The Walls of Lemuria (19 page)

He stood up and glanced around him. The others were still asleep, Gillian curled up on the floor next to him. Lotte was drooling out of one side of her mouth and looked dangerously close to falling out of her wheelchair.

Keo walked across the room and kicked Norris’s shoe. The ex-cop opened his eyes and groped for the shotgun that wasn’t there.

“It’s morning,” Keo said. “We made it through another night, old timer.”

Norris stood up and stretched, his joints popping with every movement.

“Let the girls sleep for a while,” Keo said. “They had a stressful last few days.”

Norris grunted back and watched Keo walk over to the stairs and start climbing up.

Near the door, Keo stopped and listened for a moment.

“Anything?” Norris asked below him.

Keo shook his head, then pulled Norris’s Remington out of the brass ring and tossed it back down to him.

“Still in one piece,” Norris said. “Maybe our luck really is changing.”

Keo was reaching for the door when it flew open by itself.

He reached for his shotgun, freezing at the sight of a man wearing a camouflage cap and pants and long-sleeve shirt, staring back down at him. But it wasn’t the man’s hunting clothes or bearded face that got Keo’s attention. It was the AR-15 rifle in his steady hands, the barrel pointed straight down and between Keo’s eyes.

“Hi there,” the
man with the rifle said. “Tell your friend down there to take his hands off the shotgun, or I’m gonna have to put you down.”

“Shit,” Norris said behind Keo.

Pale brown eyes flickered past Keo and down to, he presumed, Norris. The man’s hands were amazingly steady. Despite the beard, he wasn’t really that old. Late thirties, maybe, and he had definitely killed before. Not a killer by any means—Keo had met plenty of those and knew the look—but the man was fully capable of unloading his magazine into Keo from a meter away.

Keo stayed perfectly still and waited for the opening that never came.

He was poised four rungs down from the top, but he was high enough on the stairs that he didn’t have to move very much to pop his head through the open door. The Remington was slung over his back and the prospect of actually using it was nil. There were no two ways about it; he was dead in the water.

Or just dead.

A second figure appeared, walking around the door and stopping behind the first man. He was wearing similar hunting clothes, stringy blond hair sticking out from under the sides of his LSU Tigers cap. He was younger, and at first Keo thought they might be father and son, but no; the years weren’t that far apart. Maybe ten at the most.

“You were right,” the second man said. “There were people in here. How’d you know?”

“This place was abandoned when I came by three months ago,” the first man said. “Those cars weren’t outside, either.”

“Hey, Earl, there’re a bunch of supplies in these trucks!” a third voice shouted from somewhere outside the cabin.

The two men eyed Keo carefully. The younger man had unslung his rifle—another AR-15—but hadn’t aimed it into the basement. If Keo thought the older man was experienced, the second one looked anything but. He had an almost anxious look about him.

“What are we going to do with them?” the younger man asked.

“I don’t know,” the first one said, then, “Hey, come on, don’t do it.” He wasn’t speaking to Keo, but to Norris behind him. “This doesn’t have to get bloody.”

Keo resisted the urge to look back at Norris to see what he was doing down there. He decided to trust that the ex-cop would know what to do in this situation—not that he thought Norris had been in a jam like this before. Instead, Keo concentrated on the figure above him, and to a lesser extent, the one in the back.

If he could get to one of those rifles, they had a chance. A small chance, but it was better than nothing, because that was all he had right now. A big fat nothing.

“Shit, they got kids down there, Earl,” the second man said, leaning over the older man to get a better look.

“I see ’em,” the first man, Earl, said.

Keo saw something in Earl’s eyes and knew the man had instantly made a decision. He braced himself for what was coming, got ready to dive up through the hole for the rifle (was that even
possible?
), when Earl took a step back and pointed the AR-15 away from Keo.

“Truce,” Earl said.

Keo stared at him, not quite sure if this was some kind of trick—a joke at his expense, maybe—or if he was really seeing two men with the drop on him calling for…a truce?

“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Earl said. “Least of all kids. I’m Earl and this is Levy. Come on out of there and let’s talk,” he said, directing that last part to Norris and the others in the basement below Keo.

Keo didn’t move. This had to be a trick. Wasn’t it?

Earl seemed to have read his face. The older man grinned. “Hey, I’m the one with the AR-15 and you’re the one stuck on some stairs, remember? I don’t have to do this. Doesn’t that count for something?”

He’s got a point.

Keo climbed up the rest of the way.

*

There were four
of them: Earl and Levy, the two in the cabin; and Gavin and Bowe, who were outside with the Chevy and the Durango. Gavin was the third voice Keo had heard earlier. Earl was easily the oldest, while Gavin and Bowe were around Levy’s age. They all wore similar camo hunting clothes, but unlike most hunters he knew, they carried pouches stuffed with magazines for their AR-15s, each of the carbines showing the wear and tear of heavy past use.

“You’re lucky I decided to circle back here at the last minute,” Earl said when they were all outside the cabin. “We usually don’t stray too far from the house, but we decided to see what was down here this morning.”

“You have a house around here?” Keo said.

“About ten miles upriver.”

Earl was friendly enough, and so were the three with him. Their only relation was as co-workers at a warehouse in Corden. The three younger men worked under Earl and it was actually there, working the second shift, that they survived three nights ago.

