watch.

3:36 a.m.

He smiled.

The hour of the wolf…

24

Lara

When Riley opened his eyes, the first thing he said was, “Andy shot me.”

Lara nodded. “Yes, he did.”

“Then someone shot him…”

“Peters.”

“I told you he never misses.”

“So I’ve been told,” Lara smiled.

Riley closed his eyes for a brief few seconds, then opened them again. “You’re still here. How long has it been?”

“I am, and it’s past midnight. You’ve been heavily sedated. I’m surprised you’re already talking.”

He squinted. “Feels like an elephant’s sitting on me.”

“But you’re alive.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” Riley looked pale and in pain, but his voice was surprisingly stronger than it should have been for a man who had been shot very recently. “I had a dream…”

“What was it about?”

“The Ocean Star was sinking.”

“Sounds more like a nightmare.”

“I guess it was.” He peeked down at his bandaged side. “Andy shot me,” he said again.

“How much do you remember?”

“I remember that it hurt like hell.” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It’s quiet. Why is it so quiet?”

“It’s one in the morning, Riley.”

“No wonder it’s so quiet.” He turned his head to look at her. “Is everything…okay?”

“You mean has Mercer sent anyone to attack the Ocean Star yet?”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Thank God.” Then, “Did I almost die or something?”

“No,” Lara said, and sat back in her chair while trying to decide how much to tell him.

They were the only two people in sickbay at the moment, and except for Riley’s slightly labored breathing, it was as if the world outside didn’t exist beyond the thick walls. Zoe had returned to the Trident a few hours ago, satisfied that Riley was in good hands with the rig’s vet/doctor, George, taking over. Like everyone onboard the yacht, Zoe had a lot of work ahead of her.

“Hart took charge after you went down,” Lara said.

“Where is he now?”

“Overseeing the transports.”

“Transports?”

“We’re shuttling your people to my boat.”

“In the middle of the night?” he asked, eyebrows rising in either curiosity or alarm, she couldn’t really tell.

“We didn’t think it was prudent to wait any longer, in case more of Mercer’s men showed up on their way back to Black Tide.”

“Something happened, didn’t it? Besides Andy shooting me. What else happened while I was out?”

“Erin’s group came through. Hart did the best he could in your place, but they didn’t buy it. Something about the lack of civilians on the top deck spooked them.”

“Erin noticed,” Riley said. It wasn’t a question.

Lara nodded. “According to Hart, yes.”

“Is she…?”

“No. But you did lose a man, and someone named Troy was killed by Peters.”

“But Erin’s alive?”

“Yes,” she said, noticing the relief on his face. “It was bad, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.”

“Who was it? My guy.”

“I don’t know his name. You’ll have to ask Hart.”

“Was it a man or a woman?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.” He ran his hands over his face. “I brought them here, Lara. They’re my responsibility. Every single one of them. Even Andy…”

The burden of leadership, Will. How did you ever shoulder it for so long? I’ve been at this for only a few months, and I already feel a million years old.

“Hart handled it,” she said. “He’s not a bad second-in-command.”

“He’d rather be fishing,” Riley said, and smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to convince him to lead the mission to your boat.”

“It’s a good thing you did. If someone else were in charge, that night might have gone differently. We might not be having this talk right now.”

Riley nodded and scooted up to a sitting position, stuffing pillows between him and the wall. He grimaced the entire time but kept at it until it was done. She resisted the instinct to lend him a hand, mostly for his ego’s sake.

After finally settling back down, he said, “How’s it going? Moving everyone over to the Trident?”

“It’s going,” Lara said. “Everyone’s been very cooperative. We should be done by sunup, if not before then. I’m having Hart transfer the rest of the supplies over at the same time on different boats, but they’re going to take much longer than the people. Everyone’s handling the move surprisingly well. You could even say enthusiastically.”

“Must be the idea of cruising around in that sweet ride of yours,” Riley said, looking over at the sickbay’s only window, not that he could see anything but darkness on the other side. “Is there a reason you’re doing this now?”

“Between the time Andy shot you and now, we’ve already gotten five radio calls from Mercer’s people in Texas. The first group is supposed to be here by ten in the morning. There’ll be more by midday.”

“They’re moving much faster than I expected…”

“Is that good or bad?”

“For the war effort, it’s good,” Riley said. “But not for the people caught in the middle. If they’re already starting to return to Black Tide en masse, it means they’re having a lot of success in Texas.”

I wonder how Mercer measures “success.” Maybe in body bags.

“Thank you,” Riley said, looking back at her. “I mean it, Lara. You could have bailed, but you didn’t.” He smiled, and it was probably a little too smug for her liking. “I knew the Lara wouldn’t back out of the deal.”

She frowned. “Please stop calling me that.”

“Don’t freak out,” Riley said, and she thought, Too late, “but some of my guys are carrying around iPods with your messages in a loop on them.”

Lara sighed. “I know. Hart told me.”

“I know it’s not something you’re comfortable with, but your messages gave a lot of people hope. To a lot of us, you’re not just Lara, you’re the Lara. You’re famous.”

“Glad to be wanted, I guess,” she said. Then, hoping Riley would take the hint and move on, “Maybe it’s time you filled me in on where I’m taking your people.”

“I guess I should tell you, since we’re in this together now.”

“I think so.”

“Have you ever heard of the Bengal Islands?” he asked.

Lara smiled. “I might have heard a thing or two about it.”

“Don’t tell me…”

“Yeah.”

He broke out into a big, stupid grin. “Maybe I was right the first time.”

“About what?”

“This.”

“What is ‘this?’”

“Fate. You showing up just when we needed you the most. It’s got to be fate, Lara.”

“I don’t believe in fate,” she said, and thought, At least, not anymore. Not after Will didn’t come back to me.

“I do,” he said.

“Then you’re a fool.”

“I’ve been called worse. I know what Mercer’s going to be calling me when he learns about what I’ve done.”

“You think he’ll come after you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t thought about it?”

“I guess I never got that far,” he said, and seemed to drift off.

He looked as if he was thinking very seriously about her question when there was a squawk and she heard Maddie’s voice coming through the radio hanging off her left hip.

“Lara, come in.”

She unclipped the radio, but said to Riley first, “She’s one of my people.”

He nodded, though she wondered if he actually heard her. He looked gone, as if he was still trying to come up with an answer to her question.

She felt like giving him some space and stood up and walked over to the window, where she keyed the radio. “I’m here, Maddie.”

“Uh, there might be a little problem,” Maddie said. “Well, maybe a possible complication.”

Riley, hearing that, glanced over.

“What kind of ‘complication?’” she said into the radio.

“Hart was doing a head count of the Ocean Star folks, and he thinks we might be, uh, missing a few, uh, heads.”

“Be more specific, Maddie.”

“Hart says a couple of the civilians are missing.”

Riley sat up straighter. It was a mistake, and he grimaced with pain from the sudden movement.

“Did he check the entire boat?” Lara said into the radio.

“Twice,” Maddie said. “All the civilians should have been on the Trident by now. The only ones that should still be on the Ocean Star with you are a few of Hart’s soldiers.”

“There’s an armory,” Riley said.

“I know; I had Hart put guards on it after you were shot,” she said. “The guns were the first things I had your people move over to the Trident. I know I said I didn’t need them before, but I didn’t see any point in leaving them behind when we go.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” he nodded.

“What are the chances some of the civilians might have snuck weapons onboard? Like Andy?”

“Pretty good. It wasn’t like we searched everyone. Or anyone, for that matter. There was no reason to.”

“Lara?” Maddie said through the radio.

“I’m here,” she answered. “Where is Hart now?”

“Doing a third head count.”

“That’s a waste of time,” Riley said. “They must have stayed onboard while you guys were shuttling people over. It wouldn’t make sense for them to go along only to sneak back here.”

Lara nodded, then walked over to the door and pushed the lock into place.

“Why did you do that?” Riley asked from behind her.

“Just in case,” she said and walked back to him. Then, into the radio: “Maddie, you said all the civilians except two are onboard?”

“That’s what Hart says,” Maddie said.

“I want you to pull anchor and take the yacht farther out.”

“How much farther?”

“At least another half mile.”

“Should I ask why?”

“Just in case.”

“Gotcha. But you know we’re not done with the supplies, right?”

“Doesn’t matter. We can finish it later. Right now, I want you to put some distance between the yacht and the platform.”

“What about you?”

“When you see Hart again, tell him to radio me on this frequency and we’ll coordinate what to do next. Your job right now—your only job—is to take care of the Trident and everyone onboard, understand?”

“Roger that,” Maddie said.

“Why the second ‘just in case?’” Riley asked when she put the radio away.

“Because I don’t know what those two missing crewmen will do. Best-case scenario is they’ll hide until we leave.”

“And the worst-case?”

“They use whatever guns they snuck onboard and finish what Andy started. And maybe they won’t stop with you. Maybe they’ll decide no one should be able to leave, either.”

Riley shook his head. “If you think they’ll blow up the Trident with all those people onboard, it’s not going to happen. They wouldn’t do that. I know everyone who served onboard the Ocean Star. None of them are capable of something that heinous.”

“You thought you knew Andy, too.”

He flinched. “Below the belt, Lara.”

“But true,” she said, and stared back at him.

“Goddammit, I know you’re right.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned forward to gather his strength, even though those movements probably cost him more unnecessary pain. “I messed up,” he added quietly.

“Think of it this way,” she said, “you’re three out of forty-six. These days, if you’re batting over .500, I’d say you’re coming up ahead.”

He made an effort to smile, but she could tell he was far from convinced.

* * *

“They were in the comm room,” Hart said when Lara opened the sickbay door for him. “But they took off long before we showed up.”

“What were they doing in there?” Riley asked from his bed.

“I don’t know, but they didn’t go in there for their health, I’m guessing.”

“Who was it?”

“Ezekiel and Lang.”

Lara looked back at Riley. “Anything special about them?”

Riley shook his head. “Nothing that I can think of. Ezekiel’s one of the mechanics and Lang helped out in the galley.”

“A mechanic and a cook?”

“Basically.”

Lara turned back to Hart. “Any ideas where they’re hiding now?”

“Not a clue,” Hart said. “It’s a big place with a lot of nooks and crannies to hole up. Frankly, if they are hiding and waiting for us to leave, I’m not sure we should even bother looking for them.”

“I agree,” Lara said.

Riley nodded. He had looked stronger when he first woke up, but the last hour had drained some of that strength, and just sitting on the bed seemed to take a lot out of him. “The only thing to be concerned about is that they might have called for help. Given us away.”

“What’s the status on the supplies?” Lara asked Hart.

“About sixty percent are already onboard the Trident,” Hart said.

“The essentials first?”

“Just like you said.”

“Then that’s going to have to be enough.”

“You mean leave the rest behind?”

She nodded.

“That’s too much to abandon,” Riley said behind her. “We might need everything we can get when we reach the Bengal Islands.”

“I’m thinking about your people, Riley,” Lara said. “There’s a lot of space between the storage area and the top deck. A lot of rooms and doors and corners. Right now we don’t know if Ezekiel and Lang plan on doing anything. If they even have just one gun between them…”

Riley shook his head. He clearly didn’t like it, but he said anyway, “You’re right. It’s not worth risking one more man to this war.” Then to Hart, “We’ll leave the rest behind, like she said.”

“You’re going to have to help him topside,” Lara said to Hart.

Hart nodded and glanced back at two men in black tactical gear, weapons out, standing guard behind the open sickbay door. “Phil, give me a hand.”

One of the men turned around and stepped inside.

Hart walked over to Riley. “It’s going to hurt.”

Riley gritted his teeth. “I’ll try to keep the crying to a minimum.”

Hart chuckled, then with Phil, they flanked Riley and helped him up to his feet. Riley’s face turned red almost right away with the strain.

“We’ll have to move slow,” Lara said. “And give me that,” she added, reaching for Hart’s rifle.

“I’d ask if you knew how to use one, but that would be a stupid question, wouldn’t it?” Hart said.

She gave him a wry look.

“What about the prisoners in the brig below us?” Hart asked. “We never talked about what we were going to do with them.”

“They’re Lang and Ezekiel’s problem now,” Lara said.

Hart and Riley exchanged a look, but neither one protested.

She walked on ahead of them, stepped outside in the hallway, and stopped next to the remaining sentry. “What’s your name?”

“Jolly, ma’am,” the man (boy) said. He may or may not have been out of his teens—and if he was, then it was just barely—though he was at least a foot taller than her and big around the chest and shoulders.

“Jolly?” she smiled.

“It’s a nickname, ma’am,” Jolly said, and actually blushed.

“I’m Lara.”

“I know, ma’am.”

“You can stop calling me ma’am. I’m not that old.”

“Sorry, ma—Lara.”

“Better,” she said, then nodded up the hallway. “We’re going to lead them upside and to the boat, okay, Jolly?”

“Gotcha, Lara.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go.”

* * *

“They might have called for help. Given us away,” Riley had said.

Lara thought it was a pretty good bet the missing crewmen had done exactly both those things. Why else would they go through the effort of using the comm room? They would know it was empty, with Terry and the others already onboard the Trident.

So the question was: Who did they call for help and give Riley’s plans away to?

The only thing that kept her from panicking even just a little was the knowledge that they weren’t going to be here to wait and find out. She felt a flush of pride at having convinced Hart to start moving his people over to the Trident sooner than he had expected. Not that Hart had really put up much resistance. She hated to admit it, but the older man was somewhat of a pushover.

They made it to the top platform without any problems, even though Lara kept expecting Ezekiel and Lang to pop out from behind every corner they approached. Judging by his awkward steps and bunched shoulders, so did Jolly, who seemed to be alternating between moving beside her and just slightly ahead of her. The young man was, she realized after a while, purposefully making sure he was always first to reach the potentially dangerous points so she wouldn’t have to.

Who says chivalry is dead? she thought, smiling to herself.

They made slow but steady progress, with Hart and Phil trailing behind with Riley between them. She didn’t rush them because they could afford to take their time. Sunup was still far off, and Faith was waiting on the docks below. Two more men were standing guard when they emerged out of the submarine door at the top of the entrance, and the suddenly bigger party moved through the windy top deck.

As well as things were going, Lara kept waiting for the gunshots that never came. Wherever Ezekiel and Lang had escaped to, all signs were pointing to the two men being determined not to reveal themselves. Which was fine with her, and frankly, more than she could have hoped for.

Glancing to her left off the platform, she could see the lights of the Trident standing out against the suffocating blackness of the ocean, still maintaining its safe distance from them.

Lara unclipped her radio and keyed it. “Maddie, we’re on our way now.”

“Roger that,” Maddie answered. “Any trouble?”

“So far, so good. We’ll see you soon.”

“Sarah’s keeping a pot of coffee hot for you.”

“You guys have coffee?” Jolly asked as they rounded a hulking piece of machinery that had conduits sticking out of its sides. Predictably, Jolly had casually hurried ahead before falling back beside her when they were safely around it.

She fought back a smile and said, “Don’t you?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, Lara.”

“The place we were at before had boxes of them. We had to leave most of it behind when we left, but fortunately we brought enough to last for a while.”

“I’d love some coffee. Black. How do you take yours?”

“Same.”

“Awesome,” Jolly said.

Awesome? Lara thought, not quite sure if she was amused because Jolly was so easily impressed or because he sounded very much like a crushing teenage boy. He reminded her a bit of how Benny was around Gaby, though taller and less awkward.

A radio squawked behind her and she heard Hart’s voice. “Status.”

“You guys are in the clear,” a male voice answered through Hart’s radio. “No one’s followed you outside.”

“All right. Chain the door and catch up to us.”

“On our way,” the voice said.

It was another “just in case” plan, though this time Riley had come up with it. If Ezekiel and Lang were indeed hiding below deck, chain-locking the main entrance would keep them pinned inside so they couldn’t come out to freely take potshots at them or the Trident. The last thing she needed right now was someone armed with a grenade launcher lobbing rounds at the yacht. It was a small chance, but she’d rather it be zero instead.

By the time Riley’s other two men caught up to them, they were already moving down the stairs at the edge of the platform. Yet another one of Riley’s men stood below them, waiting with a flashlight.

“Lara?” Jolly said as they went down.

“Yes?” she said.

“Don’t take this the wrong way…”

Oh God, I already don’t like where this is going.

“But I just wanted to say it’s cool finally meeting you,” Jolly said.

Okay, not so bad, she thought, and said, “Likewise, Jolly.”

“Anyways,” the young man continued, “I thought you might get a kick out of knowing that me and some of the other guys carry around iPods with your messages on them.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, fighting back the cringe from showing on her face.

“It’s just the same two broadcasts you put out,” Jolly said. “But—and again, don’t take this the wrong way—but sometimes I pretend you’re saying something else.”

Oh God, someone shoot me now.

“Nothing bad,” Jolly quickly added. “Just stuff like the weather and traffic reports.”

She was so relieved that she didn’t even try to fight back the short laugh. “Traffic reports?”

He grinned, pearly white teeth showing, but if he was slightly embarrassed or blushing again, she couldn’t tell in the semidarkness of the stairs. “You know, like you were doing the newscast? Just to give some variety to the messages and all. Nothing perverted or anything. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine, Jolly,” she said, and made an effort to smile at him.

“Thanks,” he said, before quickly hurrying down the stairs ahead of her just before another turn came up.

“Told you,” Riley said behind her. He wasn’t even trying to suppress a chuckle. “The Lara.”

“Shut up, Riley,” she said.

* * *

They loaded Riley onboard Faith’s boat first, settling him down on the front bench, then climbed in after him. Faith powered up the engine and maneuvered them into the water, Riley’s people at the stern standing guard with weapons ready and eyes watching the Ocean Star for signs of Ezekiel and Lang.

But neither man showed up, and before long Faith made another turn and they were on an intercept course with the Trident.

When they had put enough space between them and the oil rig, Lara sat down on the bench next to Riley while Hart and the others remained standing around them. She looked back one last time at the lights blinking on the edges of the massive platform as it began succumbing to the blackness.

“How long will the lights last?” she asked.

“Until the generators run out of fuel,” Riley said. “A day, tops.”

“Communications?”

“Nothing runs without diesel, and we’re taking most of that with us.”

He was referring to the refueling ship, which at the moment was anchored on the other side of the Trident. They would bring the second vessel with them as insurance. It was going to slow them down, but speed wasn’t going to be an issue once they cleared the area, regardless of what Mercer did in response to Riley’s mutiny tomorrow. She didn’t think they would need the old boat anytime soon, but the Bengal Islands were a long way off and they had a detour or two ahead of them.

“Who do you think they radioed?” she asked.

“The comm room can reach anyone, including Black Tide,” Riley said. “If I were them, that’s where I’d direct everything. Texas right now is too unpredictable, and they probably knew they wouldn’t get much assistance from there.”

“If that’s true, then Mercer already knows about the mutiny.”

Riley nodded but didn’t say anything.

“I asked before what he would do when he found out,” Lara said. “Did you come up with an answer yet?”

“I don’t know what he’ll do,” Riley said. “I really don’t.”

“Maybe he won’t get the chance to do anything,” Hart said. He was standing next to them, one hand on the railing to steady himself as they moved across the slightly bumpy water. “If Keo gets the job done, I mean.”

She nodded, though she didn’t really like to think about Keo succeeding, because it meant he wasn’t coming back. She remembered watching him leaving with Erin and thinking that she was never going to see him again.

“Who’s Keo?” Riley asked.

Lara told him about Keo and him leaving with Erin.

“Are you surprised she’s helping him?” Lara asked him.

There was almost a ghost of a smile on his lips when he said, “Not at all.”

“What do you think?” Hart asked.

“About what?” Riley said.

“He means Keo killing Mercer,” Lara said. “Is that going to stop the war?”

Riley took a moment to think about it. She couldn’t tell if it was such a foreign concept that he was having trouble grasping the question or if he really was running through all the scenarios before answering.

“Maybe,” he finally said. “There are a lot of people who’ll throw down their guns, but there’s also a lot who won’t.”

“What about Rhett?” Hart asked.

“I think he’ll argue for stopping the bombings, definitely. Bellamy, Jerkins, and Taylor might feel differently.”

“But there is a chance,” Lara said.

He nodded. “If your friend can kill Mercer, then yes, there’s a chance.” He looked over at her. “Can he do it?”

“Keo’s very good.”

“But can he do it?”

“Yes,” she said. “If anyone can do it, it’s Keo.”

Even if it kills him, she thought, but didn’t say that part out loud.

25

Keo

He didn’t know if he should be pleased, disturbed, or slightly annoyed at how easy it was to move around the main building. As with the beach, there weren’t nearly enough people left behind on the island to post on every corner or watch every hallway, and accessing the facility was a simple matter of checking in at the guard station, where Erin did most of the talking; she was, after all, one of Mercer’s easily recognized lieutenants, and that came with a lot of respect.

Once Keo separated from Erin on their way to the communal living quarters for the non-married people, he simply followed the numbers on the walls, which also happened to have helpful arrows pointing the way toward his destination. There wasn’t a single soul in sight to question, much less stop him. There wasn’t even an occasional soldier for him to worry about getting past; everyone who wasn’t sound asleep was already outside standing guard.

“Technically he should be sleeping in the communal area because he’s single, but I guess even he couldn’t bring himself to justify that,” Erin had said before they went their separate ways. “It’s part of the role he’s playing. I recognize that now.”

“The Everyman,” Keo had said.

“Yes.”

“What about guards?”

“What you see is what you get. The rest will be coming back later today or the days after. Like you said, you’ll have to get it done before the sun comes up or it’s going to get a hell of a lot harder.”

“No pressure.”

“I’m serious, Keo,” she had said, stopping at a door marked Quarters and fixing him with a hard stare that was meant to deliver just how serious she was. Then, lowering her voice slightly to an almost whisper, “You were right to come here now, in the middle of the night. Everyone is either asleep or dead on their feet. What did you call it?”

“The hour of the wolf.”

She snapped a quick look past him and up the hallway. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to ask who you are. Mercer’s going to want an after-action report, and I’m going to have to explain what happened to Troy and the others. You understand?”

“Relax,” Keo had said. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“We have to stop him, Keo. I should have done it months ago when I had the chance, but I didn’t. That’s on me, and I’m going to have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life. So please, stop him. Do what I and Riley and everyone else couldn’t bring ourselves to do. End this.”

Keo had nodded. “I will.”

He was thinking of Jordan bleeding to death in his arms when he finally located the room he had been looking for, in the exact part of the building where Erin had told him he’d find it. There were no guards posted outside, or anywhere in this or the previous three hallways he had walked through, and when Keo tried the lever, it moved without resistance.

Too easy. Way too easy.

He put his hand on the Sig Sauer P250 and looked left, then right, then left again. He stood perfectly still and listened for sounds of running feet, shouting voices, and safeties being clicked off. Some indication that his trip from the singles living quarters to Mercer’s room had not gone completely unnoticed.

But there was nothing.

There would be dead silence if not for the hum of lights above him and the vibrations from generators in the background. No one was coming, rushing around the corners, or converging on his position so he couldn’t enter this room and take the life of the man on the other side.

Way, way too easy.

It had to be a trick. Maybe Erin had gotten some of the details wrong, or gotten the hallways mixed up. After all, except for the numbers marking each door, they all looked the same in the last four hallways he had walked down.

“Are you sure?” he had asked her.

“506,” she had said for the second time.

“What if he moved?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“What if he did?”

“Why would he? He’s been in that room since we got to the island. He was there when we left for the mainland, and he’ll be there after returning.”

He was staring at the number now.

It had to be a trick, because this was too easy. It was just too goddamn easy.

He sighed, thought, Fuck it, and pushed the door open and slipped inside, palming and drawing the Sig in one smooth motion as he did so.

Once inside, he stood perfectly still, mostly because he couldn’t see a damn thing. After moving around in the brightly lit corridors the last five minutes, it took Keo a while for his eyes to adjust to near darkness. When he could finally make out gray floors, walls, and the shape of a small (much too small for someone of his position) cot at the back of the room, Keo searched out and found the light switch on the wall behind him and flicked it into the on position.

In the second or two after the light bulb buzzed to life, Keo glimpsed the room’s Spartan design in a glance.

It was essentially a big concrete box—nothing fancy or very big, but perfect for a grunt who needed a place—any place—to rest. There was nothing comfortable about it, but he’d been in worse places during jobs. Besides the cot at the far side, there was a flimsy-looking nightstand in the corner to his right with a canteen and a two-way radio sitting on top of it. A complete wardrobe was folded over the back of a wooden chair at the foot of the bed, with a pair of polished boots next to it. There was a closet carved out of the wall with just enough space for a dozen or so articles of clothing to dangle from hangers. A gun belt hung from a hook next to the bed with a pistol in the holster, but there wasn’t a rifle anywhere in the room that he could see.

The springs on the bed creaked as the body on top of it moved suddenly, and Keo found himself wishing the pistol in his hand had a hammer so he could do the oh-so-dramatic click! like in the movies. He briefly thought about jerking back the gun’s slide to achieve the same drama, but that would have just ejected a perfectly good bullet.

Instead, he had to make do with holding the gun at waist level and aiming forward at the figure sitting up in front of him, whipping a wool blanket sideways. From the looks of it, the man had fallen asleep while still wearing his uniform—the familiar tan color topped with a black collar and the white sun emblems stitched along the sides.

The man swung his legs off the cot and stared across the narrow space at Keo while trying to blink sleep from his eyes. After what seemed like forever, he finally said, “Are you sure you have the right room, son?”

Keo nodded. “Pretty sure.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I have an inside man.”

“Ah.”

Keo didn’t know why he didn’t just pull the trigger right then and there. The man wasn’t even armed, so it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

So do it and get it over with. That’s what you came here to do, isn’t it? So get it over with already. Maybe you can still catch up to Lara and the Trident afterward…

Except he didn’t. Not yet.

The truth was, the whole thing threw him for a loop and Keo had to readjust on the fly. It wasn’t how he had pictured any of this going down at all, not even close. It didn’t help that the man in front of him looked nothing like how Keo had imagined him. For one thing, he was missing horns and hooves and a tail with a long pointy arrow at the end. His skin was more tanned than it was a shade of devil red, and he leaned more toward grandfatherly than mass murderer or war criminal.

The man was in his fifties, with brown hair that looked almost blond against the slightly yellow ceiling light, and looked fit enough to be dangerous. In so many ways, Keo was reminded of Pollard, another ex-military officer who had made Keo’s life difficult. Just thinking about the other man made the scar along the side of Keo’s face tingle.

He didn’t need to see the name Mercer stenciled across the man’s shirt to know who he was pointing a gun at. He was in the right room, all right; there was no question about that. Keo could read every line on the grizzled face, and even heavy with sleep there was intelligence and a certain (madness?) something about the eyes. Keo imagined the cogs spinning behind the worry lines that crisscrossed the man’s forehead, processing information and coming up with and discarding scenarios, even as the man gazed back at him.

“I don’t recognize you,” Mercer finally said.

“You know everyone on the island?” Keo asked.

“Yes.” He stared at the gun in Keo’s hand for a brief second, then perhaps deciding there was nothing he could do about it, refocused on Keo’s face. “At least tell me your name, son.”

I’m not your fucking son, asshole, Keo thought but didn’t say. Even the slightest bit of annoyance might give Mercer something to use against him.

He willed himself to stay calm before answering, “Keo.”

“Interesting name.”

“It gets me free drinks in the bars.”

“Does it really?”

“Nah.”

If Mercer was the least bit amused by that, it didn’t show on his face. “So what’s this all about, Keo?”

“Oh, I think you know.”

He sighed tiredly. “Maybe if you gave me some hints. Then again, it is the middle of the night, and I’m not exactly at my best.”

“Your mom ever told you never to sleep in your clothes?”

“Yes, but sleep is a precious commodity these days. You take it when it comes.” He paused, then, “I give up.”

“Already?”

“I’m very tired. Why don’t you just tell me why there’s a stranger with a gun pointed at me in my own quarters, and we’ll move on from there.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Keo said, and pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket and crumpled it into a ball before tossing it over.

Mercer caught it and opened it before taking a few seconds to straighten the sheet over one knee, then looked down at it. Keo thought the man might have been stalling for time, but he dismissed it. Mercer was simply letting him know that he would not be rushed, even with a gun pointed at him.

“I hear Texas frowns on littering,” Keo said. “They even have an official motto and everything.”

Mercer ignored him and laid the piece of paper on the cot next to him before looking back at Keo. “I take it you’re not here to enlist.”

“’Fraid not, boss.” Keo gestured with the Sig Sauer. “But I am here to join the bullets in this gun with your brain.”

Mercer’s mouth curved into a slight smile.

“Her name was Jordan,” Keo said.

“Was it?” Mercer said.

“Your men killed her. She died in my arms.”

“She was a collaborator.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. She was fighting them. We both were.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yes,” Mercer said. “But mistakes happen in war.”

“Collateral damage?”

“That’s right.” He narrowed his eyes at Keo. “I can tell you know a thing or two about that. But you’re not a soldier.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes. I can always tell just by looking at someone if they’re ex-military. It’s in their eyes, on their face, even in the way they stand or hold a gun. You know the Army, but you were never one of us. My guess is, someone you knew was. A parent, maybe. Or siblings. You grew up around the Army and maybe that’s why you steered clear of it, though in many ways you simply joined another Army, one with less strict…guidelines.”

“Keep going…”

“You’re a man of violence, with a long history of blood on his hands.”

“You got all that just from looking at me, huh?”

“I’m a fast study. And I’ve always been good at reading people.”

“What else do you see?”

“I don’t know how you got in here, but you don’t expect to leave alive. Not that you’re too worried about it. In fact, you’ve already accepted that things will end here for you, so long as you can take me with you.”

“Not bad.”

Mercer shrugged. “I have my moments.”

“You should go on the road. Become a carnie.”

“Not quite the future I had in mind,” Mercer said, and stood up.

Keo watched the older man walk the short distance to the canteen sitting on the nightstand. He passed the gun belt hanging on the wall but never looked at it. Mercer opened the cap and took a slow, purposeful drink.

“So this is personal,” Mercer said, lowering the canteen and brushing his lips with the back of a shirt sleeve. “Simple bloodthirsty revenge?”

“Revenge gets a bad rap. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“I’d rather waste my energy on more productive things.”

Mercer spun the lid back into place before returning to the cot, passing the gun hanging off the wall a second time and sitting back down in almost the exact same spot. The springs creaked under him, the only other noise in the room besides the hum of the single light bulb, the generators in the background, and the sounds of their breathing.

“You want to ask me something,” Mercer said. It wasn’t a question.

“What makes you say that?”

“You haven’t shot me yet, so I assumed you have something else on your mind other than just killing me. Please, do go ahead. I’ll answer, if I’m able.”

“Aren’t you the giving kind.”

“I wouldn’t want you to leave this room feeling unfulfilled. After all, we both know you’re not going to get off the island alive.”

“You’ve said that already.”

“Because it’s true.”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty good at this,” he said, gesturing with the Sig again.

“Oh, I don’t have any doubts whatsoever about that, Keo. I know you’re an old hand at this.”

Keo stared at the man. He could see now why people like Erin, Gregson, and even Hart would view Mercer as some kind of potential savior. The man was unsettlingly calm, even with a gun pointed at him. Mercer wasn’t the very least bit scared. He didn’t even seem slightly disturbed by what was happening, as if this was a regular occurrence for him.

So shoot him and get it over with. What the hell are you waiting for?

Because I have to know. I have to know…

“Are you crazy?” Keo asked.

The older man gave Keo a wry (disappointed?) look, as if to say, “That’s it? That’s all you could come up with?”

“No,” Mercer said.

“You must be crazy.”

“Why ‘must’ I be?”

“What you did in Texas, what you’re planning on doing next.”

“Someone has to do something. It might as well be us. I don’t take any of this lightly, but—”

“Someone has to do it,” Keo finished for him.

Mercer nodded. “Yes. Someone had to do it.”

“What happened, did you lose someone? Is that why you’ve gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?”

“Not at all.”

“You didn’t lose anyone?”

“We’ve all lost someone. Even you have, I’m sure. But that’s not anything new. It’s the cycle of life. We’re born and we die, and others are born and take our place. It’s how nature works. But there’s nothing natural about what’s happening in those towns. Man was not born to be enslaved at birth, Keo. We were not created to provide sustenance for monsters that shouldn’t exist. It’s unnatural.”

“Some would say what you’re doing is unnatural.”

“They’d be wrong. I’m trying to bring back the natural order of things. Fate saw fit to appoint that role to me, but I never asked for it.”

“Fate?”

“Fate. Destiny. God. Whatever you want to call what’s behind this.”

“There’s nothing behind this.”

“Of course there is. Just because you can’t grasp it, or see or feel it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

“So God’s telling you to do this?”

“Would it make you feel better to think of me as some Bible-thumping nutcase, Keo?”

“Are you?”

“I believe there’s something out there desperately trying to balance the universe. Maybe I’m a part of it; maybe I’m just playing a very minor role. And maybe it sent you here to kill me, to end my command. If that’s the case, then so be it.”

“So you actually think you can win this war by dropping bombs on towns full of kids, old men, and pregnant women?”

“Is it really that farfetched?”

“Have you been out there? Have you seen how many of them there are? All you’re doing is killing a whole lot of people when there aren’t that many of us still left to begin with. You’ll never be able to do enough with the limited resources you have. All you’re doing is giving the nightcrawlers minor headaches. This crusade of yours will never expand past Texas.”

“Headaches can grow into tumors.”

“Good one, but it’s still bullshit. You don’t even have enough men right now to cover half of Texas, and you expect to take the entire state? What about the other forty-nine? Mexico? Canada? However many you think are in Texas, there are millions—billions—more out there.”

Mercer smiled.

“What’s so funny?” Keo asked.

“You seemed to be under the impression I haven’t considered all the possibilities. I have. Every single one.”

“And yet here you are, fighting an impossible war.”

“This was never going to end overnight. This is the fight of our lifetime, Keo. And when we’re gone, our children and their children’s children will still be fighting it. There isn’t any easy way out. No quick victories. The only other option is surrender. Become slaves. I’d rather die on my feet than on my knees.”

“Nice speech. Is that what you used to convince the others?”

“I didn’t need to convince them. They always understood what was at stake.”

Not all of them, Keo thought, and said, “Your own people are already turning on you.”

“Just because you’ve given up doesn’t mean the rest of us will too, Keo.”

“You’ll never be able to hold everyone together when more of your people start coming back home with stories about dead pregnant women and children. You’re massacring civilians, you crazy bastard.”

Mercer frowned. It was the first real emotion the man had surrendered, and Keo felt a rush of triumph.

“And you’re here to murder me for… What was her name?” Mercer asked.

“Jordan.”

“Jordan,” Mercer repeated.

“I don’t like the way you say her name.”

“No?”

“I don’t want you to say her name again.”

“You’re losing your composure, Keo.”

“Fuck my composure, and fuck you,” Keo said, and lifted the gun and pointed it at Mercer, wishing again that the P250 had a hammer for him to dramatically cock back and hear that clicking! sound, but he had to be satisfied with the resigned look on Mercer’s face.

The man wasn’t afraid—if he was even capable of that particular emotion. No. That wasn’t fear staring back at Keo; it was a man who was at peace with his decisions.

He’s either insane, or he just doesn’t give a fuck.

“Shoot true,” Mercer said. “You don’t have a suppressor on the weapon, so the first shot will alert the base and the guards on duty. You’ll want to be out of this room and running as soon as I drop. Given my lack of resources at the moment, my guess is you’ll make it almost to the front doors, but no farther.”

“There’s a rear exit close by. I plan to take it.”

“Your inside man.”

“Uh huh.”

“He or she would have also told you about the sentries in the fields. Even if you managed to elude them, you’d never access the boat yards alone.”

“What makes you think I’ll be alone?”

“An extra gun or two won’t help you very much.” Mercer shrugged. “But that’s all a moot point, since I’ll be dead anyway.”

“You’re not even going to pretend to beg for mercy?”

“Everyone dies, Keo. If fate dictates that I die here, tonight, then so be it. The war will go on. Better men than I will assume leadership roles.”

“Your true believers.”

“No, just loyal men who understand what I’m trying to accomplish.”

“Well, in that case, I might just have to stick around and kill them, too.”

“Ambitious.”

“What the hell, I could always use a hobby. Life’s boring these days without a little Internet porn to pass the time with.”

Keo lined up his shot.

“One thing,” Mercer said.

“Changed your mind about begging?”

“Not at all. I was just going to ask: You don’t know anyone important onboard the Trident, do you?”

Keo jerked his forefinger off the Sig Sauer’s trigger and glared at Mercer. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“We were alerted to Riley’s mutiny a few hours ago. Not everyone on the Ocean Star is a traitor. There is still a patriot or two onboard.”

Sonofabitch, Keo thought, but he forced himself to smile back at Mercer and said, “What makes you think any of this matters to me?”

“Because you didn’t just know where to find Black Tide, you also made it onto the island without anyone stopping you. That means your inside man has to be one of Riley’s people. And because you’re not one of my mine—I would remember a face like yours, especially that scar—that only leaves you as a member of the Trident, the group that Riley struck a deal with. Am I close?”

Close enough.

“What did you do?” Keo asked.

“I dispatched one of our warplanes to intercept them. The pilot has a full tank of fuel and his orders are simple: Find the Trident and sink it. The good news for you is that we haven’t heard back from him yet, which means his mission is still ongoing.”

“It’s a big ocean.”

“It’s not big enough to hide from a plane flying at high altitude and equipped with infrared. Not to mention plenty of fuel to search and our very own inside man to tell us which direction they went. All those warm bodies crammed into one moving boat, out there in the middle of a black sea… You really think they’re going to be able to slip by unnoticed?”

Keo ground his teeth together and glared at the man. “You’re willing to murder your own people just to stop them from leaving your crusade?”

“Not at all,” Mercer said. His face remained stony, his voice even. “I have no idea Riley and the others are onboard the Trident. As far as I know, the yacht is full of enemies—strangers. Sinking it, and unfortunately killing every soul on board, was a terrible accident. Or, at least, that’s what I’m going to tell my people, and that’s exactly what they’ll believe, because I’ve never lied to them before.”

Keo curled his finger back around the pistol’s trigger. It would be so easy. One quick pull and Mercer would no longer exist. Keo could already smell the gunpowder, see the viscera on the concrete wall behind the man’s head, the spray of brain matter that would splash the cot’s bedsheets…

Do it. Do it!

What are you waiting for? Do it!

“Call the plane back,” Keo said.

“I can, but not from in here,” Mercer said. “And not with you pointing that gun at me.”

“I thought you were ready to die.”

“I am, but I’m not interested in becoming a martyr. There’s still too much work left to do. Texas was always just the beginning, and I plan on seeing it through to the very end—or as far as I can take it before my time is up.”

“The very bitter end?”

“Hopefully it won’t be too bitter.”

“There are a lot of innocent people onboard the Trident. A lot of them once believed in you.”

“Casualties of war.”

“You’d sacrifice them…”

“It wouldn’t be a sacrifice, but it would be a tragedy. I don’t know Riley and the others are on that yacht, remember?”

Keo squinted his eyes. If Mercer was feeling triumphant, it didn’t show on his face.

“Where?” Keo asked.

“The Comm Room,” Mercer said, and stood up. “After you give me your gun. This is the only way it’s going to work. The Trident and all the lives onboard it are in your hands. That’s a hefty responsibility. I know a thing or two about that.”

The gun was suddenly very heavy against Keo’s palm, the trigger more resistant than usual against his finger.

He thought of the Trident.

No, not the boat itself, but the people on it.

Lara. Carly. Carrie. Bonnie. The big Mexican and the small Texan. The girl who Lara had adopted and Carly’s little sister. But most of all, he thought of Lara on the Ocean Star, telling him not to be an asshole and to at least try to survive Black Tide Island.

“Clock’s ticking,” Mercer said. “Make your choice, son.”

“I’m not your fucking son,” Keo said through gritted teeth.

Mercer didn’t react at all, but he didn’t sit back down, either.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Keo said.

“I’m listening…”

“Let the Trident go. Tonight. Tomorrow. Just let them go. Don’t look for them again.”

“And in return?”

I’m sorry, Jordan, he thought, and said, “I don’t put a bullet between your eyes. I step out of this door and we never see each other again.”

“I need more than that.”

“I’m all out of candy.”

“You might not care about Riley’s people, but what about your friends?” Mercer asked.

Keo didn’t say anything.

“The only thing left is to ask yourself one question,” Mercer said. He held out his hand with the palm up. “How much of your friends’ lives are you willing to sacrifice to claim my one?”

26

Lara

“There,” Lara said, pointing at the heavily marked map spread out on the table inside her cabin. “The Bengal Islands.”

Riley nodded. “That’s the one. Or ones, to be more specific.”

“And you know what’s there?”

“On the islands?”

She nodded.

“Are you talking about potential survivors?” Riley asked.

“No,” she said, watching him closely across the table.

He was probably leaning too heavily against the wooden edge and putting more of his weight on it than he might normally have if he wasn’t a little drowsy from the meds. Zoe still didn’t want him moving around on his own power even with the crutches, but Riley was right when he said he couldn’t stay bedridden forever, and not with his people crowded onboard the Trident. This was one of those times when they needed to see him, if just to be reassured they hadn’t made the biggest mistake of their lives.

“You know what the islands are mostly used for, right?” she asked him. “Who goes there? And why?”

“It’s a haven for criminals,” Riley nodded.

“So you know.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I guess I am, a little.”

“I was an auditor before all of this. I spent a lot of time freelancing for the U.S. government, looking for places where people hid their money when they thought Uncle Sam had taken enough of it.” He gave her a wry smile. “I know how I know, but how does a third-year medical student know about the Islands’ reputation?”

“Keo told me about it.”

“Him again. Too bad I never got the chance to meet the guy, though Hart had some good things to say. Was he a soldier or something?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what Keo used to be before all of this.”

“You never asked him?”

“He’s never been all that anxious to talk about it.” She shrugged. “Besides, what happened before doesn’t have anything to do with now. And right now, he’s a good friend and someone I wish had come with us.”

“Instead he’s going after Mercer.”

“He has his reasons.”

“A lot of people have reasons to want Mercer dead.”

“He’s done some bad things. They’ve hung men for less.”

Riley nodded, then, “So what else did you want to talk to me about?”

“Your soldiers. How good are they?”

“I wouldn’t really call them soldiers.”

“So what are they really?”

“They’re trained, don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t volunteer to run around Texas creating chaos for a reason. They’re not killers. Aside from skirmishes here and there before R-Day, they haven’t really been in prolonged conflicts. At least, not the kind of gun battles that we might encounter if the aforementioned criminal elements are still hanging around the Islands when we get there.”

“But you trust them to stand up in a firefight?”

Riley seemed to think about it for a moment before nodding—though not quite with enough confidence for her liking. “I don’t think they’ll run from a fight, if that’s what you mean.”

That’s not what I meant at all, but I guess it’s good enough…for now.

“What about your people?” he asked.

“We’ve been surviving out here for the better part of a year. We’re not going to run from anything.”

“You guys have been through a lot.”

“We have.”

“Lost a lot…”

“Everyone’s lost someone, Riley.”

For a moment, his eyes drifted away, as if some long-buried memory was rushing back to him. She knew what it was because she had seen that expression on a lot of faces these days, including her own when she stared in the mirror. She didn’t want to ask him who he’d lost, because eventually the question would get turned back to her.

“And you’re okay with us not going straight to the Islands?” she asked him.

Riley nodded. “In your position, I’d do the same thing. Besides, the Islands aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be there waiting for us when we reach them tomorrow or next week or next month.”

That’s what I keep telling myself, and maybe that’s why we never seem to get there.

“When do you expect them to radio in?” Riley asked.

“As soon as they’re able.”

“It’ll be nice to have an Army Ranger around.”

“What about those kill teams Mercer has running around Texas?”

“They’re mostly civilians, though Benford was in the National Guard. I’m not sure how long ago, though. He and a couple of ex-Army guys did most of the arms training back in the early days.”

“I take it you didn’t have a lot of weapons training while auditing for the U.S. government?”

“You took it correctly. The first time I ever picked up a weapon was after all of this happened. It was a huge learning curve.”

Lara felt like laughing. If Riley only knew the things she’d had to do, how much she’d had to change since the world ended. They were things no one had ever taught her—not her parents or any of those long and hard years in school. Sometimes when she thought about what she’d been through, she had a difficult time understanding how she was even still alive.

Adapt or perish, right, Will?

“I have a question for you,” she said, looking across at Riley.

“Sure.”

“What if Keo succeeds?”

“I don’t understand…”

“Would you go back?”

“Where?”

“Black Tide Island.”

“Go back, after what I did?”

She nodded. “Think about it: How many other people like Erin are out there running around killing for Mercer right now? How many of them are exactly like her in that they just need someone or something to get them to do the right thing? Mercer’s death could be that catalyst.”

“Go back to Black Tide Island,” Riley said quietly.

“You could make a difference.”

“How?”

“If Mercer’s dead, there’ll be a power vacuum. Someone will have to step in and assume command of all those people, all those guns.” Lara let that sink in before continuing. “I’m willing to bet there are more people like you and Erin than you think.”

“There are,” he nodded. “But why would any of them listen to me? After what I did?”

“Maybe they’ll listen to you because of what you did.”

He stared at her, confused.

“You did what many of them, including Erin, couldn’t—you finally said no to Mercer,” Lara said. “You disobeyed him at great risk. How many of them wanted to, but were too afraid? Maybe that’s why they’ll listen to you.”

“Or maybe they’ll just shoot me as soon as I step onto the island.”

Lara gave him a wry smile. “Or that.”

He chuckled. “That’s not very reassuring, Lara.”

“Sorry. Anyway, I was just thinking out loud.”

“Your friend would have to succeed first for any of this thinking out loud to matter,” Riley said.

He was looking at her, but not really at her. She could tell that she had planted a seed in his head and it had taken root.

“There’s that,” she nodded, remembering the last time she saw Keo, and their last conversation on the Ocean Star.

“Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” she had told him. “If you won’t stay with us, if you won’t come back to the Trident with me, at least promise me you’re not going out there just to get yourself killed. Tell me you’ll at least try to make it back, and mean it.”

“What if I can’t?” he had answered.

“You can. You just have to make the choice.”

“I’ll do my best,” he had finally relented.

Do your best, Keo, she thought now. You better do your goddamnest best, or I’m going to find you and kick your ass.

* * *

“How goes it?” Maddie asked when Lara stepped onto the bridge.

“You tell me,” she said.

“We’re on course. The question is: How long do we wait for them?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Does Riley know that?”

“He knows.”

“And he was good with it?”

“I didn’t give him a choice.”

“That’s my girl,” Maddie said.

The small Texan was planted behind the helm where Blaine usually was and looked just as comfortable, even if she didn’t quite fill out the room the way Blaine did. If it were anyone else but Maddie guiding them across the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico right now, Lara might have been worried, but next to Blaine, there was no one else who knew more about the Trident.

“Any word from them yet?” Lara asked after a while.

Maddie glanced at the dashboard. “Nothing yet, but we’re not expecting them so soon, right?”

“No…”

“You worried?”

“I’m always worried.”

“I mean, more worried than usual?”

“No. They know better than to do something stupid while it’s still dark out there.” She leaned toward the wraparound front windshield, as if she could see her friends out there, hiding among the thick blackness that covered the ocean. “They should be hanging out in the water right now, far from land, waiting for sunup to go ashore.”

“Still feels weird with everyone separated like this.”

“You want me to ask someone to keep you company?”

“No, I’m good,” Maddie said. “I’ve been spelling Blaine all this time, so I’m used to being all by my lonesome up here. Anyway, I like it; gives me time to reflect.”

“On what?”

“Life and other stuff.”

“Sounds deep.”

“Oh yeah, it gives me headaches, too.”

“Did you ever come up with something insightful? I could use a little good advice right about now.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing, boss lady.”

That’s what I was afraid you’d say.

“That’s it?” Lara said.

“You’re doing all right in my book. Anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

“I guess I’ll take that. Thanks.”

“No prob.”

“Any complaints so far about Riley’s people crowding the boat?”

“No one’s said anything to me yet. Besides, it’s nice to have more people around. Was starting to get tired of staring at Blaine’s ugly mug all the time. There’s a couple of cute guys in the bunch, too.”

“I’m sure Blaine will appreciate hearing that.”

“Eh, he knows he’s ugly. God knows why Sarah doesn’t think so.”

Her radio—and Maddie’s, perched on the dashboard—squawked, and they both heard Benny’s voice. He sounded noticeably anxious as he said, “Lara, come in, please.”

Lara keyed her two-way. “What’s up, Benny?”

“I’m at the back of the upper deck right now and saw something that… Well, I’m not sure. I could use a second pair of eyes.”

“I’m on my way.” Lara glanced at Maddie. “You sure you don’t want some company up here? How about one of those cute guys?”

“Maybe you can ask Hart to come up here.”

“Hart’s old enough to be your father.”

“What can I say, I like ’em gray,” Maddie smiled. “They know how to appreciate a woman.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

She hurried out of the bridge and through the hallway, then across the upper deck. She could already hear the din of people moving around and talking in nervous but excited voices from the entertainment area beyond the narrow corridor. She walked through the group of people, exchanging nods with a few of the men, though she didn’t spot Hart anywhere.

To keep any one area of the yacht from becoming too congested with bodies, they had spread out Riley’s people across all three decks, with the majority in the lower and main floors. The Trident wasn’t the Ocean Star and it didn’t have the space to accommodate all forty-something of Riley’s people comfortably, but everyone seemed to be making the best of the situation as far as she could tell.

But she had to keep reminding herself they were just a few hours into their arrangement. It was going to take time—maybe a few days—before restlessness set in and people began to notice the lack of freedom to move around. When that happened, she was going to need Riley and Hart to help her deal with it. The good news was that she was sure she could rely on both of them.

Lara maneuvered her way to the back of the floor and pushed out of the door and found Benny bracing against the railing, peering up at the sky with binoculars. There wasn’t a whole lot of moonlight tonight, and all she could see with the naked eye was a darkened sea of nothing, which was appropriate since it correctly mirrored the ocean around them at the moment.

“Benny,” she said, closing the door behind her.

He lowered the binoculars and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know for sure, but there was something up there.”

“What was it?”

“It looked like…”

“What was it, Benny?”

“I thought it might have been a plane, but…”

“But what?”

“It’s gone.”

“When did you first see it?” she asked, taking the binoculars from him.

“About five minutes ago,” Benny said. “Then it just disappeared. It looked like a black dot up there, but it’s so dark it’s hard to be sure.”

She wanted to ask the teenager if he might have imagined it, but she didn’t want to undermine his already fragile confidence. Lara peered through the binoculars instead. It was equipped with night-vision and rendered the world in a sea of green. There were barely any clouds above them, but she spotted a few in the distance.

She scanned left, then right, but there was nothing up there.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, and turned around in case whatever the “something” Benny had seen (or thought he had seen) was now behind them.

“False alarm, I guess,” Benny said. “Maybe I’m just a little paranoid?”

“You okay?”

“Maybe it’s all the new people on the boat. Feels weird having so many people suddenly around.”

“I know how you feel.”

“Yeah?”

She looked back at him and nodded. “We’ve been out here by ourselves for so long. Suddenly adding a bunch of new faces can be disconcerting.”

“That must be it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said and handed the glasses back to him. “I’d rather you stay a little paranoid than sleep on the job. I need everyone as alert as possible until we’re in the clear, which won’t be for a while.”

“We’re not leaving the others behind, are we?” he asked, though she knew what he really wanted to say was, “We’re not going to leave before we pick Gaby up, are we?”

“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” she said, and thought, Not again. Never, ever again. She smiled at the young man and gave him a pat on the shoulder, feeling more than a little weird doing it since they weren’t that far apart in age. “I promise.”

He looked relieved and went back to scanning the horizon. Lara watched him for a moment, feeling as sorry for Benny as she did for herself when she finally accepted that Will wasn’t coming back, that he was gone for good.

At least Gaby’s still around to be seen, Benny. So there’s that.

Lara didn’t have the urge to face the crowd inside the floor again so soon, so she walked over to the side railing. She hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when a speck of something black and nearly indistinguishable against the darkened sky flickered across her vision. It might have been completely invisible if it hadn’t been moving across a stream of white clouds when she looked up.

“Benny,” she said. “Binoculars!”

He must have heard the urgency in her voice (she was pretty sure she might have screamed) and quickly shoved the glasses into her extended hand. Lara held them up and focused on the clouds, but the object was gone. Or was it?

“What is it?” Benny asked. “Did you see something?”

“Give me a second.”

She tried to picture where the object had been when she last saw it, then attempted to track its trajectory from left to right—

There!

“Oh, dammit,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Benny said behind her. “What do you see, Lara?”

It wasn’t actually black, she realized now that she was able to focus on it for more than a few seconds—maybe more of a grayer color, possibly even white, against the dark sky backdrop.

“Lara?” Benny said. “What is it? What do you see?”

She kept moving along the deck in order to keep it in view, and when she saw what it was in the process of doing, her heart might have stopped beating entirely.

It was a plane, and it was turning back toward them…

27

Keo

Keo was used to having guns pointed at him. Two guns, three guns. Four? Why not. It could be fifty, for all he cared, because all it took was one guy and one shot to do the job.

Of course, Mercer’s men didn’t see it that way, and there were already two of them in the hallway when he began marching their leader from his quarters to the Comm Room on the other side of the main building. Just his luck the men would turn the corner as soon as he stepped out of the room with Mercer.

It took a lot of effort to make sure the men never got behind him, and each time one of them drifted too far back, Keo had to stop and pull Mercer against him, with his back against the wall, and order them back in front of him. He thought about using the M4 he still had slung, but while the firepower was a major plus, the weapon’s length made it untenable for quick close-quarter action. Even so, he was tempted to lob a grenade round or two to wake the whole place up, maybe give Erin a heads up that the shit had, indeed, hit the fan.

Two guns became four when they rounded the second corner, because the first two had radioed for reinforcements. Keo recalled the two new arrivals (Two more makes four, unless my math is off) as being the same two from the front doors when he first entered the facility with Erin. Four later became five when they took the final turn, because there was another man standing outside the Comm Room.

There would probably have been more if the island wasn’t already pressed for bodies and if Mercer hadn’t ordered the rest to stay at their positions.

“Send them away,” Keo said as they approached the Comm Room.

“No,” Mercer said.

“You do remember that I have a gun pointed at your head, right?”

“And the answer’s still no.”

“You’re pushing your luck, pal.”

“So are you.”

So what else is new, Keo thought as he backed his way to the door, reached over and found the lever, then pushed it down. With Mercer between him and the soldiers as a shield, he bent slightly at the knees and turned his head and peeked into the room, noticing a lone figure sitting on the far side, oblivious to what was happening outside in the hallway.

Keo tightened his grip around Mercer’s arm and backtracked into the Comm Room, then moved quickly over to the wall where he once again put Mercer between him and the soldiers as they rushed inside after him. It took a while, but the woman sitting in front of the row of communications gear finally sensed that someone else—a lot of someone elses—were in the room with her and turned around. Keo saw why she was so clueless when she did—she was wearing a headset with thick earpieces.

The woman shot up from her chair and stared wide-eyed at Keo and Mercer, then (hands shaking) removed her headset and said, “Sir, what’s going on?”

“It’s fine, Jane,” Mercer said in that impossibly calm voice of his. “Please sit back down.”

But Jane remained a statue, seemingly incapable of moving.

“It’s all right,” Mercer said, and nodded.

His calmness had an effect on Jane and she finally sat back down, then oddly rested her hands in her lap like she was back in school. Unlike Mercer and the men pointing their weapons at Keo, her uniform collar was white.

The room wasn’t particularly large, and with all the electronics equipment hugging the back wall, it didn’t leave a lot of space for Keo and Mercer and all five soldiers to breathe. It was suddenly so quiet that Keo thought he could hear all eight heartbeats beating at the same time, but that might have just been his and Mercer’s. Or his, anyway, because he swore Mercer was as relaxed as any man could be with a gun jammed up his chin.

Guy’s got the emotions of a robot.

“Send them out,” Keo said.

He kept his head hidden behind Mercer’s, leaning out only far enough to see just in case one of the soldiers decided to risk a shot from close-range.

“We already went over this,” Mercer said. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Look around you, pal. You really think six people with guns drawn in a room this small is a good idea? All it takes is one Nervous Nelly and we’re all dead.”

Mercer didn’t take long to think about it, and maybe the sight of his men fidgeting nervously in front of him sealed the deal. “Not all of them,” he said.

“Three,” Keo said.

“Two.”

“Deal.”

Mercer nodded at two of the men—the first two that had intercepted them on the way over here. “You and you. Wait outside.”

The men pulled up their rifles and backed away without a word before slipping outside the open door. They weren’t even trying to hide their relief as they left.

“Sir,” Jane said, her voice trembling slightly. “What’s happening?”

“Everything’s fine, Jane,” Mercer said. “Has Cole radioed in yet?”

“Ten minutes ago, sir.”

“Contact him for me, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Jane said and swiveled around in her chair, though she glanced back at Keo and Mercer one more time before getting to work. “Cole, this is Black Tide Island. Please come in. Cole, this is Black Tide Island. Please come in.”

“Relax,” Keo said to the three men in front of him.

The three didn’t respond. At least, not verbally. One of them shuffled his feet (Olsen was scribbled across his name tag) and another (Travis) wrinkled his nose like he had an annoying itch he couldn’t get to. The third man, the biggest of the bunch, didn’t move a muscle, and dark brown eyes remained laser focused on Keo. Jasper was stenciled across one side of his chest.

“Tell your men to relax, Mercer,” Keo said.

“Relax, men,” Mercer said. “Everything is under control.”

Jane turned around and slipped off her headset again. “Sir, I have Cole on the radio.”

“Put him on the speakers,” Keo said.

Jane looked to Mercer for approval, and he nodded. She hit a switch and Keo heard a deep male voice coming through the walls around him: “Waiting for further instructions, Black Tide.”

“The microphone, Jane,” Mercer said, holding out his hand.

Jane picked up the mic and walked the short distance over.

“She can go, too,” Keo said.

“Agreed,” Mercer said, and nodded at Jane.

Like the other two, Jane didn’t argue and hurried past them and out the door, moving as fast as her feet would carry her.

Everyone’s getting out alive except me. Just my luck.

“Just the five of us, boys,” Keo said, forcing his best devil-may-care smile at the three soldiers standing across from him. “You guys fans of the show Full House?”

No response.

“Guess not,” Keo said.

Mercer had pressed the transmit button on the microphone and was saying into it, “Cole, this is Mercer. Come in.”

“Yes sir, I read you loud and clear,” the pilot answered. “Didn’t think you’d still be awake, sir.”

“Neither did I.”

“This isn’t a fucking date,” Keo said. “Get to the fucking point.”

“What’s your situation, Cole?” Mercer said into the microphone.

“Spotted that white whale I was looking for,” Cole said.

White whale? Keo thought, then, Right. The Trident. Clever, jackass.

“Can’t tell how many people are onboard,” the pilot continued, his voice coming loud and clear through the speakers along the walls. “It’s currently heading southwest.”

“Southwest?” Mercer said.

“Looks like it might be angling back toward the Texas shore.”

“Interesting,” Mercer said, but he hadn’t keyed the mic when he said that last part, so Keo assumed it was meant for him. “Why are they heading back to Texas?”

Good question, Keo thought, but he said, “Tell him to back off and return to the island.”

“I can’t do that.”

Keo jammed the gun harder against Mercer’s chin, and the man grunted. Travis and Olsen reflexively took a single step forward, fingers tightening around their weapons’ triggers. Jasper, on the other hand, remained where he was.

Mercer held up a hand. “It’s all right, men. Back up.”

Travis and Olsen obeyed instantly, stepping back until they were standing side-by-side with Jasper again. The big man had never taken his eyes off Keo, and his rifle hadn’t wavered even an inch.

Keo turned his focus back on Mercer, but not before slipping just a little bit farther behind his human shield. “Tell the pilot to back off now.”

“And I told you, I can’t do that,” Mercer said. “You know how this has to work, Keo. Your life for the Trident. There is no other way this can end. I told you there was going to be a price to pay.”

“What guarantees do I have that you’ll keep your word?”

“You have just that. My word.”

“I don’t trust the word of a madman.”

“Says the man who snuck onto an island with the sole purpose of murdering someone he’s never met.”

“You don’t have to have met someone to know they need killing.”

“You’ve done it before, I take it.”

“More times than you can count, pal.”

“I don’t know, Keo; I can count pretty high.”

“Sir?” Cole said through the speakers. “What are your orders?”

“Good question,” Mercer said. “What are my orders, Keo? Or let’s put it this way: If Cole doesn’t get any response from me in the next few minutes, will he follow through with my initial orders or completely disregard them and return home? Before you answer, keep in mind that he doesn’t know who is onboard the Trident at this moment. As far as he’s concerned, it’s an enemy boat, and I’ve already given him authority to shoot it out of the water.”

Keo listened to Mercer’s heartbeat—not hard to do with the man pressed up tightly against him, their bodies touching back to front—and waited to hear the slight increase. Except there was none. It was perfectly flatlined. If Mercer was even a little bit anxious or scared, Keo couldn’t detect it, which was a hell of a feat because he was almost certain he could hear one of the soldiers in front of him actually hyperventilating.

“Sir,” Cole said through the speakers, sounding slightly concerned by the lack of response, “do I proceed with the initial orders?”

“The man is getting anxious, Keo,” Mercer said. “What should I tell him?”

“Tell him to turn back,” Keo said.

“Give me one good reason why I should.”

Lara, Keo thought as he let the gun swivel against his trigger finger until the muzzle was pointed away from Mercer. He released his grip on the older man and Mercer stepped forward, then calmly turned around and took the Sig Sauer before removing the M4 slung over Keo’s back.

The soldiers in the room with them relaxed and lowered their weapons slightly, but not entirely.

“The pilot,” Keo said. “Turn him around.”

Mercer put Keo’s handgun into his front waistband and handed the carbine over to Jasper, then keyed the microphone. “Cole, turn around and come back to the island.”

“Sir?” Cole said, confused.

“Mission’s over. Come home.”

“Roger that, sir.”

“So I was right,” Mercer said, this time to Keo. “You’re part of the Trident’s crew.”

“Would you have let him do it?” Keo asked.

Mercer didn’t answer him right away. Instead, he walked over to the row of communications gear and put the microphone back down in its reserved slot, then calmly swiped at a small film of dust on one of the screens.

Finally, he looked back at Keo and said, “It’s hard to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

“Collateral damage,” Keo said.

“Collateral damage,” Mercer nodded.

“And now?”

“And now, nothing. If Riley wants to take his people and leave, then good riddance. I need men and women who are dedicated to the cause. Bringing them back would just infect the others.”

“You’re going to let them go. Just like that.”

“I’ll keep my word. I’m not going to pursue them. But if they should cross my path again, then that goes beyond the perimeters of our agreement, do you agree?”

Keo nodded. “I do.”

“Good.” Mercer looked over at his soldiers. “It’s been a long night, and we’re all tired. Take Keo to the beach and shoot him in the head and give him to the ocean.” He focused on Jasper when he added, “I want it to be fast and painless.”

“Yes, sir,” Jasper nodded back.

Olsen and Travis grabbed Keo from behind while Jasper drew his sidearm and held it at his side.

“A bullet to the head, huh?” Keo said to Mercer.

“You surrendered your mission to save your friends,” Mercer said. “I respect a man with that kind of conviction.”

“That makes one of us.”

Mercer ignored the insult and nodded at his men then turned around, effectively dismissing all four of them.

“You can’t win,” Keo said. “You’ll just end up killing a lot of people, but you’ll never be able to win. Not this way.”

“We’ll see,” Mercer said without bothering to turn around.

Olsen and Travis tightened their hold around Keo’s arms, and one of them (maybe Olsen) grunted, “Come on, man, make it easy. It’s over.”

“Who’s fighting?” Keo said, and relaxed his arms against their grips.

He caught the two of them exchanging a surprised, then suspicious glance when he didn’t fight back. He could have told them he had no intentions of resisting, that he had already decided there was no point. It wasn’t like he had any places to escape to even if he could get out of the Comm Room in one piece. There were two more waiting outside (and the unarmed woman), and as soon as someone fired a shot, the entire island would be on high alert. Not just the ones already awake, but everyone.

Besides, Mercer had, against all odds (because Keo was ninety percent sure the man was lying through his teeth) kept his word and let the Trident go. And if he was to be believed, he would continue doing so unless some bad stroke of luck had Lara and the others crossing his path again.

In many ways (maybe in all the ways that mattered), the night hadn’t ended so badly after all. Sure, he’d come here to kill Mercer and avenge Jordan and failed at both, but he had ended up saving Lara and the others onboard the Trident instead. They were his friends. He’d spent a lot of time with them, long enough to know that he liked them. So, in terms of accomplishments, he had to admit he was definitely coming out ahead.

He must have been smiling as they led him to the door, because Olsen, to his right, said, “You look pleased with yourself.”

“Going for a swim, boys. I’ve always loved the water,” Keo said, and smiled even wider.

“Guy’s crazy,” Travis said from his left.

“Keep him moving,” Jasper said, his footsteps heavy behind them—

Bang! Bang!

Gunshots. Two of them, coming one after another, and less than a second apart.

Then someone screamed. A woman. Followed by footsteps fading fast.

Keo couldn’t see how Jasper reacted behind him, but he saw Olsen releasing his arm as the man scrambled for his rifle while Travis was less decisive and continued clinging to Keo. Even as Keo tried to figure out what was happening, the words Drop! Drop! Drop! flashed across his mind.

He did exactly that, letting both legs turn to jelly and dropping like a sinking rock. In the process, he dragged Travis down with him. His knees had just slammed into the floor, sending stabs of pain through him, when a familiar figure appeared in the open doorway in front of him.

Erin.

She had a gun in one hand, and if she saw him she didn’t give any indication of it. Instead, she fired again, the gunshot a thunderous boom! in the small communications room. She had fired high, which meant she wasn’t aiming at him, so it was either Olsen to his right or Jasper somewhere behind him. Keo hoped it was Jasper because he had a feeling the big man was going to be the hardest one to take down.

Two shots responded from behind him and from such close proximity that they might as well be nukes going off, and Keo wondered if he might not have gone deaf as a result. In front of him, Erin seemed to take a staggering step back before collapsing, having made it only a couple of steps into the room, while her gun fell out of her numbed right hand and clattered to the floor.

But it wasn’t Erin’s falling gun or Erin herself that Keo found himself staring at. No, it was the instantly recognizable oblong-shaped green object rolling out of her left palm when the back of her hand slapped the floor and the fingers unfurled and—

Uh oh, Keo thought as he spun at the waist while a pair of hands tried desperately to keep his left arm in place. Travis, unwilling to let go despite everything happening around them. But Travis wasn’t fast or strong enough, and Keo twisted free and turned around and looked up at—

Jasper, staring back at him, even as he started to lower the Smith & Wesson in his right hand to aim at Keo’s head, when someone shouted, “Grenade!”

The shout froze Jasper in place—at least, for just a second—but it was enough time for Keo to launch himself and grab Jasper’s arm and jerk back down with everything he had. The loud crack! as Jasper’s arm snapped at the elbow was only drowned out by Jasper’s screams, but Keo was beyond caring. He wrested the gun out of the man’s suddenly pliant hand and spun back to the door.

Travis was on the ground, staring wide-eyed at the grenade that had rolled out of Erin’s left hand. Except Travis didn’t see what Keo had spotted earlier—the pin was still intact. Erin might have come here with the intention of taking all of them (Mercer) out with the grenade if she couldn’t do it with the pistol, but somewhere between shooting the two outside and stepping into the Comm Room, she had never armed the frag device.

But Travis didn’t know that and kept trying to get up, draw his gun, and keep his balance at the same time, and failing at all three. Next to Travis, Olsen lay on his back on the floor with blood pumping out of his chest.

Keo was still taking stock of the action behind him (a second? Half a second, if that?) when a fist landed against the back of his head. But the blow, while catching him by surprise, wasn’t nearly as strong as it could have been if it had been delivered by someone who didn’t have a broken arm and was relying on his weak hand. Still, it staggered Keo just enough while Jasper followed, useless right hand dangling at his side like a stump while his left cocked back for another strike—

Keo shot the man in the stomach at almost point-blank range. At the exact same time, he glimpsed Mercer in the back of the room taking aim with the Sig Sauer he had taken from Keo earlier.

“Keo!” Mercer shouted.

Fuck you! Keo wanted to shout back, but he was too busy ducking as Mercer fired and Jasper’s body twitched against the impact above him.

He grabbed the big man by the shirt collar and hid behind him, using him as a shield the way he had done Mercer earlier. Except Jasper was much heavier (and dead?), and it took all of Keo’s strength to keep him propped up on his feet. Keo stuck his gun between Jasper’s side and left arm and squeezed off two rounds in Mercer’s direction.

The first shot missed completely and hit a radio receiver, but the second struck Mercer in the left thigh and the man stumbled, his gun hand wavering for just a heartbeat before he raised it again and fired a second time, then a third—

Keo shoved his shoulder into Jasper’s limp body and ran it forward, using the man as a moving battering ram. He only caught a blur of Mercer before he had crossed the remaining space between them and slammed the soldier into his superior and knocked all three of them down like stray bowling pins. It would have been comical if Keo weren’t so close to death that all he could think was move, move, move!

Luckily for Keo, he ended up on top of Jasper, whose back had collided with Mercer and now pinned the man to the floor under them. Mercer glared up at him, but his gun was somewhere trapped underneath Jasper’s heavier body, along with his entire right arm. For the very first time since he met the man, Keo saw real concern flashing across Mercer’s face.

So he is a real boy after all!

Keo might have laughed out loud if he wasn’t too busy checking on Travis, who had finally managed to gather enough of his senses (and had realized the grenade wasn’t live) to stand up and turn around.

He shot Travis in the hip—it was his best angle while still perched on top of the unmoving Jasper—as the soldier was turning, gun in his hand. Travis let out a startled grunt and dropped the pistol, then stumbled to the door and leaned against it while grabbing at his wound. He still had his rifle slung over his shoulder, but he might not have remembered as he hobbled outside into the hallway.

He’s got the right idea, Keo thought as he looked back at Mercer, still struggling underneath Jasper. The only thing Keo cared about was that the older man’s right hand—and the gun in it—was still absent.

He could already hear pounding footsteps behind him coming from outside the Comm Room. In a minute—maybe half that time, but even that was being overly generous—there would be enough guns here to keep him from doing what he needed to do, what he had come here to do in the first place.

After all the struggling hadn’t done him any good, Mercer finally ceased all movement and seemed to lie back and stare up at Keo. “Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?” Keo said.

“The war,” Mercer said. “Someone has to do it. If not me, then who?”

“Fuck your war,” Keo said, and shot Mercer between the eyes.

He was rewarded with a fresh coat of red paint on the floor.

28

Gaby

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

She hated the sound of his voice and the stupid cavalier attitude he was trying to project through the radio. She would have turned the two-way off if she could, but there was no upside to that and plenty of downside. As long as he was talking, he was giving her valuable information even if he didn’t know it. She couldn’t decide if he was stupid or if he just didn’t care.

“We can play this game forever. I got all the time in the world, sweetheart. Don’t know about you, though.”

I’m not your sweetheart, asshole.

She would have said it out loud if she weren’t afraid he might hear the pain in her voice. At least this way he didn’t know if she was even still alive, and that, hopefully, would deter him from coming in because she wasn’t entirely certain she could take Mason and however many men he had out there with him if they did.

She had to be satisfied with peering out from behind the corner of the large countertop because the last time she poked her head up over it, someone nearly took it off with a bullet that was still lodged somewhere in the wall behind her. She looked past the broken glass curtain wall that separated the diner and the empty street beyond. There were no signs of a shooter out there, not that they would have made it that easy for her to spot them, because they were definitely out there somewhere.

The diner was a place called “Tobey”-something; the rest of the name was buried with the debris that covered large sections of the streets outside. And this was one of the few parts of Gallant that was still (mostly) intact. The rest, particularly around the middle section, was almost complete rubble. She hadn’t realized the full extent of damage Mercer’s warplane had inflicted on the abandoned town until she, Danny, and Nate stepped out of what was left of the bank and into the morning sunlight.

The carnage was everywhere they looked. Shards in big chunks and small pebble sizes had carpeted everything, and walking over them was like trying to tiptoe through one of those mailing foam bubble wraps where every step produced a sharp crunching noise. Despite all that, Tobey-whatever was strangely in one piece—or its interior, anyway, which was why she had stopped to search it for supplies, and maybe a forgotten bottle of water or two.

“Now you’re just being rude, Gaby.” Mason again, his annoying voice still coming through the radio sitting on the floor behind her. He was either having the best time of his life or he wanted her to think so. “If you’re waiting for your boy toys to come to the rescue, you’re gonna have a long wait ahead of you, sweetheart. They got problems of their own right now.”

As if on cue, a series of pop-pop-pop cracked across the Gallant morning skyline. They originated from her left, farther up the street…which was the direction where she had last seen Danny and Nate.

“Speaking of the devils,” Mason said.

She pulled her head back and scooted away from the counter until she was leaning against the back wall with the kitchen window above her. She was still facing the street, even though she couldn’t see very much of it. She laid her rifle across her knees and opened the pouch around her waist and pulled out the field first-aid kit.

There was a hole in her left shoulder, the bullet that had caused it wedged somewhere just under the clavicle. The shot had come from across the street and sailed undeterred through the already-broken front windows. Sooner or later, she was going to have to dig the bullet out. Or have someone do it for her, more likely. Either way, it was going to hurt even more than it was hurting now, and it was hurting now plenty.

She gritted her teeth and fought back a scream the entire time she treated the wound, the silence around her only broken by the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire continuing to roll back and forth from up the street. Danny and Nate were out there, either together or separately, and making their way toward her. She could tell from the way the gunshots continued to get closer with each new volley. More importantly, she knew they wouldn’t abandon her, just as she would never abandon either one of them.

Gaby swallowed the pain and didn’t stop working until she was done. She breathed in a deep breath and blinked away the tears, then tossed the remains of the kit and picked her rifle back up and crawled to the other side of the counter, toward the blasted front doors. To get to the other end, she had to maneuver around the fresh trail of her own blood. There was surprisingly very little, which she guessed was a good thing.

“Gaby, you still there?” Mason was saying through the radio behind her. For all she knew, he could have been talking this entire time, but she just hadn’t noticed because she was so focused on treating the wound. “I’m starting to think you don’t like me. After all we’ve been through. Remember Louisiana? Those were good times, huh?” Then, almost as an afterthought, “Remember Josh?”

She ignored him (The past is the past. Concentrate on the now!) and kept going until she reached her destination and looked out from behind the counter. She scanned the street and the buildings on the other side.

A thrift shop and a donut place were flanked by a couple of storefronts whose signs had come down last night, their windows blown out and contents scattered. Mason and whoever else was out there with him had to be in one of those places, she was sure of it. How else could they have seen her going into the diner earlier, and then later, taken that second shot at her?

“That kid,” Mason was saying, undeterred by her silence, “I swear he had it bad for you. Even when he had you locked up in that town, he was convinced you’d see the light. You know teenagers in love, runaway hormones and all that good stuff.” Mason paused for a moment before continuing. “I guess he was wrong.”

She wasn’t sure if he was trying to goad her into answering or if he really was just reminiscing. And he had to know that the longer he toyed with her, the more time he was giving Danny and Nate to reach her. Or was that the point, she wondered, even as the pop-pop-pop continued unabated outside, getting closer…

Is that it? Is he using me as bait to lure Danny and Nate here?

That, more than anything, pissed her off. Gaby had stopped thinking of herself as a damsel-in-distress a long time ago, and to be used as one now…

She leaned against the counter and rested for a moment. The crawling from one side to the other had tired her out more than she wanted to admit. Her shoulder continued to throb underneath the bandage, as if the entire arm was going to fall off at any moment.

Maybe that would have been best; maybe the pain wouldn’t be so unbearable if the arm just plopped right off…

* * *

No!

She opened her eyes.

When had she closed them?

She blinked against the sweat and wiped dirt from her face, then painfully picked herself up from the floor and searched frantically for—there, her rifle. She grabbed it with her good hand.

How long had she been out? Worse, she had laid her head down on the floor just beyond the edge of the counter’s protection, and it was a miracle Mason or whoever was out there with him hadn’t spotted her and ended everything right then.

Stupid. Don’t ever do something stupid like that again!

She pulled farther back from the edge and sat up, using the wall as support, and tried to calm down her breathing. Her left shoulder pulsed with every breath she took, and the pain was still as awful as anything she had experienced. What she wouldn’t do for some painkillers, or maybe just a little bit of morphine. They still had some from when they treated Nate—

Wait, something’s wrong.

She didn’t know what it was—what grabbed her and refused to let go—for the first couple of seconds, but then it came to her.

It was quiet around her.

The shooting had stopped!

Glancing down at her watch did her no good because she had no frame of reference. They had climbed out of the rubble around the bank as soon as the sun washed over the town, and it had taken her maybe an hour to walk the length of the street, maneuvering around the destruction, all the while looking for danger. No one had wanted to separate, but they had no choice. They weren’t going to get anywhere on foot with their cargo.

They needed a vehicle. A working vehicle. And that meant spreading out to cover as much ground as possible. It was a calculated risk, especially with Nate still hobbling around moving almost entirely on pain meds.

“Gaby?” Mason’s voice again, coming from the other side of the counter. She looked over at the radio, still sitting where she had left it. “I feel like I’m talking to myself here. Won’t you say something?”

He doesn’t know.

She could hear it in his voice: Mason had no idea she had lost consciousness for…however long it had been. Maybe it was just a few seconds, after all, because he sounded more bored than anything.

“It’s not too late, you know,” Mason said. “With Mercer’s people out there, we can always use more volunteers. You’d fit right in, and you can count on me to keep quiet about what you’ve been up to out here. We’ll just pretend it never happened. Clean slate and all that. What do you say?” When she didn’t respond, “I bet all the boys would go crazy trying to get into your—Uh, I mean, be all friendly like with you.”

This time she didn’t stop herself from crawling back down the length of the counter and snatching up the radio and keying it. “That ship sailed when you tried to kill me, you piece of shit.”

“She lives!” Mason laughed. “Sorry about that. I thought you were someone else.”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay, okay, I admit it, I knew it was you. Can you blame me? These last few days have been a real pain for both of us.”

“Go to hell,” she said, and lowered the radio back to the floor. Just holding it to her lips was tiring, and with her useless left arm it meant she had to rely on her right, and she preferred to be holding the M4 instead.

“That’s not very ladylike, is it?”

She lifted the radio back up with some effort. “Fuck off.”

“You kiss Nate with that mouth?”

“I do more than that.”

Mason laughed again. It was loud and booming, and she tilted her head to see if she could hear it outside the diner, but she couldn’t. Wherever he was, he was well hidden enough that his voice didn’t travel. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing that with everything reduced to rubble around her, he couldn’t have been all that comfortable out there.

“By the way, you hear that?” Mason asked. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Shooting’s stopped. You know what that means, don’t you? The rescue has, alas, been canceled. You’re all by yourself, Gaby. There’s just you and me now. Somehow, I always knew it’d end up this way.”

She glanced to her left, where all the shooting had come from before the silence. What were the chances Mason was telling the truth, that Danny and Nate had been stopped on their way to her?

No. He’s lying. That’s what he does. He lies.

She looked back at the radio. Mason was in a mood to talk, so who was she to keep him from flapping his gums? The more attention he paid to her, the less he was looking for Danny and Nate, because she didn’t believe for a second they were both dead, and death was the only thing that was going to keep them from coming to her.

She picked the radio up. “Last night…”

“What about it?” Mason said.

“You attacked us.”

“So?”

“You weren’t supposed to do that. But you did.”

“That’s what’s on your mind? Now? With Danny and Nate dead, and you in that diner all by your little lonesome, surrounded by my guys?”

She ignored him and said, “Why did you attack last night?”

“Because I could,” Mason said. “Because the person our mutual friends were luring to Gallant had arrived, and they gave me the go-ahead to finish you off. I know, I could have sat back and let the little beasts finish the job without ever having to get my hands dirty, but I really wanted the satisfaction of shooting Danny in the face. It must be the Army Ranger thing. I don’t have a lot of ambitions in life—survival’s always been the number-one goal—but to take out a Ranger… Well, I couldn’t resist.”

Danny’s going to love hearing that…because he’s not dead.

God, please, don’t be dead, Danny. Don’t be dead.

“I met your friend, you know,” Mason said.

Friend?

“Will,” Mason said. “The other Ranger. Back in Louisiana, outside of Dunbar. That was me. I put that together. Well, most of it. See, we’ve been connected for a while now, only you never knew it.” He chuckled, clearly satisfied with himself. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to let that slip while you were dragging me around Texas.”

“You were there…”

“Not just there. I was the one who handed him over to them. To her.”

Her?

Gaby stared at the radio, not quite sure what she was feeling. Anger? Hatred? Guilt?

There had always been a large hole in her knowledge about what had happened to Will that day and the days after. The not knowing had affected Lara the most as she waited for him, but it hadn’t been easy on her and Danny either because they were the last two to see him alive, and it weighed heavily on them that they had left him out there, alone.

Maybe, she thought, that was why it was so hard for her to believe that the thing from last night was Will, because admitting it was also accepting that Will hadn’t managed a miraculous escape, a fairy tale she continued to cling to all the way up to last night. In so many ways, accepting that the blue-eyed creature that had shadowed them from Larkin and Starch and now Gallant was, in fact, a transformed Will was the same as coming face-to-face with her failure.

“Hey, you still there?” Mason was saying. “You didn’t fall asleep on me, did you?”

She didn’t bother answering him. Her shoulder hurt and her left arm had grown three (five?) times its normal weight, and it was difficult just to lift it an inch off the dirty diner floor. Besides, Mason’s voice was starting to give her a headache.

“Sweetheart?”

Don’t call me sweetheart, you sonofabitch, she thought, but didn’t have the strength to say into the radio.

“I guess this is goodbye—”

She was so numb and tired and ready to just close her eyes and go to sleep that she almost didn’t react when a hellacious series of gunfire crackled through the radio and cut Mason off in mid-sentence. At first Gaby thought it was all taking place on Mason’s side of the radio, but no, she could actually hear it outside in the street, too.

Crunch! as something broke underneath a heavy boot to her left.

Gaby turned her head—at this point it was the easiest part of her to move without sending jolts of pain through her body—as a man in a black uniform stepped out from a back hallway. The man had frozen in place when his boot came down on a piece of fallen plaster, the crunch that she had heard earlier. He was cradling a rifle and looking forward, searching for (her) something when she saw him.

Almost as if in slow motion, the man turned his head in her direction, and for the briefest of heartbeats they stared silently across the length of the counter at one another. The gunfire from across the street continued, but neither one of them heard it at the moment. For a second—maybe two—there were just the two of them in Tobey-something, staring at one another, both shocked to see the other there.

Mason?

No, not Mason.

She hadn’t needed to see his face to know the man wasn’t Mason because he was too tall and too skinny. He was holding his rifle in front of his chest, the muzzle pointed slightly forward and down, so when he reacted he had to lift the weapon and turn at the same time. She didn’t have to do anything because her M4 was already flat in her lap, the muzzle pointed right at him.

She simply squeezed the trigger and the carbine jumped slightly without the benefit of a second hand to steady it, but she unleashed enough rounds—and, more importantly, in the right direction—that the man screamed as bullets chopped into his legs just around the kneecaps. Many more rounds missed him and slammed into the far wall—and he collapsed to the debris-strewn floor, his body jerking uncontrollably the entire way down.

Gaby didn’t stop firing until she had emptied the entire magazine. She quickly pulled out a fresh mag from her pouch with her good hand and reloaded the rifle, her eyes glued on the twitching form the entire time. The collaborator had landed on his back with both legs still attached, but enough blood had gushed out of his destroyed limbs that they blanketed the area under and around him in no time. A thick stream was already flowing in her direction, and Gaby found herself fascinated by it even as she jerked back the charging handle, doing the whole thing without having to look down at the rifle once.

