The Isles of Elysium (Purge of Babylon, Book 6) (44 page)

The water glistened under the moonlight, waves
sloshing
back and forth against the docks. Calm, welcoming, calling to him. He imagined he could hear it moving despite the roar in front of him, the noises of the creatures stampeding behind him, getting closer and closer, louder and louder…

Almost there.

The stench of the creatures continued to fill his nostrils, the manic
tap-tap-tap
of their bare feet invading his space even further.

He wasn’t going to be able to run fast enough. He knew that now. He would never reach the water before they got to him. Unlike at Song Island, when he could just leap for it, here he was still too far away from the water.

So close, and yet so, so far.

“Half-dolphin, this guy,”
Danny had once said about him.

Too bad dolphins can’t fly.

Then he saw it out of the corner of his right eye, the thing he had been waiting for. It was just a single, long bony finger, but it was a harbinger of what he knew was coming. The black-fleshed digit brushed against his shirt, sending an electric sensation through his entire body. It started to curve, to grab onto him, when—

Something sailed over his head.

Keo didn’t hear it coming (the boat’s motor was too powerful, the relentless pounding in his chest, the patter of death behind him), but he actually felt it rippling through the air.

He tried to turn his head, to follow its trajectory, but he might as well be moving on quicksand compared to its speed. A heartbeat later there was a loud
BOOM!
and the ground shook. The wall of ghouls behind him let out one long singular shriek, the sound of things dying
(again)
. Keo had seen shrapnel rip into flesh before, but he’d never seen what they could do to an entire wall of them.

The concussive force slammed into him from behind like a sledgehammer and Keo was picked up and launched through the air as if he were little more than a rag doll. He was trying to orient himself, make sense of what had just happened, when a second
BOOM!
shattered the night. His eardrums rang and the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. His bones shook from the vibrations, but his ears were still ringing from the first impact, so this second one was more of a dull
THOOM
instead of the familiar blast of a grenade impacting.

The screams behind him, like the wails of dying animals, somehow managed to pierce through the internal thrumming slashing up and down his body. Then he shut everything down and missed the wooden bulkhead that separated the marina from the ocean by barely a foot and hit the water headfirst and went under like a stone.

Maybe it was all those days and nights and months on the San Diego beaches, but he had enough awareness and ability to fight through the pain and spin around even while he was crashing through the water until he was looking up again. The moonlit night sky stared back at him on the other side of the surface, just before the air began filling with a red and orange glow. It was beautiful and inspiring, and he found himself gazing up at the spreading color and smiling, or thought he was, anyway.

He wanted to look at it forever, but for some reason he was still free-falling, going deeper and deeper into the Gulf of Mexico.

Keo was a strong swimmer. He’d always been, and those skills had come in handy the last few months. But for some reason, he couldn’t call on them at the moment. His legs didn’t move, and neither did his arms. There was a continuous throbbing pain from behind him, as if someone (or a hundred someones) were repeatedly stabbing him in the back, over and over and over again.

He didn’t want to go anywhere, anyway. He found himself incredibly content to stare at the blooming spectrum of colors beyond the surface and wondered if this was what it was like to witness the birth of the universe.

Daebak,
he thought, and smiled up at the sight of the night sky burning. It was glorious.

“I thought you
were dead,” Jordan said. “Again. Though I guess I can’t be that mad at you this time; it was kind of my fault.”

He smiled up at her. Or thought he did. He might have just spat out some of the water he had taken in while he was drowning.

So how did he get up here?

“I didn’t know it would do that,” she said. “I thought it was a riot gun or something. You know, the kind that shoots smoke? Shit, I almost killed you.”

“What was it?” he asked. Or tried to. It sounded suspiciously like a loud croak.

“It’s uh…this.”

She held up an M32 grenade launcher. The last time someone had fired one of those at him—it might have even been the same one, for all he knew—they were using tear gas. This time it was 40mm grenade rounds. He had seen what one of those could do to an area and had launched a couple himself back at Beaufont Lake not all that long ago. But he had been firing a single-shot weapon back then, whereas the one she was showing him could launch six in a few seconds.

“M32,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s an M32 grenade launcher.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. Sorry.”

“’s okay. What happened?”

“I, uh, hit one of the trucks in the parking lot with the first round by accident. I don’t know what happened after that, it was dark and it looked like the entire marina was exploding. Then I saw you flying through the air. It was kind of cool, actually. That is, until I realized I might have killed you in the process of trying to save you.” She frowned. “They were almost on top of you and I didn’t want to lose you, too. If I didn’t do something, you’d never have made it into the water.”

“You saved my life.”

“I almost blew you up. That blast should have killed you.”

“Shrapnel?”

He remembered the ghouls shrieking behind him, the sounds of flesh rendering, metal bouncing off bones…

“I didn’t find any on you,” Jordan said. “But your entire back is black and purple, kinda like my face the last few days. I guess we have that in common now. When you didn’t swim back up to the surface, I thought your back might have also been broken.”

“Is it?”

“Can you feel your legs?”