“You know about them, I’m guessing,” Earl said. “That’s why you were in the basement.”

“The creatures,” Keo nodded.

“Uh huh. Bloodsuckers. I guess everyone knows about them now. The ones still alive, anyway.”

Norris and the girls were carrying the supplies they had taken into the cabin back out to the vehicles. Earl’s people lent a hand and they had everything loaded back up in less than ten minutes.

“Where were you guys headed?” Bowe asked. He had short brown hair and was just slightly taller than Keo at six-two, but he had much broader shoulders. Keo had no trouble envisioning the kid running over people during a high school football game. Bowe also looked about five years removed from his high school graduation.

“Fort Damper,” Norris said. “We were headed down there when we ran into some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” Earl asked.

Norris told them about the men in assault vests and the ambush.

“Shit,” Earl said. “Levy swore he heard some shooting when we were searching homes up the road yesterday. Around noon?”

“Sounds about right,” Keo said.

Levy smiled triumphantly. “I told you guys, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“You always hear shooting,” Bowe said. “When do you not hear shooting?”

“It’s true,” Gavin grinned. He had short red hair and barely came up to Bowe’s chin, though he filled out his camo with girth what he lacked in height. “Every single time we’re out here.”

“Yeah, but I was right this time, wasn’t I?” Levy said, and actually reddened a bit.

“And you didn’t know who they were?” Earl asked.

Keo shook his head. “They just opened up on us.”

“Damn.”

“Black assault vests?” Bowe said. “Like what, commandos?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Keo said. “You’ve never run across people like that since all of this happened?”

“Not yet,” Earl said. “Hopefully, we never will. We’ve mostly kept to ourselves down here. Yesterday was the farthest we ever went up toward the interstate. If we need something specific, we just drive to Corden.”

“Corden’s close?” Gillian asked.

Keo noticed that the men, including Earl, stood a little bit straighter when Gillian walked over to them. He found that oddly amusing and comforting at the same time. He was worried about how the four men would react around Gillian and Rachel. Besides food and shelter, women were likely the third most valuable commodity these days. For some, they might be the number one.

Seeing Earl and the other three’s reaction to Gillian, though, put Keo’s mind slightly at ease. Not entirely, but he was less concerned than he had been just a few minutes ago.

“Pretty close,” Earl said. “Why?”

“We were hoping to find some more survivors there,” Gillian said. “Maybe even pick up supplies along the way.”

“It’s about an hour’s drive from here. You don’t need to go back to the interstate if you know the right roads to take.”

“Wait a minute; you guys said you were headed down to Damper?” Bowe said.

“Yeah,” Norris said. “If someone has answers about what’s happening out here, it’d be the military. Damper would have had contact with the government in the early going, I’d imagine.”

“You don’t wanna be going down there,” Levy said.

“Why not?” Rachel asked, walking over to them. “Isn’t it safe?”

“Fort Damper’s gone, ma’am,” Bowe said, looking almost apologetic. “Some fool burned it down to the ground the night all of this happened.”

*

They had been
following Earl’s mud-caked black Bronco for the last thirty minutes when it finally turned off Highway 146 and onto a patch of dirt road marked by an old rusted sign that didn’t have letters anymore. They drove slowly for a few more minutes, heading deeper into the woods.

The Bronco finally slowed down before turning into an open clearing. Keo followed in the Chevy, Norris bringing the Durango behind him. It was hard to miss the house after he made the turn.

The clearing was a wide-open yard carved out of the surrounding woods. Trees had been felled recently to make extra space, and the ground was brown and flat and easy on the Chevy’s tires. The house was red and black brick and mortar, a large one-story building around 2,500 to 3,000 square feet. Antennas jutted out of the roof, and there were two ATVs parked haphazardly in the yard along with three trucks. The two front windows had burglar bars over them, and the front door was protected by a heavy security gate.

It looked like the kind of country home someone who liked hunting would build from the ground up and retire to in his old age. So what were four guys who worked at the same warehouse doing here?

Keo parked next to one of the trucks while Norris maneuvered the Durango behind him. Earl, who was driving the Bronco, pulled up next to them.

Earl climbed out and walked over to them. “This is it. The house.”

“You built this place yourself?” Keo asked.

“It was just me for the first five years,” Earl nodded. “The boys lent a hand in the last two, so it went much faster after that. I gave them a place to stay in return for the free weekend labor.”

“Any objections to throwing our supplies in with yours?”

“Heck no.” He walked over to the Chevy and peered in at the boxes of food, cases of bottled water and soda, and everything they had liberated from the gas station. “You guys really stocked up on the junk food, huh?” Then he gave them an amused look. “You know that a lot of your boxes have holes in them?”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Keo said. “Got some boxes of jerky in there somewhere.”

“One question,” Gillian said as she came around the Chevy’s hood.

“Shoot, ma’am,” Earl said.

“Is that a generator in the background?”

“Good ear.”

“Does that mean…?”

“Working plumbing? Yes, indeed.”

“Oh, thank God,” Gillian said, smiling brightly at him.

Earl laughed. “We’ll get you guys settled in, share with you what we have. It’ll beat sleeping on a dirt basement floor, I can guarantee you that much.”