She couldn’t see the dead man’s head or face because of the angle he had landed, but she could hear him gulping for air just fine. Because of the way his hands were positioned, she had no fears that he was going to reach for the fallen rifle or his holstered sidearm anytime soon.

“Did you get her?” a voice asked. It was Mason, and it was coming from another two-way, this one still clipped to the (dying) dead man’s waist. Mason sounded out of breath, as if he had been running. “Carter, did you get her?”

No, Carter didn’t get me, you shit.

Gaby scanned the diner while doing her very best to ignore the new stabs of pain that seemed to be coming from everywhere. If one of Mason’s goons had managed to sneak into the building unnoticed, a second—even a third—could have done the exact same thing.

So where were they? Because she was ready. Or she was as ready as she was going to be, anyway.

After about five seconds without an answer from Carter, the radio on the floor next to her squawked, and Mason said, “I guess it’s true what they say: If you want something done, you have to do it yourself.” He sighed, sounding exasperated but resigned. “Maybe next time, sweetheart. Until then, don’t forget me, huh?”

Go to hell, she thought. Go to hell…

* * *

Sometime between when Mason signed off and she was telling him to go to hell while staring at the unmoving body at the other end of the counter, she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until a voice said, “Hey-o, what have we here?”

She snapped awake and turned her head because the voice had come from right next to her—

“Relax, it’s me,” Danny said.

She let out a relieved sigh and forced her finger off the trigger. “Jesus, Danny…”

“No, just Danny, but you’re not the first person to confuse me with a higher power.”

He was crouched next to her, looking past her at the dead body on the other end. She choked back tears at the sight of him. She didn’t know how he was still alive or how he had gotten here, and she didn’t care, either.

“You made a hell of a mess there, kid,” Danny was saying. “Remind me never to invite you to Danny’s Game Nights in the future.”

“I’d kick your ass,” she said.

“Oh, I have no doubt,” he said, and grinned at her through a face full of scratches and bandages. Gaby didn’t even want to think about what kind of work Zoe was going to have to do on all three of them when they made it back to the Trident.

All three of us…

“Nate?” she said, almost too afraid to see the response on his face.

Except he smirked, which was a good sign.

“Limping around somewhere outside, but otherwise still in one piece,” Danny said. “Well, mostly. I had to leave him behind so I could take care of the dudes hiding in the donut shop.”

“What happened?”

“There were guys. I killed them. No big whoop.”

“Did you get him? Mason?”

Danny shook his head. “Sneaky little bugger must’ve snuck out before I showed up and ventilated the place.”

“He’s really good at that…”

“His luck’s going to run out sooner or later.”

“Hopefully sooner…”

Danny nodded when suddenly he jerked his head toward the street and lifted his M4 from the floor.

“What is it?” she asked, because she hadn’t heard anything.

“Cars,” Danny said.

“I don’t hear—”

“Stay here,” he said before she could finish.

“Danny, wait—”

But he was already on his feet and rounding the counter.

She sighed and tried to get up, but the pain was too much and she had to sit back down. With the carbine still across her lap, she waited to hear gunshots, but there was just the silence and…

She gave up and closed her eyes.

* * *

“Hey,” Nate said as he hovered over her.

“Hey,” she said, smiling up at him. “You’re alive.”

“I am. And you are, too. You did a pretty good job with that shoulder. Good thing you’ve had a lot of experience lately.”

“You really okay?”

“Stop worrying about me.”

“I can’t help it.”

He smiled. “Okay, if you insist.”

He reached down and stroked her cheek, and she leaned against the familiar and welcoming feel of his hand as she tried to figure out where she was.

She was lying down, she knew that much, but where? It wasn’t the diner’s hard-tiled floor under her, but it wasn’t quite a mattress, either. Maybe one of the booths? It was definitely something soft, and she never wanted to get up.

“It’s a van,” Nate said, seeing the look on her face.

“A van?”

“They found it near the shoreline. I don’t think they had any idea how handy it’s going to be, with you and the chest and all.”

“They?”

“I’ve been called worse,” a familiar voice said.

Gaby turned her head and saw Carly leaning over the front passenger seat of the vehicle. She had a ball cap on, long red hair spilling out along the sides, and she had a contagious grin on her face as she looked back at Gaby and Nate.

“And yes, in case you were wondering, I was totally eavesdropping on all the lovey-dovey talk,” Carly said.

“Thank God you’re here,” Gaby said. “I’m getting so sick and tired of staring at these two guys all the time.”

“You’re just saying that because I brought a van to pick you up.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Now that we’re all caught up, what’s in the chest?”

“The chest?”

“The chest,” Nate said. “Remember?”

Oh. Right. The chest.

It was an old-fashioned wooden treasure hope chest, to be specific. They had found it in an antique shop next to the bank. The building had almost completely collapsed in on itself from the bombing, but the chest, all thirty-by-eighteen-by-twenty inches of it, stood out from the destruction anyway, heavily chipped by falling debris but intact. They had covered up all the edges where even the littlest bit of sunlight could possibly penetrate with duct tape and ended up using three full rolls just to be absolutely certain.

“So what’s in the chest?” Carly asked again, looking from Nate to Gaby.

“You didn’t ask Danny?” Nate said.

“He wouldn’t tell me. Kept saying it was a surprise.”

“Oh, it’s a surprise, all right.”

Carly sighed. “See, this is why I could only get Blaine and Bonnie to come with me to rescue you guys. Because you guys suck. Even Lara turned me down.”

“Liar,” Danny said as he leaned into the front passenger-side door and kissed Carly.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him in tight. After a while, Gaby wondered if the two of them even remembered that she and Nate were still back here doing their best not to notice, which was difficult since they were just a few feet away.

After a while, Nate cleared his throat. “Come on, guys, do you really have to do that in front of us? It’s kinda gross.”

Danny stopped sucking face with Carly just long enough to grunt out, “Shaddup, Nate-o-meter.”

“Yeah, shaddup,” Carly said before dragging Danny’s mouth back onto hers.

Nate sighed and looked back at Gaby. “It’s going to be a long car ride.”

“We’re going home?” she asked.

“Bonnie already radioed the Trident. They’ll be waiting for us at the shoreline, and this time they’re not going anywhere until we’re back onboard. Lara’s supposed to be sending some people to meet us halfway as insurance.”

“People? We have ‘people’ now?”

Nate shrugged. “She didn’t elaborate, but apparently a lot’s happened on their end while we’ve been running around out here.”

“More surprises,” Gaby said. Then she smiled up at Nate again. “What the hell. I like surprises…”

Epilogue

“We took a vote,” the man with the bald head and red facial hair said three seconds after he entered the room and sat down on the chair, facing Keo from the other side of the iron bars. Keo liked a man who got right to the point.

“Pray tell,” Keo said.

He didn’t bother getting up from the stained cot in the back of the cell or making any effort to open both eyes. One was enough to see the newcomer. Sunlight streamed in through the room’s only high window, but it was still closed and therefore didn’t do anything to clear up the stale air. The irony sucked—he was sitting on an island with an abundance of fresh air, but he couldn’t breathe in a single speck of it.

“Half voted to shoot you and toss you into the ocean,” the man said. “The other half wants to make it slow and painful.”

“I’ll take choice number three.”

“There is no choice number three.”

“I demand a recount.”

The man frowned. “You’re not taking this very seriously.”

“This is totally my serious face.”

“Your life is on the line.”

“Yeah? So what. Same shit, different day.”

The man smirked. “Interesting life you must lead.”

“You have no idea. I should write a book.”

“What would you call it?”

“Keo’s Life of High Adventure and Shitty Luck.”

“Doesn’t sound like such a great life, after all.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Keo said.

The man smelled of fried fish, something Keo hadn’t had the pleasure of enjoying the last three days. At least they had fed him something, even if he couldn’t tell what that “something” was. But food was food, even if it did come in clumpy white liquid form on a heavily chipped and peeling cafeteria tray. They hadn’t bothered to give him any utensils—not even the cheap, flimsy kind—so Keo’s fingers were still sticky with this morning’s rations.

“I’ll tell you some stories if you tell me how the war’s going,” Keo said.

“We’re pulling most of our people back earlier than planned,” the man said.

That was surprising—not that they were pulling people back, but that the man was actually answering his question. Normally Keo couldn’t get a single word out of his guards, and the last four people who had come to see him hadn’t offered very much in terms of information, never mind what was happening beyond the island’s beaches.

“We’re not sure how to proceed without Mercer,” the man continued. “He was the engine that drove the revolution. Without him…” Baldy shook his head. “We’re at a crossroads, Mr. Keo.”

“Just Keo. Mr. Keo was the guy I pretended to be back in college in order to get some cheap tail.”

The man chuckled. It even sounded genuine.

“You got a name?” Keo asked.

“Rhett,” the man said.

“Nice to meet you, Rhett.”

“Can’t say the same, unfortunately.”

“Understandable. I did murder your boss.”

“Yes, you did.”

“So why am I still alive, Rhett?”

“Erin.”

“Erin?” Keo said, remembering his last image of her lying on the floor inside the Comm Room.

“We’ve been trying to figure out for the last three days why she did what she did,” Rhett said. “She was one of us. More than that, she was one of Mercer’s chosen few. And for her to do what she did… That’s why you’re still alive.”

There was sadness in Rhett’s face, the look of someone mourning more than just a colleague, but a friend…and maybe something more?

“Were the two of you involved?” Keo asked.

Rhett smiled but shook his head. “No. She wasn’t interested.”

“You ever heard of Rogaine?”

“No. I mean, she wasn’t interested in men.”

“Ah.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I never asked.”

“Not that that has anything to do with anything,” Rhett shrugged. “Anyway, we’ve spent the last three days gathering information, talking to people—everyone she knew, and who thought they knew her. We were at a dead end until we found this.” He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of folded paper. “One of her friends found it. It was wedged under her pillow, which is why she didn’t see it until this morning when she was changing the covers.”

“What is it?”

“A note from Erin.” He opened it but didn’t show the contents to Keo. “It explains why she did what she did and what she was hoping to accomplish by it.”

“I’m not in there, am I?”

“No. She didn’t even mention you once.”

“Given my luck with women, that figures.”

“It’s about Mercer. And the war. Or, as she calls it in the letter, ‘Mercer’s bloody crusade.’”

“What else does it say?”

“The rest is meant for her friend.”

“Come on, Rhett, have a heart. I haven’t had much entertainment in here waiting for you guys to make up your minds.”

Rhett folded the paper and put it back into his pocket. “Suddenly it made sense why she did what she did. It’s something that a lot of us have thought about, but it took Erin’s sacrifice to finally bring it into the light.”

“The townspeople,” Keo said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Rhett nodded. “The townspeople.”

“None of that explains why I’m still alive. Mind you, not that I’m complaining, but being all alone in here day after day makes a guy think, and my head hurts.”

“We know you came to the island with Erin. What we don’t know is how much of a partnership the two of you had.”

“Assuming we had one, how does that work out for me?”

“I don’t know. I guess it would depend on how we ultimately decide to judge what Erin did.”

“So how’s it looking?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Eh, I’ve had worse odds.”

Rhett nodded. “If I were you, that would be my play, too. I don’t see any other option, given that you blew Mercer’s brains all over the Comm Room.”

“In my defense, I wanted to blow his brains all over his private quarters. We just ended up in Comm.”

“In any case, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, Keo. For better or worse, right now you’re nowhere near our top priority.”

“Daebak.”

“What?”

“Just glad not to be number one with a bullet, is all.”

“No promises.” Rhett stood up and returned the chair to the corner. “Like I said, we’re at a crossroads. With Mercer gone, we don’t know how to proceed. Half of us wants to abandon the war effort, and the other half wants to finish it in Mercer’s memory.”

“Which half wants to kill me slowly and painfully?”

Rhett grinned. “Both halves want to kill you, remember?”

“Yeah, but I’m not a fan of the whole ‘slowly and painfully’ part.”

“Who is?” Rhett walked to the door. “Sit tight, Keo. No one’s going to kill you yet, slowly or painfully, until we decide where to go from here.”

Keo finally stood up and walked to the cell bars. “Hey, Rhett.”

Rhett stopped at the door and looked back.

“Do I at least get a phone call?” Keo asked. “Even a condemned man on death row gets a last wish.”

“No one has phones anymore, Keo.”

“One radio call, then.”

“And who would you radio?” He added quickly, “If I were to grant you your wish, hypothetically speaking.”

“A friend,” Keo said. “She happens to be a hell of a lot smarter than me—but that’s not saying much—so maybe she can help you out with your little problem, too.”

“What problem would that be?”

“You got an army, but you don’t know what do with it.” He leaned against the bar and held Rhett’s gaze. “Tell me, why did you go along with Mercer’s plan in the first place? You had to know it wasn’t going to mean dick in the larger scheme of things. Deep down, what was the reason? The real reason?”

“I wanted to fight back,” Rhett said without hesitation. “After everything they took from us—our loved ones, our friends, our city, our fucking planet—I wanted to strike back at the fuckers, and I didn’t know how. Mercer gave me a way.”

“See, the thing about sitting here all by my lonesome night after night is that it leaves you time to think.”

“And a headache, right?” Rhett grinned.

“Yeah, that too. Anyway, it occurred to me that I might know a guy who knows a way you can still do that—strike back at the ghouls—without that whole murdering innocent civilians part. And I bet this army of yours would come in real handy in making that happen.”

“A guy? You said you wanted to contact a ‘she’ earlier.”

“I can’t find the guy, but she can.”

Rhett stared at him but didn’t say anything. Keo couldn’t tell if the man was trying to decide if getting him a radio was worthwhile or how best to dispose of his body. Given how bad he was at reading people, it was probably a coin flip.

“Erin told me she should have stopped Mercer a long time ago,” Keo said. “It was her one big regret—that she let all of this happen. Mercer’s dead, but the damage is done. His way was never going to work. You have to know that.”

Rhett remained silent, but he didn’t turn and leave, either.

“I’m offering you another way,” Keo said. “A real path to victory. You interested?”

Rhett began walking back toward him. “I’m listening…”

“Good,” Keo said. “First things first: Get me that radio. Second thing: Can someone open that fucking window already? I’m choking on my own BO in here…”

About The Bones of Valhalla

Copyright (c) 2016 Sam Sisavath

For every night, there is a new dawn.

One night. That was all it took for the world to be forever changed. Creatures that once lived in the shadows rose, spreading like a plague across the globe, swallowing whole cities and collapsing unprepared governments.

Survivors call it The Purge.

In the months since, every night has been a struggle against the supernatural terrors that thrive in the darkness. The days are no better, with constant battles against human traitors that have chosen to serve the new overlords.

But an end to the nightmare is finally at hand.

Mercer’s army is in disarray, and Danny and Gaby have returned to the Trident with precious cargo. Meanwhile, Keo is a marked man behind enemy lines, and Lara once again finds herself tested as the answer she and the other survivors have been waiting for is finally revealed.

In the finale to The Purge of Babylon series, the future of mankind is at stake. Sacrifices will be made and heroes will be forged, and the road to Babylon will be paved with the deeds of the brave…and the Bones of the dead.

Acknowledgements

To everyone who picked up a copy of The Purge of Babylon, despite the fact it was written by a nobody, then decided to keep reading all the way up to The Bones of Valhalla, you’re the reason I’m able to write for a living and I will never be able to fully thank you. But I’ll try anyway: Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.

Special thanks to George Bardmesser, Davis G., L. Chow, Stephen Schumacher, Tim Kilner, Naomi F., and Elizabeth Stang for everything you guys do.

Book One

With Enemies Like These

1

Lara

“Is it him?”

“Yeah, it’s him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Danny, are you sure?”

“I’ve spent enough time in a foxhole with the guy—then there were all the times we were in the Stan. Bottom line? Sure enough to stuff him into an ancient-ass-looking chest and drag him all the way out here across the ocean. That sure enough for ya?”

“But you have to be absolutely sure.” Because I don’t want to go through this again. Not now, not after I’ve already accepted him being gone. I don’t think I can do it, Danny; I can’t go through it again. I won’t.

She stared through the open door into the cabin where Gage used to reside (before I shot him and we threw his body overboard). It was musty and smelled of abandonment, but maybe that had more to do with the window being sealed up and the lack of fresh air than anything else.

She couldn’t pry her eyes away from the sole object in the room. If she didn’t know it was there—all thirty-by-eighteen-by-twenty inches of it—she wouldn’t have been able to see it. They had deposited it—an old chest that looked like it might hold some unimaginable treasure—against the back corner. Even if they hadn’t blotted out the window, it would have been difficult to make out the object from the shadows. It was constructed of thick, heavy wood, but that wasn’t immediately obvious with all the duct tape mummifying it—Danny’s way of ensuring not even the smallest ray of sunlight could penetrate it.

And he was in there.

Will.

She hadn’t said his name out loud since the chest was brought onboard, and not when Danny led her down here while giving a rundown of what they (he and Gaby and Nate) had gone through last night in the small Texas town of Gallant. Maybe she was afraid of what would happen if she let his name slip out. It felt like another lifetime since she had last seen him, since she had held him and kissed him, before she finally surrendered to reality and forced herself to move on with the rest of her life.

And now here he was.

But he’s not really Will anymore, is he? He hasn’t been Will in a while. Out there, alone, while I gave him up for dead…

Next to her, Danny was picking at a speck of dirt clinging to his dirty blond hair. Danny, like Gaby and Nate, hadn’t escaped Texas unscathed. They were bruised and battered and wounded, but Danny had managed to come through it mostly, well, Danny. The fact that he was here standing next to her onboard the Trident when there were so many nights where she didn’t think she would ever see him again made all the difference in the world. It also greatly eased her mind, because if she’d lost him out there, it would have been her fault. After all, she was the one who had sent him back to Texas on a fool’s errand in the first place.

How did you do it, Will? How did you manage so much with so little help from the rest of us for all those months?

“It’s him, Lara,” Danny was saying. “I made sure of it. He knows things only Willie boy would know.”

“I believe you, Danny,” she said quietly, and thought, It’s him, but is it really him? How long has he stopped being him?

She didn’t know what to do, what to say, or even what to feel at the moment. There was so much emotion roiling inside her, but she couldn’t be certain about a single one of them. That uncertainty, more than anything, dominated her senses, though somewhere in there was the desperate urge to turn around and (run) walk away.

Is that really you in there, Will? After all these months? Have you really come back to me?

Danny was sure. Really, really sure. And yet, the ghouls could play tricks with your mind, make you do and think, even believe things that weren’t true. But maybe the most painful part was that she wasn’t sure if she wanted this to be true.

Will. Her Will.

Back, after all these months. Except it wasn’t really him.

“You said he was hurt?” she asked, managing to keep her voice calm, even steady somehow. Her legs remained still, every inch of her fighting the intense need to flee up the hallway.

“Yeah, he took a real beating last night,” Danny said. “A hell of a mess. Honestly, I didn’t think he was even going to survive, but he pulled through. That’s Willie boy for ya; he doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘No means no.’”

“That’s a phrase, Danny.”

“Same diff.”

“Okay,” Lara said, and took a step back.

Danny did likewise, and she closed the door but didn’t lock it. Since the mess with Gage, they had put a heavy deadbolt on the door with the intention of using it as a brig. She wished she could have said it was needless paranoia, but all she had to do was recall what they had gone through the last few nights, and she knew it wasn’t. With so many people on the yacht now, the chances were good she was going to need it soon—she just hadn’t counted on its first visitor to be someone she knew. Someone she had been waiting for. Even longed for all these months…

Will.

Is that really you in there?

She leaned against the hallway wall and wondered if he could still hear them out here through the thick door. The blue eyes were different from the black-eyed ones, according to everyone who had encountered them. They were faster, stronger, and hyperaware of their surroundings. Could they hear through walls, too? Could he hear the faltering beats of her heart right now? Or sense the doubt in every word she spoke, in her every movement?

You were dead, Will. And I accepted it and moved on.

Goddamn you, you’re supposed to be dead.

“Who else knows?” she asked.

“I told the kids to keep it mum,” Danny said. “But Carly knows. The BBs know it, too.”

“BBs?”

“Blaine and Bonnie.”

“Oh.”

“Pretty much just the ones that came to get us when we showed up.”

“Did anyone see you bring it onboard?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. I guess I underestimated the amount of civvies crawling all over the place. Carly told me the ol’ tugboat’s gotten a lot more crowded since the last time, and I didn’t expect to get back onboard all ninja-like. Would have been better to wait until dark to bring it back, but…”

“Gaby and Nate needed Zoe’s help.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t wait too long. Both those kids were touch and go there for a while.”

“What about you?” she asked. She could still smell the gunpowder on his clothes, in his hair. He had brought her straight down here after returning to the Trident.

“Scratches, bruises, a few tender bones. Nothing to get too excited about. Just more character for the ladies.”

“We need to keep it from Riley’s people. They don’t know him the way we do. We need to keep the circle tight—which means just us.”

Danny nodded. “Agreed. But like I said, people saw us bring it onboard. They’re liable to wonder about it. Curiosity killed the cat, and all that.”

“We’ll deal with it if it becomes a problem.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Danny said. Then, “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“It’s a lot to take in. It took me a few days to just open the figurative door into the possibility of accepting it was even him, and I never slept with the guy—long, lonely nights in foxholes in the Stan notwithstanding.”

I don’t know, Danny. I had convinced myself he was dead, that he wasn’t coming back and I had to move on.

And I did. I moved on, Danny.

God help me, I moved on…

“When did you know for sure?” she asked instead.

“Not until Gallant, but I had my suspicions before then,” Danny said. Like her, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the cabin door. “The first time was in the airfield outside Larkin. It wasn’t him, then. Not really.”

“Meaning?”

“It gets a little confusing, but bear with me.”

“Go on…”

“He had taken over one of the black eyes in Larkin.”

“They can do that?”

“Pretty easily, apparently. From what he tells me, the black eyes are like puppets moving on an almost base intelligence. Eat, sleep, stay out of the light. That kind of stuff.”

“So how did you know it was him? Will?”

“I didn’t, not back then. It’s hard to explain, but I thought there was something different about those black eyes. Then came Starch, when he actually made contact. I still wasn’t completely sure. At least, not until Gallant.”

“That’s when you talked to him…”

“Yup. We had a nice, long conversation. Hours and hours of gabbing. Well, mostly by me, but he eventually grew his lips back and contributed to the convo.”

“What did he tell you?” she asked.

Did he say why he waited so long to make contact? Why he let me think he was dead all this time?

“He’s been a real busy bee out there,” Danny said. “Making a real nuisance of himself. So much so that the bad guys laid a mousetrap for him.”

“At Gallant.”

“Right-o. And we were the cheese. A very attractive and not-at-all stinking cheese, I might add.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“A lot of things. You should talk to him, Lara. He can explain it a whole lot better than I can.”

“Explain what?”

“He says he’s found a way to win the war.”

“Win the war…?”

“Yeah. Win the war. Save the world. Give humanity a second chance. You know, all the good stuff we’ve been waiting for.”

“How?”

“The way he laid it out for me, it sounds doable. It won’t be easy—hell, it’s borderline impossible unless we get a lot more help—but when have overwhelming odds ever stopped us before? I call it Plan G.”

“What’s the G stand for?”

“Really? You have to ask?”

“Oh,” Lara said.

“I repeat: He can explain everything much better than I can. You know him; even his backup plans have backup plans. If I didn’t know what I know or seen what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it.”

“But you do…”

“Absolutely.”

“How sure are you?”

“Pretty damn sure.”

“All right.”

“You want me to stay with while you talk to him?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Lara, it’s him. It’s Will.”

Maybe, she thought, but said, “I’m not ready yet, Danny,” and turned and walked up the hallway, picking up her pace as she went, needing to get away—as far away—from the cabin as possible.

Behind her, Danny snapped the deadbolt into place over the door. Then a second later there was just her labored breathing dominating everything, even the roar of the engines grinding away around her.

* * *

She moved through the main deck, maneuvering around people whose names she didn’t know and children whose faces she didn’t recognize. Riley’s people were everywhere, and eventually she would get used to it, but right now it didn’t seem as if there was a hallway or room or turn where there wasn’t a stranger waiting to almost bump into her.

Most of Riley’s people stuck to the lower and main decks, but it was hard to keep track of everyone with so many onboard at the same time. The upside was that everyone seemed to be cooperating with the rules she’d laid down, and even the kids stayed away from the bridge and upper deck as ordered. She could make out pockets of conversation as she walked through them, but her thoughts were too jumbled to pay any attention.

By the time she reached her destination, Lara had shaken off some of the cobwebs that had lingered during the seemingly endless walk. She knocked on the strip of tan gaffer’s tape someone had slapped on the door and scribbled Dr. Zoe, M.D. on it in permanent marker.

“It’s not locked,” a voice called from the other side.

Lara stepped inside. They had remodeled the place into something that actually looked like an infirmary, complete with cots and all the medical supplies and equipment they had been smart enough to stock up with before Song Island fell. The rest came from the Ocean Star.

Zoe was across the room, tapping on a tablet when she looked up. “Visiting time’s not for another hour.”

“I’m going to have to insist,” Lara said.

“Hey, boss’s prerogative.”

Zoe nodded over at Gaby, who was lying on one of the beds with her shoulder wrapped. The teenager looked over and smiled, and Lara returned it.

They didn’t have hospital gowns, but Gaby was in the next best thing—pajamas and a long-sleeve cotton shirt. She’d been cleaned up, but her eyes were glassy from the medication. The bruising and cuts along her face would stay for a little while longer, but they would heal along with the hole in her left shoulder. Or, as Danny put it, “A going away present from this thoroughly unpleasant little midget we ran across in Texas.”

“How’re you doing, kiddo?” Lara asked as she sat down on a stool next to Gaby’s bed.

“Annoyed,” Gaby said.

“Why annoyed?”

“Because I was shot and I’m lying in here, but Nate was shot too, and he’s already running around out there.”

“Your boyfriend didn’t need me to pull a bullet out of him like you did,” Zoe said. “And you’re due for another dose soon, by the way.”

“I feel fine. Better than fine, actually.”

“For now.”

“Zoe’s right, you’re stuck in that bed for at least all of today,” Lara said. “Third-year medical student’s orders.”

“The two of you’re ganging up on me, is that it?” Gaby smirked.

“It’s for your own good. Besides, I wouldn’t call what Nate’s doing running around, exactly. More like limping around. Slowly. You guys did a good job keeping him alive out there.”

“Danny did most of the work. I mostly just stood around getting blood on my clothes. What’s he up to since he left me, anyway?”

“Looking for an available cabin. I had to tell him there wasn’t any.”

“What about Gage’s? I heard he doesn’t need one anymore.”

“I had to convert it into a makeshift brig.”

“That’s too bad. He’s been really looking forward to that room. Mostly he’s been looking forward to us doing things down there where no one can hear us.”

“Spare me the details.”

“Heh.”

“The good news is, it won’t be like this for too much longer.”

“The Bengal Islands?”

Lara nodded. “We’ll be back on course soon, and we have all the fuel we need to get them there.”

“And assuming there are no bad guys waiting for us there…?”

“Then we’ll say our good-byes to Riley’s people and we’ll have the Trident all to ourselves again.”

“What about...,” Gaby said, but didn’t finish. She made a downward motion with her head instead—difficult to do, since she was flat on her back.

But Lara knew what she meant: Will.

“I don’t know yet,” Lara said.

“Did Danny tell you? About why he came back?”

She nodded.

“But you haven’t talked to him,” Gaby said. It wasn’t a question.

“No. Not yet.”

“Danny’s convinced it’s him.”

“What about you?”

The teenager shook her head. “I never got the chance to really talk to him. It. Him? Are we calling it—him—a ‘him’ or what?”

Lara shook her head too, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe…or cry. She said instead, “I don’t know.”

“It’s crazy, huh?” Gaby said as she reached over and squeezed Lara’s hand.

“Which part?”

“All of it.” She pursed her lips. “You’re scared. That’s why you haven’t talked to him yet.”

Lara managed a smile back at the girl. (No, not a girl. Not anymore. She hasn’t been a girl in a long time.) “What happened to you out there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve gotten smarter.”

Gaby grinned. “It wasn’t easy, being around Danny for all that time, but I managed.” Then she was serious again—and stronger than Lara remembered. “You need to talk to him, Lara. He fought his way to get back to us. To get back to you.”

She nodded. “I will. In time.”

“So it’s really him,” Zoe said from the foot of Gaby’s bed.

Lara and Gaby both turned to the doctor. They had been so caught up in their conversation Lara realized they had both forgotten Zoe was even in the room with them.

“Will,” Zoe said. “It really is him down there. In that chest that Danny brought back with him.”

“Yes,” Gaby said.

“And he’s…?”

Gaby nodded.

Zoe seemed to lapse into her own thoughts, and Lara had to remind herself that she wasn’t the only one who shared a past with Will. Zoe had, too; even if Lara never pried into the specifics, she always suspected something had happened between the two of them out there. But by the time Zoe had shown up on Song Island, alone, it hadn’t seemed to matter.

But now, as she watched the other woman struggling with the thought of Will’s return, Lara couldn’t help but wonder all over again.

“We have to keep this between us,” Lara said instead. “Understand? No one can know about what’s down there. Especially Riley’s people.”

Zoe nodded. “I understand.”

“You need to talk to him,” Gaby said. She was staring at Lara, and might have been for some time, but Lara just now noticed. “You need to talk to him, Lara. You need to hear what he has to say. What he came all the way back here to tell us.”

“I will.” Lara nodded, and thought, I’ll talk to him. I’ll go down there and open the door and pry open that chest and I’ll watch him climb outside—not as the man I remember, but as a creature.

A monster.

You’re supposed to be dead, Will. Why the hell aren’t you dead?

You goddamn bastard, you left me alone and I moved on. I moved on…

* * *

“There you are,” Carly said, leaning against the railing next to her. “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me on purpose.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Lara said. “I’ve been avoiding everyone since the infirmary.”

“Great. Now I don’t know whether to be pleased or insulted.”

Lara smiled but didn’t take her eyes off the group of strangers milling around on the floor below them. There was a steady stream of heads coming out and disappearing back into the deck, a mixture of civilians and soldiers. At one point she was sure she saw the familiar, faded ball cap belonging to Peters.

The Gulf of Mexico flashed by around them, the endless horizon a constant companion on all sides. She could look for miles and only see crisp blue water, which was the only thing keeping her mind even a little bit at ease, because an empty ocean meant no one was trying to sneak up on them. She’d had enough of that to last a lifetime. Except for the smaller refueling ship keeping pace nearby, she could almost believe the Trident was the last seafaring vessel in the world at this very moment.

Of course, she knew better. But it was nice to pretend, even for a short time.

Every now and then she found herself peeking up at the open skies, waiting for the plane she had seen last night to come back. After hearing all the stories about Mercer’s warplanes bombing collaborator towns in Texas, she had been expecting the worst, but the plane had simply abandoned its pursuit (if it had even been pursuing them in the first place) and vanished. It had never gotten close enough for them to make out what kind of aircraft it had been, so she couldn’t even be sure if it was one of Mercer’s.

It saw us. It was searching for something, and it saw us; then it turned around.

So why did it just leave?

Just one more question to fill her head and make her nights more troubled, as if she didn’t already have enough even before she ran into Riley and his rebellion.

“You’re avoiding him too, I hear,” Carly was saying beside her.

“I’m not ready yet,” Lara said.

“I can dig it.”

“Can you?”

“If Danny died, then came back as a ghoul? Oh, yeah. I can dig it.”

“Danny’s one-hundred percent sure it’s him.”

“Danny was one-hundred percent sure he had an alien baby growing inside him two weeks ago, but it turned out to just be a case of bad seafood.”

“What do you think?”

Carly shrugged. “The jackass wouldn’t even tell me what was inside that thing until we were halfway to the Trident. I guess he didn’t want me to freak out.”

“Did you?”

“Maybe a tad. I mean, I’ve never been that close to one of them before.” Carly went quiet for a moment. Then, “But if it is him, it would be nice having him back. Even if he’s not really…him anymore.” Carly sighed. “Is all of this as confusing for you as it is for me?”

“It’s going to take a lot of getting used to.”

“Glad it’s not just me, then. I haven’t told the kids, of course. Man, they are going to freak.”

“We need to keep it in-house. Riley’s people aren’t ready. I honestly don’t know if they’ll ever be ready to find out what’s down there in the engine room.”

Carly shot a quick look behind them before turning back around. “Do you think it’s him? You think Danny’s right?”

“I don’t know,” Lara said, surprised that the answer came out so quickly. The three words had simply tumbled free, but she didn’t try to take them back.

Because it was the truth: She just didn’t know.

“It’s complicated, I guess,” Carly said.

“Yeah. It’s really complicated.”

Carly reached over and put a hand on Lara’s shoulder and squeezed. “Whatever you decide, it’ll be the right decision.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because you’re Lara. You’re the boss lady. That’s why.”

Lara gave her friend a half-smile, wishing she could be as confident.

They didn’t say anything for a while and were content to just lean against the railing in silence and look out at the endless ocean, turning their faces into the cool wind. The peace and tranquility temporarily dampened her chaotic thoughts, though it didn’t come close to washing away her problems. Right now, that was an impossibility, and she accepted it.

The serenity was finally broken when the radio clipped to her hip squawked and she heard Blaine’s voice: “Lara, come in.”

“Just like Blaine to ruin a good moment,” Carly said.

Lara unclipped, then keyed, the radio. “I’m here, Blaine.”

“You’re needed on the bridge,” Blaine said.

“Problem?”

“Something you need to hear.”

“I’m on my way.”

Lara nodded at Carly, and they headed back into the upper deck.

“I didn’t know Blaine was back on the bridge already,” Lara said.

“You kidding me?” Carly said. “He practically ran up there as soon as he climbed back onboard. Also, I think he and Sarah are done.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t want to pry.” Then, when Lara flashed her an amused look, “Hey, I can be really sensitive and shit, if I try.”

“I never doubted it,” Lara smiled.

* * *

Blaine was standing behind the Trident’s helm as if he’d never left with Carly to go rescue Danny and the others at all. Riley was inside with him, one arm in a sling, and looking brighter and healthier than in all the other times she’d known him. The irony was that it took getting shot for the man to finally get some of the sleep he had denied himself for so long.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Lara asked Riley as she entered with Carly.

“I got plenty of that already,” Riley said.

Lara turned to Blaine. “What did you want to show me?”

“Tell her,” Blaine said to Riley.

“Tell me what?”

Riley said, “After you spotted that plane in the sky, I asked Marsha—”

“Maddie,” Lara said.

“Right, Maddie. I asked her to keep an ear on the radio frequency that Mercer’s people have been using since the attacks began. The transmission is supposed to be all in code, in case someone stumbled across it by accident.”

“You said ‘supposed to be.’”

“I did.” He nodded at Blaine. “Show them.”

Blaine flicked a switch on the dashboard. “It’s a recorded message.”

A male voice came through the speakers along the bridge’s walls. She didn’t recognize it, but the man sounded slightly…what was the word…hesitant? But tone was hard to decipher over the radio, and she could have been far off, for all she knew.

“This is The Tide,” the man began, “to every unit still in the field. Effective immediately, you are to stand down and cease all operations. If you’re already on your way home, continue doing so. I repeat: If you’re in the middle of operations, you are to abandon them and fall back and await further instructions.”

Blaine hit another button and the voice shut off. “That’s it. The same short message on a loop.”

“How long has it been broadcasting?” Lara asked.

“I don’t know when it first started, but it’s still broadcasting as we speak.”

“What’s it mean?” Carly asked. “Are they pulling back? Giving up? That sounded pretty important.”

“Messages don’t get any bigger than telling the kill teams to stand down and for people to come home,” Riley said.

“So back to my original question,” Carly said. “What’s it mean? Specifically for us? Call me selfish, but I just care about our own necks.”

Lara stared at Riley. She could see it on his face: He had been asking himself that very same question since he’d heard the message.

“Was that Mercer?” Lara asked him.

Riley shook his head. “No. It’s Rhett.”

“Gone with the Wind Rhett?” Carly asked.

“You told me about him before,” Lara said. “Rhett. He was one of Mercer’s original Four Horsemen. Along with you, Erin, and another guy.”

“Benford.”

“Right. Benford. So what’s it mean that it’s Rhett and not Mercer telling your people in Texas to stand down?”

“It could be any number of things…”

“Are any of them good for us?” Carly asked. “That’s all I care about right now.”

“I don’t know. It would almost entirely depend on what happened to Mercer.”

“What makes you think anything happened to him?” Lara asked.

“Because the only way Rhett would be in any position to order a stop to the war effort is over Mercer’s dead body. I didn’t risk everything to mutiny because the man was stable, Lara. Like all fanatics, he’s committed to the war to the very bitter end. Rhett, on the other hand…”

“Keo,” Lara said.

Riley nodded. “It’s a possibility. It was a long shot, and I didn’t want to invest too much energy in it, but if he’s either killed Mercer or he’s incapacitated him to the point where Rhett was able to take over… That opens up opportunities that didn’t exist before.”

“Keo,” Carly said, breaking out into a big grin. “Good ol’ Keo, always causing trouble. I love that guy.”

“You asked me before what I would do if Keo succeeded,” Riley said, looking across the room at Lara. “I told you I never really thought about it, that getting the hell away from Mercer was always my primary goal. I wasn’t lying. I really hadn’t thought that far ahead, because I didn’t think it would ever happen.”

“And now?” Lara said.

“If Keo somehow actually did it, maybe we don’t have to flee to the Bengal Islands after all. Maybe the answer isn’t out there, but back home.”

“Where is home?” Carly asked.

“Black Tide Island,” Riley said.

2

Will

He could hear them talking through the thick chest that kept the sunlight at bay. They were keeping their voices low enough that if not for his heightened senses, he wouldn’t have been able to distinguish their words from the loud roar of the engine that tried to drown out everything. The walls of the chest vibrated constantly around him and had been since they carried him onto the boat. The cramped space was a nonfactor because he had no uses for comfort anymore.

He was awake, in the daylight. The reality of sunlight inches from his exposed skin, already so weak after his encounter with the blue eyes in Gallant, had been overwhelming at first. He couldn’t really call it fear because he was beyond that; he remembered what fear was, but to actually feel it again was something else entirely.

He could hear them just fine, just as he could hear and feel the sloshing of the waves underneath the moving boat and taste the bitterness of the ocean on his tongue. He’d traversed it once before on a much smaller craft, but he would never become used to it. It made him uneasy being this close to something that could end him with so little effort, especially with so many things left to do.

Mabry.

He was there, waiting.

And vulnerable, so vulnerable.

“But you have to be absolutely sure,” he heard Lara say now.

“It’s him, Lara,” Danny said. “I made sure of it. He knows things only Willie boy would know.”

How many times had he played this scenario over in his mind, during all the nights and days since his transformation? Too many, and each time the outcome was always different…and always the same.

You’re not a man anymore. Don’t fool yourself.

But he wasn’t fooling himself. He didn’t come here in a delusional attempt to regain his humanity. The only thing left now was action, to strike back at the enemy. To save them. Everyone.

But mostly her…

The grind of the door closing, then Danny, his voice clear as day even through the thick metal: “It’s a lot to take in. It took me a few days to just open the figurative door into the possibility of accepting it was even him, and I never slept with the guy—long, lonely nights in foxholes in the Stan notwithstanding.”

“When did you know for sure?” Lara asked.

“Not until Gallant, but I had my suspicions before then…”

He let their conversation drift into the background in order to focus on healing.

He was weak. Much, much too weak to do anything for them right now. If they wanted to, they could come in here and kill him. A bullet to the head. That was all it would take. It was ironic that for all the benefits of being turned, he didn’t have the near-invulnerability of the black eyes. But he didn’t have all of their weaknesses, either.

He had reclaimed a lot of what made him him, but he would never be whole again. There were moments when the simplest things still eluded him—like the name of a book he used to love reading as a child, his favorite movie, a joke that Danny liked to tell even though it had gotten old a long time ago…

Concentrate. He needed to concentrate on healing.

Even with his pain receptors turned off, he could still tell how bad the injuries were. The muscles were torn and bruised and ripped, the tendons and sinews stretched beyond their abilities. There was no pain, but their current fragile state weighed heavily on his mind. Ironically, all the broken bones made lying inside the chest, crumpled up like a marionette with its strings cut, simpler.

Irony? Or was that tragedy?

Not that it mattered, but it would come to him eventually.

It always did…

* * *

“Where are you?”

He woke up to soothing darkness, the blue glow from his eyes the only thing keeping the narrow universe around him from being completely pitch black.

“You’re running again.”

The voice echoed inside his head, reaching out to him from the vastness of their connection with a calming hand. He had to resist the instinct to grab it, to beg for forgiveness, to give in and slip back into the hive like a good little boy.

“I know what you’re planning.”

No, that was a lie. A trick. The enemy didn’t know his plans.

“It won’t work.”

Are you sure about that? he wanted to ask, wanted to pull down his mental defenses—they were stronger now, with the extra day’s rest—and reveal his defiance. But he didn’t. Not yet. Not until the time was right.

“You can still come home.”

More lies. There was no home for him. There had never been. Not with them.

His home was with her. Lara. It had always been. Even if she turned him away…

Would she?

Maybe. Maybe…

“They’ll never accept you. But I will. What you are now, what she made you, this is the new world. Why won’t you accept it?”

Lies. The blue eyes had tried to kill him in Gallant. They had lured him there, with Danny and Gaby (and the boy, what was his name again?) as bait. They hadn’t brought him there to be embraced as one of them. No, they had meant to destroy him. He still remembered their conversation, crowing about how pleased he would be.

“Now you’re going to die.”

“Again.”

“But this time…”

“…for good.”

“And he’ll be pleased…”

“…that we finally ended you.”

“…so pleased...”

He closed his eyes and let the movement of the vessel calm him. He resumed healing even as the voice continued. He couldn’t have silenced it if he wanted to, because the voice prowled the river of thoughts that flowed through the consciousness of the brood that they were all a part of. It was an intimate connection, only possible because they came (were born) from the same blood. His life force flowed through their veins. Through his at this very second. They were as much a part of him as he was of them, and it would always be so.

Always…

“Come home. This is where you belong. This is where you’ve always belonged. In another year, in ten years—a century—you won’t remember the old world. The old you. This is the way of things now. The new order. It’s fate.”

I don’t believe in fate, he wanted to answer.

“It’s destiny.”

I don’t believe in destiny, either, he wanted to shout.

But he kept quiet, because it was a trick. Once he reacted to the voice, he wouldn’t be able to stay hidden from it, and then all would be lost.

“It’s her, isn’t it? You still long for her. Even now, after everything that’s happened. You hold onto the delusion you can be together again.”

No. He hadn’t come here for that. He hadn’t…right?

“Lara can be yours, and all you have to do is come back.”

Lies. More lies.

“Years, decades, generations from now. You’ll always be together, just the way you want it. You won’t have to worry about disease, or age, or death.”

Ignore his lies. It was all a trick.

“All you have to do is make the choice, and you’ll be reunited again. Just make the choice to come home.”

The choice…

“She’ll thank you for stripping away the pain. No more running, no more suffering. And you’ll be together again. Reunited. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

Yes, he thought, Yes…

* * *

“A priest, a rabbit, and a horse walk into a bar…”

Medical ointment passed through the chest’s walls, and though Danny wasn’t talking very loudly, he had no trouble hearing him. He almost smiled, and maybe he did, but simple tasks like that were harder to accomplish these days.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…”

He didn’t stop him, even though he had heard it many times before. The exact number escaped him, but that was nothing new. Information he didn’t need to survive was buried deep down in his mental recesses. Maybe one of these days he would release the box and let them all out, or maybe he would fling the lid open only to discover there was nothing left, that they had all dissolved away.

One day, he hoped to find out.

But that day wasn’t here yet.

“Ah, never mind. It’s just not the same when you can’t see the absolute joy in the other person’s face as I present the joke to end all jokes,” Danny was saying. “I’d open the lid, but I’m thinking you would have done it yourself if you wanted to. Surely those little strips of duct tape aren’t holding you back, are they?”

No, they weren’t.

“And that door… I bet you could breathe on it and bust it down, huh?”

It wasn’t that easy, but Danny wasn’t wrong. He could take it down with little effort.

“I would offer you something to eat, but I’m not sure if you even eat anymore. Or is it just a liquid diet these days? Food through a straw?”

This time he was sure he must have smiled. Maybe.

“She’ll be down here to talk to you soon. I don’t know when, so don’t ask. She just needs time. Can’t say as I blame her. The first time you dropped in on me… Well, you’re not exactly your old self anymore, are you?”

No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how much of his “old self” was even still left after the transformation. He had done things that he wouldn’t have before, things that would have turned his stomach back when he was…still human.

“Something’s come up, too. Our mutual buddy Mercer? He’s either dead or dead-ish. Or, at least, that’s the going theory.”

Mercer. The name hung like a sword over the hive and made the blue eyes frantic. Mercer was the human who had brought death and destruction to the food supply, and in doing so, introduced doubt about the future. Just a sliver, but it was there.

“The food!” the ghouls shouted day and night. “Save the food!”

“I’m of two minds on the guy myself,” Danny was saying. “While on the one hand he’s a murdering sociopath, but we might not have made it out of Gallant without that little Hog of his showing up. So there’s that.”

Mercer’s warplane had saved them, though not on purpose. He was sure of it. It had come there to burn the town down, wasting its armament in what amounted to a revenge attack. Even if there were ten of them—or a hundred—it wouldn’t have mattered. The ghouls were endless, and there was only one way to defeat them…

“You said we were going to need a hell of a lot of luck to make this plan of yours work. Maybe this little revelation can help with that. What do you think?”

Yes. Yes, it could. He hadn’t considered it because it wasn’t something he had any control over, but if Mercer was gone, if there was an army out there…

“The more the merrier, right?”

Yes. The more the merrier. The more, the better the chances of success. He was ready to do with less, but if there was a choice...

His mind churned, processing the new information.

“Anyways, thought you’d want to know. Maybe you can do something with it.” A slight grunt and tired knee joints popped as Danny stood up. “I hate to chat and run, but the redhead’s expecting me topside. Nice talking to ya as usual, buddy. I don’t suppose I should call you Will anymore, huh? You got a new name you prefer?”

Frank. Someone had once called him Frank.

Who was it? It hadn’t been that long ago since he saw him, but the man’s face was starting to fade from his memory, pushed into the background to make room for the here and now.

“Sit tight; I’ll be back when I can.”

Footsteps, then a door opening and closing. The scent of two additional people outside, mingling with the oil and grease from the machines. A man and woman.

Silence again, except for the sloshing of the ocean under him, the roar of the engines. Footsteps moving around above him, men and women and children talking, laughing. He listened for Lara, but she wasn’t among them.

“What’d he say?” a voice asked in the hallway. Young, but familiar.

“Is he still inside that thing?” another voice asked. This one was female and she spoke haltingly, quietly, as if afraid he would hear.

“Nothing, and yes,” Danny said. “Eyes open, kids. No one goes in there that isn’t me or Lara, understand? When in doubt, buzz the radio. That’s what they’re for.”

“But it’s him?” the young man asked. “For sure?”

“It ain’t Santa Claus.”

“Nate said it could bust through that door if it wants to,” the woman said. “So what are we doing down here exactly?”

“What, you got something else better to do?”

“That’s not what I’m saying…”

“Stay frosty,” Danny said.

Footsteps, as Danny left, leaving the boy and woman behind to shuffle their feet. Nerves, but steely resolve.

He closed his eyes and concentrated, willing the bones to mend faster, for the muscle tissues to regrow. He needed to be at full strength for what was to come. And maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.

“Something’s come up, too,” Danny had said. “Our mutual buddy Mercer? He’s either dead or dead-ish. Or, at least, that’s the going theory. You said we were going to need a hell of a lot of luck to make this plan of yours work. Maybe this little revelation can help with that. What do you think?”

A new development that he continued processing, adding to what he already knew, what lay ahead for them. For him.

The news was unexpected but not unwelcome, and he did what he did best—he adapted.

But even as he shifted the plans around in his mind, he reached out with his senses, throwing them outward and beyond the lower deck, searching for the snippets of conversation, the hushed whispers.

“Is he dead?” someone said. “Is he really dead?”

“I don’t know,” someone else said. “Rhett’s in charge now…”

* * *

It was dark outside the boat, and had been for a few hours. He knew without a doubt because he existed on two simple measurements of time—day and night.

And right now, it was the latter. He didn’t need a watch to know. It was in the way the air changed, even inside the tight confines of the chest. The gradual drop of temperature in the room, digit by digit, and the dramatic plunge in degrees beyond the boat’s thick walls.

His guards, who had been talking on and off, had gone quiet. The boy and the woman. Their names still escaped him, but he reasoned if he didn’t recall them then they probably weren’t important enough to his survival.

His body responded to the shift from day to night by cranking up, the blood in his veins flowing faster and freer, the mutated cells coming even more alive as they targeted and closed the wounds and repaired his injuries. He always healed faster at night because darkness was where he belonged. If traveling with Danny in the day had been nauseating, he was in bliss now as—

The boat. It had stopped moving.

How did he miss that before? The vessel was adrift under him and would be still, except for the occasional swaying against the waves. Why had they stopped? They were far from land; he knew because he could taste nothing but salt water all around him. So much of it that he grew agitated and had to refocus on something else.

There. Footsteps.

So many footsteps above and around him. Men and women of all sizes, and children. They were on the upper decks moving around. And talking. The buzz of excitement he had picked up earlier was still there.

“Is he really dead?” someone said.

“Maybe,” someone answered.

“What does it mean?” someone else said on another part of the boat.

Mercer. They were still talking about Mercer.

The new development, and the reason he’d had to restructure the plan.

“Adapt or perish,” someone had once said.

Had it been him? Lara? Or Danny—

A very distinct pair of footsteps intruded on the hushed conversations around the boat.

Heavy. Male. With purpose.

They were moving through the now-silent engine room toward the back. Toward him.

He shut out the rest and zeroed in on the new arrivals.

“What are they doing down here?” one of his guards said. The boy whose name he couldn’t remember.

“You know them?” the woman asked.

“Riley’s men. I don’t know their names, but I know they’re not supposed to be down here.”

“We should radio Danny…”

“Wait, let me talk to them first,” the boy said, even as his heartbeat accelerated slightly.

The woman was calmer, but not by much. “You sure?”

“Yeah,” the boy said. Then, “You guys aren’t supposed to be down here.”

“Hey, Benny,” a new voice said. Male. Older.

“You’re not supposed to be down here,” the boy named Benny said again.

“Lara sent us.”

“No one told us,” the female guard said.

“Radio her yourself,” a third male voice said. He was softer spoken than the first. Easygoing.

“Why’d she send you down here?” Benny asked.

“Backup, I guess.”

“We don’t need backup.”

“You’ll have to take it up with the bosses. We’re just following orders.”

“Is it in there?” the first newcomer asked.

“Hey, get away from the door,” the woman said.

“I’ve never seen one in person before.”

“I said get away from the door.”

“Okay, okay…”

“Stay right there while I radio Lara.”

“Be our guest,” the second new arrival said.

The sea clung to their skin, and fresh fish expelled from their breaths. They were breathing heavily even though they were doing everything possible not to show it. Their heartbeats were erratic, and one of them was on the verge of hyperventilating. Adrenaline coursed through their veins like sledgehammers against his eardrums.

They’re lying.

The click of a radio, then the woman saying, “Lara, this is Carrie. Come in.”

His nostrils suddenly filled with the smell of oil rubbing against leather, followed by the boy shouting, “Don’t—,” but he never got the rest of it out before two gunshots boomed in the narrow confines of the hallway outside his door.

Bodies falling to the hard floor, the clatter of weapons. Racing heartbeats and sweat flitted into the air as the deadbolt was pulled aside.

The door opening and a voice—one of the two new arrivals—saying, “Is that it? Is it inside the chest?”

“I think so,” the other man said. The one with the softer voice. “Should we open it?”

“Fuck opening it,” the first one said.

The air shifted as a long object was raised and a single finger moved. The smell of discharging gunpowder overwhelmed his senses, even as the bitter taste of silver licked at his lips and tried to force their way down his throat.

He bit back the bile and pushed through the discomfort as the impossibly loud crashing of automatic gunfire filled the room.

3

Gaby

She blamed it on the meds, because there was really no reason why she should be so tired or drowsy, or had no incentive to get out of bed when she finally woke up from what seemed like a year’s worth of sleep. It wasn’t nearly cold enough inside the infirmary for her to need a blanket, but she just couldn’t find the inclination to whip it off. The room was noticeably darker than the last time she had her eyes open, though she didn’t have a prayer of telling time at the moment.

Conclusion: Getting shot was a real pain in the ass, and it was something she would definitely say no to if given the choice in the future. Of course, no one had given her the choice back in Gallant. Mason certainly hadn’t.

I hope you get yours soon, Mason, you prick.

She didn’t recall when Lara had left, because there was just her and the doc, who looked busy with a tablet across the room. Gaby didn’t feel any pain, just that annoying fog rolling around in her head, making everything difficult to grasp. She’d only been asleep for a day, right?

And what had she and Lara been talking about? Oh, right.

Will.

He was alive, despite all the odds. There was a time when Gaby thought he was indestructible, that even if you could knock him down, nothing could keep him from leaping right back up to his feet. If all else failed, his love for Lara would bring him home. Naively, she had always believed that.

Until now.

She was thinking about Will, trying to remember the last time she saw his face (his real face), when Zoe was suddenly replaced by Nate. Gaby blinked, trying to understand how that had happened as Nate walked over and sat down (gingerly, she noticed) on a chair next to her bed.

“Hey there,” she said.

“You look good,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Not what I wanted to hear.”

“You still look better than every girl on this boat.”

She smiled. “That’s the one.”

“Glad to be of service. Anyway, I got good news and bad news.”

“Tell me the good news first.”

“We got a whole lot of new chumps to whip at the next game night.”

“Sweet. So what’s the bad news?”

“There are way too many chumps onboard, and they’re taking up a lot of space. And you know about…” He nodded toward the floor.

She almost laughed, because she had done the same thing when Lara was here.

“Are you afraid to say his name?” she asked.

He grunted, but then glanced quickly over at the door. “Lara made it pretty clear we can’t go around blabbing about him. I think that’s a good idea. It’s hard to predict how the others will take the news.”

“Lara’s always been the smartest person in the room. It pays to listen to what she says.”

“You won’t get any disagreements from me,” Nate said as he leaned over her, looking her up and down.

“Take a picture, why dontcha.”

“Zoe really doped you up, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You’re still the hottest thing on this boat. Have I mentioned that?”

“Yes, but you have my permission to keep saying it.”

He grinned before glancing at the window across the room.

“What is it?” she asked.

“He’s still out there…”

“Who?”

“Our pal Mason.”

She frowned. Mason brought out the worse in her, and she couldn’t picture his beady little eyes without getting angry. Not just at him, but at herself for not pulling the trigger when she’d had the chance.

“We should have shot him,” she said.

“As Danny would say, shoulda, coulda, woulda, but didnta.”

“You’ve been hanging around Danny too much.”

“I know,” Nate said, and flicked the remains of his Mohawk over to one side. “I’m even losing my sense of style.”

“So what’s the negative side?”

“Oh, below the belt, lady.”

She smiled. This time it came out better. Or, at least, she thought it did. She was so groggy it could have looked awkward and freakish, for all she knew.

“Strangely enough, I miss it,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Your dumb Mohawk.”

He flashed a triumphant smirk. “I knew you’d come around.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m making an appointment with Carly tomorrow, just for you.”

“I said I missed it, I didn’t say I wanted it back.”

“Hey, make up your mind.”

“Come here,” she said.

“Why?”

“Just come here.”

He leaned over her and she reached up, took his face in her hands, and pulled him down. There should have been stabbing pain from her left shoulder where she was shot, but she hardly felt anything and had no trouble directing Nate until their lips touched. He tasted both sweet and salty, like most things out here on the ocean.

She didn’t know how long they kissed and wasn’t all that concerned about the passing time until someone cleared their throat.

Nate pulled back and smiled across the room at Zoe. “Hey, doc.”

When had Zoe come back? Or had she been here the entire time?

Gaby couldn’t tamp down—and really, didn’t want to—the flair of annoyance with herself for her lack of focus on her surroundings.

What would Will say?

“Seriously, guys, I just came back from lunch,” Zoe said. “Go easy on the lovey dovey stuff when us single people are around.”

“Give us a break,” Nate said. “We almost died out there. Twice.” He looked back at her. “Twice, right?”

She thought about it. “Three times?”

“You sure?”

“Larkin, Starch, then Gallant.”

“So we’re not counting when that Warthog strafed us on the road?”

“You think we should?”

“A hog tried to do what to you on the road?” Zoe said.

“Warthog,” Nate said. “It was one of Mercer’s warplanes.”

“Christ. What else does that psycho have flying around out there?” Zoe looked down at her watch. “Five more minutes; then you need to let her get some rest.”

“I’ve had plenty of rest,” Gaby said.

“Hey, who’s the one with the medical degree here?”

“Can I sleep in here with her?” Nate asked. “It’s pretty cramped out there with all the new faces around. You can’t go around a corner without running into people. And you have the other two empty beds…”

“Okay,” Zoe said, “but you need to let her rest. You’ll be able to talk to your heart’s content tomorrow. Five more minutes of chatter, then it’s night-night for her. And that goes for you, too. I see you barely getting by out there.”

“I’m fine, doc.”

“Bull. Your wound’s going to take longer to heal than hers. By tomorrow she’ll be running around and you’ll still be limping along.”

Nate sighed, but said, “Thanks, doc.”

Zoe returned to her work at the far counter while Nate looked back down at her.

“How’s your side?” Gaby asked.

He shrugged. “I won’t be playing hopscotch with the kids anytime soon, or cannonballing into the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s getting better. I’ve already asked Lara to put me on guard rotation outside Will’s room.”

“And she said yes?”

“Well, no.”

“Good.”

“Why, you don’t think I can handle it?”

“Not yet.”

“I handled it pretty well in Gallant.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sighed. “Real talk?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“The truth.”

“Always.”

“I thought you were going to fall down and die on me every time I looked at you.”

He raised both eyebrows. “Was I really that bad?”

“Worse.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank God you were there, then.” He smiled again, and in that moment Gaby realized she would never get tired of seeing it. “But then I thank God every day that you came into my life.”

“Corny,” she said, but couldn’t help but smile back up at him anyway.

“Corn on the cob?”

“Maybe on a stick.”

“You love my stick.”

“I heard that,” Zoe said from behind them.

Gaby stifled a giggle. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done that, and it should have embarrassed her, but it didn’t. Not here, now, with Nate sitting next to her. The fact that they had survived Texas, gotten through the nightmare of Gallant, only made her appreciate having him at her side more.

“We really need our own room,” she whispered.

“What I’ve been saying,” Nate said. He gave her a peck on the cheek, then whispered, “The things I’d do to you when we’re finally alone again…”

“And healed up first, right?”

“Sure, if you wanna be all cautious about it.”

“I prefer not dying while doing the…you know.”

“Oh, I know,” he said, and grinned widely, though for some reason his head, followed soon by the rest of his body, started to become a little blurry. He must have seen her reaction, because he frowned. “You okay?”

“Meds are kicking in again…”

He reached down to stroke her hair gently. “Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Promise?”

“Always.”

“And no Mohawks.”

He let out an overly dramatic sigh. “You never let me have any fun.”

She smiled and drifted off…

* * *

It was fully dark when she opened her eyes again, but she didn’t have a lot of trouble seeing the two figures moving around the room. At first she thought it was Zoe and Nate—maybe he was helping her with something—but no, because the two silhouettes separated and became three, then four, in all.

Gaby recognized Zoe’s outline as a bigger, taller shape directed the doc from one side of the room to the other. Gaby’s instincts snapped to attention and the words Ghouls. There are ghouls on the Trident! flashed across her mind, but it didn’t take very long before her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, and what once looked like a black-eyed ghoul instead turned into a man wearing jeans and a plaid working shirt.

But her alarms didn’t stop completely, because the man was holding a handgun in his right fist as he pushed Zoe forward with his other hand, and Gaby woke up to him in mid-sentence saying, “—it’ll be over soon. All you have to do is not get in the way.”

“Why are you doing this?” Zoe asked.

“We don’t have a choice,” the man said.

“Need-to-know, Bray, remember?” a voice said.

Gaby turned her head slightly to look at the silhouette that had spoken. He was shorter and thinner than the first, and holding a pistol on a fourth figure—

Nate.

He was standing at the foot of a bed, hands folded behind the back of his head, and he was looking directly at her. When he saw that she had seen him, Nate shook his head—just barely. The man with the gun behind him wouldn’t have picked it up, and she wouldn’t have either, if she hadn’t been staring right at him.

No? Why is he telling me no?

She understood as soon as the second man leaned out from behind Nate and zeroed in on her. Gaby closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, and though she didn’t do it on purpose (or, at least, she wasn’t aware of having done it on purpose), her heartbeat slowed down and she slipped back into a relaxed state, the kind that someone sleeping would be in.

“What’s wrong with her?” the second man asked.

“She was shot,” Nate said. “She’s not going to give you any trouble. Zoe’s got her all doped up.”

“Is that true?” the man named Bray asked.

“Yes,” Zoe said. “She’s unconscious. Just leave her alone.”

“Check her, just to be sure,” Bray said.

“Stay here,” the second man said, though Gaby didn’t know whom he was talking to. It was probably Nate.

Quick footsteps as someone approached her bed; then the heat of a body leaning over her, along with the strong aroma of fried fish on the man’s clothes and breath. A (cold) pair of fingers pressed against the side of her neck, then gripped her chin and turned her head from side to side.

“Well?” the first man said.

“She looks asleep,” the second one said.

“Maybe she’s faking it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Fingers pried open the lid over her right eye, and Gaby stared back at a man with short blond hair. He looked to be in his late twenties and may or may not have been sporting facial hair; it was difficult to see a lot of details with only the moonlight splashing across different parts of the room for light.

Gaby willed her eye not to blink, or move, or for her pupil to dilate. Was that possible? Could you even force something like that?

The man tapped lightly on one of her cheeks, and she let out a soft, annoyed groan and opened her other eye.

“She’s awake,” the man said. “But she looks pretty out of it, like the kid said. Shouldn’t be any trouble.”

“You gotta make sure,” Bray said.

“I’m sure.”

The man let go of her eyelid, and she let it slide shut and turned her head slightly while continuing to lie still.

“What did you give her?” she heard Bray asking.

“Sedatives for the pain,” Zoe said. “I had to take a bullet out of her. She’ll sleep through this whole thing and wake up tomorrow thinking it was all just a bad dream.”

Gaby didn’t know if that was true, but Zoe must have sold it well enough, because Bray said, “Let’s keep an eye on her anyway.”

“Yeah,” the other man said.

Nice work, doc.

“You’re making a mistake,” Zoe said. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

“No, you made a mistake when you brought that thing onboard,” Bray snapped back.

“Thing?” Gaby thought.

Will. They’re talking about Will.

How did they know?

“We have to keep this between us,” Lara had said when she was here earlier. “Understand? No one can know about what’s down there. Especially Riley’s people.”

So how did these two know? They had to be a part of Riley’s group, because she didn’t recognize either one of them. It didn’t help that there were a lot of new faces onboard the Trident these days.

“What now?” she heard Nate asking.

“Sit down,” the one who wasn’t Bray said. There was just enough menace in his voice to let them know he meant business.

“And then what?” Nate asked.

Before someone could answer Nate, a radio squawked and Bray said, “We’ve secured the infirmary.”

“Any trouble?” a voice asked. It was muffled, clearly coming through the radio.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

“Good. Because if this thing goes south, we’re going to need the leverage.”

“So we’re proceeding?”

“Yeah, we’re proceeding,” the new voice said.

Proceeding with what?

Gaby resisted the temptation to move or open her eyes, and it took all of her willpower to keep her arms and legs from making any sudden movements that would draw attention. She continued to breathe, because sleeping people did that. She had to be content to listen and use what she heard to sketch out the room to the best of her ability.

Bray and Zoe were to her left at the wall with the windows, while the second man whose name she didn’t know remained on the right side with Nate. They had smartly split up the room’s two occupants (not counting her) for easier control and had no doubt locked the door as soon as they entered. She expected them to start barricading the door, but maybe they had already done that before she woke up to the sounds of their movements.

“Sit down,” Bray said from her left. Then, a few seconds later, “Please.”

It almost sounded as if he was really asking Zoe, which didn’t make any sense. Men with guns, especially ones that had taken hostages, didn’t ask—they ordered.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Zoe said.

“You already said that,” Bray said. “You should be quiet.”

“Things were going well; we would have taken you straight to the Bengal Islands,” Zoe pressed on. “You shouldn’t have done this.”

“You don’t even know what we’re doing.”

“I don’t have to. I just know what you’ve done. Which is come in here with guns and taken me and my patients hostage. That’s enough.”

“Enough for what?” the second man asked.

“To get you killed,” Zoe said.

Someone snickered. It might have been Bray, but she reconsidered when the second man, on her right, said, “We outnumber you almost five to one on the boat. And half of your number are kids and an old lady. I think we’ll take our chances.”

“This is all your fault anyway,” Bray said.

“What is?” Nate asked.

“Bray, need-to-know,” the second man said.

But Bray ignored him and said, “That thing you brought back onboard with you this afternoon. Did you think we wouldn’t find out? Did you really think you could keep it a secret forever?”

There was a brief moment of silence, and she imagined Nate and Zoe trying to come up with a response.

They know about Will. Jesus, how did they know about Will?

“We trusted you,” the second one was saying.

“Says the man with the gun,” Nate said. “Besides, it’s not a threat.”

“What the hell are you talking about, it’s not a threat?” Bray said. “That’s a ghoul down there, kid.”

“It’s…different,” Nate said. He seemed to be struggling with his words. “You don’t understand—”

“We understand plenty; you brought one of those things into our midst and you didn’t tell us about it,” the second man interrupted. “True or not true?”

Silence again.

“That’s what I thought,” the second man said.

“You can still stop this,” Nate said. “No one’s been hurt yet. Turn around now and leave the room, and—”

“What, you won’t tell anyone?” Bray said, the mocking in his voice clear as day. “Too late for that now, kid.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“What?”

“Kid,” Nate said. “Do I look like I’m a goddamn kid?”

Someone chuckled, before the man who wasn’t Bray said, “Bray’s forty going on sixty. Everyone’s a kid to him.”

“You got a name?” Nate asked.

“Ethan,” the second man said.

“Like I said, Ethan, this doesn’t have to go any further. We can still salvage this. But that option goes out the window when someone fires the first shot—”

Pop-pop!

Two shots, close together, and it came from below deck.

“Too late for that now,” Bray said, and Gaby thought there was something that almost sounded like regret in his voice.

“This was the plan, remember?” Ethan said.

“I know…”

“What’s happening?” Zoe asked.

“We’re doing what you should have done when you found that thing in Texas,” Bray said. “After that, we’re taking over the boat.”

“Over our dead bodies,” Nate said.

“Yeah, well, if it comes to that,” Ethan said, and like before with Bray, Gaby thought she could hear the regret in Ethan’s voice also.

The two shots were followed by silence—maybe it was ten seconds, or thirty, or possibly even a minute (though she didn’t think that last part could possibly be true).

But it didn’t last, and soon the pop-pop-pop of fully automatic rifle fire exploded from below her…before it was joined by gunfire from seemingly all across the boat.

4

Lara

“No wonder you spend all your time in here,” Bonnie said as she stepped inside the cabin. “Compared to the zoo out there, this is paradise.”

Lara smiled and finished drying her hair with the towel. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a moment to herself where she could take a shower and spend more than just a few perfunctory seconds in front of the mirror. “Is that what you came here for? To make me feel guilty about having this penthouse suite?”

“Well, yeah. That, and Riley requested the presence of your company.”

“He said it just like that, huh?”

“Just abouts.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, but he looked pretty serious.”

“He always looks serious,” Lara said. She took a moment to breathe in the cool air; it was like stepping out onto the exterior deck at night after the scalding hot shower. “And since when did you start doing Riley’s bidding?”

Bonnie shrugged. “Well, he is pretty cute. You could even mistake him for handsome, if you were so inclined.”

“There is that.”

“And oh, word’s getting around. Everyone’s talking about it.”

Lara gave her an alarmed look. “About what?”

“Mercer. People are talking about the radio message that we intercepted earlier.” Bonnie paused and gave her a curious look. “What did you think I was talking about?”

“The chest.”

The other woman shook her head. “As far as I know, that’s still just a secret between us. Danny, Carly, and everyone else I’ve talked to has been driving that point home. I think we’re safe on that front.”

Maybe, she thought, but said, “I’m sure we are.”

“Have you gone to see him?”

She nodded.

“Talked to him?” Bonnie asked.

No, because I’m afraid. God help me, I’m afraid.

“I will,” she said instead.

“I know it can’t be easy for you. I thought he was gone, and then he shows up…” Bonnie gave her a pursed smile. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but didn’t quite get there. “Not that I know what it’s like for you. None of us really do.”

“It’s okay, Bonnie.”

“I’ll be honest with you, kid…”

“Kid?” Lara said, giving her an amused look.

“Well, you are younger than me.”

“Not by much.”

“Still technically younger.”

Even though I feel like sixty going on ninety.

“You were saying?” Lara said.

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Everything.” She shook her head. “It’s like you were born for this.”

Or maybe I’m just a very good liar, she thought, tossing the towel onto the bed and picking up her gun belt and slipping it on.

Bonnie watched her from across the room. Lara could tell the other woman had something else on her mind, but for whatever reason she was reluctant to say it.

“What is it, Bonnie?” Lara asked.

“If Mercer’s dead, what does that mean for Keo?” Bonnie said.

The question caught her by surprise, and Lara actually had to take a moment to think about it. The truth was, with everything happening today—Danny and Gaby’s return, the chest, Will—she hadn’t had time to think about anything else. Or anyone else. Not even Keo, who had gone to Black Tide Island to kill Mercer.

You still alive out there, Keo?

If Mercer was dead—or as Riley hypothesized, somehow incapacitated—then someone would have had to put him that way. Keo had the motive and the skills to be the culprit. So what did that mean for him?

She still remembered the last (the last, last) conversation they’d had on the Ocean Star:

“Don’t be an asshole, Keo,” she had told him. “If you won’t stay with us, if you won’t come back to the Trident with me, at least promise me you’re not going out there just to get yourself killed. Tell me you’ll at least try to make it back, and mean it.”

“What if I can’t?” he had answered.

“You can. You just have to make the choice.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll do my best. How’s that?”

She had nodded, and said, “Good enough.”

So had it been good enough, after all? Had Keo reached Black Tide Island with Erin’s help and done what he had to? Was he on his way back to them right now?

That last part was a stretch because he wouldn’t know their current location. The last time he had seen them was on the oil rig, preparing to leave. But Keo would know not to go there after last night. So where would he go instead? What would he do?

“He hasn’t radioed?” Lara asked.

Bonnie shook her head. “Blaine’s keeping the emergency channel open, but so far there hasn’t been a peep.”

“With Keo, you can never tell. How many times have we given up on him only for him to pop up again? That guy has nine lives.”

“So how many has he used up so far?”

“I don’t know, but let’s hope he has a few left to spare.”

“Hope springs eternal, is that it?”

“Have faith, Bonnie.”

The other woman sighed. “Hey, it’s not like I’m married to the guy or anything. We haven’t even done the horizontal dance. I’m just worried about him, that’s all.”

“We both are. But Keo can take care of himself.” She picked up her Glock from the nightstand and slid it into the holster. “I need volunteers to relieve Benny and Carrie in a few hours.”

“Gwen and Jo have already offered. Though from everything I’ve heard, we could have everyone down there and it still wouldn’t do any good. I’ve never actually seen them in person—one of those blue-eyed types—but I was talking to Nate and…” She actually shivered. “I don’t think I want to, after hearing what they can do.”

“I know,” Lara said, heading for the door. “But the guards aren’t down there to keep him inside the cabin. They’re there to keep people out.”

* * *

They found Riley back on the bridge with Blaine and Hart. Besides her cabin and Zoe’s infirmary, the bridge was the only other place on the yacht that wasn’t constantly filled with people, the din of which faded as soon as Bonnie closed the door after them.

It was already dark on the other side of the wraparound windshield, and the bright floodlights around the boat were the only thing visible for miles around. She might have been slightly alarmed at how lit up they were (Like a Christmas tree, right, Will?) if not for the fact that the vessel was still moving. Their speed, just as it had been since they left the Ocean Star, was hampered by the refueling ship following closely behind them.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Lara said as Riley and Hart glanced over.

Riley nodded. “We just came from a meeting with our people. We had a long talk about what to do next.”

“That was fast.”

“I didn’t think we had time to waste. We’ll be at the Bengal Islands soon if we keep on this course.”

“Okay,” Lara said, and waited for him to continue.

Riley and Hart exchanged a look. She tried to read their faces, but came up with very little, except that they both seemed uncertain.

“Guys,” Lara said, “you called me up here. Let’s get on with it.”

“We’re leaning toward going back,” Riley said.

“Going back where?”

“Black Tide.”

Bonnie laughed. “You want to go back? You’re crazy.”

“Not with Mercer out of the equation,” Riley said.

“You don’t even know what really happened to him, or if anything happened at all,” Lara said.

“Rhett wouldn’t have given the stand-down order if everything was status quo.”

“But you don’t know that for sure, Riley. This is all just conjecture.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve been with him long enough—almost since the beginning—to know how he works. And I’m telling you, the kind of order Rhett gave this morning is something Mercer would never have allowed. Or if there was a reason behind it, Mercer would have given it himself. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes.”

“You hope,” Bonnie said.

“I know,” Riley insisted.

Just like you knew Andy was “all-in” with your mutiny? Lara wanted to ask him, but she refrained for the simple reason she didn’t feel like arguing the point. It was done, in the past, and bringing it up again wouldn’t have helped either one of them.

Besides, she wished she could force herself to care about what happened to Riley and his people once they left the Trident, but she couldn’t. She had other things on her mind right now, and the fate of Riley’s group was not at the top of her list of priorities.

Lara looked over at Hart. “You’ve been quiet.”

Hart shrugged, but didn’t say anything right away. He might have been the oldest man on the bridge at the moment, but he looked reinvigorated since the Ocean Star. She could almost believe he was in his late thirties, if not for those streaks of gray.

“No opinions?” Lara asked.

“I got lots of opinions,” Hart said.

“So spill it.”

“The honest truth is, I don’t know. But if there’s a chance Mercer could be gone, and Rhett or someone else is now in charge…” He shook his head. “Maybe this is our only chance to go home. It’s not about the island but the people on it. We left a lot of good friends behind. We didn’t agree with them on the war, about Mercer’s plans, but they’re one of the reasons we ran instead of fighting.”

“You didn’t want to have to kill your friends.”

Hart nodded. “If we couldn’t avoid that, I’m not sure how many people Riley could have gotten to sign up for this. I know I wouldn’t have.”

“But people are already dead, Hart,” Lara said. “Did you forget about Andy? What about the group that came through the Ocean Star with Erin?”

“And I wish none of those things had happened,” Riley said. “But that’s the past.”

“So what’s the future?”

“I don’t know yet. I guess it’ll depend on what’s waiting for us at Black Tide.” He sighed, the decision clearly weighing heavily on his mind. “I told my people about what’s happened, what we think’s happening right now. But I’m not going to force them to do anything they don’t want to. If the majority of them want to stay on course to the Bengal Islands, then that’s what we’ll do. I’m not Mercer. I’m not going to strong-arm people into doing something they don’t want to. I’ll lay out everything we know—everything we think we know—and let them make their own choices.”

“What if the majority wants to head back, but a few wants to stick to the original plan?”

“Then I’ll have to do some begging to get the captain of this boat to let them stay on and help them get to where they want to go.”

“No promises. The deal was to take you all there, not to take one group to Destination A and the rest to Destination B.”

“I understand.”

“Wow, democracy on the high seas,” Bonnie said. “Who would have thunk it?”

“Can I have it?” Riley asked. “Can I get more time?”

“How long is it going to take?”

“A day. Maybe two. This is a big decision. Almost as big as when we decided to mutiny.”

“Two days at the most,” Hart added.

Instead of answering them, Lara turned to Blaine. “Shut her down. There’s no point wasting fuel until they’ve made up their minds.”

“Thank you,” Riley said.

“One day,” Lara said, looking back at him. “I’ll give you one day to decide what you want to do, but that’s it. Make your decision, and this time, stick to it.”

* * *

The Trident was about half the length of a football field—not that Lara ever sat down to measure every inch of it or dug out the manual and looked over the specs. The yacht had seemed endless in the beginning, but that distance shrunk as she familiarized herself with its nooks and crannies. Now with Riley’s people onboard the boat felt endless again, mostly because she couldn’t go a couple of steps without almost walking into someone, or had to go around a throng of civilians blocking the narrow hallways.

She thought about detouring to Carly’s room to fill Danny in on what had transpired on the bridge, but decided to keep going to her cabin instead. Her friends needed time alone after all those days apart, and she didn’t want to ruin that reunion. They would have done the same for her if Will had come back.

But Will did come back, remember?

Except it wasn’t Will. Not really.

Or, at least, not anymore.

So what was he then? Something else? Yes. Exactly.

Something else.

The realization that Will had been out there all this time left an even bigger hole in the pit of her stomach than when she thought he was dead. Will coming back changed was the most terrible thing that could have happened to her, something she couldn’t have imagined in her wildest nightmares.

But here it was. Here he was. Down there, waiting for her, maybe wondering why she hadn’t done more than just enter the cabin and looked at the chest before fleeing. And that was exactly what she had done.

She had fled. Ran away from him. From him.

You fucking coward.

You fucking, selfish coward. He deserves better than this.

Her door was never locked, and except for a Captain’s Cabin plaque (though the Captain had been scratched out and Lara scribbled over it), there was nothing to keep anyone—not even those two kids she had just walked past—from going inside. The fact that no one had yet was a minor miracle—

Something was wrong.

She couldn’t explain it, but she knew there was something different about the room as soon as she stepped inside and let the door click back into place behind her. It was pitch dark, with only a small pool of moonlight spilling in from the window on the far wall.

A second after she sensed it, she smelled it—sweat that didn’t come from her own skin, but from someone hiding in the shadows.

Someone’s in the room.

God, she hoped it was someone, because the only other option was something being in the room with her right now—

She reached for her gun, got her fingers around the grip, and was lifting it out of the holster when the barrel of a weapon pressed against her right temple. The cold contact of the metal against her skin sent a sliver of electricity through her body.

“Don’t,” a voice said, the sound freezing her hand—and the gun—in place.

A strangely warm (and large) hand grabbed her right wrist and yanked away the Glock. The cold of the gun barrel abandoned her temple as a tall figure shuffled in the shadows and there was a clack! from behind her as the door’s lock was twisted into place, followed by more movements as her cabin’s intruder traveled the short distance from her side to stand in front of her.

Despite the semidarkness, she recognized the face looking back at her. She had first seen it on the Ocean Star.

“Phil,” she said, “what are you doing?”

He had some kind of submachine gun pointed at her face. She wished she could have said his hand and the weapon in it were shaking, but they were as calm as could be. With his other hand, he shoved her Glock into his front waistband before taking a step back and then, and only then, letting his weapon lower—slightly.

“Sit down, Lara,” he said.

“Phil—”

“Sit down,” he said through clenched teeth.

She walked over and sat down on the side of her bed and watched Phil walk to the door and lean against the wall next to it. Now that her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, she could just make out the MP5K with the pistol grip hanging almost nonchalantly at his side. Besides her Glock stuffed into his front waistband, he had only come here with just the submachine gun as far as she could tell.

“Just the submachine gun?” That’s more than enough.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

He didn’t answer her, and instead unclipped a radio from his hip and held it in his left hand, while the right continued to clutch his weapon. A sudden spurt of footsteps from the hallway made him turn his head, but he quickly relaxed and resumed his stance when the noise faded.

“Phil,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t respond or even look back at her. Had he even heard her?

“Phil,” she said again, louder this time.

“What?” he said, sounding agitated.

You’re the one with a gun hiding in my room, asshole, she wanted to snap back, but said instead, “What are you doing?”

He finally trained his eyes on her, and even without any real light in the room, she could make out the penetrating stare he had pointed back at her. “You know why.”

“I don’t.”

“The creature. The ghoul.”

Oh, goddammit. He knows. He knows.

“I don’t understand,” she said anyway. “What ghoul?”

He smirked. “You can stop pretending. We know all about it. The creature you have locked away in a chest down in the engine room.” He sneaked a peek at the glowing neon hands of his wristwatch. “But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

“What do you mean, ‘take care of it?’”

He didn’t say anything.

“Phil…”

“You shouldn’t have brought it onboard,” he said. “You should have known better. Riley might have made that mistake, but not you. You should have known better.”

I didn’t bring him onboard. Danny did. He didn’t tell me what was in the chest until after it was already in Gage’s old room.

Of course, she didn’t tell Phil any of that. She didn’t think it was going to matter anyway. The man with the gun glaring at her from across the darkened room right now didn’t care about the truth. He had come here to do a job, and he was doing it.

But if Phil’s job was in here with her, then what was happening outside? Because she didn’t believe for a second this was a one-man job. And she had absolutely heard him say, “But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

“We.” He said “we.”

“Was this Riley’s plan all along?” she asked. “Trick me into bringing you onboard with some sob story about wanting to leave Mercer’s war, then take over the boat when we let our guards down?”

Phil might have chuckled. If he did, it was very quiet and short. “Riley has nothing to do with it. He’s a good man, but he was never really meant for leadership. I could think of twenty people off the top of my head who are more qualified. Still, he got us out of Mercer’s insanity, so we owe him that much.”

Your mutineers are mutinying again, Riley. Why am I not surprised?

“What are you going to do, Phil?” she asked.

He might have answered her, but before he could the radio in his left hand squawked and a voice she didn’t recognize said, “We’ve secured the infirmary.”

Phil lifted the two-way to his lips and keyed it. “Any trouble?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” the voice on the radio said.

“Good. Because if this thing goes south, we’re going to need the leverage.”

“So we’re proceeding?”

“Yeah, we’re proceeding,” Phil said. He let go of the transmit lever for a second, seemed to take a breath, and then pressed it again. “You heard all that?”

“Yeah,” a new voice said through the radio. It sounded…hesitant?

“Do it.”

“Wish us luck.”

“Good luck,” Phil said.

He lowered the radio and stared forward. She followed his gaze, trying to see what he was looking at, but there was just the wall next to the window and nothing else except the ocean on the other side.

“Phil,” she said, “you’re making a mistake.”

“I’m fixing your mistake, Lara,” he said.

“It wasn’t a mistake. There’s a reason it’s onboard.”

“There’s no reason in this universe that justifies bringing one of those things here. Jesus Christ, we have kids on this boat.”

“There is a reason. If you’ll let me explain—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Phil…”

“I said shut up.”

She sighed, and was thinking about the spare Glock she had stashed in the room—and more importantly, about how to get to it—when Phil’s form shifted alarmingly and she saw the MP5K moving at his side.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

Phil came out of the shadows and pointed the submachine gun at her. “Don’t test me. I know you’re thinking about doing that right now. I like you, Lara. I respect you. Hell, maybe even more than Riley. But I’ll shoot you if I have to. So don’t test me.”

She stared back at him, feeling the annoyance growing. And it was that, and not fear. She didn’t know why she wasn’t more afraid; maybe it was the fact someone was in her cabin—her own private space, the only place she could count on to have all to herself these days—with a gun in her face.

“Hands,” he said.

She hadn’t been aware of it, but her hands were pressed against the mattress behind her. She brought them out and put them in her lap.

“Good,” he said, and lowered the weapon and took one, then two, steps back into the shadowy parts of the room. “I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but we’re still on the same side. At the end of the day, we both want the same thing—to stay alive. Our chances are better with that thing down in the engine room dealt with.”

