The Walls of Lemuria (37 page)

Keo didn’t answer.

“Keo, what are you going to do?” Levy asked. His voice had trembled slightly for a split-second there. “There’s still so much I want to do. We can do this together. You’re the only one at the house who understands. You know this is the right thing to do, don’t you?”

“Why did you give Bobby to Lotte and the other one?” Keo asked.

“Huh?” Levy said.

“Why did you feed Bobby to them? Inside the garage?”

“Because they were hungry,” Levy said, as if the answer was obvious. “I need them to keep up their strength. The other one, it was getting weak, dying on me. The blood should keep it fresh for months. Don’t you want to know how that works? How one person can sustain them for
months
at a time?”

He did want to know.
“Know thy enemy.”
Wasn’t that the saying? How could you hope to defeat the enemy if you didn’t know what made them tick? What hurt them, and what killed them? Levy was doing them all a big favor, whether the others realized it or not.

“Keo,” Levy said, trying desperately to read his face. “You know I’m right. You and me. We know what we have to do. You have to trust me—”

Keo drew his Glock and shot Levy in the forehead.

Joe flinched at the loud
boom!
, then stared at Levy’s body as it slumped to the ground next to him and lay still. A small trickle of blood dripped from the hole in Levy’s forehead, but most of the damage had gone out the back of his skull and splattered a healthy gob of blood and brains on the ground.

Keo holstered the gun.

“What about me?” Joe asked.

Keo looked at him for a moment. “We killed your uncles.”

Joe nodded. “I know. It was a big misunderstanding.”

The fire that Keo had seen in Joe’s eyes before was gone, replaced by something more subdued, even resignation. The kid was way more mature than his age.

“You didn’t have a choice,” Joe continued. “I know that now. I accept that.”

Keo stared at him, trying to read him. Joe’s face was placid.

“Is your place around here?” Keo asked.

“It’s a cabin about thirty miles north of here. I guessed we found a place in the woods like you guys did, to hide from those things.”

“What were you doing this far south?”

“Hunting,” Joe said. “There aren’t a lot of wildlife left these days, so we’ve been going out farther and farther to try to find some. Then Bobby went missing…”

“You’ll be alone now,” Keo interrupted him. He said it harshly, without emotion, because he wanted to see Joe’s reaction.

“Yeah, I know,” Joe said quietly, and looked down at the ground.

Keo pulled out the Ka-Bar. “You make me regret this and I’ll gut you like a fucking pig the next time I see you.”

“You won’t regret this,” Joe said. “I just want to go home. This entire day has been one big nightmare.”

“What will you do next?”

“There are some people in a house about two miles from us. We’ve traded with them before.” Joe shrugged. “Maybe I can stay with them. They’re nice people.”

Keo nodded. “Don’t make me regret this, kid.”

“You won’t,” Joe said. “I swear it.”

They buried Levy
and the two hunters in the woods near the clearing, digging just deep enough to put down the bodies. They had found shovels inside the garage, where Lotte and the creature were still suckling at the dead Bobby. Keo kept expecting Bobby to rise at any second, but he never did.

While they were shoving dirt over Levy’s surprisingly youthful-looking face—he seemed to have de-aged in death, though of course that was impossible—Keo spent a few seconds wondering if Levy and the other two buried next to him were going to come back when night fell.

We know nothing about them. Levy’s right about that. We are just guessing about everything. Who knows what we’ve been wrong about?

They thought about burning down the garage and the creatures inside with it, but the risk of setting a fire that they couldn’t control was too great. Instead, Keo and Norris spent ten minutes knocking down enough of the back walls to expose the creatures to sunlight. He heard them hissing, then smelled the familiar acidic scent. Leashed to the spike on the ground, the only path available to the creatures was to flee the formerly darkened corner. But there was nowhere to go and they died
(again)
, leaving piles of bones and Bobby’s cold, bloodied remains abandoned on the ground.

Keo and Norris thought about burying Bobby, too, but decided one more of the creatures running around wasn’t going to make any difference tonight or the next thousand nights. Besides, if he did turn while the sun was still up, he would just die
(again)
.

They left the clearing, Keo expecting to see Joe back at any second gunning for them, trying to exact revenge for the relatives he had lost earlier at their hands. The Keo from six months ago would have just shot the kid after dealing with Levy. He remembered thinking the same thing when he had found Jordan and her friends in the bungalow.

I really have gone soft. God help us.

“You think he’ll come back?” Norris asked. “Joe?”

“I hope not,” Keo said. “I’d hate to wipe out the kid’s entire bloodline. Too little of that left these days.”

“For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing. I don’t think I could pull the trigger on the kid, either. What was he, eighteen?”

“Looked about eighteen. You have any kids before all of this?”

“I was married twice, but never managed to squirt out a brat. I guess that’s a good thing, considering what happened to the world. Otherwise I would have spent all my time trying to get back to Orlando. I’m way too old for that shit.”

“Just like Murtaugh.”

Norris chuckled. “Yeah. Just like Murtaugh. We’re both way too old for this shit, though Murtaugh had a family in the movies. That was one of his weaknesses, actually. The bad guys kept using his wife and kids against him.”

