The Fields of Lemuria (9 page)

“Any trouble?” the woman, Allie, asked through the radio.

“We made sure no one saw us pushing off,” Zachary said. “You worry too much.”

“If I’m not worrying, you should be, Zach. We just put some fish on the grill for you guys.”

“Much appreciated.”

“Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

Keo looked back at Zachary. “I need to get back to land. My friend is still out there. You understand loyalty, don’t you?”

“I do,” Zachary said, but then shook his head. “But it’s not up to me. You’ll have to talk to Allie.”

“So, she’s really in charge.”

“Yup. She’s really in charge.”

“Girl power, and all that,” Shorty chuckled in front of him.

“That, and she’s smarter than the rest of us,” Zachary said.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Shorty said.

Allie had walked up the wooden planks to the end of the dock and was waiting for them as they coasted toward her. Two men, both in their twenties, had appeared alongside her at the same time. One of them grabbed a rope and tossed it over to Shorty, while the other man, a redhead, stood back with a hunting rifle cradled in his arms, eyeing Keo.

“This him?” Allie said.

“That’s him,” Shorty said. “Mister San Diego.”

“Keo,” Zachary said, “this is Allie.”

Allie looked him up and down, and he took the opportunity to do the same to her. Early thirties, attractive, about five-seven, and with clearly intelligent eyes. The kind of woman who would have intimidated him in a bar, though of course that wouldn’t have chased him away.

“You wanna tell me what you and your friends were doing running around the park, shooting it up?” she asked.

“They’re not my friends,” Keo said.

“Then who are they?”

“What do you call people trying to murder you?”

Allie frowned. “Do they have a reason?”

“Depends on your perspective.”

She looked past him at Zachary. “He sounds like trouble, Zach. You should have saved us the trouble and just shot him and tossed his body in the lake.”

“Still not too late for that,” Shorty said, climbing out of the canoe. “It’s a big lake.”

My big mouth,
Keo thought, and said quickly, “I was told you had questions, then you’ll let me go.”

She narrowed her eyes. “We’ll see.”

“How many are
we talking about?” Allie asked.

“I saw around ten,” Keo said.

“But that’s not all of them.”

“No.”

“Stop beating around the bush. How many more are running around the park right now with machine guns?”

“Assault rifles.”

“What?”

“They’re carrying around mostly assault rifles. I haven’t seen a machine gun among them yet.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, machine guns are—”

“I don’t care,” she interrupted. “How many more?”

He smiled. “I was told around fifty.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Yup.”

He followed her the short distance from the dock to the houseboat. It was beige, just over forty feet long and somewhere around fifteen feet wide. There were already a couple of people onboard, including one man inside the long cabin in the middle. The second one was manning a gas grill at one corner of the foredeck. Keo smelled more cooking fish and licked his lips.

“Hungry?” Allie said.

“I’ve been surviving on plants, MREs, rain water, and dirt for the last few months.”

“Lucky you, we have plenty of fish to share.”

“What kind of fish?”

“The cooked kind. You on a diet?”

“Seafood diet. You know what that is?”

“What am I, five years old?”

“You don’t look five, no.”

“Don’t get too comfortable. This isn’t a date. I could still toss you overboard at any moment.”

“Understood.”

Allie swung her long legs over the boat’s railing without any trouble. Freed from the zip ties, Keo followed suit, with his new bodyguard bringing up the rear. The twenty-something redhead, Granger, had one hand permanently on the butt of his holstered Glock. Granger also had Keo’s pack and MP5SD, while Zachary and Shorty had headed over to a tent somewhere along the beach.

Granger was smart enough to keep a reasonable distance, not that Keo was entertaining the idea of escaping. There was no point that he could see. Allie and her people clearly didn’t intend to harm him, despite all her unveiled threats. He knew killers when he saw and heard them, and he wasn’t in the company of killers here.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“What’s that?” she said, leading him along the side of the boat, the large box-shaped cabin to their left.

“Since you guys shoved off land.”

“About one week after the world stopped making sense. We initially had just this one houseboat, but we added the others as more people showed up over the next few weeks and months.”

“Whose idea was this?”

“Mine.” They reached the foredeck, where Allie pointed to the man standing in front of a metal grill rooted to the boat. Fish sizzled, and the smell made Keo’s mouth water some more. “That’s Bill. Bill, this is Keo.”

Bill, who looked to be in his fifties, gave him a perfunctory nod. “What kind of name is Keo?”

“Jimmy was taken,” Keo said.

Allie smirked. “That’s a running gag with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whatever. Follow me.”

She led him into the cabin, which was surprisingly spacious. A man in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, sitting in the officer’s chair in front of the helm reading a magazine, stood up and shook his hand when they entered.

“Gabe, Keo. Keo, Gabe,” Allie said. “Gabe’s in charge of making sure the boats don’t sink in the middle of the night.”

“She’s exaggerating my qualifications,” Gabe said. “I’m just a beach bum.”

Gabe was in his early forties and probably a little too tanned for his own good. Keo wondered if that was an issue with the people here, with the sun always beating down on top of them with only the tents and cabins for cover.

“You staying a while?” Gabe asked.

“Not if I can help it,” Keo said.

“We’ll see about that,” Allie said, and gave him a long look. “You could use a little cleaning up.”

“Is that some kind of subtle hint?”

“I didn’t know I was being subtle.” She wrinkled her nose. “You can use that room,” she said, pointing to the back room. “That’s also where I and others sleep, so don’t touch anything. I’ll get Granger to bring you some spare clothes, and we’ll talk over fish when you’re done.”