That “thing” used to be the man I love, asshole, she wanted to spit back at him, but said instead, “You said Riley doesn’t know about this.”

“No. We couldn’t risk him not going along with it.”

“So who’s the ringleader?”

“You’re looking at him.” Phil shrugged. “I guess you could say I’m taking a page out of Riley’s playbook. I only recruited the guys I knew I could trust, who wouldn’t like the idea of a ghoul on the same boat as them, either. We’re going to take it too, by the way. The Trident.”

“And you think I’m just going to let you have it?”

“You won’t have a choice.” He tightened his fingers reflexively around the MP5K’s grip. “I didn’t want to do this, you know, but you left me no choice. That thing down there is an abomination. It needs to be killed. They all do.”

“Talk like that makes me wonder if you don’t belong with Mercer after all.”

“Maybe, but the difference between me and him? I don’t kill civilians. At least, not on purpose. I would never do that. Why do you think I’m here? We’re going to use you and the doc as leverage. I’ll get Riley to come around, and when he does, we’ll go to the Bengal Islands just like we planned. No more of this going back to Black Tide bullshit.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Over my dead body, she was going to say, but she had a feeling she already knew what his response to that would be.

Instead, she kept quiet when there was another squawk. Phil tensed, because it hadn’t come from his radio, but from the one still clipped to her hip:

“Lara, this is Carrie. Come in.”

She didn’t get the chance to answer it, because there were two distant pop-pop from below them. They were little more than faded echoes, the noise greatly affected by the decks of the yacht, and she might not have even heard them at all if the Trident wasn’t currently drifting on the ocean.

“It’s started,” Phil said. “It’ll be over soon—”

There was a loud boom! from outside the cabin just before a big chunk of the wooden door showered the room, leaving behind a gaping hole where the doorknob (and lock!) once were. Bright lights splashed through the hole and over a section of the floor—

Phil was turning toward the door, raising his gun hand, when Lara took advantage of the distraction and let herself fall backward onto the bed. Even as she fell, she stuck out her right hand toward the pillows and reached underneath one of them.

She had no delusions Phil wouldn’t know what she was doing as soon as she did it. They were just too close for her to hope she could get away with it for more than a few seconds—two if she was really, really lucky. And she almost got those two seconds before Phil abandoned the door and turned back toward her.

There was a flurry of movement from the corner of her right eye as the door flung open, allowing even more light to wash across the previously darkened captain’s cabin. She ignored it—or tried to as best she could—and focused on swinging her right hand forward and up, revealing the gun in it, even as her forefinger struggled to find the trigger.

Phil’s eyes went wide just before she shot him in the chest. He seemed to stumble for a second and had just enough strength left to squeeze the trigger, sending maybe a dozen rounds into the ceiling before collapsing. Because she was still mostly lying on the bed on her back, he disappeared out of her view at about the same time a figure burst into the room, the sound of a shotgun racking like an explosion in the suddenly bright cabin.

Danny appeared in front of her like a wraith, sweeping the room with his weapon before locating Phil’s body on the floor. He looked up at her, a slight grin forming on his lips, and he was probably about to say something stupid when a torrent of gunfire filled the Trident.

Unlike the first two earlier shots, these kept going for some time.

“Will!” Lara shouted, even as she scrambled up from the bed. “They’re going after Will!”

5

Will

The hasps snapped first, then the clamps along the edges, followed by the strips of duct tape that covered up nearly every inch of the chest’s exterior. The lid flung open with ease, and it hadn’t fully raised ninety degrees before he was up and out, the cold air inside the room brushing against his skin and through the still-exposed wounds.

There were two of them. Men. Their rifles sending stabs of flame in his direction. They reacted instantly to his presence, eyes widening at the sight of him emerging.

What did they think was inside the chest, he wanted to ask them. Didn’t they already know it was him? Wasn’t that why they had come here prepared, their weapons loaded with silver bullets?

One of those rounds punched through his chest and out his back, hitting the wall behind him with an echoing ping! Other bullets missed their mark, and if they knew to aim for his head (all his strength and speed, and all it would take was one bullet in the right spot to end him, end his mission) they didn’t show it in the way they swung their weapons left and right, trying desperately to draw a bead on his moving form.

The room was small and the limited space made it easier (not that he really needed the advantage) to reach his targets. One of them screamed something incoherent as he scrambled to reload, reaching behind his back for a spare magazine. He smashed into the man feet first and drove him to the floor. A slight grunt of shock as the man went down, his spine snapping on impact.

The second one dropped his rifle and stumbled back, reaching for a handgun in a hip holster. The pistol was halfway out of its housing when he twisted and snatched the man by the throat, then threw him across the room. His would-be assassin sailed over the opened lid and crashed into the wall, followed quickly by the loud cracks! of bones, and disappeared behind the chest.

He set his feet to both sides of the unmoving figure below him and went into a slight crouch. There was no point in attacking a second time. His victim wasn’t going to fight back. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to.

A flicker of movement—sudden scurrying—drew his attention, and he looked up and out through the open door and into the hallway.

The boy whose voice he had heard (“Benny,” one of the would-be killers had called him) was sliding across the floor in the narrow passageway outside, one hand holding to a bloody red patch in his side. He was having difficulty breathing as he moved, blood oozing out between his fingers. His face was covered in a film of sweat and he grunted the entire way, until finally making it to the other side and leaning against the wall to keep himself from toppling over.

Then the boy looked up and their eyes met, and Benny might have screamed if he had the strength. Or, if he could, get up and run away. But the boy did neither of those things, either because he couldn’t or he was too terrified to try.

He didn’t so much as see Benny as he smelled and heard the blood dripping from the wound in his side. The wetness was fresh and thick and sweet, and it had been so long since he had allowed himself to taste the glory. There was such a difference between the life force that flowed through humans and those that came out of animals. He knew, without a doubt, that he would heal faster with a fresh supply.

No. Not again.

You promised. Never again.

He pried his eyes off the boy and returned it to the man on the floor. His would-be killer blinked back up at him, pale lips quivering as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. The man moved his head slightly from left to right, but that would be the full extent of his movements, now and forever.

A mechanical squawk from the hallway, before a voice that was all too familiar filled the air: “Benny, Carrie! Come in! Are you guys there? Come in!”

The boy reached for the radio on the floor, the slight movement helping the blood to drip-drip-drip farther out of his wound.

No. Look away.

Look away!

“This is Benny,” the boy said into the radio.

“Benny, thank God!” Lara. She was out of breath, her voice shaky from running, but somehow still in control. “We’re on our way down there now! What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’ve been shot, and I think Carrie’s… I think she’s dead, Lara.”

“We’re almost there! Hold on just a little longer!”

He stood up, and the boy’s eyes widened in response before his hand scrambled to his empty holster.

“Oh God,” the boy whispered breathlessly.

No, not God.

He took one step, then two—the boy flinching with each one—and grabbed the door and swung it shut. Relief flooded Benny’s face for the split second he was visible, just before the door closed on him.

He turned around.

You promised you wouldn’t do it again.

Don’t break your promise. Not here. Not now!

His nostrils flared at the smell of fresh blood. How long had it been? So long. He couldn’t even remember.

Lara’s coming. She’s going to see!

But he was still so weak despite the last twenty-four hours of healing. Could he afford to stay this way if more came for him?

You have a choice.

And there was so much still left to do. So, so much…

You said you wouldn’t do it again!

He focused on the precious liquid pulsing through the paralyzed man’s veins, from his arms and legs and neck.

Not here! Not now!

And behind the chest was the other one. Not quite dead, but he might as well be. Both of them. They were useless now…except to him. Except to the greater cause.

Keep your promise!

He needed it. To heal faster. To grow stronger. He needed it in the worst way.

He crouched over the man with the broken spine. The eyes—dark brown, like his own once upon a time—continued to stare up at him, and bloodied lips quivered and sounds that might have been attempts at begging came out as gibberish instead.

She’ll know what you’ve done. She’ll know.

He wished he could have said it was horrifying and the mere thought of committing the act turned his stomach, but it would have been a lie. He bathed in the man’s plasma and could feel the cells in his body reacting, mobilizing, coming even further alive to tackle his remaining wounds and mend him from the inside out.

You lied.

He made a mess, but he didn’t care.

You made a promise, and you lied.

When he finished with the first one, he got up and walked around the chest and started on the second.

So what else is new?

* * *

“Will.”

No, not Will. He hadn’t been that for a long time now.

It seemed like years ago—decades—since the last time he saw the true color of her eyes. He longed to reach out and run his fingers along the supple curves of her skin and wallow in the taste of her lips. Those lips were pale and dry tonight, as they had been for the last few weeks and months since…

I died. Ever since I died.

She looked into the room, the light from the open door behind her washing across portions of the cabin while leaving the rest shrouded in darkness. He had left the body of the first man where it lay, in front and slightly to the left of her. There was a slight shift in the air as she looked down at the dead man, accompanied by her slightly accelerating heartbeat. He could almost taste the wetness of her saliva as she forced them down her throat and did her best to orient herself to the horrors of what he had done, what he had been doing for the last—

How long had it been since the men came into the room to kill him?

Seconds? Minutes? Maybe hours.

It was always difficult to tell time when he fed, and it had been such a long time that he might have lost himself in the act.

Exhilaration overwhelmed him, and he was as alive now (Ha!) as he had ever been since the transformation. The bones were healing, the skin reforming, and every inch of him bristled with new flesh.

He stayed in the shadowed back part of the room, with his second would-be killer lying nearby, the man’s blood forming a jagged circle at his feet. If he wasn’t already bloated from his feeding, he would have lapped up the precious fluids no matter how uncivilized it might have looked. What did civilization have to do with it anyway? He was no longer human. It didn’t matter how much he held on, because he could never go back. He could never have her back.

Never…

“Will,” she said again, his name (No, not your name now, your name then) almost painful as she forced it between her lips.

Her legs were unsteady and her arms were tense at her sides. There was blood on her clothes, but it wasn’t hers.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. Or hissed. He hated the sound that came out, reminding him of the abomination he had become and how far he had drifted from himself, from her.

They were alone down here, in the lower bowels of the boat. She had sent the others away with the body of the woman and the wounded boy. (Benny. His name’s Benny.) She had the radio on her hip, but he’d heard the click as she turned it off.

It was just the two of them now. Here, in this room, with two bodies between them and blood everywhere.

God, he really did make a mess.

“No?” she said.

“Not Will,” he hissed. “Not anymore.”

“What should I call you, then?”

He didn’t answer.

“What should I call you, then?” It was a good question. He had been asking himself that ever since Kate transformed him outside that nothing gas station in Louisiana.

He remembered a little girl in a rotting barn back in Texas asking him the exact same question: “What are you, mister?”

I don’t know, he had thought then, and he thought it again now: I don’t know.

When he didn’t answer, Lara said, “I have to call you something.”

“Frank,” he said.

“Frank,” she repeated. Then something that looked like recognition sparkled in her eyes. “Frank,” she said again.

She tried to peer into the shadows, to get a better look at him. It would have been difficult without light, and he imagined her fighting the urge to reach back and hit the light switch. But even if she couldn’t really see him, she would have no trouble seeing the blue of his eyes. Their glow were beacons in the darkness, at once bright and unnatural.

“Keo,” she said. “He once told me he had someone he wanted me to meet. Someone who knew how to defeat the ghouls.” She paused, then, “That was you.”

“Yes…”

“But you left him before we could meet.”

“I had no choice.”

“Why?”

“Danny and Gaby were in trouble.”

She seemed to think about it. “When they were trapped in Starch?”

“Before…”

“Larkin. In the airport.”

“Yes.”

“Mercer.”

“Yes…”

Her shoulders drooped slightly, releasing some of the tension she had come into the room with and held onto until now.

“Can I turn on the light?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Not yet…”

“I know what you look like.”

“You don’t…know.”

“Don’t I?”

Why did she want him to explain it? Didn’t she understand why he didn’t want her to see him like this? This…monster?

“Not yet,” he said.

“But soon.”

Maybe, he thought, but said, “Yes.”

“You fed on them.”

She was staring at the feet of the dead man sticking out from behind the bullet-riddled chest. Splintered pieces of the furniture were scattered in and out of the shadows, sprinkled among the puddles of blood.

“I had to,” he said.

“Because they tried to kill you…”

“No.”

“No?”

“I was too badly injured. The injuries weren’t healing fast enough.”

“And feeding on them…helped?”

“Yes.”

“They were Riley’s people,” she said, and glanced back at the open door as if afraid of being overheard. “I don’t know how they knew about you, but they came down here to kill you. There was another one in my room. I had to kill him.” A look of sorrow, there and gone in a flash, replaced by steely determination. “They killed one of us. Carrie.” She returned her gaze to him. “But you never met her, did you? She came to the island while you were gone.”

“No,” he said. Hissed. He hated the sound.

“What about Benny? Do you remember him?”

Maybe. He knew the name, because one of the assassins had said it. He dug into his memory reservoirs, but he couldn’t find the boy in there.

“No,” he said.

“Danny told me you have trouble remembering them. Names and places. But you remember the important things. Like him, and Gaby…and me.”

I’ll always remember you.

“Yes,” he said.

Emotions flickered across her face. Happiness, sadness, and resignation. Back and forth they went, reminding him again that he should have been there for her during all those hard days and dark nights. She had been alone because he had failed to come back to her like he had promised.

He saw all of that in her eyes now as she stood before him, unsure whether to turn and run out the door or stay.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“For what?”

For everything.

“For feeding on them,” he said.

“You said you needed it.”

And it’s been so long…

“Yes,” he said.

She stood taller, her growing resoluteness manifested in the visible strength along the lines around her eyes and mouth, in her steady stance. This wasn’t the Lara he remembered. She wasn’t the same woman he had left behind and failed. That Lara was younger and less decisive.

We’ve both changed so much.

Her, for the better.

And me…

He didn’t know. Even now, after all these days and weeks and months, he still didn’t know the answer.

“What are you, mister?” the child had asked him.

“You took a risk coming here,” Lara said.

“I had to,” he said.

“Because you had something to tell us.”

Because I needed to see you.

“Yes,” he said.

“You know what’s out there. Keo said you had information. Not just about the ghouls, but about the ones pulling the strings. The blue eyes. You’re one of them…but not. You know their secrets. That’s why they tried to ambush you in Gallant.”

“Yes…”

“You think we can win this war. Turn everything around and end this nightmare, finally.”

“Yes…”

“How?”

“You stopped the boat.”

She gave him a puzzled look, caught off guard by his change of topic. Then, nodding, “I did.”

“Why?”

“Riley’s people—before all of this—were considering going back to Black Tide Island. They think he’s dead. Mercer. You know about that?”

“Yes,” he hissed. “Danny told me.”

And he had heard the conversations across the boat. The hushed whispers in secret and the rising voices in the open. They were all full of uncertainty and exhilaration and hope.

“He may or may not be dead,” Lara said. She watched his face intently, though he wondered how much she could really see without coming closer. “Some of them want to go back to find out for sure.”

“Let them.”

“Go back?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’ll need them.”

“Who?”

“Mercer’s army. We can use them.”

“Were they always part of the plan?”

“No. But the plan’s changed.”

A flash of amusement. “Backup plans for your backup plans. That’s what Danny said.”

Not quite, but close. It was more like adapt or perish.

Who had said that? He still couldn’t remember.

“So what do we need Mercer’s army for?” Lara asked.

She moved closer, kicking at a couple of bullet casings on the floor. She stopped briefly, as if coming to her senses—but then started forward again.

She’s so much stronger than before. So, so much stronger.

He wanted badly to reach out and brush his fingers against her cheeks, to taste her lips. But he resisted and didn’t move, and let her come to him—into the shadows where he resided. He could sense the fear slipping from her little by little.

“Tell me,” she said, and leaned forward into the shadows.

“It won’t be easy, and people will die.”

“A lot of people have already died.”

“More will die.”

Maybe some friends…

She nodded. “You risked a lot to reach me. And here I am. So tell me everything.”

“There’s a way to reverse the infection.”

“How?”

“Mabry is the key.”

“I thought he was just another blue-eyed ghoul.”

“He’s more than that. He’s always been more than that. He’s the beginning…”

“The beginning of what?”

“The beginning of everything.”

“I don’t understand…”

“It won’t be easy…”

She smiled. “And when have things being hard ever stopped us before?”

6

Lara

Her hands were still shaking ten minutes after she stepped outside the cabin. She leaned against the wall next to where Carrie and Benny had lain after being shot. She willed her breathing to slow down, afraid someone might hear and realize she was just as scared and wholly unprepared for all of this as they were. Without the engine running or any movement at all above and around her, the yacht was ghostly quiet, leaving just her slightly labored heartbeat to fill in the noise.

She found herself staring at the blood on the floor and a bullet casing frozen in the congealed liquid. There was a lot of blood, most of that coming from a bullet that had severed Carrie’s femoral artery. If she had any desire at all to give the shooters the benefit of the doubt (maybe they never meant to kill her), she didn’t anymore. The two men had come down here to kill Will, and they had been willing to do anything—and did—to get that done.

One gone and one down. How many more before tonight’s over?

She looked up at the closed door.

He was in there. Will.

No, not Will. Not anymore. He hadn’t been her Will for a while now. If only she hadn’t let him leave with Gaby and Jen in that helicopter…

I shouldn’t have let him go. Why did I let him go?

Because she had no choice, that’s why. She wasn’t the woman she was now. She could have no more stopped him from leaving than she could tell Danny not to bring Will (Not Will, not anymore) onboard even if he had told her what was in the chest before he actually showed up.

Even now, a part of her wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if he had stayed dead. For him, for them, for her. It was selfish, and she hated herself for even thinking it, but it had always been at the back of her mind. It came to the forefront now, stronger than any other emotion, followed quickly by guilt.

But there was no denying it: His presence on the Trident had complicated things, and not just with Riley’s people. It had turned her world upside down and made her start to doubt herself again. Without Will, she had been forced to act, to make decisions for everyone, and follow through on them.

He had never left the shadowed corner while she was inside the cabin, the blue of his eyes like twin crystals looking out of the darkness at her. But she hadn’t been afraid—not really—and maybe that was because she knew it was him in there.

Except it wasn’t him. Not really.

Her hands were still trembling, though it had lessened noticeably as she unclipped the radio and brought it to her lips. “Danny…”

“Boss lady,” Danny answered through the two-way.

“What’s the situation?”

“They’re still inside and we’re still outside. Other than that? Everything’s peachy.”

“Riley?”

“He’s here with me right now, trying to talk his wayward sheep off the cliff. I told him he should have just prodded them with his shepherd’s stick. What do you call those things?”

“So it’s not working?”

“Not so much.” Danny paused, then, “How did things go on your end?”

“Where are you right now?”

“I got the earbuds on. It’s just the dos of us.”

“You were right,” Lara said. “It’s him. It’s Will. Or it used to be him. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. It’ll take time to wrap your head around the whole thing. It did with me, but then I’ve always had a bigger-than-average size head.”

She pursed a smile at the empty hallway. If anyone knew what she was going through, it would be Danny.

“Did Bonnie find out what happened?” she asked. “How they knew about him?”

“It was Annie,” Danny said. “Apparently she spilled the beans to Phil, and he decided to make himself judge, jury, and dickhead. Convinced the other four to go along with it.”

Annie. She had come to them with Gaby and Nate back when they still had Song Island. She’d become a valuable member of the group, spending most of her time helping Sarah in the galley and Carly with the kids. Unlike Bonnie and the others, who had taken to their weapons training with enthusiasm, Annie had always done so reluctantly, and even then only because Lara insisted everyone learn how to handle a firearm.

“How did Bonnie find out it was her?” Lara asked.

“She didn’t,” Danny said. “Annie confessed.”

“Why?”

“You’ll have to ask her yourself. Let me know if you need a hand with the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“What about Riley? Do you think he knew?”

“Didn’t you tell me Phil said he didn’t?”

“He did…”

“But you don’t believe him?”

“I just want to be sure.”

“I don’t think he knew,” Danny said. “You should have seen the look on his face when I told him. You would have thought I’d kicked his cat and tossed his nana out the window, then tried to light his double-wide on fire.”

“Was this Riley’s plan all along?” she had said to Phil. “Trick me into bringing you onboard with some sob story about wanting to leave Mercer’s war, then take over the boat when we let our guards down?”

“Riley has nothing to do with this,” Phil had said. “Riley’s a good man, but he was never really meant for leadership.”

First Andy on the Ocean Star, then that hiccup with Lang and Ezekiel, and now Phil and the others.

Jesus, Riley. How many other bad choices did you make that’s going to come back and haunt me?

“All right,” Lara said into the radio. “I’m coming to you.”

“I await with bated breath,” Danny said.

She put the radio away and gave the cabin door one last look. She wondered if he could hear her in there, through the door and walls. Besides their unnatural (So what’s natural about any of this?) speed and strength, the blue eyes also had heightened hearing, according to Danny and Gaby.

Because that’s what he is now. He’s a blue-eyed ghoul.

But that wasn’t entirely true, either. He was, but he also wasn’t.

So where did that leave him?

She didn’t know, and she suspected he didn’t, either. They were in uncharted territory, that much was clear. There was nothing normal about this. Even in a post-Purge world, this was something…else.

She headed back up the corridor. She passed the machinery, went up the stairs, and pushed through the door onto the lower deck, where Gwen and Jo were waiting with M4 rifles on the other side. The two women were alert, their bodies tensing as she emerged from the hatch.

“No one goes down there,” she told them.

They both nodded and gripped their weapons tighter. She didn’t have to tell them to stay alert, because they already knew about Carrie and Benny. But especially about what had happened to Carrie.

One gone and one down. How many more before tonight’s over?

* * *

“Why did you do it?” Lara asked.

“You don’t know?” Annie said, as if the answer was so obvious she couldn’t comprehend why Lara didn’t already know.

“Tell me.”

“Because it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t have let Danny bring it onboard. It’s dangerous, Lara.”

She stood across the room from Annie, who sat on one of the small cots they had put into the crew cabin. Three people shared the room—Annie, Lorelei…and Carrie. If the irony of being locked in here with Carrie’s personal belongings—her clothes, keepsakes, even her weapons—did anything to Annie, the woman didn’t show it. Not that Annie was a stone in front of her. Lara could see something that might have been sorrow in Annie’s eyes, but how much of that was real and how much an act?

There was nothing separating them but empty space, not that Lara was afraid Annie would do something stupid, like try to lunge for her holstered sidearm. The woman sat with her hands in her lap and stared back at her, and hadn’t tried to avoid Lara’s eyes when she stepped inside the room.

“You know that, right?” Annie said now, when Lara didn’t respond. “You shouldn’t have brought it onboard, Lara. It’s too dangerous to have around us, the kids...”

“It wasn’t dangerous to anyone…until it had to be.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve been out there, Lara. I know what those things can do. I’ve seen what those things can do.”

Lara knew all about Annie’s past, about what had happened at the farmhouse in Louisiana. That was also the first time Gaby had come face-to-face with the blue-eyed ghouls. Everyone had survived the encounter…except for Lance, Annie’s boyfriend.

“So this is revenge?” Lara asked.

“Revenge? Why would you think that?”

“Because of what they did to Lance.”

“No. This isn’t revenge, Lara. I’m trying to protect us. I’m doing exactly what you would have done if that thing down there didn’t use to be Will.”

Lara sighed. She didn’t know what she was doing here in the first place. There was nothing Annie could tell her that would help resolve what was happening above them at this very moment. She could hear it in the other woman’s voice—Annie believed everything she was saying, even if the outcome of her actions hadn’t been what she wanted.

“You still shouldn’t have done it,” Lara said.

“I had no choice.”

“You could have come to me.”

“And would you have listened?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe, but you still wouldn’t have acted any differently, would you?”

Lara didn’t answer right away.

“Of course not,” Annie said. “That’s why you didn’t give me any choice.”

“We always have choices, Annie. You just chose the wrong one.”

“I didn’t…” She shook her head. “I did what I had to do to get rid of that monster.”

Will. His name is Will. Whatever he’s become, he’s still Will.

…mostly.

“All right,” Lara said, and turned to go.

“Carrie…”

Lara, with one hand on the door lever, turned back. “What about her?”

“I’m sorry about what happened. They told me they wouldn’t hurt anyone. They were just going to go down there and kill it.”

“What about Zoe and the infirmary?”

“They didn’t tell me anything about that.”

“Would it have made a difference if they had?”

Annie opened her mouth to answer, but no sounds ever came out.

“Right,” Lara said, and opened the door and stepped outside.

Bonnie was waiting for her in the narrow passageway, and the other woman padlocked the door as soon as Lara stepped out. “Talk about a waste of a whole room.”

“We’ll move her when everything’s calmed down,” Lara said.

Bonnie pocketed the key as they headed up the hallway. Without constantly bumping into someone from Riley’s party, they could walk side by side without a problem, a luxury Lara didn’t think she would ever get back.

“Where is everyone?” Lara asked.

“Riley ordered his people into their cabins, and the rest are securing themselves in the lower deck. The doors are locked and I have Lorelei walking around down there to make sure they don’t stray.”

“Lorelei?”

“She wanted something to do after what happened to Carrie. Keep herself occupied. The kid’s suffering, but she’s a trooper.”

“She’s by herself down there?”

“She has a radio. The only other able body we have left is Blaine, and I didn’t think it was wise to take him away from the bridge.”

Lara nodded her approval. “What’s Benny’s situation?”

“The vet says he’s stable.”

“The vet” was George, the veterinarian who had been a part of Riley’s crew on the Ocean Star. With Zoe stuck in the infirmary, he was the next best option.

“A hell of a mess,” Bonnie said. “You really think Riley didn’t know about any of this?”

“I don’t think he had any idea.”

“He’s cute, but he’s all kinds of clueless, isn’t he?”

“I don’t think clueless is the word. Maybe…”

“What?”

“Too trusting.”

“Yeah, that can definitely get you shot these days.”

The old her would have vehemently disagreed, but if the last year had taught her anything, it was that people you couldn’t trust with absolute one-hundred percent certainty were best approached with a gun at the ready.

I bet Mom would have loved to hear me say that.

They took the stairs, and on the way up Bonnie said, “What did he say?”

Bonnie didn’t have to elaborate on who he was. Lara didn’t answer right away, mostly because she still didn’t know how to process all of it. There was so much information, so many ifs and whys and hows that it made her head hurt.

It’s a suicide mission, she remembered thinking when he told her his plan, what Danny called Plan G.

At the same time, she couldn’t help thinking, But what if it worked? Then it would change everything. It would change everything.

But that was the problem. It could work, but it could just as easily not. There were so many possibilities, so many pieces that still needed to fall into place. And at the very center of it was Will…and her.

Always the two of us, Will. Even now, after everything that’s happened, why does it still have to fall on our shoulders?

“Lara?” Bonnie said next to her. “What did he say?”

“I’ll tell you and everyone else later,” she said. “Right now we have more immediate problems.”

* * *

With Riley’s people confined to the lower deck, Lara and Bonnie made good time reaching the floor with the infirmary. Danny was there to meet them when they climbed up the stairs. He was leaning against the wall, sipping from a ceramic mug with steam rising above the rim. Danny had slipped on his old SWAT comm gear with the throat mic and earbud and a tactical vest.

“Kendra was in the armory, counting the hardware,” Danny said when he saw them. “She said they swiped the mags with silver loads, the sneaky little buggers.”

“I guess they didn’t know about silver not affecting him,” Bonnie said.

“Oh, they affect him, all right. They just don’t put him down. It’s all about the ol’ noggin,” Danny said, tapping his temple with his free hand for effect. “It works on the black eyes so they probably assumed it was the same with the blue eyes, and you know what happens when you assume. Assholism.”

“What’s the situation?” Lara asked.

“Same-o, same-o.” He turned around and led them through the hallway. “O-O-O-O’Reilly hasn’t had much luck talking his boys down, before you ask.”

“There’s two of them?”

“A Bray and an Ethan.”

“What kind of name is Bray?” Bonnie asked.

“Redneckian, would be my guess,” Danny said. “As far as we can tell, they haven’t harmed anyone yet. The mucho importanto part being yet.”

“You think they will?” Lara asked.

“Dunno. They shot Benny and killed Carrie, didn’t they?”

“I don’t think they meant to kill Carrie. The bullet hit her femoral artery. It probably wasn’t on purpose.”

“You sure about that?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter. She’s dead and they’re dead.”

“Dead used to be dead,” Danny said. “Not so much anymore.”

No, not anymore. Will’s further proof of that.

The others were at the end of the hallway, gathered around the closed infirmary door. Riley and Hart were there with empty gun holsters, and she had expected resistance when she ordered Danny to disarm them, but Riley had capitulated without putting up much of a fight.

Hart and Riley being present wasn’t a surprise, but Jolly was. The young man nodded when he saw her, and said, “Ma’am.”

“I told you not to call me that, Jolly,” Lara said.

“Sorry, ma—I mean, uh, Lara.”

“You can call me ma’am all you want,” Bonnie said from behind Lara.

Jolly flashed a shy smile.

Riley and Hart glanced over as she approached them. The two men were leaning on opposite sides of the infirmary door, and Lara wondered what exactly they were going to do if Bray and Ethan decided to come out, guns blazing, at that very second. The only one with a weapon was Maddie, who stood slightly back in the hallway, with her M4 at the ready.

“No luck?” Lara asked.

Riley shook his head and frowned. “No.”

“They’re stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place,” Hart said, his voice purposefully low. “They might have had some semblance of a plan when Phil was still around, but after he left this mortal coil, along with those two idiots in the engine room, they don’t have any idea what to do next.”

“That makes them even more dangerous,” Maddie said.

Lara nodded. She was right, but so was Hart.

“Gaby, Nate, and Zoe?” Lara asked.

“As far as we know, they’re okay,” Maddie said. “I don’t know how long that’s going to last, though.”

Lara could read it in Maddie’s eyes—the small Texan wanted to go in there and get it over with. She could tell that much just by the way Maddie gripped her rifle, clutching and unclutching the pistol grip under the barrel.

She turned back to Danny, casually braced against the wall nearby with his steaming mug. She walked over to him to get some privacy, even though there wasn’t really a whole lot to be had given the narrow confines of the hallway and all the bodies jammed inside it at the moment.

“What do you think?” she whispered.

Danny shrugged, as if he hadn’t given it any thought at all, but of course she knew that wasn’t true. Danny, like (the old) Will, was just good at hiding it.

“What do I think?” Danny said. “Mostly that I’d love to be cuddling with the redhead in our cabin right now.”

“You can do that later. What about here, now? You’ve been in this situation before, back when you were with SWAT.”

“Once or twice. Though, usually the guy on the other end was either naked or on meth. And sometimes when we were really good boys, both.”

“So what do you think?”

Danny sipped his mug for a second. Then, “Wait till morning and see what we see. Everything looks better with a little sunlight. All shiny and shit.”

“You want to wait it out?”

“Sure, why not? There’s nothing to be gained from going in now. Put our people here in case they try anything in the meantime.”

“We’re running out of people, Danny.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but they were running out of gun-carrying adults. The idea of letting the kids get involved—like Claire, who had shown up with Gaby and was probably the most ready next to Dwayne—made her nauseous. And Carly, Sarah, and the others had their own jobs to take care of that couldn’t be ignored, even now.

“Not necessarily,” Danny said. “Give the kid”—he glanced back at Jolly behind them—“a gun and sign him up.”

Lara looked down the hallway at Jolly, watching them back from about twenty feet away. It was so quiet and the passageway was so narrow it wouldn’t have taken him very much to overhear their conversation. If he did, though, the young man did a good job pretending he wasn’t eavesdropping.

“Jolly?” she said doubtfully.

“Sure, why not?” Danny said.

“He’s just a kid himself.” She pictured Riley and Hart listening in behind her when she added quietly, “And he’s not one of us.”

“No, but he worships me.”

She gave Danny a wry look. “Since when? You’ve only known him for a day.”

“A day’s all you need. Plus, the kid always wanted to be a Ranger. Was going to apply for it before the world went kaput. Trust me, he’ll do what I tell him.”

Lara remembered Jolly’s actions on the Ocean Star, how he would always move ahead of her when they were approaching a corner so he would be the first one to encounter any dangers.

She looked past Danny at the young man again. “Jolly.”

He hurried over. “Yeah.”

“Go with Bonnie and get geared up. You’re with us now.”

A big, effortless grin spread across his face. “Yes ma—I mean, Lara.”

“Come on, kid,” Bonnie said, and led Jolly down the hallway.

“See?” Danny said.

Lara looked back at him. “See what?”

“You could practically feel the unrestrained man crush he’s got for me emanating from every pore.”

“You’re right; it’s so obvious I don’t know how I missed it.” She looked back at Riley and Hart. “You guys should go get some rest.”

“We’re okay,” Riley said.

“You should go anyway. You don’t want to be here if something happens between now and dawn.”

The two men exchanged an uncertain look, but if they had any objections, they swallowed them and nodded back.

Lara said to Danny, “It’s your show.”

“Sure, who needs sleep?” Danny said. “And where are you going?”

I have to clean Phil’s blood off the floor in my cabin, she thought, but said, “To fix my door, no thanks to you.”

“Boy, you save someone’s life and they won’t let you live it down,” Danny said after her.

7

Gaby

Bray and the second man, whose name turned out to be Ethan, didn’t do or say very much after the burst of gunfire shattered the peaceful night. Gaby eventually let go of the façade and sat up, while Nate was allowed to come over and sit on the bed to her right, with Zoe taking the one to her left. She guessed their captors realized the real danger was outside the room and not inside, and the less they had to deal with—like keeping Nate and Zoe under control at gunpoint—the better.

They were right to ignore her, because she wasn’t in any position to pose a threat. Whatever pain she had arrived on the yacht with was numbed thanks to the meds, but it also limited her movements. The men also didn’t have to worry too much about Nate; even though he was much better off after being shot in Gallant, he was still far from 100%, and Riley’s men knew it just by the way he walked gingerly back and forth.

The night came and went, and the only sound was Riley’s and Hart’s voices through the door, trying to communicate with Bray and Ethan. Gaby was at least glad to know that Riley wasn’t involved in the attempted yacht takeover, which meant this was more of a rogue mission with a limited number of personnel. That provided some comfort—fewer men meant an easier time for Lara and Danny to deal with—but of course it didn’t do anything for her, Nate, and Zoe as they sat in the dark and watched Bray and Ethan guarding the door with weapons at the ready. She couldn’t quite see their faces from across the room, but their body language didn’t suggest they were any closer to surrendering.

A pool of moonlight filtered in through the window to their left and splashed across the middle of the room, as if symbolically separating hostages from captors. The whole thing was almost romantic…if people weren’t holding her at gunpoint.

“You think he’s okay?” Zoe whispered.

She looked over at the doctor, and matching her pitch, “Who?”

“Will…”

Gaby didn’t have to think too much about it. In fact, she didn’t have to think at all. After the loud cracks of gunfire there had been only silence, both throughout the boat and from the radios that Bray and Ethan carried. As far as she knew, there were three others in on the plan, and all three had gone silent. That didn’t bode well for the mission, and she suspected both of the surviving conspirators knew it.

“Yes,” Gaby said without hesitation.

Zoe glanced over, clearly surprised by the absolute certainty in Gaby’s voice. “How can you be so sure?”

“He’s not…Will anymore.”

Just saying the words out loud made her wince, because it meant embracing the reality that Will wasn’t really Will anymore.

“He’s something else now,” Gaby whispered.

“So how are you so sure it’s really him?” Zoe asked.

“The same reason Danny is. He didn’t have to do any of the things he did for us when we were out there. You should have seen him in Gallant. He risked everything that night to come save us.”

Zoe didn’t say anything else and seemed to drift off to be with her own thoughts. Maybe some of those were about Will. Gaby always suspected something had happened between them back in Louisiana, but she’d never asked about it. Neither had Lara, who Gaby knew had the same suspicions. But after Will went missing, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

And it still doesn’t matter now.

She focused on the two black silhouettes stationed in front of the door on the other side of the infirmary. Their faces were hidden, along with their expressions, but she could just barely pick up that they were whispering back and forth. She wished she were closer so she could eavesdrop, because she had a feeling what they decided was going to affect everyone in the room.

“How are you doing?” Nate asked. Unlike Zoe, he hadn’t bothered to lower his voice, probably because the question wasn’t something worth hiding.

“I’m okay,” she said. “You?”

“A little throbbing here and there, but okay.” He looked past her. “Hey, doc, I might need a refill on those meds soon.”

“Remind me again when this is over,” Zoe said.

“Thanks.” Then, returning to Gaby, “What a night, huh? And here I thought getting back here would translate into fun times in the sun and a whole lot of bikini-clad boredom.”

“Bikini-clad boredom?”

“Well, you’d be wearing most of it, and I’d just be enjoying it.”

“Shows what you know,” she smiled back.

He snorted. “That’s me, Captain Optimism, as Danny would say. Speaking of…” He glanced over at the door, at Ethan’s and Bray’s shadowy forms. This time he did lower his voice to almost a whisper when he said, “I bet we could take them.”

“In your pain-induced dreams,” she whispered back.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Leave it alone. Danny and Lara don’t need us mucking things up.” Nate didn’t look convinced, so she added sharply, “Nate.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Sheesh. When did you get so bossy?”

“Since I saved your life back in Gallant.”

He sighed. “How many times are you going to bring that up?”

“Whenever you come up with a stupid plan.”

“So…always?”

She pursed a smile at him.

“It’s quiet out there,” Zoe said. She was looking up at the ceiling for some reason. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the boat this quiet.”

The calm after the storm. Or maybe it’s the calm before the storm.

The fact that no one had tried to breach the room wasn’t surprising. There simply was no advantage to something like that, not with two captors and three hostages. Even though the two men only seemed to be armed with handguns, that was still two too many weapons against her, Zoe, and Nate’s zero.

The night dragged on and her eyelids grew heavy, and the final straw was when Nate started stroking her forehead. That made her close her eyes, and despite telling herself to stay awake, she eventually drifted off.

* * *

“Geez, I thought you were going to sleep through the whole thing,” Danny said when she opened her eyes.

“Danny?”

“It ain’t Elvis, though I have been mistaken for the King of Rock ’n’ Roll once or twice. Must be the blue suede shoes.”

“What…?” she said, but couldn’t find the will to finish.

Her voice sounded overly groggy to her own ears, and maybe that was because— She saw the clock on the wall and groaned.

It was almost noon.

“You slept through all the fun,” Danny said.

Danny wasn’t alone. There was a man with a crew cut, and despite his intimidating size—he was taller than Danny and built like a football player—he might have been just a few years older than her. The stranger had an M4 rifle slung over his back and was wearing the same kind of tactical vest and comm rig that Danny had on.

She glanced about the room, but Zoe was nowhere to be found. On her right was an empty bed where Nate should have been.

“Don’t worry; your boyfriend’s outside getting some rays,” Danny said. “And the doc’s seeing to Benny. Can’t very well leave your ex to some animal doctor. He probably has cooties or some such.”

She slid up the bed and propped a pillow behind her, wincing at a small jolt of pain. Her shoulder was hurting a little bit more than usual, maybe because whatever Zoe had given her was starting to wear off. After all, she had slept through almost all of yesterday and the entire morning today.

“My ex?” she said.

“Benny,” Danny said. “You forgot the poor kid’s name already?”

“What happened to Benny?”

“He got caught in last night’s crossfire.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s alive.” Danny nodded at the big guy behind him, and said, “Head on out. I’ll be along in a few.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, and turned and left.

Gaby scooted into a better sitting position while Danny adjusted his seat on a stool at the foot of her bed. The infirmary didn’t look any different than the last time she was awake—except there were no strangers with guns, and she didn’t see anything that looked like collateral damage. She also let out a sigh of relief at the visible lack of blood and bullet holes around her.

“What happened last night?” she asked. “I heard a lot of shooting…”

Danny told her, filling in the pieces she was missing from being stuck up here during the whole ordeal. The two (dead) men in the engine room, the attempt on Will’s life, and Benny and Carrie caught in the middle.

Gaby frowned. “They killed Carrie?”

“Maybe not on purpose, but same shitty result.”

“And Zoe’s with Benny now?”

“He’s stable, and the doc’s got it handled. The kid bled a lot before we could get him up here, but there’s more where all that gooey red stuff comes from. Speaking of which, I’d like to be handled by Zoe. That’s one fine-looking woman.”

“You’re already taken, remember?”

“Shhh,” Danny said, putting a finger to his lips, “don’t tell the ladies. Or Carly. That redhead just don’t understand that I’m a man and men need to spread their seed around. It’s like biology or sumthin’.”

“Ugh, spare me the visuals.” She looked past him at the empty room again. “So what happened while I was asleep?”

“They gave up about two hours ago.”

“Just like that?”

“I guess with their pals dead and all their friends—including their COs—telling them to come to their senses all night long, they finally buckled. It was all very anticlimactic, to be perfectly honest with you. Me and Jolly were ready to bust the door down and come in shooting like Rambo and his mini Rambo. It totally ruined our morning. Heck, we could barely keep our breakfast down afterward, we were so disgusted.”

“What’s a Jolly?”

“The big kid that was just in here with me.”

“Who is he?”

“One of Riley’s guys.”

She gave him a surprised look. “And you gave him a rifle after what they tried to do last night?”

“The kid’s cool.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me, cool knows cool, and Jolly Green Giant’s cool as a cucumber.” Danny got up. “But back to you. You gonna lie in bed all day, or what?”

“That depends. What’s happening out there?”

“Well, we’re not going to the Bengal Islands after all.”

“When did that happen?”

Danny told her about the radio broadcast from Black Tide Island, about the stand-down order that had been issued to Mercer’s army back in Texas.

Then Danny smirked. “You remember ol’ Benford? Back in Gallant?”

“How could I forget?”

“Apparently he was one of the big cheeses. Big dead cheese now, anyway.”

“Fuck him,” Gaby said.

“Harsh,” Danny chuckled.

* * *

After Danny left, she quickly grew tired of being in the room all by herself and swung her legs off the bed and sat up for a moment, just to see if she could. It wasn’t nearly as bad as she had been expecting, and she found that moving actually helped with the occasional slight pain.

She stood up and looked around for her clothes. There was so much light in the room now as opposed to last night that she had no trouble finding a fresh pair of khaki cargos draped over a chair along with a thermal sweater from her personal effects clearly waiting there for her. She smiled, thought I love you, Nate, and made sure the door was locked before stripping out of her “patient” clothes and pulling on her own. She only grimaced three or four times during the whole thing, and once she (very) carefully slipped her left arm through the sleeve, was feeling like herself for the first time in seemingly weeks.

Walking was easier than moving any part of her upper body around, and with her left arm (and everything attached to it) basically immobile as a precaution under the sweater, she opened the door and stepped outside and headed down the hallway. There were plenty of footprints immediately outside and around the infirmary—evidence left behind by Danny and the others as they moved around last night—but no actual people.

She slipped outside using the nearest door, drawn forward by the rays of light on the other side. The sun and cool weather against her face was a monumental relief, and she hadn’t realized how much she needed the fresh air until she was standing in the middle of it. The old Gaby would have loved to lie in bed for days being tended to, but Gaby 2.0 needed to move even when there was nothing to do.

The Trident was almost as quiet outside as it was inside, with just the waves slapping against the hull and the occasional howl of wind gusts. It was a nice (ridiculously nice, in fact) cloudless sky, and she had the urge to keep going rather than retreat.

She ended up down the side of the boat until she was on the lower deck. She didn’t know how she got there, but soon she was walking toward the engine room and spotted a lone, small figure standing guard in front of it.

Maddie heard her approaching and glanced over. “She lives!”

Gaby smiled. “Hey, Maddie.”

“What are you doing out of bed?”

“Bed was getting boring.”

Gaby glanced past her at Lorelei, who was moving up and down the deck behind Maddie. The girl looked as if she were moving in slow motion, or maybe she just wasn’t certain where she was going, if anywhere at all.

“Kid’s all messed up,” Maddie said. “Fighting through it like a champ, though. Good for her.”

“I heard about Carrie.”

“Yeah. It sucks. But at least Benny’s going to get through it.”

“Thank God for that.” Then, looking past Maddie at the engine room door, “Is he alone down there?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I haven’t really gotten the chance to…talk to him.”

“You sure you wanna go down there? The last two people who did didn’t come back up.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and managed a forced smile while thinking, She’s right. Stay up here where it’s safe. You don’t really want to go down there, do you?

Well, do you?

She hadn’t turned around and left by the time Maddie pulled the hatch open, so Gaby gave the small Texan a pursed smile and stepped inside. She moved on automatic pilot through the machinery, not sure what she was doing down here or if she really wanted to see what was waiting at the other end—

She smelled the blood before she actually saw it on the floor toward the end of the narrow hallway. She stepped cautiously over and around the dry puddles until she was in front of the cabin door. Gage had been using the room until Lara dealt with him, and once upon a time it was supposed to be hers and Nate’s. But now it had become a makeshift brig, though at the moment there was nothing to fear from its only occupant.

Keep telling yourself that; then maybe your hands will stop shaking.

She managed to calm down enough to pull the lever and yank on the door, relying entirely on her good right arm. Artificial light from the hallway glinted off spent shell casings that still littered the floor, many of them held in place by the plentiful blood that had been spilled last night. She tried to look for the black among the red, but if Will had been injured and bled out, she couldn’t spot the evidence.

Gaby didn’t close the door behind her as she stepped inside. She told herself that there was no point—because sunlight didn’t reach this far down and the cabin’s only window was covered from the outside world—but the truth was she wanted an easy way out if she needed it.

I won’t need it. Not down here, not with Will.

Not with Will…

There was a slight movement in the corner of the room as a figure—tall and skeletal—stood up in the shadows, piercing (pulsating) blue eyes watching her back from the blackness. The hairs on the back of her neck went straight, and a shiver snapped up and down her spine. Memories of the farmhouse, of the nights in Gallant, rushed back in a tidal wave.

Gaby pushed through the overwhelming uncertainty (What are you doing down here? Are you crazy?) and the fear, and stood her ground. Her legs weren’t shaking nearly as much as she expected, but she hadn’t moved any closer toward it, either.

Him. It’s a him, not an it.

It’s Will.

Mostly…

“Will,” she said, his name coming out softly, as if she were afraid to say it too loudly.

There was no answer, and the shadowy form in the corner continued to watch her back in silence. For a moment she wasn’t sure if she had actually spoken his name, that maybe it was all a figment of her imagination. Maybe she was actually back in the infirmary, sleeping off another round of meds-induced haze—

“Frank,” it said, the word coming out as a soft hiss, as if it was doing everything possible to hide it.

“Frank?” she repeated.

“Will’s dead,” it hissed. “He’s been dead for a while now.”

“Danny says you’re Will…”

“I was…”

“But not anymore.”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

It—no, not it, but he—didn’t answer right away. Maybe he was thinking about the answer, or maybe he just didn’t feel like talking. It was hard to tell, because she could barely make out the tight contours of his face or the smooth dome of his head. The only thing she could be sure of were the eyes, like twin solar flares in a galaxy devoid of life, focusing in on her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked. “Danny says your memories come and go.”

“Gaby,” he said.

Her heart leapt in her throat and the smile came out unexpectedly. “You remember me.”

“Yes…”

“Are you…okay?”

Something along his face moved. Did he just…smile?

“Yes,” he said (hissed). “I’m healing.”

“Will you be okay?”

“Yes…”

Gaby looked down at the dried puddles of blood that covered the floor. The chest they had stuffed him in before leaving Gallant was riddled with bullet holes, pieces of the lock and clamps scattered across the room.

She looked up and tried to see him through the shadows. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t respond. Maybe he didn’t know why she was apologizing (Did she know?) or maybe it was something else entirely. And maybe she didn’t know what she was doing down here after all.

It’s Will. You don’t have to be afraid.

It’s Will.

“We left you back there,” Gaby continued. “In Louisiana. We should have gone back for you.”

“You…had no choice,” he said. “That was the plan.”

“It was a stupid plan.”

“Maybe…”

“We shouldn’t have left you. We should have gone back for you.”

“There were too many…”

“We should have risked it.”

“No.”

She shook her head. “We should have tried, instead of just leaving you out there by yourself. All this time, we’ve wondered what had happened to you. What your last moments were like…” It was suddenly very cold in the room and she wrapped her arms across her chest, ignoring the stab of pain from her left shoulder. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry for abandoning you.”

He didn’t say anything, but if she thought he was ignoring her, the glowing blue eyes that hadn’t left her face since she set foot into the cabin said otherwise. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say or how to respond to her all-too-human confession. Was that it? Was he beyond (human) things like that now? Maybe this wasn’t the Will she remembered after all—

“I forgive you,” he said finally.

She started to cry. It was stupid and girly, and she despised herself for it, but the first tear sneaked its way down her cheek and it was quickly followed by another, then another. At least she could say she never went full Gaby 1.0 and bawled her eyes out in front of him, in this dark room covered in blood and death. If she was going to cry, at least they were silent tears.

“Gaby,” he said.

She looked up at him, the tears coming faster now.

“You saved her,” he said, his eyes never wavering from hers. “You saved Lara. I would do it again, a hundred times over, for the same outcome.”

She fought through the emotions, wondering if she looked as silly and childish as she was feeling. But she didn’t care, and didn’t try to stop any of it. Instead, she wiped at the tears with the back of her hand, only to make room for new ones.

“I don’t know if we saved her or if she saved us,” Gaby said. “You should have seen her that night. She was amazing. We couldn’t have done any of this without her. Or gotten this far. You picked a good one.”

“I know.”

“Has she been down here?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve talked.”

“We have...”

“And you told her everything?”

He nodded. Or she saw his head bob slightly in the shadows. “She knows what she has to do. The only thing left is to do it.”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it? Knowing what to do is the easy part. Getting it done, that takes a little doing.”

“Yes.”

She managed a smile. “So. Frank?”

“Yes…”

“That’s a stupid name. You don’t look like a Frank at all.”

He made a sound—it might have even been a snort, though she couldn’t be entirely certain—and said, “I know.”

8

Lara

“I don’t agree with what Phil and the others did, but you can’t blame them,” Riley said. “One of those things, on the boat with us…”

“He’s not just ‘one of those things,’” Lara said. “He’s a friend.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that. He. You keep calling it a he.”

Because he used to be Will. Because he used to be my everything. And because I have faith that he’s here to help me, to help all of us.

God help me if I’m wrong.

“He’s an old friend,” she said.

“It used to be,” Riley said, looking at her intently from across the bridge of the Trident. “It’s not anymore. You have to accept that.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d been in Texas with us,” Gaby said.

The teenager (though it was hard for Lara to think of Gaby as one anymore, her age notwithstanding) stood next to Blaine, and if Lara was concerned about her being up and about after only a full day’s rest, Gaby didn’t just look okay; she looked energized.

There were six of them in all inside the room, with Hart and Danny making up the other bodies. They had been there for a while, trying to come to terms with what had happened. Not just with Phil, but the why behind his actions.

“He might not be Will anymore, but he’s still our friend,” Gaby continued. “And he didn’t come here to hurt us, otherwise he wouldn’t have let us lock him inside an old chest and transport him across water that could kill him, in the daylight.”

“You ever been stuffed inside a wooden chest?” Danny asked. “Granted, he’s all spindly and such, but it’s still kinda a big deal.”

“You said it was hurt back in Gallant,” Hart said. “Maybe it didn’t have any choice.”

“Oh, it had a choice, all right.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“But I do, Hart to Hart, I do.”

“Hart to what?”

“It’s his thing,” Blaine said. “Just roll with it.”

“Thanks for that, Capitan Blaine-o.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Bottom line,” Danny said, turning back to Hart and Riley, “he didn’t have to come here. He didn’t have to do any of the things he did. That means a lot in my book. And trust you me, people don’t get into my book just willy-nilly.”

Maybe Danny’s and Gaby’s words didn’t completely convince Hart and Riley, but Lara thought it might have softened the duo a bit. Even if they weren’t there yet, it was a good start, and after the night she’d had, she could work with it.

“I know how all of this sounds,” Lara said. “You didn’t know him like we did. But as hard as it is for you to grasp, imagine how much more difficult it is for us, to have him come back after we had given him up for dead. It’s him, but at the same time it’s not. It’s…not an easy concept to just accept at face value, but it’s the truth.”

“You’re right,” Riley said. “To us he’s a stranger, but to you it’s possibly an old friend coming back after…dying?” He shook his head, struggling for the right words. “It’s not something that happens every day, even these days. We’re going to need some time.”

“And this plan of his,” Hart said. “What did you call it?”

“Plan G,” Danny said. “I came up with the name, by the way. Brownie points if you can guess what the G stands for.”

“Georgia?” Blaine said.

“Close, but no cigar.”

“I think we all know what the G stands for,” Gaby said.

“It’s not you,” Danny said.

“No shit.”

Lara focused on Riley standing across from her. If she had any hope of advancing Will’s new plan, it would have to be through Riley. As much as she doubted the man’s decision-making ability, Riley was her best shot at the moment.

“This is what he does,” Lara said. “Will has always been a strategist. His mind is the reason we stayed alive through the first few months of The Purge. The reason we’re still standing here.”

“It’s what he used to do,” Riley said. “You said it yourself, Lara. He’s not the man he used to be. He’s not even a man at all.”

“But it’s still him.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I spent an hour in a room with him. I looked into his eyes. Turning into that… Turning didn’t take away his ability to think. If anything, he’s even more capable now. And he’s been out there, deep behind enemy lines, absorbing everything that makes them, them. How many of us can say that?”

“Bottom line?” Danny said. “You can take the boy out of the Ranger, but you can’t take the Ranger out of the boy. Ol’ Will did what he did best when we thought he was gone. He infiltrated, collected intelligence, and came up with a way to save everyone. Pretty friggin’ impressive, if you ask me.”

“Maybe, if he’s right,” Hart said.

“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Riley said. “If he’s right. Just to find out is going to take a lot more than what we have on this boat.”

“There’s nothing we lack that Black Tide can’t provide,” Lara said.

“It won’t be easy,” Will had said, “and people will die.”

People have already died, Will. Too many people. Good and bad, and everyone else in-between, too. And people will keep dying…unless we stop it.

“It’s not an easy thing, what you’re asking,” Riley said.

“Who says it was going to be easy?” Gaby said. “We’re talking about ending this once and for all. Even if it’s the hardest thing we ever do, shouldn’t we do it anyway? The entire human race is on the line.”

“Not nearly dramatic enough, kid,” Danny said. “But Kid Ranger’s right. It’s now or possibly never. Maybe it’s just the old fart in me, but I don’t much like being at the bottom of the food chain. I like it better on top—and yes, that’s what she said.”

Lara was doing her best to read Riley’s and Hart’s faces, and she thought she saw flares of agreement, especially from Hart. Riley appeared more reluctant, maybe the result of having so much gone wrong since his mutiny.

She decided to help him along: “You left Mercer because you didn’t want to kill innocent people, but you can’t run forever. Sooner or later, you have to come face-to-face with the monster. The real monster. This is our best chance to do that, but we can’t do it alone. We need Black Tide.”

Riley sighed. “All of this talk about saving the world will be a moot point if they open fire on us as soon as we show back up there.”

“Which is why we’re not just going to show up out of the blue,” Lara said. “First, we have to make sure Mercer’s not in charge anymore. This whole thing doesn’t work if he’s still calling the shots over there.”

“Agreed,” Riley nodded.

“So how do we make sure?” Hart asked. “We can’t just call them up and ask, can we?”

“Why not?” Lara said. “Why can’t we just radio Black Tide? They don’t know where we are right now, or that we intercepted their stand-down order. The only way to find out for sure what’s happened to Mercer without exposing ourselves—”

“Is to ask for Mercer,” Hart finished.

Lara nodded. “Give them any excuse. You just want to talk. You had a change of heart. Whatever it takes. Either Mercer will come to the radio or he won’t.”

“You’re right,” Riley said. “We don’t actually have to be there to get what we need.” He nodded, though she thought it was more for his own benefit. “We just have to be careful.”

“Very careful,” Lara said. “We don’t give away our position. As far as they know, we could be across the globe by now.”

“Jesus, if Keo really did it,” Blaine said. “I always knew that guy was dangerous.”

“I met him back at the Ocean Star when he was there,” Hart said. “He came across as more crazy than dangerous to me.”

“You mean there’s a difference?” Danny asked.

“That’s another thing,” Lara said to Riley. “Try to find out what happened to Keo, if he’s still alive.”

“It’s been two days,” Riley said. “What are the chances of that?”

“I’ve learned never to underestimate the man,” Lara said. “Keo’s been known to buck the odds once or twice.”

“Or twenty,” Danny chimed in.

* * *

“I have to leave.”

“And go where?”

“Texas.”

“Why? Is it the water?”

“No.”

“Tell me why.”

“I have too many miles to cover. I have to start now, or I won’t be ready.”

“Why does it always have to be you?”

“Because it has to be.”

She shook her head, not that it did any good. Transformed or not, he was still Will, and once he made up his mind…

“What if I can’t convince them?” she asked.

“You will,” he said.

“But what if I can’t?”

“You will.”

“Maybe you have more faith in me than I do. Than other people will.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, and there was a tenderness in his voice that belied the hissing that accompanied every word, every sound he made. “I’ve always known you were stronger than you realized. Even now, as strong as you’ve become, you’re still capable of so much more. You were born to lead, Lara. So lead. Do whatever you have to to convince them. Mabry won’t be there forever. This is our chance. It might be our only chance.”

She sat in the chair and stared across the semidarkness at him. If she still had any doubts that this Will wasn’t the same one who had left Song Island all those months ago, his tall, elongated form curled up into almost a ball in the corner of the room ended that. It was her Will, but it also wasn’t. Even so, the thought of him leaving her again so soon after coming back into her life was like a knife in the back.

Not again. You can’t just leave me again, you bastard.

She was angry with him, even though she knew things would never be the same between them—could never be the same. There had been a part of her that held out hope he wouldn’t abandon her once more, that he would stay and protect her this time, like he had promised. She wanted desperately to go back to being his girlfriend and marveling from the background as he led everyone to safety and always had the answers to all the problems.

She wanted all those things badly, but she also knew she couldn’t have them. Not anymore. Because the Will she knew and loved and missed, and eventually accepted as being lost was, for all intents and purposes, gone. Kate had taken him from her.

But she could still see enough of him left in the blue-eyed creature that looked out from the shadowed corner at her now that she found herself hating him for wanting to leave her all over again.

You promised me. You promised me.

“Do you remember…us?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said (hissed).

“Everything?”

“Most of it.”

“What do you remember?”

“It comes and goes, but if I focus… I remember that I love you. I remember that I would rather die than disappoint you. I remember…”

The smile came to her lips easily, and with it too much wild emotion that she had to shove it all back because she wasn’t sure she could control it. And right here, right now, she didn’t want to break down in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For everything. For not coming back…”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“I tried…”

“I know you did. I never doubted that you would.”

Except for all those days and nights when I did have doubts. When I lay in bed and wondered if you had abandoned me.

I was wrong.

I was so, so wrong.

“But you finally made your way back,” she said. “And now you want to leave again?”

“I have to, or the plan doesn’t work.”

“Is that the only reason?”

His eyes shifted as he looked away, and the sudden absence of his pulsating blue eyes left her feeling strangely empty.

“No,” he said.

“What’s the other reason?”

“I don’t belong here.”

“With me…”

“With people.”

“Your friends…”

“With people,” he said again.

She leaned forward. “Will…”

“Frank.”

“No. You’re Will. You’ll always be Will.”

He lifted his head back up, blue eyes reappearing in their fullness. They were soothing and calming, and nothing like the souls of mindless monsters that she envisioned the blue-eyed ghouls as being when she had heard the stories.

“You’ll always be Will,” she said. “Maybe you’re not the man you once were, but you’ll always be the man I love.”

“Man,” he said, and there might have been something that almost sounded like…amusement (?) in his voice. “I’m not even that anymore, Lara.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.”

“No…”

“It matters,” he said, so softly she barely heard it. “I have to go. I have to go back.”

“You’re going to leave me again,” she said, regretting the words as soon as they left her lips.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“Then promise you’ll come back when this is over. Promise me, and this time you better goddamn keep it.”

He nodded. “Yes…”

“Say it.”

“I promise.”

“Good. We’ll figure the rest of it out later. Together.”

“Yes,” he said, again so softly she had to strain to hear him. Then, “Lara…”

“Yes, Will?”

“Can I…”

“What is it?”

“…Touch you?”

She stared at him for the longest time. His eyes pulsed in the shadows, watching her back. She couldn’t have begun to read his face even if she could see it. He barely moved in the corner, and whenever she heard anything at all coming from him, it was the unnatural clacking of joints.

“I want to remember,” he said.

“Remember?”

“You. They’re fading. My memories of you. Each night, they fade a little more. I want to remember…”

“Yes,” she answered before he could finish, surprising even herself.

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t…want you to see me like this.”

“I’ve already seen you.”

“Not…like this.”

She didn’t move, but closed her eyes like he asked. The wait was excruciating, and she exerted every ounce of willpower she had to sit perfectly still on the chair and not get up and run away—

His touch was cold against her left cheek, and she startled but didn’t pull away because she knew without a single shred of doubt that he wouldn’t hurt her. If he wanted to, he could have done it a dozen times now. Even the guards outside the engine room door were there just to keep people out. Nothing could hold him in here if he didn’t want to stay. Those two men Phil had sent down last night had found out just how dangerous he could be when—

She sighed out loud, involuntarily, when warmth spread through his fingers and against her skin and chased away the coldness. His entire body must have been closer than she realized, because she could sense the strange aura of chill and heat that Danny and Gaby had told her about. It was an impossible balance of winter and summer radiating from every pore of his skin.

She wanted to open her eyes, to look at him up close and see every inch of him the way he was doing to her, but she didn’t, because this wasn’t for her.

A second hand touched her right cheek, and this one was also ice cold at first, but the sensation quickly faded and was replaced by warmth. He traced her face with his fingers, as if trying to remember every inch of her, every imperfection, like a blind man would in order to “see” what someone looked like.

She expected her heartbeat to continue accelerating, but after the first ten or so seconds of contact, it plateaued and returned to a normal rhythm. Her breathing came out in even spurts, defying all logic. Her entire body seemed to almost slow down, her perception of time and space and senses moving in molasses, almost as if she, and not him, were trying to prolong this moment.

“Lara,” he whispered, and his voice sounded almost human, almost like Will again. The Will she remembered, not this new Will that had come back to her changed. But that was impossible, and she was almost entirely certain it was her mind trying to deceive her in an attempt to keep her still as she allowed a blue-eyed ghoul to touch her—

Will. She was letting Will touch her.

“Lara,” he whispered again, as one of his fingers touched her lips and traced them from side to side, then up and down. The cold followed by the warmth, then back again, until there was that strange, impossible balance of heat and freeze that defied nature.

“Will,” she whispered back.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry…”

Then he was gone.

His touch faded, and so did the cold and heat that came from him.

When she opened her eyes, he was back in the shadows, huddled in the corner, and his head was downcast so she couldn’t lose herself in his blue eyes.

“Will,” she said.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Will…”

“I have too many miles to cover.”

“Will, please look at me.”

“…And you have too much work ahead of you.”

“Will, please…”

“We have to succeed, because we won’t get another chance,” he said quietly. “We won’t get another chance…”

“Will,” she said again, pleading with everything she had in that one word.

“I have to go back,” he said, still not looking up at her. “I have to go back…”

* * *

She left the cabin, but she didn’t leave the engine room. Instead, she leaned against the wall and let the loud grind of machinery camouflage her tears. There were a lot of them. She didn’t know where they came from, but maybe they were always there, waiting for the dam to finally burst.

And they did, now.

She was just glad she was alone, with only the engine to bear witness to this weakness she had spent so much time and effort to hide from the others. She didn’t know if she was actually crying too, because the noise around her was so loud she could have been screaming at the top of her lungs and never heard a single sound.

But she could be absolutely certain of the tears. They rolled down her cheeks and dripped from her chin to the floor and there was nothing she could do to stop them—not that she wanted to. She slid down and put her arms over her knees and closed her eyes, remembering what it felt like to be young and afraid and helpless for the first time in such a long time.

Her body ached—every inch of her. Her chest was tighter than it should have been, and just breathing hurt. It was as if her entire being were being ripped apart from the inside out, as if her soul were being crushed inch by inch by inch.

All those times she pushed through the emotional and physical pain so the others wouldn’t see, so they’d have at least one person to look to with Will gone.

But not anymore. Not anymore.

She looked down the hallway, toward the cabin.

He was in there.

Will. Her Will.

But not really.

No one could possibly understand that concept except for her and Gaby and Danny, and just a small handful of others. To everyone else, he would be just another blue-eyed ghoul. Phil and the others had proven that.

Eventually, she found the strength to stand up and wipe away the tears with her sleeves and used the shiny machines to make sure her eyes weren’t still red and puffy. She hadn’t worn makeup in so long she didn’t have to worry about smearing it across her face.

Only when she was certain no one would know what had happened by looking at her face did she finally go back topside.

Bonnie was standing guard on the other side of the door when she came out. “How’d it go?”

“It went,” Lara said, hoping her voice didn’t crack, but it was probably not as strong—or steady—as she had hoped, because Bonnie gave her a questioning look.

“Lara,” Bonnie started to say, but Lara turned around and started walking away. “Lara,” Bonnie called after her.

Lara ignored her and kept walking, then faster, and faster still.

Book Two

9-8 Suited

9

Keo

Rhett hadn’t returned. Of course, it had only been a few hours and it wasn’t as if Rhett were in any hurry to take Keo’s offer to the higher-ups. That is, if there were higher-ups now that Mercer was gone. It was hard to figure out who was in charge at the moment, if anyone at all. It would have been nice if Erin were still around to fill him in on the island’s hierarchy.

But of course Erin was dead, and he should have been, too. The only reason he was still breathing was because Rhett and the others didn’t know what to do with him. That, and the fact that apparently more than just Riley had thought about rebelling against Mercer’s rule, but just hadn’t had the balls to go through with it. Keo had never actually met Riley—he didn’t consider seeing some guy lying in bed on an oil rig’s sickbay as “meeting”—but he had to admit, knowing what he knew now, he had new respect for the guy. Riley had done what so many others wanted to, but hadn’t. That took some brass ones right there.

At least Rhett had done him a solid and opened the high window to the left of the holding room so Keo could, once again, enjoy the natural and very airy upside to being held prisoner on an island. So if nothing else, there was that.

That’s it, pal; look on the bright side.

He sat on the floor with his back against the wall so he could face the window on the other side of his cell bars. After three days of soaking in his own BO, it was as close to paradise as he was liable to get. Now if only he could get them to give him something to eat that wasn’t mush or tasted like something someone gurgled out—

Clank! as the door across the room opened.

Keo looked over as two men stepped inside, while a third stood back holding the door with one hand. Keo only recognized the third guy—his afternoon jailer, who swapped places with two others in eight-hour shifts.

He had never seen the other two newcomers before.

“Visiting hours?” Keo asked.

The men didn’t bother answering him, and while the first two walked over to Keo’s cell in the back, the third guy remained standing in the hallway looking in. Keo had never actually seen his jailer’s face before today, and in fact this was the most the man had ever exposed himself: Keo glimpsed his name tag and the word Donovan.

Keo focused on the two approaching him. One was six-five and built like a truck (Calvin was written on his name tag). The second one was around six foot, skinnier, and African-American (Bellamy was scribbled across his chest), and by just the way they were walking, with Calvin always a step behind, it wasn’t hard to guess who was in charge.

“On your feet,” Bellamy said.

“I like the view from down here,” Keo said.

“On your feet, soldier.”

Keo grinned. “Now that’s just mean. I spent an awful lot of time and effort avoiding that title.”

The two men had stopped in front of the cell bars and Calvin’s hand dropped to the Sig Sauer at his hip, but Bellamy didn’t make any moves toward his holstered Glock.

“Rhett sent me to come get you,” Bellamy said. “They’ve made a decision.”

“You should have started with that,” Keo said.

He stood up and brushed at his stained slacks and shirt, even though it didn’t do any good. Besides three days in here without an open window, he’d dripped (then had to wipe off) what passed for “food” on his clothes since they hadn’t bothered to give him utensils, not even those flimsy plastic ones.

“What’s the verdict?” Keo asked. He directed the question at Bellamy. If Calvin was bothered by that, he didn’t show it.

Someone knows his place.

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Bellamy said. He took a step back and nodded at Calvin, who moved toward the gate. “Hug the wall.”

“Could you at least buy me dinner first?”

“Do it.” This time, Bellamy reached for his gun for effect.

Keo gave him a wry smile and turned around, then pushed up against the wall until his chest touched the jagged brick surface. The gate clinked and clanked behind him as Calvin opened it with all the dexterity of an ape who had just learned how to use his opposable thumbs a day ago.

“Did you guys make contact with the Trident?” Keo asked.

“Ask Rhett when you see him,” Bellamy said.

“How did it go?”

“Ask Rhett when you see him,” Bellamy said again.

“Oh, come on—” Keo started to say when a pair of incredibly strong hands grabbed his arms and bent them behind his back, followed by the rubbery sensation of plastic handcuffs slipping over and then tightening around his wrists. Keo was momentarily surprised by not just how strong but quick Calvin had been.

Who knew the Yeti could move that fast?

Calvin took a step back and turned Keo around, then put one massive hand around Keo’s right arm and located a good grip.

“Easy there, Tex,” Keo said. “It’s our first date. Let’s take it slow and steady with the PDA, huh?”

Calvin ignored him and marched him out of the jail cell. Bellamy stepped back to let them pass. Keo breathed in some more of the fresh air as they walked across the room, then expelled it slowly.

“Must be nice living on an island,” Keo said.

“It has its moments,” Bellamy said as he followed them to the door.

The third man, Donovan, hadn’t moved from his spot, but it wasn’t where Donovan stood that caught and held onto Keo’s attention. It was the man’s face. He looked…conflicted?

Aw, shit. And everything was going so well, too.

Okay, maybe not “well,” exactly, but better-than-I-could-have-hoped-for-ish.

But maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was reading too much into one man’s facial expression. After all, he’d never been particularly good at reading faces. Every woman he had ever met or dated or been locked in a room with for more than a few minutes could have told him that.

Then again, this wasn’t about a single look on Donovan’s face. It was also about his body language, the way he was gripping the lever—way too tightly, as if he were afraid it would slip from his hand if he relaxed even for a second.

Donovan looked away as Keo and Calvin neared him, and by the time they reached the door the jailer had slipped behind it so Keo couldn’t see him anymore.

Shit.

“So, Rhett sent you guys to get me?” Keo asked as he was led into the hallway.

“That’s right,” Bellamy said. From the sound of his voice, he wasn’t very far behind them; Keo guessed only about five feet.

The door clanged shut; then he heard the click-clank of the lock turning into place. That last part made Keo smile to himself.

Why bother locking it, Donovan ol’ pal? There’s no one in there anymore, remember?

But of course that thought didn’t last for very long, because he was too busy concentrating on what lay ahead of him—or as far ahead as he was going to make on this particular trip, anyway. He didn’t think it was going to be very far at all.

Captain Optimism, amirite, Danny?

“Rhett said he’d come to get me himself when they finally made up their minds,” Keo said.

“He’s a busy man,” Bellamy said. “He’s running the place now.”

“Is that right? He never told me that.”

“I guess he didn’t think you needed to know.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Why tell a condemned man anything?”

“Exactly.”

Keo glanced sideways to his right, at Calvin. The big guy hovered over him, much taller up close than the six-five Keo had pegged him at earlier. More like six-six. One inch might not have seemed like a lot, but it factored into Keo’s calculations. Just as he took into consideration Calvin’s size and possible weight. The guy was practically busting out of his uniform, so much so that his name tag actually wrapped around his pecs.

And what have they been feeding you, big boy?

Keo was sure of one thing: Whatever Calvin had been surviving on, it was probably not the slop they had been giving him while he sat in his jail cell.

Behind them, Bellamy followed in silence, the only noise coming from the tap-tap-tap of their boots against the hard floor. Keo had no clue where his prison was located in terms of the building’s blueprint, because he hadn’t bothered to memorize all the turns and hallways they had led him through after the Comm Room. For all he knew, he could have been in an entirely separate building. He regretted the lack of forethought now because he had absolutely no idea where they were going—one gray wall looked like the last one—or why there didn’t seem to be anyone around.

Up a creek, and me without my hands for paddles.

He wanted to tell himself that he’d had to deal with worse situations. There was that whole mess with Pollard’s army in Louisiana, surviving Song Island, then going toe-to-toe with a blue-eyed ghoul. Compared to those trying times, he was only dealing with two guys here. Two human guys, at that. Of course, he had free hands in all those other incidents, so maybe that had a little something to do with his successes.

Oh, stop your whining and get on with it. You shouldn’t even be alive anyway. Everything after this is a bonus.

Shit, almost convinced myself that time!

“So, the big boys finally made up their minds, huh?” Keo said.

“Yup,” Bellamy said from behind them.

“And you don’t know if they’ve radioed the Trident yet?”

“Nope.”

“A man of few words, I see.”

“Uh huh.”

“Two words that time. Eureka!” He snapped Calvin a grin. “Is Bellamy your boss or something?”

“Or something,” Calvin said in a deep baritone.

“Listen to that voice! You ever thought about doing soul music?”

“What?”

“Soul music. You got the voice for it. Right, Bellamy?”

A mild chuckle from the back of their little caravan. “Sure, why not?”

Keo was hoping they would eventually run across people in the hallway, but after the third turn they still hadn’t seen anyone and he was starting to get a feel for just how big the facilities on Black Tide were. Of course it made some sense why they hadn’t seen anyone yet. Who would put the brig close to the living quarters?

Even so, he expected to see some faces, not a big fat nothing.

“Where are we going?” Keo asked.

“You’ll see when we get there,” Bellamy said.

“I didn’t realize the brig was on the other side of the island. How big is this place, anyway?”

“Big enough.”

“Not much of an answer.”

“It’s all you’re going to get.”

“Tell me something…”

“What’s that?”

“You guys manage to scrape Mercer’s brains off the Comm Room floor yet?”

Calvin was the first to react—he actually twitched with his entire body, and the fingers gripping Keo’s right arm tightened even further.

Now now now.

He threw his entire body into Calvin, and despite all the big man’s impressive bulk, the sudden shock of being rammed into knocked him off-balance. He stumbled and crashed into the wall, while somehow still managing to hold onto Keo’s arm and dragging him along.

Keo didn’t mind being pulled, because that just allowed him to twist sixty degrees until he was facing Calvin, who had thumped into the wall with his back, having turned at the last second until they were face-to-face. Keo saw the flash of confusion on the other man’s face, but if Calvin didn’t know what was about to happen, he figured it out pretty fast when Keo smashed his forehead into the bigger man’s face. There was a satisfying crunch! as Calvin’s nose turned to mush, his blood spraying the hallway.

Stars flooded Keo’s eyes and his head rang, and he was almost sure that a piece of Calvin’s pulverized nose was jutting out of his own forehead (That’s what you get for using a part of your head as a battering ram!), but he fought through all of that—or as much as he could—and staggered back and spun around. He blinked through the blood coating his eyes (his, Calvin’s, but mostly Calvin’s) as Bellamy stood five feet from him.

“Jesus Christ,” Bellamy said even as he backpedaled, the look of shock frozen on his face.

For some reason, Keo grinned and wondered what he must look like with his face coated in a film of Calvin’s plasma while the man himself was sitting against the wall, large body tilted dangerously over to one side as blood drip-drip-dripped from his chin like heavy raindrops. Calvin was still alive, because Keo could hear him breathing. Or wheezing, anyway, because the air was clearly going through that bloody hole in the middle of his face that used to be his nose. It was a grotesque sight, but at the moment Keo couldn’t be bothered to feel any sympathy for the man.

Keo didn’t so much as run at Bellamy as he threw himself like some human missile at the man. His aim was true and he crashed into Bellamy’s chest, turning his body slightly at the last second so that his shoulder buried itself into the other man’s sternum just as Bellamy managed to get the Glock out of its holster.

He collapsed back down to Earth on his shoulder and let out a pained grunt, even as Bellamy landed on his back farther up the hallway. For some reason Keo thought his luck might have been good enough to jostle the gun loose from Bellamy’s hand, but he was wrong. Very, very wrong, as it turned out, because he found himself staring at the wrong end of a gun barrel.

Keo gritted his teeth and waited to eat a bullet, but for whatever reason Bellamy, sitting on the hallway floor on his ass, didn’t fire. Instead, he just stared across the iron sights of his weapon at Keo, that look of shock still present on his face.

After what seemed like an eternity—though it was probably more like two or three seconds—Keo let out a resigned sigh and slowly picked himself up from the floor and onto his knees. He was breathing hard, but that was more from exertion and the throbbing pain originating from his forehead than fear.

Bellamy stood up, the gun never wavering from Keo’s head for a single heartbeat. After a moment, he smirked.

“I had to give it a shot,” Keo said.

“Nice try,” Bellamy said.

“So what was the plan?”

“Take you outside, shoot you, then say you were trying to escape. But this actually works better. You killed Calvin, and I had no choice.”

“In my defense, he was a big motherfucker and I had to put him down with the first try or I wasn’t going to get a second one.”

“Understandable,” Bellamy said. He took a moment to wipe at the blood on his cheeks and chin—not his or Keo’s, but Calvin’s that had whipped free from Keo during their collision.

“Does Rhett know about this?” Keo asked.

“No. Any other questions?”

“Nah, that’ll do.” Keo reached up with his bound hands and brushed at a thick patch of blood over his right eye. “Can I at least stand up before you shoot me? I’d hate to die on my knees. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.”

“Sure. It’ll look weird if you were on your knees when I put a round through you anyway.”

“Much obliged.” Keo struggled up to his feet, but while he was doing so Bellamy took two, then three more steps back. Keo grinned. “I feel like we’ve lost some trust.”

“No shit,” Bellamy said. He picked what looked like a shard of bone sticking to his shirt and flicked it away. “Jesus Christ.”

“Talk about having a thick head, huh?”

Bellamy chortled. “What did you say to Mercer before you shot him?”

“What makes you think I said anything?”

“Jane said she heard you say something before you pulled the trigger.”

“I don’t know a Jane.”

“She was in the Comm Room. She got out before the shit went down.”

Keo shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

Bellamy narrowed his eyes, and Keo couldn’t tell if that was confusion or anger. “You just murdered one of the most important men on the planet, and you don’t remember what you said to him before you did it?”

“‘One of the most important men on the planet?’” Keo smirked. “I think you’re overvaluing him just a tad. If I had my hands free right now, I’d pinch my fingers together to further make my point.”

“Fuck you,” Bellamy said, and his face reddened noticeably.

Now that Keo had no trouble reading. Bellamy was pissed.

“Go for the head,” Keo said.

“What?” Bellamy said. The Glock in his hand trembled slightly, but not enough for Keo to make up the seven or so feet that separated them at the moment. The handgun was also pointed squarely at his chest—center mass.

“Go for the head,” Keo said. “One shot, one kill. I don’t know if you’ve shot anyone before, but a body shot isn’t a guarantee. A headshot—now, that’s one and done. After all, as soon as you pull that trigger, everyone on the island will know and come running.”

“You think anyone on this island cares about what happens to you?” Bellamy asked.

“I like to think I made an impression.”

“Oh, you did; there’s no doubt about that.”

“Still, one shot, one kill.” Keo reached up and tapped his forehead. “As evidence, I point to Mercer’s brain splattered all over the Comm Room.”

Bellamy’s eyes narrowed even further—was that even possible?—and he lifted his hand slightly so the gun was now aimed at Keo’s head. “Better?”

Keo smiled. “Watch out for the kick,” he said, just before he launched himself forward and left—then right! It was a feint, and he was hoping to confuse Bellamy just enough to throw off his aim—

The bang! came faster than Keo expected, but he had been expecting it nonetheless. He twisted his body as fast as he could, but of course it wasn’t fast enough. It was never going to be fast enough. He was only human, after all. Frank, or one of his blue-eyed pals, could have dodged the 9mm round easily.

But Keo wasn’t a ghoul and even the fastest man alive couldn’t dodge a bullet at seven (six, now?) feet, a cold, hard fact that was drilled home when the round hit him in the temple and actually spun him like a top. He slammed into the wall about the same time a streak of red splashed across the dull gray concrete.

Footsteps squeaked as Bellamy moved closer for the finishing shot, but Keo was too tired (And bleeding. Shit, I’m bleeding.) to turn around and confront his would-be killer. Not that it mattered. It could have been Mercer’s ghost come back from the grave (or wherever it was that the island had buried him) to get its revenge, for all the crap Keo gave at the moment.

A bullet was a bullet, was a bullet.

And dead was dead, was dead.

…except when dead wasn’t really dead.

Right, Frank? I could definitely use your help right now, ol’ pal.

“You really thought that was going to work?” Bellamy asked from behind him. There was almost a singsong quality to his voice, as if it were all fun and games now.

“Yeah, sort of,” Keo said into the wall.

“You really are too stupid to live.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

He wished he had the strength to turn around and flash one of those faux grins that was full of bravado, if just to piss Bellamy off one last time. But he didn’t, so instead he stared down at the floor, at his feet, as he propped his body up against the wall with the top of his head. Blood drip-drip-dripped down from his right temple and made small, messy individual puddles on the floor. Sooner or later, they would merge and become one big, messy pool.

Oh, the joys of coming together, he thought, and almost laughed. But of course, nothing came out when he opened his mouth except labored breathing and what sounded dangerously like a pathetic wheeze.

On the bright side, at least he wasn’t going to have to worry about the concussion he had no doubt suffered from ramming his forehead into Calvin’s face. So there was that, if not a whole lot else.

See? There’s always a bright side to everything.

He definitely heard himself chuckling that time, and it ended up being a spurt of uncontrollable giggling. That was probably the only reason Bellamy hadn’t shot him in the back of the head yet.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?” Bellamy asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” Keo said. “Sorry, sorry, private joke. You had to be there.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re fucked up,” Bellamy said.

Fucked up? No.

Fucked? Most definitely.

Captain fucking Optimism, most indeedy!

That started another round of uncontrollable laughter, and he didn’t stop even after Bellamy pressed the cold barrel of the Glock against the back of his head and pushed, because apparently this time he was determined to get the one shot, one kill down.

With nothing left to do, Keo focused on the red liquid that was drip-drip-dripping down the side of his face and to the floor below. He was staring so hard that his eyes started to lose focus. It surprised him that his blood would be so intensely red, and thick, like ketchup if he really concentrated hard and long enough.

He managed to close his eyes and thought of the Trident.

More specifically of Lara, and Carrie, and Bonnie. Shit, he should have taken them up on their offer. Bonnie, especially. How many times did you get the chance to sleep with a model at the end of the world?

Live and learn, pal. Live and…

Or not.

His legs became too wobbly to hold him up, and he fell down.

At the same time, Bellamy decided to finally pull the trigger (Geez, man, what was the holdup? Let’s get this show on the road!) and there was a loud bang! that left Keo’s ears ringing.

Wait. Why were his ears still ringing?

Idiot can’t even shoot someone from point-blank range correctly, Keo thought before he started laughing again.

Or thought he did. All he could really be certain of was that there was a lot of blood on the floor and he was lying in it, and he was almost one-hundred percent sure most of it had come from him.

Probably…

10

Gaby

With Riley’s people still confined to the lower deck, there were plenty of spare rooms to choose from. She wished there could have been more time to enjoy that luxury but there wasn’t, not if she wanted to leave the yacht unnoticed. It was cowardly, she knew, and he was going to be angry when he woke up, but he would get over it. She hoped, anyway.

She spent some time at the door looking in at him asleep on the bed. There was a ghost of a smile on his face, his bare torso visible in the moonlight that spilled in from the open window on the other side of the room. She had never seen him so calm, so at peace with everything. It was a rare sight, and she enjoyed it just as much as he did.

I’ll see you soon, Nate. Please don’t be too mad at me.