He tried. “Yes.”

“Then it’s not. Thank God.” She gave him a pursed smile. “You’ve got to be the luckiest man I know, Keo.”

“Yeah, that’s me, lucky.”

He found it incredibly difficult to focus on her face with all the darkness around her. He would have been immediately alarmed, except he could feel the gentle ocean’s surface under him. Under the boat. They were out at sea, safe from land. Or, at least, safe from the black-eyed ones.

It came to Santa Marie Island on a boat. Ol’ Blue Eyes. It actually came on a boat…and left a lot behind, apparently.

“Take my boat,”
it had said.
“It has everything you’ll need.”

“Everything” included an M32 grenade launcher, apparently. Keo had to admit, whether the creature was still alive back on the island or not, it had come through for them. Three times now.

The question was:
Why?

*

Under the soothing
morning brightness, Keo sat on a bench at the stern of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ boat and tried to remember how to breathe again. The vessel was at least a twenty-eight-footer, with a canvas T-top to keep out the harsh sun, though at the moment he didn’t want to be separated from the warmth.

The M32 grenade launcher rested on top of a small armory at his feet. Three M4 rifles, gun belts, handguns, and a pair of knives. He idly wondered if one of those knives was made of silver, like Danny’s cross-knife. Was his luck really that good?

Of course not, so he didn’t even bother to check.

Jordan was leaning against the center console, looking back at the marina about sixty, maybe seventy meters across the ocean. The impact of six 40mm grenade rounds had left craters in the parking lot and caused half of the docks to catch fire. Their boat was gone, sunk to the bottom in the aftermath, where he would have also gone if Jordan hadn’t jumped in after him.

The weapons weren’t the only things Ol’ Blue Eyes had left behind for them. Jordan had found two tactical packs with bags of MREs and nonperishable canned goods, along with two bottles of water. She had eaten her fill even before he woke up.

She changed his bandages (he was much too weak to protest) then opened a can of beans for him, and Keo attacked it with gusto, momentarily forgetting that every part of him was throbbing. Just breathing hurt, and swallowing wasn’t any better, but an entire day without food and a night where he almost died had left him too starved to care.

“It must have killed them,” Jordan was saying, “so it could take their boat.”

“The soldiers?”

“Uh huh. Where else would the guns and packs come from?”

He nodded, remembering how Ol’ Blue Eyes had waded into Steve’s soldiers back at T18. It had demolished almost a dozen men on horseback as if they were children, effortlessly. So what were a few soldiers that had something it needed, like a boat to cross Galveston Bay with?

“What do you think happened to him?” she asked.

Keo didn’t answer right away. Instead, he spooned beans into his mouth and looked toward the island.

It was still back there, somewhere. Was it even still alive? They couldn’t see anyone
(anything)
along the ridgelines, but of course it wouldn’t be there anyway, even if it had survived last night. Blue eyes or not—smarter than the average ghoul or not—it still had to avoid the sunlight like the rest.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, we have a quarter tank of gas left.” She tapped the console with her spork. “Where should we go?”

“Back there.”

“Where?”

He nodded at the island.

Jordan stared at him with her good eye. “No way. We barely survived last time, remember?”

“It’s still there.”

“Keo…”

“It knew my name.”

“I know, but…” She shook her head. “We should just go. Let’s just go.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I need to know, Jordan.”

Jordan sighed and sat down and stared in the opposite direction of the island. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, finally, “What if you don’t like the answers?”

“I have to find out either way.”

*

Half of the
docks had sunk into the ocean from the fire, and the still-standing parts that they sidled alongside of and climbed up were slightly charred and blackened. They were armed again, even if they couldn’t find any more 40mm rounds for the M32. Too bad, because Keo would have loved to carry that thing back onto the island. Instead, he had to make do with a fresh M4 and a gun belt with a Beretta 9mm in the holster.

Jordan followed him up the pockmarked parking lot with another rifle. Like him last night, she had ditched all of her weapons and ammo in order to lighten her load in her dash to the boat. It still amazed him how fast she had been.

Competitive softball. Damn.

Keo walked across the parking lot wearing his damp clothes, thankful he could still move his legs at all after getting broadsided by the exploding truck last night. That was the kind of “accident” that could have just as easily snapped his spine and paralyzed him—or sliced him in half with shrapnel—instead of just leaving his entire back and the upper parts of his thighs bruised and battered.

Maybe my luck’s finally turning around after all…

Captain Optimism, as Danny would say.

The place was a surreal sight, with multiple craters scattered from one end to the other. Jordan told him that once she saw him flying through the air, she had kept firing until the M32 was empty, after which she jumped into the water after him.

Most of the vehicles that had been calling the marina home for the last year were now charred, scattered husks, which seemed appropriate given the piles of skeletal remains. The explosions hadn’t killed them, though they had severed arms and legs and detached heads from shoulders. The number of limbs spread around the area—represented this morning by the familiar sight of bleached white bones—were too many to count. And these, he reminded himself, were just the ones that hadn’t managed to crawl away before sunrise.