“You have a working shower in there?”

She laughed. “No, genius. Use the lake, like the rest of us. Then you can change in there. Unless, of course, you like letting everything hang out.”

*

He swam around
the island for the next ten minutes, washing every part of him with a bar of soap that Granger had tossed over while the redhead stood along the side of Allie’s houseboat doing his best not to look. The others had also courteously stopped gawking, though some of the kids couldn’t resist.

He changed into new cargo pants and a T-shirt in the back room, which took up one quarter of the cabin and held bunk beds. There were dressers, but apparently not enough for everyone, judging by the clothes hanging along wall hooks. Women’s clothes.

Allie and the others, including Gabe and Bill, and a bearded forty-something Keo hadn’t seen before, sat around the dining table in the center of the cabin eating fried fish with their hands when he came back out. It took Keo a few seconds to realize the bearded man was actually Zachary, cleaned up and wearing regular clothes.

“Look at you,” Allie said. “Cleaned up real good.”

“Was that a compliment?” Keo said.

“Mostly, sure.”

The others made room for him to sit at the table. Allie tossed a fried white bass onto a ceramic plate from a big basket at the center of the table and slid it over in front of him. His fingers were almost trembling when he picked it up and started eating.

Jesus, it tasted good.

“So, you want to tell us what’s going on out there?” Allie said. “It sounded like you guys were fighting World War III.”

“You can hear all the way out here?” Keo said.

“You’d have to be deaf not to. Sound travels these days. Plus, Zach has been tracking all of it since…when?”

“About nine days ago,” Zachary said. “Faded shots, but it was pretty clear they were coming our way. Shorty and I came to the conclusion they’ve been chasing you and your friend since that first gunshot. We wrong?”

Keo shook his head. “No.”

“Who are they?” Allie said. “The truth.”

Keo spent a moment digesting the fish. It was slightly overcooked and crunched in his mouth, but it still tasted better than anything he’d had in…well, it had been a while. Allie opened a cooler and took out a bottle of water. It tasted like rain.

“We’re running from a guy named Pollard,” Keo said. “He wants to kill us.”

“Why?” Allie asked.

“Because I killed his son.”

Allie stared at him for a moment. Then she exchanged a look with Zachary, then with Bill and Gabe. He could almost see her mind turning, crunching the numbers to see how much trouble he had brought them, and how putting a bullet in his head, then tossing him into the lake would solve all her troubles. His first instinct was that she wasn’t capable of something like that, but that was before the world went to shit. Who knew, these days, what even the most mild-mannered person was capable of…

“Why did you kill his son?” she finally asked.

“Because his son was trying to kill me,” Keo said.

“So it was self-defense.”

“Yes.”

“Or is that your interpretation of events?”

“What is this, a courtroom?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” she said with a slight edge in her voice.

“He didn’t give me any choices. He was trying to shoot me, so I shot him first.”

“Sounds pretty straightforward.”

“It was.”

“From the beginning,” Zachary said. “The truth, kid.”

Keo told them about the attack on the house and killing Joe during the gunfight. He skipped the part about Levy, the creature in the garage, and Bobby, Pollard’s nephew. He told them about Gillian and the others escaping on Mark’s boat during the battle, then added in the ambush by Pollard’s men at the gas station along the interstate, figuring it would get him some bonus points. He left out the part where he and Norris killed two more of Pollard’s men at the barbershop.

Nothing he told them was a lie. He just elected not to tell them everything. Given their situation—hiding out here in the middle of the lake—he guessed (hopefully correctly) that they were more apt to fall on his side if forced to choose between him and a man like Pollard.

“So they just go around taking what they want?” Gabe said when Keo finished.

“They have the firepower for it,” Keo said. “From what I’ve been told, Pollard is ex-military, and he’s leading the others like a paramilitary group.”

“How do they survive out there?” Allie asked. “Do they have a base?”

“Apparently there are more of them back in Corden. Pollard just bought his killers with him. As for how they’ve been surviving since they started chasing us, I guess the same way we have—sheltering in buildings at nights, et cetera.”

“Hard to do with that many people,” Zachary said.

“Not my problem. I got the impression they were used to it, though.”

“Would have to be. Fifty is a lot of people to take care of on the road.”

Keo grabbed another bass and dug out some choice white meat. He was thinking about Norris as he ate.

Are you still alive out there, old-timer?

“So, what’s your next move?” Allie asked him.

“Go back and find my friend,” Keo said.

“What if he’s dead? Or captured?”

“Doesn’t matter. I need to find out for sure. I owe him.”

Allie nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?” he said.

“Okay,” she said again. Then, “We’ll return your stuff and you can be on your way. I assume you’ll want to leave as soon as possible.”

“You assumed correctly.” Then he added, “Thanks.”

“Don’t bother. The only reason we even believe anything you’re saying is because of what Zachary and Shorty saw out there. They backed up your story of this Pollard asshole having a paramilitary army running around in the park.”

“You saw them?” Keo said to Zachary.

Zachary nodded. “They made base at the visitors’ building at the other side of the park. Like you said, about fifty or so. Tactical assault gear and armed to the teeth. People like that are used to taking what they want.”

“So eat up, and I’ll send Zachary and Shorty to take you back to the park,” Allie said.

He smiled at her. “And, of course, me going back there keeps you out of Pollard’s crosshairs in case he notices your little island out here, right?”

“What, was I being too subtle again?” Allie said.

*