She closed the door softly, and as she walked through the empty corridor, she couldn’t help but wonder how many times Will had thought that exact same thing while he was trying to get back to Song Island and Lara. She told herself it was different with her because she wasn’t going to fail. Whatever happened, she would come back to Nate and start a life with him. If everything went well out there, that life would be a good one. A very good one, indeed.

Plan G. That’s a hell of a name, Danny.

Hiding the preparations from Nate all day long was the hard part, but surprisingly the lying came easier. Maybe it was because she was doing this for his own good, that if he knew what she had planned he would have demanded to come with her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. But after the last time, she couldn’t allow that. He wasn’t ready. She could see it in his movements, in his eyes. He was putting up a front, but that gunshot had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit, even now, days later. Zoe had confirmed as much.

She took the short trip to the girls’ cabin on the main deck to look in on Claire, but the girl was already asleep on the large king-size bed with Elise, Vera, and Milly. Lorelei was there with them, the teenager sleeping curled up on a recliner in a corner after taking over Annie’s duties. Despite the extra empty rooms, the girls hadn’t branched out. Gaby guessed that had more to do with familiarity than anything.

Gaby wished she could have said she was surprised by what Annie had done, but she wasn’t. Loss made people do strange things, like how she had thrown herself into Ranger training on Song Island after Josh “died,” and how Lara had spent every waking day (and no doubt some of those nights, too) trying to keep them alive. Annie, meanwhile, had decided to lash out at the closest target—Will.

She stepped back into the hallway. It was better this way, anyway. If she started saying good-bye to everyone on the boat it would just make everything more difficult than it had to be. Besides, it wasn’t as if she were leaving forever. She would return; she just didn’t know when exactly.

On her way down to the lower decks, she fished out the bottle of pills Zoe had given her and swallowed two of the white ones. Once upon a time she would have needed water to wash them down, but those days were long gone. Her left shoulder still throbbed from time to time, but that would lessen to a dull numbness when the meds took effect. She put a hand over it now, feeling the thick bandage under the thermal clothing. She could barely move the arm this morning, but it had improved immensely since.

“One-armed Gaby,” a voice said from the shadows as she stepped out onto the exterior deck.

She glanced over at Danny, leaning against the railing nearby. He was still wearing his full tactical gear with the throat mic, and he pushed off and walked over to her.

“You should get that stenciled across your uniform,” Danny said. “One-Armed Gaby. The Most Dangerous Girl Who Ever Fought With Just One Arm.”

She smiled. “That’s kind of long, don’t you think? Besides, I’m not wearing a uniform. And neither are you.”

“Hey, everyone’s wearing uniforms these days, so why not us, too? I already told Carly to start making them. It’ll give her something to do other than nag me. I was thinking blue with hot rod stripes. What do you think?”

“Sounds tacky.”

“If by tacky you mean glorious, then yeah, it’s gonna be all kinds of tacky, all right.”

They walked side by side the rest of the way. There wasn’t anyone else along the railing, and she had never known the Trident to be so quiet before. She swore she could even hear her own heartbeat. It was surprisingly calm, considering what she was about to do and where she was going.

“You ready?” Danny asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“What about the arm?”

“It’s good.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s good, Danny. Besides, I’m a rightie.”

He didn’t look convinced, but nodded anyway. “I should be going, not you.”

“We already talked about this.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Besides, I’m only there to pull security. Bonnie and Blaine will be doing all the heavy lifting. Then it’ll be up to Will.”

“I’m not worried about that last part. It’s the everything-in-between part.”

“Have faith. Will knows what he’s doing.”

He smirked. “I have so much faith in that boy—dead or alive or, er, dead-alive-ish—that I even took three seconds to come up with a name for his plan.”

“Wow, a whole three seconds, huh?”

“It’s everyone else I don’t have a lot of faith in. Present company excluded, of course.”

“Mercer’s people?”

“Uh huh,” Danny nodded.

“I know what you mean. I still feel a little queasy about allying with them after everything they did. All those towns, those people…”

She went quiet for a moment as the memories of T29 came back in a rush. The smoke, the blood, the bodies…

“But we have to do what we have to do,” she said quietly. “Otherwise, we’re going to be fighting this war forever. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be doing this two or three decades from now.”

Danny chuckled.

“What?” she said.

“You, thinking we’ll have decades if this doesn’t work.”

“I guess some of Nate’s optimism is rubbing off on me.”

“How’d Nate-o-meter take it, by the way?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“That good, huh?”

“He would have wanted to come. I couldn’t let him do that. Not in his condition.”

“As I recall, you were both shot.”

“I took one in the shoulder. Zoe said there wasn’t any lasting damage. I got lucky.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Nate, on the other hand, nearly bled to death and required emergency field surgery. Big difference.”

“You and I and the moon up there know it, but he won’t see it that way come morning. I imagine there’ll be a lot of screaming and cursing and tears.”

“Tears?”

“Silent, manly tears.”

“He’ll want to follow us, so you can’t tell him anything. Promise me, Danny. No one can tell him.”

“He’d need to torture me with pliers and at least three hookers before I spill the beans. Okay, one hooker, but she has to be really good.”

They finally reached the door to the engine room, where Jolly was standing guard. He gave Gaby a what’s up? nod.

Gaby returned it. “Hey.”

“Good luck out there,” Jolly said.

“Thanks.”

“Enough chitchat; this isn’t The Love Connection,” Danny said, and opened the door and headed in.

Gaby followed him downstairs, then through the impossibly quiet engine room. “Your own personal mini-me, huh?”

“Jolly?” Danny said. “Good kid. Fast learner. He might make a good Ranger one of these days. Hell, if I sweat him enough, he may even be half as good as you.”

“I had two Rangers training me. He’s going to have to make do with one.”

“Maybe not for long.”

She nodded and couldn’t help but smile.

* * *

Blaine and Danny had spent most of the day making the gear by hand, using the engine room to hide all the work from everyone else on the boat. They had brought down tools, supplies, and extra help as needed, and the results were now squirreled away inside two large duffel bags that looked like they might bust at the seams when Bonnie lifted them, grimacing, one in each hand.

“Heavy?” Gaby asked.

“Be glad you got the bum shoulder,” Bonnie said. “But I’ll manage.”

The ex-model tossed one bag, then the other one, into the fifteen-foot offshore vessel tied to the back of the Trident. One of the bags landed with a loud thwump, the other one giving off a distinctive clank! as its contents hit the fiberglass hull.

“Good thing I’ve been bulking up,” Bonnie said as she stepped off the swimming platform and into the swaying smaller boat. “Used to be I tried everything possible to keep my weight down.”

“Muscle weight’s different from fat weight,” Blaine said from behind the helm.

“My aching muscles agree with you.”

“Quit yer whining,” Danny said, walking across the landing behind them.

Gaby glanced over as Danny handed her something wrapped in a plain brown cloth. It was easily over a foot long and heavier than it looked when she held it.

“Going-away gift,” Danny said.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You can take a peek later.”

“It’s not a dildo, is it?”

He grinned. “I’m not saying it is, but I’m also not saying it isn’t.”

She smiled back and shoved the bundle into her pack. “Thanks, Danny.”

“Keep in touch,” Danny said, not just to her, but to Bonnie and Blaine in the boat as well. “That radio’s not there for show, you know. Use it. Twice a day. Once in the morning, once before nightfall. And remember, if something goes wrong out there, you’re on your own. Well, mostly. Bottom line: Try not to let anything go wrong out there.”

“I can’t believe I volunteered for this,” Bonnie said, mostly to herself.

“That’s right, you did. Sucker.”

“Keep an eye on the boat until we get back,” Blaine said. “I trust Maddie, but you know women and driving.”

“Hey,” Bonnie said.

“The man speaks the truth,” Danny said. Then, to Blaine, “You want I should keep Sarah company, too?”

Blaine sighed. “She’d prefer you over me these days.”

“Still trouble in paradise, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“If you can, keep the other eye on my sister for me,” Bonnie said to Danny. “She wasn’t all that happy when I told her.”

“Don’t worry; I’ll cuddle all the women on the boat for you guys,” Danny said. “Now get the hell gone. All this sentimental crap’s getting me all Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

Gaby kissed Danny on the cheek and embraced him, and he returned it with surprising enthusiasm.

“I wish I was going with you, kid,” he whispered to her.

“I know,” she whispered back.

“But if it’s not me out there watching his back, you’d be a solid second choice.” He pulled away and took a step back, both hands stuffed oddly in his pockets, like a kid who didn’t know what to do with them. “Eyes wide, ears open, and guns hot. Shoot first, never mind the questions. Don’t take any chances. Understand?”

Gaby nodded. “Take care of everyone.”

“That’s what I do.”

She untied the line, keeping the fifteen-footer attached to the Trident before climbing onto the smaller fishing vessel. She gave Danny one last look before nodding at Blaine. The boat hummed to life, the motor catching without a problem.

Soon, they were reversing, then turning.

Danny stood at the back of the platform and watched them go, and she had never seen him look sadder or more helpless.

She waved, and he waved back.

Then Gaby hurried to the stern and sat down on one of the seats along the starboard side. She looked down at the lump resting on the floor near her legs. It was a standard size suitcase with spinner wheels that made it easy to move. The polycarbonate material gave it a nice black sheen, and though it was mostly brand new when they “borrowed” it from one of Riley’s people, they had mummified it with duct tape just to make sure there weren’t any holes.

“How’re you doing?” Bonnie asked as she carefully maneuvered to the back, using the railing to steady herself as the craft gunned it through the darkness.

“Good,” Gaby said. “You?”

“Scared shitless.”

“I’ve been with him when he had to come up with a plan while bullets were flying over our heads. This is what he does, Bonnie. Have faith.”

Bonnie pursed a nervous smile. “I have faith that you guys have faith in him, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“He might have changed, but he’s still in there. Maybe not all of him, but some of Will is a hell of a lot better than all of a lot of other people.”

Bonnie nodded and put one hand on the railing. Gaby did likewise, because no matter how many times she had been on one of these smaller boats, she could never quite shake the feeling that the next wave they hit was going to send her into the water.

She took the opportunity to glance back at the yacht, slowly fading into the endless night behind them. The only reason she could still see it at all was because of its lights, but even those were starting to blink out of existence one by one.

She thought of Nate, asleep in the cabin, oblivious to where she was right now or even that she wasn’t in bed anymore. She hoped he was having a good dream. All the signs were there—that smile on his lips, the carefree sleeping posture. Those were all indicators that he wasn’t reliving one of his nightmares tonight.

“You told Nate?” Bonnie asked, shouting a bit over the roar of the motor behind them.

Gaby shook her head. “He’d want to come.”

“Of course he would. Kid’s head over heels in love with you. The question is, do you feel the same way?”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

Bonnie laughed. “That was fast. I guess that answers that.”

Gaby thought she might have actually blushed, and thought, God, what are you, back in high school all over again?

“Benny’s going to be a real sad panda after hearing that,” Bonnie said. “He’s still holding out hope, you know. I told him it was a slim one.”

“The two of you talked about me?”

“He talked about you. We usually ended up on guard duty together, so I was helpless to do anything but listen.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“‘Kid,’” Bonnie chuckled. “I can’t believe you guys are so young.”

You grow up fast or you don’t grow up at all these days.

“Anyways, I’m glad you’re coming with us,” Bonnie said. “Blaine here’s okay, but to have a real badass around…”

Gaby laughed, but felt a flush of pride, too.

She peered forward, watching as the Texas coastline started to appear out of the blackness. She didn’t think she would see it again—no, that wasn’t true. She was hoping she wouldn’t see it again, and yet here she was, bandaged shoulder and all, heading right back to it.

As much as she hated returning, there was no choice because it couldn’t just be Blaine and Bonnie, even though they were two of the more capable members of their group. Lara couldn’t because she had an even more important role ahead of her. And Danny desperately wanted to, but he had other responsibilities now. So that left her.

Gaby remembered Danny’s bundle and unslung her pack and took it out.

“What’s that?” Bonnie asked.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said, and carefully placed the item in her lap and took out her knife and cut away the two zip ties holding the cloth in place.

Moonlight seemed to bounce off every inch of it, making it gleam in the darkness. It wasn’t quite white, but it could have been mistaken for the color. It was silver, and at one point it was a cross, but had since been forged into a weapon. A cross-knife, similar to the one Danny and Will used to always carry with them. Danny had lost his back in Texas and Will, well, Will didn’t need silver anymore. This one was freshly forged.

“Looks too heavy,” Bonnie said.

Bonnie reached down and pulled her own knife out of its sheath. It was also silver, and like hers and the one Blaine carried, was thinner and lighter and the blade was only half the length of the cross-knife’s.

“I like ours better,” Bonnie said. “Lighter, easier to cut with.”

Gaby picked up Danny’s gift by the grip and held it in front of her, then took a few practice swings. It was definitely heavier than the knife sheathed at her hip at the moment, but there was a nice balance to it. There was even something that acted as a pommel at the end, and cross-guards where the grip ended. The blade itself was double-edged and sharp, as was the point.

“It feels good, though,” Gaby said. “I wonder when he made it?”

Bonnie put her knife away. “I remember he had one like it before. I always thought it was kind of clunky. If you’re going to be carrying around something like that, a sword or machete might be a better option.”

“Danny can be sentimental with his weapons.”

“We’re talking about the same Danny here?”

“He and Will found a pair of something like this in an abandoned apartment when The Purge happened. That’s how they discovered silver kills the ghouls.”

“So it was just sitting there? Waiting to be discovered?”

“Pretty much.”

“Wow,” Bonnie said. “I’ve never heard that story before. If I didn’t know it was true—it is true, right?”

Gaby nodded. “It’s one-hundred percent true.”

“Then I wouldn’t have believed it. Things like that…finding a pair of crosses—what do you call those, cross-knives?—in an abandoned building when you needed them the most…” She shook her head. “It almost makes you believe, doesn’t it?”

“Believe?”

“In a higher power.” Then, as if realizing what she had just said, “Not that I subscribe to something like that, but… It’s a hell of a coincidence, that’s all.”

“Carly thinks it’s providence,” Gaby said. She bundled the knife back up and put it away in her pack. “Danny and Will thought it was just a stroke of good luck.”

“What does Lara think?”

“We’ve never really talked about it in depth. I know she was raised in an atheist household, but after you’ve seen everything we have…”

“It’s hard to keep telling yourself there’s no heaven or hell,” Bonnie finished for her.

“Uh huh.”

“And Will, coming back…” Bonnie snapped a quick glance down at the suitcase on the floor between them. “I’m telling you, Gaby, I don’t believe in anything I can’t see, touch, feel, or taste, but if we survive this, and it works the way he says it will…”

“Maybe there is something out there?”

“Yeah. Maybe there is something out there, or up there,” Bonnie said, and let the rest trail off.

Gaby looked forward, past Blaine standing behind the helm, and at the fast approaching coastline. It was still too dark to see any stretch of the beach, but it was starting to slowly, very slowly, come into view.

If we survive this, and if it works…

She didn’t feel the dread she was expecting as land loomed in front of them. Maybe it was the presence of the suitcase—or more specifically, what was inside it—or maybe she had successfully transcended fear (Bullshit, girl). Of course, it could have just been Zoe’s painkillers finally taking effect and making her feel invincible.

Regardless of the reason, there was a calmness at the center of her being as they skipped across the open Gulf of Mexico and back toward Texas. Gaby turned her face into the wind and leaned back in the seat, then closed her eyes completely.

She thought of Nate, oblivious to her betrayal; of Claire, asleep with the other girls in their room; and of everyone back on the Trident. She thought of Lara and the hard work ahead of her; of Danny, who wanted desperately to be the fourth person on the boat with them right now.

And she thought about the future.

And there would be a future, if this worked.

If this worked…

11

Lara

“What did you find out?” Lara asked.

“He was smart. Phil only approached the soldiers,” Riley said. “People he knew who were ready and able to take up arms. Not counting Phil, there was Bray and Ethan in the infirmary.”

“What about the two unfortunate souls that wandered down to the engine room?” Danny asked.

“Stephens and Doug,” Riley said. “Phil also went to Peters and Janice and tried to recruit them.”

“How do you know about Peters and Janice?” Lara asked.

“Peters came to me after everything went down, and Janice followed later. They were the only other two Phil approached.”

“That you know of,” Lara said, and thought, And we all know how wrong you can be when it comes to your own people.

But of course she didn’t say that last part. Rubbing it in now wouldn’t help them get to the bottom of the problem, and right now she wanted to nip this in the bud as soon as possible. There were other, more important matters on the horizon that were going to require all of her time.

“That I know of,” Riley nodded. If he suspected anything else behind her statement, it didn’t show on his face.

They were gathered on the Trident’s bridge again. It had become their go-to meeting spot because no one was supposed to be up here without permission. It allowed them to talk freely, and Lara liked being able to see what was out there with just a glance at the windshield.

Maddie was behind the helm in place of Blaine, while Danny leaned against a wall next to the small Texan. The yacht was moving again, the world beyond the wraparound screen so excruciatingly bright that Lara had trouble focusing, and she was certain the growing headache was the result of the overwhelming sunlight and not because she had barely slept at all the last few nights.

It was morning and she had eaten with the others before coming here, and she was still tired. So, so tired. Her body was drained of energy, and all she wanted to do was retreat to her cabin and lie down on her bed and reclaim all that lost sleep. She would have settled for a couple of undisturbed hours at this point.

“What about the civvies?” Danny was asking.

“They don’t know what really happened or why,” Riley said. “I told them Phil and the others tried to take over the boat because of the possibility we might return to Black Tide.”

“They bought that?”

“Mostly.”

“Not very reassuring.”

“It’s all I can offer.”

“It’ll have to do,” Lara said.

“I talked to Peters and Janice,” Riley said. “They’ve agreed not to let the others know what really went down.”

“You good with that?” Danny asked. “Lying to your peeps?”

“I don’t have any choice. The truth isn’t going to get us any closer to our objective. Speaking of which, what’s the plan when we finally reach out to Black Tide?”

“You’ll tell them that we have an inside man in Texas who’ll coordinate the attack for us,” Lara said. “His name’s Frank.”

“Will is Frank.”

“Yes.”

“Why not just call him Will?”

Because he doesn’t want me to, and because people might figure out it’s my ex-boyfriend, except he’s not the man he used to be.

She said instead, “He prefers Frank.”

“Bottom line: I have to lie some more,” Riley said.

“Practice makes perfect, right?” Danny said. “Anyhow, we know what happened the last time someone found out Willie boy’s true identity.”

“It’s not who Will is that’s important,” Lara said, “it’s what he knows. Who he is—Will or Frank—doesn’t matter.”

“The fact that he’s one of them kinda matters,” Riley said. “But I get your point.” Then, after a brief pause, “All right. Frank it is. What else?”

“If they push for more information, we’ll tell them Frank is a collaborator turncoat.”

“Well, it’s not too far from the truth,” Danny said. “Kinda works, in an almost poetic sort of way.”

“Not sure you know what poetic means,” Maddie said.

“Words that rhyme, stanzas, and shit, right?”

“Not even close.”

“Which is why poetry won’t be a required curriculum in Danny’s School of Badassery.”

Riley ignored their back and forth, and said to Lara, “So he’s gone. Will. Frank. Whatever we’re calling him.”

“He left last night,” Lara nodded.

“And it’ll be up to him. This whole thing—this entire Plan G—it all rests on his shoulders.”

“He’ll be there when the time is right.”

“Are you sure about that? Are you absolutely certain?”

“Yes,” Lara said, without hesitation.

He’s never let me down before, she almost added, but didn’t because it would have been a lie. Will had let her down before. He had promised he would come back to Song Island, and he never did.

But then he did come back, and you let him go again. So whose fault is it this time?

Maybe that was why she was so damn tired now, more so than she’d been all those months leading up to the last few days. Talking to Will, being around him, thinking about him, then letting him leave again after reentering her life in the most dramatic way possible was exhausting.

Even after watching the small vessel push off the Trident and drift into the blackness from the bridge last night, she still couldn’t decide if she should have protested more. After all he had done to get back to her, and she had simply acquiesced and prepared for his departure. Had she wanted to let him go? Was that it? Was the reality of who he was—who he had become—more than she could bear?

She hated herself for thinking those thoughts, but she couldn’t deny them. Will leaving had removed a heavy burden from her. She wouldn’t have to explain his presence on the yacht anymore, wouldn’t have to deal with more Phils opposed to his very existence.

She promised herself that once he came back, once this was all over, she’d learn to deal with who he was, because he was still Will. Whatever had happened to him, whatever he looked like and sounded like now, he was still Will.

Wasn’t he?

She wasn’t sure when she had closed her eyes, but when she opened them Riley was talking and looking at her: “You’re that convinced he’s right? About everything?”

She kneaded her forehead with her knuckles while summoning all the patience she had left. Getting annoyed with Riley’s constant doubts wasn’t going to do her or the plan any good. She had to convince him, because if she couldn’t, what chance did she have of convincing the rest of Black Tide?

“He went through hell to get back to us,” Lara said. “He almost died.”

“Again,” Danny said. “Dying once is a pain in the ass, but twice? Now that’s hardcore.”

She wasn’t sure if Riley was convinced, but he nodded and glanced out the window at the bright ocean. “The best I can do is present your plan. I can’t force anyone to do anything.”

“And I don’t want you to,” Lara said. “Besides, I won’t need everyone. Just enough to make a difference.”

“We might be putting the cart before the horse, anyway. After all, if Rhett’s already ordering everyone out of Texas, it might take a lot more than just your word to get them to commit to another fight so soon.”

“Except this time we’re not talking about razing women and children,” Danny said. “Big difference.”

“Maybe so. I’m just telling you one possibility.” Riley shrugged. “Maybe I’m entirely off base and they’re not as gun-shy about jumping back in as I think, and they’ll readily embrace Frank’s plan. After all,” he added, looking over at Lara, “if you’re right, then this is our best chance to take back the planet. That’s something worth dying for.”

“Happy thoughts, kids,” Danny said. “Remember what my homeboy George S. Patton used to say: ‘The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.’”

“Now that was poetic,” Maddie said.

“Told you I’m all up poetry’s skirt,” Danny said.

* * *

“You said your good-byes?” Danny asked as they walked through the Trident.

“Did you?” Lara said.

“It was short and sweet, just the way we like it. If Willie Boy wasn’t a top-notch conversationalist before, he’s gotten even worse since.”

It’s his voice. Will doesn’t like to talk because of his voice. He hates it. I can see it—feel it—whenever he speaks. More than anything, it reminds him that he’s not the man he once was.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Lara said, “but why didn’t you leave with them?”

He sighed, and she could see it in his face that it was a question he had asked himself a thousand times since Gaby and the others left on the fishing boat last night.

“Carly?” Lara said.

“Something about, ‘Go with Will and I’m going to kill you,’” Danny said. “I think she meant it, too. Unless, of course, that shotgun she was holding when she said it was just for show.”

“I don’t blame her. You should have seen her while you were gone. I don’t think she can handle you running off again.”

“What can I say? I’m very lovable. Plus, I’m a wildcat in the sack.”

“So Carly keeps telling me.”

“Gaby’s a decent replacement. Of course, she’s not the genuine article, but she makes for a pretty good facsimile.”

He was putting on a good act, but she could hear it in his voice that he was still tortured by staying behind.

“It’s good you didn’t go,” she said. “I’m going to need you here when we make contact with Black Tide.”

“Happy thoughts, remember? I’m sure they’re not still pissed off at Riley and company.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Nah, they probably are. I was just trying to be optimistic.”

“Captain Optimism, huh? Haven’t seen him make an appearance in a while.”

“I’m trying to bring him back, just like how I singlehandedly brought sexy back a few years ago.”

“That was you?”

“Yup.”

She smiled. “Besides, who would Jolly look up to if you’re not around?”

“Yeah, there’s that too.”

“How’s he coming, by the way?”

“Kid knows some stuff, but I’d still pick Gaby first on the playground.”

“She’s had Ranger training.”

“I just meant because she’s hot.”

“Don’t tell Carly that.”

“Never,” Danny said, and made a zipping motion over his lips.

“What kind of training did he come with?”

“Some basics back on that island of theirs, but he’s probably ten percent ready. Kid’s enthusiastic though, and ready to run through a wall, so that’s good.”

“Don’t make him run through a wall, Danny.”

“No promises.”

“What about Nate?”

“What about him?”

“He asked me where Gaby went when I was on the bridge with Maddie, but we wouldn’t tell him. I’m assuming he went to you next since you’re the only other person who knows.”

“Oh, he did. He even threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t tell him.”

“You didn’t…”

“Of course not. He left fuming. Carly says he’s already asked everyone in our group and will probably start in on Riley’s peeps pretty soon.”

“Poor kid. I know how he feels.”

“He’ll get over it,” Danny said. “He has no choice. Adapt or perish, right?”

“Something like that,” she said, even though watching Nate leave the bridge heartbroken hadn’t been easy.

She had wanted to tell the young man, but Gaby was right—if he knew, Nate would just follow them out there. She knew why Gaby had left him behind, because Lara could see it in the way he walked that Nate wasn’t ready. In his current condition, he would just be a liability to the mission.

They made their way through the deck, out the back door, and onto the viewing area. She leaned against the railing and let the chilly wind rake across her face, then looked out at the open seas, back toward where Texas would be.

“When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?” Danny asked.

“It’s been a while.”

“No time like the present to do some catching up.”

“Maybe when this is all over.”

“It’s not going to be over for a while, Lara.”

“What are you, my dad now?”

“Feel free to call me Daddy Danny if you want.”

“I’ll have to take a pass on that.”

“Too bad Willie boy couldn’t stay longer.”

“Yeah.”

“It was decent of him to tell us in person, though. Of course, we wouldn’t have believed a single word of it if he had just passed it through Keo or someone else.”

“Plan G…”

“Great name, if I do say so myself.”

Danny laid his chin on the railing and stared down at some kids fishing off the aft of the yacht. To her left, the refueling ship kept pace with them, but only because the Trident wasn’t moving anywhere close to its full speed.

“Back in Gallant, while we were hunkered down in that bank waiting for daylight, we had a nice long talk,” Danny was saying.

“What did you talk about?”

“This, that, everything. Had a lot to catch up, and all that girly stuff.”

“Girly stuff, huh?”

“Yup. Girly stuff. Anyways, the takeaway was that he was worried about coming back. About seeing you again since…well, you know. He didn’t say it in so many ways, but I think he was afraid of how you’d react. I don’t think he gave any thought to the rest of us, which should really wound my ego, but whatever. What I’m trying to get at here is, it was always about you.”

She didn’t reply for the longest time, and instead turned her face into another large gust of cold wind, thankful for the soothing sun rays caressing her skin.

“Thank you for seeing him off,” she finally said.

“No problem. It still kinda sucks to see him leave again. But if this plan works, there’s nothing to say he can’t stick around. Not that I’m saying it could ever be the same for us, or for you and him.”

“We’ll deal with that when the time comes. For now, let’s just concentrate on getting past the next couple of days.”

“You think it’ll work the way he says it will?”

“Are you having doubts?”

“No, but…” Danny shrugged. “I don’t know. Whenever we talked about it, even before he had to switch it up when he learned about Mercer, it always felt like he was holding something back.” Danny grunted and shook his head. “I’m probably just reading too much into it. You know me, always letting the ol’ brain machine take over. Besides, why would he keep anything back now, after all the trouble he went through to get it to us? It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Lara said, but her mind drifted anyway.

Was there a chance Danny could be right? Was there something Will hadn’t told them about the plan? A facet of it that he didn’t think they could handle, so he left it out on purpose, even from her?

“It had to be Houston, didn’t it?” Danny said after a while. “But of course it had to be Houston.”

She smiled. She had thought the same thing when Will told her: Of course it would be Houston. Where else would the end come, if not where it all began for us?

Both hers and Danny’s radios squawked at the same time, bringing her back to the cold present. Maddie’s voice came through the tiny speakers, and it was very obvious she could barely contain her excitement: “Lara, Danny—you wanna get back to the bridge.”

“There goes your first real sleep in a month,” Danny said.

“Like that was ever going to happen,” Lara said. She unclipped her radio and keyed it. “What’s happening, Maddie?”

“Just got a call on the designated emergency channel,” Maddie said.

“Is it Gaby and Blaine? Did they run into trouble?”

“No, not them,” Maddie said. “He says he’s calling from Black Tide Island.”

“Keo?”

“It’s not Keo, but he wouldn’t tell me his name. Said he’d only talk to you.”

Lara exchanged a quick look with Danny, and they immediately turned and slipped back into the ghostly empty main deck.

“We’re on our way,” she said into the radio.

“If it’s not Keo, then it has to be Keo-related,” Danny said.

Lara nodded. “Has to be.”

“What are the chances they sweated our number out of him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?”

“How would they even know to force it out of him in the first place?”

“Maybe through this Erin girl he was headed there with?”

“She doesn’t know about the emergency channel. I haven’t even told Riley.” Then, when Danny gave her a surprised look, “I’ve only known him for a few days, Danny. And as you probably noticed, Riley’s been known to make a few mistakes about personnel.”

“Oh yeah, there’s that,” Danny said.

* * *

“It’s Rhett,” was the first thing Riley said when she stepped back onto the bridge with Danny. “He wouldn’t tell Maddie his name, but it’s him. I recognize his voice.”

She was slightly out of breath when she said, “Did you talk to him?”

Riley shook his head. “He asked for you by name.”

“Definitely the same guy who issued the stand-down order before,” Maddie said.

Lara nodded at Maddie. “Okay. Put him on speaker.” Maddie pressed a button on the dashboard while Lara picked up the microphone. She took a breath, then keyed it. “This is Lara. I hear you’re looking for me.”

“Someone gave me this frequency,” a man said, his voice booming through the bridge’s speakers for everyone to hear. Maddie was right—it was the same voice that had given the stand-down message they’d heard earlier.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” Lara said. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Rhett,” the man said.

“Who gave you this frequency, Rhett?”

“He said he was a friend of yours.”

Keo. It has to be.

“I need a name,” she said.

“Keo,” the man said.

Lara looked over at Danny, who grinned back at her. “I told you that boy’s got nine lives. Or however many lives dolphins have.”

“Dolphins?” Riley said.

“Long story,” Maddie said.

“And wet,” Danny added.

Lara smiled, because she couldn’t help it, and then turned back to the microphone and keyed it again. “Is Keo there with you?”

“Afraid not,” Rhett said. “He’s currently in the brig. A little matter of murdering our commanding officer.”

“Mercer,” Riley said softly, as if he was afraid Rhett would hear. Or maybe he was afraid Mercer would hear?

“Put a stake in him, the man’s a goner for reals,” Danny said.

“I’ve never met the guy, but even I’m relieved,” Maddie said.

“Trust me, you’re not missing much. He was a typical officer ass munch.”

“Mercer,” Lara said into the microphone.

“Yes,” Rhett said.

“Did he say why he did it?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.

The truth was she wanted to get a feel for Rhett, wanted to dissect every word he said. More importantly, she wanted to know how he felt about Mercer’s death. Maybe it was impossible to discover all those things over the radio, but it was worth a try.

“He said some people just needed killing,” Rhett said through the speakers. “If you were to ask me, it was personal. Not that he admitted it.”

“Why’s Keo still alive if he’s been captured, and if he took out Mercer?” Riley asked.

“He’s a smooth talker, that Keo,” Danny said. “Maybe he smooth-talked himself into a jail cell instead of a bullet to the head. Which reminds me, don’t ever let him talk me into gambling with him.”

Lara said into the mic, “Is this just a social call, then?”

“You’re his last phone call,” Rhett said. “Or last radio call, I guess. Also, he had some interesting things to tell me.”

“Such as?”

“That he knows someone who knows how to defeat the ghouls. That you would know how to get in touch with this someone. He didn’t give me a name, though.”

Will?

“Was he right?” Rhett continued.

Lara exchanged another look with Danny, who raised a curious eyebrow, and said, “Is he talking about Willie boy?”

“I think so,” Lara said. Then, into the microphone, “I might.”

“You either do or you don’t,” Rhett said.

“That depends…”

“On?” Rhett said, the suspicion in his voice very obvious even through the radio.

“What are you going to do with that information?”

“It’ll depend on what that information is.”

Lara lowered the mic and glanced at Riley. “You know him. Rhett.”

Riley nodded. “Besides Erin, he was the only other member of Mercer’s command that I was mostly sure would come with me if I had asked. He’s a good man. It makes perfect sense he’d be put in charge after Mercer’s death. People like Rhett. He’s decent, and smart, and he’s no pushover. If there was a power vacuum on Black Tide, there would be a lot of people who would look to him.”

“Lara?” Rhett said through the speakers. “You still there?”

She turned back to the mic. “I’m still here.”

“So who’s this guy with the plan?”

“His name is Frank,” Lara said. “And Keo’s right. Frank has a way to defeat the ghouls and take back the planet.”

Rhett went quiet on the other end.

“That’s some response,” Danny said. “You actually made him speechless.”

“It’s been known to happen,” Lara said. Then, to Riley, “Where would he be talking to us from?”

“The Comm Room,” Riley said. “That’s where all the communications equipment are.”

“Hence the name,” Danny said.

“So there’s a chance he’s by himself?” Lara asked.

“Maybe, but chances are Jane will be there with him,” Riley said. “She’s in charge of the room and has been since we arrived on the island. Kid’s pretty good with all the gear. She was the one who figured out how you were doing that repeating message thing and replicated it for us.”

“What about everyone else? The other commanders?”

Riley shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. That would depend on how much control Rhett has—”

“Lara,” Rhett said, interrupting Riley.

“I’m still here,” Lara said into the mic.

“That’s a hell of statement you just made. Defeat the ghouls and take back the planet. The last person who promised me that ended up shot in the head by your friend in this very room I’m standing in right now.”

“That’s Kia, always making friends wherever he goes,” Danny said.

“It’s the truth,” Lara said into the mic. “There is a plan, and it doesn’t involve slaughtering civilians or shelling towns filled with pregnant women. This time the only things that will be hurt are the real monsters.”

“So you claim.”

“If you don’t believe me, maybe someone else can convince you.”

“Someone else?” Rhett said.

Lara looked over at Riley, then held the microphone out to him.

He stared at it, then at her. “Now?”

“No time like the present,” Lara said. “He needs to hear it from a familiar, friendly voice.”

“The same voice who betrayed them not very long ago…”

“Mercer’s dead, remember? Things are different now for everyone. You said besides Erin, you thought you could turn Rhett. Well, here’s your chance to prove that theory.”

Riley sighed, then walked over and took the mic from her. He swallowed hard before keying the radio. “Rhett…”

There was no response from the other end.

“Rhett,” Riley said again. “It’s Riley.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rhett finally said. “You sonofabitch.”

Danny chuckled. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting a really good feeling about this.”

12

Keo

“You head-butted a man to death,” Rhett said when Keo opened his eyes. “Goddammit, Keo, you’re not making this any easier for me.”

“In my defense, they were going to kill me first,” Keo said. “Or did I read the situation wrong?”

Rhett sighed. “You didn’t.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I now have two more bodies connected to you.”

“So they’re both dead?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take the fall for Calvin, but what happened to Bellamy?”

“We shot him,” Rhett said with a frown.

“You shot him?”

“No, one of my men.”

Keo smirked. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer asshole.”

“Don’t be so goddamn cavalier. We’re talking about lives here.”

“Hey, better them than me.”

He reached up and touched the bandage wrapped so tightly around his head that he felt like a watermelon being squeezed by a few hundred rubber bands.

A few hundred? Try a few thousand.

He could feel the rows of stitches, the ones in the very center of his forehead and the ones along the temple, underneath the gauze, but thank God there weren’t any Calvin bones sticking out of him. The flesh around the impact points were probably red or black, or both, and likely made him looked like a walking ambulance, not that he wasn’t already. Still, scars were better than a casket.

Getting prettier and prettier, pal. At this rate, you’re going to end up looking like Lurch. Only uglier.

“Yeah, it’s pretty messy up there,” Rhett said with obvious amusement. “Looks like your modeling days are over.”

“Eh, I was getting tired of throwing up after every meal anyway.” He brought his hands back down. “By the way, I can’t help but notice I’m still not dead. Not that I’m complaining, of course. Though I might feel differently if someone doesn’t stop trying to jackhammer nails into my skull.”

It took only a glance to know he wasn’t back in the brig, but in some kind of military sickbay. Which was to say, sparsely decorated and efficiently built. There were empty beds to both sides of him and two uniformed figures worked across the room, talking over clipboards. They weren’t armed, but they didn’t have to be with the other two standing at the door holding M16s.

Someone had swapped out his old stained (and bloodied) clothes with one of those familiar tan uniforms with the sun emblem on white collars. No wonder his nostrils weren’t instantly twitching from his own stench. He didn’t have socks or shoes on, and except for the constant thrumming against his chest all the way to the very top of his head, this was probably the most comfortable he had been in a while. Of course, he didn’t have a bed in the brig, so it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of competition.

Rhett sat on a chair next to him, one leg casually draped over a knee. Keo couldn’t decide if the other man looked worried or angry. Maybe a little of both, or maybe a third option that he couldn’t figure out given the goddamn relentless pounding in his head.

“They said the bullet caught you in the temple and glanced off the skull underneath,” Rhett said. “Took a nice chunk of skin along with it, but didn’t penetrate the bone. You must be the luckiest sonofabitch alive.”

Keo grinned back at Rhett.

Lucky? Maybe. He was lucky he had managed to talk Bellamy into going for a headshot instead of a surefire chest target. Or maybe “talked into” was too nice a phrase; it was more like cajoled.

Hey, whatever works.

“Lucky me Bellamy wasn’t the best shot,” Keo said.

Rhett shrugged. “Well, he was a truck driver in a previous life. We can’t all be as dead-shot accurate as the great Keo.”

“My legend precedes me.”

“I’m talking more about your handiwork the last few days,” Rhett said, leaning back in his chair, eyes never leaving Keo.

Keo looked over at the guys with M16s. He was at least reassured one of them wasn’t Donovan, the guard who had let Bellamy and Calvin into the brig. “So what happened in the hallway?”

“Calvin died of his wounds before we could get him back here. Bellamy was shot when he wouldn’t put down his gun.”

“How did you know?”

“I went to the brig to get you, but you weren’t there. Donovan confessed pretty quickly and then there was the gunshot, which told us where they took you. Bellamy was about to finish you off when we turned the corner.”

“A day ago you were trying to decide whether to kill me fast or slow, and today you’re running around trying to save my life. If my head didn’t feel as if it were about to explode, I might just let out a nice long laugh. A guffaw, even.”

“I guess if anyone deserves a good laugh, it’s you.” Rhett gave him what almost looked like a pitying smirk. “By the way, I got in touch with your friend Lara.”

That brought a smile to Keo’s lips. “She told you what a great guy I am?”

“If by great you mean a royal pain in the ass.”

“But a great ass, right?”

Rhett ignored him, said, “Your friends are worried about you.”

“I make very good first impressions.”

“Apparently.”

“You said you were coming to get me earlier. So what’s the verdict? Do I get to keep being a pain in the ass?”

“I had more questions for you, mostly about your friends,” Rhett said. “But no decision’s been made. I guess it’ll depend on what your friends have to say when they get here.”

“They’re coming here?” Keo said, unable to hide the surprise in his voice or on his face.

“They intercepted one of our broadcasts.” He made a wry face. “Riley has been telling them our secrets.”

“The prodigal son returns.”

“There are some on the island who won’t welcome him back.”

“Is one of them you?”

“No. In a lot of ways, he opened our eyes to what we were doing. He and Erin…” Rhett pursed his lips. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to repay her for her sacrifice.”

“Hey, I’m the one who pulled the trigger on Mercer. Thank me.”

“I’ll do that by arguing for you to keep breathing.”

“That’ll work, too.”

Rhett stood up. “Meanwhile, keep praying to whatever God you believe in. If Bellamy had moved his gun one more inch to the left, I’d be talking to a corpse right now.”

“What makes you think I believe in God?”

“Everyone has to believe in something.”

“I do. He has nine millimeters.”

Rhett grunted and turned to go.

“Hey,” Keo said. When Rhett stopped and looked back, “Can I get something to eat? Something that doesn’t look like someone tossed day-old mashed potatoes into a glass of water and didn’t bother to stir it?”

“I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”

“Coconut drinks? You guys have coconuts on this island, right?”

“No.”

“Well, that sucks.”

“I’ll get you some water instead,” Rhett said, and walked to the door. He said something to the two armed guards, and one of them went outside with him while the second remained behind.

Keo lay back down on the slightly hard mattress and sighed with relief. Whatever they had given him before he woke up had numbed most of his body; with the exception of the relentless throbbing coming from the halo around his head, he was as comfortable now as he’d ever been since laying eyes on Black Tide Island.

Things looked up even more when one of his doctors came over. She was in her early twenties, with light brown hair. She was just a bit taller than Lara, but shorter than Bonnie. He focused on her friendly smile. Mary was written across her name tag.

Way too young to be a doctor. Maybe a nurse?

“How’s the head?” Mary asked.

“Pounding,” Keo said.

She jotted something down on her notepad. “You were shot in the head. If a pounding headache’s the worst of your problems, you’re in good shape.”

“I’ve been told I have a thick head.”

Mary smiled. “That’s putting it mildly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get head-butted to death before. You…really did a number on Calvin.”

“Wasn’t a friend of yours, was he?”

She shook her head. “I’ve seen him around, but no. I try to stay away from the soldiers. All that testosterone isn’t good for your health.”

“Tell me about it,” Keo said, rubbing his bandaged forehead.

* * *

Mary gave him some additional meds for the throbbing pain and he drifted off a few minutes later, and didn’t open his eyes again until—Well, he wasn’t entirely sure when he opened his eyes because there didn’t seem to be any clock on the walls, and the two doctors (or one doctor and a nurse) had left while he was knocked out.

Keo grunted and tucked the pillow under him so he could (mostly) sit up on the bed. He looked across at the only other person still left in the room with him—his guard, who seemed to be staring at an old calendar on the wall to Keo’s right as if it were the most fascinating thing he had ever seen in his life.

“Hey,” Keo said.

The man didn’t respond.

“Hey,” Keo said again, louder this time.

The guy finally turned his head. “What?”

“You got a name?”

The guard tapped his name tag. Keo squinted, but he couldn’t make out the letters even though they weren’t that far apart. Of course, he still had a major headache and focusing on one thing was difficult, especially small letters across a room.

“You can’t read English?” the guy asked.

“I can even read cursive, smartass,” Keo said. “I just can’t read it from here. They told you I was shot in the head, right?”

“And that you head-butted someone to death.”

“That, too. So you can probably guess I’m not exactly working at one-hundred percent capacity here. Wanna help me out?”

“Henry,” the guy said.

“I’m Keo.”

“I heard,” Henry said.

Keo nodded at the bed next to him. “Can you grab me that extra pillow, Henry?”

Henry fixed him with a suspicious look, but didn’t move from his post.

“Oh, come on,” Keo said. “It’s not like I’m going to try anything. Didn’t Rhett tell you? We’re practically BFFs now.”

“I doubt that’s even remotely true.”

“Doubt all you want, but I’d still like you to grab that extra pillow for me. I’m tired of lying down. How long has it been since Mary shot me up with those sweet, sweet meds, anyway?”

“Two hours, give or take.”

“That’s all?”

Henry nodded before walking over. He shifted his slung rifle from his right shoulder to his left as he did so—to take it a little more out of Keo’s reach—but otherwise didn’t look too paranoid that Keo was going to try something. Henry grabbed the pillow and handed it over, keeping a respectful distance between them before returning to the door.

“Thanks,” Keo said after him.

“Sure.”

“How long’s your shift?”

Henry glanced down at his watch. “Another hour.”

“Hey, at least you get to leave this place.”

“From what I’m hearing, you won’t be here very long, either.”

“Back to the brig?”

“Not what I meant.”

“Ah. Good news, then.”

Henry resumed his post and casually switched his rifle back to his right shoulder. “Despite everything you did.”

“We talking about Mercer now?”

“Who else?”

“Well, there was that incident in the hallway earlier…”

“I don’t care about that,” Henry said. “You didn’t have any choice. They were going to kill you against Rhett’s orders.”

Keo stuffed the pillow under him and propped himself into a better sitting position. His head started to clear up even though the throbbing continued, though it had lessened noticeably since the last time he was awake. Instead of jackhammers trying to punch their way into his skull, the pain was now more like mallets banging away. But it was an improvement, and the best he could hope for after his most recent ordeal.

“Someone once told me there were three types of people in Mercer’s army,” Keo said. “The true believers, the nonbelievers, and everyone else in between. Which one are you?”

Henry didn’t answer right away, but Keo didn’t think he was a part of the first group. The young man didn’t have the look of a Mercerian who thought Keo had killed someone he worshipped. If anything, Henry looked angry, but not that angry. Then again, considering Keo’s ability to read faces, he could be completely off.

“He saved us,” Henry finally said. “If it weren’t for him…”

“That doesn’t mean you have to slaughter innocent civilians for him. There were pregnant women and kids and old men in those towns.”

“I know that,” Henry said. He had come dangerously close to snapping. Then he added, in a much softer tone, “We all knew that.”

“But you still went along with it.”

“I…stayed behind. A lot of us who had problems with it did the same. The ones that went out there, the kill teams, were the true believers, as you call them.”

“Like Bellamy and Calvin?”

Henry nodded. “They’re not the only ones. That’s why I’m here and Pete’s outside.”

“Pete?”

“The other guard. He’s in the hallway.”

“Two guards to keep me safe,” Keo chuckled. “I told you Rhett and I are practically BFFs now.”

Henry didn’t say anything.

“So Rhett’s in charge of this place now?” Keo asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Who decided that?”

“The others, I guess.”

“Did you get a vote?”

“I’m not that high up.”

“How do you guys know who’s up and who’s down if no one wears a rank?”

“It’s not that hard to figure out. Everyone knows who was in charge before and who’s in charge now. We’ve had a year to figure it out.”

“I’m not much for official rankings myself, but that sounds dangerously chaotic.” When Henry didn’t respond, Keo said, “So, question.”

“What now?”

“What happened to my food?”

“Your food?”

“You mean no one brought me my food?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Rhett promised he’d send some food over, and not that slop you guys have been feeding me in the brig.”

“Maybe he forgot.”

“What an asshole.” Then, smiling at Henry, “You wouldn’t mind—”

“Not my job,” Henry interrupted.

“How about Pete?”

“Not his job, either.”

“Do a guy a solid, huh? I’m starving.”

Henry didn’t bother with a reply.

Keo sighed. “At least tell me something, just to keep my mind off the food people keep promising but never delivering.”

“What?” Henry said.

“Mary.”

“What about her?”

“She single?”

“She’s married.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I didn’t see a ring on her finger.”

“Maybe not technically married. It’s not like there are priests around or anything. But she’s shacking up with some dude. I think his name’s Gary.”

“Well, that sucks.”

“For you, maybe.”

“I thought it was fairly obvious that was what I meant,” Keo said. “Now, let’s figure out how to get me some food, Henry…”

* * *

It was nice to be up and about, even with the cold wind whipping at his face. Rhett had been nice enough to give him a windbreaker, socks, and boots to complete his new wardrobe, so the only thing exposed to the elements as he stood on the beach of Black Tide Island was his face. It might have been the harsh chill, with much of the breeze unhindered by the island’s relatively flat land mass, or maybe lingering effects of the meds, but the throbbing in Keo’s head had lessened dramatically.

Mary stood next to him, hands stuffed inside her coat’s pockets while unsuccessfully trying to stop her body from shivering. Apparently she wasn’t nearly as happy to be outside as he was, though as his nurse she had no choice but to follow him around in case he fell on his face.

“Can we go back inside now?” she asked after a while.

“What’s the hurry?” Keo said.

“It’s freezing out here!”

“It’s nice weather for a walk.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Of course it is. Come on.”

Keo started down the beach, and Mary had to hurry to catch up. “Slow down, Keo!”

He didn’t know why she felt the need to shout. They were close enough that he could smell her perfume. Or was that just regular feminine scent? He couldn’t be sure after spending three days in that jail cell with nothing to occupy his sense of smell but his own BO.

His boots squished in the soft sand, but he stayed far enough from the incoming tide to keep from getting wet. It was nice out, but he didn’t feel like getting wet, too.

They were somewhere at the back of the island, the same general vicinity where he had landed with Erin not all that long ago. The guys watching him like hawks from a distance might have even been the same men who had helped him and Erin come ashore that night. He counted two guards when he first arrived at the beach, then two more had showed up later. It wasn’t like he was going anywhere without a boat in sight, so the men, as with Henry and Pete back in sickbay, were likely here more for his protection.

Which made Keo wonder: How many more true believers were out there, waiting for their chance to finish what Bellamy and Calvin had started? He’d been lucky so far, but luck was luck because it tended to come and go.

Maybe coming out here and walking around in the open wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“Keo!” Mary shouted as she caught up to him.

She was already breathing hard, as if this was the most exertion she’d had in a while. And maybe it was. Mercer had brought these people to the island a long time ago, and many of them had never left. He didn’t blame them for not wanting to leave, though. It was human nature not to voluntarily abandon a safe place. Lara and the others had done the same on Song Island, fighting to the very bitter end to hold onto it and only jumping ship when they no longer had any choice.

Like a few thousand ghouls coming out of a hole in the ground. Yeah, that’ll make you change your mind about a place real fast.

“Henry told me you’re married,” Keo said.

“What?” Mary said. She gave him an odd look, as if she couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. He thought she had very lovely brown eyes. “He said I was married?”

“Not married, married, but taken. By some guy named Gary.”

“He said I was taken by Gary?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m not.”

“No?”

“Not that it’s any of your business.”

“I was just curious.”

She took her hands out of her pockets and folded them across her chest for warmth.

“Cold?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“A little body heat would fix that.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, and moved away until there were a couple of extra feet between them.

“Oh, come on; I don’t bite. At least not if you don’t want me to.”

“You think you’re charming, don’t you?” Mary said, narrowing her eyes back at him.

“You mean it’s not working?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Give me a break. I almost died today. You know what happens when you almost die?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You start thinking about what’s important in life. Like a pretty nurse in a tan-colored uniform.”

She shook her head, but he caught just a ghost of a smile on her lips. “I’m already seeing someone. Gary, remember?”

“I thought you said you weren’t taken.”

“I’m not. I’m just seeing him. There’s a difference.”

“Is it serious?”

“Not really,” she said quickly. Then, maybe catching her mistake, “Maybe. I don’t know.”

That’s definitely a “not really.”

“Word’s already gotten out about your friends,” Mary said. “The ones on the way here to meet with Rhett. Something about a plan to beat the ghouls and win the war?”

Keo smiled. “Are we changing the subject?”

“Absolutely,” she said, and this time didn’t try to hide her smile. “Is it true?”

“Yeah. It’s true.”

“How?”

“I think you’re going to have to wait for your commanders to tell you that.”

“Tell me now.”

“What do I get in return?”

“You know those pain meds I’ve been giving you for that raging headache you’re currently experiencing? Well, sometimes they can be a little hard to locate.”

“I love a woman who knows how to blackmail.”

She rolled her eyes. “So what is it? What’s the plan? Tell me something.”

“There’s a guy out there who knows how they operate. He knows just about everything there is to know about them, including how to beat them. And none of it involves shelling towns with pregnant women and children.”

They had stopped walking and Mary stared at him, though now she didn’t look nearly as cold as before. Or at least her body wasn’t trembling against the wind, even as long dark hair splayed across her pretty face.

“We can take back the planet,” she said.

“That’s the idea,” Keo nodded.

“But how?”

“I’ll tell you under one condition…”

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him. “And that is…?”

“I gotta find a cafeteria, Mary. I’m starving here.”

She laughed. “Okay, Keo. Okay. Follow me.”

She turned and led him back up the beach. He followed, eyes drawn irresistibly to the way her ass moved beneath her slacks.

“Are you staring at my ass?” Mary said, glancing over her shoulder back at him.

“Of course not,” Keo said. “I’m insulted you would think that.”

“Riiiiight,” she said.

“Question, Mary.”

“Oh God, what now?”

“When you said you weren’t taken, how untaken are you?” Keo asked.

13

Gaby

The morning sun beat down on them as they climbed out of the boat and made their way up the beach, careful not to step on the carcasses of sea life that had washed ashore. There wasn’t very much in the way of living things to greet them, though there was plenty of grass that went all the way up to their knees and, at various points, tickled at their waists. But they had expected the open fields, having seen them last night as they sat in the fifteen-footer and waited for dawn to come.

They had taken the small craft in by trolling motor to hide their approach, then let the waves take over for about half a mile before switching to paddles. Maybe they were being too cautious (if there were such a thing these days), but the fact that everything depended on this—getting Will to where he needed to be—weighed heavily on all their shoulders. If Gaby hadn’t volunteered for the mission with her eyes open, the responsibility might have been too much to bear.

She was the first one to step foot on the mushy sand, then the first one in the grass. She moved quickly and quietly, M4 in front of her and Danny’s gifted cross-knife at her hip. Maybe it was a combination of Zoe’s pills and adrenaline, but she hadn’t felt this good in days, even weeks, and the soreness from her shoulder was barely a blip on her radar. She didn’t stop until she was twenty yards up the beach and crouching in grass, her breath forming mists around her as she breathed in and out, in and out, concentrating almost as much on her surroundings as she did to control her accelerated heartbeat.

“Gaby,” Blaine whispered from behind her.

She glanced back and shook her head.

He nodded, then jumped out of the boat to join Bonnie, and the two of them pulled the vessel out of the ocean. By the time they reached land, their pants, like hers, were soaked in cold water up to the knees. There was just enough green around them that if she didn’t look closely she wouldn’t have spotted the drab olive hull of the fifteen-footer as Bonnie tied its line to a rock, then pulled it tight to ensure it didn’t go anywhere. There was very little chance they would actually need it again, but it was better to have it available in case they did.

Just in case, right, Lara?

It was strange to hope they wouldn’t need the boat again, but that was exactly the best possible outcome. She had every confidence in Will’s plan—even if he did have to alter it at the last minute—not only because it was Will who had engineered it, but because he had gone to such great lengths to bring it to them.

Now all we have to do is get it done…without everyone dying first.

Yeah, no pressure.

When she looked back a second time, Blaine and Bonnie had started removing items from the boat and putting them on the beach. She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty about making them do all the heavy lifting. Besides her own pack, she just had her gun belt and rifle. Her job was to provide security, a task that she relished. Bonnie had gotten very good with her weapon in recent months, but she was still a notch below Danny and Gaby. Though to hear Lara tell it, none of them could touch Peters, some guy who had come aboard with Riley’s crew.

Note to self: Find out if she’s right when you get back.

She focused on the grass-heavy fields around her. There were no signs of civilization as far as she could see, but that was the point of choosing this spot to beach. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to the long walk ahead of them, but a lot of nothing was better than even a little hint of something, especially if those somethings carried guns.

Loud grunting behind her as Blaine eased the suitcase out of the boat while Bonnie waited to lend a hand.

Gaby willed Blaine to get the piece of luggage over the side of the boat, then for Bonnie to hurry over and grab the other end.

Don’t drop it into the ocean. Whatever you do, don’t drop it into the ocean!

She breathed a sigh of relief when they both found firm holds and successfully made the transfer, splashing water around their ankles the whole time, before depositing the black case on dry land.

Blaine looked up and nodded at her, and Gaby returned it.

She turned back to the empty world in front of her, slinging the rifle and raising the binoculars hanging around her neck. She scanned the horizon, looking for signs—anything—that might indicate they weren’t so alone out here after all, that maybe they had misjudged how empty the place looked while they were waiting in the ocean last night.

Nothing. There was absolutely nothing out there.

So far, so good.

She lowered the binoculars and looked back at Blaine and Bonnie as they were slipping on their bulky packs. They already looked tired from the lack of sleep, and she wanted to tell them this was just the beginning, that the road ahead was only going to get tougher the closer they got to their ultimate destination.

But she didn’t, because they already knew everything that she did. They had, after all, also volunteered when they didn’t have to.

We’re all idiots. All three of us.

“Good to go?” Blaine asked.

She nodded. “I don’t see anything out there. We landed in a good spot.”

“Nothing is good. Nothing is very good.”

“You wishing you were back on the boat yet?” Bonnie asked him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is going to be easy. In and out, just like that.”

Bonnie smirked. “Just like that, huh?”

“Yup,” Blaine said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Besides, who wants to live forever?”

“I do,” Bonnie said.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the next couple of years myself, Gaby thought, but kept that to herself.

Bonnie and Blaine didn’t just have their packs and weapons to carry, but they were also burdened with the two duffel bags—one each—and had the black suitcase between them.

“You guys need a hand?” she asked them.

“Nah, it’s just like dragging around a really big piñata,” Blaine said.

“Yeah, what he said,” Bonnie said.

Gaby didn’t quite believe them, but she nodded anyway and stood up, and weapon in front of her, began moving forward, back into Texas.

* * *

They made surprisingly good time despite having no forms of transportation except their feet. Gaby remained up front, with Blaine about ten yards (sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the terrain) behind her. After leaving the mushier grounds around the beach, Blaine was now able to drag the suitcase by its handle, which helped them move faster. Bonnie, meanwhile, brought up the rear about twenty yards back to make sure no one was sneaking up on them. Blaine was the only one with both hands occupied, so that left Gaby and Bonnie with their rifles at the ready.

The only times they stopped was to catch their breath and drink some water, and to radio the Trident to let them know they had made it on land in one piece. After that, they wouldn’t call again until almost nightfall. Ever since Keo had given Black Tide their designated emergency channel, Lara had switched to a secondary one, which was what they were using now to make contact.

Just in case…

It was almost noon when they finally stumbled across something that hinted at civilization—in this case, a small blacktop two-lane road that cut across the flat landscape. There were no official road signs close enough for them to see, but it was easy to pick a direction and follow it, basically keeping the Gulf of Mexico at their six o’clock.

After a while, the soothing warmth of the sun began to take its toll, and Gaby found her focus wandering slightly. There was something to be said about seemingly being the only three souls on the whole planet, with only the sounds of their footsteps against the hard earth and occasionally labored breathing to keep them company. She only wished Nate were here to enjoy it, too.

Sorry, Nate, but I couldn’t let you risk it. Not after all you’ve been through. Don’t hate me too much.

Footsteps, before Blaine appeared alongside her, the suitcase rolling behind him on its well-oiled wheels. “Anything?”

“Not much.”

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the thought of walking all the way over there.”

“Will said there’s supposed to be a collaborator town nearby.”

“And he would know, right? He’s been running around out here for how long now?”

“Long enough.”

“Yeah.” He paused, then, “So just walk up and ask to borrow one of their trucks?”

“Sure,” she smiled. “If they don’t feel like being neighborly, we’ll just take it by gunpoint.”

“Sounds good to me,” Blaine said, and drifted back until he was behind her again.

Gaby didn’t change her stride. She would have slowed down if she thought the two of them couldn’t keep up, but they hadn’t said anything about her going too fast or too slow, so she maintained her current pace.

Except for the occasional breeze that swept across the countryside, she had difficulty remembering it was winter. Texas weather was an oddity that most Texans had come to accept, but she hadn’t realized just how strange this place was until after she’d been living onboard the Trident. Of course, the thermal sweater she had on and the heavy load she was carrying had a little something to do with keeping the cold at bay.

Don’t like Texas weather? Wait five minutes, she thought with a smile.

* * *

It was big and black and looked new if not for the blown-out front windows. There was a machine gun mounted on top of the cab, the muzzle pointed up at the cloudless sky. It was parked next to a tall elm tree, though not directly underneath the provided shade. She was looking at it from over a hundred yards and from a side angle with binoculars, and there was too much knee-high grass in her path to allow her to see much of anything around the parked vehicle.

Blaine scooted up next to her and went into a crouch a few feet to her right. He had left the suitcase and duffel bag behind to free his hands for his rifle, and he gripped it with one hand now as she handed him the glasses.

“That’s a hell of a nice spot for a picnic,” Blaine said as he peered through the binoculars. “What happened to its windows?”

“Looks like they were shot out,” Gaby said.

Gaby glanced back at Bonnie, crouched in the grass about twenty yards behind them, rifle clutched in her hands. The two of them exchanged a brief acknowledging nod.

Then Gaby turned back to the truck. “See anything I might have missed?”

“Nope,” Blaine said, lowering his hands. “Looks like a Ford. F-150 or F-250.”

“Is there a difference?”

“The 1 or the 2 in front of it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, Danny Junior.”

Blaine chuckled. “Not the worst insult I’ve gotten.”

He turned slightly and looked through the binoculars at a wall of trees about 200 yards to their right. It was the first real group of woods they had seen since arriving on land, and they had gone around it like the plague, sticking instead to walking under the sun where it was safe.

Stay out of the dark places, girl, stay out of the dark places, she remembered telling herself.

She stared at the truck again. “What do you think?”

“I think it was smart of Danny boy to give us these,” he said, tilting his rifle so that the sun glinted off the smooth steel bore of the long suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.

Her own M4, along with Bonnie’s, had the same custom attachment. The extra length made the rifle somewhat unwieldy, but out here, in the open where a gunshot would travel for miles, she was glad to have the option.

“It looks pretty new,” Blaine said, handing the glasses back to her. “Or someone’s been keeping it clean. Good chance it’s still drivable; maybe there’s even some fuel in the tank depending on how long it’s been out here. The blown-out windows are a problem, though.”

“It’s a big problem.”

“The plan was always to find a ride, and here it is.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Here it is…”

He snapped a quick look back at Bonnie, then over to her. “We’re going to have to take a chance sooner or later.”

“It could be a trap.”

“I don’t think so,” Blaine said. “No one knows we’re out here. At least, no one we can’t trust. And I don’t see how it makes any sense for anyone to leave a truck out here on the off chance someone would walk across it.”

She thought about it for a moment. Blaine wasn’t wrong. There was a very small number of people who knew their itinerary, though Lara might have already told Riley and possibly Hart, his second-in-command. And Blaine was right about the other thing, too: Sooner or later they were going to need a ride.

And here it was…assuming it still ran and there was fuel in the tank. These days, those two things weren’t always a given.

Finally, Gaby said, “We go at the same time. You take the right side, and I’ll take the left. Bonnie keeps an eye out for snipers, just in case.”

Blaine grinned. “You sound like you’ve done this before.”

“Once or twice.”

“I’ll go fill Bonnie in,” Blaine said, then got up and jogged, slightly hunched over at the waist, back to Bonnie.

Gaby pulled at the straps of her pack to make sure they were tight. Her heartbeat had picked up slightly, but not nearly as much as she would have thought.

Maybe I really am getting used to all of this.

Blaine returned a few seconds later. “Ready?”

She nodded.

“Be careful,” Blaine said, and was on his feet and moving forward toward the parked truck in the next breath.

She launched to her feet and was on his heels before starting to angle to the left side and didn’t stop until she had put almost ten yards between them. Her eyes snapped left and right and forward, never staying still in one direction for longer than a second each time.

The country road they had been following for the last couple of hours was to her left, but there were too many fields of grass to see it at the moment. To the right of Blaine was the wall of trees, and she couldn’t help but feel like eyes were watching her every movement, listening to every haggard breath she took…

Focus!

She trained her eyes back on the truck and kept moving, matching Blaine’s pace.

Eighty yards…

Seventy…

She glanced left again, toward the road, but still couldn’t see it. Back to the truck and the tree on the other side of it. It was a nice shaded area, the perfect spot for a pair of lovebirds to park and do whatever it was that lovebirds did. She had an image of two naked people in the truck bed popping up suddenly as they neared it.

Sixty yards left, and nothing except for the slight swaying of the branches in the background.

Fifty yards…

She sensed eyes watching her and snapped a quick look over at Blaine, but he was concentrating on their target. She looked past him, at the trees in the background.

Dark, black trees, so thick she wondered if the sun could even penetrate their crowns.

Thirty yards…

Closer now, she could see the Ford emblem up front, and there, the splashes of blood on the chrome grill.

“Blood!” she snapped, half-shouting and half-whispering.

Blaine nodded, but neither one of them stopped. Like her, he had already assumed the vehicle wasn’t just sitting there on purpose. Something had happened to its occupants, and out here these days that “something” usually involved guns and blood and bodies.

She lifted her carbine and took a quick look through the red dot sight, then lowered the weapon, all the while continuously moving. Blaine hadn’t stopped or slowed down to her right, and he had actually picked up his pace, which forced her to do likewise in order to keep up with him.

She finally reached the Ford and circled the front hood, sweeping the blood caked over the grill and on the dirt floor directly below.

A body.

Male. Young. Maybe in his early twenties, though it was difficult to tell for sure with the blood on his face. He was crumpled on the ground and half-hidden under the front bumper, either because he had attempted to crawl to safety after being shot or his momentum had rolled him into that position after falling off the hood. The blood on the truck was clearly his because there was a hole in the side of his head.

Jesus, that’s some shot.

“I got a body!” she said, using the same half-shouting and half-whispering voice.

“Back here, too,” Blaine said, matching her pitch.

She rounded the truck onto the other side, where a second man sat awkwardly against the trunk of the large elm tree. He was older than the first body, with gray in his hair. His head was lolled to one side, and if not for the patch of thick red that covered his chest, turning the uniform he wore an even darker shade of black, she might have thought he was just tired and decided to sit down to take a nap. A pair of empty beer cans lay at the man’s feet, and sunlight glinted off the shards of glass sprinkled around the Ford.

“I hope those beers were at least cold,” Blaine said.

“I don’t see a cooler,” Gaby said.

Blaine made a face. “You couldn’t pay me enough to drink warm beer.” Then, “Your guy wearing a uniform, too?”

Gaby nodded. “They’re collaborators.”

Blaine glanced around at their surroundings, then hurried to the back bumper and waved at Bonnie, still hiding in the grass across the field. Gaby walked over to where the second dead man sat and quickly noticed the tree behind him.

“Blaine,” she said.

He walked over. “Find something?”

She pointed at the large indentations in the trunk just above the dead man’s head. There were three of them, and they had gone in deep. Gaby took out the cross-knife and picked at the bark until she could see what had caused one of the jagged holes.

“What is that?” Blaine asked.

“Bullets,” Gaby said. “Someone was shooting at the tree.”

“Why was something shooting at a tree?”

“It wasn’t because of him,” Gaby said, nodding at the dead man. “I think he was standing in front of it when he was shot. The shooter took him out by going through the two front truck windows.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Blaine said, looking back at the shattered windows. “That’s a Danny shot right there.”

“These guys might not have even seen him when he picked them off.”

“Then the sniper was shooting at someone else if it wasn’t this poor bastard,” Blaine said. He turned and looked around them before settling on the wall of trees in the distance. “There’s a third one still out there somewhere.”

“What do you think they were doing out here?”

“Beer, a nice shade… Looks like they had some downtime.”

“That means the town’s nearby.”

“Not close enough.”

“No?”

“The gunshots,” Blaine said. “No one’s responded to the shooting yet. These guys still look pretty fresh.”

“Unless the shooter was using some kind of suppressor. We are.”

“There’s that,” Blaine nodded, before walking around the tree to get a better look at the other side.

“Nice truck,” Bonnie said as she came around the hood. Like Blaine, she had left her heavy cargo behind in the field to free her hands for her carbine.

“We got it cheap,” Gaby said. “Free.”

“My favorite price tag. Does it run?”

“Let’s find out.”

Gaby opened the passenger-side door. There was glass scattered across the seats but no blood. A two-way handheld radio lay on the dashboard, and someone had left their AR-15 behind. She looked across at the steering wheel and saw a key dangling from the ignition.

“Key,” she said, before climbing inside.

She reached over and turned the key—but not all the way—and smiled when the dashboard lights turned on, along with a chime to indicate the door was open. Even better, the fuel gauge rose almost three quarters of the way before stopping.

“Hallelujah,” Bonnie said, leaning in the exposed driver-side door. “I was starting to think we were going to have to walk all the way to Houston.”

Blaine reappeared behind Gaby. “They couldn’t have been out here for very long. Less than an hour, give or take.”

Gaby climbed out of the Ford. “Did you find anything back there?”

“Some traces of the third guy,” Blaine said. “My guess is, he was hiding behind the tree and the sniper tried to pick him off. After that, he ran for it.” He nodded at the wooded area. “In there.”

“I’d rather take my chances out here than go in there,” Bonnie said, not even trying to hide the slight tremor in her voice. “Was it another collaborator?”

“Makes sense, considering the other two. The sniper was picking them off one by one.” He walked around the truck to look at the first body. “He went first. Then the guy in front of the tree. Number three got the hint after that.” He took in the endless fields around them. “The question is: What happened to the sniper? And who was he?”

“One of Mercer’s people?” Bonnie said.

“Who cares,” Gaby said. “Let’s get the hell out of here before someone comes back for the truck.”

“I’m all for that,” Bonnie said.

Blaine and Bonnie left her to retrieve their belongings, and Gaby took another look inside the Ford—a F-150, as it turned out—and went through its glove compartment. She found a bag of jerky and a folded map of Texas, and pocketed both. There was a cooler on the passenger-side floor, and when she flipped it open found three more cans of beer, but no ice. She didn’t have a lot of uses for beer, but water was water, and she tossed the cooler into the backseat.

The AR-15 leaning against the seat also went into the back, but she picked up the radio and checked the power to make sure it was still turned off. She clicked it on, but there was only silence. Gaby put it away and got out, then opened the back door to search the backseats. Boxes of supplies, MREs, and six more warm beers on the floor. There were two backpacks on the seats, each containing additional supplies and loaded magazines. Both packs had blood and what looked like bullet holes in them.

She peered out the shattered driver-side window as Bonnie and Blaine came back. The two of them looked like they were on a nervous stroll through a dangerous park, armed to the teeth and carrying their luggage for some reason.

She exited the vehicle and looked into the truck bed. There were more empty beer cans back there, though these looked as if they had been exposed to the elements for much longer than the others. There were also two ammo cans for the machine gun. She climbed up and checked the weapon.

It was a different model than the M240 they had back on the Trident, but it didn’t take a genius to know how it operated. Every weapon was the same—the bullets went in one hole and out the other when you pulled the trigger. It was a no-brainer. The box of bullets attached underneath made the machine gun heavy when she moved it around on its tripod, which was welded to the top of the cab. There were spare casings around her feet, so someone had definitely been putting the gun to use.

From her high vantage point, Gaby took a moment to stare at the dark woods across the field one more time, the hairs along her arms spiking at the thought of running headfirst into that thing.

“How’s the view from up there?” Bonnie asked.

“Nice, but empty,” Gaby said, and jumped off the truck.

“Come on; let’s get the hell out of here,” Blaine said, opening the back door and throwing his pack inside first. “Houston’s not gonna come to us.”

14

Lara

“Can you do it?”

“Yes.”

“You want to at least think about it first?”

“Do you want me to at least think about it?”

“It would be nice, yes. They used to be your friends.”

“They’re still my friends. But not if they’re trying to shoot me.”

“What if I asked you to shoot first?”

Peters didn’t answer that one as quickly. Lara looked across the map table and watched his expression. Peters was a tall, stocky man in his early thirties, as unassuming as they come, with short black hair poking out underneath the Houston Astros ball cap that he always seemed to have on. Or at least in the three times she’d seen him up close. The thing looked well worn, and she had no trouble whatsoever believing he had been wearing it even before The Purge. A rifle jutted out from behind his back. Some kind of bolt-action.

“I’m not saying I’m going to need you to do anything,” Lara said. “We’re talking worst-case scenarios.”

“I understand,” Peters nodded. For such a dangerous man, he was surprisingly soft-spoken, and even in a room with just the two of them she had to put some effort to hear him.

“If I need you to, can you do it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated.

“Why are you so willing?”

He stared back at her with hazel eyes. “I signed up with Mercer because I thought he was the right man, the right leader. But I discovered that wasn’t the case, even before Riley came to me. Everyone needs to believe in something, Lara. I chose badly with Mercer, but I rectified that. Now I’m choosing to believe in you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’re making another mistake.”

“Maybe I am. And if that turns out to be the case, I’ll deal with it. But for now, you asked me for my loyalty and I’m telling you that you have it, whether you think you deserve it or not.”

Lara could only nod, because everything she had planned to say sounded wholly underwhelming against that response from him. She had called him to the conference room to talk about what lay ahead, but she hadn’t expected this. The fact that it came from Peters made it even more astonishing, and at the same time terrifying.

The only thing she could think of to say was, “Thank you. That means a lot, Peters.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Is that all you wanted to talk about?”

“Not quite.” She looked down at the map, at the small speck that was supposed to represent Black Tide Island. It really was in the middle of nowhere, and they would never have gotten within a hundred miles of it if they didn’t know it was even out there. “How familiar are you with the place?”

“We trained on it for months. Except for the missions into Texas, most of us spent our time there. So I know it pretty well.”

“If this whole thing is a trap, how would they attack us? Where are the boats, and how fast can they hit the water and swarm us?”

“Lara, if this is a trap, Cole and the other Warthogs could strafe you before you’re even within sight of Black Tide.”

Well damn, Peters, at least make an attempt to lie to me! she wanted to say, but she didn’t, because she knew he was right. So why wasn’t she more afraid?

Peters was still looking at her closely when he shrugged. “But if you want me to work up some scenarios, I can do that.”

“How soon can you have it for me?”

“I got a few hours to kill.”

A few hours to kill, she thought, wondering if Peters had meant that as some kind of joke, especially considering the two bodies she knew belonged to him on the Ocean Star. But Peters didn’t appear to be joking, not that she could really tell just by looking at the man’s face.

God, I’m glad he’s on my side.

“Anything else?” Peters asked when she didn’t say anything.

“You said you went on missions for Mercer. What did you do on them?”

“Mostly overwatch for the scouts. Keep people—and things—from getting in their way. We were fortunate; we never really ran into any major obstacles.”

“Never?”

“The few times we had run-ins, we dealt with them.”

“And the collaborators never knew?”

“Not as far as we know. But it wasn’t like we stayed in one place. The job was to map out their network, and once we did that, we moved on. The problem with the collaborators, and the towns themselves, is that they’re largely isolated and self-sustaining organisms. Without modern technology at their disposal, they don’t really have much communication with each other, with the other towns. So we were able to get away with fighting skirmishes when we couldn’t avoid them and still stay under the radar.”

Self-sustaining organisms, she thought. That was the last thing she expected to come out of Peters’s mouth. It wasn’t that she thought he was stupid—far from it, in fact—but it sounded so… What was the word? Scientific (?) coming from a man who could kill you before you even knew he was there.

“And no one ever connected the dots?” she asked.

“Apparently not.”

“Okay,” Lara said. “Come see me when you’re done with those scenarios. I know you think they’re useless, but I’d rather have something in place, just in case.”

“Will do,” he said, and turned to go.

“Marines, right?” she said after him.

He stopped at the door and glanced back. “Marines?”

“Danny said you used to be a Marine.”

There was just a bit of a grin on his face when he answered. “No one used to be a Marine, Lara. You’re either a Marine for life, or you never were.”

“So you’re a Marine.”

“No. I never had much use for the regimens of modern military life. Why did Danny think I was a Marine?”

“Because of your rifle. He’s only seen Marines carry it.”

“Ah,” Peters said, and left the conference room without another word.

Lara looked after him for a moment, almost expecting him to come back and elaborate on that answer, but of course he didn’t.

She shook her head and thought again, God, I’m glad he’s on our side.

She looked back down at the map. She didn’t know what she was looking for, or if any of Peters’s scenarios were going to make a bit of difference, but it felt good to be doing something during the trip.

“Lara, if this is a trap, Cole and the other Warthogs could strafe you before you’re even within sight of Black Tide,” Peters had said.

Tell me something I don’t already know…a hundred times over.

There was no escaping it: She was taking a very big risk by going to Black Tide. As soon as they showed themselves, it would be impossible to turn away. How much did she trust Rhett? How much could you trust someone you’ve never met in person?

The X factor was Keo. He had trusted Rhett enough to give the man their emergency frequency in order to make contact. He wouldn’t have done that without a reason. Someone who didn’t know Keo might think he would have done it to save himself, but she knew better. Keo had gone to Black Tide to kill Mercer and was willing to die in order to do it. He wasn’t the kind of man who would sacrifice her and the Trident to save his own hide.

“You better not be wrong about this, Keo,” she said out loud to the empty room.

Lara didn’t know how long she stared at the map, thinking about all the things that could go wrong, all the lives that were in her hands, and wondering if this wasn’t the worst decision she’d ever made.

Wouldn’t be the first time. And it probably won’t be the last.

“Squid for your thoughts?” a voice said. She looked up at Carly, poking her head into the room. “You sleep conferencing again?”

Lara smiled at her friend. “I know, it’s a real problem.”

“You should see Zoe about that. There’s probably a pill for it or something.”

“Or something. What’s up?”

Carly came in and closed the door after her. “What’s up is that I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last half a minute or so.”

“You were?”

“You were out of it,” Carly said, doing jazz hands in the air. “Big, heady thoughts, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“I ran across the Shootist on the way here.”

“The what?”

“Peters. That’s what Danny calls him. Something to do with a John Wayne movie.” When Lara gave her an even more confused look, Carly sighed. “Danny’s old, Lara. He knows old man stuff.”

“He’s not that old.”

“Old enough to qualify for Medicare, if there were such things as Medicare still around.” Carly leaned against the table and looked down at the spot where Black Tide would be. “By the way, speaking of being a pain in the ass, Nate’s still bugging me about Gaby. I’m liable to punch that kid in the face if he asks me one more time.”

“You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Of course not. That fool would just steal a boat and try to catch up to her.” Carly rolled her eyes. “Kids in love in the apocalypse. What will they think of next?”

“Kids, huh? Nate’s older than you.”

“Semantics.”

“That’s not really what semantics mean.”

“Shut up,” Carly said. Then, “So that’s it?”

Lara nodded. “That’s it.”

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“Nope.”

“And we’re going there.”

“Uh huh.”

“To ask them to join our little Scooby-Doo gang.”

“That’s the plan.”

“What if they say no?”

“I guess we say thanks and leave.”

“And they’re going to just let us head off into the sunset? Remember, we are carrying around over forty people that mutinied against them. Is that the right word? Mutinied?”

Lara nodded. “You’re becoming a regular Webster’s Dictionary.”

“What can I say? I have a lot of free time on my hands.” She put a finger over Black Tide. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? I can practically squish it with just one little pinky.”

“It’s apparently bigger in person. There’s even an airfield that runs through the middle.”

“Airfield means planes. Warplanes.”

“Yup.”

“Dangerous.”

“Definitely.”

“And we’re still going there.”

“We are.”

“Because Will says we need them.”

“He didn’t say we need them, but he said it’d be nice to have them.”

“He said that? Ghoul Will? ‘It’d be nice to have them?’”

“Something like that.”

“But that wasn’t the original plan.”

“No. He adapted.”

“Adapt or perish,” Carly said. “Now where have I heard that one before?” Carly looked across the table at her. “Okay, now that all the genius military talk is out of the way. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine, Carly,” she said, and hoped the forced smile was at least semi-convincing.

It wasn’t if the frown on her friend’s face was any indication. “Danny told me you were surprisingly okay with Will leaving again so soon. But he said he understood why.”

“What else did he say?”

“That he felt the same way. As much as he was happy Will was still alive—well, sort of, you know what I mean—he’s not the same man who left Song Island all those months ago. Hell, he’s not even a man anymore. He’s…something else. That’s reality. Danny says they could never go back to the way things were. It was hard for him to admit it, but Danny can be very pragmatic sometimes when he puts his mind to it. Is that the right word?”

She nodded. “He’s right. Will’s not the man he used to be.”

“What was it like? Talking to him again?”

What was it like, Carly? Thrilling and frightening and discombobulating, all at the same time. I still can’t decide even now.

“It was…strange,” she said. “Will’s there—he’s finally back—but he’s not really there. When I hear him talk, when he brings up the things from our past, it’s like I’m listening to a recording of our history together. It doesn’t feel real.”

“I’m sorry,” Carly said.

“For what?”

“For everything. I would have looked for you sooner and did all the girly stuff—you know, cry over ice cream and bad rom-coms on Blu-ray—but I knew you were busy with Black Tide and all the other stuff we’re not supposed to tell anyone who hasn’t been on this boat longer than a few days.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“Danny wanted to go, of course. With Will. But I told him he couldn’t.”

“He told me.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He said you wanted to be the one to tell me.”

Carly sighed. “The only way I could make him stay was by telling him that I’m carrying his devil child.”

Lara stared at her friend, speechless. She waited for the punchline, but Carly only smiled back at her.

“Really?” Lara finally said.

“Really,” Carly nodded.

Lara hurried around the table and slipped her arms around Carly, and the other woman laughed as she hugged her back. They might have also been on the verge of tears, but at the moment neither one of them cared, though Lara did glance at the door to make sure it was closed.

“Danny hinted at it,” Lara said.

“I’m surprised he managed to keep it a secret this long,” Carly said. “I guess threatening him with his own shotgun worked after all.”

Lara pulled back and looked down at Carly’s belly. She wasn’t showing yet and wouldn’t for a while. “You’re going to be a great mom.”

“I’m going to get fat,” Carly frowned.

Lara laughed. “So we’ll get you a big jacket. It’s winter, anyway. No one will suspect a thing.”

“Yeah, but there goes my fashionista cred.”

They laughed and hugged again, and this time Lara was pretty sure they were both sobbing like little girls. Good news was so hard to find these days, and after everything they had been through, she was glad there was at least one unquestionably good (great) thing happening in the world.

* * *

“Daebak,” the voice said over the radio. “Didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again.”

“You’re a hard man to kill, Keo,” Lara said. She couldn’t help but smile at the sound of his voice.

“Only because I have a lot to live for. Like seeing you guys again.”

Maddie was at the helm on the bridge of the Trident, Danny and Riley standing behind her. Black Tide wasn’t even close to being in sight yet, but it was out there somewhere. The sun had begun its downward trajectory on the horizon, but they still had a couple of hours left. Sooner or later they would have to stop and anchor, because Lara had no intentions of showing up at the island in pitch darkness. Bad things happened when it was night, even out here.

“He’s a regular John McClane, all right,” Danny was saying. “Reminds me of me.”

“Who?” Lara said.

“Die Hard.”

“That doesn’t help.”

Danny sighed. “Seriously, what did you do with all your free time when you were a kid, missy?”

“It’s a movie,” Riley said.

“See, here’s a man with taste.”

Lara turned back to the microphone. “How are they treating you over there, Keo?”

“Pretty good, all things considered,” Keo said.

“Considering he blew their dear leader’s brains out, I’d say that’s an understatement,” Maddie said.

Danny chuckled. “Yeah, ol’ Keo’s got himself a way with the locals, all right.”

“Some guys did try to kill me earlier today,” Keo was saying.

“You okay?” Lara asked.

“Nicked, but still in one piece. Well, mostly.”

“Mostly is good.”

“Anyway, the reason I’m calling. Rhett wanted me to assure you that he’s willing and able to listen to what you have to say when you arrive, in case your extended convo with him earlier wasn’t enough to convince you.”

“That’s awfully considerate of him.”

“Yeah, Rhett’s a real Southern gentleman, like that guy from that movie Danny probably knows, but don’t ask him because I don’t really care.”

Danny grunted and mouthed something, but Lara didn’t catch it.

“But considering it’s almost dark,” Keo was saying, “it might be a good idea to wait until tomorrow before putting the tugboat into harbor. Morning-ish, say.”

“That was always the plan,” Lara said.

“Brilliant minds think alike.” Then, “What about our mutual friend?”

“He’s in-country,” Lara said, but didn’t add anything else.

“And everything went…okay?”

She knew he was asking about her reunion with Will. Keo and Will had traveled together long before she ever learned Will was still alive, and sometimes she wondered what they had talked about out there as they were making their way to Sunport to link up with her.

“As can be expected,” she said into the mic.

“Is that good or bad?” Keo asked.

“I’ll let you know when we see each other again.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll keep both eyes out on this end, and I suggest you do the same. Not everyone’s all-in with Riley coming back after that Ocean Star fiasco, so you’re not out of the woods yet. Hell, half the people on this island still want to kill me.”