“Sounds like a chump.”

“Up yours,” Norris said.

They picked up their weapons and carried the shovels with them back through the woods. It was a long walk, made longer by what had happened back at the burnt house. Keo tried not to think too much about it, but of course it was impossible.

“What does Riggs look like?” Keo asked after a while. “If I’m supposed to be Riggs to your Murtaugh, I mean.”

“Well, he was crazy, like you. Had a questionable past, like you.”

“So I’m basically him, is that what you’re saying?”

“He had a mullet, too.”

“Ugh,” Keo said. “I’d rather be Murtaugh, then.”

*

He expected a
fight with Gillian, but instead she listened quietly and didn’t interrupt once. While he talked, she helped him out of his shirt, then disinfected and treated the wound. When she was done, she grabbed a fresh T-shirt from one of the drawers in the back. It was either Earl’s or Gavin’s. It fit him just fine, and Keo didn’t spend another second thinking about whom it used to belong to.

When he finished the story—he didn’t tell her where he and Norris had buried Levy in the woods—Gillian put her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. “I know it wasn’t an easy thing for you to do.”

“It wasn’t,” Keo said.

“I know. You did what you had to. What you thought was right.”

“What do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. To me.”

“Keo…”

“Tell me.”

She pulled back and gave him a pursed smile. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what you saw. With Lotte, with that kid Bobby…” She shook her head. “I’m not going to second-guess you, Keo. After all, the day I met you, you drove a truck through a hospital wall.”

He smiled at the memory.

“You’re crazy,” she continued, “but you’re also a good man.”

“Am I?”

“You don’t agree.”

“I’ve never considered myself a particularly good man, no.”

She watched him carefully for a moment, trying to read him, to understand him. She had such deep green eyes and she had let her hair grow out even longer in the last few months. He often joked that pretty soon she would look like Rapunzel, except with jet-black hair.

“You are,” she said after a moment. “Whatever you did before all of this was before all of this. That’s in the past. Right now, I trust you. Okay?”

He nodded and kissed her. “Okay.”

“You look tired. Lie down and I’ll go grab some soup from the basement.”

He lay down on the bed and listened to the door open and close softly after her.

Keo stared up at the ceiling, thinking about Levy. About Lotte, who slept on the other side of the room. Losing the two of them on the same day reminded him why this leadership thing was for dummies.

He’d never wanted it. Never needed it. If it were up to him, he’d give it all up tomorrow and go back to being the guy who did the work and clocked out afterward. He knew guys who took the job too seriously, who had nightmares about the things they had done for the organization. Keo had never been one of them because he had never really cared.

Well, he never used to, anyway.

He intended to stay awake until Gillian came back with the soup, but he must have lost more blood than he thought, because he was tired from head to toe. He closed his eyes for a bit, but was somehow snoring a few minutes later.

*

He opened his
eyes to sunlight inside the room, which instantly set his mind at ease, and Gillian looking down at him. Soft hands stroked his hair, and his head was in her lap. He didn’t think waking up to the sight of her could ever feel so right, so at home. He had forgotten how beautiful she was, how perfect everything was about her, even that twinkle of mischief in her eyes.

“Stop staring,” she smiled. “Although, I admit, it’s flattering—especially with that stupid grin on your face.”

“Where’s my soup? Didn’t you promise me soup?”

“It’s over there,” she said, nodding to a foldout table. “But it’s already cold. And yucky. I’ll warm it back up for you later and you can have it before dinner. It’ll be like we’re married, or something equally distasteful like that.”

“Would it be so bad being married to me?”

“Not as long as you don’t grow a beer belly and start fooling around with every floozy around town.”

“That’s a lot to ask from a man.”

“Well, marriage is a big deal. It requires commitment.”

“True enough. What time is it?”

“An hour before nightfall.” She added quickly, “Don’t worry. Everyone knows what to do. You’re not the only capable guy around here, you know.”

“But I’m definitely the handsomest, right?”

She shrugged. “Eh. Mark’s pretty cute.”

“What about Norris?”

“Too old.”

“You don’t like them old?”

“I don’t like them
that
old.”

He smiled. “I’m going to tell him you said that.”

“Don’t you dare.” She continued stroking his hair before finally saying, “We’ll be okay, won’t we?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“You said that pretty fast.”

“Because I don’t have any doubts about the answer,” he said, hoping it was more convincing than he felt.

The truth was, he wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

Joe, Levy, Lotte…

Did he make the right decisions today? Was letting Joe go the right thing to do? Killing Levy? Lotte’s death?

“I almost believed you,” Gillian said.

“You should, because it’s true.”

“No, it’s not. I’m not an idiot, Keo.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“You’ll do your best. And so will Norris and me and everyone else here. Jordan and Mark and Jill. But every night, they’ll still be outside our doors, waiting for us to make a mistake. Like you said, all it’ll take is one small mistake.”

Like not dealing with Levy in time…

She looked off across the room, and he knew she was staring at Lotte’s empty bed. He reminded himself to get rid of it tomorrow. It didn’t need to be there anymore. It was a reminder of what they had lost and, more importantly, the bad decisions that had led to it.
His
bad decisions.