“What about the other half?”

“I’d love to say they want to give me a medal, but it’s more like give me an enema. With a hollow-point bullet.”

“Ouch,” Maddie said.

“What about Rhett?” Lara said into the mic. “What’s he doing to keep you safe?”

“Whatever he can,” Keo said. “But let’s face it, no one looks out for my hide better than me, myself, and I. People call it selfish, but I like to think of it as basic self-preservation. Anyways, that’s all I’m allowed to say. I got a couple of guys here watching me like hawks. Hawks with rifles. I don’t think they’d shoot me, but why chance it, right?” There was a second or two of silence, then, “Speaking of Southern gentlemen, heeeeeeere’s Rhett.”

“Well, that was sweet,” Rhett said through the speakers. “I almost got all teary-eyed just listening.”

Danny snorted. “Me too.”

“Keo’s right about the clock,” Lara said into the microphone. “We’re running out of daylight.”

“Neither one of us are going anywhere, so let’s save it for tomorrow,” Rhett said. “Until then, can I speak to Riley? We have a few things to hash out before he gets here. He needs to know that not everyone will be happy about it.”

Lara held the mic out to Riley. “It’s for you.”

* * *

She and Danny stood just outside the bridge in the hallway while Riley and Rhett communicated over the radio. The door was open and they could hear snippets of conversation, mostly from Rhett’s side thanks to the speakers broadcasting everything he was saying out loud.

“You think Kobe Steak was trying to give us hints back there?” Danny asked. “About not showing up until morning?”

Lara thought about it for a moment before finally shaking her head. “I think he was just being cautious and wanted to make sure we saw things the same way. I don’t think he’s willingly helping Rhett to lure us into an ambush.”

“That didn’t stop you from getting the Shootist to come up with some scenarios.”

“I’m just being cautious. Just in case.”

Danny grinned. “We should put that on a banner. ‘Just in Case.’”

“You knit and I’ll sew.”

“Deal.”

They continued to watch Riley on the mic while listening to Rhett’s voice coming through the speakers. They seemed to be discussing names, people who Rhett thought was on their side and those who weren’t there yet—or were completely opposed. None of the names made any impression on Lara.

“So I guess that settles that,” Danny finally said. “We’re still doing this come morning.”

“Are you having doubts?” she asked.

“I’m always having doubts. Back in college, they used to call me Having Doubts Danny. Later, we shortened it to HDD, because, you know, brevity.”

“Of course.”

“As for doubts, well, my best friend in the world just came back from the dead as a blue-eyed ghoul. Next to that, this plan of his makes perfect, logical sense.”

“Even after you thought Will might not have told us everything? Do you still think that?”

Danny thought about it for a moment before answering. “It’s Will. I mean, it’s not Will, Will. But it’s still Willie boy. Ish. I have to either believe that wholeheartedly, or I’ll have to question everything. And I guess I’m choosing to believe.”

They returned to listening to Riley and Rhett for a moment before Lara finally said, “I hear congratulations are in order.”

Danny grinned. “She finally got around to telling you, huh? I was wondering when she’d do that. Kinda got tired of you thinking I’m a chicken shit for not going back out there with Gaby and Will.”

“I never thought that, Danny.”

“Why not? I did.”

“I’d never think that of you. Ever.”

He forced a smile. “I feel it, though. That chicken shit feeling. I should be out there with them, not safe and sound on this floating bathtub.”

“You’re going to be a father, Danny. That’s important.”

“What they’re doing out there is important, too.”

“And it might not work,” she said. “I have faith in Will, but it might not work. We can’t just pretend that’s not a very real possibility. But this, right here, right now with Carly, is a sure thing. That baby’s going to need you whether the next few days work out like we hope or not.”

Danny sighed and leaned against the wall and stared back into the bridge. “Yeah, I know. I just wish I didn’t feel like such a steaming pile of crap right about now, that’s all.”

She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and the two of them exchanged a brief half-smile.

“Welcome to the club,” she said.

15

Gaby

She was thinking about Nate, about how much he must be hating her right now, when she heard him coming up. That shouldn’t have been possible at all—first climbing up the ladder behind her, then walking across the floor. She could even hear the rustling of the trench coat against the cold night air.

Gaby expected to feel sudden pangs of apprehension at his approach, but they weren’t there. Not at the beginning, and not when he slid against the wall across the closed loft door from her and looked out at the open fields that surrounded the farm they had taken refuge in. Moonlight filtered inside the stained glass window between them, highlighting the year-old bales of hay in the back.

His face was hidden under the hoodie, the twin pulsating blue of his eyes seeming to gleam in the shadows. The flaps of the trench coat hung at his sides, revealing flashes of the matte black fabric with the mesh stretch panels that covered him from the neck down. It looked like something from the future but was really just clothing worn by extreme sports athletes to protect them from crashes, with brush guards along the upper arms and absorption panels across his torso. Danny called it a ballistic jersey and had gotten Mae and a few others to add bits here and there, but the wardrobe wouldn’t stop a bullet or a knife. They did, however, hide his real identity as long as you didn’t look at his face.

She did that now and couldn’t tell if he was comfortable in the clothes. They were tighter than necessary because they had to hang off his thin frame, but if she didn’t know better she might have just thought he was a lanky guy with a thing for black and brown leather. The eyes, of course, gave it all away, as did his face. But they had taken those things into consideration too, and he was only revealing parts of him now, to her, because there were no dangers of them being spotted by anyone else.

Gaby joined him in looking out at the long-abandoned farm, marveling at the lack of fear (she had expected something, but it just wasn’t there) at his nearness. There was no anxiety whatsoever, and not in a million years would she ever think she could be this comfortable with a blue-eyed ghoul so close to her.

But then this wasn’t just any blue-eyed ghoul. This was Will. If she were out there watching them, they could have just been two guards doing their jobs while Bonnie and Blaine rested below them. He even moved like a human, but she knew he had done that on purpose, to let her know he was coming. She had seen how fast and smooth and silent the blue eyes could move, and she had no doubts Will could too if he so chose.

“When did you get back?” she asked.

“Recently,” he said, the hiss like a sharp knife through the stillness of the barn, though for some reason it wasn’t nearly as obvious as the last time they had talked, back on the Trident. Was he going out of his way to lessen it?

“How did you know about this place?”

“I was here…before.” He turned his head slightly, as if expecting to see something among the shadowed parts of the hay behind them. “There was a girl and a boy… They’re gone now. There was a struggle and blood was spilled.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But they were here the last time you came through. They were hiding in this barn.”

“Yes.” He looked back out the window, past the film of dirt over the glass panes and at the nothingness on the other side. “Nothing lasts forever.”

I have a feeling we’re not talking about two kids who used to call this place home anymore.

Will was hard enough to read when he could still be read, but now, she didn’t have a clue what was going on inside that domed head of his.

Instead, she said what had been on her mind ever since he told them his plan: “You’re connected to them. The hive mind.”

“Yes.”

“That’s how you know so much about them. About him.”

“Yes.”

“Who is he? Where did he come from? Where did all of them come from? I wasn’t in the cities when it started, but I could see the results almost right away. Everything just went black in one night.”

The questions burst out of her in one long stream, as if she had been holding them back all this time, waiting for someone who knew the answers to come around. Not that Will seemed bothered by it or the fact that she barely took a breath before she got to the end.

When he didn’t answer or say anything, she continued: “You know, don’t you? Who he is? Who he really is?”

“Just bits and pieces,” Will said, “but nothing that makes a complete story.”

“How?”

“When he’s occupied with other matters, in other places, he becomes vulnerable. His defenses are lowered and I can sneak into his mind, see snippets of his past, some of his less guarded secrets.”

“Other places?”

“The rest of the world.”

“Right. Sometimes I forget we’re not the only ones out there.” She paused for a moment, then, “Tell me about him.”

“He’s old, and he’s evolved over the years. Centuries.”

“Centuries,” she repeated.

Will nodded.

“That’s a friggin’ long time,” Gaby said.

She didn’t know why she was so surprised, because it made sense, didn’t it? Did creatures that didn’t die even after you cut off their heads still adhere to the laws of aging? And those were just the black eyes. The blue eyes were an almost completely different species that she knew almost nothing about except that they were even more dangerous than their black-eyed counterparts.

“If he’s been around for so long, why now?” she asked.

“He had no choice.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We were poisoning the planet. He’s already lost the oceans. Soon, he would lose the land and the air, too.”

“How did he lose the oceans?”

“He believes that human progress contaminated the water, and that we were doing the same to the air and the land.”

“Contaminated how? It’s a big planet, Will. I’ve seen the water out there in the Gulf of Mexico. It doesn’t look all that contaminated to me.”

“I don’t know. Even when he lowers his defenses, I can only glimpse his surface thoughts. Everything else is buried too deep.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter. At least to us, right here and now. If this works, if we do our jobs, there’ll be people smarter than us who’ll figure all this stuff out years from now.”

He nodded.

“So he acted,” Gaby said. “The Purge.”

“The plan has been around for almost as long as he has, but as humanity grew and spread out, he was forced to adapt, to rethink everything. He’s been building the nests, around the world, in secret for decades.”

“And no one ever knew about them. How is that even possible?”

“He’s had all the time in the world to prepare. He knows where to hide, how to stay unseen. They don’t need very much. A drop of blood…a single body… They were content to feed on the dregs of society. The homeless. Runaways. People who wouldn’t be missed.”

“And then we screwed up the ocean.”

“Yes…”

“What about the rain? Why doesn’t that affect them?”

“The rain is purified in the atmosphere. But soon even that might not be possible as we continue to taint the Earth. We forced his hand, you see, and he had to act much sooner than he had planned. But the rate of infection took him by surprise. The cities were too dense, the people too crammed into one space. Despite his best efforts, too many were taken in the first night, and once the tide began it couldn’t be completely reversed.” A brief pause before he continued: “He always knew that when the end came, the bloodletting would be difficult to control without the safety nets in place. But he had no choice. The rate of human progress was simply too fast, and it was unyielding.”

She had so many more questions, but before she could ask any of them, something flickered in the corner of her eye and Gaby slipped farther back behind the rotting barn wall.

“Will…”

“They haven’t seen us,” he said.

There were three of them—thin, gaunt, sickly-looking things—appearing from around the side of the main two-story house across the weed-covered yard from them. She didn’t have to see the blacks of their eyes to know what they were as they leapt onto the front porch and vanished into the building through what remained of the door, now just a slab of wood hanging off one lone hinge. They moved through the house, skeletal figures flitting across the curtainless windows as they scoured the first floor before darting up to the second.

“I thought you said this place was safe?” she whispered.

“It was,” he said, looking out the window. “They shouldn’t be here.”

But they are, she thought, tightening her grip on the carbine and thanking God for the silver bullets inside the magazine. That helped to calm her suddenly frayed nerves, even though she knew nothing they had on them right now would be enough if they were discovered. Because there might have only been three out there right now, but there were never “just” the ones you could see. There were always more out there, waiting patiently to converge.

The hive mind. It’s that damn hive mind of theirs.

She watched the creatures moving back to the first floor and knew that as soon as they were done they were going to come out, and there would be only one place left for them to search.

“Will…”

“I know,” he hissed. “Wake the others.”

She pushed off the wall without arguing and slipped across the moonlit parts of the second floor until she was at the ladder. It was old and rickety and it made too much noise as she climbed down with the rifle slung over her back before jumping the last four rungs to the hard ground below.

Bonnie and Blaine were asleep in one of the stalls, lying on pallets covered with old stained sheets and using their packs as pillows. It was pitch dark at the back of the barn, but it was easy to make out Blaine’s larger form from Bonnie’s.

She woke Blaine first, nudging him on the shoulder and whispering his name.

Blaine’s eyes snapped wide. “What?”

“Trouble,” she whispered.

She didn’t have to say any more. He was already scrambling for his weapon as she moved over to Bonnie and repeated the process.

It took longer to wake Bonnie up, and Gaby had to raise her voice just a bit too much, but finally the other woman opened her eyes and said, “It’s not morning.”

“Ghouls,” Gaby whispered.

“Fuck me,” Bonnie said, and hurried up.

“I thought he said this place was clear,” Blaine said as he snatched his pack up from the floor.

“He thought it was,” Gaby said, and thought, But nothing’s really “clear” out here anymore. I learned that the hard way.

“Where is he now?” Blaine asked.

“Up—,” she started to say, when a figure moved behind them and Blaine raised his M4 reflexively.

“Stay here,” Will said, and then he was gone.

“Jesus Christ,” Blaine whispered, lowering his weapon. “I’ll never get used to the way he moves.”

“What’s he doing?” Bonnie asked as she slipped on her own pack and grabbed her rifle.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said.

She exited the stall and dodged the slivers of moonlight filtering into the building from all the rotting wood and cracks along the walls. She got a shadowy glimpse of Will just as he opened the side door.

“Will,” she said.

He stopped and looked back, blue eyes glowing against the darkness. “Stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“They’ll search the barn next. If they find us, more will come.”

“Will,” she said, but he turned and slipped outside before she could finish, and she stared at the door as it clicked closed after him.

Blaine appeared behind her. “Where the hell is he going? He knows we’re out here because of him, right?”

“He knows,” Gaby said. “I think he’s going to lead them away from us.”

“So where does that leave us?” Bonnie asked as she appeared beside Blaine.

“We stay put,” Gaby said, “until he comes back.”

“Is that wise?”

“We don’t have any choice,” Blaine said. “None of this works without him. So either he comes back and we proceed with the mission, or…” He left the rest go unsaid.

Or we’re screwed, and all of this will have been for nothing…

* * *

By the time she got back to the second floor and peered out the loft doors, the three ghouls that were searching the main house were gone. There were no signs of them ever having been there, and for a moment she wondered if she might not have imagined the whole thing.

“How many did you see?” Blaine asked. He was occupying the same spot Will had earlier.

“Three,” Gaby said.

“Just three?”

She nodded. “Just three, but where there’s even one, there’s usually—Oh, Jesus.”

They came out of the shadows and flooded across the open yard between the barn and the house. Gaby pulled farther back until she could only see a tiny sliver out the loft doors, but it was more than enough to watch them racing below her.

Blaine had done the same thing and was staring wide-eyed, his rifle clutched so tightly in front of him she could see his knuckles turning ghostly white.

There were so many of them that their number actually drowned out the sunburnt grass that had reclaimed the property in the year since their owners were taken. She might as well be looking at a moving ocean wave made of quivering pruned black flesh.

“God,” Blaine whispered, “I’d forgotten how many of them there are out here.”

I haven’t, she thought, and said, “They’re going after Will. That’s why he left us. He’s leading them away.”

Blaine nodded and didn’t say anything. Like her, he was unable to pry his eyes away from the endless horde flowing past below them. Moonlight glinted off their domed heads like flickering beacons, and they kept coming, and coming, and coming…

“There’s more of them,” Blaine whispered. “Over there, where we’re going. You know that, right? We’re walking right into a viper’s nest.”

She didn’t say anything. Gaby recognized the long odds the moment she went over it with Lara and Danny. So she didn’t know why Blaine was bringing it up now because they all knew what was out there waiting for them when they volunteered. Or at least, she did. Maybe Blaine and Bonnie didn’t fully grasp the mission, but she never had any delusions it was going to be easy. Far from it.

If it works, it’ll be worth it. If Will’s right, three lives will be worth it…

The wave of ghouls kept coming, appearing from one side of the loft window and out the other. She willed them to keep going, despite knowing the object of their pursuit. But Will could take care of himself now that he was fully healed up. It was them she was worried about.

Don’t stop now, you bastards. Don’t stop—

“No, no, no no,” Blaine hissed, because he had seen the same thing she had:

Two of the creatures had stopped almost exactly in front of the large twin barn doors and turned to face them. Not her and Blaine, but the doors.

“Keep going, you fucks,” Blaine whispered. “Keep going.”

But they didn’t, and instead the ghouls moved toward the doors and disappeared out of their field of vision.

“Bonnie,” Gaby whispered, and hurried across the floor to the ladder on the other side. She started trying to tiptoe at first, to lessen the noise, but she was moving much too slowly and began sprinting a few seconds later.

Blaine was right behind her.

Gaby was about to stab her foot down on the first rung on the ladder when she heard the unmistakable sound of a suppressed rifle shot—the pfft! barely audible, but with nothing else making noise inside the barn except her (and Blaine’s, behind her) labored gasps against the cold air, her ears were able to pick it up.

Then a second—and a third—shot, very close together.

Pfft-Pfft!

Gaby grabbed the ladder and hurried down, this time ignoring the creaks that every single one of her steps produced, and instead of waiting until the last few rungs to jump like last time, she let go around remaining step number five and landed with a (Too loud!) thump against the hard barn floor.

She straightened up and spun around, unslinging her rifle as fast as humanly possible. Dormant pain lanced through her left shoulder, but she gritted her teeth through it. The long suppressor that added to the length of her M4’s barrel still made the carbine less comfortable in her hands, but she was glad for its silent capabilities, especially with God only knew how many creatures still outside the barn right this second.

She ran forward, passing the empty stalls one by one, making a beeline for the front of the building. The first thing she saw was the big, bulky Ford F-150 parked in the largest part of the barn up front. She could just make out the tops of the twin doors on the other side of the vehicle, along with the machine gun jutting out the back like some freakish appendage—

A flicker of movement, before she realized Bonnie was crouched in front of her in the darkness, aiming her rifle at something lying on the floor about ten yards up ahead. Whatever it was, it had come inside the barn through the side entrance, the same one that Will had used earlier, which was still partially ajar. That was the only way in because they had barricaded the front entrance.

Bonnie glanced over her shoulder and hissed, “There’s one more!”

Gaby was about to say “Where?” when a black shape the size of a small child fell out of the corner of the first floor ceiling and landed on top of Bonnie, who squeezed off two more shots as she went down. Pfft-pfft! as silver rounds vanished into the second floor above her.

Oh, Jesus! raced through Gaby’s mind, but she was unable to put them into actual sounds as she took aim, but it was impossible to separate the creature from Bonnie because their two bodies were so entwined on the floor while lost in the shadows.

Then a startled cry—Bonnie!

Shoot! What are you waiting for? Shoot it!

She had to chance it, even if she couldn’t be sure where Bonnie ended and the ghoul began—

There! A sliver of separation between the two forms at last!

Gaby squeezed off a shot from five feet away and the creature’s head exploded like a watermelon, a chunk of it flitting across the blackened air before splattering a stall door. The ghoul’s body simply toppled sideways, allowing Bonnie to grab its spindly legs, which were wrapped around her waist, and pry them free so she could scramble out from underneath the sickly frame.

“Bonnie!” Blaine hissed as he rushed past Gaby.

Bonnie seemed to have trouble standing and had to lean back against the wall for support once she was finally on her feet. Blaine reached her and grabbed her just as Bonnie’s legs gave and she threatened to slide back down.

Gaby stepped over the dead ghoul and spotted the second one lying in a pile in front of the still-open side door. A cold draft invaded the barn as Gaby glimpsed blackness on the other side before she grabbed the thin slab of wood and cautiously pushed it shut with a soft click.

She glanced over at the front doors just to make sure they were still closed and that the two wooden beams held in place by brackets hadn’t been removed. Satisfied, she hurried back to where Bonnie and Blaine were. She stepped over the first dead ghoul a second time—it was such a small creature, like a sleeping child with half of its head missing.

Blaine had guided Bonnie to the back and was crouched in front of her now. Bonnie was staring forward, eyes wide, as if she was seeing something in the shadows that neither Gaby nor Blaine could. Gaby noticed Blaine’s hands, holding a rag to Bonnie’s neck.

Oh, God.

Blaine looked back at her, but he didn’t have to say anything. Gaby slung her rifle and crouched next to Bonnie, then took over holding the rag against Bonnie’s neck. The cloth was already heavy with wetness, because Bonnie was bleeding. A lot.

As Blaine scrambled for the first-aid kit inside his pack, Gaby leaned toward Bonnie and smiled. Or did the best she could. “Think about Jo. Think about going back home to her.”

Bonnie turned to look back at her, the simple act of turning her head seemingly too much. Her face was already covered in a sheen of sweat, and Gaby used her free hand to wipe it from the other woman’s forehead.

“It was too fast,” Bonnie said.

“What was too fast?” Gaby asked, even though she knew the answer. She just wanted to keep Bonnie talking, because talking meant she was fighting, that she wasn’t going to just sit back and take this lying down.

Fight it, Bonnie. Fight it!

“The ghoul,” Bonnie said. “I got the first one, but the second was too fast.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“…I lost track of it when they came inside.”

“It was fast, Bonnie. It was really fast.”

“But you got it.”

“It was a lucky shot.”

“Yeah, right.” Her lips curved into a barely-there smile. “You were always the better shot. I’m glad you came along.”

“Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

“Still?”

“It’s boring back on the Trident anyway.”

Another attempt at a smile from both of them.

Then Bonnie’s expression turned somber. “Don’t turn back, Gaby. You and Blaine have to keep going. We have to stop them now, or we never will. Finish the mission. You understand? Finish the mission.”

“I will,” Gaby said. “We will. You, me, and Blaine.”

“You, me, and Blaine,” Bonnie repeated.

“That’s right. The three of us.”

“We’ll finish the mission,” Bonnie said, and nodded. Or tried to. “We have to finish the mission or it’ll never end. This nightmare can’t go on. For Jo’s sake. For all of our sakes.” Bonnie’s voice had dropped with each word and her eyes were struggling to stay open. Gaby wasn’t even sure if she was talking to her anymore.

Blaine scooted back over and she moved aside to let him treat Bonnie’s wound, then, with her help, put a thick pad against the hole in Bonnie’s neck and wrapped gauze around it. Blaine worked silently and quickly, but he was also applying too much pressure and Bonnie grunted with pain.

“Not too tight,” Gaby said. “It’s not going to help if she can’t breathe.”

Blaine nodded and eased up a little. He continued gritting his teeth and focusing on the work, doing everything possible not to look Bonnie in the eyes. Not that Bonnie was aware he was avoiding her. She was staring off again at that invisible something that neither Gaby nor Blaine could see.

“You’ll be okay,” Gaby said, realizing how stupid it sounded, but unable to stop herself. Or wanting to. “Think about Jo. She’s going to be pissed if you don’t come back. You promised her you would, right?”

Bonnie nodded.

“So make sure you do,” Gaby said. “You don’t want that girl mad at you. I know I don’t.”

Bonnie almost managed another smile. Almost. “God, I’m sleepy,” she said, and closed her eyes completely. “I’m going to go to sleep now, guys. Wake me when we get to Houston.”

Blaine finished and sat down on the ground and spent the next few seconds wiping his bloody hands on his pants legs. Anything at all to avoid looking Bonnie in the eyes.

Gaby sat down next to him and watched Bonnie falling asleep, her memories of her friend Matt coming back in a flood. It had been a dank basement then, and Josh was there. It felt like such a long time ago, but she could still remember every terrifying second of it.

Neither she nor Blaine said anything for the longest time, and Gaby even forgot that not long ago there had been a horde of ghouls on the other side of the thin, rotting walls around them. None of that seemed to matter very much anymore.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes (Seconds?), she whispered, “Blaine.”

“I know,” he whispered back, even as his body sagged, every ounce of strength seemingly sapped from his big frame.

16

Keo

He had a belly full of food (real honest-to-goodness food, not those leftovers they had been feeding him back in the brig) and a nice, comfortable bed in the facility’s sickbay, and Lara and his friends were on their way. Things were definitely looking up. Of course, compared to his situation just twenty-four hours ago, simply getting a block of cheese would have been cause for celebration. And on top of that, he was pretty sure Mary was coming around.

So he should have slept through the night without a care in the world, except he opened his eyes to semidarkness and knew they were outside the door.

More than one, from the sound of it, even if they were being pretty light on their feet. But it was going to take floating in the air to escape Keo’s notice, given how impossibly silent the island was at the moment. That, and the fact Mercer’s true believers had already tried to kill him once already. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that there were more of them out there, waiting to make him pay for what he had done to their dear leader.

You blow one guy’s brains out and suddenly you’re the bad guy. Geez.

Keo glanced down at the watch Rhett had given him. The hands didn’t glow, but his eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness to see that it was just a shade over three in the morning. He grinned.

The hour of the wolf.

He slowly sat up on the bed and looked across the room at Kelly, the girl who had replaced Henry around ten o’clock yesterday. She was at her chair where he had last seen her before he drifted off to sleep, her head leaning back against the wall about a foot from the door. Her rifle lay nonchalantly across her lap, and she was snoring blissfully. They were the only two people in the entire room.

His eyes shifted back to the door. It was gray metal and stood out in the blackness. It had a lever handle and Keo waited for it to move, but it didn’t.

Not yet, anyway, because he had definitely heard noises from the other side. Not the kind of sounds made by people just walking by in the hallway, either. Those would be obvious and clear. No, these were very soft and just barely audible, the result of people moving but trying not to be heard. But they couldn’t help but make sounds because Keo’s second guard, Jackson, was out there. Jackson had replaced Pete at the same time Kelly showed up for Henry.

Which meant Jackson was either dead or was in on it. Keo was inclined to believe the former after the last attempt on his life. Unless Rhett was a complete idiot (and nothing Keo had seen from the guy pointed to that conclusion) he would have only assigned people he could absolutely trust to guard Keo from now on. Of course, that was assuming Rhett actually knew his people as well as Keo was hoping he did, because if Jackson was in on this too, along with Kelly…

He remembered Donovan, his brig guard, opening the door for Bellamy and Calvin. He hadn’t seen Donovan again since. With any luck, the guy was occupying the same cell Keo had spent time in. It would be poetic justice.

He focused on Kelly. She was definitely asleep, which either meant she didn’t know what was going on or…well, she was literally sleeping on the job. The question was: What was that “job?”

He calmly swung his legs off the bed, then lowered them until his bare feet touched the cold, hard floor, and stood up—and almost fell right back down. He managed to grab the wall to steady himself first and remain upright, then spent the next few seconds trying to shake away the dizziness. Maybe it was the getting shot in the head, or having the bandages wrapped way too tightly—

Oh, who was he kidding. It was definitely the getting shot in the head from almost point-blank range that was the real culprit here. He was lucky he was even still able to stand at all after the painkillers Mary had graciously given him before leaving her shift.

He didn’t move again until the stars had disappeared and he could see the concrete wall across from him. He refocused on Kelly’s slumped-over form. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl if she got a decent haircut. She’d been friendly enough when she tagged in for Henry and they’d even had a nice conversation about China, where she thought he was from. Keo hadn’t bothered to correct her.

He had taken two steps toward Kelly—really, toward that rifle of hers—when he glimpsed shadows flitting across the narrow slit under the door, where a generous pool of artificial light spilled inside the darkened room, courtesy of the hallway beyond.

Shit.

He knew exactly what the shadows were doing without having to think about it: They were positioning themselves to enter, and there was definitely more than one. Two that he could see, possibly more hiding behind the walls either waiting for their turn or pulling security. Which meant Jackson was definitely dead.

Or in on it.

Either/or.

Voices followed—incoherent (to him, anyway) whispers—just before the door lever started to move.

Now or never!

He gave up on stealth and launched into a half-run. He made it halfway to Kelly when her eyes flew open, waking up to the sound of him running. That was bad news, because if Kelly could hear him while asleep, then there was a good chance the men lining up outside the door could, too. But that might be the least of his worries if it turned out Kelly was also a secret Mercer loyalist, because he wasn’t going to reach her or the door in time. He was fast, but he wasn’t that fast, so Keo did the only thing he could think of: He took a chance.

“The door!” he shouted about half a heartbeat before the door in question swung open to reveal two silhouetted figures standing in the open doorframe.

Kelly bolted up from the chair, at the same time grabbing her M4 rifle as it was falling off her lap. Keo braced himself for the inevitable—for Kelly to turn her weapon on him—but instead she began to spin toward the wide-open door to her right and he thought, Oh, thank God something’s going right for once!

Either the invaders didn’t know where Kelly was stationed inside the room or they had no clue she was even there, because the first man through the door was clearly searching for—and finding—him and never looked anywhere else. The hallway lights danced off the long, smooth barrel of the suppressor attached to the end of the man’s submachine gun as he raised it in Keo’s direction.

The bang! of Kelly’s rifle shattered the quiet, but instead of waiting to see what happened next, Keo kept running even as the first man through the door collapsed in front of him, revealing his partner in the background. The second man was also armed with some kind of submachine gun, but he wasn’t nearly as ready as the first, and his eyes went down instead of up and it took him awhile to see Keo’s charging form.

So Keo kept running, except this time he was focused entirely on the door (You picked the right guards this time, Rhett!) even as Kelly tried to step away from the wall to get a look at the second would-be killer. The man finally glanced up and saw Keo and began to raise his weapon when Keo launched himself and barreled into the man, striking him perfectly in the chest with his shoulder.

Fuck me! Keo’s mind screamed as a nuke went off inside his skull as he and his victim tumbled through the open door and into the hallway beyond. Keo landed on his chest and chin (but thank God not his forehead!) and let out a pained grunt.

The first thing he saw was Jackson slumped awkwardly nearby, back against the wall, a red line running from one side of his neck to the other, and blood dripping down his tanned uniform. The poor bastard probably never knew who had sneaked up behind him and slit his throat, or if he did, he hadn’t been able to do anything to defend himself against it.

Pounding footsteps alerted Keo to a fourth person inside the hallway. He twisted his head just in time to witness a pair of fleeing boots going the other direction and he wanted to shout, Yeah, you better run!

But he didn’t get the chance because the man he had slammed into was already scrambling to his knees in front of him. The man had dropped his weapon during the collision (Second time’s the charm!), but instead of going for his holstered sidearm, he went for the knife in his left hip, and Keo glimpsed small strips of blood clinging to the blade’s edge as it came out of its sheath.

The man was in his thirties with dark brown hair, and if there was a name on his tag, it was impossible to read with what looked like black tape placed over it.

“Fucking die!” the man spat out through clenched teeth as he lunged at Keo.

Keo rocked backward on his heels as the blade went for his chest, slashing from left to right.

It missed—barely!

The man didn’t let his first failed attack stop him and was already moving again, bringing the combat knife—all twelve inches of it, seven of that making up the actual killing part—back up for another strike. Before he could, Keo reached forward with his left hand and grabbed the wrist with the knife and jerked the hand up, then drove his fist into the man’s chest, aiming for the spot where his target’s heart would be.

The assassin’s face seemed to bug almost comically for a split second as his heart skipped a beat. He also lost all momentum and strength in his knife hand, which allowed Keo to push forward and invade the man’s defenses and punch him in the nose. Blood splashed Keo’s knuckles, but he ignored it and hit the man again. And again.

He didn’t stop until the body went slack and fell to the floor, the knife clanging to the hard floor next to it.

Keo let out a sigh and sat down next to the door. He checked the hallways to make sure no one else was coming—or that the guy who had fled, returned—before allowing himself to lean against the wall to catch his breath. He thought about reaching for the dead man’s weapon, but his head was pounding, not helped by the large dose of adrenaline still racing through every inch of him.

He barely noticed Kelly coming out of the door to his left. She swept the hallway with her rifle, said something when she saw Jackson, then stepped over Keo’s splayed legs and crouched next to the other guard.

Kelly didn’t do something stupid, like feel for a pulse. She didn’t have to. One look at Jackson’s throat told her all she needed to know. Instead, she stood back up and glanced down at the second attacker. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet,” Keo said.

The man just looked dead with the thick layer of blood covering most of his face, almost all of it coming from his shattered nose. But he was still very much alive, even if he was barely breathing, and didn’t seem to be moving at all except for the slight rise and fall of his chest.

“Jesus, how many times did you hit him?” Kelly asked.

“Relax, he’s alive. Thought Rhett might want to ask him some questions.”

Kelly crouched next to the man.

“You know him?” Keo asked.

“Pollack,” Kelly said. “The other guy”—she looked back into the door—“is Stans. Or was Stans.” She poked at Pollack’s name tag with the barrel of her rifle, noting the black tape over it. “Why’d they cover their names?”

“I’d guess it has something to do with that,” Keo said, pointing at Pollack’s right arm.

He had seen it earlier when the man was trying to slice him with the knife—a black patch with a white letter M written on it, surrounded by a white circle. The patch looked homemade, as if Pollack had cut out a piece from a black T-shirt and found a white permanent marker to make the emblem.

“That’s new,” Kelly said. She stood up and went back into the room, then came out a few seconds later. “Stans is wearing the same thing. What do you think it means?”

“Beats the shit outta me,” Keo said. He was out of breath for some reason and struggled to regain his composure. “There was a third guy. He took off when Pollack and me took our argument into the hallway. I don’t think he’s coming back—” He stopped when he heard footsteps approaching from around the corner and quickly reached for Pollack’s fallen weapon. “Spoke too soon.”

“It’s okay,” Kelly said next to him. “I radioed in while you were out here with Pollack. They’re friendlies.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

Keo grunted, wondering how sure “pretty sure” was when half of the island wanted you dead. Of course, Kelly was probably not taking that into consideration when she offered up her “pretty sure.”

She was right, though, when a group of tan-colored uniforms turned the corner led by Henry and Pete. The group of men jogged down the hallway toward them.

Keo relaxed his grip on the gun but was apparently smiling stupidly down at the weapon because Kelly said, sounding more than slightly annoyed, “Why are you so happy?”

“Things are looking up,” he said, and ran his hands over the smooth side of the Heckler & Koch MP5SD resting comfortably in his lap.

* * *

“Goddammit, Keo, will you fucking stop killing my people?”

“Tell your people to stop fucking trying to kill me.”

Rhett let out a deep sigh, though at this point Keo wasn’t sure if that was frustration with him or his own people. He guessed it was probably fifty-fifty, depending on what Rhett had found out before he showed up in sickbay two hours after Pollack and Stans were carried off.

“Goddammit,” Rhett said again, and resumed pacing at the foot of Keo’s bed.

“What did you find out?” Keo asked.

“Like you said, they cut up black sheets and made those armbands. I don’t know how many there are. Maybe half of the damn island’s got black armbands hidden in their mattresses as we speak.”

“So search the mattresses.”

“I can’t search the mattresses.”

“Why not?”

“That would just escalate the problem.”

“How the hell would that be escalation?”

“Because we’re sitting on a powder keg. All it would take is one more Pollack or Stans or Bellamy to decide they’d rather go out in a blaze of glory, and I’ll have a full-fledged civil war on my hands. When that happens, people will have to start choosing sides. Putting the place on lockdown and starting to search people’s rooms will be the spark that causes that. All the other Mercer loyalists hiding out there will feel like they don’t have any choice but to fight.”

“Mercer would have done it.”

“And look what happened to him.”

“Point taken.”

“I just have to limit my circle to those I can trust. And even then...”

“You can’t be sure if one of them isn’t informing on you to the Mercerians.”

Rhett gave him a wry smile. “Mercerians?”

“Mercer loyalists.” Keo shrugged. “I coined the term myself. If you wanna use it, it’s gonna cost you a tribute.”

Rhett walked over to a chair and sat down, and spent the next few seconds just watching Keo putting the MP5SD he had disassembled on a clean bedsheet and was now painstakingly putting back together. Both Pollack and Stans had been carrying identical weapons, though the one Stans had was noticeably more well-worn and chipped, and its inside parts as equally poorly maintained.

He thought Rhett might balk at letting him have the submachine guns, but apparently two attempts on Keo’s life within two days had convinced him otherwise. The man had, in every way possible, fully committed to keeping not only Keo alive, but moving the island’s inhabitants onto a new era. Keo could see the strain of that commitment on Rhett’s face and wondered if he might not be having second (or hell, third) thoughts right about now.

“What did Pollack tell you?” Keo asked.

“Jack shit,” Rhett said. “He’s still unconscious. How many times did you hit him, anyway?”

“People need to stop asking me that. I hit the fucker enough times to get the job done. If he loses a nose over it, tough nuts.”

“I guess he had it coming.”

“You’re damn right he did. Speaking of getting what they’ve got coming, what about the third guy?”

“You sure there was even a third guy?”

“I saw him take off while me and Pollack were in the hallway playing footsy.”

“Did you get a look at his face?”

“Just a pair of boots running in the other direction. It was a guy, though.”

“You can tell that from a pair of boots?”

“Can’t you?”

Rhett shrugged, then nodded at the MP5SD. “You look like you know what you’re doing with those things.”

Keo put the final piece in place, then slipped the long magazine back into the weapon and laid it on the bed next to him. “I’ve been around a gun or two.”

“No shit,” Rhett said. He looked across the sickbay at the closed door. Kelly and Jackson’s replacements were outside, along with two more men. “There’s one good thing that came out of this…”

“I’m still alive?”

“Besides that.”

Keo snorted. “What’s the other thing?”

“Jackson’s death isn’t going to go down well with the island. The fact that they cut his throat… Jesus.”

“You think the ones stuck in the middle might turn on the Mercerians after this?”

“I’m hoping. Or at least push them further over to my side.”

“Let’s hope.” Keo stood up and slipped Pollack’s gun belt around his waist and cinched it. “Thanks for letting me keep the weapons.”

“Wasn’t my first or second choice.”

“Always happy to be everyone’s third choice.” Keo folded the bedsheet he had been using to clean the guns and tossed it across the room. “I don’t have to tip housekeeping, do I?”

Rhett grunted.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Keo said. “So how does this affect the Trident’s arrival in—” he glanced at his watch “—soon.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should call it off.”

“What are the chances they might attack my friends?”

“Not your friends, but Riley and the others onboard. The…Mercerians still consider them traitors. They hate you for killing Mercer, but they don’t have any love for Riley, Hart, and the others, either.” He shook his head. “I’m talking about it with the others. We were already set on taking it slowly anyway, but after what happened this morning… I don’t know, now.”

“Don’t cancel the meeting,” Keo said. “You’ll want to hear what Lara has to say.”

“About this plan to take back the planet.”

Keo nodded. “That’s right.”

“I have to tell you, Keo, I’m not optimistic. What can she possibly know that we haven’t already considered? Or found out in the year or so that we spent scouting the collaborators in preparation for R-Day?”

“You’d be surprised what one well-placed source can find out.”

“So that’s it. You guys have an inside man. Am I close?”

Keo barely managed to suppress a grin. “Something like that.”

“Has to be,” Rhett said. “Riley hinted at it, but he wouldn’t come right out and say it.”

“Talk to Lara.”

“I never said I wouldn’t.” He paused, then, “I’ll tell you one thing: The fact that it’s coming from her is one of the reasons so many people are pushing me to meet with your friends as soon as possible. It’s not just anyone, after all. It’s her. Lara. The woman on the radio. A lot of guys here still carry around iPods with her message in a loop.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t mention that last part to her.”

“No?”

“She doesn’t like the whole messiah thing. It makes her uncomfortable.”

Rhett chuckled. “That’s just going to make people like her more.”

* * *

Mary the pretty nurse, who in a previous life had been an EMT trainee, came to check his stitches about half an hour later. Sunrise was already filling the room, and he’d be damned if she didn’t look as good in the morning as she did every other time of the day.

“Stop,” she said as she unwrapped the bandages around his head.

“Stop what?” He sat on the bed as she worked. “I wasn’t doing anything but being a good patient.”

“You were staring at my boobs.”

“It’s not my fault you have very nice boobs.”

“If there were still human resources around, you’d be so fired.”

“Justifiable termination.”

“Sit still.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He sat perfectly still as she checked the stitches along his temple, then did the same for the ones on his forehead. There was a little bit of blood in both places, but as long as it wasn’t pouring down his face, he wasn’t too worried about it. Even so, Keo had been doing everything possible to avoid his own reflection and took it as a good sign whenever Mary (or someone else) looked at him and didn’t flinch reflexively. Maybe one or two more scars would get him to Frankenstein territory, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

“You’ve really been through a lot,” Mary was saying as she picked up a fresh roll of gauze from a nearby tray. “I’m not just talking about your head. You have a broken nose, too. It doesn’t look like it had the chance to heal properly.”

“You’re worried about me,” he said, smiling up at her.

“It’s my job to worry about my patients.” She stopped wrapping the bandage long enough to trace the long scar that went down his cheek. She had very soft fingers. “Does this hurt?”

“Not anymore.”

“But it used to.”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Tough guy.”

“Only in front of the pretty ones.”

She gave him a wry smile. “You’re not going to stop, are you?”

“It can’t be news to you that you’re very easy on the eyes.”

“Makes me think you’re overcompensating for something.”

“You don’t think it could just be old-fashioned lust?”

“Oh, I know it’s lust. But you’re coming on way too strong. So what’s the real story?”

Keo watched her finish her work, then pack up the medical supplies and return to a counter across the room. “I told you, almost dying gives you a new perspective on life. And I have so many friends on this island who want to keep giving and giving me those new perspectives.”

She glanced back at him with a pitying smile. “I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more hated man in my life.”

“But half the people on this island love me for taking out Mercer for them, right?”

“Who told you that?”

“Not true? Not even a little bit?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Most people still don’t know how to feel about Mercer’s death. A lot of them are still in a state of shock and confusion about recent events. You killing Mercer, Rhett recalling everyone. We don’t even know if this is the end of the war we spent a year preparing for. Things are…uncertain, to say the least.” Mary walked back over and handed him a small cup with two pills inside. “In case of pain. Did they bring you water?”

“Not necessary.” Keo swallowed them down and handed the cup back to her. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Have you figured out what you’re feeling about all of this?”

She smiled at him. “I’m not a Mercerian, I know that much.”

He smiled back. “Word’s getting around.”

“It’s got a certain ring to it.” She sat down across from him, where Rhett had been sitting earlier, and seemed to really think about his question for a moment. Finally, she said, “Maybe grateful.”

Keo was unable to hide the surprise on his face. Even Rhett hadn’t gone that far.

“We all saw the pictures the scouts brought back,” Mary said. “The towns, the people in them. When the planes took off, we knew what they were going there to do.” She shook her head and there was genuine sadness in her eyes. “So yeah, I’m grateful for what you did, Keo. I don’t have any problems admitting that. A lot of us are, even if we won’t say it out loud. The truth is, not hating you for what you did is the same as condoning it, which is then the same as admitting they’d allowed themselves to be blindly led by Mercer all this time. It’s...not an easy thing for people to confess, so you have to give them time.”

“How much time?”

“I don’t know. Maybe your friend coming here will help them get there.”

“They know about Lara?”

“It’s a small island, Keo,” Mary said. “Secrets don’t stay a secret for very long around here. You should know that by now.”

“I’m beginning to realize that,” Keo sighed.

17

Lara

If Rhett had been drinking water when he climbed off the twenty-footer and onto the swimming platform at the back of the Trident, Lara was almost certain he might have done one of those spit takes from the movies. Instead, he just stared at her for a second or two, long enough to reveal his surprise, but also to quickly recover.

“Lara,” he said, extending a hand out toward her.

She shook it. “Rhett.”

“You’re not what I was expecting.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, if it helps, you’re exactly what I expected.”

He reached up and rubbed his bald head. “Riley told you.”

“He might have mentioned it, among other things.”

“All good, I hope.”

“I don’t know yet.”

He chuckled and she smiled before turning and leading him onto the lower deck while Nate and Jolly remained behind, watching the lone man who had guided the offshore boat over from Black Tide Island.

Lara liked having Jolly around—he made for an imposing figure clad in the stripped down urban assault vest. Nate wasn’t entirely out of place next to the bigger kid, but he wasn’t quite as intimidating. The extra day’s rest had made Nate the healthiest he’d been since returning with Gaby and Danny, and she was glad he had given up trying to get her to reveal Gaby’s location. For now, anyway. According to Carly and Maddie, he was still asking around, but doing it a little less obviously.

“You got Jolly too, huh?” Rhett was saying as they walked side by side along the boat’s railing.

“He volunteered,” Lara said.

“He already looks at home. But I guess it’s not too hard to like living on a luxury yacht.” He glanced around. “Where’s Peters? I know he’s around here somewhere. That guy’s like a gargoyle, always perching high above you.”

“You’re right, he’s around here somewhere.”

“You had him watching us on approach, didn’t you?”

“He volunteered, too.”

“Of course he did.” Then, “Would he have shot us if we’d tried anything?”

“Funny, but I asked him the same question.”

“What did he say?”

“You know him better and longer than I do. What do you think he said?”

Rhett grunted. “That’s going to help, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“Getting Peters on your side. People respect him. Hell, having Peters on your side’s going to do more good than having Riley. You were smart to give him a home.”

“Speaking of homes, I was expecting to see Keo with you.”

“You didn’t say he was part of the package.”

“I just assumed he’d want to come back the first chance he got.”

“Circumstances being what they are, I’d have a full-blown riot on my hands if I let him waltz off the island after what he did.”

“So he’s still your prisoner.”

“Not quite.”

“Then what is he?”

“I have him on lockdown for his own good.” Then, when she gave him an unconvinced look, “He’s not my prisoner. In fact, he’s armed to the teeth.”

“You let him have a gun?”

“Guns. Like I said, he’s isolated at the moment, for his own good.”

“Let me guess: Not everyone has been as benevolent towards him as you?”

“That’s putting it mildly. You already know about the first attempt on his life. There was a second one earlier this morning.”

“But he’s okay…”

“He’s probably busy right now trying to get into my nurse’s pants, so what does that tell you?”

She smiled. “Sounds like Keo.”

They walked along the railing instead of going into the deck where most of Riley’s people were currently housed. Faces peered curiously out of the windows as they passed by, and Rhett stared back.

“Speaking of house arrest,” Rhett said.

“Not exactly,” Lara said. “We had some complications.”

“You too, huh?”

“It’s a dangerous world, Rhett.”

“The week I’ve been having agrees with you.”

“I’m glad you came. You made the right choice.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Still, it took guts.”

“So did you, coming here knowing what we have.”

“Your planes…”

“Among other things.”

“I guess we both know there’s more at stake here than just us.”

“That we do.” Then, as they passed another window with civilians looking out at them, “Is everyone in there?”

“Just about everyone.”

“All squeezed into this little boat?”

“It’s not that little.”

“Smaller than the island.”

“Most things are smaller than your island.”

“True enough.”

“But you came here to talk about the future. So let’s do that.”

“All right.” He paused for effect. “You told me you had a plan to beat the ghouls. I’m frankly on pins and needles waiting to hear it. Like I mentioned on the radio, the last person who claimed to have a plan, well, we all know how that one worked out.”

“I’m not Mercer.”

“True, you’re better looking.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“The fact that you’re not Mercer is why I’m here, alone, and unarmed.”

“That’s not exactly true now, is it?”

He chuckled. “No, I guess not.”

They were both taking big risks this morning. Even now, with the Trident adrift five miles from Black Tide, she didn’t feel safe at all. She told herself she would never feel safe around Mercer’s people, even if Mercer himself was no longer around to command them. These were, after all, the same men who had been razing towns full of pregnant women and children. People like that were not to be fully trusted, if she could help it.

So why are you here?

Because I don’t have a choice. Because I need them. Because Will’s chances go way up with them on our side.

“You have an inside man,” Rhett was saying.

“What makes you say that?”

“What else could it be? Besides, Keo confirmed as much.”

She nodded. “His name’s Frank. He’s in-country right now.”

“And Riley’s met him?”

“He has.”

“What’s he doing out there?”

“Making preparations for what’s coming.”

“You mean if we go along with your plan.”

If you go along with the plan. If all of this wasn’t for nothing. If we don’t all die in the process.

There were a dozen more ifs that she could come up with, but every one of them led down the same road: Doubt. And right here and right now, she couldn’t afford that.

“I think you will,” she said, and the words came out so confidently that she almost fooled herself. Almost.

“What makes you so certain?” Rhett said.

“Because I’m offering you the opportunity to end this war. Really end this war in a way that doesn’t include slaughtering innocent civilians.”

“You’re going to keep hanging that over our heads, aren’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? You did it.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

They walked the length of the yacht in silence for a while, and she led him up one staircase at a time. She could have taken him up using the ladder at the back when he first boarded and drastically cut down their walking time, but Lara wanted to get a feel for him out here in the open, with no one else around but the two of them. She needed to know if she could trust this man.

“All right, I take it all back,” Rhett said when they reached the final floor. “I can see you not wanting to abandon this place anytime soon. Not every day you get to call something like this your base of operations.”

“It’s nice,” Lara said, “but it’s never going to be home.”

“So where is home?”

“Texas.”

“Ah.”

“You?”

“Kansas. I was on a business trip when the shit hit the fan,” Rhett said. “What were you doing before all of this?”

You mean how old am I, don’t you? she thought with a smile, and said, “At home.”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping.”

“I mean, what were you doing. As in, your former occupation.”

“Why don’t you just ask it, Rhett.”

“Ask what?”

“My age.”

“All right. How old are you?”

“Old enough to keep everyone on this boat alive when no one else could, through more trials and tribulations than you could possibly imagine.”

Rhett chortled. “You wanna ask me how old I am?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Curiosity has nothing to do with it. I don’t think your age matters. The only thing I care about is how capable you are and if I can trust you with the lives of my people.”

“And vice versa,” Rhett said. “So convince me, Lara, and I’ll see what I can do to convince you back that I’m worth allying with.”

* * *

It was just the two of them inside the conference room, with the morning sunlight streaming through the port window. Rhett had listened to her in silence, interrupting only when he needed clarification. In all, he broke in a total of six times.

When she was done, he leaned against the table and looked across at her as if really seeing her for the first time. She read him back, but couldn’t tell whatsoever if she had convinced him or if he had concluded she was insane. The fact that he hadn’t laughed in her face or turned and left was, she thought, a good sign.

Maybe.

“So that’s your plan,” he finally said.

She nodded. “That’s our plan.”

“This Frank. Can you trust him?”

“With my life,” she said without hesitation.

“Even though he used to be one of them,” Rhett said. It wasn’t a question.

“He turned on them a long time ago,” she said, marveling at how easily the lie came. But then, was it really a lie? Will had turned on the ghouls very early on, didn’t he? “It doesn’t matter what he was before; he’s one of us now. I trust him enough that when the time comes, I’ll be committing lives to his plan; lives that I spent a lot of time trying to protect. He’s seen things no one else has. Knows things people don’t even know to look for. He risked everything to get this plan to us. And now he’s risking everything again by going back out there to take point.” She paused to let all that sink in before continuing. “So yes, Rhett, I trust him implicitly.”

“Even so, what you’re talking about, it’s dangerous. Hell, it’s borderline suicidal.”

“No more dangerous or suicidal than doing nothing. How long before they completely overrun us more than they already have?”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter. You’re on a boat, and I’m on an island.”

“They can’t get to you, but their human lackeys can. How long before they send an armada out here for you?”

“Have you looked around the Gulf of Mexico, Lara? There are no more armadas. They went around sinking every boat they could find along the marinas and shorelines a long time ago.”

“They only need a dozen boats with machine guns. I’ve seen it, Rhett. If the blue eyes want something badly enough, they’ll commit everything they have to take it. I’ve seen it. I’ve fought it. I barely survived it.”

He stared at her before finally nodding. “I believe that you have.”

“Besides, it’s no more dangerous than sending kill teams on hit-and-run missions all over Texas.”

“There is one big difference: those guys were fighting collaborators. Human beings. More importantly, a limited number of human beings. What we’re talking about here is taking on the entire ghoul population.”

“Not all of them. Just the ones in Houston.”

Rhett grunted. “How many people were in Houston before all of this? A million?”

More like two million.

“The vast majority of those people are ghouls now,” Rhett continued. “That’s a hell of a lot to contend with, Lara, and we’re going to run right into the thick of them.” He shook his head. “It’s almost certainly a suicide mission.”

“Most of the fighting will be in the sunlight.”

“But not all of it. We’ll have to go into the dark eventually. That’s their turf.”

“Frank knows what he’s doing.”

“Frank’s one man.”

“He’s also our best chance to end this. Now. Not a week from now. Not a month or a year. But now, Rhett. This is our best chance.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it’s true. We don’t know how long the target’s going to be there. Right now, it’s vulnerable. But that might change in twenty-four hours. In a week. If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, we might not get another one. Ever.”

“I get that you believe everything you’re saying, but what you’re asking…”

“Is a lot, I know. But it’s not any more than what your people were already committed to under Mercer. The only difference is, this time your bombs will be dropping on the real enemy, not kids and old men.”

Rhett sighed and looked down at the map, as if the answers were down there. She could have told him it wasn’t because she had lost count of the number of times she had done the exact same thing. It was just a map, and it didn’t shed light on anything.

He returned his gaze to her. “Just to be clear, I can’t order them to be a part of this. I wouldn’t, even if I could. It’ll have to be their choice.”

“I’m not looking for a conscripted army. I want volunteers.”

“Just volunteers?”

“I’m not ordering any of my people to do this, either. Everyone who is involved is doing so of their own free will.” She thought of Nate and Danny, and added, “Some of them want to do more, but I won’t let them.”

“You have people anxious to get killed?”

“No. I have people who know what’s at stake, who know this is our single best chance to take it all back.”

“And they trust Frank.”

“He’s earned our trust. Over and over again.”

“And you just want volunteers,” Rhett said.

She nodded. “I just want volunteers.”

Rhett looked back down at the map and didn’t say anything for the longest time. She could almost picture the gears turning inside his head. Had she done a good enough job of selling it? Maybe. It was hard to gauge how convincing she had been. How convincing could she even be if she still had doubts about the plan herself? Even after sending Gaby, Blaine, and Bonnie out there with Will?

God, you better know what you’re doing, Will.

Rhett finally stood back from the table and glanced around the room. “I can’t help but notice it’s only been you and me in here since I arrived. Where’s Riley?”

“He’s around. I asked everyone to give me time alone with you.”

“You wanted to make sure you could trust me.”

“And vice versa.”

He sighed again. It was the sigh of a man with too much on his mind and the weight of the world on his shoulders. She knew the sound and the look because she had heard and seen it countless times from herself.

“So what do you need from us?” Rhett asked.

“Whatever you can give me,” she said.

“It might not be nearly as much as you think. R-Day was a success by every stretch, but we did suffer casualties. And not everyone made it back home when I gave the recall order.”

“We’ll work with what you can give us. My people are very adaptable, Rhett. We were already prepared to go at this alone before we learned about what happened to Mercer.”

“You’re telling me you were going to do all of this by yourselves?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Then you’re crazier than I thought.”

“We’ve been called worse.”

Rhett chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that makes two of us.”

* * *

“Did he go for it?” Danny asked when she stepped onto the bridge.

“Maybe,” she said. “He’s with Riley now. Maybe Riley can nudge him to where we need him to be.”

“What if they say no?” Maddie asked from behind the helm.

Lara shook her head. “I don’t know, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“I don’t know about you, but five miles doesn’t seem like that long of a bridge when the other guy’s got warplanes,” Danny said, turning back to the windshield and looking out at the tiny black dot blinking in and out of existence underneath the morning sun.

Danny was right—five miles felt way, way too close given what was parked on Black Tide Island’s airstrip. It was hard to believe how potentially dangerous the speck of dirt staring back at them at the moment was.

“Want me to pull back some more?” Maddie asked.

“No,” Lara said. “I don’t want them to think we’re scared.”

“Even though we are?”

“They don’t have to know that. Besides, it doesn’t matter if we put five or ten or fifty more miles between us. They know we’re out here and they found us once before—and that time was in the dead of night. They’re not going to have any difficulty locating us in broad daylight.”

“Doesn’t help we’re the only rich man’s toy floating out here for miles and miles,” Danny said.

“Yeah, that too.”

“By the way, while you were having your chat with Scarlett’s boyfriend, Expedition 2.0 radioed in on schedule. They’re on course into the…Heart of Darkness.”

“‘Heart of Darkness?’” Maddie said.

“What? Too ominous or not ominous enough?”

“As long as there isn’t a fat Marlon Brando waiting on the other end.”

“Well, there is something waiting on the other end, but I wouldn’t call it fat, exactly.”

“Did they run into any problems?” Lara asked.

“Apparently, it’s smooth sailing so far,” Danny said.

“Apparently?” she said, looking over at him.

He shrugged. “They didn’t mention any complications.”

“You didn’t either when you and Gaby were trapped in Gallant with no way out. Why was that?”

“Because if you knew what kind of creek we were up at the time, you might have rushed over like a bunch of idiots and tried to rescue us. Then I’d have to save even more people, and even Super Danny has his limitations.”

“Did you get the sense Gaby was doing the same thing when she radioed in?”

Danny thought about it. “I think she would have told me if they’d hit a snag. But she didn’t, which means they’re still good to go. Probably.”

“I don’t like probably, Danny.”

“I’m sure the kid would have told us if they couldn’t finish the mission. You worry too much.”

“When I stop worrying, that’s when you should start.”

Danny smirked. “Where’d you get that from, an old T-shirt?”

“Maybe.” She unclipped her radio and keyed it. “You see anything up there, Peters?”

“Ocean,” Peters said through the radio. “Just a lot of ocean.”

“Just a lot of ocean’s good,” Maddie said. “Oceans don’t drop bombs on you, the last time I checked.”

Lara glanced up at the ceiling, not that she could see Peters somewhere up there. The man had apparently found a good enough perch that even Rhett and his driver hadn’t spotted him when they were approaching the Trident earlier.

“That guy’s like a gargoyle, always perching high above you,” Rhett had said about Peters earlier.

Thank God he’s our gargoyle now.

Danny was looking at her. “You spent a lot of one-on-one time with Rhett Butler. Anything we should be worried about?”

“You mean, does he have squirrelly eyes?” Lara smiled.

“Something like that.”

“I never got the sense that he was being dishonest. If he’s lying—playing some kind of game—then he’s very good at hiding it. Besides, he came here and he didn’t have to do that.”

“Riley also vouched for him,” Maddie said.

“And we all know what a great judge of character Riley is,” Danny said.

“Riley’s word matters, but Keo’s matters more,” Lara said. “He wouldn’t have okayed Rhett if he didn’t think we could trust him. But just in case, keep us ready to move at a moment’s notice, Maddie.”

Maddie nodded. “I got one foot on the gas pedal, boss lady—”

A brilliant white flash from the horizon cut Maddie short. Lara didn’t have to turn her head to get an eyeful because she was already staring at the spot where the light had come from—it was directly in front of her.

Black Tide Island.

She was still trying to process the sight when a loud BOOM! washed across the ocean and over the boat.

“That was an explosion,” Danny said, walking toward the windshield. “Something just went off on Black Tide. Something big.”

18

Keo

If he hadn’t almost died twice (three times?) in just the last few days alone, Keo would have been able to appreciate the quiet of Black Tide Island a little more. But he was intimately aware of the situation—Rhett was on the Trident and he was, essentially, left by himself in sickbay, with God only knew how many men waiting for the opportunity to take their shots at him.

Well, he wasn’t really alone. There were two guards in the hallway immediately outside his door and two more nearby. But Keo was not the kind of guy who relied on other people—in his experience, strangers tended to let you down more than they helped—and if not for the presence of the MP5SD leaning against the wall to his right, within easy reach, he might have been on his feet pacing instead of lying in bed.

The second submachine gun lay on the next bed over, along with the gun belt and Glock he had taken from Pollack. It felt good to be armed again. Hell, overly armed, if you really wanted to get technical about it, but Keo wasn’t about to moan about having too many weapons after having gone without for so long.

Rhett had orders for him to stay inside where it was (supposedly) safe, which meant no more wandering out onto the beach for some fresh air. Keo would think Rhett was being overly paranoid if there hadn’t already been two attempts on his life. Rhett might not have come right out and said it, but he clearly seemed to think a third attempt was just waiting in the wings. Keo wasn’t about to disagree, even if being stuck inside the medicinal-smelling sickbay was getting old pretty fast.

Keo busied himself by taking inventory of his bullets for the fifth time in the last hour. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do. Both MP5SDs yielded fully loaded thirty-round magazines since neither one of his would-be killers had managed to get a single shot off last night. The bad news was that he didn’t have any spares. He had thought about asking Rhett for some but hadn’t felt like pushing his luck. Being able to keep the guns was already more than he could have hoped for; keeping the belt and sidearm too was a bonus.

Besides, thirty rounds apiece meant a total of sixty, and Keo had gotten by with much less. Like zero-bullets-at-his-disposal less. So he was definitely not going to complain. At least, not out loud.

It was already eight in the morning, and the sun was forcing its way into the room through the high window. Although Mary had claimed the doctor was supposed to show up to check on him by now, the man hadn’t done so in the hour since she left. That left Keo to wonder if she had gotten her boss’s schedule wrong or if someone had held the man back. Not that he needed a doctor at the moment. Everything throbbed occasionally, but he’d never felt more alive, even if he didn’t look the part. Besides, there were plenty of bottles in the drawers and cabinets around him if he was feeling adventurous.

He couldn’t see the Trident from the room’s lone high window because the sickbay was on the wrong side of the island. He couldn’t see much of anything really except for blue skies. But they were out there, with Lara meeting with Rhett. It was only a matter of time before Rhett came back, and whether he had agreed to pitch Frank’s plan to the other islanders or not, Keo was gone after that. He wasn’t looking forward to a confrontation if Rhett said no, but Keo was tired of asking people for permission.

Have German guns, will swim.

Hopefully he wouldn’t have to swim too far to get back to the Trident. What were the chances Lara would immediately leave without him if Rhett turned her down?

He was still trying to figure that one out when the door opened and Henry stepped inside. Keo glimpsed Vern, one of his newer guards standing in the hallway with Kelly.

“Glad you’re up,” Henry said. “Saves me the trouble of waking you.”

“I was never asleep,” Keo said. “Hard to have nice dreams when half the people on this island want you dead.”

“You’re being dramatic. It’s more like one-third.”

“Hurray for me. Rhett come back yet?”

“Not yet.”

“So what is this, a social call? You miss our chats, Henry?”

“Cameron wants to see you.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Rhett put her in charge while he’s gone. Come on.” He nodded at the MP5SDs. “Just bring one of those, and be careful where you point it.”

Keo slung one of the submachine guns and walked over to Henry. “Trust me, I don’t go around pointing my muzzle at people unless I plan on pulling the trigger.”

“Yeah, well, not everyone’s ready to accept the sight of you walking around with a gun yet. Let’s not give them any excuses to see you as a threat.”

“Since when did they need an excuse? Besides, the people on this island should be used to me doing things they don’t approve of by now.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Keo followed Henry to the door. “I was just going to bring one anyway. What do I look like, a redneck with a gun fetish?”

Henry chuckled. “I don’t think anyone’s ever going to mistake you for a redneck, Keo.”

In the hallway, Keo locked eyes with Kelly. She appeared rested and had changed clothes, and for some reason was prettier than he remembered or had initially thought when they first met. Of course, people tended to look more attractive to him after they had saved his life, and Kelly had definitely done that last night.

“Now that’s a look I didn’t think I’d ever see,” Kelly said.

“Heckler & Koch is the latest accessory fad in Paris this year,” Keo said.

“Yeah? I gotta get me one.”

“Maybe in pink?”

“Why, is that your favorite color?”

Keo smirked. “It’s not not my favorite color.”

Besides Vern and Kelly, there were two other soldiers waiting outside. One of them was named Mallory, but Keo had never caught the other one’s name. Henry started heading down the hallway and everyone followed, with Keo and Kelly behind him. He guessed Henry was one of Rhett’s more loyal men and had been put in charge of the guards, though all of it was confusing to Keo without proper ranks on uniforms. It made him appreciate the obvious hierarchy of the U.S. military just a little bit more.

They walked for a while and turned two corners.

A few minutes later and after two more empty stretches of hallway, Keo asked, “How big is this place?”

“Big enough,” Henry said.

“That’s big.”

“I know, right?”

“I can talk to you all day, Henry.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So where are we going?”

“I told you, Cameron wants to see you.”

“But where.”

Henry tossed a quick look back at him. “Why? You afraid I’m luring you into another trap?”

“You’ll forgive me if I’m not in the most trusting mood.”

“I don’t blame you after last night,” Kelly said beside him. “But this isn’t that. Cameron just wants some help.”

“Help?” Keo said.

“People have gone missing,” Henry said. “As far as we know, it happened after Pollock and Stans’s attempt on your life.”

“Mercerians,” Keo said.

“I like the name,” Kelly smiled. “It kind of fits with what they did with the black armband, with the M and everything.”

“Creative types, huh?”

“That’s one description for them.”

“Whatever you wanna call them, we have people looking, but they’re coming up empty,” Henry said.

“And how can I help?” Keo said. “Do I look like a bloodhound to you? I’ve been locked in solitary all morning. I didn’t even know for sure the Trident had arrived until you told me. I don’t know anything about what’s happening on this little jovial island of yours.”

“I don’t know what she thinks you can do, but Cameron asked for you, and I’m assuming she’ll let you know when we get there. So just chill and stop with the questions. You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

Keo smiled. “So this is what it takes to get on your nerves?”

Henry chose to ignore him and kept walking through the empty corridor, with Keo, Kelly, and the other two following behind. After a while, Keo was starting to get the impression he had wholly underestimated the size of Black Tide.

“By the way,” Kelly said next to him, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

“Brad was taken,” Keo said.

“Huh?”

“That’s what Brad said.”

* * *

Cameron was in her late forties, graying around the temples, and looked like someone’s grandmother instead of the woman in charge of Black Tide while Rhett was away on the Trident. She looked up at Keo with a tired face that told him she hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep recently. She was bent over a table with a map of the island inside what looked like a command center. There was a bigger version of the map on one of the walls, but the one on the table had small green figurines placed strategically over it. Toy soldiers, the kind you’d find in a kid’s room.

For the first time since he arrived, Keo got a good idea of what Black Tide actually looked like from an aerial view, including the interconnected buildings that made up the base. He had been kept in the brig on the east wing, while the quarters and the Comm Room were in the middle sections. And just minutes ago they had walked through the west wing, which had a noticeably higher presence of soldiers and armed people going in and out of operations-centric rooms.

“So you’re him,” Cameron said. “The man who destroyed everything we’ve been planning for the last year with one bullet.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Keo said.

“It is, for some people.”

“Are you one of those ‘some people?’”

Cameron shrugged and gave him a tired look—which was to say her expression didn’t change since he stepped inside the room. “I’m just trying to keep people alive. If calling off the war brings everyone home, then all the better.”

“So we have that in common.”

“Was that why you killed Mercer? To stop the war?”

“What do you think?”

“You don’t look like the savior type.”

“I can be very deceptive.”

Henry and Kelly had stayed outside in the hallway with the other two, so Keo walked over to Cameron by himself. There had been three others in the room when he arrived, but after Cameron sent them off, it was just the two of them in a place designed to accommodate twenty, maybe more, comfortably. There were no windows, but the lights were bright enough for Keo to see every worry line on Cameron’s face.

“When was the last time you slept?” Keo asked.

“I can’t remember.” Cameron waved a dismissive hand. “But I didn’t ask you here to talk about my sleeping habits. What did Henry tell you?”

“He was short on specifics.”

“The specifics is that as of right now we’re missing nine people.”

“Define ‘missing.’”

“As in, unable to confirm their whereabouts. They didn’t report in for duty this morning, and when people were sent to their quarters, they weren’t there.”

“Mercer loyalists.”

“Possibly. Rhett and I talked about searching the rooms for those black armbands Pollack and Stans were wearing, but we decided against it.”

“He told me. Something about not wanting to set off a powder keg.”

“We were being cautious. But now…”

“Now you have nine guys with guns somewhere on the island hiding from you.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Did you find any black armbands in their quarters?”

“No.”

“Have you told Rhett?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because nothing’s happened yet. Right now it’s just nine missing people. Maybe they snuck off the island after news of what happened to Pollack and Stans reached them.”

“And why would they do that?”

“They know we have Pollack, that he’s still alive. Maybe they’re afraid he might break and start naming names.”

“Lots of maybes.”

She nodded. “Too many.”

“Did he? Pollack. Did he break?”

“He hasn’t said a word since he woke up this morning. I don’t think he’s going to, either.”

“You should tell Rhett about the missing men.”

“Not yet.”

“You don’t think this is something he’d want to know?”

“I don’t want to interrupt what’s happening on the Trident right now. What they’re talking about over there—what’s eventually decided—might very well change the course of humanity.”

Overstatement much? Keo thought, but he quickly realized she wasn’t entirely wrong or that far off the mark. Lara and Rhett were, at this very moment, talking about Frank’s plan, which if it worked could save mankind.

Okay, maybe not too much overstating it, after all.

“He told you what the meeting’s about,” Keo said.

“Word gets around.”

“So I’ve heard,” Keo said, remembering Mary’s words not too long ago:

“It’s a small island, Keo. Secrets don’t stay a secret for very long around here.”

He wondered how much the missing Mercerians knew and if this was their reaction to it. That thought made him a bit uneasy, and suddenly he was less concerned about what they were planning to do to him and more about Lara and his friends on the Trident.

“I’ll call him when I have something substantial to tell him other than that I can’t find a few missing people,” Cameron was saying.

“So that’s your problem,” Keo said.

“That’s my problem.”

“And why am I here? How can I help?”

Cameron stared at him from across the table for a moment. He thought she might be trying to read his face. and he wanted to tell her good luck seeing through the scars and the bandage around his head. Even Keo wouldn’t be able to read his own face—that is, if he’d let himself see his own reflection, which he still hadn’t yet.

“Rhett told me what you did,” Cameron said. “How you did it. I don’t just mean with Mercer, but with the others, too.”

“I was defending myself.”

“I’m not accusing you, Keo. But there’s a reason Rhett decided to let you have those weapons. The ones that are missing—all nine of them—were in Texas when they were recalled. They were all part of Mercer’s kill teams.”

“What are you getting at? That they’re dangerous? Not news, Cameron.”

“The point is, they’ve killed before. Henry, Vern, and the others—even Kelly, before last night—haven’t. There’s a reason some of us stayed on the island and others, like Pollack and Stans, volunteered to go out there to run around killing collaborators.”

“Spell it out,” Keo said. “I don’t have all day.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“Hey, only one person can tell me not to be an asshole, and you’re not her.”

Cameron clenched her teeth, a clear sign she’d rather not say what was coming next but apparently had no choice. Watching her discomfort was almost enough to make Keo do a little chuckling, but he somehow refrained himself.

“I need you to help me find the missing men, and if necessary, kill them,” Cameron said.

Keo would have let out a laugh if he hadn’t already guessed what Cameron wanted from him minutes ago. Instead, his only thought was, The more things change, blah blah blah.

“Well?” Cameron said, still watching his face.

“Well, what?”

“Will you do it?”

“Are you saying I have a choice?”

“You didn’t twenty-four hours ago. But as of this morning you do, per Rhett’s orders.”

“You should still call Rhett,” Keo said.

Cameron looked down at the two-way radio sitting on the edge of the table between them. “Not until I have something concrete to tell him.”

“You just asked me to murder some of your people. You don’t think that’s concrete enough?”

“I didn’t tell you to murder anyone,” Cameron said, and he could almost picture cartoony steam venting from her ears as she glared at him. “I just need your help to find—”

The room shook as a massive BOOM! washed across the island. Keo spun in the direction of the explosion (Outside the building!) even as the floor under him trembled and the toy soldiers on the table toppled.

When he turned back around, Cameron already had the radio in her hand and was almost shouting into it: “What’s happening? Someone tell me what’s happening out there!”

“An explosion!” someone shouted back through the radio. Male, the man’s voice labored; he was clearly running and talking at the same time. “It’s the fuel station! Someone just blew up the fuel station!”

“Jesus Christ,” Cameron whispered.

“Jet fuel?” Keo asked.

“No. Those are stored separately from the gas we use for the boats. They’re at the hangar on the opposite side of the island.”

“The docks!” the same man shouted through the radio. “The fire’s spreading to the docks!”

“The boats!” someone else shouted. A woman this time. “Cameron, the boats are still tied to the docks!”

“Put out the fire!” Cameron shouted into the radio. “This is Cameron, to everyone listening right now: Get to the docks and put out that fire! Save as many boats as you can! Now, goddammit; everyone get down there now!”

The docks, Keo thought. Why the hell would someone blow up the docks?

The boats, of course, were moored there, but what was the point of setting them on fire? To sink them? Why would Mercerians want to sink the boats? They were eventually going to need them to get off the island. That is, if they wanted off the island.

Did they want off the island?

Voices were shouting through the radio, too many for Keo to even begin to decipher what they were saying. Cameron had put the two-way back down between a couple of fallen soldiers and was staring at it, maybe just as confused about what everyone was shouting. After a while it all started to sound like gibberish, and except for repeated words like fire and docks, he had no clue what was happening out there.

Why the hell would the Mercerians want to destroy the docks? Why—

“It’s a trick,” Keo said.

“What?” Cameron said, looking up at him.

“The explosion. It’s a trick.”

“I don’t understand…”

“They set the docks on fire because they knew it was important to the island. To everyone. So what happens? Everyone runs straight there to fight the fire. It’s a trick, Cameron. Do you see?”

Cameron stared at him as if she didn’t quite understand what he was saying. Or maybe she did, but she just found it too difficult to believe.

“Cameron,” a voice said. Keo looked over at Henry, standing in the open doorway. “Should we go too?”

“No, stay where you are,” Keo said.

“What?” Henry turned to Keo, as if surprised to hear his voice. It didn’t take him long to ignore Keo and turn back to Cameron. “Cameron, what are your orders—” he started to say, when there was a second explosion—except this one was closer and much louder because it was right outside the room.

Keo was looking at Henry when the other man vanished in a torrent of shrapnel, just as a third BOOM rang out about half a heartbeat after the second explosion, the force of the nearby blast knocking Keo off balance and into the table. Cameron grabbed onto the edges on the other side as toy soldiers spilled to the floor; the radio joined them a second later, chaotic voices still shouting through its speakers.

Grenades. Those were goddamn grenades in the hallway!

He pushed off the table and was running to the door even before Cameron had righted herself. He unslung the MP5SD just as he reached the opening, doing his very best to pretend he couldn’t see the frag damage all along the frame or the bloody red chunks of Henry that had been left behind.

He slid the last few feet, stopping just before the toes of his boots touched a pink fleshy lump that might have been a hand sticking to the floor. Smoke and explosive powder stung his nostrils even before he leaned out and looked left, glimpsing bodies (no, not bodies, body parts) everywhere.

Kelly had been out there when he last saw her. The same Kelly who had saved his life last night, and who this morning looked much prettier than he remembered.

But Keo didn’t get a chance to look for Kelly or anyone else, because as soon as he stuck his head out, he spotted them: Four figures moving down the hallway, picking their way through the remains of bodies that had been left in the wake of the two exploding grenades. Keo’s head was still ringing from being so close to the explosions, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes. All four men were wearing green and black camo paint over their faces, looking for all intents and purposes like killers on the warpath.

They spotted him a split-second later and one of them stopped and lifted his AR, and as he did so Keo glimpsed a black band wrapped tightly around his right arm between the elbow and the shoulder.

Keo already had his weapon up, and he shot the man in the chest, the suppressed gunshot absurdly gentle against the death and destruction around him. It was an easy shot from less than thirty meters, and the man should have gone down, but instead he stumbled backward. Another man, behind him, reached out to catch his comrade.

Body armor?

Keo didn’t get a chance to squeeze off a second shot because two of the four men stepped forward and opened up, the clatter of automatic rifles firing in the narrow hallway like a cascade of thunderclaps. Bullets pek-pek-peked! off the concrete walls and ping-ping-pinged! against the metal doorframe, and Keo jerked his head back into the room as erupting pieces of the building flicked at his face and pelted his clothing.

“Keo!” Cameron, shouting from behind him.

“Mercerians!” he shouted back over the rain of gunfire.

He took five steps away from the exploding opening before darting to his left where he flattened his back against the wall next to the door. Even though he had the hallway on the other side, he felt safe enough with the thick slab of concrete between him and them. They weren’t going to get through the wall unless they had a rocket on them, and frankly if they were carrying that to this party, they deserved his scalp for being so goddamn well prepared.

He glanced over at Cameron, who had a pistol in one hand and was crouched behind the table. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the table was almost in the very center of the room (by design, he guessed), which also lined Cameron up directly with the damaged door and gave her a perfect view when the first Mercerian stepped into the doorway, his tan uniform and painted face flashing across the thin slit where the door hung on its hinges for Keo to see.

Keo hadn’t even gotten the chance to react when there were two shots—pop-pop!—from Cameron. Keo opened his mouth to scream out “They’re wearing body armor, aim for the head!” when there was a hellacious burst of return gunfire and the map table splintered, and large pieces of it buzzed across the room.

The Mercerian kept firing in Cameron’s direction, his rifle bucking in his hands as he stepped through the door—

Keo shot him in the head with the MP5SD, the pfft! of his single shot comical against the loud racket of the man’s AR. But barely audible or not, the suppressed shot did its job and the 9mm round blew the man’s brains out the other side of his temple. This time Keo’s target went down.

Even as the shooter was falling, Keo had spun out from behind the door, at the same time switching the fire selector on the submachine gun to full-auto. He hated to do it because he only had the one magazine (Should have brought the other one too, dammit!), but there was no other choice, not with three more armed assholes out there—

No, not out there, but in the doorway.

Two of them at least, watching as their friend collapsed in a heap in front of them. By the time they looked up, Keo had squeezed his trigger and stitched the opening from left to right, firing diagonally from bottom to top.

The first couple of shots ping-ping! off the metal doorframe but the rest found their marks, shattering a leg, a kneecap, then slamming into body armor before continuing up and up. One of the Mercerians’ faces turned mushy red even as he somehow squeezed his own trigger and his rifle raked the floor to Keo’s right, sending small chunks of concrete into the air before dotting the wall across the room.

One of the men fell, only to scream when his blown knee slammed into the hard floor, but even that scream was cut short when he toppled face-first. The second one simply fell, a bloody red lump where his face used to be. Keo ignored the horrific sight and kept moving until he was on the opposite side of the doorway and was pushing against the wall. He quickly slung the now-empty submachine gun and drew the Glock.

He waited for the fourth man to try his luck, but the guy either figured out that all of this was a lost cause and ran for it, or he was biding his time. Either way, no one else poked their head through the opening.

Keo leaned toward the door to listen for footsteps, for the telltale squeak of boots against the hallway floor, but all he could hear was his own racing heartbeat and a series of gunshots. The latter wasn’t coming from immediately outside, but rather from other parts of the facility. There was a hell of a gun battle going on somewhere out there.

He pulled away from the door and slowed down his breathing. His nose twitched at the stench of blood and smoke and gunpowder in the air.

A groan came from behind him and Keo looked over. The man who had screamed when he slammed his shattered kneecap into the floor was trying to raise himself back up. He dripped blood with every labored breath, and Keo didn’t think the man had enough strength left to fully—No, the guy was stronger than he looked, and somehow managed to crawl back to his knees.

Keo shot him in the back of the head.

Then he spent the next few seconds listening to the gunfire in the other parts of the building. Keo’s position also allowed him to get a better look at what was left of the map table and Cameron lying behind it. She wasn’t moving, which was no surprise since there was enough blood pumping out of her neck and chest to make a small kiddie pool. He wished he could have said he felt something, but the truth was he barely knew her, and people dying around him was starting to become a regular occurrence.

It was different with Henry and Kelly, though. Especially Kelly. She had saved his life last night, goddammit. Maybe she was still alive in the hallway. He hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time looking—the bodies and blood and body parts had gone by in a blur—so there was a chance she might have survived. Henry definitely hadn’t, but Kelly, maybe…

Say it one more time and you might actually believe it, pal. They tossed two grenades out there. Two grenades. Nothing’s going to survive that. Nothing.

He sighed and waited, but if the fourth guy was still out there he was being very, very quiet, which allowed Keo to hear the ongoing gunfight on the other parts of the island. Was it his imagination or was the whole thing coming toward him? It sure as hell sounded like it.

And him without a fully-loaded submachine gun.

Keo holstered his Glock and grabbed one of the dead Mercerian’s AR. It was way too light, but luckily the dead men came with waists full of ammo pouches. Keo grabbed one, loaded the rifle, then stuffed two spares into his back pocket.

Outside the door, somewhere close by, the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire continued, and this time he was definitely certain it had crept closer toward his position.

Here we go again…

19

Lara

“Peters, what do you see?”

“I got targets,” Peter answered through the radio. “Too many targets.”

“Don’t shoot unless you’re sure.”

“That’s the problem. I don’t think I can be sure.”

“Explain.”

“It’s the uniforms. They’re all wearing identical uniforms. I can’t be absolutely sure, but some of them might be wearing camo on their faces, too.”

Lara exchanged a look with Maddie even as the Trident moved closer toward Black Tide Island. There was something inherently very wrong with what they were doing at the moment—moving toward the sound of gunfire instead of away from it. And yet she hadn’t been nearly as hesitant about giving the order as she should have been, a realization that made her more than a little worried.

“What did Keo call them, Mercerians?” Maddie said.

Lara nodded (Who else could it be?) before keying the radio again. “We’re treading dangerous territory here. Don’t take a shot unless you can be absolutely sure they’re targeting the Trident. Otherwise, let Rhett deal with it.”

“Roger that,” Peters said through the radio.

“We’re close enough, Maddie,” Lara said. “Let’s not make ourselves too tempting a target in case they decide to turn their guns on us.”

Maddie manipulated the controls and the boat slowed. “You think they’re still on the island? The ones that caused the explosion?”

“I don’t think they’re going anywhere. If they were, they wouldn’t have blown up the docks.”

“Good point. Kinda hard to swim all the way back to Texas from here. Of course, Keo probably could.”

“Probably,” Lara said, and managed a small smile.

The engine might have cut off, but the ocean currents continued to push them forward. Black Tide loomed in front of them—500 yards or so. They were close enough that she could see the gray smoke billowing into the sky on the other side of the island. That would be where the docks were, the source of the explosion they had heard earlier. It was also the reason Rhett, Riley, Hart, and a few others were on the two speeding boats headed back now.

“You think this is a good idea?” Maddie asked. Like Lara, she was looking after the boats as they carved their way toward the island. “Letting Riley and Hart go back now?”

“It wasn’t my call. They wanted to go.” Lara keyed the radio again. “Peters.”

“Yeah,” Peters answered.

“Can you hear anything?”

“Like what?”

“Anything at all that tells us what’s happening over there, who’s doing all the shooting. Anything.”

Peters didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, “The gunshots have stopped. Or I can’t hear them anymore.”

If anyone could hear shooting it would be Peters, who was still somewhere on top of the Trident right now with his sniper rifle. Inside the bridge, they could see almost everything out there, especially with binoculars, but hearing what was happening was an entirely different story.

Lara said into the radio, “Danny.”

“Yeah!” Danny shouted back, his reply almost completely lost in the loud roar of wind and boat motors.

“The shooting seems to have stopped.”

“I’ll take your word for it! I can’t hear shit down here.”

“Be careful.”

“Careful’s my middle name!”

“That guy has more middle names than a porn star,” Maddie said.

She couldn’t see Danny on one of the two boats speeding back toward land, but he would be on the same vessel as Hart and Riley. Without Danny onboard, she should have felt a little uncomfortable putting the Trident’s security in the hands of Peters and Jolly, two men who had been a part of Mercer’s army only a few days ago, except she wasn’t. It was easy to trust Peters—she had looked into the man’s eyes, knew what he had done and could do, and believed with every ounce of her being that he didn’t do anything he didn’t want to, including following her orders. And he wanted to, which was the amazing part.

“That’s going to help, you know,” Rhett had said about Peters. “People respect him. Hell, having Peters on your side’s going to do more good than having Riley.”

As for Jolly, who was standing outside the bridge in the hallway right now, Danny was vouching for him, and Danny was better at reading other men than she would ever be. Besides, she was pretty sure the young man had an almost teacher’s pet-like crush on her, which made her feel old.

That’s because you are old, and getting older every day.

Her radio squawked loudly, and Danny shouted through it, “Beaching now!”

Good luck, she thought, but didn’t bother to shout it back over the radio. Danny wouldn’t have heard her anyway because he—along with Hart, Riley, and Rhett—had already driven their boats up onto Black Tide and were jumping over the sides and onto the sand.

The first thing the four men would see would be the bodies. There were three that Lara could make out through binoculars—or she thought they looked like bodies, anyway. The truth was, given the distance and (lack of) clarity, she could have been staring at three deformed logs that had washed ashore.

Except she knew better. Those were bodies, victims of the prolonged gunfire that had erupted after the explosion. She was at least comforted that this time it wasn’t happening onboard the yacht, though the fact that Keo was still out there tempered that quickly, and what were the chances that this didn’t have anything to do with him?

Almost as likely as Keo not being able to handle himself in all that mess.

Danny and the other three black silhouettes were racing up the beach now. They were moving at a steady pace when one of them paused for a moment next to one of the bodies, maybe to check it for vital signs. But the man was back on his feet a few seconds later and running to catch up with the other three.

Lara focused her binoculars on the stacks of smoke rising lazily into the cloudless sky from the other side of the island. The fire had either been contained or had stopped its spread because the rest of Black Tide looked untouched by the explosion and resulting blaze.

She thought about telling Maddie to go around Black Tide to get a better look, but decided against it. There were still no guarantees that the same people who had torched the docks weren’t still around. The last thing she wanted was to risk the Trident against something more than just small arms fire. What if they had used a grenade launcher on the docks? Or maybe even an RPG? According to Rhett, the island had its own armory built up from an entire year of constant stocking.

“Peters,” Lara said into the radio. “Anything?”

“They’re in the weeds,” Peters said.

He was referring to Danny and the others. She had lost sight of them once they left the beach behind. She could just make out rows of gleaming metal in the background—the military facilities that stretched across the length of the island.

“They must have taken the fighting indoors,” Peters continued.

“Can you hear gunfire?”

“No. But if they’re inside the facilities, I wouldn’t. The walls are concrete and metal.”

“All right. Keep your eyes open.”

“Roger that,” Peters said.

Maddie glanced over. “Anxious?”

Lara gritted her teeth. “I hate standing here helpless.”

With nothing to do, they stood on the bridge in silence and looked out the wraparound front windshield and waited.

It was an agonizing full minute, which later became two…then five.

Five minutes became ten…

“You want me to move closer?” Maddie finally asked. Lara could hear it in the other woman’s voice—Maddie was hoping for the go ahead.

“No,” Lara said, despite wanting desperately to give the small Texan her yes.

* * *

It was almost an agonizing half hour later when they finally heard from Danny again: “Sorry to keep you waiting, ladies. And Peters.”

“Danny,” Lara said. “What’s the situation?”

“It’s under control. They were trying to retake the facilities. Fortunately they had the decency to concentrate their bad guy planning to the command area, left the civvies section mostly untouched.”

“Who were they?”

“One guess.”

“Mercer loyalists?”

“Bingo-schmingo,” Danny said. “Or Mercerians, as Keystone calls them.”

“Speaking of which, did you find Keo?”

“Yeah, he was in the middle of it, but you probably already figured that one out.”

Lara exchanged a quick of course look with Maddie.

“He’s uglier than I remembered, but still relatively in one piece,” Danny said.

“Relatively?” Lara said.

“Like I said, way uglier, so who knows what’s going on with that dude that isn’t immediately obvious to the human eye.”

“What about Rhett and the others?”

“All good. We caught those Mercerian troublemakers while they were retreating through the hallway. It wasn’t pretty. I guess you could say not all of them’s going to get an open casket funeral.”

“And the docks?”

“Rhett says his people secured it. Or, well, what’s left of it.”

“How bad was it?”

“No official body count yet. You probably can’t hear it, but Rhett’s giving a speech over the intercom right now. Pretty rousing little sucker too, from the reactions I’m seeing on the faces of some of the civvies.”

“What’s he saying?”

“He’s telling them what happened, who’s responsible, and how many people are dead as a result. Don’t tell anyone, but I think he’s playing a little fast and loose with that last number. Anyway, I think this could be it, kiddo.”

“‘It?’”

“The last gasp of Mercer’s ghost,” Danny said. “After this, I don’t think anyone’s going to want to be caught dead calling themselves Mercerians. When the crowd turns on you, that’s when you know your Amateur Night at the Apollo’s finito.”

* * *

There was no one waiting for her on the beach when she arrived alone on the tender. Not that she expected anyone to be, since she hadn’t told Danny or Rhett that she was even coming. But she had to see it in person, if just to familiarize herself with Black Tide and its inhabitants. These were the people she was going to have to win over in order to give Will’s plan every possible chance of success.

When she climbed out of her small boat, people in civilian clothes were removing the three bodies she had seen from the bridge of the Trident. They had draped sheets over the dead men and were carrying them away while soldiers in tan uniforms stood watch along the beach. No one tried to stop her, or even seemed to notice her.

She walked through the group of civilians and soldiers, stepping around the blood in the sand where she could and over them when she couldn’t. Lara recognized the looks on the faces of the people closest to her—they were still shell-shocked by what had happened and seemed to almost be moving on automatic pilot. The soldiers looked more alert, though not by very much.

She took her time traveling up the beach, the mushy sand sinking under her boots with every step. Finally, she reached the grass and got her first real good look at the connecting metal structures that made up Black Tide’s facilities. A stripped down version of an airfield separated her and the buildings, but at the moment there were no planes in sight. She guessed they were probably housed in hangars at the other end of the island.

There were spent shell casings on the ground, along the path that was used to walk between the beach and buildings, and scattered in the untended fields. Some were old, but most were unmistakably very new and still glinting against the morning sunlight. Fresh splashes of blood clung to the taller stalks of grass.

Black Tide was eerily serene in the aftermath of the gun battle, with only a few scattered whispered conversations on the beach. Some of the people she passed by gave her a slight acknowledging nod, but no one stopped to question her presence.

She was halfway to the buildings when a familiar voice said, “As I live and breathe, the Lara walks amongst us.”

She stopped and glanced over. “You’ve looked better.”

“Story of my life,” Keo said, smiling back at her.

He was sitting against a tree, some kind of submachine gun leaning against the trunk next to him. The weapon looked similar to the one he had been carrying when they first met. An MP-something.

She wasn’t surprised at all to see that he had collected extra scars, most noticeably the stitches across the middle of his forehead where the skin was still black and purple. A thick bandage, held in place by tape, stuck out from his right temple like some kind of abnormal third ear. Other than that, he looked like the Keo she remembered from their last meeting on the Ocean Star, and the sight of him very much alive and sitting there casually watching her back brought a smile to her lips.

She walked over to him. “I heard you went and got yourself shot in the head.”

“My legend precedes me.”

“You look pretty good for a guy who was shot in the head.”

“There’s some debate about that.”

“You’re alive.”

“Since you put it that way, yeah, never felt better.”

She nodded at the submachine gun next to him. “I also see that someone let you have your toys back.”

“It’s a decent replacement. Sort of just fell into my lap, too.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that at all.”

“You’re too paranoid. Just because people are constantly trying to kill you doesn’t mean everyone’s trying to kill you.”

“Now you’re starting to make almost as much sense as Danny.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“Depends on your perspective. But I don’t see anyone trying to kill you now, so I take it you’ve made nice with everyone here?”

“The ones still alive, anyway.” He picked up a can of beer and drank from it, then made a face. “Tastes like dog piss.”

“So stop drinking it.”

“Can’t. Free beer. I never turn down free beer.”

She sat down against the tree next to him and sighed as a fresh, cool breeze whipped across the island and over them. Keo had chosen an excellent spot, one that allowed him to see almost everything, including a long stretch of the beach. She could see the tender she had arrived in from here, which meant he had been watching her all this time and didn’t say anything until she was almost past him.

“Can I have some of that?” she asked.

He passed the can over. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Can’t be that bad,” she said, and took a small sip…before spitting it back out. “Jesus.”

“Told ya.”

She handed the beer back to him. “How can you even drink this?”

“It was either this or water.” He drank from it again before making the same face. “A guy can only drink so much water before he wants something different.”

A couple of civilians walked past them, sticking to the path. Neither one of them glanced over in their direction.

“Thank you,” Lara said.

“For what?” Keo said.

“You saved our lives. That night, when Mercer’s warplane found us…”

“Eh, I had nothing else better to do anyway.”

“I mean it, Keo. Thank you. Elise and Carly and everyone else on the Trident thanks you, too.”

He nodded, as if she’d just told him thanks for mowing the lawn, and gulped down the last of the warm beer before folding the can between his palms and tossing it into the grass. “What about you? You doing okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Frank.”

She sighed and leaned back against the tree and closed her eyes and enjoyed the wind against her skin. It had been so long since she allowed herself to just sit still and do nothing. How long ago had it been since she had an entire day where she wasn’t making a decision that could cost people their lives?

Too long. It had been too damn long.

She opened her eyes and stared up at the cloudless blue sky. “He’s in Texas waiting for me to convince what’s left of Mercer’s people to go back to war.”

“I don’t mean that,” Keo said. “I mean, are you okay after Frank’s return?”

“I’m okay, Keo.” It was probably a little too quick of an answer, but if Keo doubted her, he didn’t pursue it.

He said instead, “I think they’re ready to be convinced.”

She followed his gaze to the beach, where a half dozen civilians were milling around in small groups. They were looking out at the Trident, adrift at sea in the near distance.

“What if I can’t?” she asked.

“You will,” he said.

“You sound like him.”

“Who?”

“Will. Frank. He’s sure I can do it, too.”

“He’s right.”

She glanced over at him. “Why?”

He smiled again, and she thought it was probably the most earnest, not-smartass smile she had ever gotten from him. “Because it’s easy to believe in you, Lara.”

“Why?” she asked again. Then, before he could answer, “Why?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just something that is, not something you can put into words. Some people might call it destiny. Some might call it fate. You can call it whatever you want. It just is.”

“I don’t believe in fate or destiny.”

“Providence, then?”

“My parents would have a stroke if they heard that.”

“Not believers, huh?”

“Not much, no.”

“Maybe you should start. It’s never too late.”

She shook her head and looked back at the beach. “When did you start turning into a hippie?”

“Like I’ve been trying to tell people, after you’ve almost died as many times as I have, you start wondering about things you didn’t use to.”

“Sounds dangerous for a man like you.”

“Oh yeah. Spending three days in a jail cell by yourself while stewing in your own juices, waiting for people to decide whether they’re going to kill you fast or slow, doesn’t help either. You start thinking about all kinds of crazy things.”

“And after all that, you’re still alive.”

“What can I say? I didn’t want to be accused of being an asshole by some chick with a fancy yacht.”

Lara smiled to herself. “She sounds like a real bitch.”

“She has her moments.”

They watched two men in tan uniforms walk by. One of them glanced over, saw that she was looking at him, and quickly turned away. They continued on up the path, but she could almost sense them doing everything humanly possible not to stop and look over again.

Next to her, Keo chuckled. “Like I said, they’re ready. Not all of them, mind you, but maybe enough.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated on the wind in her hair, the feel of the breeze against her skin.

She didn’t want this. She’d never wanted this. The fact that everyone seemed to be convinced she could do something she had no experience in, or ever dreamed of doing in this life or any other, made it all the more…what was the word? Aggravating? Annoying? Absolutely terrifying?

“How freaked out are you right now?” Keo asked.

“What makes you think I am?”

“If people started treating me like I’m the second coming, I’d be pretty freaked out right about now.”

She pursed a smile. “Maybe a ten.”

“It’s human nature, you know. This need for a savior. That’s why they gave themselves to Mercer so willingly and went along with his insane plan for a whole year. They knew what it was, but they went along with it because everyone needs something to believe in. Or someone.”

His words brought back what Peters had said, that she still couldn’t get over:

“Everyone needs to believe in something, Lara. I chose badly with Mercer, but I rectified that. Now I’m choosing to believe in you.”

“Why me?” she asked now.

“Why not you?” Keo said.

“What if you’re wrong? What if Will’s wrong? What if everyone’s wrong about me?”

“We’re not, though.”

“What if.”

“But we’re not,” he insisted. “You took charge on the island, knowing bad men with guns were coming right at you. You stood your ground and you led. Then you did it again on the boat. You could have folded and hid in your room at any time, but you didn’t. Instead, you took command. That was instinct, Lara. Not everyone has those kinds of instincts, but you do.”

She watched two women in civilian clothes walking along the path in front of them. They were doing their very best not to look over at her, but she could tell they wanted to badly.

“Keo,” she said after a while.

“Yeah?” Keo said next to her.

“If I’m able to convince them, I’m going to need someone to lead them. Danny can’t do it.”

“What’s wrong with Danny boy? I saw him a few minutes ago. He looks like he’s still got all his arms and legs.”

“Carly’s pregnant.”

“Ah.”

“I need someone to take over for him.”

“Okay,” Keo said.

“Don’t you want to at least think about it?”

“Nah.”

“I think you should at least think about it.”

“You said you need me to do this, right?”

“Yes. Besides Danny, you’re the only one I trust to get this done.”

“Okay, then. Consider it done.” There was a snap! as he opened another can of fizz-less beer. “Want some?”

She shook her head and gave him an amused smile. “How many of those do you have?”

“They got cases of the stuff in storage,” Keo said. He took a sip and made the same face. “Unfortunately, they all taste like warm piss.”

* * *

The Comm Room was smaller than the bridge on the Trident, but the gear that lined one side of the wall was more sophisticated. Right now she was only concerned with the microphone that Jane, the young woman in charge of the room, had handed to her and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Lara nodded back before looking over at Riley and Rhett standing nearby. Under the room’s artificial light, Rhett looked as if he had aged ten years since she first saw him this morning. Riley just looked anxious.

Behind her, Danny leaned against a wall next to the open door, spooning meat from a can of SPAM as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

“Any suggestions?” she asked him.

“Speak from the heart,” Danny said. “Wherever that is.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Any time.”

She turned to Keo, sitting on a chair in a corner. He had found another can of warm beer and was balancing it on one knee as he looked back at her. If not for the scars and bruises, he could easily have been mistaken for the guest at someone’s backyard Fourth of July party, a man without a care in the world.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Have a sip; it’ll loosen you up,” Keo said, holding up the can in offering.

“No thanks. I learned my lesson the first time.”

“Your loss,” he said, and took a drink. “Christ, this thing sucks.”

“So why do you keep drinking it?” Danny asked.

“It was either this or water.”

“Now that’s one fine answer.”

Lara looked back at Jane. The young woman was smiling at her, as if she knew something Lara didn’t. Lara had seen that same expression on other faces, including Jolly and a few others she’d passed in the hallways on her way here.

She should have been terrified of what she was about to do, what all of them were asking her to do. For God’s sake, what did she know about leading people? About convincing traumatized soldiers to voluntarily go back to war when they had already been through so much?

This is insane. This is completely and utterly insane.

But she nodded at Jane anyway. “Okay.”

Jane turned around in her chair and pressed a button on the dashboard. “You’re connected to the intercom. Hit the transmit lever and you’ll go live.”

She took a breath, then keyed the microphone and raised it to her lips.

“This is Lara.” She paused, closed her eyes for a bit, then opened them again. “Some of you may know who I am. I’m no one special. I’m just like you, trying to survive this madness the best way I know how. But things are different now. For me. For you. For all of us.”

She hesitated, but this time didn’t depress the transmit lever.

“I came here to ask for your help. I need your help…to put an end to this fear that consumes me every time I close my eyes and try to go to sleep. This endless nightmare that we’re all living in. Right now, as I speak, we are making preparations for an attack on the enemy. The real enemy. The ghouls. The nightcrawlers. Whatever you want to call them. The things that hide in the shadows and stalk us night after night after relentless night. There is a plan to end this, to save everyone. But I need your help.”

Another pause. It was so much easier when she was practicing the speech in her head. Now, having to say it out loud with everyone watching and listening…

“It won’t be easy. I won’t lie to you. It’s going to take determination and blood and sweat and tears. But if you help me, if we come together under this single purpose, I believe we can strike a crippling blow against the enemy and take back the night.”

She took a breath.

One second, two…

“We’re going to be holding meetings for as long as it takes. Everyone is welcome to attend and ask questions. Ask anything. Ask everything. Nothing is off the table. Nothing will be held back. But you don’t have to come. This is voluntary. I won’t force you to meet with me, and neither will Rhett or anyone else. If you show up, it will be because you want to. Because like me, you look out there and you’re tired of living in fear.”

She was drained, emotionally and physically, and even keeping the transmit lever pressed seemed to take a lot out of her.

She took another deep breath and let time slip by.

One second, two, three…

“Forget about Mercer. Forget about his war, or what happened today with those loyal to him. This isn’t about him or them. This isn’t even about us. This is about your children, or the children you’ll have one day. Your children’s children. For all the generations that are going to come after us. This is for them. Don’t let them inherit a world where they have to hide from the monsters like we did.”

Another deep breath.

“We’ve lost people. Every single one of us. Friends. Family. Loved ones. We’ve all suffered and made sacrifices. We’ve done things that we aren’t proud of. I’ve been there. I’ve done all of them and more. Every single one of us has. None of us are angels. We’re just survivors trying to keep going the best way we know how. We’ve made mistakes along the way. Terrible mistakes. We’ve put our faith in people who didn’t deserve it.”

She thought about Mercer, about Will, Keo, about Carly and the kids…

“The past is the past, and it can’t be undone. But in the here and now, we can affect the future. Because this is it. This is the chance we’ve been waiting for. What we do or don’t do in the next few days will decide the path of humanity for generations to come. This is the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for.”

She released the transmit lever and took a breath.

One second, two…five…

“There is a plan to strike back at the enemy—the real enemy—and end this nightmare once and for all. But I need your help…”

20

Gaby

She was making sure the locks on the suitcase were in place for the third time in the last hour when Blaine finally returned to the barn. He was wiping dirt off his hands, and despite the fact they were all wearing mostly dark clothing, she could still make out the specks of dry blood on his shirt and under his chin. He tossed the shovel with the chipped wooden handle near the shelf where he had found it this morning and dug out a water bottle from his pack.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Gave her a nice spot under a tree about fifty yards from here,” Blaine said. “Took a while. The ground is a lot harder than it looks.”

“I could have helped.”

“Not with that shoulder. Besides, you’re going to be carrying her load from now on; might as well save it for that.”

She nodded and picked up her pack and slung it on. The duffel bag that Bonnie had been carrying since they reinserted into Texas sat nearby, and she picked that up and tossed it into the backseat of the Ford. Blaine did the same with his bag before walking to the suitcase, kicking at the empty rolls of duct tape she had used to seal the piece of luggage.

“How are we for gas?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Keep an eye out for a replacement. Our best bet is to find a car that still has some usable gas left.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“We found this one, didn’t we?”

“We got lucky.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll keep getting lucky.”

Tell Bonnie that, she thought as she helped him lift the suitcase and shove it into the backseat.

“You radio the Trident yet?” Blaine asked.

“I did.”

“Did you tell them about Bonnie?”

“No. I just told them we were still on course.”

Blaine nodded solemnly. “The mission was always to get Will to where he needs to be. We’re still ahead of schedule when it comes to that, so nothing’s changed. Any news from Black Tide?”

“They made contact, and the guy in charge’s supposed to show up and meet with Lara.”

“She’ll get it done.”

“She didn’t sound all that confident.”

“She’ll get it done,” Blaine repeated without a shred of doubt.

She nodded. She wanted to share his confidence, but too many things had already gone wrong for her to be absolutely certain. She didn’t say it out loud, though. Blaine didn’t need to hear them, and frankly, neither did she.

Blaine walked around the Ford truck while Gaby went back for her rifle. She picked it up and paused, staring down at Bonnie’s M4 leaning nearby. There was blood on the grip and some on the barrel; she hadn’t noticed them last night, but they were clear now in the morning light.

“Kid,” Blaine called from the other side of the truck.

“What about Bonnie’s rifle?”

“Leave it. Maybe someone will find some use for it later.”

Gaby hurried to the front doors and threw them open. Sunlight pierced the barn and she blinked against the brightness, and for a moment—just a very brief moment—let herself be lost in the welcoming heat.

Then she turned around and climbed into the Ford as Blaine fired up the engine.

“How far?” she asked, glancing over at the fuel gauge.

“Not far enough,” he said, and put the car in gear.

* * *

“Not far enough” turned out to be twenty miles short of their ultimate destination. Or, at least, that was according to one of the signs on the highway where the Ford eventually slowed down, groaned for a few seconds, then simply stopped working.

Even so, she had to be happy; they had made pretty good time despite having to constantly use back and smaller country roads to avoid detection. Simply taking the on-ramp onto the freeway was out of the question, as tempting as it was. There were too many potential dangers to worry about, and all it would take was one prolonged skirmish with a collaborator patrol—or one of Mercer’s kill teams—to not just delay them but grind the mission to a halt. And they couldn’t afford that. Not now. Not after losing Bonnie just to get this far.

They spent the next three hours inside a small town called Henley looking for a replacement vehicle, or at the very least still-usable fuel. Despite being a small hole in the middle of nowhere, Henley had two gas stations. They pried the storage tank lid open on one of them, and Blaine peered down with a flashlight.

“Give me some good news, Blaine,” Gaby said.

He shook his head. “It’s gone bad. The color’s too dark and”—he wrinkled his nose—“the air’s sour.”

It was the same with the second gas station on the other side of town. Fortunately, Henley was a small community and the “other side” was only a leisurely ten-minute walk away.

“What now?” she asked as Blaine stood up and clicked off his flashlight.

He looked around, then nodded at the garage attached to the station’s store. “Check in there. Maybe someone was smart enough to sock away extra gas with some kind of stabilizer.”

“Really?” she said doubtfully.

He shrugged. “It’s the countryside. People are smarter out here.”

“If you say so. What are you going to do?”

“We passed by a used car lot a few streets back. Maybe they’ll have something we can use.”

“Good luck.”

“I’ll need it,” Blaine said, and was turning to go when she heard it: A car engine.

“Blaine!” she snapped.

But he had heard it too and spun around and darted back toward her before she could even get his name completely out. “Garage!” he hissed.

They had plenty of time to jog across the station. Sound traveled these days, especially in a place as dead as Henley, and the car could have been a mile or two—or five—away when they heard it.

She was glad they had left the bags and suitcase in the Ford, which they had pushed off of the road and into someone’s attached garage. Without the added weight, she was able to move faster and they reached the side building while the sound of car engine was still far off. In fact, they didn’t really have to run at all and she felt a little silly while trying to catch her breath.

The room was just dark enough to give her pause as she opened the door, sunlight spilling inside for possibly the first time in a year. She waited to hear shuffling—telltale signs there were creatures inside—but there was just the haggard rush of air expelling from hers and Blaine’s lungs. The smell that hit her was spilled motor oil and old chemicals and not the foul stench of undead things that shouldn’t exist.

After five seconds inside the semidarkness with no attacks from the shadowed corners, she breathed easier and moved toward the steel metal front door and peered out the small windows at the top.

Blaine appeared next to her. “They’re still a long way off.”

“What are the chances they found the Ford?”

“I don’t think so. Or at least they better hope not.”

He was referring to Will. The garage they had stashed him and the Ford in was pitch-dark, which meant anyone who found him would be making the biggest mistake of their lives, just like the two poor bastards who had tried to kill him back on the Trident.

“Best-case scenario is it’s just a patrol,” Blaine said. “They’ll show up, look around, then leave.”

“And worst case?”

“We weren’t as careful as we thought, and they saw us. Or heard us.”

He was right. Just as they could hear the car coming long before they could see it, it wouldn’t have been difficult for someone else to pick up the Ford’s engine from many miles away.

“Here it comes,” Blaine said.

A white truck with GMC in big red letters on its front grill turned the corner. She thought (hoped) it might go right past them, but the vehicle slowed down and changed to the right lane—toward the entrance into the gas station.

“Shit,” Blaine said.

“They know we’re here.”

“Or maybe they’re stopping for gas.”

“You don’t think they already know the gas here isn’t good anymore?”

He sighed. “Maybe they know we’re here,” he said, and pulled away from the small window and unslung his pack.

“What are you doing?”

“Suppressors,” Blaine said.

She understood and did the same, searching through her pack for the long metal accessory, then screwing it onto the barrel of her carbine.

“Just occurred to me,” Blaine said, “but that GMC looks like a fine replacement, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

He grinned. “That’s what I’m here for. The brains.”

“If you’d told me that beforehand, I wouldn’t have volunteered.”

Blaine chuckled and she smiled, then turned around and peeked out the window at the white truck as it stopped in the wide-open parking lot spaces in front of the gas pumps, to the left of the garage. She said a little silent prayer at the lack of a mounted machine gun in the back, though a man did appear from behind the cab to stretch his arms like he had just woken up from a good nap.

“Collaborators,” Blaine said.

She nodded, noting the black uniform the man standing up in the truck bed was wearing. Of course they would be collaborators. Who else would be driving around out here like they owned the place?

Two more uniformed figures climbed out of the vehicle. The driver was a tall man and his passenger was a woman with a ponytail. They both wore gun belts, though only the man reached back into their truck and pulled out an AK-47. The third man, who remained standing in the truck bed, had also picked up a Kalashnikov and slung it, all the while shielding his eyes from the sun above.

There was just enough distance—about twenty yards—and brightness for Gaby to make out the names on their uniforms. Not that she wanted to know anyway. It was easier to just think of them as obstacles to be taken out.

“This is it?” the driver asked the woman.

“This is it,” the woman said. “There’re only two gas stations in Henley.”

“One-horse town,” the third man said.

“Not even one horse,” the woman said.

The driver walked over to the gas pumps and flicked absently at the nozzles with the barrel of his rifle. “You sure you heard a car, Cory?” he called back to the truck.

Cory, the one in the truck bed, nodded. “It was definitely a car. Heard it clear as a bell.”

“It was probably one of ours,” the woman said.

“Maybe, but you wanted to detour to check, so don’t blame me if we come up with goose eggs.”

“You’re a better shot than me, right?” Blaine said in a low voice next to her.

“Yeah,” Gaby said.

“You answered that pretty fast.”

“Why, did I hurt your feelings?”

“A little bit.”

“Too bad. I’ll take the two at the truck. You take the driver.”

“Or I take the driver and one of the two at the truck.”

“Okay, sure,” she said. “After you take the driver.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

By the time they maneuvered in the darkness back to the side door and pushed it open (Quietly!), she was afraid the three collaborators might have moved from their last position.

But they hadn’t: The driver was still at the gas pumps, though he had slung his rifle and placed his hands on his hips as he scanned the town. The woman hadn’t bothered to wander away from the truck and was leaning against the hood, looking bored. Cory had produced a pair of binoculars and was peering through them with his back turned to the garage. The three of them looked so disinterested in their surroundings, at the potential dangers hiding in all the buildings, that she almost felt sorry for them.

Gaby stepped out of the garage first, and once she did that there was nowhere to hide, because there were no other structures or covers on this side of the business. She took one, two, three, four steps away from the opening door to give Blaine the freedom to exit and move without her blocking his path. Pebbles on the cement floor crunched (Too loudly!) under her boots with each step, and she glimpsed Blaine out of the corner of her right eye as he hurried forward to get to the corner in order to see his man at the gas pumps.

The woman at the truck either heard her or Blaine’s footsteps, because she turned her head—almost lazily—around.

Twenty yards. Easy peasy.

She didn’t think about the woman as a woman—a fellow human being—and instead just saw her as what she truly was: a target. That made it easy for Gaby to pull the trigger and instantly ignore the sight of the woman dropping, or the fresh splatter of blood on the hood of the white vehicle.

She swung the rifle over, lining up her second shot at Cory, still standing in the truck bed. Because of the suppressor on the M4, Cory hadn’t heard the gunshot, or if he did he didn’t process it fast enough.

By the time Cory sensed that something was wrong—maybe he saw the woman falling down out the corner of his eye—and began to turn around, lowering the binoculars as he did so, Gaby shot him in the chest and the young man vanished behind the cab like some kind of magic act.

Gaby hadn’t stopped moving for a single second since exiting the garage. She rushed toward the GMC, the carbine in front of her the entire time, one eye fixed on the red dot sight. She snapped a look at the woman on the parking lot floor, then at the cab again, waiting for Cory to poke his head back up and shout out, “Surprise!”

She didn’t worry about Blaine or wonder if he had taken care of his target. She trusted that he had (Don’t let me down, Blaine!) and didn’t waste the second or two it would have taken to check. If she was wrong she would be dead in the next few seconds anyway, and when those seconds went by and she was still on her feet, she took it as a very good sign.

The female collaborator was also still alive and staring at Gaby as she neared. Their eyes locked—the woman had light blue eyes and an impish nose—and Gaby expected her to reach for her holstered sidearm, but she didn’t. Instead, she kept one hand pressed against her right shoulder, a few inches higher and slightly to the right of where Gaby had aimed for.

Gaby felt a pang of annoyance at having missed her shot. It wasn’t really a miss, but it wasn’t a killing shot either, and if the woman had been able to summon the wherewithal to draw her pistol and open up, maybe she or Blaine, or both, might be bleeding on the ground right about now. She wanted to blame it on the adrenaline, or the fact that she was moving and shooting at the same time, but neither explanation did anything to temper the irritation.

She grabbed the Glock from the woman’s holster and threw it across the parking lot. Another time and place and she might have saved the weapon, but she was already carrying too much to add another two pounds.

The woman continued to stare up at her, eyes blinking rapidly as if she was having difficulty focusing. Ashley was written on her name tag. Gaby ignored the confused stare and finally checked on Blaine.

The big man had rounded the gas pumps and was standing over the truck’s driver, who had managed to unsling his AK-47 but never got the chance to use it. Blaine looked up from the crumpled body and nodded at her.

Gaby turned her focus back on the GMC and peered into the truck bed. Cory lay awkwardly on his side, blood pumping out of the hole in his chest—right where she had aimed for.

One out of two ain’t bad.

She returned to Ashley, who was still staring at her as if afraid to look away for fear something might happen if she ever lost sight of Gaby even for a second. Blood trickled out between Ashley’s fingers; her face had paled noticeably, the energy sapping from her with every passing second and labored breath.

“I guess Cory was right after all,” Ashley said, her lips curling into something that almost resembled a wry smile.

“I guess so,” Gaby said.

She stood over the woman, who looked to be in her late twenties. The ponytail was pulled much too tightly and it stretched her forehead, giving her a severe look that wasn’t entirely attractive.

“You shot me,” the woman said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Cory?”

“He’s dead.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Gaby said.

Blaine finally appeared next to them and took in the woman. “How many more of you are out there?”

“A lot more,” Ashley said.

“Where are they?” Gaby asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” the other woman said, and again, that barely credible attempt at a defiant smile.

Gaby crouched and unslung her pack and opened it. She pulled out a white box and set it down on the concrete parking lot between them. It was a first-aid kit Zoe had put together before they left the Trident, and Ashley’s eyes zeroed in on it.

“It’s not a life-threatening wound,” Gaby said. “But it will be without proper treatment. I don’t think anyone’s coming here to rescue you, do you? At least, not in time.”

Ashley sighed. “What do you want?”

“You know what we want. Information.”

“I can’t give you that.”

“Of course you can.”

“How you figure?”

“You’re a survivor,” Gaby said, staring back at Ashley. “I know the type. I’ve run across more than a few of you. You don’t care about them. You’re just wearing that uniform because it keeps you alive.”

Ashley didn’t say anything, but she also didn’t look away from Gaby, either. Blaine, meanwhile, was staying very quiet next to them.

“It’s a pretty easy trade,” Gaby said. “Information, in exchange for tending to your wound. What you do after that is your business.”

“They’ll want to know what happened to Cory and Drake,” Ashley said.

“So tell them the truth. After we part company.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Where we’re going, it’s not going to matter who or what you tell about us.”

Ashley narrowed her eyes, maybe wondering how much she could trust Gaby. Finally, she said, “What are you, sixteen?”

“I’m the one with the first-aid kit.”

“That’s a fair point,” Ashley said. Then, nodding, “All right.”

Gaby opened the box and spread out the contents on the floor. “You said there were more of you out here. How many more between us and Houston?”

“Everyone,” Ashley said.

“What do you mean, everyone?” Blaine said.

“I mean everyone who can get there by tonight, who isn’t already locked down in the towns.”

Gaby exchanged a look with Blaine before turning back to Ashley. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “I just do what I’m told. We were headed to the city and were taking a break on the side of the road when Cory heard your car.”

She pried Ashley’s hand away from her shoulder and pressed down with a sterile bandage, then took out a small pair of scissors and began cutting away enough of the shirt uniform to get at the wound underneath. Ashley grunted but didn’t put up any fight.

“No peeking,” the collaborator said instead to Blaine.

“Don’t worry; you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before,” Blaine said.

Gaby might have put more pressure than necessary against Ashley’s wound, and maybe the woman thought the same thing because she glared at her. Gaby ignored the hard look and went to work.

The wound wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked, and the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. In fact, it was almost at the same spot where she had been shot not all that long ago. Just remembering that made Gaby’s own left shoulder throb slightly, and she made a mental note to take another one of Zoe’s painkillers (maybe two) before the day was over.

“How many are we talking about?” Gaby asked.

“Hard to answer, since I don’t know everyone,” Ashley said.

“That you know of.”

“A couple thousand.”

“A couple thousand?” Blaine said, not even trying to hide his surprise.

“I told you, it’s everyone who isn’t already locked down keeping the towns safe,” Ashley said. “They’re ordering every patrol across the state to converge on the city.” She shrugged her good shoulder. “Something big is happening, but I guess I’ll never find out now.”

“You’ll live,” Gaby said.

“Why?” Ashely asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you saving me?”

“Because we had a deal.”

Ashley nodded, but by the look on her face, she didn’t entirely believe Gaby. “You’re going there, aren’t you? Into Houston?”

Gaby didn’t answer her and neither did Blaine.

“Damn,” Ashley said. “The party of the century and I’m gonna miss it.”

* * *

“You believe her?” Lara asked through the radio.

“I don’t think she’s lying,” Gaby said. “She has no reason to.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She thought about Mason, about Josh…

“Every collaborator I’ve ever come into contact with other than Josh weren’t true believers,” Gaby said. “They were opportunists. Ashley is one of them. She does what she’s ordered so she can keep surviving. No more, no less.”

Lara didn’t reply right away, and Gaby took the moment to glance out the office window at Ashley outside. The collaborator sat in the back of the GMC, parked inside the garage of an auto body shop two blocks from the gas station. There was enough natural light coming through the windows that they weren’t sitting in complete darkness. Ashley’s head was tilted against her chest, the effects of the sedative Gaby had given her—not because she wanted to spare the woman any pain, but because a sedated hostage was easier to handle than a fully alert one. Ashley’s hands and legs were bound with duct tape and she was sitting in the same spot where Cory had fallen (and bled) after being shot, but if that made her uncomfortable when they put her back there, Ashley hadn’t said a peep.

There were scuffling noises as Blaine’s boots moved around on the roof above her. He was waiting for signs that Ashley had lied, that there were other collaborators out there who would come looking for them. Gaby didn’t think she was lying, though, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

They had transferred everything from the Ford over to the GMC Sierra, including Will. Gaby wondered what Ashley’s reaction would be if she knew just how close she was sitting right now to a blue-eyed ghoul. Someone like Ashley wasn’t “chosen,” the way Josh or Mason had been, so she would never have come into close contact with the creatures. Gaby knew intimately how unnerving that introduction could be.

“Unnerving?” That’s one way to put it.

More like “horrifying.”

“As long as you’re sure,” Lara was saying through the radio.

“I am,” Gaby said. “What about what she said? Does it change anything?”

“Maybe,” Lara said. “We were already prepared to clash with the 200 or so Will had seen patrolling the city even before we found out about Mercer. But a couple of thousand… It makes getting Mercer’s people onboard even more important. I’ll talk to Danny and Keo, see what they think. God knows they have a lot more experience in battlefield tactics than I do. Whatever happens, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll adapt.”

Gaby smiled to herself. “Adapt or perish.”

“Exactly. And speaking of adapting, are you in any immediate danger out there?”

“I don’t think so. The group we stumbled across was on its own. According to Ashley, no one’s looking for them. They’re calling all the collaborators to the city, and I don’t think they’re going to waste time sending out search parties for a truck that didn’t make it. Even if they did, we’re in a good place here. They’d have to literally run into us to find us.”

“How is everyone? Bonnie and Blaine?”

Bonnie…

She must have been quiet for too long, because Lara said, “Gaby, what happened?”

“Bonnie’s dead,” Gaby said.

“What happened? When?”

“Last night. Two of them found us where we were hiding. I guess it wasn’t nearly as abandoned as Will thought. But it would have been worse if he hadn’t been there and led the rest of them away.”

This time it was Lara’s turn to be silent. As she waited, Gaby was glad there was an office—as small and cramped and crowded with junk as it was—for some privacy. She didn’t like the idea of saying all of this out there where Ashley could overhear, even in her sedative-laden condition. Not because she was afraid Ashley would escape and snitch on them, but because it was none of her damn business.

“What about you and Blaine?” Lara finally said. “How are you guys really doing out there?”

“We’re fine. I wasn’t lying about that part.”

“And Will?”

“He’s fine, too. Don’t worry about us, Lara.”

“I can’t help it. It’s my job to worry about you. About everyone.”

Gaby could hear the stress in Lara’s voice even over the radio. The kind of pressure her friend was under all these months and to this very day was something Gaby couldn’t possibly imagine, or ever want to.

“How are things progressing on your end?” Gaby asked.

“It’s…coming along,” Lara said. “I won’t know anything until later tonight. And maybe not even then.”

“Where are the winds blowing?”

“The winds are very hard to read right now, but I think there’s a chance. It’ll depend on how much the last few days have taken out of them. Not just fighting Mercer’s war, but the aftermath of his death. A lot has gone on since. With us, with them…”

“But there is a chance.”

“There’s a chance, yes, or I would have told you to come home right now, especially after what happened to Bonnie.”

“What are you going to tell Jo?”

“The truth. That Bonnie died a hero, that she sacrificed herself to ensure the mission’s success.”

Gaby nodded to the empty, silent room and remembered Bonnie’s last words:

“Don’t turn back, Gaby. You and Blaine have to keep going. We have to stop them now, or we never will. Finish Will’s mission. You understand? Finish the mission.”

We’ll finish it, Bonnie, don’t you worry, she thought. We’ll goddamn finish it or die trying.

21

Keo

“You’re handsomer every time I see you, Keo. What’s your secret?”

“A good personality. People skills. All that good stuff.”

“Maybe you should go easy on that good stuff because you’re running out of places to put bandages.”

“Always more below the neck, Doc.”

“Let’s not go there.”

“That’s what she said.”

Zoe smirked. “What’s the gossip around the island water cooler? Did Lara’s speech go over well?”

“From what I’m hearing from my well-placed sources, it’s about fifty-fifty,” Keo said.

“Is that good?”

“It’s not bad.”

Zoe deftly placed a new bandage over his temple and taped it into place. “I thought the island had their own doctors.”

“They’re a little busy right now.”

“Right. The shooting this morning.”

More like “the attempted coup d'état this morning.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

“Was it as bad as I’ve heard?”

“Most of the injuries are from the docks. Burns and shrapnel.”

“What about all that shooting?”

“Dead people don’t need doctors, Doc.”

“Oh.” Zoe moved to his forehead to check on the stitches, then went about cleaning and covering them with a new bandage. “So there’s a fifty percent chance Black Tide might decide to pitch in?”

“I wouldn’t bet on the whole island, but maybe just enough to give Frank’s plan a boost.”

“You mean Will.”

“Uh huh.”

She finished up, then snapped off the surgical gloves before putting her instruments away. “How many were willing to meet with Lara?”

“When I was there, a few hundred had shown up.”

“Soldiers?”

“And some civilians.”

“Why do we need civilians for this?”

“You win wars with fighters, but they can’t do their job without support from everyone else, Doc. Mercer understood that when he set up the FOBs. I’ll say this for him: He was a maniac, but he knew what he was doing.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have killed him.”

“He started it.”

“Yes, he did.”

Zoe pushed her cart back to the corner where she kept all the other medical equipment. She looked over at him and he thought she wanted to say something—or ask something—but didn’t. Instead, she began putting the roll of gauze away.

Keo slipped his jacket back on and zipped it up. He had forgotten how cold it could get on the Trident. The island by comparison felt warmer despite not having a whole lot of nature to block the winds. Then again, maybe it was all that tropical scenery.

“What’s on your mind, Doc?” Keo asked.

Zoe stopped what she was doing and turned around. She leaned against the counter and didn’t say anything right away.

“I won’t bite,” Keo said.

“What do you think?” she finally asked.

“About what?”

“Plan G. Lara and the islanders. Can it all work? You’ve been out there. More than any of us. You’ve seen more.”

“You were at the camps.”

“I was, but it’s not the same. I was sheltered, and mostly around other people.”

Keo sat back down on a stool. “To be honest with you, I don’t know. But that’s the thing…”

“What is?”

“I know what I don’t know.” When she gave him a quizzical look, he continued: “I’ve never been a leader. It was never my thing. I’ve always taken orders, did what was necessary. I guess when you’ve been doing that for as long as I have, you start developing the ability to tell when someone is full of bullshit. Like a sixth sense. You have to, because they’re sending you to what could potentially be your death.”

“So what is your sense telling you about all this? Are we just setting ourselves up for failure? For more dead friends?”

“I think…” He stopped himself. He was sure he had the answer, but suddenly realized now that he didn’t and maybe he never had.

Zoe watched him patiently from across the room.

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “But Frank believes in the plan, and I haven’t seen or heard anything about the guy that leads me to think he’s talking out of his ass. You know what he is now, right?”

She nodded.

“He believes it can save Lara,” Keo continued. “And that guy—or thing, or it, or whatever you want to call him now—is alive almost purely because of that driving need to protect her.”

“He loves her. He’ll always love her.”

“That seems like the safest bet in history.” Keo stood up. “So what I’m saying is, I guess, yeah, I think it could all work, but it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take a lot of doing, but I’ve seen Frank in action. That guy, he can do things.”

Zoe nodded, and he saw the relief on her face.

“A year ago, all of this would have been beyond my pay grade,” Keo said. “But I’ve seen things that can’t be explained; hell, that defy logic, even. You can’t help but start entertaining wild possibilities after that.”

“But it’s so risky.”

“Life is risky, Doc. Especially these days. At least there’s a big ass pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.”

She nodded again and seemed to be talking mostly to herself when she said, “And we could use a win. God, can we use a win. We’ve already lost so much already. Carrie, and now Bonnie…”

Keo stared at her. “What about Carrie and Bonnie?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘Carrie, and now Bonnie.’ What did you mean by that?”

Zoe’s face paled. “You don’t know…”

“Know what?”

“Oh God, no one’s told you…”

“Told me what, Doc?”

* * *

He vividly remembered Carrie, back on Song Island, trying to convince him to stay. They were preparing for an attack at the time, and he wanted no part of it—especially one on behalf of a bunch of strangers.

“It’s not about the island,” she had said. “It’s about the people on it. It’s always been about the people. Stay with us, Keo. There might not be anything for you out there, but there’s something here, now.”

She hadn’t come out and said it, but he’d known what she meant. She was talking about herself, asking him to stay with her. In the months after she had followed up with hints, but he had always been too focused on getting to Gillian to take her up on her offer. He had regretted it ever since.

Then there was Bonnie…

But it was always about Gillian…until it wasn’t anymore.

Keo gritted his teeth and thumbed a bullet out of the magazine and flicked it into the air, then watched it drop all the way down to the water three decks below. He had a great view of Black Tide nearby as well as the surrounding Gulf of Mexico from the rear of the Trident. The cool wind and solitude, along with the slowly creeping orange glow of evening, made the place ideal to be alone with his thoughts.

Another 9mm round shot into the air before gravity pulled it back down, turning end over end as it vanished out of view and, a second later, the soft and barely audible ploomp as it landed in the water below.

“Those things cost money, you know,” Lara said as she appeared next to him. She leaned against the railing and looked down at the same patch of blue water.

“I’m replacing them with silver ammo,” he said.

“Smart, but that still doesn’t mean you can literally just throw bullets away. Every bullet counts.”

“My bad.”

“My bad?” she smiled.

“Don’t people say that anymore?”

“I don’t think people ever said that, Keo. At least not anyone over ten.”

“You learn something new every day.” He nodded at the beach in front of them. “What’s going on over there?”

People were milling along the sand. Most of them were civilians, but there were a few soldiers among them. He saw handshakes, talking, and laughing. A few might have even been embracing.

“Riley’s people,” Lara said. “I asked them to go back, to put in a good word for us.”

“Looks like they’re getting along. Like that little uprising on the Ocean Star never happened.”

Ploomp! as another round dropped into the water below.

“I guess they realized it wasn’t about them after all; it was always about Mercer,” Lara said. “About his war. In a lot of ways, Riley did them all a favor by opening their eyes.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

“Funny how things work out. Not all that long ago, one of them almost killed Riley for it. Now he’s helping Rhett organize the meetings on the island, trying to convince them to do it all over again. It feels wrong somehow.”

“Soldiers fight, Lara. Even if they weren’t soldiers before this, they are now. The ones who don’t have the stomach for it will stay home. The ones that do will come with us. Yours, Mercer’s, or Frank’s war. It doesn’t matter, really.”

“Maybe you’re right. I still have a hard time thinking about this from a military perspective.”

“You’ll come around,” Keo said. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be over there right now?”

“What do you think I’ve been doing since noon? I’m exhausted, Keo. I think I might have met and talked with every single person on that island.”

“I told Doc we’re looking at a fifty-fifty chance we’ll get enough volunteers to give Frank’s plan the best shot at success.”

“You were being generous.”

“Was I?”

“I’d kill for fifty-fifty. It’s more like forty-sixty. Maybe thirty-seventy.”

“Still good odds. I’ve done with worse.”

“For you, maybe. For us mere mortals, it’s not nearly enough. But we should get a better idea by the end of tonight. I wish I could give them more time, but we’re running out of it. Will’s going to be in position soon, and we need to be there for him.”

“How many do you need?”

“All or most of the pilots. Some of the tankers. And a lot of the support people.”

“I think you’ll get it. Or most of it.”

“You think so?”

He thumbed loose another 9mm bullet. “Your speech over the intercom was pretty convincing. I got goose bumps.”

“I didn’t know you had goose bumps to get, Keo.”

“It’s either that or I’m coming down with the flu. Considering my run of luck these days, who knows.”

She gave him an amused glance. “What are you talking about? You’re still alive, aren’t you? When I last saw you on the Ocean Star, I thought that was the last time we’d ever talk.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“I should have known better. Next time, I will.”

Keo flicked another round into the ocean. “So, lowballing it at thirty-seventy, huh?”

“Around there. I just hope they can get over the fact that I’m a twenty-something medical school dropout trying to convince them to fight another war after everything they’ve been through.”

“In your defense, you’re only a dropout because the world ended.”

She laughed, and Keo smiled.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her laugh—if ever. Had she ever laughed before while he was around, before he left to find Gillian? Not that she ever had a whole lot to be happy about. Will had been missing all that time, and there was all the work involved with training everyone and keeping the Trident afloat. Even now, he had no idea how she was doing it, shouldering all the responsibility on so little sleep and rest.

She looked as tired today as she did back then. The number on her birth certificate might have said twenty-six years, but he was looking at a much older woman. It wasn’t in the worry lines or the bags under her eyes, but in the way she leaned against the railing, as if she needed the extra support.

“That’s what people keep reminding me,” she said. “College dropout by way of the apocalypse, getting ready for a war.”

“It’s true.”

“Still, Mom would be so disappointed.”

“That you’re a dropout, or that you’re about to launch another war?”

“Both.”

She looked across the water at the beach and the civilians still gathered there. It really did look like one big happy reunion, and he found himself watching along with her in silence for a while.

Finally, she said, “What are you going to do after this, Keo?”

You mean if I’m still alive? he thought, but said, “I have no idea. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

“No plans?”

“Not a one.”

“That makes two of us.”

“What about Frank?”

“What about him?”

“If this works out the way he says it will…”

“I don’t know if it’ll be possible to go back to the way it was. Everything’s so…”

“Fucked up?”

She smiled. “Different. Everything’s so different.”

“That would have been my second guess.” Keo slipped the empty magazine back into the MP5SD and slung the weapon. “I’m just sorry I wasn’t around when you asked for volunteers to go out there with Frank. Or around when everything else happened onboard the boat.”

Lara sighed. “Zoe told me. I’m sorry, Keo. I was looking for the right time to tell you myself, but with everything happening at the island… I’m sorry you had to learn about Carrie and Bonnie this way.”

“Don’t sweat it. You had a lot on your plate.”

“I know you were close to both of them. I don’t know what else to say except I’m sorry.”

“I’m more worried about Lorelei and Jo.”

“Lorelei took it hard. She threw herself into helping with guard duty as a way to cope. I have Carly and Sarah and the others keeping a close eye on her.”

“And Jo?”

“Jo…” Lara pursed her lips. “I haven’t gotten around to telling her yet. How do you tell someone their sister isn’t coming back?”

“You want me to do it?”

Lara shook her head. “No. It’s my responsibility. I’m the one who sent Bonnie out there.”

“She volunteered. All three of them did.”

“That doesn’t matter.” She looked off at the setting sun in the distance. “First Carrie, now Bonnie. And it’s not going to stop. There are going to be more casualties before this is over.”

Keo didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say anyway, and the silence, with only the calming back and forth of the waves against the anchored Trident, was almost therapeutic.

Their peace and quiet was only broken when Elise and Vera and a couple of the other kids appeared along the railing two decks below them. The kids looked off at the island’s long stretch of beach, pointing and talking excitedly amongst themselves.

“They’ve been bugging me about going over,” Lara said. “I think they miss the beach we had back at Song Island.”

“Why haven’t you let them?”

“Because I can’t protect them out there. I can’t be everywhere at once. Neither can Carly nor Sarah. They’re safest here, onboard with us. For now.”

“You sent Riley’s people back there.”

“They’re not Elise and Vera.”

He nodded. “Pretty soon they’ll have company.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“Danny. He’s going to be a daddy, remember?”

That brought a smile to her lips. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around that concept.”

“That poor kid,” Keo said. “That poor, poor kid.”

Lara laughed, and Keo smiled.

22

Will

“You’re coming home.”

No. Not home. It had stopped being home over a year ago when the world crumbled and the cities blacked out and he found salvation elsewhere. Home wasn’t a place of brick and mortar or cement. Home was her.

Lara.

“You belong here.”

The voice had grown in strength after that first night back on land, when he had to lead the black eyes away from Gaby and the others. He had only been partially successful and two of them—the slowest among the horde—had lagged behind. The woman died as a result of that failure.

That left two.

“You’ve always belonged here.”

He couldn’t let that happen again. Not with Gaby’s life at stake. She was one of the reasons he was doing this. The reason he was taking the fight to Mabry. Back to where it all began one cold, dark night.

“It’s good you’ve finally accepted it.”

He was the beginning and the end, the nothing and the everything. Nowhere, and everywhere.

“You didn’t think you’d be able to slip through unnoticed, did you?”

No. He never had any delusions he would be able to make it back to the city without being seen, felt, or sensed. Mabry had spied him through the black eyes as he led them away from the barn, into the woods, and out the other side. But they were slow things, dumb things, and he outmaneuvered them with minimal effort and destroyed the ones that got close enough to pose any danger.

“Or maybe you’re still lying to yourself.”

He wanted to answer, wanted to shout back in defiance. But he didn’t, because it was a trick, an attempt to lure him out of hiding. Once he exposed himself to the stream of consciousness that linked the brood to Mabry, there would be no secrets left between them. It was already difficult enough to stay hidden this close to the city, having to move in the daytime.

“Lying to them.”

The sun made him defenseless and weak and reliant on others. Unlike all the other times when he was here, in the darkness, when he was alone and fast, and though Mabry always knew he was close, he could never locate him.

“Lying to her.”

It wasn’t just Mabry out there probing, picking at the defenses he had erected to protect his mind and his sanity. He could feel them—the other blue eyes. The ones that had remained in the city to protect him. To protect Mabry. They were reaching out, too. Searching, waiting for him to make a mistake. Just one mistake so they could pounce.

“Come home.”

Home? No, not home. His home was wherever she was.

“I’ll see you soon…”

* * *

The desire to come out of the suitcase was like an itch he desperately wanted to scratch, that continued to grow with every passing second. Finally, finally, Blaine unwound the layers of duct tape and pulled the zipper, and he emerged. He could have broken through—it wouldn’t have taken very much effort at all—but that would have damaged the transportation and forced them to repair it, and they might need it again for another day.

Blaine flinched at the sight of him—it would have been imperceptible to the human eye—and the big man’s heartbeat increased marginally, though they might as well be firecrackers to his hypersensitive ears. The clothing he wore helped to ease Blaine’s mind, but it would never be enough. Because whatever he did, whatever he hid underneath, he would never truly be the man they remembered. He wasn’t a man at all anymore.

“Sorry about that,” Blaine said. “Had to take care of the prisoner first. Make sure she didn’t see you.”

He nodded, not that he cared if the woman saw him or not.

“Place’s secure,” Blaine continued. “So tomorrow we either get moving or run back to the shoreline, huh? I’m not sure which one I’m hoping for, to be perfectly honest with you.” An awkward grin. “Still waiting for word from Lara.”

The right response eluded him, so he chose to stay silent instead. It was difficult talking to Blaine and the others. They didn’t know him as well as Lara did. As well as Danny or Gaby. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough.

“What now?” Blaine asked. “We just wait it out?”

“Yes,” he hissed.

“I guess it’s gonna be a long night. Good thing the truck seats are comfortable. Not to mention warm. Not that you need warmth, right?” Another attempt at a smile that went awry from the very beginning. “Of course not. I keep forgetting where you’ve been spending your days.”

There was a slight quiver in Blaine’s voice, the uncertainty that comes with allying yourself with a blue-eyed ghoul. He understood and decided to take mercy on them both by leaving Blaine and gliding across the oil-slicked garage floor.

Gaby was in the office at the back, and he slipped through the open door. She looked up from the desk where she had placed her disassembled rifle on white rags and was running a toothbrush through the metal parts. She was biting down on a small flashlight to see with, and she removed it now and placed it next to her.

A flush of pride at how much she had grown, proof that what he used to be—who he once was—had mattered. But the unwanted emotion was only temporary and quickly diffused by the large amount of exposed silver on the desk. He wrinkled his nose and wanted to spit out the taste, like knives against his tongue.

“Blaine’s still nervous around you; that’s why he’s blabbing so much,” Gaby said. “It’s going to take him a while to get used to it. The others, too.”

“I know,” he said.

“Haven’t heard back from Lara yet, if that’s what you’re going to ask.”

He nodded, even though that piece of information was unnecessary because he could hear everything while inside the suitcase.

“But I think it’s going to be good news,” Gaby continued. “Lara can be pretty convincing when she needs to be, but I probably don’t have to tell you that.”

“She’ll convince them,” he said. “She was born to lead. She just didn’t know it until now.”

“I hope you’re right, because there’s a lot of bad guys out there for us to take on all by ourselves.”

“We wouldn’t have been alone.”

“I know. We’d have help. Still, I’d feel better about this mission if there were a couple of tanks and Warthogs lending a hand.”

“She’ll convince them.”

“I hope so.” Gaby stopped what she was doing and turned around in her chair. Green eyes fixed on him and he saw no traces of fear or hesitation. “Regardless of what happens with Lara, or on Black Tide, when you get right down to it, it’s all going to come down to you. So you better be right, Will. After what we went through to get this far…” She stopped short before continuing: “You better be right.”

He nodded.

“Then why do I keep getting this feeling you’re not telling me everything? That you’re holding something back? Not just from me, but from Lara too?” She stared at him with none of the reluctance or apprehension that Blaine still couldn’t overcome, and might never be able to. “Tell me you’ve told us everything, Will. Tell me the truth.”

“I’ve told you everything,” he lied.

“Everything,” she repeated.

“Everything,” he lied again.

She nodded and sat back in the chair. “So what now? Sit here until Lara radios back with news?”

“Yes.”

“I hate waiting. Have I told you that?”

“Maybe…”

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head.

“I guess it’s not important. You only remember the important things, right?”

“Yes.”

“That makes sense. Everything else is just a pain in the ass.” She swiveled around to the desk and picked up the pieces and continued working. “Do you remember all those times on the island?” A smile creased her lips. “When you and Danny taught me all of this? Those were still some of the best days of my life.”

The memories weren’t there. Not in their entirety, anyway. There were flashes, visions that came and went. Some were more cohesive than others; but many were just fragments, reminders that they served no purpose other than to cloud his mind and divert him from the truly important things.

“Danny wanted to come,” Gaby was saying. “You know why he didn’t, right?”

“Yes.”

“You do?” she said, unable to hide her surprise.

He knew, because he could hear everything on the boat even while shuttered away inside the cabin below deck. If not the actual sounds that made up the conversations, then the vibrations that resulted and traveled along the ship’s hull. It was one of the many talents he had developed very early on after his transformation—to hear without actually hearing. But he didn’t know how to put those things into words, just like he didn’t know how to explain the hundreds (thousands?) of other things the change had bestowed upon him—the gifts that came from the curse.

So he only hissed, “Yes.”

“I keep forgetting how different you are from the run-of-the-mill ghoul. Are all the other blue eyes like you?”

“Not like me.”

“You know what I mean. I know they’re not like you. Thank God for that. I meant in terms of everything else.”

“Yes.”

“What about Mabry? He’s blue-eyed too, isn’t he?”

“Yes…and no.”

She gave him a quizzical look. “What’s that mean?”

“He’s more.”

“More how?” she asked.

He’s the everything, and the nothing. The nowhere, and the everywhere.

The beginning…and the end.

* * *

The town was empty as he made his way through it, slipping around buildings and up and down rooftops. He could see and smell evidence that they had been here many times before, doing what they did best—searching, always searching—but there wasn’t a single black eyes in the area tonight.

The humans were gathered along the highways that led into the city. A dozen here, another dozen behind them, and more still that he couldn’t see, on the other sides of the city. The stink of fear clung to their pores underneath their black uniforms, trails of sweat behind the gas masks despite the cold. Anxiety radiated off them, the knowledge that they had been summoned here to take up positions against…something.

“You’re close now, aren’t you? Yes. You are. You’re very close.”

Like all the other times, he didn’t answer. Instead, he glided through the night underneath, over and around the highway. It would be so easy to reach out and kill the human traitors, but he resisted the urge.

Not here, not now.

Besides, they didn’t matter. Only the plan mattered. The mission.

Plan G, as Danny called it.

“That’s everything?” Lara had asked him, back on the boat. “That’s the plan? All of it?”

“Yes,” he had lied.

The city loomed in front of him now, its buildings dark and proud under the moonlight, like sentries watching for signs of his encroachment.

“You’re so, so close.”

The voice had gotten stronger, more insistent. It took everything he had to quell it as he scaled down the side of the building. He expected the blue eyes that guarded the city to come out in search of him, but they remained where they were.

In there, with Mabry. Always with Mabry.

“Come closer.”

It didn’t take him long to reach the edge of the city, even taking every precaution. He didn’t worry about the humans and concentrated on the overwhelming presence of the brood before him. He could feel their unease, taste the uncertainty in the air around them. There were so many, packed into one place. Every building, every home, every office. The side and back streets were empty when they shouldn’t have been, but the emptiness was a lie, an obvious ploy to lure him in.

They knew he was coming, because Mabry knew.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

Millions…

He retreated. Slowly at first, then faster.

And faster still…

* * *

“Gaby.”

She opened groggy eyes while her hand instinctively moved an inch or two closer to the rifle leaning against the desk she had laid her head on to sleep.

“You’re back,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, even as she pulled her hand away from the weapon.

“Yes,” he hissed.

She opened a bottle of water and took a drink. “I’m never going to get used to how quiet you can move. Even with all that stuff on. What were you doing out there?”

“Scouting.”

She smiled. “Danny was right. You can take the man out of the Ranger, but you can’t take the Ranger out of the man. So what did you find out?”

“Nothing new.”

“What about the collaborators?”

“They’ve arrived.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Everywhere.”

“That’s not good.”

“They don’t matter.”

“Right. The plan.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “So Ashley wasn’t lying after all.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think she was anyway.”

“Lara?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard back from them yet.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s only a few minutes past midnight, and she did say this was probably going to go all the way till morning.” The chair creaked as she leaned back on it and let out a yawn. “Do you ever get tired?”

“Not anymore.”

“But you can get hurt. Like back at Gallant.”

“Yes.”

“You can die, too.” She added quickly, uncertainly, “Again, I mean.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“I feel like Blaine sometimes. As much as I’ve gotten used to being around you—this new you—there are still things I’m never going to understand, and I’m not sure if I really want to.”

“Gaby,” he said.

She looked over at him, suddenly alarmed by the tone of his voice. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“The woman.”

“What woman?”

“The collaborator.”

“What about her?”

“I need her.”

“You need her?”

“Yes.”

There was a moment of confusion on her face, but it was quickly replaced by understanding.

Then something else, something… Disgust? Fear? Or maybe it was resignation, an acceptance of the way things were. The way he was.

“I need her,” he said again.

“Are you hurt?” she asked quietly, as if afraid Blaine and the woman would overhear outside the office.

“No.”

“Then why?”

“I need more. I need to be stronger.”

“What about back on the Trident?”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Because of what happened at Gallant?”

“Yes,” he lied. “Because of what happened at Gallant.”

She looked past him and out the window—at the truck, but mostly for the woman in the backseat, whom she couldn’t see from her angle but knew was out there.

Her eyes finally returned to him. “Is there another way?”

“No…”

“There has to be…”

“There isn’t.”

Her face darkened, anger replacing the uncertainty. “Then why are you telling me this? You could have just taken her. It’s not like Blaine or I could have stopped you.”

“You needed to know.”

“Needed to know what, Will?”

“Who I am. What I am.”

She sighed, then nodded and turned back to the desk, and said quietly, “Then I guess you should do what you have to do.”

* * *

Blaine was asleep in the front seat of the truck when he opened the door and took the woman out. Her eyes flew wide and she might have screamed, except his hand was over her mouth before she could utter a single noise and he carried her out of the side door and into the darkness.

He took her far from the garage, far from Gaby, before laying her down on a rooftop. Her eyes, as wide as he had ever seen a pair of eyes, focused on him instantly and every inch of her body shook uncontrollably and never stopped.

“Please,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It seemed like the thing to say, even though he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know this woman, but he had no ill feelings toward her. She was simply there and he needed the precious liquid pumping through her veins.

“Please. Please,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“But I did everything you wanted. I even killed for you.”

“Not for me.”

“I don’t understand…”

“You don’t have to,” he hissed, and bent over her.

She whimpered as he bit down. Her hands clutched at him, fingernails digging into his skin. He didn’t feel it and continued to feed, drawing the life force out of her one slurp at a time.

Over and over and over, until she stopped thrashing and lay still in his arms.

I’m sorry, he thought, but the words sounded hollow even in his mind, so he concentrated on the feeding instead.

She tasted sweeter than the two from the Trident, and for a moment—just a moment—he allowed himself to savor her in the way he was meant to. The way Mabry always intended him to.

“Come closer,” Mabry beckoned somewhere in the back of his mind. “Come closer…”

Book Three

The Last Rodeo

23

Keo

“Excuse me, but I thought I just heard you say there might be millions of those bloodsucking things in Houston right now, waiting for us to walk right up to their front door and ring the dinner bell. But that couldn’t have been right, because what suicidal moron would volunteer for something like that?”

Keo grinned to himself. He had to admit, Peele had a way with words for someone who looked like he should be filling out people’s tax forms and not volunteering to lead the tank portion of an attack on the enemy position. Then again, Keo had met plenty of people who didn’t look like they could defend themselves, but proved otherwise when the chips were down. Peele may or may not be one of those folks, but he was certainly asking all the right questions.

“And how do we even know this Frank guy will be there?” Peele continued. “For all we know, he might not even make it into position. And then what? We’ll be slugging it out with a few thousand—you did say thousands, right?—collaborators who probably came better armed this time after what we did to them during R-Day.”

Because Frank is a blue-eyed ghoul. Because he can go where we can’t. Because if you knew the truth about ol’ Frank, you’d piss your pants.

“Frank will be there,” Lara said. “He’s the most sure-thing part of this plan. It’s everyone else you should be worried about.”

“Who is he?” Cole asked. The pilot stood with his arms across his chest like he didn’t want to be there.

And yet here he was, along with Peele and Alex, another one of the tankers. Of the three, Cole stood out. He was, after all, the guy who had been doing Warthog strafing runs all across Texas ever since Mercer’s war began. Of the three pilots on Black Tide, he had been the only one to volunteer. It made perfect sense to Keo that Cole would be here. Only the grizzled veteran would be able to shake off what he had done in Mercer’s name in such a short turnaround. It wouldn’t surprise Keo at all if the other two were too disillusioned to ever climb back into a cockpit ever again, though to hear Cole tell it, he was on the verge of convincing at least one to join the fun.

It’s all fun and games until the bullets fly, right, boys?

They were inside a large room in the command area of Black Tide’s facility. It didn’t have the size of the earlier room where Keo had met with Cameron, but then it also wasn’t riddled with bullets and blood. It was big enough to accommodate all eight of them, including the two R’s—Rhett and Riley—while still leaving room for a few more bodies.

“The kind of intel he’s sending back takes a lot of work for one man,” Cole continued. “And you say he’s been out there this entire time. So who exactly is this guy, that he’s able to do all of this?”

Keo couldn’t tell if that was suspicion in Cole’s voice or just straightforward curiosity. Maybe it was a little of both, and from the looks on Alex’s and Peele’s faces, it was a question that was also on their minds.

“He was an Army Ranger before all of this,” Lara said. Her voice was steady and confident, and if Keo didn’t know any better, he would swear she didn’t have a single doubt about Frank or his plans. “He served in Afghanistan, then was part of a SWAT unit. When I tell you that he’s the most sure-thing part of this plan, I’m not exaggerating. This is what he does. And he’s very good at it.”

Alex and Peele exchanged a quick look, but Cole remained unmoved. Or, at least, Keo couldn’t read anything on that lined face of his.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” Alex said. He was the youngest by far—twenty-two, if that, with dark blond hair. Keo thought he looked a bit like Danny, if Danny were shorter and learned to shut up once or twice.

“A Ranger,” Peele said. “That explains a lot.”

Lara looked over at Danny, standing next to her behind the table with the map of Texas. That was a signal for him to pitch in.

“We served in Afghanistan together,” Danny said. “He’s a good bloke. Smart as a whip. The guy excels at SERE and you should take everything he sends back as gospel. I can’t count the number of times I’ve put my life in his hands. A lot of people have. Lara, Keystone Cops over there, to name just a few who wouldn’t be here if not for him.”

“If his intel is correct, that just confirms we’ll be running into a buzz saw,” Cole said.

“Speak for yourself,” Peele said. “You’ll be in the sky. We’ll be the ones on the ground with all those collaborator assholes.”

“You volunteered, remember?” Rhett said. He had kept quiet while Lara did the briefing, and this was the first time he had spoken up in almost twenty minutes. Keo had almost forgotten he was even in the room with them. Then again, he wondered if anyone remembered he was present, since he hadn’t said a word since the meeting began.

“I know that, Rhett,” Peele said. “But I didn’t know this was what we’re going up against.”

“It doesn’t matter how many are out there,” Lara said. “I’m not asking you to win. Your objective—your only objective—is to keep them away from Willie Boy while they finish the mission.”

“That’s this guy Frank’s group?” Alex said. “Codename Willie Boy?”

“Yes.”

“Who came up with that, anyway?”

“I did,” Danny said.

“What’s it mean?” Alex asked. “I get that we’re Rolling Thunder and Cole’s Eagle, but what the hell’s a Willie Boy?”

“Trade secret. Maybe I’ll tell you when this is over.”

“So we’ll just be a distraction,” Peele said, still focused almost entirely on Lara. “Keep as many of them off Willie Boy’s back as possible?”

“Yes,” Lara nodded.

“For how long?”

“As long as you can.”

“What if we’re forced to retreat?”

“As long as you can,” Lara repeated. “I’m not asking you to sacrifice yourselves. We just need to give Willie Boy every single second possible.”

That seemed to appease Peele somewhat, and he nodded. He had a good ten years on Alex, but looked young next to the aging Cole.

“While they’ll be busy with you on the ground and Eagle in the air, Striker will assist Willie Boy,” Lara said. “Together, they’ll complete the mission.”

“Just like that?” Cole said.

“Just like that,” Danny said. “What, it should be harder?”

“Is it really going to be that easy?” Alex asked. He sounded doubtful, but Keo thought he heard a little bit of hope in there as well.

“It won’t be that easy,” Lara said. “None of this is going to be easy in the slightest.”

She stared at all three of them, one after another, and gave time for her words to sink in. Keo had to admit, it was the right play. It was the same as telling them that she wasn’t hiding anything, that she wasn’t going to bullshit them about how hard all of this was going to be.

“Everyone will have to do their part,” Lara finally continued. “We need to give Willie Boy every chance in the world to succeed. That means holding on for as long as you can. As long as you can.”

“How does it work?” Alex asked. “Not the plan, but everything else.”

“The ghouls share a hive-like mind. This King Ghoul, as Danny calls it, controls them through a psychic link. Don’t ask me how it all works, it just does. You’ve all been out there; you’ve seen them for yourselves. The things we don’t know about them could fill a book. But we know enough, thanks to Frank.”

“It’s all supernatural shit,” Rhett said. “I stopped trying to understand them a long time ago.” He gazed across the table at Lara. “If she says killing King Ghoul takes them out, then I believe her.”

Lara nodded gratefully back at him.

“I’ve seen it up close and personal,” Danny said. “I’ve gone toe-to-toe with them. And I’m not talking about your garden-variety black eyes.”

“The blue eyes,” Riley said.

“We’ve heard stories about them,” Peele said. His voice had dropped noticeably for some reason. “They lord over the towns, keep the blood pumping.”

“They do that, and then some,” Danny said. “The important takeaway is that they run the show. They use the black eyes like marionettes. Cut the strings by taking out the baby blues, and the puppets go down for the count.”

“How?” Cole asked.

“That’s for history and scientific folks to figure out. I just know that when you snuff out one of them, every black-eyed ghoul in the area just stops.”

“Just stops?” Peele said.

“Like they ran out of batteries or something.”

“That’s…insane.”

“Right, because this whole year has been so sane,” Keo said. It was the first time he had spoken, and they all turned to look at him. “I’ve seen the same things Danny has, up close and way too personal for my liking. You take out one of the blue eyes, and the rest don’t know what the hell to do. Imagine what happens when you remove King Ghoul. The one that controls them all. The head of the snake.”

“Think of it like a military chain of command,” Danny said. “At the bottom you have the grunts—the black eyes. They make up the vast majority of the ghouls out there. The baby blues are the COs and NCOs rolled into one—they run every aspect of the daily grind. And up at the very top—”

“King Ghoul,” Cole said.

Keo watched the veteran’s face carefully. Cole might have been the only pilot to volunteer so far, but he had come into this room with a lot of doubts, and from the looks of it, Keo had a hunch he would eventually leave with less.

“Exactamundo,” Danny said. “Cut off the head and the tentacles flail around all dramatic like, then they eventually die. That’s what Frank found out while he was out there. Trust me when I tell you, he went through hell and back just to get this information to us. He sure as hell didn’t do it for the LOLs.”

“And now he’s back out there again,” Lara said, picking up after Danny.

It was almost as if the two of them had rehearsed it, but of course Keo knew better because he had been with them for the last five hours on the Trident, coming up with the plan.

She continued: “He’s moving into position, and when the time is right, Frank will kill King Ghoul.”

“How?” Peele asked.

“It doesn’t matter how. What matters is that he’ll be the one to do it, with a lot of help from us. From you and Cole, and Keo over there. He can’t do this alone. If this is going to work, he’s going to need all of us to throw everything we have at the city.”

Alex and Peele exchanged another quick look, and this time Cole joined them.

“What do you think?” Alex asked, looking across at Rhett.

“I think this is our chance,” Rhett said. “Lara and her people know more about these things than all of us combined. Mercer had us so concerned with the collaborators, with the towns, that sometimes I think he forgot who the real enemy was. Lara and her people never did. I think we need to grab this opportunity before it’s gone, because we might not get another shot at these fuckers.”

Keo watched the faces carefully, and he was almost certain Alex was completely convinced. Peele still had some way to go, but he was headed there. As for Cole…the pilot could have been thinking about a cheeseburger, for all Keo could decipher from his facial expression.

“There’s some good news,” Keo said.

“Spill the beans, Kerosene,” Danny said.

Keo got up and walked over to the table. He leaned over the map and made a circle around the city of Houston. “They’re calling every available patrol unit to help secure the roads into the city. That leaves everything else”—he circled the rest of the state—“wide open.”

“Meaning?” Peele asked.

“Meaning, when we reinsert back into Texas and start moving toward the target, there won’t be any opposition until we reach Houston itself. Or if there’s any along the way, it’ll be but a shadow of what they could have thrown at us. Will we run into a patrol or two out there? Maybe. Maybe not. But it won’t be as many as we were going to before they recalled everyone to help guard Houston. So in a way, Head Ghoul—or King Ghoul, or whatever it’s called—did us a big favor and it doesn’t even know it.”

“Even if all that’s true, there’s gonna be a hell of a lot of opposition once we do reach the city limits,” Peele said. “Truthfully, I can shell those black-eyed fuckers all day, but the other type of enemy does tend to shoot back. The tanks can withstand a lot of damage, but if what your people are saying is true and there are a couple thousand collaborator assholes waiting for us…” He shook his head. “Man, I wish we had more tanks.”

“What about you, Cole?” Alex asked, looking eagerly across at the former airman. “What are you thinking?”

Good question, Keo thought, turning to observe the grizzled veteran himself.

“It’s going to be more dangerous for you boys down there,” Cole said. “Like you said, Peele, I’ll be in the sky. Unless the bad guys have learned to fly since R-Day, I’ll have the airspace all to myself.”

“So you’re in?” Peele asked.

Cole pursed his lips, but he nodded, if almost reluctantly. “After what we’ve done, even if it was in another man’s name, I don’t see how I can not do this.” He paused, before continuing: “If you’re asking me to tell you what to do, I’m not going to do that. That’s for every man to decide for himself. But I got markers on my soul, boys. We all do, after R-Day. I figure we owe it to ourselves to try to make up for that. It’s not going to magically erase every horrible thing we did out there, but maybe it’ll help me get some sleep in the nights to come.”

It was a damn fine speech, and even Lara and Danny were impressed by it. The fact that it had come from Cole meant even more to the other islanders from the looks on their faces.

Leave it to the old guy to bring it home.

“Are you guys in?” Rhett asked, looking across at the tankers.

Alex hesitated and looked to Peele.

“Yeah,” Peele nodded. “I’m in.”

“Then I guess I’m in, too,” Alex said.

“Good,” Lara said, as if she never had a single shred of doubt that this was exactly how the meeting would end up.

Damn, she’s good at this.

Lara glanced down at her watch. “Go back to your people and fill them in. Then try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day for all of us.”

* * *

Lara and Danny went back to the Trident, but instead of going with them, Keo decided to stay behind and wander the halls of Black Tide even though it was well after three in the morning. He had never really had much luck getting shut-eye the night before a big assignment, and this was definitely the biggest he had ever been given by a long shot.

“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”

That was the old motto, for a simpler time. Which was funny to think of them as that, but looking back, everything was so much more black and white when he was pulling the trigger for the organization. Nowadays he was coming up with mission plans and volunteering for work that no one was going to pay him a single dime for, and if he were to not come back, probably only a few people would even care.

Lara would be one of them. Maybe Danny too, and Lorelei. He would have been able to add Carrie and Bonnie to that list, once upon a time, but that wasn’t possible anymore.

Rhett’s people had done a great job cleaning the hallways after the running firefight yesterday. Except for the area around the command wing, the rest of the buildings looked almost untouched, and he wouldn’t have known a shootout had taken place if he hadn’t been right in the middle of it.

It was late, and he hadn’t stumbled across a single soul until he reached the civilian section. There, a man and a woman were engaged in quiet conversation when he turned the corner. As he walked past them, the woman followed him with her eyes.

He was almost at the other end of the corridor when she finally said, “Hey.”

Keo stopped and glanced back.

“You’re Keo,” the woman said.

“Who?” Keo said.

“Keo. The guy who killed Mercer.”

“Wrong guy.”

“You sure?”

“I’d know my own name.”

“What is your name?”

“Ken.”

She clearly didn’t believe him. “Where’d you get all of that, Ken?” she asked, making a circle in front of her face with her hand.

“Went for a swim and jumped smack into a pile of rocks.”

“Really.”

“Uh huh. It’s dangerous out there, so you guys might want to be careful when you’re skinny dipping later on tonight.”

He turned and went around the corner.

“That was him,” he heard the woman say.

“He said it wasn’t him,” the man said.

“Seriously? Who gets those scars from jumping into the ocean?”

Keo smiled to himself and kept going.

* * *

The infirmary door was closed, but not locked. There were no guards standing outside, but there were bloodstains on the floor and walls from the last time someone had tried to kill him. He guessed Rhett’s people hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up this part of the facility yet.

He opened the door and leaned in, then took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the semidarkness. A single stream of moonlight splashed in from the high window, and Keo could just make out the figures occupying the beds. The wounded from this morning’s coup attempt.

A figure sitting at a desk turned around. Male, wearing a white coat, and not who Keo was hoping to find.

“Help you?” the man asked.

“I’m looking for Mary.”

“Her shift was up three hours ago.”

“Communal quarters?”

“She has her own room now.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know which one, would you?”

The man squinted through the darkness at him. “Do I know you?”

“Keo.”

The man chuckled. “I should have known with that face.”

Keo sighed. “You got a number for me or not, pal?”

* * *

“What time is it?” Mary asked when he knocked on her door and she opened it and peered out, blinking rapidly against the hallway light.

The room behind her was darkened, but it was the exact same décor as Mercer’s had been the night Keo came for him. He guessed every single private quarter in the place was identical, with a small bed in the rear and very little in the way of aesthetics.

More importantly, a quick glance inside the room didn’t reveal a second figure.

Half-asleep or not, Mary noticed and rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m alone.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Uh huh.”

“Gary?”

“So you came here looking for Gary?”

He smiled. “No.”

She took a step back and held the door open for him. “Wanna come in?”

“Yes, please.”

“Just to sleep.”

“I’m insulted you think I’m here for anything but.”

She smirked and closed the door behind him.

“Nice place,” Keo said. “The guy at the infirmary told me you just moved in.”

“A lot of the private quarters opened up after this afternoon, and they let me choose one. I guess being one of a handful of people who know their way around a wound helps. Though I wouldn’t have had the opportunity if it weren’t for you.”

The cot squeaked as he sat down. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.” She walked over. “I don’t know who it used to belong to, but he was a Mercer loyalist. I found his black armband hiding under the pillow.” She sat down next to him and yawned. “I’m really tired, Keo. It’s been a long day.”

“Then you should go back to sleep.”

“You staying?”

“It’s an awfully small bed.”

“We’ll make it work.”

She lay down on her side and turned her back to him. Keo followed her lead, and she scooted over until their bodies were pressed front to back.

“Keo,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

“I didn’t say or do anything.”

“I can feel little Keo stirring.”

“Little?”

“Tame him now, or you’ll be sleeping on that very hard floor.”

“Speaking of hard—”

“Keo!”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Sleep only.”

She reached back and patted his hands, and he slid them around her waist and pulled her tightly against him. He inhaled her scent, and even though he knew she had been much too busy today to take a shower, he couldn’t fathom how she could still smell so wonderful.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she whispered, not sounding nearly as tired as she had seconds ago.

“I thought you wanted to sleep?”

“Answer the question.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That’s only a few hours from now.”

“Uh huh.”

“I heard not a lot of people volunteered.”

“Enough did.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re one of them.”

“I am.”

“Why you?”

“Why not me?”

She didn’t answer right away, and he could feel the slight rise and fall of her heartbeat even from behind. Finally, she said, “You’re crazy. You’re all crazy. After everything Mercer put us through, to jump right back into another fight so soon…”

“This might be the last one we ever have to fight. That’s worth a little risk, isn’t it?”

“That’s the problem, Keo…”

“What is?”

“You know why there are wars with Roman numerals in human history?”

“Crazy Germans?”

“No, because they’re leaving room for more. Because there will never be a ‘war to end all wars.’ There will just be sequels. That’s why they put Roman numerals at the end of wars.”

Keo didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He’d never been much of a historian—staying alive one day at a time, one gig at a time, had always been more important than what some old guys did before he was born.

But he had to admit, Mary made a good point. Did he really think this was going to be the end of the struggle? Even if, by some miracle, Frank’s plan actually worked out the way he said it would, would there be no more wars for him to fight? No more skirmishes to survive? No more bad guys (Haha, look who’s calling other people bad guys now. Cute.) for him to nip in the bud?

“Go to sleep,” Mary whispered, the tiredness returning to her voice. “You’ll need all the rest you can get.”

He closed his eyes and felt her body relaxing even further against him as she dozed off moments later.

Keo followed ten minutes after that.

In his dreams, there was asphalt and bullets and blood. In the middle of it all were pulsating blue eyes, so blue and bright that it was like staring into the sun itself…

24

Gaby

This is what you get for ditching Nate. This is your punishment. And you deserve it. Every stinky chunk of it.

She sighed as one foot and then the other sank into the thick, muddy water.

No, not water. Not even close to water. She wished it were water.

For a second she was afraid she would keep sinking, that the unholy mess (That’s a nice word for it) would just swallow her up, but the liquids finally settled around her knees even though the ripples extended farther out and bumped harmlessly against the brick walls around her.

I can’t believe I’m down here. This is so disgusting.

Even with the mask firmly in place over the lower half of her face, the still-exposed parts of her skin tingled against the tainted air. She concentrated on regulating her breathing (In and out, in and out) and focused on seeing the world in a sea of green provided by the night-vision goggles. The extra effort helped to keep her mind distracted, and for just a second or two she almost managed to convince herself she wasn’t standing knee-high in a sea of year-old waste.

Year-old? God, I hope it’s only a year old.

Her heart was racing at double its normal speed, and she could hear every single breath she took like aftershocks against her earlobes. She snapped her eyes shut and fought for control, willing herself to slow down, to let the mask’s filter do its work, and pretend she was somewhere else at that moment.

“Gaby.”

She opened her eyes to the sound of Blaine’s voice behind and slightly above her. “Yeah.”

“You went quiet there for a moment.”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“What’s the verdict down there?”

“It stinks. What do you think?”

Blaine chuckled. “I’m coming down.”

“The more the merrier.”

She took a couple of steps forward and swept the narrow passageway with the M4, the laser pointer underneath the barrel providing an exact guide of where the bullet would go if she fired. She tuned out the clank-clank of Blaine’s boots moving down the rusted metal ladder behind her while getting a better look at her surroundings.

The only saving grace to standing in a major city’s sewer system was the size—the round-shaped tunnel was over ten feet wide and tall, like a giant straw made of brick and concrete, except the floor was flat against the soles of her boots. Condensation drip-drip-dripped around her, the plops that landed adding to the filth like drawn-out raindrops. Despite the generous size of the place, she would have still felt a stab of claustrophobia if not for the fact she could see every crack and puddle of water thanks to the NVG.

“Sorry, kid,” Blaine said when he hopped the last rung behind her and splashed parts of her clothing with the water.

“It’s okay; I can’t smell it.”

“You sure about that? Even with this thing on, I’m getting some serious whiffs.”

“Sure? No, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Blaine chuckled again, and she smiled. The levity helped to ease her mind somewhat. She remembered all those times when Danny and Will joked their way through a bad situation. This definitely qualified as one of those, though no one was shooting at them and there was nothing hiding in the darkness.

There you go. Jinx it, why don’t you?

“Where did he go?” Blaine asked.

He had gone on ahead of them after coming down first and ensuring there was nothing waiting down here. The last time she saw him was almost two minutes ago when he disappeared around a bend in the tunnel in front of her.

“Scouting ahead,” she said.

“He’s good at that.”

“It’s what he does.”

“I should have spent more time with you guys back on the island. One of my biggest regrets.”

“You can always ask Danny when we get back. He’s already training Jolly.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Blaine said.

Soft sloshing sounds from in front of her broke through their chatter, and Gaby lifted her rifle, as did Blaine, who had moved to stand beside her. She sneaked a quick look over at him, at the single lens protruding out from in front of his face like a freakishly long third eye, complemented by the breathing apparatus over his mouth. The only thing on Blaine’s face (and hers) that was still exposed to the climate was his forehead, and it was already damp with something that looked like dirt and soot and…other things.

Her finger tightened against her carbine’s trigger, and she thanked God for silver bullets when he appeared around the bend, his movements so light and effortless that if not for the trench coat, she didn’t think he would have created any ripples in the water at all. Gaby still couldn’t decide how to feel about seeing him in that black leather getup, with the hoodie covering most of his face and those glowing blue eyes peeking out at her.

He carried the remaining duffel bag—the heavier of the two—behind his back as if it weighed little more than a feather. They had left the other bag behind since she and Blaine were now wearing its contents.

Gaby lowered her rifle. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” he said (hissed).

“How far?” Blaine asked.

“Far enough,” he said, and turned back around.

Gaby exchanged a quick look with Blaine, but all she could see was his NVG lens staring back at her. He looked a bit like a bipedal insect, albeit one with a rifle.

“Ladies first,” Blaine said.

Will had begun moving again, and she fell in behind him. Blaine carried the radio in his pack, the bulk making him look like a hunchback. If he was having trouble with the extra weight, he hadn’t said a word.

The mask that covered her mouth had a fleece portion that extended all the way down the length of her neck. It was comfortable enough to wear for long periods (and it was going to have to be) and although she told Blaine she couldn’t smell the (mostly) liquefied waste around her, it was very much a lie. There was simply too much of it to ignore completely, and it probably didn’t help that her eyes had begun to sting and the exposed parts of her face continued to tingle, a constant reminder of where she was.

God, if I never have to do this again in a hundred lifetimes…

She picked up her pace until she had caught up to Will. From behind, with the trench coat dragging over the water’s surface, she wouldn’t have been able to tell that he wasn’t the Will she remembered. Even his hands were covered in tight black gloves, and there was absolutely nothing about him to give away that he wasn’t human. At least, from the back. Every now and then she heard the distinctive clanking of the objects inside the duffel bag slung over his back.

“Will,” she said.

He didn’t answer verbally and didn’t stop, but she caught a slight turn of his head in response.

“Why aren’t they down here?” she asked. “It’s pitch-dark. Sunlight doesn’t even know this place exists.”

“They don’t need it,” he said. “The city is theirs.”

So even the monsters don’t want to come down here. So what does that make us, exactly?

Filthy, that’s what.

He didn’t say anything else, and the only sounds were her breathing and the drip-drip-drip around them. After a while, he pulled slightly ahead of her.

She slowed her pace until Blaine caught up. “Is it me, or is he going slow on purpose?” Blaine asked.

“Maybe,” she said. “But if he wanted us to move faster, I’m sure he would have said so.”

“Any idea where we’re going, exactly? Which part of the city?”

“He didn’t say. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

Blaine sighed. “If I knew we were going to be down here literally walking in people’s shit, I’m not sure I would have volunteered. What about you?”

“I probably would have still.”

“Yeah, who am I kidding? I would have, too.”

“I guess we’re both idiots.”

“Yup.”

They walked on in silence, the filthy water displacing and reforming around them and, gradually, she became aware of what sounded like animals moving on the other side of cracks along the walls. Condensation continued to drip-drip-drip in front and behind them, and the only thing louder than her filtered breathing was the thump-thump-thump of her heartbeat.

“If this works, you think they’ll give us medals?” Blaine said after a while. “Maybe write songs about us?”

“Songs?” she said, smiling behind the mask.

“I’d like a song about me,” Blaine said wistfully. “That would be cool…”

* * *

She wasn’t sure how long after they climbed down into the sewer system that she started to notice the air had gotten warmer and sweat was starting to form around her temple and drip down the corners of the NVG and mask. It was so quiet down here, with the only sounds coming from their breathing and movements—and the occasional scratching noises from behind the curved walls—that it was difficult to tell how much time had passed.

Gaby snapped a quick look at her watch every now and then, but time seemed to be standing still and didn’t explain why her legs were getting tired and she was moving slower. She didn’t fully grasp just how much her pace had flagged until Will began putting more distance between them, even though he didn’t seem to be moving any faster than before. If anything, he was holding back just to ensure he didn’t outwalk her and Blaine.

She wanted to ask him to stop so she could rest, but she didn’t. She refused to do so because Blaine wasn’t complaining, and he was carrying more pounds on his back than she was. But at least there was one benefit to her growing fatigue: her shoulder wasn’t giving her any problems, either thanks to having numbed over or the result of Zoe’s painkillers. She wasn’t going to be throwing softball pitches with her left arm anytime soon, but this was the next best thing.

Finally, Will began to slow down before stopping completely ten feet in front of them.

Gaby said a silent prayer, but also reflexively tightened her grip around the carbine. “Something wrong?”

“No,” Will said. “We should rest.”

“Are we almost there?”

“No.” He pointed to his right. “I’ll be back.”

He continued on, disappearing around another turn in the tunnel.

Gaby walked over and glanced at where he had pointed. It was another raised platform carved into the side of the tunnel, about five inches above the water line, similar to their original point of entry. There was also a rust-covered ladder at the back.

“Where’s he headed off to?” Blaine asked as he appeared next to her.

“He didn’t say.”

“So he can see in the dark, huh?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“I figured they had good night eyes—because, you know, that’s their natural environment and everything—but I didn’t know it was that good.”

“Now you know,” Gaby said, and climbed up the platform.

Once up, she was reaching instinctively for her mask when she stopped herself just in time.

Right. The sewage.

She kept the mask on but took off the night-vision goggles. There was just enough light inside the tunnel to see the thick films of filth dripping from her pants legs. She didn’t even want to think about how badly she was going to smell for days to come, or how many showers it was going to take just to get enough of the stench off her to be bearable to herself, never mind to others. She pictured Nate laughing at her discomfort, her punishment for leaving him behind in the middle of the night.

She walked all the way to the back of the narrow platform and glanced up at the manhole covering above them. It was sealed tight, but there were small holes (for fingers or tools to remove the metal lid, if necessary) all along it that allowed slivers of morning sunlight to rain down on them, but not enough to brighten the tunnel.

Blaine unslung his pack and let out a loud sigh of relief as he settled on the damp concrete floor next to her. Like her, he reached for his mask, but thought better of it and left it on, and only removed his NVG. She sat down next to him and didn’t know how tired her legs were until she wasn’t standing on them anymore.

“You think he told us to rest because he knew we were tired?” Blaine asked.

“Maybe. Were you tired?”

“Hell yeah. My legs are killing me. But at least I’m not lugging around that thing he has over his back. I didn’t know he was that strong, either.”

“They all are.” She thought about the farmhouse in Louisiana. “And fast. You need to remember that if you ever come face-to-face with one of them.”

“How fast?”

“However fast you’ve made them out to be in your mind, increase it by a hundred times and you’ll come close.”

“You’re kidding…”

“No.”

“Noted, then.” Blaine leaned his head back against the wall and shook his pants legs and watched the thick sludge dripping off the fabric. “You’ve seen them—fought them. What’s it like?”

“It’s…not something I want to ever do again, if I can help it.”

“Silver doesn’t do anything, but a bullet to the head is all it takes?”

“Yes.”

“Crazy how that works. All that speed and strength and night vision, and all it takes is one bullet to the head to put them down.”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds, Blaine.”

“Right. Because they’re fast.”

“They’re really, really fast.”

“Fast,” Blaine repeated. “Gotcha.”

I hope you never have to find out for yourself, Gaby thought as she stared into the pitch darkness of the tunnel and wondered if hell was being trapped down here without night vision, and alone.

* * *

Time had a way of slipping by when you were moving through a dark tunnel lit up in a sea of green fluorescent. After a while, she started ignoring the scratches coming from between the cracks to her left and right (and she swore at one point, above her) and the constant stirring of sewage around her ankles. The brief rest had done her legs good, and they walked the next few hours without stopping.

It was difficult to judge if they were making good time without being able to see where they were at any given moment. Even the occasional presence of platforms to their right wasn’t much help since they seemed to show up at almost random intervals. The only upside was the presence of sunlight raiding the tunnel from the manhole coverings above the platforms, so each time they reached one it was an exhilarating reminder that there was a world beyond this hellhole she was currently trapped in.

Will continued to come and go, and once he vanished and didn’t return until almost thirty minutes later, which was about twenty-five minutes more than his longest previous disappearing act. She had spent most of it trying to decide whether to retreat or race ahead in search of him, and each time she thought she had made a decision she had to remind herself that this was his plan, that he knew what he was doing, that God, I hope he knows what he’s doing or we’re all going to die down here, and I do not want to die down here.

But then he would come back, and she would breathe a sigh of relief and was glad the mask hid most of it. Even though, when she thought about it, he probably heard her reaction anyway, given his hypersensitive hearing.

Another time the green colors of her NVG found him standing in front of them. He was so still she thought it was a mannequin at first…until he moved slightly. She had no idea what he was doing—maybe he was listening for something.

Each time he left them, the tunnel seemed to get smaller and more claustrophobic, and the water colder and tougher until it was like fighting through mud. When he was with them, Will kept his position in front the entire time, the bottom half of his coat growing thicker as it sponged up more of the tunnel’s contents. Not that the extra weight slowed him down even a tiny bit. But as his coat became more and more bloated, she was reminded that she was also knee-deep in the same disgusting filth, and no wonder her own pants were starting to feel heavier, and heavier…

Blaine stayed silent for most of the trek, and she only knew he was still back there at all because she could hear him moving around. The big man never lagged too far behind, but he was more active than her, mostly because he wasn’t always walking forward; he occasionally turned and walked backward to make sure nothing was sneaking up on them. She could always tell when he did this because the ripples around her increased noticeably.

Eventually, after what seemed like half a day, Will indicated another platform in front of them before disappearing up ahead into the shadows.

“I think that means we get to rest again,” Gaby said.

“He’s a prince, that guy,” Blaine said.

They climbed up the platform, and this time both she and Blaine had to pull off their masks in order to eat and drink from their rations. She did the best she could to breathe through her mouth the entire time, but that was a tricky thing when she had to bite and swallow, too.

She was gagging by the time she gratefully slipped the breathing apparatus back on, thinking, Never again. Jesus lord, don’t ever let me do something this ungodly stupid ever again.

Blaine, next to her, let out a large breath as soon as his own mask snapped into place. “Jesus Christ. Let’s make a pact to shoot each other in the head if we ever decide to do something like this a second time.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have to. Either we make this work the first time, or there won’t be a second time.”

“I didn’t say to bum me out, kid.”

She smiled at him before realizing he couldn’t see with the entire lower half of her face covered up. “I’ve been meaning to ask: What did Sarah say when you told her you volunteered?”

“She told me good luck.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “We’re not really seeing each other anymore.”

“You said that before. What happened?”

“We grew apart, that’s all. It happens. We’re both adults, so no point in living in misery if it’s not going to work.”

“I’m sorry, Blaine.”

“Hey, it was a good run. We were good for each other…until we weren’t anymore.” He stared off at nothing in particular for a moment. Then: “What about you and Nate?”

What about me and Nate? Good question, and I wish I had a better answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’ll depend on whether he shoots me on sight for leaving him in the middle of the night when I see him again.”

Blaine chuckled. “The only thing that kid’s going to do when he sees you again is run over and grab you in a big bear hug.”

“You think so?”

“Trust me. I know guys. I’m one of them.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Yeah, the kid loves you. That’s not the kind of thing that comes every day. You should hold onto it.”

Gaby nodded. She knew about Blaine and his own past. Before Sarah, there had been another woman whom he had found after The Purge, only to lose.

We’ve all lost something. Someone. But we keep going. That’s what makes us survivors.

Next to her, Blaine had stood up and slipped his heavy pack back on. “Anyways, what is this, a mission or a Doctor Phil counseling session?”

“Can’t it be both?” she said, standing up alongside him.

“God, no.”

He climbed down first and she followed.

They hadn’t gone more than a few yards when she spotted Will’s cloaked figure standing up ahead. When he turned around, his eyes were a dull blue-green against her night vision.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, making up the rest of the distance between them.

“We’re almost there,” Will said.

Thank God. I was beginning to think this damn tunnel would never end.

“Already?” she said instead, doing her best to hide her relief.

“Soon.”

She stared at him for a moment. There was something about the way he was looking at her—as if he didn’t even see her at all.

“What’s wrong, Will?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and turned and started forward again.

She hurried after him. “Will. What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

But he didn’t stop, and kept walking, and soon he had extended his lead without any effort at all.

She gave up trying to catch him, and soon Blaine was walking next to her.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said, trying to remember the look on Will’s face. There was something about it that scared her, because it looked like it scared him.

“Maybe it’s because we’re getting closer,” Blaine said. “That’s what he said, right?”

She nodded.

“It could be that hive mind thing,” Blaine added. “Lara said he could hear them and vice versa. Maybe the closer he gets to them, the more it’s affecting him.”

“Maybe…”

Up ahead, Will had come to a sudden stop again.

“What now?” Blaine asked.

Will’s head was craned slightly toward the ceiling, and she was about to ask what was happening when she felt it.

Oh.

She couldn’t hear or see the cause of the aftershocks from down here—at least, not yet—but she had no difficulty feeling it through the rippling in the water around her and the slight tremors in the floor underneath her boots. More evidence came from the small layers of dust that broke off and drifted down from the curved ceiling above them.

And then, just like that, it was gone.

“Was that what I think it was?” Blaine asked next to her.

She nodded, then sought out Will’s pulsating blue eyes, now peering back at her from the darkness.

“It’s started,” he said.

25

Lara

“He pulled a Gaby on me, Lara. That asshole.”

Lara had to fight back a smile, but was mostly unsuccessful and hoped her friend didn’t see it. Carly had been saying the same thing since they left the Trident. Lara was inclined to blame it on all the coffee they had drank—she’d had two herself, each one packed with as much sugar as she could stomach—but knew better. Carly was angry for a very good reason.

“He Gaby’d me, Lara,” Carly had said as soon as she saw her. “That asshole snuck off while I was still asleep. He snuck off.”

“I’m sorry,” she had said, and she was.

If she knew what Danny was planning, she would have tried to stop him, for all the good it would have done. Danny was still tortured about letting Gaby go with Will, essentially taking his place. The news of Bonnie’s death might have been the last straw for him. A child on the way or not, Danny couldn’t stay behind again.

And she knew exactly how he felt. There was something very wrong about being here, safe on the island, while her friends were out there risking their lives. Gaby and Blaine with Will, Danny and Keo with the strike team.

I should be out there with them.

With him…

“What exactly are you going to do out there?” Keo had asked when she brought the topic up last night, while they were in the conference room onboard the Trident coming up with, essentially, the battle plan to sell to Rhett’s people.

“Something,” she had said. “I would be doing something.”

“No offense, but you’d just get in the way,” Keo had said, with that seriousness that was rare for him. “This is what I do, Lara. Let me do my job, and you do yours.”

He had said it with such straightforwardness, as if he were telling her the ocean was blue, that she didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful.

And Danny had stood there during their back and forth and hadn’t said a word. Looking back now, she had a feeling she understood why. Keo’s words didn’t just work on her, but it had with Danny too, because like Keo, this was what he did: Danny was a soldier.

I should have known he would do this. I should have seen it coming.

“That shithead,” Carly was saying next to her. “He promised me, Lara. He promised me he wouldn’t go.”

“Did he say anything last night?” Lara asked.

“He didn’t say a damn thing. He came back from your meeting and went straight to sleep.” Carly sighed. “Normally Danny leaving me alone in the early mornings is a good thing, but this time… That shithead!”

Carly was still fuming as they walked through the facility’s hallway. The place was strangely empty, as if everyone knew what was about to happen today and decided to stay out of it by hiding in their quarters. Except for her and Carly, there was just Jolly behind them, keeping a respectable distance. Lara had grudgingly let the young man follow her to Black Tide, but she was still embarrassed to have an armed escort, even if it was just one man.

“We should just nuke the whole city,” Carly was saying. “Drop a big one and take them all out, King Ghoul and all. That would keep Danny from having to go in there.”

“You have a nuke stashed away you haven’t told me about?” Lara said.

“Well, no.”

“Then there’s that whole radiation fallout mess. We kinda want to reuse Texas after this, Carly.”

“Stop making too much sense. Anyway, Danny deserves to get a little radiation roast for what he did.” Carly narrowed her eyes at her. “And you swear you don’t know anything about it?”

“I swear I didn’t know what he was going to do,” Lara said, looking her friend back in the eyes.

Carly nodded and sighed heavily again. “I hate him so much right now.”

“No you don’t.”

“You’re right, I don’t, and that makes it worse.”

They turned the last corner and approached the Comm Room, which had two guards outside. They both stood a little straighter when they saw her, and the only thing missing was a salute.

I’ll never get used to this. Never.

Lara did her best not to let her discomfort show on her face and gave both men a pursed smile.

“You ready for this?” Carly asked next to her.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lara said.

“I’m not sure I even want to be here. Should I be here?”

“I need a friendly face with me, Carly. Everyone else is out there.”

“Okay, then, let’s do this.”

One of the men opened the door for her, and she stepped inside with Carly. Jolly didn’t follow them in.

Rhett and Riley were already there, along with Jane, the young woman who manned the communications equipment. The two men were standing in front of a wall with a large map of Texas taped in place. The banner was a new addition and was already heavily annotated with colored markers. Houston was circled, as were multiple points along the Texas shoreline.

Riley looked over. “Got a good night’s sleep?”

“No, but I had a lot of coffee,” Lara said.

“That makes three of us.”

“Four,” Carly said.

“We drank about a gallon of the stuff,” Rhett said. “So if I need to call a bathroom break, you’ll know why.”

“You guys have bathrooms in this place?” Carly asked.

“Yes, but you have to look for them.”

“This is Carly,” Lara said. “Danny’s, uh…” She looked over at Carly.

“The mother of his demon spawn,” Carly said, and shook Rhett’s and Riley’s hands.

“I heard he went out with Striker this morning,” Riley said. “That was a surprise. I thought he was sitting this one out.”

Carly grunted, but didn’t say anything.

“That’s what we thought,” Lara said. “But apparently he had other ideas.”

“Gotta say, I’m glad to have him out there,” Rhett said. “You can never have too many Rangers on your side.”

“He’s not going to be on your side for very long, because when he comes back, I’m going to kill him,” Carly said.

“She doesn’t mean that,” Lara said.

“The hell I don’t.”

“Where are we now?” Lara asked the two men.

“We’re on course to hit the target by noon,” Riley said. He pointed out the locations on the map as he talked. “Eagle One and Two are ahead of everyone, as expected. We’re expecting real-time reconnaissance from them very soon. Striker’s getting ready to lift off as we speak, and Rolling Thunder’s already inland and is reporting no troubles so far.”

“No one’s tried to stop them?”

“According to Rolling Thunder, the regular patrols all seem to be MIA. They haven’t run across a single collaborator, on foot or on a technical. Looks like Keo was right, which should make the road to Houston mostly uneventful for the teams.”

“Uneventful is good,” Lara nodded.

“A good news, bad news situation if I’ve ever seen one,” Rhett said. “The teams won’t have to fight their way to the equipment they hid while they were pulling back, but there’s going to be a hell of a lot of personnel waiting at the roadblocks.”

“Have you heard from Willie Boy?” Riley asked.

Lara walked over to the map and looked it over. “I talked to them last night. They were already moving into position while we were all trying to sleep.”

“How will we know when they’ve made it there?”

“Striker will make contact.”

“You have an awful lot of trust in this Frank guy,” Rhett said.

He died and came back for us. For me. How do you not have faith in someone who did that for you? she thought, but said, “You would too, if you knew him as well as we did.”

Next to her, Riley kept quiet but shuffled his feet slightly.

“Willie Boy will be in position when the time comes,” Lara continued. “Everyone else just has to play their part.”

“They’ll get it done,” Riley said.

“Is it going to be enough?” Carly asked. “The ones that volunteered. Are they enough?”

Lara looked back at her and pursed a smile. “God, I hope so.”

* * *

“Eagle One to Black Tide. Over.”

Rhett picked up the microphone and keyed it. “We read you loud and clear, Cole. What’s it look like up there?”

“Empty,” Cole said, his voice piped through the room’s speakers. “I’m confirming the earlier scouting reports that collaborators have stopped their daily patrols around the southeast part of the state and begun to amass around the Houston city limits.”

“How many are we talking about?”

“A few hundred per each defensive position, concentrated around the major arteries into the city.”

“God, that sounds like a lot,” Carly said quietly.

Because it is a lot, Lara thought, remembering the size of a city like Houston and all the many ways in and out of it.

“What kind of weapons are you seeing?” Rhett was asking into the mic.

“Technicals, machine guns,” Cole answered. “No heavy firepower from what we can see from up here, but they could be hiding it, waiting to bring them out when Rolling Thunder gets closer.”

“I thought for sure they’d have added some tanks to their arsenal after what we did to them,” Riley said.

“Maybe we gave them too much credit,” Rhett said. Then, back to the mic: “Wheeler. What’s your take?”

Wheeler was the pilot of the second Warthog, codenamed Eagle Two. Cole had been telling the truth last night when he told them he was on the verge of convincing a second pilot to join him.

“Ditto what Cole’s reporting,” a second male voice said through the speakers. “They’ve got perimeters pretty well set up. Roadblocks with cars on the highways, along the feeder roads. Everything into the city. Haven’t taken a shot at us yet, so I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

“Don’t jinx it, kid,” Cole said.

Wheeler laughed. “Sorry about that, old timer.”

“You got an ETA on Rolling Thunder?” Cole asked.

“Two hours,” Rhett said. “How are you for fuel?”

“We’re good to go. Eagle One out.”

“Eagle Two out,” Wheeler said.

“They know we have planes,” Riley said. “So why no anti-aircraft measures?”

“Maybe Rhett’s right; maybe we give them too much credit,” Lara said. “They’re just civilians, after all. They don’t have the added benefit of Army Rangers helping them prepare for a battle. According to Willie Boy, they weren’t summoned to Houston until two days ago. That’s not a lot of time to hunt down and drag something like anti-aircraft weapons into position.”

God, you’re getting good at lying to people, Lara thought, marveling at just how calmly and confidently she had said everything.

“There are easier ways to shoot down planes,” Rhett said. “A few of the smarter ones began arming themselves with shoulder-fired missiles after R-Day. Those things are point-and-shoot, and one of them could just as easily lock onto an A-10.”

“Do Cole and Wheeler know that?” Lara asked.

“Cole’s an old pro; I didn’t need to tell him. Wheeler would have done the same thing since they’ll be flying in formation most of the time, and Cole wouldn’t let him make himself an easy target.”

“What about the tanks?”

“Dodging rockets comes with the territory. They’ll deal with it. After R-Day, they have experience doing exactly that.”

“You said they were only two hours away. I didn’t know they could move that fast.”

“The M1 Abrams are faster than you think, especially when they can open up on a highway.”

Lara checked her watch. “What about Striker?”

“They’ll be taking off from the Erin soon,” Riley said.

Lara smiled at the name. Rhett’s people had rechristened the Ocean Star to Erin in honor of the woman who had brought Keo to Black Tide. According to Danny, renaming FOBs after lost heroes was a common thing in the military.

“How good is the pilot that’s going to be flying them in?” Lara asked.

“He’s the best we have,” Rhett said. “He trained the other three helicopter pilots. If anyone can get Striker to where they need to be, it’s him.” Rhett looked over at Carly when he added, “Don’t worry. They’re in good hands.”

Carly didn’t answer, and Lara walked over and put a hand on her friend’s arm and squeezed. She could feel the tension radiating from almost every inch of Carly’s body.

“He’s got Keo with him,” Lara said. “He’ll be fine. They both will.”

“I know,” Carly nodded back before giving Lara a pained smile. “I’m still going to kick him in the balls when he gets back, though.”

Lara couldn’t help but smile. “I’ll hold him for you.”

* * *

“The rig definitely looks better in the daytime,” Keo said through the radio. “The name change was a nice touch, too.”

“That was Rhett’s idea,” Lara said. “Where’s Danny?”

“He ran away when I told him I was going to contact you guys before takeoff,” Keo said. “I have no idea why.”

Lara glanced over at Carly. “I guess Danny’s smarter than he looks.”

Carly sighed. “Only until I smash him in the head with his own boots.”

Lara turned back to the microphone. “Are you guys ready?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Keo said. “Lots of raw nerves, but they’ll get over it. I would be extremely doubtful this thing is going to work if I didn’t know Frank as well as I do. The guy knows his stuff.”

“What about you?”

“Not my first time on the roller coaster. Besides, who else is going to make sure this thing actually works? Danny boy’s a bit rusty. I guess that’s what happens when you start playing house with redheads.”

“I’m going to kick Keo’s ass, too,” Carly said.

“Carly sends her love,” Lara said into the mic.

“I’m sure she does,” Keo chuckled. “Tell her not to worry. I’ll keep Ranger boy alive long enough for him to come home and get his just desserts. I’m expecting at least a couple of kicks to the groin area.”

“At least once,” Carly nodded.

“Do me one favor, though?” Keo said.

“Anything,” Lara said.

“I can’t get Danny to promise to name his kid after me, so how about rechristening the Trident to the Keo? That has a nice ring to it.”

Lara smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

“Sweet.”

“I always wanted to ride around on my very own Keo,” Carly said. Then, before Lara could repeat it over the radio, “Don’t say that.”

Lara didn’t, and said instead, “Bring everyone back home, Keo.”

“I’ll do my very damn best,” Keo said.

Next to her, Jane had snapped to attention. She was wearing a headset and leaning over the controls.

“I have to go, Keo,” Lara said into the mic. “Good luck.”

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” Keo said, “but thanks anyway. Striker out.”

A second later, their connection went silent.

Rhett had walked over and taken the headset from Jane. He adjusted the mic and spoke into it. “Roger that. Continue on course and keep us updated.” Lara waited for Rhett to remove the headset and look in her direction. “Rolling Thunder. They’re halfway to the city and are still reporting zero enemy contact.”

“Where did you hide those tanks, anyway?” Carly asked.

“We had an entire year to plan this, remember?” Rhett said. “There are contingencies for contingencies. We scouted the entire state from east to west, south to north. There are whole swaths of Texas that the ghouls don’t waste their time searching because there’s nothing there. Say what you will about Mercer, but he made damn sure we were ready for a long campaign. He always saw this as a crusade that wasn’t going to end in our lifetime.”

“That’s the right word for it: crusade,” Riley said solemnly.

Lara walked back to the map and looked it over. “Rolling Thunder is moving too fast. They’ll reach Houston before Striker does.”

“We had factored in opposition on the roads,” Rhett said. “The lack of that is putting them ahead of schedule.”

“Tell them to slow down. The last thing we want is for them to get there too soon and get bogged down in premature skirmishes.”

“Danny hates it when his skirmishes start prematurely,” Carly said.

Lara smiled back at her before turning to Rhett. “I’ve been thinking about them. The collaborators. Maybe there’s a way to cut down their numbers.”

“How?” Rhett asked.

“I’m going to ask them.”

“Ask them?” Riley said. “Ask them what?”

“To leave the battlefield.” Riley and Rhett exchanged a look, but she ignored them and turned to Jane. “We had a program on the Trident that allowed us to broadcast a recorded message through all the frequencies. It cycled automatically and repeated the message. Riley told me you came up with something similar?”

“Like what you did with your broadcasts,” Jane said.

Lara nodded. “Yes.”

“Mercer had me look into how you guys were doing that. It took a while, but fortunately I had a lot of time on my hands.”

“What are you thinking, boss lady?” Carly asked.

“I want to give them a choice,” Lara said. “Keo once told me about a collaborator town where people were secretly listening to our broadcasts. Maybe it wasn’t just confined to that one town; maybe there are others out there still tuned in.”

“You want to broadcast to the collaborators ringing Houston?” Rhett asked.

“Yes.” Then, before she could hear the doubting words she knew were coming from the two men in the room with them, “I know they’re not all just going to throw down their weapons and walk away at the sound of my voice. I’m not that delusional. They’ve been committed to their ghoul masters for a year now, and it won’t be easy to turn them.”

“Then what’s the point?” Rhett said.

“The point is trying to save lives.”

“Theirs?”

“Ours, theirs. If I can convince even one of them to leave their posts, that’s one less person for our people to fight.”

“She’s right,” Riley said. “Even if we can get just a handful to leave, it’ll be worth it. One less gun to deal with.”

Rhett didn’t look convinced. “So what are you going to say?”

“I’ll think of something,” Lara said.

“Whatever you do, don’t mention that they’re traitors to the human race,” Carly said. “People hate it when you call them that.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Carly, thanks.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for. That, and glowing.”

“You’re definitely glowing,” Riley said.

“Back off, Romeo; I’m already spoken for,” Carly said. “At least, until I strangle Danny to death when he comes home.”

* * *

Jane handed her the microphone. “Whenever you’re ready. I’ll record the message, loop it, then run it through the program and send it out into the world on multiple frequencies at the same time, so that way we’ll increase the chances of someone hearing it.”

“You improved on our program,” Lara said.

The young woman blushed a bit. “Like I said, I had a lot of time on my hands. There is still stuff in here I don’t know how to use.”

“No pressure,” Carly said from the back of the room. “It’s not like it’s my baby daddy’s life at stake, or anything.”

“Thanks, Carly,” Lara said.

“You’re welcome, boss lady.”

Lara took a deep breath, then keyed the transmit lever.

“This message goes out to all the men and women guarding the roads into Houston. My name is Lara. Some of you may know who I am. I was there at the beginning, just like all of you. I survived when so many didn’t, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about everything and everyone I’ve lost.”

She depressed the transmit lever and looked back at Carly.

Her friend nodded. “Good start.”

Lara turned back to the mic before keying it again:

“I did what I had to in order to survive, just like all of you. It’s not my place to judge your actions; I can’t put myself in your shoes. What I can do is tell you that the past is the past. What matters is what we do from here on out. Some of you may know what’s headed your way, but you might not know why, because they won’t tell you. But I will.”

Another pause, then:

“Listen carefully, because I’m about to tell you everything they don’t want you to know…”

26

Keo

Take out some bad guys. Kill some monsters. Save the world.

Keo would have laughed if he really thought about it, but the truth was he was beyond the point of no return. If he had any doubts about that, all he had to do was look out the hatch and down at the shadow of the chopper as they glided across the rippling blue surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Way too late for doubts now, pal.

“She’s going to kill you when you get back!” Keo said, shouting over the engine to be heard.

“Fuck off!” Danny shouted back.

Danny sat on the other side of the bench, with warm bodies between them. They probably didn’t really have to shout back and forth, but it was the natural thing to do when you were flying around in a very loud helicopter.

“I’m going to tell her you convinced me to tag along,” Danny shouted. “That you begged and begged until I gave in.”

“Yeah, she’ll buy that.”

“She definitely will. I have her under my thumb.”

“You’re that good in the sack, huh?”

“I’m the best, buddy. Back in college, they used to call me Danny Best. You know why?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Because I’m that good.”

Keo grinned. “Just keep telling yourself that!”

“What do you think I’ve been doing since we climbed onboard this spinning machine of death?” Then, when the others looked over at him in response, “Oops, did I just say that last part out loud? I meant, this totally non-dangerous-looking contraption! Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

“Smooth!” Keo said.

They had been airborne for less than ten minutes, and Keo’s butt was already going to sleep on him. It was so much easier the last time he was in a helicopter, or maybe it was the constant (and multiple) throbbing pain that kept him from feeling the discomfort that time. He didn’t have any excuses now, even though being squeezed into the back with seven other guys, with enough guns and ammo to arm a small Third World country clank-clank-clanking on the metal floor around their legs, was a pretty big pain in the ass.

But at least he had the window seat, which gave him something to look at other than James’s young and way-too-handsome face all morning long. The blond kid looked wired, as if he had spent more time drinking coffee than sleeping the last twenty-four hours. Keo was used to seeing people getting jacked up for operations, but something about the way James was gripping his AR (so tight that his knuckles were actually turning pale white) between his legs made Keo just a little bit nervous.

“Relax, kid!” Keo shouted across to James.

James wasn’t really a kid, and Keo seemed to remember the other man telling him he was twenty…something back on the Ocean Star. Keo had been a little occupied with other things to actually commit it to memory at the time.

Probably twenty-something…going on thirty-something, from the looks of it.

James flashed him the most unconvincing of grins. “I am!”

Yeah, right.

“I thought you’ve been out there before?” Keo asked.

“I have,” James said, “but it wasn’t like this.”

“Like what?”

“Before, we did everything possible to avoid them. That was the job. This time, we’re going straight at them.” He shook his head. “Not the same.”

Apparently the others felt the same way, because no one had really said much except for a few throwaway chitchat lines about the weather when they boarded. The nervous energy thrummed all around Keo, even from the pilots up front. Keo and Danny’s brief burst of back-and-forth had been the longest conversation since the chopper took off.

They were riding in a Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawk, one that was designed for the United States Coast Guard, except the orange and white colors had been changed to dull tan to match Mercer’s army. It was plenty big enough to haul around two pilots and eight passengers, and wasn’t the same one he and Erin had flown in before; that one was also a Sikorsky, but he distinctively remembered that the interiors were different.

Keo took a moment to look at the faces in the back of the chopper with him. They were young and old, almost all men except for one woman. Danny was on the other side, and the ex-Ranger had his eyes partially closed and looked as if he were napping, much to the chagrin of the others.

He glanced out the open hatch as a flock of birds shadowed them from a distance. He thought of Mary, who was awake and already at the infirmary before he had even woken up this morning and made his way back to the Trident, where Danny was waiting for him all geared up with his M4A1 slung.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before Carly wakes up,” was the first thing out of Danny’s mouth.

A flurry of movement, as the copilot turned around in his seat and handed a headset to Danny. “Take a listen to this!”

Danny opened his eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s going out on all the frequencies. Looks like a little psyops at work.”

Danny took the headset and slipped it over his ears. He listened in silence while Keo and the others looked on.

“Psyops?” James said. “I didn’t know we were doing that.”

“Me neither,” Keo said.

After about a minute, Danny pulled off the headset and leaned in Keo’s direction. “Take a peep, take a peepers.”

Keo took the gear from him and slipped it on. “What is it?”

“Just listen.”

Keo did, and smiled.

Lara.

“…We’re coming to kill them. To kill it. The true monster that lives inside the city, that is responsible for all of this. It calls itself Mabry. Yes, the devil has a name, and its death will end our collective nightmare. Our forces won’t engage unless fired upon, so I’m asking you to get out of their way, to let them into the city so they can do what they have to do. For us. For you. For everyone. I’m asking you to be a part of the solution. I’m asking you to join us. This is our planet. Help us take it back. Don’t fight us. Help us.”

There was a brief pause, then the message repeated itself from the beginning:

“This message goes out to all the men and women guarding the roads into Houston. My name is Lara. Some of you may know who I am. I was there at the beginning, just like all of you. I survived when so many didn’t, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about everything and everyone I’ve lost. I did what I had to in order to survive, just like all of you. It’s not my place to judge your actions; I can’t put myself in your shoes. What I can do is tell you that the past is the past. What matters is what we do from here on out. Some of you may know what’s headed your way, but you might not know why, because they won’t tell you. But I will…”

Keo pulled the headset off. “You think it’ll work?” he shouted across at Danny.

The ex-Ranger shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt. They already know we’re coming. Might as well see how many we can peel off.”

James was staring at him intently, and Keo took pity on the kid and handed him the headset. The young man quickly slipped it on.

“Hey,” a voice said.

Keo turned to the big guy sitting next to him; he had a goatee and a bald head that looked freshly shaved. An M249 light machine gun was perched between his legs, and Vince was stenciled across his uniform’s name tag.

“Yeah?” Keo said.

“What’s she like?” Vince asked.

“Who?”

“Lara.”

“What do you wanna know?”

“I saw her on the island, but I never got the chance to talk to her. I was going to introduce myself at the meeting last night, but there were too many people in front of me and I could tell she was getting tired of answering questions.”

“Well, aren’t you sweet,” Danny said. “Barf.”

“She’s the toughest woman I know,” Keo said. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. A lot of people wouldn’t be alive now if it weren’t for her.”

“I’m one of them,” Vince said.

“Yeah?”

Vince nodded. “I wasn’t like most of these guys. I didn’t join up with Mercer until much later. I was out there by myself, barely getting by. Running out of food, water, ammo, you name it. There were five of us in the beginning, and by the end there was just me. I was about to give up, you know, end it all myself instead of waiting for those bloodsuckers. Then one day I hear this voice coming through the radio. It wasn’t even mine. The radio, I mean. One of the guys was always playing with it, hoping to hear something, but he never did.”

Vince paused and seemed to relive the memory. Keo noticed that the others were listening, some more actively than others. Even Danny, on the other side of the bench, was watching as Vince told his story.

“Anyway,” Vince continued, “this voice comes through the radio. Telling me about silver, about all the other stuff I didn’t know. But more than that, telling me to keep fighting. I still remember what she said. ‘If you’re hearing this message, you are not alone. Stay strong, stay smart, and adapt. We owe it to those we’ve lost to keep fighting, to never give up. Good luck.’”

“You remembered all that?” Danny asked.

“Yup,” Vince said. Then he grinned almost shyly. “It wasn’t hard. That message played over and over. I must have heard it a thousand times. Her voice… It’s not even about the silver or the other stuff. You don’t know how it feels to have someone out there talking to you, even if they weren’t really talking to you. Just reaching out, telling you there’s hope. That you’re not alone.” Vince paused again before continuing. “Anyway, that’s why I was hoping to meet her last night.”

“You can, when we get back,” Keo said.

“Yeah, I’m definitely doing that. Whatever it takes this time.”

“When you do see her, you might wanna edit out the part where you wanna make beautiful babies with her,” Danny said. “She gets a little squeamish about that sort of thing.”

The others laughed, but Vince shrugged it off with, “Screw you, man,” though he didn’t sound all that offended.

“Just a thought,” Danny said before leaning back against his seat.

“I mean it, though,” Vince said, turning back to Keo. “First thing I’ll do when I get back is find a way to thank her. I know a bunch of guys who feel the same way.”

“I’ll introduce you,” Keo said.

“You guys good friends?”

“Not as good as that guy,” Keo said, nodding in Danny’s direction.

“Cool,” Vince said, and sat back looking very pleased.

“What about me?” James said, taking off the headset.

Keo looked across at him. “What about you?”

“I never got the chance to meet her, either.”

“You were on the oil rig when she was there.”

“Things were kind of hectic back then.”

“Weren’t you also on the Trident?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know who she was then. And plus, people were pointing guns at each other. It wasn’t the best time to make introductions.”

“Okay, sure, you too, then.”

“Hey,” someone else said. It was the only woman in the group: Angie. “I wouldn’t mind a proper intro myself. And unlike these guys, I won’t be trying to convince her to make beautiful babies with me.”

Keo grinned across at Danny. “You hear that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Danny said. “We’ll see what we can do, kids.”

“Anyone else?” Keo asked.

One other person raised their hand…then another one. That left only one more—a large lump of a human being sitting between Angie and James. He had shaggy blond hair and shoulders that would have made him a lot of money in the NFL.

“What about you?” Danny asked him.

The man with Hanson written on his name tag said, “What about me?”

“You don’t want a piece of this action, big fella?”

“Not interested.”

“No? Then why’d you volunteer? You do know this is an all-volunteer mission, right?”

Hanson tapped the M249 sitting between his legs. “Your friend ain’t got nothing to do with it. I spent a year making silver bullets. Now I’m finally going to get to use them. That’s why.”

“Perfectly logical, albeit somewhat scary, reason,” Danny said.

Hanson just grinned back at him.

* * *

There were three of them, all tan-colored M1 Abramses moving northwest on the long stretch of State Highway 288 in almost a single (though somewhat jagged) line. There was absolutely nothing but flat country and farmland flanking them, and would be for a long time until they neared Houston. There was no traffic for the tanks to worry about, but they were clearly moving slower than their forty-five miles per hour max speed. Not that a car or two (or a dozen) would have slowed them down even a little bit. He’d seen those monsters do plenty of damage against unwanted obstructions. Smartly, there was no one manning the machine gun turret just in case there were snipers out there.

“Three?” Keo said to Danny. “When did we get three? I thought it was just Peele and Alex?”

The ex-Ranger nodded. “Third crew threw in at the last minute. It’s our lucky day, Canoe.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Hey, chin up. We’re riding into battle. What more could you possibly ask for?”

“Oh, I could think of plenty.”

Danny chuckled. “Now you’re just being greedy. This is what we do. Let’s just enjoy the ride.”

Keo looked across at James, noticing that the younger man had taken something out of his pocket and had put it on one of his fingers.

“When’s the big day?” Keo asked.

James looked up. “What?”

Keo nodded at the ring on his finger.

“Oh,” James said. “We got married this morning, before I left for the Erin.” He twirled the ring nervously. It was a plain gold band, but Keo didn’t think its value was in how much it cost. “She didn’t want me to wear it. You know, so I wouldn’t lose it. What do you think?”

“It’s a nice ring.”

“No, I mean, should I put it away? So I won’t lose it?”

Keo shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s plain-looking enough you could probably find a thousand of them in a jewelry store to replace it if you did lose it. She’d never know the difference.”

“She had this one saved up for a while now—or at least that’s what she said—and I’d hate to lose it.”

Danny leaned forward and looked over at James. “Don’t sweat it, kid. If you want, I’ll chop it off your finger and take it back to her so she can give it to the next guy.”

“Hey, fuck you,” James said.

“Was it something I said?”

“Maybe,” Keo said.

“Sheesh, everyone’s so sensitive these days,” Danny said.

* * *

The pilots broke away from the highway long before they saw the city in the distance. The advance scouting by the Warthogs had given them a pretty good idea of where the enemy positions were, and the Jayhawk had rerouted its approach to the target site accordingly.

Out the helicopter’s hatch, the flat lands and fields of the Texas countryside had given way to concrete and buildings. The smaller towns on the outskirts of Houston looked frozen in time, vehicles still parked where their owners had abandoned them. There was a peacefulness about the scenery, a calmness that might not have looked so different a year ago even when there were people around. Wasn’t that the reason most people moved out here in the first place? For the peace and quiet?

He was staring at a McDonald’s golden arch, wondering how much longer it was going to stay up there, when he glimpsed figures moving around on the rooftops of a nearby Wallbys. He hadn’t fully processed what he was seeing before they opened fire, bullets punching into the hull above his head, the ping-ping-ping! like firecrackers going off next to his ear.

“Contact!” Keo shouted even as he jerked his head away from the opening. “Collaborators at five o’clock!”

Thank God he was strapped to the bench, or Keo might have been thrown out the hatch when the big Sikorsky pitched left, then right, even as the pop-pop-pop from below faded against the engine’s roar.

Vince had grabbed ahold of Keo while the helicopter was throwing them around and putting distance between them and the shooters. “Whoa, man, you hit?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” Keo said, righting himself. “I’m good…”

“I guess they definitely know we’re coming now,” James said across from him.

“Yeah, I think that’s a pretty safe assumption, kid.”

Danny unbuckled his seat belt and leaned toward the cockpit. “How much farther?”

The copilot glanced back. “Ten minutes!”

Danny nodded, then swept the faces around him. “Listen up!”

They turned to look at him.

“You’ve all been briefed on the mission,” Danny shouted, even though he really didn’t have to. Keo guessed it was mostly to get everyone’s undivided attention. “You know how this is going to go down. The bird’s going to insert us right up the target’s skirt. There may or may not be a hornet’s nest of bad guys waiting to make us wish we hadn’t volunteered. You can take one thing to the bank: It’s going to get hairy real fast, and you’re going to be scared—hell, you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t—but you’ll have to push through it and do your job. Whatever happens, do your job, and we all go home happy little campers with a great story to tell the kids. Fuck up, and we carry you back in a body bag. Comprende?”

The others nodded back at him.

“Good.” Danny turned to Keo. “You got the ball, Kemosabe. Try not to get me killed, huh? I got the world’s hottest redhead and a bun in the oven waiting for me at home.”

“No promises,” Keo said.

Danny grinned, then sat back down.

No pressure, Keo thought, staring at the faces looking back at him and wondering whatever in the hell possessed him to agree to lead this mission.

Oh, who was he kidding? He knew exactly what he was doing out here. It was because she had asked him to.

“Besides Danny, you’re the only one I trust to do this. To get this done.”

How the hell was he going to say no to that? He could have, sure, but he didn’t want to. It wasn’t often people told him they needed him to do something and didn’t threaten to put a bullet in him if he didn’t. All she had to do was ask.

You’re going soft, pal. Real soft.

Keo sighed to himself and refocused on the faces looking back at him.

Vince to his left, close enough that they rubbed shoulders every time one of them took a breath. Then there was Mackey, squeezed between Vince and Danny. James, directly across from him, with the mountain of a man, Hanson, immediately to his right. Angie after that, and, across from Danny, Delaware, who looked more like a Florida with his dark tan.

Keo smiled back at them. It wasn’t hard. He had mastered the fake smile a long time ago.

Up front, the copilot threw another quick look into the back. “Hold onto your panties, ladies; we got incoming!”

Keo turned his head and looked out the hatch as both Warthogs appeared outside, staying alongside them just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of the shark’s teeth painted on the front of both jets, the “mouth” opening wide where the Avenger rotary cannon was positioned. Instead of the U.S. star insignia on the side, there was the familiar sun emblem with the rays shooting outward.

The twin-engine planes were close enough that the Sikorsky actually tilted slightly as it was caught in their wake. Keo also reflexively grabbed onto the hatch, forgetting for a moment that he was still buckled in.

One of the Warthogs veered right while the second one kept straight ahead.

“I’m glad those things are on our side,” Vince said beside him.

“Yeah,” Keo said. “Let’s hope they’re enough.”

Or this is going to be one short mission, he thought, but didn’t think Vince or the others needed to hear that last part.

Keo kept his eyes outside the hatch as the main downtown area of Houston appeared in the distance. The sun was high in the sky, a great ball throwing a sea of brightness against the towering skyscrapers. Monuments to mankind’s greatness, now probably teeming with tens of thousands of ghouls. Could they see the aircraft gliding across the cityscape right now? He could imagine their frenzied state, wanting desperately to attack, to swarm with their numbers but held back by an invisible enemy.

He looked across at James, still playing with his wedding band. “Hey.”

James glanced up and tried to smile—and failed miserably.

“You’ll do fine,” Keo said. “Don’t wander off, and don’t do anything I don’t do. Stay close to me or Danny at all times.”

James nodded, but it looked too halfhearted.

“Stay close,” Keo said again.

“Okay.”

“It’s okay, you know. Everyone’s nervous their first time.”

“Were you?”

“I was fucking terrified. But I got over it.”

James nodded again, and this time Keo almost believed the kid wasn’t scared shitless. Almost.

“What about me?” Vince asked, clutching and unclutching the machine gun between his legs. “Any words of wisdom?”

“Yeah,” Keo said. “Shoot everything that isn’t us.”

“That’s it?”

“Danny, you got some advice for him?” Keo shouted across the bench.

“Yeah,” Danny said, leaning forward, “if you absolutely must shoot someone, go for Lego My Keo over there. After all, he’s ugly and no one’s going to miss him.”

“Thanks for that, pal,” Keo said.

Danny grinned back at him, just as two massive BOOMS! shattered the afternoon air, both explosions coming from directly ahead of them.

It was quickly followed by the familiar roar of a 30mm cannon, firing to their right:

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

27

Gaby

They were close. She could feel it, an overwhelming sense of dread—the kind that made it hard to breathe even with the mask keeping (most) of the smell around her at bay—growing with every step. It had gotten worse in the last hour or so, and as if to confirm her suspicions, the attack finally began.

The narrow, claustrophobic world they had been stuck in for what seemed like an entire lifetime shook and the cracks widened, dust and dirt falling from the walls in sheets as the first bomb detonated, followed not long after by the second. Then a third and a fourth, sending aftershocks across the entire length of the tunnel.

They stopped moving to listen to the buildings crumbling, the pek-pek-pek of falling debris easily heard even from all the way down here.

“Jesus Christ,” Blaine said. “That last couple sounded way too close.”

A big chunk of the ceiling came loose and plopped into the thick sewage water in front of her, creating ripples around her knees. She had hoped the water would start to get shallower the farther into the city they went, but there was no such luck. If anything, it seemed to get denser, and each footstep took just a little bit more effort. Of course, it could have just been that she was more tired now than when they had begun the trek.

Will was standing about ten feet in front of them, looking forward as if the tunnel (seemingly) coming apart around him wasn’t worth his attention. It was nothing new—if anything, he was doing that more and more often. He was here, with them in the sewer system, but not really here.

“Will,” she said.

He glanced over, blue eyes glowing against the green of her night-vision goggles.

“Is this all going according to plan?” she asked.

“Yes,” he hissed.

She clutched the rifle tighter. “What—”

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Every inch of her body trembled at the noise and it took a second—five seconds—before it passed.

“Jesus, I hate that sound,” she whispered. “I fucking hate that sound.”

“Is that it?” Blaine asked, water sloshing around his boots as he moved closer. “Are those the Warthogs you were telling me about?”

“Yeah. I still hear them in my nightmares.”

“At least they’re on our side this time.”

“‘They?’”

“Doesn’t it sound like there’s more than one of them up there?”

“Maybe, I don’t—”

Will was looking at them.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We have to go,” Will said before turning and continuing on.

They followed, while beyond the tunnel walls the continued brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! of the Warthog sent shivers up and down her spine. This one sounded farther from their position than the previous, which meant the planes were constantly on the move as they engaged enemy targets across the city. Or at least, that was the plan.

God, I hope it’s all going according to plan up there...

“You’re right,” Blaine said, “they do sound like Godzilla…on crack.”

“It’s worse when they’re right on top of you.”

“What kind of guns are they using?”

“Danny says they’re 30mm Gatling guns. By the time you hear the noise, the bullets have already landed. And if they’re shooting at you…”

“You’re already dead.”

“Uh huh.”

“Like I said, glad they’re on our side.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, still not fully one-hundred percent in agreement.

The loosened parts of the tunnel were starting to fall at a quicker rate around them now. Something pek! off her NVG and bounced into the water. Will had put a little more space between them, and she had to keep biting her tongue to ask him to slow down. She picked up her pace instead, and Blaine did likewise next to her.

“Damn, that sounded way closer,” Blaine said when another brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! filtered through the thick concrete walls.

“It’s definitely closer,” Gaby said.

“So it wasn’t just me.”

“No.”

“Good to know. Being down here for so long—how long has it been now?—I’m not sure I can trust my instincts anymore.”

You and me both.

Will had slowed down, allowing them to catch up. Seeing his unpanicked state (was he even capable of panicking anymore?) always put her mind at ease, and she had to keep reminding herself that this was all going according to plan. His plan.

God, she hoped this was all going according to plan.

She kept one eye glued to Will’s black-shaped form about fifteen yards in front of them and the other on the walls and ceiling, waiting for the tunnel to come tumbling down and bury them down here where no one would ever find them.

Way to think happy thoughts, girl.

“I didn’t think she had it in her,” Blaine was saying.

“Who?” Gaby said.

“Lara. When we had to abandon Song Island, I didn’t think she could keep it together, much less take command the way she did. She really proved me wrong.”

“I think she proved everyone wrong, including herself.”

“Funny how things work out.”

She understood why he was talking. It wasn’t because any of this was important, because they weren’t. He was doing it because it helped to keep his mind off what was happening up there and the continuous trembling around them whenever one of the planes came too close to their position. And each time the Warthogs did that, she trembled slightly, thankful it was too dark for Blaine to see unless he was staring right at her.

“Lara thought she was going to be a doctor,” Blaine was saying. “I thought I was going to go from one dead-end job to dead-end job until the day I died. Now look at us.”

“Is that a good thing?” she asked.

He chuckled. “I don’t know. But what about you? I bet you had choices.”

“I always just thought I’d go to college and see what happened after that.”

“So it’s safe to say you never thought you’d be carrying an M4 while knee-deep in, literally, shit?”

She smiled underneath the mask. “That’s an affirmative.”

* * *

Small-arms fire.

They had begun about ten minutes ago and didn’t sound as if they were going to be stopping anytime soon. Instead, they got louder as she, Blaine, and Will continued to trudge their way through the sewer, which meant of course they were moving toward the gunfire.

Will was somewhere in front of her, though she had lost sight of him when she craned her neck to look up at the ceiling (for just a moment) to make sure it wasn’t going to cave in on her. Every now and then she would hear one of the Warthogs doing another strafing run from somewhere else in the city, the familiar roar of their guns reaching her all the way down here, as if seeking her out and asking her, Hey, you remember us?

Yes, she remembered them. She would never forget them for as long as she lived…however that turned out to be.

Positive thoughts. Think positive thoughts.

And then Will disappeared.

“Where’d he go?” Blaine said as he stepped up beside her.

“I don’t know,” she said, fighting back the panic in her voice.

“I wish he’d tell us first before he does one of his vanishing acts.”

And I wish I was back on the Trident with Nate, she thought, when her night vision picked up something in the water in front of them.

It was floating on top of the sludge: A trench coat.

“What is that?” Blaine asked.

She knew the answer even before she reached forward and picked up the fabric with the barrel of her carbine, the long suppressor at the end giving her a pole with which to work with. The cloth was heavy, its natural color buried underneath the layers of filth. It was shredded in spots, just like Will’s trench coat had been when he led the ghouls away from them at the barn a few nights back.

“This ain’t good,” Blaine said, lifting his rifle until it was in firing position.

Above them, the gunfire continued, the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle, interspersed with barrages of brap-brap-brap from a machine gun, coming from seemingly every direction now. It was a full-blown war zone up there.

“Gaby,” a voice said.

The hairs on the back of her neck spiked as he appeared out of thin air in front of her.

“Jesus Christ,” Blaine whispered. “I think I just had my first stroke.”

She didn’t give voice to it, but Gaby felt the same way. She always knew Will could be extremely (impossibly) quiet when he wanted to be, but to come and go without her or Blaine even noticing, while the three of them were trapped down here in the close confines of the tunnel and knee-deep in sewage?

How does he do that?

Will hadn’t just taken off the coat, she saw, but had ditched the backpack he had been carrying. The reason for that was easy to see: he didn’t need it anymore because he was now wearing its contents.

The “gauntlets,” as Danny called them, covered both of Will’s hands and extended almost all the way up to the elbows where they were clasped in place by a combination of leather and metal straps. Studs gleamed against her night vision, jutting out of the gloves from where his knuckles would be—essentially silver spikes, each one almost three-quarters of an inch long. He wore identical foot-long knives on his thighs, the handles covered in thick black duct tape for better gripping. The blades themselves were silver which, while not fatal to Will, was to the black eyes. A smooth, black matte ballistic helmet covered his entire head, his eyes hidden behind tinted goggles built into the piece.

The addition of the helmet to the ballistic jersey made him look like a motocross racer geared for the ride of his life; or maybe an extra from one of those post-apocalyptic movies, wandering wastelands looking for unsuspecting victims. The getup was unquestionably intimidating, even though its main purpose was to hide his identity as well as give him the tools he’d need for close-quarter survival against ghouls.

Close-quarter. Like being stuck in a sewer tunnel.

She couldn’t tell at all that he wasn’t just another man by looking at him. Maybe he was a little too obviously lanky, but the wardrobe hid his skeletal shape underneath it. The whole thing should have been heavy—she would know, having carried all of that in the duffel bag for a time herself—but Will moved in them as if they weighed nothing.

“Sweet threads,” Blaine said. “Gotta get Mae and the gals to make me one of those when we get back.”

Gaby almost smiled, except the shooting above them had increased in intensity and it drew her attention instead. It was still just the pop-pop-pop of small arms, along with the brap-brap-brap of machine gun fire. There were no signs of the Warthogs, and she couldn’t decide whether to be glad or worried by that fact.

She looked back at Will. “How much farther?”

“Almost there,” he said, and turned and continued on.

With his helmet on, she had to strain to hear him. His voice also didn’t sound nearly as hissy.

She and Blaine followed him down the tunnel again, and with each step the gunfire above them (In front of them? Behind them? She swore it sounded as if it were coming from every direction now.) seemed to get louder and faster, more intense as the back-and-forth continued unabated.

Jesus. What’s going on up there?

“Listen to that,” Blaine was saying. “Like World War III times ten.”

“It’s the strike team,” she said. “Striker. Looks like they’re already here.”

“So shouldn’t we, I don’t know, hurry?”

She glanced at Will for confirmation. If he had heard Blaine, it hadn’t pushed him to go any faster.

He knows what he’s doing. Just follow his lead.

But then, creeping into her consciousness, God, I hope he knows what he’s doing, because Blaine’s right; it sounds like World War III times ten up there.

“What’s our code name?” Blaine was asking.

“What?” she said.

“That’s Striker up there. The tanks are Rolling Thunder, right?”

“Uh huh. Lara told me when I talked to her before we came down here.”

“So what’s our code name? Do we even have one?”

“Willie Boy.”

“Willie Boy?” Blaine repeated, staring at her as if he thought she was trying to prank him. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“That’s…not nearly as cool as Striker or Rolling Thunder. What’s about the Warthogs flying around up there?”

“Eagle.”

“Yeah, Willie Boy’s definitely not nearly as cool.” He sighed. “Do I even need to ask who came up with it?”

She smiled to herself under the mask. Inane chatter with Blaine helped to keep her mind off the viciousness of the gun battle above them. It also kept her from screaming at Will to hurry. Hurry before everyone is dead while waiting for us!

She wondered if she might have actually said that last part aloud, because suddenly Will stopped and turned around, and Gaby saw her own reflection in the helmet’s goggles.

“What is it?” she said.

“Here,” he said.

“Here?” she repeated.

The helmet bobbed up and down. “We’ll need help to go farther.”

He turned his head and she followed it to another platform carved into the side of the tunnel about ten feet in front of her. Small streaks of sunlight became visible when she took a few steps forward.

“This is it?” Blaine asked behind her.

“This is it,” she nodded.

“About friggin’ time.”

Definitely about friggin’ goddamn time, she thought, listening to the hellacious gunfire above them.

Turning to Blaine, she said, “Ladies first.”

Blaine grunted. “You’re Danny now, is that it?”

“He’s like a virus. Infecting everyone around him.”

“They have shots for that, I hear,” Blaine said as he climbed up the platform, waste dripping from his pants legs.

Even though she couldn’t smell it, seeing the sewage sloughing off Blaine’s clothes made her gag slightly. She fought through it and followed him up. As she straightened, clutching her rifle, she glanced behind her.

Will had turned around again and was now looking down the tunnel, as if he could see something up there that she couldn’t even with the NVG.

Trust him. You have to trust him.

She and Blaine turned their backs on the dark tunnel and looked up at the round metal object at the end of the ladder embedded into the wall. Long streaks of sunlight slivered through the ventilation holes, partially distorting her night vision. Here, on the platform and standing directly below the grate, the gunfire was even louder, the pop-pop-pop more immediate, and she thought she could even hear the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings flicking across…concrete pavement?

Where the hell were they, exactly?

Blaine went into a crouch and unslung his pack. She watched him frantically dig around before he found what he was looking for and pull it out: a two-way portable radio.

Blaine turned the gear on and, glancing up at the covering, keyed it. “Striker, come in. Striker, this is”—he might have cringed a little when he said—“Willie Boy. Can you hear me? Answer if you can hear me.” When no one answered, he said louder, “Striker, Striker, this is Willie Boy, do you read—”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time,” a familiar voice said through the radio.

Keo.

Gaby couldn’t help but grin to herself, even as the rattle of gunfire echoed from the other end of the connection. There were so many and they were overlapping, sounding more like hail slamming into a metal roof.

“Took your sweet ass time,” Keo said through the radio. “We got tangos coming at us in waves over here. What’s your position?”

“We’re right below you,” Blaine said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Coming to you!”

Blaine stood up and put the radio away, then snatched up his carbine and took a step back from the ladder. Gaby positioned herself next to him, her own M4 pointed up at the grate above them.

Keo had said “Coming to you!” but he hadn’t said when he would get there, or how far he had been when they made contact.

So they waited ten seconds.

Then twenty seconds…

Thirty…

Gaby exchanged a puzzled look with Blaine and wondered if he found staring at her NVG just as comical as she did staring at his.

“He said he was coming to us, right?” Blaine asked.

She nodded. “That’s what I heard.”

“So where is he?”

“Give them more time. Sounds like they have their hands full up there.”

“Sure, why not?” Blaine said. “It’s not like we got anywhere else better to be.”

“No hot dates, huh?”

“Nope. What about you?”

“Maybe a hot shower after this.”

“Or a hundred.”

“Or a hundred,” she nodded.

Gaby looked over her shoulder, expecting to find Will standing behind them, but he was gone. Again.

Dammit, Will, I wish you’d stop doing that.

She refocused on the manhole lid above them instead. It still hadn’t moved since the last time she looked, though she thought she could see shadows flitting across the ventilation holes this time.

“Where’s Will?” Blaine asked.

“I don’t know. He left again.”

“I wish he’d stop doing that.”

She smiled to herself behind her mask. “Yeah.”

She glanced over, hoping to see that he had returned, but there was still just empty space back there. The fact that all of this depended on him and he was nowhere to be found left her more than just a little terrified—

“Gaby,” Blaine said.

She turned around and was going to ask What? but she didn’t have to because she could see it:

The round covering above them had started to move...

28

Keo

The HC Dome was over 200 feet high and the length of one and a half football fields. According to Danny, the place was originally built for a capacity of 40,000 before it was expanded in recent years to 60,000. It was where the local professional sports teams played their games, and in its time the Dome (because that was what it was—a stadium with a giant dome on top) was the first of its kind but had since been surpassed by more high-tech sports arenas in recent decades.

Keo didn’t know a thing about the place or what used to go on within its round-shaped walls, and he would never find out because the first time he laid eyes on it, the structure was missing the thing that gave it its name, along with a large chunk of everything else. There was just a pile of rubble where the gargantuan building used to be, the result of two massive cluster bombs dropped by an A-10 that had preceded their arrival.

Plumes of gray and white ash smoke still filled the sky above the jagged skeletal remains, while the Warthogs had begun dropping smaller payloads on the surrounding buildings when the Sikorsky touched down in one of the many parking lots that circled the area. The pilots chose their LZ wisely—in a no-parking zone toward the top half of the lot. There was a surprising mass of cars waiting for them, signs that there had been some kind of concert or game here the night of The Purge.

They were far enough from the crumbling dome—200 meters, give or take—that he didn’t reach for the breathing mask to protect himself from the spreading clouds of pulverized cement and concrete. He was the first one off the MH-60T Jayhawk and blinked against the sun (Day is good. Day is very good!) and proceeded to sweep the area with the MP5SD while peering through the red dot sight, Lara’s voice going through his head from the briefing last night:

“Other than the Dome itself, Eagle will take out the nests around the area. Frank says that’s where the bulk of the blue eyes will be. If we can take them out—all or most of them—it’ll make his job a lot easier.”

He’d gotten three breaths out when a missile slashed over his head and impacted an apartment complex across the street. The resulting explosion sent a sea of brick and smoke and God knew what else into the air.

Ghouls. He was looking at ghoul body parts.

Now that’s something you don’t see every day!

James, the second person off the Jayhawk behind him, saw the building go up and said breathlessly, “Holy fuck.”

“You good?” Keo asked, shouting to be heard over the whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades above their heads.

James nodded back, but his face didn’t look “good” at all.

Tough it out, kid, Keo thought while shouting, “Don’t stray! Understand? Stick to the group!”

Another nod, this one much more assured.

The Warthog that had devastated the building had veered off, traveling miles in the blink of an eye, and Keo heard the brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! of its Gatlin gun, like some man-made monstrosity cursing its creation, as the warplane razed something on a highway well beyond Keo’s line of sight.

“What’s it doing?” James shouted.

“Keeping collaborators off our ass!” Keo shouted back.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

Damn, he was loving that sound!

He spun back to the chopper and smacked the younger man on the shoulder, shouting, “Give me security!” as a second Warthog swooped by overhead, the wave of its flight path like a gust of hurricane wind ripping across both their faces, overwhelming even the helicopter’s rotors for a moment.

To his credit, James did exactly as he was told, racing away from the Jayhawk while Vince and Hanson hopped down after him. Keo pointed at them, then at the four-lane road that led into the parking area from a nearby frontage road.

“Take up positions!” Keo shouted. “That’s where they’ll be coming first!”

Vince and Hanson nodded and jogged off, each man resting his machine gun across the hood of a different vehicle facing the south entrance. Keo took a moment to pull out his binoculars and swept the highway in the near distance, the same one the Warthog had strafed earlier. He searched for the moving vehicles he knew would be coming as soon as the collaborators figured out where their helicopter was going.

BOOM! from behind him, as a Warthog fired another missile into a building to the right of the HC Dome. It looked big enough to be an arena, but maybe his perspective was somewhat warped by being at ground level. Even as the structure began to fall apart, a second missile—BOOM!—took out the walls that were still standing.

Keo was too far away to make out any details, but he thought he might have heard what sounded like screams (?) coming from the collapsing building.

“Eagle needs to take out these buildings around the Dome,” Lara had said, staring across the map at Cole. “Use everything you have on them and save the Gatling gun to push back any collaborator reinforcements that will be rushing to Striker’s position.”

To hear her giving the orders, he could almost believe she had come up with every single part of the plan herself, that it wasn’t her, him, and Danny who had hashed everything out on the Trident before heading over to Black Tide. But that was the one thing about Lara he always admired: When she committed, the woman really committed.

“Hey, Coaster!” someone shouted behind him.

He glanced back at Danny, heading to his position from the other side of the helicopter. He was already pulling on a thin white mask over his mouth, and like Keo, James, and everyone else, was shouldering a large pack.

“I’ve heard of silent but deadly, but never loud and deadly!” Danny shouted.

Keo was going to ask him what he was talking about, and why he was putting on the mask, when the stench hit him.

Jesus Christ!

It came from seemingly nowhere and overwhelmed him in the blink of an eye. Keo was used to the stench of vaporized ghouls—or, at least, he thought he was—but he wasn’t at all prepared for this level of assault on his senses, as what must have been thousands of dead (again?) ghouls were exposed to the sun.

He reached into his pocket and took out the mask and snapped it over his mouth, even as his eyes stung and began to water, and if not for the continued whup-whup-whupping of the chopper blades above them, he wasn’t sure if he could keep this morning’s breakfast down.

Danny crouched next to him, the Ranger’s heavily modified M4A1 resting casually atop one bent knee. “You know, I used to come here all the time with our mutual friend. Watched the home team take on the bad guys and drank enough beer to barf out a small swimming pool.”

“Bad guys?” Keo said.

“Yeah, everyone who isn’t on the home team are the bad guys.”

“Of course.”

Danny glanced back at the remains of the HC Dome. “Had a lot of good times in there.”

“Not anymore!”

Danny sighed. “Don’t rub salt in the wound, Kilometer. That’s just mean.”

A sudden massive gust of wind made them both glance up just as one of the Warthogs came back around. Keo stared at the empty slots under its wings as it swooped past them and headed toward a long stretch of highway in the distance.

“Looks like it blew its load all over the place,” Danny said. “I hate it when that happens.”

“That happen often?” Keo asked.

“Once or twice. Let’s hope he stocked up on those sweet, sweet 30mm rounds, otherwise this is going to be one very short trip to the ol’ Dome. Speaking of which—” Danny said and pointed.

“I see it!” Keo shouted.

He got up and jogged over to where Vince had stationed himself, his M249’s bipod perched on the hood of a Jeep Wrangler. He patted the big man on the shoulder and pointed at a vehicle barreling down the frontage road from the highway. “Incoming!”

Vince nodded and repositioned his machine gun. “Weapons free?”

“Wait until it gets closer!”

He snapped a quick look at Hanson, positioned fifteen meters to his right, his own MG mounted on the hood of a red sedan. He didn’t have to shout across at Hanson, who had already seen the approaching vehicle and turned to face it, too.

Keo took a moment to take in the scene.

Danny was still crouched next to the Sikorsky behind him, with James nearby; Danny may or may not be saying something to the kid. Angie, Mackey, and Delaware were on the other side of the aircraft; they looked alert and ready—or at least as much as they could with the rotors sending a continuous blast of wind against their backs and faces while they tried not to gag on the stench of dead ghouls that continued to swarm them from every side.

He turned back at the approaching enemy—some kind of truck—moving fast toward them, and soon would be turning into the street that ran parallel to the stadium. There was just the one car, so either the guy had been sent here to find out what they were doing, or more likely, it was the only collaborator that had survived one of the Warthog’s recent strafing runs along the highway to reach its destination.

Not that it mattered. One truck, even a technical (though it was still too far off at the moment for Keo to be absolutely sure that was a machine gun mounted on top of its cab) wasn’t going to do much against two waiting MGs.

A tap on his shoulder made him glance back at Danny, who shouted, “I told the chopper to take off! They’re just sitting ducks out here!”

Keo nodded and watched the Jayhawk as it began lifting up, and up…

“Fingers crossed they don’t wander off too far and forget about us!” Danny said, and Keo was pretty sure he was grinning like an idiot behind his mask.

“Not funny!” Keo said.

“You just need a sense of humor, that’s all!”

“I got plenty of that. You’re just not funny!”

“Hey, do I go to where you work and heckle you?”

Without the helicopter’s presence on the ground with them, Keo could suddenly hear his own racing heartbeat again, not to mention the growing acrid stench of dead ghouls wafting across the parking lot from the Dome and surrounding buildings. The Warthogs had taken down everything they could before running dry of bombs, but that left over a dozen or so apartments still standing around them.

Too many. Still way too many.

“Frank says that’s where the bulk of the blue eyes will be. If we can take them out—all or most of them—it’ll make his job a lot easier,” Lara had said.

If, if, if, Keo thought. My life is full of ifs these days.

They had positioned themselves in a rough semicircle, with Vince and Hanson facing the south—where the parking lot connected to the main point of entry—while James and Delaware watched the east, with Angie and Mackey facing west. Keo didn’t have to worry about north—there was nothing back there except the craggy remains of the HC Dome, and nothing was coming out of that. At least, not while the sun was on their side.

He turned around when someone opened up, the brap-brap-brap filling the void left behind by the helicopter’s rotors.

Vince was firing as the collaborator truck finally turned into the parking lot. The vehicle was a Chevy, and it was big and red and moving fast. Too fast, because either they didn’t know what was waiting for them, or they weren’t afraid.

Should have been a little more afraid, boys.

Vince was slightly perched over his SAW, controlling it with two hands as the weapon’s bipod seemed to dance and spent shell casings clink-clink-clinked onto the hood of the Wrangler and bounced off and onto the concrete floor around his feet.

The enemy vehicle hadn’t made it very far into the lot—a hundred meters, give or take—when Vince’s rounds caught it in the grill and spiderwebbed its windshield. Keo glimpsed a man in the back holding on for dear life as the driver lost control. The Chevy rammed into a parked sedan, and the man in the back looked as if he had been fired out of a cannon and disappeared between two other parked cars.

“Ouch,” Danny said. Without the helicopter blasting wind in their faces and ears, he no longer had to shout. “Poor bastard.”

“Fuck him,” Keo said.

“Harsh!”

Keo didn’t have a chance to see what became of the driver and his passenger, because carbines began pop-pop-popping to the right of him. He spun in that direction as Angie and Mackey fired on two trucks coming from the west side of the parking lot. They had fired much too soon because both vehicles were still too far away, and they were just throwing rounds downrange and not hitting their targets, though they were doing plenty of (unnecessary) damage to everything else

“They’re abandoning the perimeters and converging on us,” Danny said before getting up and jogging over to Angie and Mackey’s position. Keo watched the ex-Ranger tap Angie on the shoulder. “Hold your fire. Let them get closer. Those bullets cost money, you know.”

Angie and Mackey stopped shooting and slid down behind the car they had been using as cover.

“Hanson!” Danny shouted. “You’re with me!”

Hanson picked up his M249 and jogged over to Danny, the big man carrying the MG as if it were a toy and not something that weighed almost twenty pounds empty. The two of them set the weapon up on the hood of a car next to the one Angie and Mackey were using.

Keo checked in on their east side. James and Delaware were supposed to be watching that direction, but they were too busy staring anxiously at the two vehicles coming at them from the west.

“Hey, eyes forward!” Keo shouted.

The two men snapped out of it and turned back around just as a fresh torrent of gunfire exploded from the west. Hanson had opened up with his SAW before Angie and Mackey joined in. Danny was directing Hanson’s fire, but not shooting himself.

The collaborators were almost within a hundred meters when the closest truck was ripped to shreds by machine-gun fire. The vehicle slowed down, then slammed into a lamppost, cutting it in half as someone—maybe the driver—slammed into the windshield headfirst and left a bloody stain behind.

The second truck kept coming, though for some reason it seemed much slower than the first. A uniformed man was swiveling around an MG welded in the truck bed and began opening up on the car Angie and Mackey were hiding behind, the ping-ping-ping! of rounds hitting the sedan’s other side like out-of-control pinball machines.

Danny was shouting, but his voice was lost in the continuous roar of Hanson’s M249, busy pouring everything at the approaching vehicle. The twin MGs going off at the same time—literally firing at one another—created the kind of strange cacophony of noise and rhythm that Keo had never seen replicated anywhere except on the battlefield.

“Keo!” someone shouted.

Keo looked back at Vince, staring at him. He didn’t have to hear what Vince was going to say next to know what he wanted.

“Stay where you are!” Keo shouted at him.

Vince gritted his teeth, but stayed put.

Now that the vehicle was closer—fifty meters and closing!—Keo saw why it wasn’t stopping: It had armor plates on its front grill and sides, and there might have been two (two?) slabs of glass over its front windshield. The tires were massive to accommodate the extra weight, which also explained why it was moving so damn slow.

But slow or not, the technical wasn’t going to stop because Hanson’s machine-gun rounds were landing but ricocheting off the metal plates. Danny had begun firing too, now that the enemy vehicle was closer, for all the good it did.

Keo was about to turn back to Vince and give him the okay to join the fray when a gust of wind slammed into him, and a split-second later the unstoppable enemy vehicle speeding toward them simply evaporated against a flood of 30mm rounds pouring down from the sky.

Then came the delayed brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! as the A-10 swept past the parking lot and kept going, and Keo remembered Vince saying back in the helicopter as they were approaching the city, “Jesus Christ, I’m glad those things are on our side.”

No shit, pal. No shit!

The devastated vehicle actually kept moving for a while on its oversize tires, even though there was absolutely nothing left of it but a carcass. Then it simply rolled to a stop. There were no signs of the driver or his mates, and Keo was glad he couldn’t see what had become of them.

He didn’t have a lot of time to process the destruction anyway, because he heard Vince shouting from behind him, “Incoming! We got more incoming!”

Keo turned around and cursed under his breath.

Collaborators. Two sets of them, converging on the south entrance from two separate directions.

He counted two—four—six.

“Hanson!” Keo shouted. “Get your ass back into position!”

“Yeah, Hanson, move that sweet ass!” Danny chimed in.

Hanson was struggling to reload his machine gun when Keo called his name. The man grunted, snapped a new ammo box into place, then lifted the heavy weapon and jogged back to his old spot. Keo couldn’t fathom how he was carrying all that load and didn’t seem to be even breaking a sweat.

“James, Mackey!” Keo shouted.

Neither James nor Mackey needed Keo to say the rest. They stumbled to their feet and ran over, James leaning against the trunk of the Wrangler while Mackey joined Hanson at the sedan.

Behind him, Danny shouted, “Angie, Rhode Island—stay where you are!”

“It’s Delaware!” Delaware shouted.

“Close enough!” Danny said before running over to Keo’s position. “Any word from Willie Boy?”

Keo shook his head. “Not a peep.”

“That means they’re still on their way.”

“They’ve been on their way here for two days now.”

“Hey, you can’t rush Plan G. Didn’t anyone tell you that?” Danny slipped a new magazine into his carbine. “And to think, I almost missed out on this!”

“Lucky you!”

“I know, right? Good things really do happen to good people!”

Keo snorted, then turned around just as the collaborator trucks began pouring inside the parking lot. “Pick a target and keep shooting until they stop moving!”

“Brilliant strategy!” Danny laughed as he stood up and began shooting over the vehicles in their path. “George Not-So Patton this guy!”

Danny’s laughter was quickly drowned out by the ping-ping-ping of rounds hitting automobiles, interspersed with the brap-brap-brap of machine guns and the pop-pop-pop of carbines. Keo had been through plenty of battlefields, but he had to admit he’d never had to fight in a place congested with this many cars. Glass shattered all around them and he was pretty sure tanks were being punctured because he could suddenly smell gasoline over the still-lingering acrid stench of dead ghouls.

Keo darted over to Vince’s position and opened fire with the MP5SD, his suppressed gunfire comically quiet against all the clatter of unsuppressed weapons around him. If he had any ideas about getting a good chuckle out of that, though, the sight of six—five now, with one having just stopped, its windshield riddled with bullets and blood—collaborator trucks coming toward them ended that notion.

Then, without warning, four of the remaining five broke off from the main pathway, leaving just one to come straight up the middle at them. Two went east and two more went west, the drivers bent low over their steering wheels while the men in the back simultaneously hung on and fired their mounted MGs.

The continuous roar of small arms fire and light machine guns was dizzying, fraying Keo’s senses to the point where he couldn’t even feel the adrenaline that he knew must be surging through his veins right about now. It always happened during a stand-up gunfight, and this was as stand-up a gunfight as he’d ever been in.

Danny appeared next to him, his M4A1 clattering loudly, but he somehow managed to shout over it anyway: “Where the hell are those A-10s?”

“Maybe they’re out of bullets!” Keo shouted back.

“Hell of a time to be running out of bullets! Remind me to give them a stern talking to after this! Spankings may be in order, too!”

“You got it!”

Keo focused on a white GMC zig-zagging its way around the parking lot, squeezing between stalled cars when it could and slamming grill-first to move them when it couldn’t. He couldn’t see how many men were in the vehicle—not that it mattered, because the only one worth keeping an eye on was the uniformed guy behind the machine gun.

Finally the GMC seemed to jerk off course about fifty meters from their position and buried its nose into the side of a gray Prius. It hadn’t stopped for more than a second before Vince stitched the side with 5.56 rounds. Keo couldn’t see the collaborator in the back or any of the ones in the front, so they were either dead or out of the fight. Either/or worked for him just fine.

Just as Keo was turning to pick up the remaining vehicle coming from the east side, it slammed on its brakes about sixty meters away and people lunged out of the truck. James had stopped firing to reload, and Keo stepped over next to him and emptied the rest of his magazine into the black Nissan with white stripes, but he had no clear target and was just wasting bullets. It was a good thing, he told himself, that he’d brought plenty this time.

He didn’t stop shooting until James had finished reloading and began firing to his left. Keo went down into a crouch and was reaching for a fresh magazine when a body to his right jerked and collapsed to the parking lot floor.

Vince!

Keo slung his submachine gun and hurried over. He leaned over the big man and was reaching for him when he saw Vince’s wide-open eyes staring up at the cloudless sky, a surprisingly small thin trail of blood trickling out of a hole in his forehead.

One down…

He glanced up at Danny, now crouched across the open space next to Hanson. Danny was reloading and watching Keo, who shook his head. Danny let out a silent sigh, then nodded to his left—Keo’s right.

Keo looked over at Mackey, on the ground next to the trunk of another vehicle that looked like it had been shredded by a few hundred rounds. The barrage had taken Mackey with it, blood pooling over his chest and under him.

Two down…

Keo stood up and snapped a quick look over the Wrangler: One of the collaborator trucks had been stopped by their weapons fire, but the other one, taking a cue from their comrades, had abandoned their bullet-riddled vehicle and taken cover behind the parked cars that dotted the lot about seventy meters away. They were now exchanging fire with Hanson, James, and Danny.

He ducked back down, bullets zip-zip-zipping over his head, and maneuvered over Vince’s body and was preparing to take over his SAW, still perched on the hood of the Wrangler, when the radio clipped to his hip squawked and a familiar voice said, just barely audible through the roar of gunfire, “Striker, come in. Striker, this is Willie Boy.”

Keo stayed down behind the hood and took out the radio, even as Blaine continued calling out through the two-way: “Can you hear me? Answer if you can hear me. Striker, Striker, this is Willie Boy, do you read—”

He keyed the radio and interrupted Blaine. “Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.” Keo glanced over at Danny, who was watching him back and simultaneously reloading his rifle. “Took your sweet ass time,” Keo said into the radio. “We got tangos coming at us in waves over here. What’s your position?”

“We’re right below you,” Blaine said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

About fucking time.

“Coming to you!” he shouted.

Danny got up and streaked over, keeping low as bullets buzzed over his head. “Willie Boy?”

“They’re in position and waiting for us!” Keo shouted.

“About fucking time.”

“What I said.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?”

“Cover me!”

“Gee, I was just going to do my nails, but since you asked so nicely…” Danny stood up and resumed shooting, and somewhere between when he pulled the trigger and when he stopped firing, he managed to shout out, “Go! We’ll be right behind you once we take care of these pecker heads!”

“James, you’re with me!” Keo shouted, and darted across the open space.

James was immediately on his heels, both of them keeping low as they raced out of their area of operation and across the parking lot. Keo led him into the open, the strangling smell of vaporized ghouls getting thicker with every step closer to the rubble that used to be the HC Dome.

“Christ!” James shouted behind him, just as something zipped! over Keo’s head.

Too close!

They finally reached their objective while still far from the remains of the domed sports building: A manhole covering out in the open near the very end of the parking lot.

Keo snapped a quick look left, then right, just in case there were more collaborators trying to outflank them. As bad as having to survive a dozen technicals was, it could—and would—have been worse if they didn’t have the tanks and A-10s to lend a hand. A hell of a lot worse.

“This is it?” James asked, sliding to a stop next to him.

“This is it,” Keo said, and crouched on one side of the round metal object embedded in the concrete floor while James scooted over to the opposite side.

The young man looked across at him and swallowed.

“You okay?” Keo asked.

“No,” James said. “I should have stayed on the island with my wife.”

Keo had a humdinger of a retort, something even Danny would have been proud of, except before he could say it there was a thunderous THOOM! from behind him.

He glanced up just in time to see a fireball falling out of the sky in the distance.

29

Will

Silver.

There was silver everywhere.

If he remembered how to gag, he might have.

The ones that clung to his hips and stuck out from the gauntlets over his hands were the worst of them. But the silver in all the weapons around him was just as bad.

Silver.

So much silver.

He was grateful for the helmet, because it hid his discomfort. He pushed through it, flexing his fingers underneath the gloves, knowing that he would need them very soon. Not yet, but soon, because this was the end of the line. The tunnel continued and bent left, but he didn’t need to go left; he needed to go straight.

They came down the ladder one by one. Racing heartbeats and gasping breaths pounded in his ears, followed by gasps as the smell hit them. It was such a human response, and for a moment he was glad he was beyond all of it.

“Oh God,” the young blond who came down first said as he reached up to make sure the mask was still firmly placed over his mouth. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Not yet, kid,” Blaine said. “How bad is it up there?”

“It could be worse,” a familiar voice said as its owner skipped the remaining rungs and leaped down to the platform. “Make room, there’s more coming.”

“Sounds like you guys got a hell of a party going on up there,” Gaby said.

“A handful of technicals, but it could have been a lot worse.”

“Mercer’s army came through after all?”

“Looks like it. But our luck might have run out. I saw an aircraft go down. Not sure if it was our ride out of here or one of the Thunderbolts.”

“You’re fucking me,” Blaine said.

“Nope.”

“Well, shit.”

“Ditto,” the man said (What was his name? It was there, just underneath the surface— There. Keo. His name was Keo.) as he and the blond unslung their packs and pulled out night-vision goggles and snapped them on.

“You guys okay?” Gaby asked.

“We took some casualties,” Keo said, “but in one piece, for the most part.”

“We’ll wait for the others. Go ahead with Wi—Frank.”

Keo climbed off the platform and sighed when the sewage sloshed around his knees.

“I think I’m going to throw up again,” the blond said as he stepped down beside Keo.

“Keep it together,” Keo said before looking up the tunnel, allowing his artificial third eye to adjust to the darkness. “Long time no see.”

“Yes,” he said, grateful that the helmet obscured his voice and tamed the hiss.

“Nice outfit.”

“Danny.”

“Of course Danny.”

“That’s him?” the kid asked. No, not a kid. Just young.

“That’s him,” Keo said. “Frank, James. James, Frank. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to work so we can all get the hell out of this literal steaming pile of shit.”

Behind them, another figure climbed down onto the platform, the clank-clank of boots on the metal rungs even louder than the continued gunfire from above. Another familiar voice, urging the figure on, “Move faster, Hanson! Or do you want me to go down there and give you a hand, princess?”

“Hey, I’m going as fast as I can!” a gruff voice answered. “You try climbing with fifty pounds of gear!”

“Excuses, excuses!” the familiar voice said.

“I got you,” Blaine said, and helped the climber off the steps.

They made room for a woman. She was wounded, and he licked his lips at the taste of fresh blood in the air.

“You’re hurt,” Blaine said.

“I’ll live,” the woman said. “It’s just a scratch.”

“Looks like a hell of a lot more than a scratch to me. Can you walk?”

“She’s a big girl, she’ll be fine,” the familiar voice said, just before its owner landed on the platform. Danny. He pinched his nose and his voice was muffled when he said, “I’ve heard of being knee-deep in shit before, but this takes the cake.”

“Don’t mention cake,” Blaine said.

“Where’s Delaware?” the woman who wasn’t Gaby asked.

Danny shook his head.

“Shit,” the big man with the machine gun said.

Danny turned to Gaby. “Hey there, kid.”

“What are you doing here?” Gaby asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be back on the Trident, safe and sound?”

“And what, miss all this fun?” He pulled his night-vision goggles out from his pack and slipped it on. The newcomers did the same. “Well, let’s get this show on the road. I got places to be and babies to watch being born.”

Danny hopped down the platform and walked over to where he stood with Keo. He couldn’t see the man’s lips behind the mask, but he assumed Danny was grinning at him.

“Nice, if I do say so myself,” Danny said. “I should open my own fashion line when this is all over.”

“This getup’s your handiwork, too?” Keo asked.

“Most of it. The ladies helped with the sewing and such. My hands are way too manly for that sort of stuff.”

“What about the guys chasing you?” Blaine asked as he and Gaby walked over to them, the other two newcomers following behind.

“I doubt they’ll come down after us,” Keo said. “It’d be almost suicide, and I don’t think they’re that stupid.”

“Someone’s being overly optimistic,” Danny said.

“But just in case, James and Angie, stay behind on the platform. Shoot anyone that tries to come down after us.”

“Go; we got this,” the woman said.

Danny walked over and nodded at him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Can’t let you hog all the glory,” Danny said. “Okay, Willie boy, it’s your show. Lead the way.”

All eyes turned to him, the faces he didn’t recognize staring the hardest.

“Let’s go,” he said, and turned back into the dark tunnel.

They moved silently, labored breathing pushing against their masks. Adrenaline coursed through their veins, increasing their already rapid heartbeats. Every one of their steps sounded like crashing ocean waves against his ears even through the thick wall of the helmet.

He knew exactly where to go because he had planned it to the exact step, and stopped when they came to the section of the wall where the tunnel curved left. There was nothing here to indicate that this section was anything special, but he knew better, because he could feel and smell and hear them on the other side.

“Here?” Keo asked.

He pointed.

“I’ll take it that’s a yes,” Danny said. He stepped forward and unslung his pack. “Just like old times, huh?”

“Not quite.”

“Close enough. So this is your big plan.”

He nodded.

“What’s the matter, sewer rat got your tongue?” Danny asked.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Aw, I didn’t think you still cared.” Danny glanced back at the others. “You boys might want to make some room. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I’m definitely not paying for any missing eyes or ears.”

His nostrils twitched at the smell of plastic and chemicals as Danny brought out the pack’s true contents.

“I hope this tunnel was built to city specs,” Danny said as he began attaching the malleable material to the wall, creating an almost door-shape design above where the water ended. “Or, er, hopefully they didn’t. Whichever one keeps it from falling on our heads.”

“Don’t jinx it, man,” the big man said from the back.

“I’m just kidding, Hanson, relax. I know exactly what I’m doing.” Then, slightly under his breath, “Mostly.”

Behind him, Gaby and the others took a few tentative steps back. Their pulse accelerated further, the force of their breath against their masks increasing accordingly. Although it was cold, damp sweat covered their skin from head to toe and dripped down to the filthy water around their knees.

As they watched Danny work, Gaby said, “This is it. The end of the line. I didn’t think we’d ever get here.”

“Didn’t think I’d ever be alive to see this, either,” the big man, Hanson, said. “That’s him? Frank?”

“That’s him.”

“What’s with the wardrobe?”

“Protection.”

“From what?”

“What’s on the other side of that wall.”

“What is on the other side of that wall?”

“Glory, boys,” Danny said, standing up. He looked back at them. “When I mentioned you should all take a few steps back, what I really meant was, keep going until I say stop.”

Tentative steps as they started backing up again. Danny followed, unfurling a bright yellow cord from a spool as he backpedaled.

“Is the tunnel going to hold?” Gaby asked.

“Should,” Danny said.

“Should?”

“There’s not enough C-4 to take out the whole place, just enough to punch a big hole in the wall for us to go through. So it should, theoretically, hold.”

Gaby sighed. “I hope you’re right.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Man, I don’t like the sound of that,” the young blond said.

When they had put enough room between them and the turn up ahead, Danny flashed them one last look and chuckled. “Remember, you guys volunteered for this.”

“We’re all going to fucking die down here,” Blaine said from somewhere in the back.

“That’s the spirit,” Danny said. Then, as the others lined up and hugged the wall behind him, Danny turned to him. “You sure about this?”

He nodded. “Do it.”

“I told you Carly’s pregnant?”

“I know.”

“Of course you do. We’re still thinking about a name. Got any suggestions?”

He shook his head.

“Still the chatterbox, I see,” Danny said. Then, holding the trigger in front of him, “All right. Enough of this awkward reunion. Fire in the—”

“Wait, you’re not going to count to three?” Keo asked.

“Three schmee,” Danny said, and there was a click! followed by a BOOM! as the tunnel shook around them.

Loose chunks of brick plopped into the water, and a thick mist like some kind of living thing extended out of the blast with rubbery fingers. He didn’t need the helmet or the clothing to protect him against the flood, but he wiped at the goggles as they appeared…a moving forest of black eyes and frail limbs.

Too many.

Had he miscalculated? Or had Mabry summoned more down here since the last time?

There were so many he could barely make out any spaces between their twisting and gyrating forms as they surged forward toward the opening where the wall used to be and through the hole.

It took him a second—maybe less—to make the decision.

There were too many—simply too many—and the others would never survive to reach the other side.

He stepped forward, alone, and into the spreading clouds.

* * *

He had removed the helmet because it was too cumbersome and he didn’t need to conceal his identity anymore. He could move faster without it, and even though the extra weight was minimal, he needed everything he had—speed, strength, and agility—at their absolute fullest as he waded into the abyss.

There were a lot more of them than he had expected, that had survived the bombings, and they poured down the darkened hallway, so many that they were almost climbing on top of one another to reach him. He didn’t hesitate and stepped into them, the silver studs over his knuckles doing tremendous damage with every swing regardless of direction.

He punched through chests and heads and smashed bones, and this time they didn’t get back up when he felled one—two—a hundred of them. The silver was toxic to them and they collapsed, screaming in his mind, and somewhere, beyond, the blue eyes shouted through the hive, “Stop him! Kill him! Don’t let him advance!”

But they couldn’t stop him. They never could before, and not now.

They flopped by the wayside, dying (again) as they fell, one by one by one. Soon, he began to smell the fear emanating from their pores, glimpse the horror on their faces and in their hollowed eyes as he continued cutting a swath through their numbers.

And yet they came, one after another after another, because they had no choice. This was what they did. They were the first line of defense.

Screams roared inside his mind, but he didn’t try to shut them out. There was no time—not even a second to waste on something so trivial.

“Stop him!”

And they kept coming, an endless surge of black eyes and limbs. The never-ending clacking of bones against the concrete floor as he smashed and tore and ripped through them two, three—five at a time. Still they came, pushing against his exterior, but doing almost no damage. He would have felt sorry for them if he could muster the emotion.

Behind him, shouting and gunfire echoed. Keo, Danny, Gaby, and the others. To help them would mean going back, and he couldn’t do that. He was too far in now that retreating would mean total and complete failure.

And he was close to the end. So, so close.

“Kill him!”

This wasn’t part of the plan, but it would have to be. Maybe he always knew it would be him alone at the very end, despite all his preparations. Despite his friends, despite Mercer’s tanks and planes. Who else could survive this? Who else could break through the onslaught of flesh and bone and teeth?

So he kept moving, pushing forward, doing whatever it took. He shut out the gunfire from behind him and wished them well, because there was more at stake than just a few men and women in a tunnel. A lot more.

“Tear him limb from limb!”

He fought and gained ground inch by inch by inch. The hallways blurred and he lost track of how far or long he had traveled. They were all identical—dark and dirty and swamped in the stench of the dead. There was no light, but that didn’t matter because he didn’t need light to see anyway. He could have closed his eyes and simply relied on his other senses. There were so many beating against him, from all sides, that he couldn’t move his arms in any direction without striking one, two, a dozen of the creatures.

And still they came.

“Don’t let him advance!”

And he punched and kicked and struck and tore and ripped and severed.

And still they came…

They seemed never ending, relentless in their need to push him back, to stop his momentum. But if they expected him to be cowed by their continued onslaught, they were sadly mistaken.

He pushed on, striking blow after blow, because he couldn’t stop.

Not now, not when he was so close.

“Stop him! STOP HIM!!”

* * *

There were five of them, their blue eyes pulsating in the shadows. They had been waiting here all this time, commanding the black eyes to attack. It was a smart strategy, he realized as he turned the corner.

He was tired and the gauntlets had ripped to shreds, each and every one of the silver studs dull and unusable, little more than stumps now. The seams of the gloves were beyond loose, and it would have taken too much effort to hold onto them, so he relaxed his fingers and let them drop to the floor.

Black blood oozed from his arms and legs and face, splattering the already filthy floor. Most of it wasn’t his, though some was. Teeth bites and missing flesh covered his limbs and neck, but nothing that would slow him down.

They stood watching him.

Waiting, unmoving, maybe trying to gauge his remaining strength.

And there, behind them, was the steel door. He was on the other side.

But not yet. That would come later.

He always knew there would be obstacles. The planes had taken away most of them, but not all. He had expected this, so there wasn’t really disappointment as he turned the corner.

He imagined Danny’s voice in his head: “Five? That’s plenty manageable, buddy!”

The blue eyes hadn’t moved or looked away since he showed himself. Sports memorabilia littered the floor between them; torn posters and murals of men in bright costumes covered the walls. Memories of champions from the past.

“Look at him,” they said, their five voices sounding as one inside his head.

“He wears clothes…”

“He wants to be human again…”

“Why?”

“Pathetic.”

“We’ll be doing him a favor…”

“…putting him out of his misery…”

“Yes…”

“Doing him a favor…”

“He’s pathetic.”

“…not worth all the attention.”

“…pathetic…”

“Why don’t you just die?”

No, he thought, forcing the single word—calm and measured, but full of defiance—back at them.

They looked stunned by it.

“Finally, he talks,” they said.

“Finally, he gives in.”

“…he should have a long time ago…”

“Saved himself the pain…”

“…the misery…”

“Stupid…”

“Too late now.”

“He’s going to die…”

“…should never have come here…”

“You fool.”

No, he thought again, and began walking toward them.

The first knife slid free, then the other. His nostrils flared at the taste of fresh, untouched silver, but he pushed through like he always did.

The creatures snickered at the sight of the blades.

He clutched the handles tight, tighter. His only advantage. Whatever happened, he couldn’t lose them. The thing that left him gagging would now save his life, so long as he never relinquished them.

And he wouldn’t.

For them.

For her.

“Silver,” they said inside his head. “He uses the enemy’s weapon against us.”

“…still wants to be human…”

“We’ll show him…”

“…what it means to be human…”

“Weak…”

“Frail…”

“He’ll break easily…”

“…like before…”

“Do you remember?”

Yes. He remembered the pain. Every second of it. The days of healing from his wounds on the Trident. Having to drink from the two men, then later, the female. He told himself he hadn’t wanted to, that he needed them in order to regain his strength.

He had been telling himself that for a while now.

“You’ll die here,” they said, watching him approach.

“Alone…”

“Then we’ll come for her…”

“…Lara…”

“Such a pretty name…”

“We’ll play with her…”

“Until she begs us to stop…”

“But we won’t…”

“Oh no, we won’t…”

“…no matter how many times she begs.”

He smiled back at them.

They frowned in response, confused.

“Come then,” they said. “Come, and do your worst.”

* * *

“Welcome home.”

It was fast. They were all fast. But the first one wasn’t fast enough, and he stabbed it in the chest and listened to it roar inside his head. It thrashed against the blade that he used to impale it to the wall, but before it could pull itself free, he plunged the other knife into the side of its head and it simply and immediately stopped moving.

“It’s been a long time coming.”

The air rippled behind him, signaling another impending attack. He dropped and the fist intended for him missed by an inch and cratered the wall instead. Specks of concrete pelted him, but he ignored it and spun while in a slight crouch, and lunged, driving both blades into the creature’s stomach. It squealed, but before the others could come to its rescue, he slashed upward with both knives and severed its body into three sections. It stumbled back, and while its arms drooped from what remained of its torso, he stabbed it under the chin and drove the blade all the way up into its brain.

“You should have come sooner.”

He sensed the hesitation in the remaining three even as they attacked at once, converging at him from three different sides. He backpedaled, their blows glancing off his chest and head and face, but he shook them off. They were strong—as strong as him—but they were using fists whereas he had knives.

“What took you so long?”

He slashed, the blade slicing through its target without any resistance. The arm fell off, but its owner ignored it and reached for his throat. He cut again and its other arm flopped to the floor, and this time it paused for the smallest of nanoseconds before stumbling, even as the other two leaped over it to get at him. He saw them coming but didn’t react fast enough, and they pummeled him to the blood-slicked floor.

“Why did you waste so much time?”

They were on top of him, one holding his legs in vise-like grips while the other straddled his chest, pinning him to the hard pavement. There was no triumph on its face, no wasted emotion as it cocked back its fist to deliver the killing blow, when he drove the knife into the side of its head. Its eyes widened even as life sapped from them and it toppled off him.

“Why did you have to keep fighting your nature?”

He got his legs under the second one and launched it into the air. It slammed into the ceiling and came crashing down along with crumbs of loosened plaster. It was scrambling back up, but before it could straighten on buckling legs, he threw one of the knives and caught it in the forehead, and it collapsed back to the floor and remained still.

“Always fighting.”

He staggered to his feet and walked the short distance over to the ghoul. He pulled the knife out of its still form, then decapitated the head of the last creature, the one without the arms sitting against the wall. There was a spark of defiance in its eyes just before it simply ceased to exist.

“Kate was right about one thing...”

Finally, finally, he allowed himself a moment to rest, even as thick coagulated blood drip-drip-dripped off the blades, their rhythm intoxicating to his still-enflamed senses. Everything around him was slick with blood—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, even him. His muscles were sore and every inch of him ached.

“You’re persistent. Resilient. A born fighter.”

His strength was sapped, his mind spinning, and just standing was a chore. He raised a hand and leaned against a wall to keep his legs from giving up on him. He couldn’t shut out the pain because that would mean paralyzing himself, and he couldn’t do that.

Not now. Not now…

“You would have made such a fine addition.”

He had never felt more human since his transformation, and he didn’t know if he should be exhilarated or alarmed by the sudden realization. He had blocked out all the sounds from behind him, where the hallways connected to the tunnel. Keo and Danny and Gaby. They were still back there, somewhere. He longed to turn around and go save them.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t…

“Maybe I always knew it would end this way. Even back then, in that nothing town outside the bank. Do you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. He didn’t even have to dig very far. He recalled that night in that small town, inside the bank. A chaotic twenty-four hours as he and Danny fought for their lives, and the lives of their friends. One of many times they had been forced to rely on everything they had while praying to an unseen God that neither one of them actually believed in.

Yes, he thought, pushing his response into the hive mind. I remember.

“There you are. It’s good to hear your voice again. You’ve shut me out for so long.”

Enjoy it. It’ll be the last thing you hear.

Mabry laughed inside his head.

He glared at the metal door up the hallway. There was nothing between him and it now, and it beckoned him like a siren.

“You’ve come this far, so finish the journey.”

He gripped the knives and began walking toward the door.

“Welcome home…my son.”

30

Keo

“What the fuck! Where did Frank go?”

“Did anyone see him?”

“Holy shit!”

“What the fuck do we do now?”

“What the fuck do we do now?”

There was too much smoke and pulverized concrete trying to get into his eyes and nostrils and mouth, despite having the mask and NVG on, for Keo to pinpoint who was shouting out what questions. It could have been one or two or all of them at the same time. His ears were still ringing from the blast, so that didn’t help at all. Behind the lens of the night-vision goggles, the thick mist on the other side of the tunnel looked like a living thing with tendrils reaching out for him.

Frank had disappeared into the expanding clouds, his dark shape there one second and gone the next. Keo struggled to see even with the artificial assist, though breathing was easier thanks to the mask. He was stumbling backward, trying to regain his footing because he swore the ground was still trembling in the aftermath of Danny’s C4. The only thing he was certain of was the pounding headache inside his skull, reminding him of all the punishment his poor head had endured the last few days.

Right. Like I needed the reminder!

But Danny had done his job—he had carved a hole in the wall for Frank to go through without bringing the entire structure down on top of them. The problem was that Frank had gone without them.

What the fuck, Frank? This wasn’t the plan!

A warm body pushed against his back and a familiar voice (Gaby) shouted very close to his ear, “Keo! Will’s gone! What happened to Will?”

“He went inside!” someone answered. Male. Danny. “That dumbass! We were supposed to go in together!”

“Inside? Inside where?” Gaby asked.

“Where do you think, kid!”

“Why—” Gaby started to ask when someone opened fire, the brap-brap-brap of a machine gun like a series of thunderclaps slamming off the dripping walls around them.

“There goes the neighborhood!” Danny shouted.

“Back, back!” Keo shouted. “Get the fuck back now!”

“Oh, ya think?” Danny said, sounding very dangerously close to laughing.

They came out of the smoke—thin figures slightly hunched over, obsidian eyes like polished gems against the green field of his NVG. They were moving fast, racing through the sludge, some actually clinging to the walls and a few of them were on the ceiling, but how was that even possible? When had they learned to do that? Could they always do that?

A red laser dot flashed across the first wave of ghouls as the brap-brap-brap continued to rain death and bodies fell, plopping into the water one by one by one. But if Keo thought that was going to stop them, he was sadly mistaken, because more of them rushed out of the swirling smoke, like nightmares coming to life before his very eyes.

“Back, back!” Keo shouted again, flicking the fire selector on his MP5SD to full-auto with one hand while turning on the laser pointer attached to the bottom of the barrel with the other.

“Wait, which direction should we go again?” Danny asked, and this time he really was laughing. “I’m so confused!”

Keo couldn’t help himself and grinned behind his mask. He didn’t know if he liked the ex-Ranger or was this close to turning around and kicking him in the face.

He was still deciding when he squeezed off a burst and three ghouls flopped into the thick sludge. With the NVG and the silver rounds going exactly where the laser pointer directed them, he couldn’t miss, and neither could any of the others shooting to the left and right of him. Their bullets punched through weak flesh and hit one, two, sometimes three bodies behind the first target.

It was the literal definition of a shooting gallery, except this one was endless and each falling creature only opened up a new space for the one behind them. They kept coming, like rabid dogs splashing the sewage filth that threatened to swallow up their tiny forms. Keo swore a few of them actually disappeared under the water where they were trampled by the others. Bodies began floating around them, looking more like unreal papier-mâché than beings that were, once upon a time, men and women.

The only thing that saved them from being overrun in the very first seconds of the hole’s creation was the size of the tunnel. Not that he had ever been down here before—or, thank God, any place even remotely similar—but Keo was surprised by how roomy it was. But maybe roomy was a matter of perspective, because for the endless horde trying to get at him, the man-made cavern wasn’t nearly wide or tall enough, and the black eyes were starting to slam into each other and the walls as they surged forward all at once.

Keo continued to backpedal, not wasting a second to glance back to check where he was going and trusting everyone else to keep moving. Then he was past Hanson, who had stopped firing his M249 for some reason.

“Keep firing, Hanson!” Keo shouted.

Hanson shook his head and dropped the machine gun, then unslung his carbine. “I’m out!”

“Whatever happened to the magic ammo box?” Danny shouted.

“No such thing!” Hanson said.

“Now you tell me!” Danny said as he backed up on the other side of Hanson while firing nonstop with his M4A1.

Keo squeezed off a long volley into the oncoming tide of blackened creatures and watched a group of them drop and vanish into the water, but their sickly forms weren’t nearly heavy enough to cause them to sink and they simply floated back up…only to be crushed under by a new wave of ghouls trying to get by.

There was no order, no semblance of control with the monsters. The sight of them vomiting forth out of the dark tunnel without end should have terrified Keo, but instead it made him chuckle to himself.

A girl. You know that, right? You’re here because a girl asked you to.

Man you’re getting soft!

“I’m out!” Keo shouted, and ejected the magazine and scrambled for a new one.

“You want me to reload for you?” Danny shouted. “Go go go!”

Keo turned and ran, kicking up filthy water over his clothes, and some got high enough to splash his mask, but he was beyond caring or even aware of the smell at that point. He reloaded as he ran while Danny and Hanson and Gaby fired into the throng behind him.

A new round of gunfire, these coming from in front of him, made him look up.

Angie, James, and Blaine were retreating toward him, firing into a new wall of ghouls surging from the other side of the tunnel.

“Fuck me,” Keo said under his breath.

Blaine either heard him or sensed him, and glanced over his shoulder while fumbling to reload his own weapon. “They’re behind us!”

Gee, thanks for that newsflash, Blaine.

Keo wanted to laugh, but he raced forward and took Blaine’s place in the middle of the trio and unloaded his new magazine into the twisting sea of bodies and jet-black flesh and eyes instead.

Angie was firing to his left, a sewage-covered bandage wrapped tightly around her right hip. If she was in any pain, Keo couldn’t see it on her face as she backed up and shouted, “I’m out, I’m out!”

Blaine had snapped a fresh magazine into his M4 and begun firing again, standing to Keo’s right. “What happened?” he shouted. “Where’s Will?”

“He’s gone!” Keo shouted back.

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“Poof! Gone! We gotta get to the platform and get the fuck back to the surface!”

“There’s no fucking way we’re getting to the platform now!”

“Fuck!” Keo shouted.

Keo couldn’t even see where the platform was anymore. There was just bodies. Moving and twisting black bodies as ghoul after ghoul scrambled up the tunnel, trampling and climbing and crawling over one another.

“Back up!” Keo shouted. “Back the fuck up!”

Angie and James reappeared to his left and right, Angie hobbling on her bad leg. But she gritted through it and shouted, “Go! Go!”

Keo and Blaine turned and went, reloading as they did while Angie and James covered their retreat.

Behind him—now in front of him—were Danny, Gaby, and Hanson, the flashes of their weapons lighting the dark tunnel in staccato flashes, each one giving Keo a good view of a sea of crooked and butchered teeth and gnarled flesh. The creatures were still coming, but slowly, their advance hindered by their own vast numbers and the quickly forming piles of bodies of their dead that began soaking up the sewage water, creating a sickening wall of bloated corpses that slowed their progress.

Jesus Christ, if I never have to see anything like this again in fifty lifetimes…

The ghouls were slowing, but they weren’t stopping. Which was a problem because Danny, Gaby, and Hanson were backing up toward Keo and pretty soon they were going to be pressed up against him and there would be nowhere to retreat.

Ten meters…

Nine…

Danny stopped shooting and backpedaled away from Gaby and Hanson to reload. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder, and Keo saw that he had removed his mask. “Let me guess: The exit’s no good?’

“Yup!” Keo shouted back.

“Well, that sucks!” He finished reloading and pulled back the charging handle. “Man, Carly is so going to kick my ass when they find me down here covered in shit! Talk about being in double-deep shit!”

Danny spun around and opened up on the fresh wave of incoming horde, even as Gaby stumbled past him, trying to reload and run at the same time, only to discover that there weren’t a lot of places for her to run to. The look on her face as she saw what was back there was one of pure horror, and for a split second she locked eyes with Keo.

Then someone screamed, and Keo turned back around in time to see James disappearing into the mass of limbs. The ghouls flowed over him as if he were little more than a speed bump, and Keo watched helplessly as Angie, instead of retreating, ran forward and began hitting the closest ghoul with the stock of her rifle.

Keo wanted to shout You idiot! Get back here! but he never got the chance. Instead, he watched with almost morbid fascination as an undead thing’s head caved in under Angie’s brutal assault. But the creature didn’t go down, and instead its hands grabbed Angie and pulled her in like a mother would a child for an intimate embrace.

“Blaine!” Keo shouted.

The big man had finished reloading and immediately started firing into the very spot where Angie and James had disappeared. Keo couldn’t figure out if he was doing that to spare the two of them from being turned or—

“Blaine!” Keo shouted again. “Get back here!”

But Blaine didn’t move, and kept firing, even as the horde converged on him. Keo cursed under his breath and took one, then two steps back toward Blaine, determined to grab him and drag his ass back whether he wanted it or not, when Blaine’s legs seemed to give out from under him and he disappeared into the water. The last Keo saw of him was the barrel of his rifle sinking but still firing into the ceiling, bringing down chunks of the brick and mortar on top of the ghouls that had begun to overwhelm the spot he had been standing in just seconds ago.

“Blaine!” Gaby shouted, racing forward while firing her rifle.

Keo reached out just as she was about to pass him by and grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her back. She nearly lost her balance and fell, but he managed to keep her upright enough to begin dragging her back with him. “He’s gone! He’s gone!”

Gaby struggled against him, but Keo kept dragging her backward, even as she continued to squeeze off round after round into the trudging horde. There were now so many bodies in the water that every step the creatures took meant they had to push away a half-dozen dead ghouls blocking their path. Keo didn’t want to think about where James and Angie and Blaine were in that quickly growing graveyard.

“I’m empty!” Hanson shouted from behind him.

“Go!” Danny shouted.

Their voices were so close—much closer than Keo had expected—that it made him look back to be sure, and found himself staring right into Hanson’s NVG from less than a meter away.

“We’re fucked!” Hanson shouted at Danny. “We’re outta space!”

“Shut up and reload!” Danny shouted back.

Keo spun back around and put another burst through the nearest four ghouls, watching them fall and almost-sink before the next wave was on top of them. Gaby was free again and was unloading her M4 next to him, the plop-plop-plop of their bullet casings hitting the water echoing off the walls of the tunnel, which seemed to have constricted inward since the last time he looked.

He had been running back and forth with such wild abandon that there were clumps of things on his face and over the NVG lens, but Keo could still see and what he saw, as dirt-smeared as it was, wasn’t something he wanted to bear witness to in the last few seconds of his life.

He took a step back and sprayed, then did it again. Gaby was mirroring his movements, though he was pretty sure she wasn’t aware of it. Not that it did any good because there were simply too goddamn many of them.

So many that the water was rising as it became stuffed with their corpses, and despite the fact that every one of their bullets chopped their way through two, three, sometimes four of the damn things, there was such an unlimited number that it didn’t do any good at all. The only results were that they kept backing up, and Keo was very aware that Danny and Hanson behind him were doing the exact same thing, and pretty soon there would be no place for any of them to go.

“Keo!” Gaby shouted next to him. “What now?”

He snapped a quick look at her, but saw only the NVG tube staring back at him as she dropped her rifle into the water—it sank and didn’t come back up—and drew her sidearm and began shooting.

What now? Good question.

There was no what now. This was the plan. Get Frank through the wall and follow him under the HC Dome and finish off Mabry. They always knew Frank would have to do most of the work—he was, after all, stronger and faster than all of them combined—but they would assist him, because that was the plan.

Frank’s plan and Danny’s stupid name for it.

Plan G.

Oh, to have a backup plan.

Plan H? he thought, and wanted to laugh out loud, but of course he was too busy shooting and so was Gaby next to him, and Danny and Hanson were behind him doing the same thing.

There was no path forward and no road back. They had come to a complete standstill in the tunnel, somewhere between the platform in front of them and the hole in the wall behind them. Darkness was closing in from both sides, though the creatures had begun to slow even further because of the sheer number of dead bodies in their path.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Hanson was shouting behind him.

“Get a new vocabulary, Hanson!” Danny said, laughing as he did so.

“Fuck you!”

“Sorry, already married! But if you wanna buy me dinner first, I might think about it!”

Danny laughed again, and for some reason Hanson joined right in.

Keo had switched back to semi-auto to conserve ammo. He didn’t need to know he was down to his last magazine. The lightness around his waist was all the evidence he needed. Pretty soon he’d be down to his pistol, just like Gaby, who had just reloaded a second time—

Click! as the MP5SD went empty.

Keo slung it instead of just dumping it into the water the way Hanson had done with his M249 earlier. After all, you didn’t find a whole lot of Heckler & Koches lying around Texas these days, and Keo was a man who appreciated good firearms—even if they were empty and were only going to be useful as a blunting instrument in the next few minutes.

Minutes? We’re being a little optimistic, aren’t we?

Try seconds, pal!

He squeezed the trigger on the Sig Sauer again and again, and though the handgun didn’t have a laser pointer, it didn’t matter because the ghouls had gotten so close that he didn’t even have to aim to take out one, two, three with a single shot. Another time and another place and the kill ratio per bullet would have made him a happy man, but right now all it did was open space for another one or two or five to take a fallen undead thing’s place.

And they kept coming…and coming…

“Keo!” Gaby shouted next to him.

He ignored her and reloaded.

“Keo!” she shouted again.

He finally glanced over and saw that she had stopped shooting. The Glock was back in its holster and she was palming something in her left hand. The parts of the oblong object that he could see behind her clutching fingers gleamed green against his NVG.

He stared at her—or at her night vision—and they didn’t have to say anything. He knew exactly what she was going to do.

Keo pulled the mask off his face—retching smell be damned—and grinned back at her. “Do it!”

She pulled off her own mask and smiled back, then took a step closer to him even as she slipped her right index finger into the grenade’s pin.

Behind him, Danny and Hanson had stopped shooting, either because they were out of bullets or dead. He could have turned around and made sure, but at the moment he didn’t want to find out. Besides, it wasn’t going to matter anyway in the next second or so.

“Do it!” he shouted at Gaby.

She nodded and started to pull the pin—

“Wait!” he screamed, and Gaby was maybe half a heartbeat from finishing the pulling motion when she stopped.

Keo looked up from the frag device in Gaby’s hand and down the tunnel, and stared right into the twin black eyes of a ghoul. It was so close that Keo almost let out an involuntary gasp, but he didn’t because he was too busy taking aim with the Sig Sauer and was on the verge of pulling the trigger—except he didn’t.

Because it was quiet.

The tunnel had gone completely and terrifyingly silent.

The creature in front of him looked frozen in place, even as its twin blackened eyes stared at him. (Jesus Christ, how did he get so close?) Except there was something wrong with its eyes—they were hollow and lifeless like all the rest, but that wasn’t it. It looked almost like it was in some kind of a trance.

And it wasn’t alone. The ghoul standing immediately to its right, and the one immediately to its left had also gone still and lifeless. The same was true for the legion of hunched over forms behind them.

The only noise in the entire tunnel, other than Keo’s racing heartbeat—and that of Gaby’s to his right—came from the drip-drip-drip of condensation around them.

“Keo?” Gaby whispered. She was still clutching the grenade in her left hand, still in mid-pull with her right.

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

He stared at the ghoul standing less than a foot from his face. It was looking at him, but he didn’t think the creature actually saw him, as if he had simply stopped existing in its universe. So what the hell was it looking at?

The same was true for the others. They looked in his and Gaby’s direction, but not at them.

Keo took a quick step away from the closest ghoul and glanced behind him. He saw the back of Danny’s head, the Ranger’s right fist holding a Glock at his side. Next to him, Hanson was gripping his knife, the silver blade gleaming against the fluorescent green of Keo’s night vision.

But it was the sight in front of the two men that made Keo stare for more than a few seconds. The ghouls on that side of the tunnel were standing like permanently frozen stalks of grass jutting out of the filthy water, staring at Danny and Hanson (and Keo now) but not seeing them.

Danny shot a quick look back at him and whispered, “What the hell did you say to them?”

“I didn’t say shit,” Keo whispered back.

“It’s him,” Gaby said. “It has to be him.”

Keo glanced over at her, saw that she had taken her finger away from the grenade pin and was holding it nonthreateningly at her side, and had drawn that weird cross-knife with her right hand.

“Him who?” he asked.

“Will,” she said. “This is him. He’s doing this.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Keo looked over his shoulder again and saw Danny watching him back, equally as confused. The fact that Danny didn’t have a single smart-ass thing to say was more stunning than the ghouls simply just stopping.

“Um, maybe we should, uh, go?” Hanson said.

“Big man’s got good ideas,” Danny said.

Keo turned back around and tried to locate the platform down the tunnel through all the still bodies, but there were so many of them and even with the NVG, all he could see were bloated corpses in the water and motionless ghouls—

There.

There was just enough of a sliver in the creatures’ ranks that he was able to make out the edge of the platform twenty meters away.

Twenty goddamn meters away.

“You first, Kemosabe,” Danny said behind him.

“Why me?” Keo said.

“You’re closer.”

“Not by much.”

“Still, closer.”

Keo sighed. “I fucking hate you.”

“You don’t mean that,” Danny said, and Keo could imagine him grinning when he did.

“Be careful,” Gaby whispered next to him.

He nodded.

Be careful. Right.

Keo took a big breath—didn’t even smell the filth that was his entire world at the moment—and took one step, then another one, around the undead thing that was almost on top of him. He maneuvered around the ghoul, then another one, then two more until he had reached the wall. He hugged it with his back and slid more than he walked forward down the length of the tunnel. He jostled a ghoul (actually heard Gaby gasping behind him), but the stick-thin figure didn’t seem to notice, so he kept going.

He didn’t look back at the others until he was a third of the way to the platform and saw all three of them watching him. Hanson was sweating profusely, and Gaby and Danny were either mesmerized by his every movement or about to vomit. Keo knew exactly what they were feeling, and he tightened his grip further on his Sig Sauer at his side.

Then he resumed sliding his way through the limbs and wet bodies.

About halfway to the platform, he was unable to keep moving in the same manner and had to step forward, then around one, two, then three of the creatures. It was impossible to go around them without bumping into them, which he did again and again, and each time he swore his luck was going to run out, but it never did.

The ghouls continued to ignore him and stared off, even as he rubbed up against them and had to push floating bodies out of his path and into them. There were so many and they were so small he felt like an adult trying to make his way through a field of children.

Finally (finally!) he reached his destination and climbed up onto the platform. He spent a moment to strip off his NVG before stepping forward and craning his head up while leading with the Sig Sauer in both hands. He expected a head or two to stare back down at him from topside, but there was only the round covering still in place. Keo might have actually let out a loud, involuntary sigh as the brilliant rays of sunlight caressed his face.

He moved back to the platform’s edge and was able to see the others easily over the domed heads of the creatures between them. He waved them over.

Gaby moved first, then Hanson, with Danny coming last.

Keo hurried back to the ladder, afraid his luck was going to run out any second now, and started climbing. Every step took him closer toward the sunlight and away from the filth of the sewer. After not smelling the stink of the tunnel for so long, he was starting to lose his tolerance. Or maybe it was the fresh air filtering through the gaps in the round lid above him, reminding him there was another world beyond this stinking hellhole.

He finally reached the top and pushed the heavy metal covering up with one hand before sliding it completely out of the way. He held his breath for the sound of a gun discharging, but his head was still attached to his shoulders a second—two, and even three seconds later—so he kept moving, sticking first his head up into the euphoric brightness, then the rest of him.

He climbed out into the sunlight, realized he had been holding his breath for the last thirty or so seconds, and finally gave himself permission to breathe again as he rolled away from the round hole. He swallowed in a lungful of fresh air (God bless you, fresh air!) as he pushed himself up on one knee and raised the 9mm.

Footprints and splatters of dried blood covered the area around the opening, but there were no signs of anyone living or dead. He looked toward the parking lot, where they had carved an LZ for the Sikorsky earlier and come under fire, but only saw bullet-riddled cars and no collaborator presence.

Keo turned around when he heard Gaby coming up behind him, then reached down and pulled her out of the sewer. She had been holding her breath too, and Gaby finally sucked in a large lungful when she collapsed on the pavement and stayed down there for a while.

He hurried over to help Hanson up. The big man was halfway out of the hole when Keo looked past him and down at the platform below.

“Hanson,” Keo said, “where’s Danny?”

Hanson gave him a confused look, then stopped climbing and glanced down. “He was right behind me.”

“So where is he?”

Hanson shook his head, mumbled something incoherent, then started climbing back down.

“Hanson!” Keo hissed, but Hanson didn’t respond.

“What is it?” Gaby asked. She had picked herself up and was holding her Glock at her side while looking around at the parking lot. “Where’s Danny?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. He stayed at the opening, looking after Hanson as the last of Mercer’s men hopped down the ladder and craned his head (hesitantly, very hesitantly) back into the tunnel he had just escaped from.

“Keo,” Gaby said. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

Hanson came back, got on the ladder, and began climbing up with surprising speed for a man his size. Keo scooted away as Hanson reached the opening, and Keo grabbed his proffered arm and pulled him out.

“Where’s Danny?” Gaby asked.

Hanson shook his head. “He’s not down there.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Keo asked.

“Just that,” Hanson said. “He’s not in the tunnel.” The big man shook his head, looking, Keo guessed, probably as bewildered as he and Gaby were at the moment. “He’s gone.”

31

Will

“So here you are. At last. Tell me: Am I everything you imagined?”

Mabry’s voice was everywhere—inside his head and outside. The duality of it was jarring, and it took him a moment to adjust. Fortunately he had enough experience shielding himself from unwanted voices and was able to limit the effects on his senses. Even Mabry’s hiss was comforting, which shouldn’t have been possible but was.

“All that effort to avoid me. To run away. Only to come here. So much time wasted for nothing.”

Mabry didn’t resemble the creature he had seen outside the Cleveland bank all those months ago. The ghoul was taller, his chest fuller, and his shoulders broader. The blue of the eyes so incandescent that he couldn’t look away even if he wanted to, and he didn’t for fear of losing track of his target, his mission.

Make it count! a voice that wasn’t Mabry’s echoed inside his head. The words came tumbling from the past, at a time when he was surrounded by sand and blood, heat and cold. Danny had been there. He didn’t remember much, but he remembered enough. Was it Danny’s voice? He couldn’t be sure.

Danny…

He was back there, in the tunnel. With Gaby and Keo, and Mercer’s men. Maybe dead. Maybe barely alive. He couldn’t hear or feel them because he couldn’t afford to extend his senses beyond the room. Everything he had, every ounce of willpower, was focused on Mabry. In this room, right here, right now.

His mission. His final mission.

“Tell me,” Mabry said, “was it worth it? Was all of this worth it?”

“Yes,” he said.

Mabry smiled. A true smile, the kind the other blue eyes could never quite master no matter how hard they tried—how hard he tried. “It must be fate, then. Or maybe you think it’s providence. That night in the apartment, when you stumbled across the silver. You, of all people. A man who doesn’t believe. And yet, and yet, it was there when you needed it most.”

“Coincidence,” he said.

Mabry laughed. It was dry and humorless, and it reverberated off the walls and the interior of his skull. He willed himself to ignore it, to push through.

Concentrate.

Concentrate!

“I’ve been alive too long to believe in coincidences,” Mabry said. “There was a time when I was a nonbeliever like you. But that was long ago. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve witnessed men do—the things I’ve done to get this far.”

There was an entire room between them, and it should have been difficult to hear Mabry’s soft (soothing) exterior voice, but it wasn’t. The air around him hummed, the sensations both warm and cool, stale and fresh—at once freezing and scorching.

It didn’t make any sense. Nothing made any sense.

Concentrate!

“Men were never meant to have dominion over the planet,” Mabry said. “They’re too destructive for their own good. They poison the oceans with their filth, and they would have done the same to the sky before I stopped them. It’s not their fault, really. It’s in their nature to destroy.”

His nostrils flared at the stench of human bodies. Too many to count even if he had wasted the second or two it would have taken to do so. They were shoved inside the lockers that lined the walls around him and hung from heavy metal hooks. Men and women, old and young. Frail and naked, resembling black-eyed ghouls, but not there yet. They were very much still alive, and if they were lucky, they wouldn’t know what was happening to them, that Mabry fed on them whenever he needed the blood that flowed through their veins.

He licked his lips involuntarily.

No, this wasn’t him. He wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t like Mabry.

No.

“I knew the time would come,” Mabry continued. “All I had to do was wait. But I’ve always been patient. You learn to be when you’ve survived for as long as I have. Time loses its power when age and disease no longer matter.”

“Everything dies,” he said.

Mabry’s lips creased again. Even standing so far apart (so near), the two of them bathed in absolute darkness, he could see the gentle (caring) smile. “Do you really think it’s going to be that easy? That you would come here, kill me, and save everyone? Save your beloved Lara?”

No, he thought, and tightened his grip around the hilts of the knives hanging at his sides. If their silver blades nauseated Mabry as much as they did him, the ghoul didn’t show it for even a split second.

“You didn’t even tell her the truth,” Mabry said. “Not all of it. What does that say about your commitment?”

He had told her enough. Told Danny and Gaby enough. They didn’t need to know everything. Not yet, anyway.

“Do you know how many have stood where you are now?” Mabry continued. “And I’ve survived them all. Every single one of them. What makes you different? What makes you special?”

He couldn’t help himself, and the corners of his lips curled into a smile (or at least, what he thought was a good version of one).

Mabry cocked his head slightly to one side. “Kate. You think because she turned you, that this time it’ll be different. This time you’ll succeed where all the others have failed. You and your two little knives.”

He refused to stop smiling.

“I’ve braved armies,” Mabry said. “I’ve mastered monstrosities the likes of which you couldn’t imagine. Untold lives have been cast against me, but I’ve always continued on while they fell and rotted into the ground.”

“This time it’ll be different,” he hissed.

“That’s what the others thought, too. But it never is. Maybe fate brought you here, maybe it was providence lending a hand. Whatever it was—whatever it is—it’ll all be for nothing. Humanity’s days have come and gone. Lay down the knives and embrace it. I still have room for you by my side.”

“No.”

Another sigh, this one slightly more impatient than the last. “You should have come home earlier. I would have sent people for your beloved and brought her to you, given you the happy ending you so desperately crave.”

“You’ll never touch her. You’ll never get close to her.”

“We’ll see about that. When we’re done here, I’ll send for her. It doesn’t matter how far she hides from me. I’ll find her—somehow, some way—and bring her here. I’ve already reserved a spot. And whenever I feed on her, I’ll think of you, and how silly you were, how wrong Kate was about you.”

“No.”

“You won’t have a choice. You never did. Neither will she. None of you ever did. You think you know how long I’ve been planning this? Putting all the pieces into place? You don’t have a clue. You’ll never truly grasp the complexity of it; you couldn’t possibly appreciate how much patience and planning and effort it took to get this far.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You talk too much.”

A hint of anger flared across Mabry’s eyes. “Show some respect.”

“You don’t deserve it.”

The razor-thin smile returned to Mabry’s lips. “I should have taken you outside the bank. It would have been mercy. For both of us. All it would have taken was a few hundred more of my children.”

“You made a mistake.”

“Yes. I did. I thought I saw something in you, something Kate thought she saw, too. But we were both wrong.”

“She’s dead. Kate.”

“Yes, she is. You took her from me.”

“You can join her.”

“No, I won’t. Every mistake can be rectified, but you will never find peace with your precious Lara. You will never find peace anywhere, because you will never leave this room alive.”

“We’ll see.”

He gripped the hilt of the knives even tighter and took the first step across the room.

“Come then,” Mabry said, and this time the ghoul’s voice thrummed, hollow and lifeless, inside his head. “Show me what you’ve learned. Show me how you’ll succeed where whole armies have failed. Show me.”

His walk became a run—faster, faster, faster—and he was on the other side of the room in the blink of an eye, and slashing—

—and missed!

He had been fast. As fast as he had ever been. Faster than he thought he was capable of—and it hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t even been close.

“Pathetic,” Mabry said.

He shut off the pain receptors to his left arm as soon as Mabry grabbed it by the wrist and broke it, and the knife clattered harmlessly to the hard floor.

“This is it?”

He hacked away with the remaining blade, but Mabry jerked his head back and the blade missed again, and again, and again.

“This is all you have?”

His chest quaked against Mabry’s open palm, bone and muscle quivering against the impact. But there was no pain, just numbness.

“You woke me up for this?”

He swung the knife in desperation at Mabry’s neck, but the ghoul effortlessly sidestepped it and got ahold of his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

“How sad.”

The second knife fell away as he stumbled back. Long—impossibly long—and warm fingers snatched him around the throat before he could retreat too far, and flung him across the room into one of the lockers. He collapsed to the floor, the warm body hanging in the locker coming loose from the impact and collapsing on top of him.

“Kate spoke so highly of you.”

He struggled to stand, but it was difficult with arms that didn’t—and couldn’t—obey his commands. At least he couldn’t feel the pain.

“She would be disappointed by this effort.”

He managed to stand and attempted to refocus on Mabry as the air around him shifted and then the ghoul was there, in front of him and grabbing him by the throat again and slamming him into the locker. Metal fragments stabbed through his back, and blood splashed the cold concrete.

“I expected more from you,” Mabry said, and smashed him into the locker, twisted sharp metal spearing his back and drawing more blood.

“I expected more fight.”

And again, into the remains of the locker. Bam!

“I expected more spirit.”

Bam!

“But Kate was wrong.”

Bam!

“And so was I.”

Bam!

“You’re just another husk.”

Bam!

“And that’s all you’ll ever be.”

The fingers finally, mercifully released him and he slid to the floor, a heap of shattered bones and ripped flesh. Blood pooled under him. Too much blood. All his. His senses were out of control, and he couldn’t focus on any one thing.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” Mabry said, talking aloud now. “Maybe you never were. I welcomed you to my side, but maybe I shouldn’t have.” Thin lips formed a frown, the disappointment radiating from every pore of the creature’s blackened flesh. “You don’t deserve it.”

“Yes,” he said, forcing the word out through a sheet of blood that dripped down his face from the open gashes along his skull. He didn’t feel any pain, but he knew it was there.

His body was broken. Everything was broken.

“Yes?” Mabry said, standing over him.

Blood dripped from the ghoul’s fingers, the rhythmic drip-drip-drip as intoxicating as what poured out of his back, his thighs, and his arms where the sharp edges of the locker had dug deep enough to slice bone.

“Yes,” he said again.

Mabry bent and grabbed him by the throat and lifted him effortlessly into the air. He had no strength left to resist. The ghoul held him in place as if he were nothing—and maybe he was nothing.

Concentrate! the voice from somewhere in his past shouted. Make it count! This is it! Make it count! You won’t get another chance!

You won’t get another chance!

He thought of Lara. It was always Lara at the back of his mind, even in his lowest of low moments. She was always there—a radiant glow, waiting to bring him back from the abyss, back to where things mattered.

Except there was something wrong with his memory of her this time. She wasn’t quite as easy to see, the crystal blue of her eyes not quite as bright, and he began to lose his way.

Lara. Lara!

“Yes?” Mabry said, leaning forward. “Yes what, Will?”

“You’re right,” he said. Croaked. Whispered?

“About what?”

“I can’t beat you.”

“No, you can’t. You never could. And you never will.”

“I can’t beat you…”

“You said that already,” Mabry said. “So what made you think you ever could?”

“I can’t beat you,” he said for the third time.

Mabry sighed and his face softened. It was such a human emotion for such an inhuman creature. Even his grip seemed to lessen out of mercy, though the ghoul didn’t let him down.

“Good-bye, Will. Go with the knowledge that you won’t be alone for very long. She’ll join you—your precious Lara. Then Danny and Gaby and the others will follow. In the years to come, we’ll train the rest to serve us, and in time they won’t remember any other life. It will be glorious.”

Now, he thought. Now, now, now!

He’d heard the footsteps when they were still in the hallway while Mabry was talking, gloating. By the time he tasted the bitter bite of new silver in the air, the figure had slipped inside the room through the open door and was running—and running fast—at Mabry.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

Mabry spun and struck, and the dark figure flew across the room and crashed into the lockers on the other side.

In that split second, he reached out and grabbed Mabry’s arm, the one still holding him in the air, and pulled himself forward and toward the ghoul. It was difficult because of his mangled hands, and getting a good grip was impossible, so he wrapped his shattered appendages around Mabry’s arm instead and kicked out and backward at the wall behind him for leverage.

Mabry turned, eyes enlarging—not in fear, no, he was beyond that—as he lunged forward. If Mabry knew what he was going to do, he didn’t stop him in time. Despite everything—his superior speed, his impossible strength—Mabry entertained a brief moment of indecision, of confusion.

That was just enough time for Will—

(My name is Will!)

—to open his mouth, extending his jaw as wide as it would go—and even wider still—before biting down, his teeth tearing through flesh and then the cranium itself. It was surprisingly weak and flimsy, for all the power it was sheltering, but even so two of Will’s teeth, then a third and a fourth and a fifth shattered against the frontal bone as he made contact.

And he kept pushing and pushing until he was through and finally, finally tasted the mushy thing underneath.

Mabry screamed, and a mind-numbing explosion of pain erupted inside Will’s mind. It echoed and burst and reformed and imploded again and again, even as Will tasted flesh in his mouth and blood dripped from his teeth. And this time it wasn’t just his blood.

He collapsed to the floor in a pile of pulverized bones and speared flesh as Mabry stumbled. The ghoul’s legs gave way and he dropped to his knees, hands groping at the chunk of missing flesh and bone even as he continued to scream inside Will’s head, his pain and misery piercing the river of consciousness that linked the two of them—that linked all of them.

Listen, Will thought, projecting his voice out into the hive mind. Listen!

And they did. He could sense the fear in the ones inside the tunnel just beyond the dome, from the others nesting inside the buildings around them, desperately waiting for nightfall. More than that, he could feel the ones in the other parts of the city, the state, and beyond, every single one of them watching and listening and witnessing Mabry’s fury and pain.

The images and sounds of the encounter had started broadcasting when Will first confronted the five blue-eyed ghouls, when he brought down his mental defenses and rejoined the brood, and the link remained intact when he showed himself to Mabry.

And they had listened and watched and felt every blow and pain, including the fight that proved not to be much of a fight after all. They were seeing and hearing everything he was, and the signal only got stronger as more of them plugged in.

One became two, two became four, and on and on until the numbers reached the tens of thousands, then the millions, and more.

He could sense the blue eyes trying to take control, trying to demand the hive’s attention, and failing miserably. The brood was enraptured by the sight of Mabry’s agony, the undeniable sound of his pain.

Listen! Will shouted. Do you see? Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Listen!

Mabry continued to scream, the full extent of his pain beyond anything Will had ever experienced. And he had done that. He had attacked and conquered the father—the beginning and the end, the nothing and the everything, the nowhere and the everywhere—and left him bruised and bleeding and dying.

Will rolled the meaty, gooey substance he had found with his teeth around in his mouth before finally swallowing it down. He savored the taste clinging to the roots of his shattered and bleeding mouth, not because he wanted to, but because he wanted them—all of them—to see and know it along with him.

I did this, he said without saying it. I did this!

Blood oozed down the corners of his mouth and dripped from his chin as he stood up—rising slowly, but rising nonetheless. His legs weren’t working correctly, but they obeyed him enough to carry him forward, toward Mabry, and he stood over the kneeling ghoul, whose voice continued to cry out in his mind.

The ghoul looked up at him and its thin lips quivered, though no words came out. Its eyes seemed to have dulled, more ash than blue now. There was an emptiness about the way it looked up at him, at once defiant and yet weak.

Do you see it? he said into the hive mind. Look at him. Do you see it?

Then Will shoved his fist through the open hole in Mabry’s forehead, and the spongey black and blue-veined thing on the other side offered no resistance whatsoever. He pulled his hand out as the ghoul collapsed to the floor and lay still, and Mabry’s cries faded from his mind.

Will walked back to the lockers, finding renewed strength from a place he couldn’t fathom, and sat down. He leaned against a pair of dangling feet and watched the black-clad human figure reappear, dragging one leg behind him as he approached tentatively.

The man stepped over Mabry’s body, then came over to crouch next to Will. Bright red blood covered the lower half of his face, and his breathing was ragged and slightly out of control, but he was also grinning.

“How many times have I told you not to run off all by your little lonesome like that, huh?” Danny said. “Now look at you. All bleeding and broken and shit. By the way, that was gross. You bit his fucking head off. That’s got to be the most fucking gross thing I’ve ever seen in my life, man.”

“I…adapted,” Will said. His voice came out odd, the result of broken teeth. Maybe he had just mumbled the words, though Danny seemed to understand him fine.

“So taking a literal bite out of the bad guy wasn’t part of the original plan, huh?”

“No.”

“But it worked. That’s all that matters, right? Plan G is officially in the books.”

“Not over,” he said. It was easier to say as few words as possible. There was no pain—he was beyond feeling pain at the moment—but the damage was severe all over.

Danny glanced back at Mabry’s body, then at the open door. He gripped the knife in his fist. A cross-knife with a silver blade. “What the hell are you talking about? The plan was to kill King Ghoul, and it’s game over. Cut off the head and the body dies. Right?”

“No.”

“No? What do you mean, no?” Danny narrowed his eyes at him. “You lied, didn’t you? You lied to us. Lara. Me. Everyone.”

“Yes.”

“You dick.”

“Not over.”

“Now what?”

“Help me. Up.”

“And then?”

“Finish it,” Will said. “One more. Thing. Left. Then…it’s over.”

Danny sighed, wrapping his arms around Will’s thin frame. “It’s time to get a new wardrobe, by the way. You look like a hobo. And oh, have I mentioned you’re bleeding? Like, a lot?”

“I know.”

“What the hell’s wrong with your body?”

“Broken.”

“That explains it.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, I’d say it matters, dude.”

“Doesn’t matter. One more. Left. Then…over.”

Will felt them stirring finally—the creatures in the tunnel beyond the hallway. The black eyes. A few hundred here, a few thousand out there, and the millions (billions) beyond. They waited, confused and agitated.

But mostly confused.

My children, Will projected. My brood. The father is dead. But you’re not alone. You’ll never be alone.

“You wanna give me some directions here?” Danny said as he pulled them up from the floor with some effort.

“Outside,” Will said.

“It’s still day out there.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Outside.”

“You are aware that you’re still all spindly and shit? Or did you lie about that, too?”

“No.”

“So what then, Mr. Mushy Mouth?”

“Help me. Danny. Stop. Talking.”

“Might as well tell me to stop breathing,” Danny said as he half walked and half dragged the both of them to the door. “By the way, I think one of my legs is broken, thanks for asking.”

“You’ll. Be. Fine.”

“Shows what you know. I’m pretty sure one of my kidneys flew out of my mouth when that thing hit me, too. Is that possible? Can you lose a kidney through your mouth? Christ, you’re bleeding a lot. I’m drowning in this stuff. By the way, I’m having a kid. Did I tell you that? God, you’re bleeding a lot. It’s like a friggin’ Free Ketchup for Everyone Day back here.”

“Danny…”

“So this is it, huh?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you have to be sorry for? I’m the one dragging your skinny ass around, Mister Hobo. I’m the one doing all the work. But then, what else is new?”

“Sorry. Danny. I’m…sorry.”

“Sorry’s not gonna fix this, man. You thought about what I’m gonna do without someone to try my awesome jokes on first?”

“You’ll. Do. Fine. All…of you. Look. After. Her. For…me.”

Danny didn’t say anything.

“Danny…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Danny said. “It’s not like I got anything else better to do, you selfish prick.”

Will smiled. A true smile this time, he was sure of it, as his friend led him to the door one step at a time.

He could sense the black eyes out there, in the tunnel, waiting for them. For him. The confusion lingered among them, but there was something else that hadn’t been there before: a growing anticipation, almost excitement.

Follow me, Will thought, pushing his voice into the hive mind. He heard it reverberate through the stream of consciousness, from one mind to the next, to the next. Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to fear.

“No!” the blue eyes shouted, their voices rising from the ranks of the brood. They were desperate, demanding attention. “Don’t listen to the traitor! Ignore him!”

Will continued projecting, because he could feel it: He had them. The black eyes were listening to him, and him only.

I’ll show you the way, he said, his voice growing with confidence as it expanded further and further, to more and more minds.

Follow me, he said, trumping the fading voices of the blue eyes as the hive, as one, turned to him.

Follow me, he called out, his voice soothing and comforting, the way Mabry’s had been before him. The father’s dead, but you’re not alone. You’ll never be alone.

Follow me, and I’ll show you the way back to the light…

32

Lara

“We’ve engaged the enemy. I repeat: We’ve engaged the enemy.”

The calm voice coming through the Comm Room’s speakers belonged to Peele, the man in charge of the three tanks that were at this very moment butting up against the main roadblock into Houston. Peele and Rolling Thunder’s goal was less to actually break through and more to keep the collaborators from leaving their posts and interfering with Striker’s mission, which was to link up with Willie Boy and take the fight directly to Mabry. A year ago that kind of tactical planning would have made Lara question who she was; these days, it was just another decision that she hoped didn’t get too many people killed.

You’re responsible for this. You sent them out there. Your friends, strangers, even the man you love.

You did this. You did this.

Rhett had the microphone and spoke into it: “How many are we talking about, Rolling Thunder?”

“Don’t know; didn’t get the chance to take a roll call,” Peele said through the speakers. “I’ll get right on it as soon as they stop shooting at us.”

“Small arms?”

“Looks like a couple of LAWS—Shit!” Then, to someone else, presumably in the tank with him, “Jesus Christ, Larry, watch where you’re going! I don’t wanna be eating a rocket right about now!”

“Laws what?” Carly said quietly next to her.

“Light Anti-Armor Weapons System,” Lara said. “Shoulder-mounted single-shot anti-tank weapons, basically.”

“And you know this how?”

“Danny. He thought they’d have something like that.”

They stood behind Jane, who was planted in front of all the communications gear in the room, while Riley and Rhett remained in front of the big map. The two men were constantly marking locations of where the forces were—theirs, the enemies, and a big circle in red marker around where the HC Dome was to the southwest of the city, away from Downtown area. She had stared at that spot so many times today that she thought she could remember every single parking lot and tenement building or highway around it.

Anxiety radiated from Carly next to her, and Lara knew exactly what her friend was feeling. It wasn’t just that their loved ones and friends were out there in danger, but that they couldn’t do anything about it except to stand here and listen, helpless to affect what was happening in Houston right now because it was out of their hands.

God, please, don’t die. Please, don’t die because of me.

“Okay, okay,” Peele was saying through the speakers. Lara wasn’t sure who he was talking to, and neither was Rhett by the look on his face.

“Peele, you okay?” Rhett asked.

“Hell no,” Peele said. “They’re coming from everywhere. The only reason we’re still in one piece is because of the armor.” Then, shouting, “Back up, back up! Alex, for God’s sake, watch where you’re shooting!”

Riley looked across the room at her. “I’m not sure how long Peele’s going to last out there. He sounds pretty rattled.”

“They have to last a lot longer,” Lara said, and thought, Please don’t die, please don’t die. Then, as confidently as she could muster, “Without them, the collaborators are all going to converge on the HC Dome. We need to give Striker as much time as possible to get down there and assist Willie Boy with their mission.”

“Willie Boy,” Carly said, shaking her head. “Let me guess: Danny came up with these code names?”

Lara managed a smile. “Yeah.”

“Well, at least Rolling Thunder and Eagle sound cool.”

Lara leaned forward and put a hand on Jane’s shoulder. “Can you get the A-10s on the radio for me?”

Jane nodded and flicked switches on the dashboard, then adjusted her headset’s mic and spoke into it: “Eagle One, Eagle Two, this is Black Tide. Eagle One, Eagle Two, can you read me?” She paused for a moment, then picked up a second microphone and handed it to Lara. “It’s Eagle One. Cole.”

Lara took the mic while Jane hit another switch, and they heard Cole’s voice through the speakers.

“—crazy down there,” Cole was saying. “There’s a swarm of technicals buzzing around Rolling Thunder. They look like ants trying to bite a lumbering elephant.”

“Now that’s a sight,” Carly said.

“Cole,” Lara said, “I need you to keep any collaborators that are breaking away from the roadblocks from converging on the Dome.”

“I hear ya, and that’s what Eagle Two and me’ve been doing all day,” Cole said. “But not all the bad guys are getting the hint; some of them look pretty stubborn. We’re doing all we can to convince them otherwise, but there’s just two of us trying to cover an entire city.”

“Do the best you can, Eagle One.”

“Understood, Black Tide. We’ll do our best.”

“Thank you, Cole.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cole said.

“Now that’s a gentleman,” Carly said.

“How are you for ammo?” Rhett said into the mic.

“Not good,” Cole said. “I’m down to just the Avenger. I’m doing my best to conserve ammo, but it’s going to run dry sooner rather than later.”

“What about Eagle Two?”

“Wheeler’s in the same boat.”

“Ask him if he saw anyone abandoning the fight,” Carly said. “You know, in case Lara’s plea worked.”

Rhett relayed the question, and Cole answered: “A dozen or so vehicles took off when Rolling Thunder showed up. I was about to blast them, but they were obviously hightailing it so I held off.”

“A dozen or so technicals,” Riley said, smiling slightly. “That’s something.”

“That’s a dozen less assholes trying to kill my Danny,” Carly said. “That’s more than something.”

“The true believers are staying behind,” Rhett said. “The ones slugging it out with Peele and the rest of Rolling Thunder right now. Only true believers would think you can go head-to-head with tanks. You gotta be pretty goddamn committed.”

“Straight-jacket type of commitment?” Carly asked.

“Not to them. There’s no turning back for them. It’s all-in or nothing.”

Lara watched Rhett for a moment, wondering if he was talking about the collaborators out there fighting with Peele and the others, or if he was referring to people closer to home.

She was still thinking about Rhett’s words when Cole shouted through the speakers, “No, goddammit, no!”

“What happened?” Lara said into the mic. “Cole, what happened?”

“Wheeler,” Cole said. “Shit!”

“What happened to Wheeler?”

“His Warthog just went down. Jesus Christ. They’ve been trying to tag us with shoulder-mounted launchers all day, but—Jesus! How the hell did they manage to get Wheeler? I warned that little punk not to make it too easy on them. Dammit!”

“Without two Warthogs up there keeping them honest, those technicals are going to start converging on the Dome,” Riley said.

Lara keyed her mic. “Eagle One, I need you to do a flyby of the Dome. I need an update on Striker.”

“I’m almost there,” Cole said. He sounded calm again, but maybe that was just the transmission hiding his emotions. “Okay, I see… I see tangos in the open, but our boys are MIA.”

“MIA? Explain.”

“I don’t see any action down there. Either they’re all dead or they made it underground.”

Lara looked back at Carly.

“Dead or underground,” Carly sighed. “We’re hoping for the latter, right?”

Lara nodded, as Rhett said into his own mic: “What else do you see, Cole?”

“Wait, wait,” Cole said. “Okay, okay, I’m pretty sure Striker’s underground. I see tangos moving toward one of the manhole coverings. Give me a sec; I’m going to make sure no one follows them down.”

Cole went silent for five seconds…

Seven…

Ten…

Then he was back: “That’s it, guys, that’s my last bullet. I’ll stick around, buzz the area, and try to draw some of their fire. I don’t know how long until they figure out I’m running on fumes and start ignoring me, though.”

“Be careful, Cole,” Rhett said.

“Roger that, Black Tide. Eagle One out.”

“Tough old coot,” Carly said. “Reminds me of my dad, if my dad was a former airman with suicidal tendencies.”

Riley looked across the room at Lara. “That’s it. They’re in the tunnel. Nothing we can do now but wait.”

She nodded, not quite sure what she was feeling. Maybe it was relief that Keo and Danny had made it to Will, or possibly terror because she knew what was waiting for them down there.

Please don’t die. God, please don’t die because of my decisions.

The thought weighed her down and sapped the energy from her, and she was already so damn tired. All the days of not sleeping, the nights of worrying about Will and everyone onboard the Trident came back in a rush to punish her, and she had to sit down in a chair next to Jane or else she might have collapsed in a heap.

When was the last time she had just sat down? She didn’t know the answer to that question and couldn’t even begin to come up with one. Her eyelids were suddenly heavy, and she could feel something out there, calling to her.

What?

She wanted to fight it, wanted to resist. There was too much work to do, too many lives out there hanging in the balance.

Will. Gaby and Blaine and Danny.

She couldn’t allow herself to close her eyes…

Maybe just for one second.

I’ll close my eyes for just one second…

* * *

When she opened her eyes, she was standing on a beach. She had no shoes on and she was smiling as cool water gently lapped at her toes. The sand was very white—much whiter than she remembered Black Tide having—and there was a nice breeze. A perfect breeze, in fact. She had let her hair down and it lifted and swayed with the wind, and for some reason it seemed to be longer than it should have been.

She looked around her.

She wasn’t standing on Black Tide Island. She would remember this stretch of beach anywhere, but these days it usually only appeared in her dreams because she could no longer actually go there anymore. In her dreams, where things were perfect and she could live as a twenty-something woman without the weight of the world on her shoulders.

There, the solar-powered lampposts that ringed the island. And there, the long cobblestone walkway where, once upon a time, armed men had attempted to rush only to be met at the other end by violence. The very same violence that she had orchestrated in a bid to keep the island.

But there were no bodies there now. No blood and no bullet casings to mark one long, bad night. And there were no beached vessels loaded with killers trying to kill her and her friends.

There was just…her, back on Song Island.

This is a dream.

It was in the way the wind caressed her cheeks, the warmth of the water against her feet. The sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky and it was all perfect, which was how she knew it wasn’t real. The closest she had ever come to perfection was here, on this place months ago, when she had someone to share it with.

What am I doing here?

She glimpsed a figure in the distance, walking toward her. He was so far (How is he so far?) that she couldn’t make out any details, but she knew it was a man by the shape of his shoulders. He was wearing slacks, the legs rolled up to his knees; a bright-colored Hawaiian shirt meshed perfectly with their surroundings.

Perfectly. There’s that word again.

She shielded her eyes to get a better look, but she already knew who it was before the man ever reached her. Even that didn’t make any sense because when she first saw him he appeared to be on the other side of the island, except now he was only twenty yards away.

Then ten…

Then stopping in front of her.

“Will,” she said, whispering his name as if she were afraid he would evaporate into nothingness if she said it too loudly.

He was the Will she remembered. A human Will. The one with the deep brown eyes that made her trust him back when they first met, even though she shouldn’t have trusted any man after what she had been through.

It was Will.

It was her Will.

She leaped into his arms and he grabbed her in a tight embrace. Then he was laughing when she pulled back and began kissing him on the forehead, on the nose, on the cheeks, on the lips. He kissed her back urgently, hands gripping her tightly. She ran her fingers through his hair—short, perfectly cut, as if he’d just come from the barber—and refused to let him go, too afraid he would leave her again if she did.

She didn’t know how long they stayed that way—hugging, kissing, laughing on the sand—but it had to be minutes. Maybe longer than that. She wasn’t sure because time felt slippery, as if days could go by and she’d never notice, or ever need to stop to eat and drink and sleep. Not while she had him back.

Which was how she knew it was a dream.

She pulled away but refused to let him go. Dream or not, he looked and felt and tasted so real that a part of her wanted desperately not to care, to just go with it; take everything she could get before it slipped away again.

But she didn’t listen to the voice because she wasn’t the same person she was when they first met. She had changed over the months since meeting him, since losing him, since…

…losing him…

“Will,” she said softly. “This is a dream.”

He smiled at her. “I just wanted to see you again as the man you remembered.”

“I don’t think I ever remembered you in a Hawaiian shirt.”

He laughed. It was loud and hearty and her heart filled up hearing it, because the Will she knew was reserved and thoughtful and he rarely just let it out like he was doing now. And she beamed, because his laughter was so wonderful and she couldn’t get enough.

“No,” he said, “but I thought it would be a nice touch.”

“It is,” she said. “It is.”

She kissed him on the lips again. Softly, gently, afraid of breaking him.

“Will,” she said, the sound of his name like music to her ears. “How are you doing this?”

“We’re connected. We’ve always been connected.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

“So why didn’t you do this before?”

“Because once I make the first connection, I won’t be able to sever it. I’ll always be there at the back of your mind. It can be…uncomfortable for some people.”

“Like you and Kate.”

He nodded. “But it was never this powerful with her. What you and I have…” He was glowing in the sunlight, the smile frozen on his lips, contagious. “It’s stronger than with anyone else.”

“So what does this mean?”

His smile faded.

“Will,” she said, the joy draining from her until there was just that empty hole in her soul again. “What does this mean for us? For you, out there in the real world?”

“I lied to you.”

“About what?”

“Mabry. I lied when I said killing him would reverse the infection. There is no reversal, Lara. What’s done can’t be undone.”

Her arms came loose and she pulled away from him, taking one, then two steps back in the sand. The water continued to lap at her feet but she barely noticed it now, too consumed by the whirlwind of emotions ripping through.

“You lied to me,” she said. “You lied to me…”

“I’m sorry.”

“What else did you lie about?”

“Not everything. I can end this nightmare by killing Mabry. I can give you and humanity a second chance. A real, fighting chance.”

“How?”

“I told you about him. How Mabry’s the beginning and the end. The everything and the nothing. The nowhere and the everywhere. He exists in here.” Will tapped his temple. “Even when he’s not there, he’s there. We come from him, Lara. All of us.”

“The ghouls…”

“Yes.”

She saw the sadness in his eyes, but there was also something else there that hadn’t been before: Acceptance.

“Every ghoul comes from him,” Will continued. “His blood flows through our veins. In so many ways, he gave birth to us. He’s our father.”

“Your father?”

“It’s how they look at it. The brood. They are his children. They obey him without question. They go to sleep with his voice in their heads, and wake up with it comforting them. He is the everything, and the nothing. Everywhere, and nowhere. The beginning…and the end.”

“What’s happening at the Dome right now, Will? Where are you?”

“Still there. Danny’s with me. He’s helping me to finish it.”

“How can you be there and here at the same time?”

“This is just a dream, Lara. You were right. It’s a shared connection between the two of us. A bubble that exists outside of time.”

She shook her head. She didn’t understand any of it and she didn’t care to try, because he had lied to her. He told her he could save them and himself, and he had lied to her.

But slowly, very slowly, the anger slipped away, because she knew why he had done it. Because she would never have agreed to the plan if it meant he wouldn’t return, wouldn’t come back to her even if it wasn’t as the man she loved.

He did it for you. Everything he’s done, it’s been for you, you stupid girl.

She walked back to him. She put her hand on his cheek, and he closed his eyes and leaned into it. She smiled and held him there, enjoying the warmth of his skin. It was so unlike the last time they had made contact, below deck on the Trident. He wasn’t the Will he once was then—or the Will he was now.

“Will I remember any of this when I wake up?” she asked.

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“Then you will. The same way I remembered my dreams with Kate. It lingers. Always. That’s why I never joined with you before. It can be disturbing always having another consciousness at the back of your mind. And our bond is so much stronger…”

“Then why now?”

He smiled at her, and it was genuine and touching, and the sadness had left his eyes, replaced by happiness. “I wanted to see you again. I wanted to explain why I lied, why I did what I did. But most of all, I wanted to tell you that I love you.”

She put her other hand on his other cheek and held him steady. Even as her mind processed everything he had said—the magnitude behind his words—she clung onto him for as long as possible.

“You’re leaving me,” she whispered. “You’re leaving me again.”

“I have to,” he whispered back, covering her hands with his and squeezing, hard. “It’s the only way.”

“Why?”

“Because Mabry’s dead. I killed him. His death will leave a hole, and someone has to fill it.”

“You.”

“Yes. They saw me kill him. They heard him crying in pain before his last moments.”

“You overthrew him,” she said, and pursed a smile at the thought.

“It was the only way to make them listen. To make them pay attention. Not all of them will do it—obey me—but enough will to make a difference in the days to come. Enough to give you and everyone a fresh start.”

“And what about you?”

He squeezed her hand even tighter, then leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

“Will,” she whispered. “What about you?”

“I have to show them,” he whispered. “They won’t do it unless I show them that there’s nothing to fear. It’s the only way.”

“Why you?”

“Because…I love you.”

He pulled away, but she wouldn’t let him go. She held onto his hands, but he somehow slipped through anyway and stepped back, and back…

“Will,” she said. “Don’t go.”

“It’s the only way it’ll work,” he said. “I have to show them. I have to lead them.”

“Do something else.”

“I would if I could, you must know that. But this is the only way.”

“Will, no.”

He stopped, but the dozen or so feet between them might as well be an ocean. The sun played tricks with her eyes, and she could barely make out his face for some reason. She wanted to run over to him, to hold onto him and never let go, but her legs refused to obey her.

Move! Why won’t you move?

“Lara,” he said, the sound of her name on his lips filled with so much joy that her heart ached just to hear it. “Take care of our friends. Take care of Danny. Take care of everyone for me.”

She held out a hand toward him, pleading for him to take it. “Don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“No…”

“I love you. I’ll always love you.”

She tried to force her legs to move, but they wouldn’t, even as Will got smaller, slipping further and further away from her.

“You have more important things to do now,” he said. Though it shouldn’t have been possible with the crashing waves and the growing distance, she could hear his voice just fine, as if he were standing right next to her and not slowly but surely vanishing before her eyes. “They’re going to come to you, ask you to lead them. You should, because you can. You’re stronger than you think you are. Even now, after all you’ve done, all you’ve accomplished, you’re still capable of so much more. I believe in you, Lara. Now you have to keep believing in yourself.”

“Stop!” she screamed. “Will, stop!”

But he didn’t, and he turned, and continued walking away.

As the waves splashed against her bare feet and the wind whipped at her hair, she knew he was never coming back, that this would be it—the final time she got to see him. Not just as the Will she always remembered and loved, but the new Will too, the one in Houston right now with Danny.

He was leaving her…and this time he wouldn’t come back.

* * *

She opened her eyes to Keo’s voice coming through the speakers, the sound of helicopter blades whup-whup-whupping in the background.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing. They’re just… They’re just walking out of the buildings and into the sun. Jesus, there’s so many of them. I had no idea there were so many… God, what is this? What’s happening?”

She looked over at Carly, standing next to her, one hand gripping the headrest of her chair so tightly that her fingers were ghost-white.

Rhett had the microphone and said into it, “Eagle One, can you confirm what Striker’s seeing?”

“Striker’s right; I’m seeing the same thing,” Cole said. “There are just ashes down there. Ashes and bones. It’s like a graveyard. And they’re still coming out of the buildings. Every single building in the city. Goddamn. They’re just walking outside and dying by the hundreds, thousands…”

“I have to show them,” Will had said. “They won’t do it unless I show them that there’s nothing to fear. It’s the only way.”

“Rolling Thunder,” Rhett said into the mic, “can you confirm what they’re seeing?”

“Fuck yeah, I can,” Peele said. He sounded almost delirious. “When they started coming out of the buildings, I thought for sure we were fucked. But they’re just dead. Again. Whatever. You know what I mean. They’re just stepping outside and burning and poof, like that, gone. Never seen anything like it. Jesus Fuck.”

“That man’s got a way with words,” Carly said, and Lara wasn’t sure if her friend was going to cry or laugh, or do both.

Lara reached for the second mic. “Keo, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Keo said.

“What about Gaby and Blaine? What about Danny?”

“Gaby’s right beside me…”

She waited for him to add Danny’s and Blaine’s names, but he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t say anything else.

“Keo,” she said, too afraid to say the rest of it.

“Blaine didn’t make it,” Keo said. “And Danny’s MIA.”

Lara glanced over at Carly, her friend’s face as pale as she had ever seen it.

“We lost sight of him when we were hightailing it out of the tunnel,” Keo said. “Gaby thinks he went back for Frank. But I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

“Nothing. Nothing for sure. We’re circling now, heading back to the Dome.”

Lara leaned into the mic, but she didn’t say anything right away. She dreaded what she was going to say next, with the dream still fresh in her mind. Even now she could taste the crisp air, hear the wave coming onto the beach and lapping at her toes…

“I have to show them… It’s the only way.”

“Keo,” she said into the mic, “what happened to Frank?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “It was chaotic down there. Chances are he’s with Danny like Gaby says, so when we find one we’ll find the other, too.”

“Gaby’s right; Danny would never just leave him,” Carly said quietly behind her.

“We’re circling the HC Dome now,” Keo said through the radio.

“Collaborators?” Lara asked.

“They’re bugging out. Whatever’s left of them, anyway. They can see what’s happening just as we can. The ghouls coming out of the buildings, then frying in the sun. There are bones everywhere, Lara. Jesus Christ, there are piles of bones everywhere.”

“Find them,” Lara said. “Find them, Keo.”

“I will,” Keo said, and there wasn’t a single shred of doubt in his voice. “One way or another, we’re not leaving empty-handed, I can fucking guarantee you that.”

* * *

Carrie. Bonnie. And Blaine.

Maybe she should have been happy it wasn’t more. How close had Gaby, Keo, and Danny come to joining that list? How many others had lost their lives helping Will do what he needed to do in order to save them? To save all of them?

She thought of them. Her friends…

Blaine, whom she knew longer than the others, but Bonnie had become a good friend. Carrie too, in her own way. But she would miss Blaine most of all, and maybe that was why she had avoided going to the bridge when she made her way back to the Trident, because everything in there reminded her of him.

But she knew she needed to be back on the yacht. More than that, she wanted to be here. There wasn’t the feeling of triumph she was hoping for as Peele and the others confirmed what they had initially seen—that the ghouls had simply stepped out of their hiding places to burn in the sun.

“I have to show them,” Will had said. “They won’t do it unless I show them that there’s nothing to fear. It’s the only way.”

But there was a lightness in her, brought forth by a sense of accomplishment. There wasn’t quite the pangs of regret and guilt from her losses that she had been fully prepared to confront, even though she continued to feel it in her very soul.

Carrie. Bonnie. Blaine…and Will.

And who else whose names she didn’t know? Even now, Riley and Rhett were trying to get a head count of the people they had lost in the mission. The tankers, Wheeler, the members of Keo and Danny’s Striker team…

She was leaning against the railing on the main deck, watching Elise, Vera, Jenny, and some of the other kids running around on Black Tide’s beach in the near distance, when her radio’s squawk broke in through the serenity of the moment.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Ten minutes out,” Danny answered. “I heard you were looking for me. What can I do you for?”

Danny was putting on an act, but she appreciated it anyway, and said, “Are you okay?”

“In one piece. At least until I get back there and Carly tears me a new one.”

“Justifiable homicide, some would say.”

“No arguments from me,” Danny said. Then, quietly, “About Will…”

“I know, Danny.”

He didn’t say anything right away. Then: “How?”

“I’ll tell you when you get back here. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Broken leg, maybe a punctured lung. Whatever. I’ll get by.”

“I know you will.”

“He didn’t, you know,” Danny said. “Will. He didn’t suffer at the end. Of course, I could have just misread that stupid smile on his face.”

“He was smiling…”

“Yeah. A big ol’ grin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Willie boy smile that big in my life. Like he was going on vacation with three high-priced escorts or something equally awesome fantastic super duper.”

Lara couldn’t help but smile. “Did he say anything?”

“He told me to look after you, on account of how you’re always getting into trouble and whatnot. So, that’s on my plate.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Eh, that’s why God gave me an extra arm, amirite?” Then, without missing a beat, “By the way, I think we should try to convince Keo to stick around. That guy’s pretty useful. Ugly as sin with those scars of his, but pretty useful in a pinch.”

Somewhere on Danny’s side of the connection, she heard Keo’s voice: “Hey, you know I’m sitting right here, right?”

“Did you hear that?” Danny said. “Some weird buzzing noise. Shoo, fly, shoo!”

“Tell her about the other thing,” Keo shouted in the background.

“What other thing?” Lara asked.

“Keester had a thought,” Danny said. “I know, dangerous, right? But it might be worth spending a sleepless night or two on it.”

“What is it?”

“The time zone differences.”

“Time zones?”

“Willie boy timed it to kill the black eyes in our area, when it was still bright and shiny out. What Kilo was wondering was, what about in the rest of the world, where it was dark when Will sent out the call? Are those buggers still going to follow through, even after knowing what happened to the others? And they would know, right? With that whole connected hive mind of theirs?”

Lara didn’t answer him right away. She didn’t know how to, because the mere thought that all of this might have been for nothing, that for every million or so ghouls Will’s death (again) had erased from the world there was still countless more out there, made her want to retch.

“I know, sorry to poop on the party,” Danny said through the radio. “I told Kimbo Slice over here he was being a real buzzkill.”

“Tomorrow,” she said finally. “We’ll find out what’s happening out in the rest of the world when people start talking again. For now, let’s just enjoy this.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Hurry back. I’ll be waiting on the Trident.”

“Roger that,” Danny said. “Striker and company outro.”

Lara put the radio away and continued leaning against the railing.

Was it possible? Could Will’s sacrifice have been in vain?

No, she couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. Will would have known about something like that. He would have taken it—along with countless other factors she hadn’t even thought about or realized even existed—into consideration when he came up with his plan.

Right?

Elise and Vera were in the water now, trying to splash Jenny and the other kids. They had decided to team up and looked to have victory well in hand.

She thought of what Will had said on the beach, in the dream that only she would ever know about.

“Take care of our friends. Take care of Danny. Take care of everyone for me.”

She would do that. She would take care of their friends and everyone else who needed her help.

She would do it, because she had it in her.

And because she wanted to.

Lara smiled again and looked up at the sun. It was bright. As bright as she had ever seen it. How was it so bright? It didn’t matter, as long as it was there and she could close her eyes and let the warmth wash over her.

And she did that now, and thought about her next move…

Epilogue

“This is Lara, and if you’re listening to this, then you’ve survived the unimaginable. It doesn’t matter how you did it, just that you did when so many didn’t. By now you’ve seen the endless piles of bones outside and you’ve heard the rumors. They’re true. All of them. We’ve struck a crippling blow against the ghouls, but it’s not over. It’s far from over. They’re still out there, along with the blue-eyed ones. But they don’t control us anymore, and we know how to defeat them. It’s their turn to be afraid. We’re going to organize and we’re going to hunt them down and destroy every single one of them, and they’re going to find out that the night is no longer theirs. Make no mistake, this is the chance we’ve been waiting for—this is the start of a new beginning. For all of us. Because we’re in this together, whether we called ourselves collaborators or rebels, or didn’t call ourselves anything at all in the last year. None of it matters. Not anymore. A lot of very good and brave people paid the ultimate sacrifice to give us this second chance. Don’t waste it like we did before with endless bickering and petty grievances. Let the past die with the past. This is our chance to make the world ours again. Help me—join me—and we’ll take it back. I’m Lara, and I’m a survivor. If you’re listening to this, then so are you…”